Authors: Joan Thomas
She is truly aghast. “You’re planning to buy a video camera. You’ve got that much spare cash at the moment.”
“They’re not that expensive, Liz.”
“You’re not thinking, Aiden.”
“What’s to think about? It’s not that big a deal.”
“Everything’s a big deal. Do you have any idea how much the diaper service costs? As just one example.”
“Oh god, Liz, we could live on half of what we earn now.”
“Aiden, you are so full of shit.” By then she’s too furious to talk.
He’s gone several hours, during which she rehearses her arguments and cooks, quickened by her rage. “He’s a wanker,” she says to Max, slamming the cutlery drawer shut. “He’s a total goddamn wanker.”
By the time he comes back, the evidence of her industry is lined up and cooling on the counter. She looks over at him when he appears in the doorway but she doesn’t speak.
He shrugs. “Don’s was closed. I just rode around the park.”
“Well, that’s five hundred dollars you didn’t blow.” Her overly-pleasant voice is going to put him on his guard. She drops her dishtowel and lowers herself into a chair. “But you know, we do need to sit down and have a serious talk about finances. Now might be good.”
“You think so, eh,” he says, opening the fridge, and the danger she senses is a heady foretaste she hasn’t encountered in quite some time.
“Yes, I do,” she says. “I’m overdrawn at the moment, and I suspect you are too. It’s going to be years before Sylvie is on her feet. It’s going to be really tough. We’ll need a second car, for one thing. My salary is frozen, and your practice is not exactly growing.”
He opens the cheese drawer and checks out its contents. At the sight of him rummaging in the fridge, her fury thrums in her chest. “Aiden. Please don’t eat now. It’s too late for lunch. I’ve made a wonderful dinner,
boeuf bourguignon
.”
He pulls a package of corned beef out of the meat tray and lifts it to his nose.
“You know … you won’t like what I’m about to say, but you need to start thinking about it. We’re going to have to sell the cottage. It’s our only disposable asset. And the taxes are ridiculous.”
“What?” It’s clear this has never once crossed his mind.
“Think about it. You never get up there, and Sylvie and I haven’t been in ages. Sell it to some back-to-the-earth types. Some kayaking kids. It’s not doing us any good. It’s not accessible.”
He stands very still. She actually sees his neck thicken. Then he puts the meat back in the fridge and closes the door and turns towards her. “And why am I not up there?”
“Well, I know, this spring has been weird. But even last year – didn’t you go just once last year?”
“Yes,” he says. “Just once.”
Her heart contracts at the venom in his voice and the brutal downturn of his mouth, and for the first time ever she thinks,
He looks like his dad
.
“Congratulations,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“You have finally found a pretext. To get at the one thing that matters to me. It was only a matter of time, I guess. But I never thought you’d stoop to this – using this crisis, our daughter’s baby. To take away the one thing, the
one thing
I care about.”
She is seeing it; she is finally seeing into the vault. She stands up. “The one thing,” she says, taking a step towards him. “We don’t matter? Our life together? Our daughter and this tiny baby? Do you
hear
yourself?”
Their voices are low, they’re both breathing hard. Max is on high alert between them. “Don’t twist things,” Aiden says. “You know what I mean.” The phone on the counter rings. He swings an open hand and knocks it off its stand and it clatters to the floor.
“What the hell is that?” she says. “You’re trying to intimidate me?” She smells the meat in the slow cooker, she feels the cork, cool under her feet. She sees his exhilaration, what it means to him to accuse her like this, his hatred open and undisguised at last, and she feels a dark rush too: she sees he’s right, she
has
been waiting for this chance. Their eyes are locked, neither of them is going to look away. She’s tasting blood. He has no idea, no idea what he’s up against, the carcass of their sorry marriage is well within her sights – and a dial tone drills into her consciousness.
“Pick it up. It could be Sylvie.”
He bends for the phone. In his movements, in the angle of his head and the stoop of his back, she sees his regret already setting in and satisfaction warms her. The phone rings again as soon as he sticks it back into the base, and this time she grabs it.
“Elizabeth Glasgow?” It’s a man.
“Yes?”
“You’re the registered owner of a silver 2012 Jetta
SE
?”
“Yes.”
“Licence
MIE
466?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Constable Glowicki from the Powerview detachment of the
RCMP
.”
“The Powerview
RCMP
?” she repeats, trying to make the words mean something.
F
rom the ridge Aiden can see the lake, a dark molten body to the left. The sun hovers above it. It’s going to be a long, long twilight. Mosquitoes hit at his arms and temples. What do you call this sort of country? It’s scrubbier than forest, not as friendly as a wood. It’s bush.
He’s standing on a rise above a little trail about twenty miles north of Presley Point. On that trail are parked three
RCMP
cruisers and a couple of trucks belonging to kids from the research station, and the Jetta, of course, sitting crookedly in a big square of police tape.
He and Liz drove up in Rupert’s car with Max in the back seat. On the way, as they rolled north out of farmland and into bush, they tried to get their minds around what the police had said on the phone.
“She was not dehydrated – did I tell you that? They said she’s absolutely fine.”
“She can’t have been there long. The kids will be nearby.”
It was a man driving a truck who spotted the car and stopped to check it out. He found a tiny baby alone in it and took her to the closest town, to Pine Falls. Was the car locked? Presumably not. Sylvie’s things were in it. When the police called, Liz gave them Noah’s name, and Thea’s.
“They’re hiking,” Liz said to Aiden as they drove. “Obviously. It’s a beautiful day. They’re having a great time and they got carried
away. ‘Come on, one more bend in the trail!’ I can just hear Sylvie. I can
hear
her.”
“With the baby alone in the car? I’m not seeing it, Liz.”
“You’re right, of course. It’s beyond belief. It’s
breathtaking
that anyone could be that stupid and irresponsible, but let’s face it, that’s what they are. Your cerebral cortex is not fully developed until your late twenties, I’ve read that. I can see it in Sylvie, I’m sorry to say. And Thea – well, just look at the girl. But I thought Noah might be a little more mature.” He was so plucky as a kid, she said, after the swing hit him. He insisted on walking on his own, even though his eyes had pretty much vanished.
She talked nervously until about the time they passed through Brokenhead First Nation, and then she stopped and sat with her arms tightly folded, staring straight ahead. “Well, at least they’re together,” Aiden said into the silence at one point. She didn’t answer.
But in fact, as Aiden and Liz discovered when they got to the site and an
RCMP
officer walked soberly over to the Caprice, it’s just Sylvie who is lost; she is lost alone. After talking to Liz, the police tracked down Noah. Sylvie had spent last night at his place, but then she took off on her own and drove up to this road and left the baby in the car. Noah’s in Pine Falls now with the child welfare authorities. Thea? Thea was never there.
When Aiden walks back from the ridge, the police are taking photos of tire marks, hoping to figure out how many vehicles drove up that trail. “I’m going to hike a little further up the escarpment and take a look,” he says to a cop with a ponytail.
“No point. We’ve been back and forth over about five square kilometres in the past few hours.” She puts a hand on his arm. “Listen, you’ll just make our job harder if you head off in the dark. Would you mind stepping into the cruiser? We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
So Aiden and Liz climb into a back seat with no door handles. “Did she have your permission to take the car?” asks the cop in the driver’s seat.
“Of course. Did you think she stole it?” Liz stares at them fiercely.
“Well, we see your daughter’s not a licensed driver.” They’ve got her purse, her phone, they’ve gone through everything and they’ve hatched their theory. That Sylvie, upset because of a fight with her boyfriend, has walked or hitchhiked back to the highway.
“Oh, come on!” Liz cries. “Without her things?”
Aiden asks whether Noah reported an argument. “He says there was tension,” the female cop says.
They hear barking and shouts and the police let them out of the cruiser. Max is dancing in an excited circle of young people, Noah’s friends from the research station. One of them opened the door of the Caprice and the dog headed straight up the ridge, sniffed around, and started to dig in a spot where the turf has been torn open by
ATVS
. And he found a diaper! Recently buried, the sand sticking to it. The kids open it, they display the orange smear inside.
“Yes,” says Liz, reading the entrails. “Of course it’s hers.”
Aiden crouches with his hand in Max’s ruff. “Sylvie,” he says urgently. “Let’s find Sylvie! Where’s Sylvie, Max?”
Max smiles and butts his head against Aiden’s thigh. Play! he barks. Throw something, Aiden! When no tennis ball materializes, he appeals to the cop with the ponytail, pawing flirtatiously at her thigh. You love me, he barks. I can tell.
The male cop from the car is at Aiden’s side. “Can I ask you not to bring your dog tomorrow? If we get a sniffer, it will just complicate things.”
“Yeah, of course. I’m sorry. We didn’t quite have the picture when we left the house.”
The Jetta’s being towed to the
RCMP
detachment in Powerview
for a forensic examination. There’s a little motel in Pine Falls that will let them stay with the dog. Its stucco walls are covered with the transparent wings of fish flies, and dead fish flies litter the sidewalk. Where people have walked, the separate wormy bodies have been ground into muck. A teenage desk clerk slides a big, flat key across the counter.
Liz opens the door of unit fourteen and then closes it again.
“What?” Aiden says.
“It’s an ashtray in there.” She walks back to the Chevy and leans against it, pressing her face into her hands. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she says.
“Come on,” Aiden says, putting an arm around her shoulders.
Inside she finds the ice bucket and fills it at the bathtub for Max. She sits on the edge of the bed, making no effort to undress. “They will have to bottle-feed the baby,” she says. “Sylvie will be really uncomfortable by now. Oh god, she’ll be going crazy.”
“She’s spent enough time in the wilderness.” Aiden’s working at lowering a malfunctioning blind. “She’ll be sensible. She’ll smear mud on herself to keep the bugs off. She’ll climb a hill and orient herself.”
Liz looks at him mournfully. “You know, when they held up the diaper, that snowy-white cotton diaper with our baby’s pumpkin-coloured poop in it, I couldn’t help but think,
That diaper is a testimony to a family doing everything right
.”
Finally they undress and crawl into bed. A few minutes later, Liz sits up. “Oh fuck.”
“What?”
“I left the slow cooker on.”
She turns on the light and finds her cellphone and calls Wendy. “We got detained. It’s a long story, I’ll tell you tomorrow. You have your key, right?”
“Why didn’t you tell her?” Aiden asks when she lies back down.
She makes a small distraught sound and doesn’t answer.
Ten minutes later she’s up again. She fishes a couple of little blue pills out of the zip pocket of her bag and presses one on Aiden. He doesn’t want to take it but she makes him. It’s not much of a drug – when the digital clock on the bedside table reads 1:00, they’re both still wide awake.
Aiden has been trying to tune in to Sylvie’s distress, to get the measure of it. All he can feel is Liz’s agitation humming in the mattress. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Anyone who loves the world as much as Sylvie does is not suicidal.”
“Thanks for that,” she says. “Suicide hadn’t actually occurred to me.”
They roll to the far sides of the bed. Aiden turns the clock away and it lights up the wall red. Sylvie’s all right, he tells himself. We don’t have the stature of tragedy victims.
Their orientation into the bush next morning is decided by a dog with more authority than Max, a beautiful classic German shepherd called Damsel, who retires afterwards to her kennel in the back of a van, having led the police to the far side of a second ridge before she admitted defeat. Forty or fifty human searchers, and all they have is sight – no sense of smell to speak of, and anyway they’re walking in a fog of bug spray. Aiden is nauseated from it, and from the
RCMP
coffee and stale doughnuts, and from the drug Liz forced on him, which put him to sleep eventually but left him irritable as hell, robbed of the night journey, as though he’d been blindfolded and driven towards morning in a truck. That’s okay, it’s better that everything irks him: the billions of leaves in minute motion from here to the treeline, the grasping nettles, the tiny flies like spots in his retina. Nothing’s going to slip past him, not a
gum wrapper, not a button, not a Kleenex, not the infrared trace of Sylvie’s energy zigzagging across the floor of the bush.
And he’s got what nobody else has – he knows his daughter. This morning he stepped out of the motel as the sun was colouring the clouds in the east, and he knew what had happened: Sylvie was looking for something. She set out on a quick, impulsive quest and got disoriented, and now she’s living the parent’s classic nightmare, knowing she’s left her baby somewhere and can’t get back to her.
This presumes that her state of mind is the sort of thing you can predict. Noah rolled onto the site in a truck with two other guys just after Liz dropped Aiden off, and Aiden headed straight for him.