Authors: Joan Thomas
“How you doing?”
“I’m okay, I guess. I’d like to get started.” He was standing at the open door of the truck, stuffing an anorak into a backpack. “Do you have the gear you need?” He glanced down at Aiden’s slip-on shoes.
“I’ll manage.”
“I’ll try to find you some boots. What size do you wear?”
His buddies were banging around in the back of the truck, unloading a blue plastic water barrel. Aiden drew him a few steps away. “Listen, how did Sylvie seem all weekend?”
“Not great. She was really upset on Saturday night, and then yesterday morning, before she took off, she was just quiet.”
“Were you expecting Thea to come up with her?”
“No.”
“So you asked Sylvie up on her own?”
Noah frowned. “I thought she had her licence.”
“Okay, fair enough. But what happened? How the hell did she end up out here?”
“I have no idea. I was trying to find somebody to ride back into town with her, and she just took off.”
“Did she seem confused? Out of touch with reality? As though some psychosis was setting in?”
“No, she was just stressed out. Upset. Pissed off with me. I was kind of a shithead with her.”
Aiden turned abruptly away, happy to let Noah have the last word on that. He went back to the food table and sucked down a second cup of coffee, kissing goodbye to the prospect of borrowing boots. A cop with a bullhorn climbed up on the tailgate of a truck and briefed them. Somebody handed out water bottles and then they were shuffled into crews, and Aiden saw Noah working his way through the crowd to join him. He had a friend from the research station with him, and a pair of mustard-coloured construction boots. “These were in Tyrone’s truck.” They were rough and cheap, but they fitted and Aiden took them. So, a generous guy, as well as candid.
They’re searching side by side now, he and Noah, walking north towards a fire tower, using it as their compass point. The bush is silent. They’re forcing the rodents into burrows, herding the ungulates north. The sun is hot. Look for shade, Sylvie, Aiden counsels as he tramps. It’s nightmarish country the further they get into it: uneven, marshy, given to burrs and mosquitoes and random ankle-breaking stones. Root balls wrenched up, their black undersides masquerading as bears – a trick the bush plays over and over. It’s the sort of marginal land where bodies are found. A hunter stumbles on a simulacrum of clothes and human bones, two-dimensional and plastered onto the ground. Your whole career as a parent, you’re rehearsing for that moment; you always know you’re a hostage to fortune.
Two or three hours in, it’s like they’re doing a boot camp drill, he can’t bring his daughter up in his mind. “Sylvie!” he calls. Her name ricochets from the ridge, invisible searchers calling in front
of him and behind. As the echo dies out, Tyrone takes it up in his eager young voice. Noah. Gilles, who says her name beautifully, in the French way. And then Aiden can see her again, standing alert, turning her head to check out the direction of the sound.
L
iz hates getting into Rupert’s old boat of a car – the smell of it, the plaid seat covers held in place with wide bands of dirty elastic. It
is
like driving a boat, she thinks as she turns onto the highway. And there’s the fact that Aiden’s mother died in this car, in the seat where Liz had to ride yesterday. They were driving up Ness Avenue, Rupert and Greta, following a truck with an open box full of junk. Going fast, the truck hit a big bump and some small but heavy engine part was dislodged, sailed through the air, and smashed into Rupert’s windshield. A distributor, is that what Aiden said it was? Greta never knew what hit her, as people like to say when they’re not prone to imagining the catastrophe of flesh and blood and bone that suddenly materialized in that seat.
What a strange sense of unreality she has this morning. Go home, the police said when they saw her at the site, standing there miserable in her skirt and sandals. Go home and email us a recent photograph. If I was going to go home, I could have gone last night, she said. They ignored this. There should be someone there, they said. Your daughter may call, or she may show up. As soon as you get there, check through the house. See if she came home while you were out and packed up some things.
Max is whining in the back seat. He’s starving, poor dog. In their rush yesterday he slipped into the car, and they didn’t want to take the time to drag him back into the house. Plus they were in shock, dizzy with adrenaline – they’d been standing in the kitchen tearing each other apart and all the while, life was working up a real tragedy
to dangle over them. So they didn’t think too much about the dog. Rupert would shit if he saw Max with his paws up on that seat.
His wife died in this car, and Rupert simply had the windshield replaced and kept driving it. She died on a trip out to the bulk stores in what Aiden calls Little America. They were on the road because Greta couldn’t resist canned peaches at ten dollars a case. Liz always blamed her for that, as if her passion for discount shopping had led to the accident. You find something to blame people for when bad things happen to them, because then you can say, I’d never do anything like that. So I’ll be okay.
The highway is quiet. She takes the car up to 110. It’s bleak country she’s passing through, trees, and swamp full of last year’s ragged bulrushes, and more trees. Dead spruce still holding on to all their rust-coloured needles. But it’s June, the nights are warm enough. No one dies from mosquito bites. And how far could Sylvie wander between the lake and the highway? Liz is amazed at her own calm as she considers this. That’s because letting yourself feel fear is admitting that something really terrible may have happened.
At home, Max pads into the kitchen and gulps down a heap of kibble and then curls up on his mat and goes to sleep. The ceramic insert from the slow cooker is soaking in the sink and the house smells unpleasantly of desiccating meat. She calls Wendy, who answers from an aisle at Costco. This time she tells her.
“I’ll come straight home,” Wendy says. Then Liz calls Thea’s number.
Against all odds, Thea is at her parents’ place and picks up. “Oh god,” she says. “Oh, I’m really sorry. She just
so
wanted to go. I didn’t know how to say no.”
“Well, too bad about that,” Liz says, and hangs up without a goodbye.
She has the number for the relevant child welfare worker; the police gave it to her. There’s no answer and she has to leave a message. Then she calls the Powerview
RCMP
detachment. They have close to seventy searchers at the site now. “Feel free to keep calling in. And by the way, does your daughter have a passport? Check whether she took it. Check her bank account, if you can.”
Oh, for crying out loud, Liz thinks as she hangs up.
She climbs the stairs of the quiet house and stands in the doorway of Sylvie’s room, surveying the crib with its eyelet lace skirt. The mobile of dancing dolphins, the stack of contoured flannel diapers. Calm, she’s still calm. Because they’ve been here before, Liz and Sylvie. Although it may just be wishful thinking to link Sylvie’s being lost now with Sylvie lost then, that terrible evening of the missing children in Minnesota. When she and Krzysztof were back at the harvest table and the au pair came trembling up from the beach with just that sad little girl in the goat costume and they had no idea where any of the other children were. The little girl was crying in a raspy way and was totally incoherent.
She remembers them running down a long trail to the lake and staring in bewilderment at its marshy margins and the waves that were blowing up. Back at the house, they went straight to the phone, telling themselves they were calling the sheriff’s office out of an excess of caution, and sure enough, just then a man drove into the clearing with two little blond boys he had picked up on the highway. They were trying to hitchhike to the store with money they had stolen from the au pair’s bag while she slept on the beach. No doubt Liam had tried to follow them.
But Payton, this child who had been invited along for respite from the spectacle of her mother’s dying, would not be consoled. “Nobody ever liked him,” she kept sobbing. And later, when the sheriffs went up the cabin line asking questions, someone turned
up with the two empty blow-up rafts, tied together with a cord, and of course there were still two children missing at that point. And then a cottager reported the little boy’s body floating in the water.
That other time, Sylvie was lost for five hours. Liz finally found her in the car – where she had
not
been earlier: they had searched the cars, including the trunks – so she was clearly playing some sort of game. Almost lightheaded with relief and not knowing what had happened, what Sylvie had seen, it was very hard for Liz to know how to deal with her. She absolutely refused to talk through the rest of that night, when Adrienne and her husband had gone to the sheriff’s office and then wherever else one goes (the morgue? the coroner’s?) and Krzysztof was wordlessly doing the
I’m not sure what any of this has to do with me
thing, and the au pair, a vulpine-looking girl, like Princess Diana in her bulimic phase, was a weeping mess, and Liz was obliged to look after four upset children, counselling them about the tragedy, trying to sort out beds for them, trying to get them to eat. She knew Sylvie would be morally offended by the rabbit, so she made up a plate of salad and bread and cheese and took it over to the armchair where she was curled up. Sylvie caught her breath sharply and shrank away.
When they left after breakfast the next day, Sylvie would not get into the front seat. She wouldn’t put on a seatbelt. She rode kneeling on the back seat and looking out the rear window or lying with her back towards Liz.
They rolled silently past the Mall of America and headed straight north. It was an early autumn day of shattering beauty. From time to time Liz tried to reason with Sylvie, although god knows, she had her own thoughts to occupy her mind that day. “That makes me really uncomfortable,” she said about the unattached seatbelt. “But I guess, when I think about it, we never used seatbelts when I was young. We drove out to B.C. almost every year, right through the
mountains, Maureen and I rolling back and forth from the front seat to the back. And we survived.”
Silence. Liz put it to herself that there was enough trauma in the drowning of that little boy to account for any sort of acting out on the part of a pubescent child. But as she drove, as the forest gradually slumped into browning cornfields, the painful realization that Sylvie
knew
grew upon her like rheumatism settling into her bones. It was impossible to ask. Either way, where could such a conversation go?
By the time they got home she had run out of stamina. In the kitchen,
Aiden Home
was scrawled on the calendar. On Thursday, three days away. She looked up the number of the marina at Rocky Landing. She asked the guy there if he would take a message over to the island. Tell Aiden Phimister they’d be at the landing, noon tomorrow.
Next morning Sylvie sat in the front seat like a sphinx, and Liz drove east into the Shield with the understanding that she might be driving them towards the end of their life as they knew it. Bring it on, she thought furiously. She was desperately thirsty – she’d spent most of the night in the living room with a bottle of wine, and she’d forgotten to bring water. When they got to the marina, Sylvie pitched in to haul their bags down to the landing, and there was Aiden, paddling across the water in his padded vest, and Liz saw him clearly and knew that, whatever was drawing him away from them that summer, it was not the sort of thing she had let herself believe.
Sylvie dashed down the boat ramp, calling for her dad. As he hoisted himself out of the canoe she threw herself at him, burying her face in his vest. Aiden looked questioningly at Liz over her head. “What’s all this about? Was the festival a bust?”
“The festival was fine. No, it’s something else. I’ll tell you when we get there.” Her mouth was so dry she could hardly speak.
“Can’t you tell me now?”
“Well, something very sad happened.” Terror – the sort you feel in childhood – overtook her: she could feel her heart pounding through her entire body. “After the festival we stayed at a little lake because the weather was so nice. And there were some people from Madison, Wisconsin, on the beach, and a little boy drowned. He drifted away on a blow-up raft.”
Sylvie was leaning her full weight against Aiden, as though she were six years old. He tried to get her to stand up so he could see her face. “Did you see it, sweetie? Is that why you’re so upset?”
“No!” she cried sharply into his vest. “I didn’t see it.”
He stroked the back of her head and looked at Liz. She raised her shoulders slightly. He bent over Sylvie. “Well, that
is
really sad. It must have kind of taken the fun out of your holiday.”
She wouldn’t look at him. So it was Liz who said, “Yeah, it did, all right. It was terrible. So I figured your little girl needed her dad. And how has your time at the cabin been?”
Back in the kitchen she goes to the phone and calls three or four friends, recruiting volunteers. She calls her sister, Maureen, in Toronto and finds herself downplaying the situation to the point where Maureen wonders why she’s phoned. She calls Charlotte in Vancouver.
“I am so scared,” she says. “Although maybe Sylvie’s just trying one on. Maybe she was hiding in the trees, watching the car, waiting to be sure the baby was found.”
“Liz,” Charlotte says, “that’s totally crazy. That’s like something out of a movie. Why would she do such a thing?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Liz says. “I’m just having trouble thinking straight.”
“Should I come?”
“No, stay where you are. Just keep answering your phone, okay?”
She hangs up. She makes a pot of coffee. She hasn’t eaten a bite since lunch yesterday. She drops some bread into the toaster and stands with her forehead against the cupboard. The toast comes up and then Wendy is at the side door. She taps and comes in without waiting for Liz to answer.