Authors: Joan Thomas
“Scarlet Nantes” her carrots were called. They were lovely and straight because she had thinned them faithfully, and with their rounded tips they looked like new candles. She nestled them in
rows on a blanket in the wagon, and then she shoved the dirt back into the trench and raked her plot. By the time she turned up Westminster Avenue, her wagon wheels squeaking, a harvest moon was lifting itself over the tall trees of Wolseley.
That night at Presley Point, while Sylvie and Noah and their baby sleep, fish flies wriggle out of the muddy bottom of the great lake and swim up through fathoms of black water. At the surface they sense the warmth of the dark air and they cast off their fishy disguises and rise into the starry sky with cellophane wings. Then daylight overtakes them and they spiral helplessly down, glomming onto the asphalt shingles of cabin eleven.
Noah goes outside to do his tai chi and a minute later he’s in the doorway, saying, “Come outside for a minute.”
Sylvie comes to the door with the baby on her shoulder. It looks as though a frilly curtain has been hung over the front of the cabin.
“They’re what I was screening for on the boat last summer,” Noah says. “When they were in the nymph stage.” He’s holding a wriggling worm with wings you can pinch like handles between your thumb and forefinger. So many emerged from Lake Erie a few years ago, the Doppler radar picked them up – Alison, a woman he works with, told him this. They live only a day, just long enough to mate and lay their eggs.
Alison
, Sylvie thinks. She shoves his hand away, revolted by the antenna-like hairs sticking out of the fish fly’s tail.
Miles away on the horizon, you can see the tufts of waves blown up during the night. Sylvie is bleary from lack of sleep and from the beer, and from the light that lies uneasily over the lake and the bush, bleaching away their nighttime conversation. A cheap red kayak struggles along the shoreline, the kayaker banging his paddle against the plastic sides with every stroke.
Noah turns up the path. “I’ll run up and talk to Alison before I do my tai chi. I want to catch her before she hitches a ride with someone else.”
Alison has today and tomorrow off. She has a driver’s licence, and Noah wants to see if she will ride into the city with Sylvie. Sylvie was eating a bowl of granola when he sprang this news on her. “Today?” she said. “It has to be today,” he said. “There’s nobody going in on Monday.” The baby was sitting in her car seat with a little trail of spit-up on her chin and was indifferent to this news.
“I’ll try to talk her into hanging around until noon,” he says now. “We can do something this morning. Take the canoe out maybe.” He frowns as he says this, hearing how stupid it is.
The minute he’s out of sight, Sylvie runs back into the cabin and puts the baby in the car seat and begins to shove her things into her bag. Her clothes from yesterday, the baby’s blankets, her hairbrush and makeup bag. She takes the big bale of disposable diapers because she doesn’t want Noah looking at it and thinking of her. While she’s strapping the car seat into the back, the baby bats impersonally at her face. She looks like a stranger’s baby this morning, rounder faced and bigger headed than usual.
Noah is still nowhere in sight. “Bye-bye, Daddy,” Sylvie says in the baby’s voice as she heads the car up the little trail that runs to the main road.
She can see the sun shining in a wintry way behind thin clouds. A hydro line runs along the lane, and a crazed blue heron is trying to perch on a wire, like a tightrope walker on stilts. When she reaches the main road, she turns the wrong way, she turns north. This is to throw them off. She can picture them chasing her down, this Alison person in wild confederacy with Noah, the two of them skimming over the landscape like the canopy walkers in kung fu movies and throwing themselves on the hood of the car, pressing
their accusing faces against the windshield. Sylvie drives quickly, nimbly away from them, taking pleasure in the snap of gravel under her tires. When she can peel her eyes away from the road, she glances in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes meet the baby’s, and in an instant the baby is crying. Mile after mile, she cries. In her rage she’s worked her way to one side of the baby seat – all Sylvie can see now is a tiny fist shaking.
This is the road they took the night Sylvie met Noah, almost a year ago. Thea was driving her dad’s old minivan. It was late – they couldn’t leave until Sylvie’s shift at Stella’s finished – so Sylvie was designated to stay awake and talk to Thea and help her watch for deer. Thea could hardly see over the steering wheel and she drove very strangely, with her right foot on the gas pedal and her left foot ready to hit the brake. It was after two before they got to Zach’s road. They had slowed right down, shining Thea’s big flashlight out the window, looking for a sign that said
MO
’
S MARINA AND ENGINE REPAIR
, and they spied deer – two does, standing still on the gravel edge. The spotlight caught their eyes.
“Holy shit,” Thea said, braking.
“I wish I knew what that is,” Sylvie said. “In their eyes, that makes them gleam like that.”
“They’re throwing death rays at us.” Thea drove cautiously past them and turned up the lane to the cabin. “Wakey, wakey,” she called to their three friends sleeping in the back seat. Nobody moved.
“You know fauns?” Sylvie asked. “Like from mythology?”
“Yeah,” Thea said. “Mr. Tumnus. Standing by a streetlight holding an umbrella. That was James McAvoy – did you know? The guy from
X-Men
?”
“It was a
lamppost
in the forest,” Sylvie said. “I always think about fauns when I see deer. Because
fawn
, right?”
“Well, duh, fauns
are
deer. Half deer.”
“No, they aren’t, Thea. They’re half
goat
.”
The baby’s crying is plaintive – it’s hard to shut it out. On either side the bush is scrubby, she’s driving through a stretch of muskeg. Not like the forests she dreamed about as a kid: the massive trees with their limbs lacing overhead, the forests where you went in as one thing and came out as something else. She sees the faun crouching in the filtered light, talking in an ecstasy of sibling viciousness, unhinged but galvanizing, her eyes golden. Just an ordinary girl whose mother was dying.
She drives on along a highway that bisects the bush in a straight line. She hasn’t met a car in miles. For the first time she notices a terrible stink in the car. It’s the diaper from yesterday, rotting on the floor of the hatchback. Then she realizes that the screaming has stopped. She tilts the rear-view mirror. The baby is sitting with a look of pure sorrow on her face, but she is alive.
This is Zach’s corner. There’s the sign:
MO
’
S MARINA AND ENGINE REPAIR
. Sylvie could drive up there now and see the old boathouse where she and Noah kissed; she could stand in the echoing darkness and listen for their voices. But the boathouse and the cabin will be covered with fish flies, which seem to follow human settlement like a plague. And Zach or his family might be there.
On impulse she turns left onto a gravel road and follows it for a few miles. Then a trail angles off the road, grass growing up the middle of it.
Drive me
, the trail says, so she turns off and drives into the bush.
Stop here
, the bush says after a little way, so she does. She stops and presses the window down and sits for a minute, listening to insect sounds and the twitter of birds. Then she gets out. She opens the hatchback and picks up the dirty diaper. The baby is asleep. She’ll sleep now until noon, and then she’ll wake up in a panic as if she’s about to starve to death. Sylvie is an expert regarding this baby. She closes the hatch as quietly as possible and
looks for a minute at the white dome of her daughter’s head, dead to the world on the other side of the tinted glass, before she starts to climb the ridge.
A little way into the bush, five or six young poplars are brownly dying. People have been here, the earth is torn up, exposed as pure golden sand for no reason that she can see. Thistles are growing at the edges of the scar. There’s a Cheetos wrapper plastered onto the sand. Cotton takes how long to degrade? But it will, eventually. She crouches, scooping sand with her fingers, feeling how cold it is just under the surface. A crow lifts in disapproval off one of the dead poplars, floating upwards. As she stoops, Sylvie feels how heavy her breasts are. She hadn’t really believed she and Noah would make love. She just pictured how he would run his fingers tenderly, sympathetically along her scar.
She has never before worried about his liking other girls. Never once. I had the idea I owned Noah, she thinks. Because I knew him when he was little. I made up a story about him, and now he’s stepped out of it. The silver falconer’s sleeve – it was armour made from beer cans, as it turns out. At one time it glowed in her mind like a talisman. Not magic exactly. Meaningful. Or
sacred
. Will she ever see that force in things again? Or was it only inside her – some molten underground stream that she crouched beside and dipped things in to make them special?
She buries the diaper and then stands and starts to walk along the ridge. She’s wearing flip-flops, she has to watch her footing. There’s no path but there is a natural way. She can see the lake lying like fresh cement along the horizon. This is mixed forest, untouched: spruce, oak, aspen, poplar, Manitoba maple, birch with its chalky paper, and lots of scrubby bushes she can’t name, rising and falling by a logic of their own. As she walks, her eyes lay squares over it. If she’d gone to botany field school she’d have been
given a square metre of this land, and she’d have taken it apart with tweezers and identified every single bit of plant life in it.
She’s over a second ridge when she finds what she’s looking for. It’s a perfect little diorama of bush, a square of permaculture. Her eyes peg it at its corners. It’s sunken, as if it may have been a creek bed long ago, or the source of a spring. There are poplars all around, but her square metre is mostly tiny shrubs and lichen. Three shoots of spruce like miniature trees. A single stem of oak with wavy adult-sized leaves. She’d have had a whole summer to spy on the secrets of these plants and how they make a garden for each other, and if she was lucky she’d have discovered some synergism nobody has noticed before.
She crouches by her square metre, taking it in. And then, from over the ridge, she hears her name. A deep voice, a dream voice, like God’s.
Syl-vie
. She scrambles to her feet. Now there is sun, as there has not been sun in all these weeks. Now it’s hot – she finds herself in a different day, lightheaded from the sun. She goes to brush off her shorts and her hand encounters a small, soft bit of ectoplasm. Panicked, she flings it at the bush – a fish fly. Something flails in the corner of her eye, white, spasmodic, and she leaps in the other direction, startled. It’s her hand, it’s her fucking hand.
And then she hears it again. Syl-vie. With a yelp she starts to run, clumsy in her flip-flops. Syl-vie, the ridge calls. She turns, slips, and rights herself. Around her the aspens quake and spruce trees clutch the earth with knuckled roots.
Syl-vie
, the voice calls again, and she scrambles in terror up the ridge in the opposite direction.
L
IZ SLIPS OUT OF BED, LEAVING AIDEN ASLEEP, and goes down to the kitchen. She smells baby in the house – puked-up milk and the diaper pail and the ancient perfume of talc – and she feels more buoyant than she has in ages. She puts on coffee and reaches for her tattered recipe file. She still has a day and a half of quiet ahead of her. She’ll get a stew going in the slow cooker for their dinner tonight (they can be carnivores while Sylvie is away), and she’ll make a couple of vegetarian casseroles with an eye to restocking the freezer. Then in the afternoon, if it’s warm enough, she’ll take the phone and a glass of wine out onto the deck and get caught up with Char.
She’s at the stove browning cubes of flank steak when Aiden wanders in, looking like death warmed over. “What time did you get home?” she asks.
“Around midnight.”
She pours his coffee. “The kids don’t have a very nice day at the lake.”
“It might be warmer up there.”
“How about pancakes?”
“No, I’m okay.”
Doctor Jekyll has left the building, she thinks as she sets the coffee pot back on its element. This is our own Mister Hyde, hunched on a stool in his tattered Eric Clapton sweatshirt. Then something wiry inside her asserts itself, and she turns back to Aiden. “So how was the concert?”
“Didn’t get in.”
“Oh. I thought you had tickets.”
“I never said I had tickets.”
“So what did you do?”
“Just went for a drink.”
“How’s Neil?”
“I didn’t see Neil.”
“Who’d you go with?”
“Jake.”
“Jake. You know a Jake?”
“Defrag. My client.”
“Since when do you socialize with your clients?”
“It was a one-off.”
“Still.”
He gets up and opens the bread drawer and drops two slices into the toaster.
“What have you got planned for today?”
“I plan not to plan. That’s my plan.”
“Well, you need to clean up all that tree debris, for one thing. The grass is never going to come up.”
“Okay, I’m on it.”
He eats his toast and drinks his coffee, a cone of silence over his head. After that he settles into the armchair in the living room and works his way methodically through the weekend
Globe and Mail
. He does something with a pencil, the crossword or the
Sudoku. Finally he goes upstairs for a shower. Then, when she’s chopping vegetables for a peanut stew, she hears him out in the hall, putting his boots on.
“Where you going?” she calls, keeping her voice friendly.
“I thought I might ride over to Don’s Photo.”
Liz puts down her knife and steps into the hall. “Don’s Photo? Whatever for?”
“Oh, just to look around. I’d like to have a video camera. Or at least a webcam. While the baby’s tiny like this.”