Authors: Joan Thomas
“Nobody is suggesting you’re evil, honey,” Liz said. But (though she’s been hounding the child welfare authorities) she’s stymied by the whole thing. Sitting on the deck night after night, she and Aiden go over it. Is it such a crime, Aiden says, to stroll a few yards away to bury a diaper? Anyone can get lost in the woods. There was no one around who was going to steal the baby. But Kenora? Liz says. How could she end up in Kenora, unless she was running away? Still, Aiden says. You’d think they’d want this infant with her family while they investigate. I agree, Liz says. I don’t get it. There is something going on that I can’t figure out. And
Maggie
? Where is the beauteous goddess of new-age parenting now that everything’s fallen apart?
On the floor now, Sylvie gives one last lick of the brush to Max’s haunch. He recognizes her farewell pat and walks stiffly away. She leans against the wall and closes her eyes. Instantly she’s back riding in a big white truck that smells like a chicken barn. There’s a leather satchel on the floor at her feet. The driver tells her to open it, and directs her to a cardboard folder with a photograph tucked inside, his
hijas queridas
. Two little girls with dark hair pulled back from their blunt faces. They were standing against a cement-block wall, pressed closely together: Anaclaudia, the taller one in the red sweater, eyes wary and her arm tight around her little sister, and Esmeralda, in a bright pink T-shirt and turquoise jacket, looking trustingly at the camera.
“La luz de mi vida,”
he says fervently. “
Sí
,” Sylvie says. She’s never studied Spanish but she’s been to Isla Mujeres.
She opens her eyes and sits up, sinking her fingers into the dog brush, gathering up a handful of coarse grey hair, which she drops into the garbage bag. This story has a happy ending. The man is kind, he does not harm her. After some hours of travel, they come to a town and he pulls up in front of a brick building and tells her
to go in. She slides awkwardly down from the high seat of the truck and walks up to the door. It opens on its own, revealing a hospital. She goes straight up to the desk and tells someone who she is and what she has done. Then she sits in a chair with her head in her arms until a woman comes back and bends over her and says, “We talked to the police. Your baby is okay, someone found her in time.”
She scoots her butt back towards the wall. She feels so light these days. Because her breasts are vanishing … well, shrinking. She lays one hand on her scar, where pain blooms. Not the pain from her surgery – that’s gone, she’s totally recovered. She can do anything now, as long as she can cope with the feelings that grab at her whenever she moves quickly. Your baby is okay, the woman said. Sylvie sees her tiny, grasping hands, takes in the smell of spit-up milk. The light of my life, she says to herself, trying out the words. She stretches out her legs on the cool floorboards and the old panic rises.
La luz de mi vida
, she whispers, leaning her head back against the wall: it’s a little easier in Spanish.
If you talk to someone about what happened, you’ll get over it faster, her dad pointed out this morning, standing in the doorway of her room. I believe you, she said. But she knows the way she talks, the hateful sound of her voice when (for example) she is forced to answer the questions of the police. A voice she still hears screaming
Baby
into the bush, a bush that had fallen silent, no sound then but her own panting, and her own calling and screaming, which sometimes echoed.
If she could see the nurse from the Kenora hospital again, she would talk to her. The nurse in the aqua jumpsuit, who took Sylvie to a room and started an
IV
to get her fluids up, and who was standing with a policeman in the doorway when Sylvie woke up. The cop lifted his hand and said, “Bye,” and Sylvie said, “Are they leaving me without a guard?” and the nurse said, “Get a grip. He’s my
boyfriend. He just dropped by on his break.” She came over to the bed and set about checking Sylvie’s blood pressure and temperature. Sylvie was feeling drugged from her short sleep, and she was filled with wonder at the sight of this woman planted solidly by the bed with her big feet in pink Crocs, larger than life, more fully realized, a heavy metallic zipper straining over her humungous breasts, a fat, bulging frog-throat with a little chin perched high above it, and a red rash on that throat with tiny black dots in it, as though she shaved. “So tell me,” the nurse said in a bold voice as she stuck a probe into Sylvie’s ear. “How exactly does a tiny baby end up alone in a car in the middle of nowhere?”
Sylvie rubbed her arms, which were chalky now with calamine lotion. “I had to bury a dirty diaper. And I didn’t take her with me because if I tried to put her in the sling I’d have woken her up.” Her own voice was hoarse from all her screaming. “I just walked a little way into the bush to check something out. Then, when I turned back, I came to the ridge, and I saw the sand where I’d buried the diaper, but the car was gone. So then I was running up and down, looking for the car, and I got all mixed up. I saw something white under some spruce – it was bright, I could see it from far away, and I thought it was the diaper I’d buried, like it had already been dug up by animals and dragged there. I ran all the way over to it, and here it was a disposable diaper somebody else had dumped there. It wasn’t even my diaper. And then I was
so
lost.” The nurse was watching her closely with little blue eyes. “It felt like hours might have gone by, or days. It was like there’s another world behind the world we’re in, and suddenly I was in it. Like I’d stepped through a portal.”
“You read too much science fiction,” the nurse said. “Your car was there. Nobody moved your car. If you’d stopped running around like a chicken with its head cut off, you would have figured it out. But I understand you walked to the road and you hitchhiked here?”
In the cold blue clarity of her gaze lay the things Sylvie was straining to see. “Are people saying I did this on purpose?”
The nurse lifted her big shoulders. “I haven’t heard a word on the subject.”
She was bundling up the blood pressure cuff, she was getting ready to leave. The terrible possibilities of the night still gripped Sylvie. But the nurse was going to refuse to utter a judgment, although there was judgment in every line of her body.
“I suppose you have children,” Sylvie said.
“I’ve got three.”
“Well, I didn’t even know I was pregnant until this baby was half-developed.”
“Oh, is that right?”
“And you know – I sort of feel like I didn’t really
have
her. I didn’t go through labour. All over the world, women labour when they give birth. But it’s like modern medicine used a shortcut with me.” The nurse was peering at her as if she was looking over reading glasses. Sylvie wanted to grab hold of her arm to keep her there, but she didn’t have the nerve. “I didn’t even learn the breathing. I treated the prenatal classes like a joke.”
“So you think that’s why you had a C-section?” the nurse said, provoked at last. “Because you didn’t learn the breathing?”
“Well, maybe. In some strange way.”
The nurse dropped her clipboard on the bed. “Listen,
Sylvia
. I was eighteen when I had my first baby, and I lived behind a gas station in Cochenor, way up in northern Ontario. I’d never
heard
of pain-control breathing. I had contractions for twenty-four hours and I screamed like a stuck pig through most of it. Second time, I was washing dishes and my water broke, and the next thing I know, I’ve got a little girl sucking on my tit. My third, I had a planned C-section because I’ve got uterine leiomyoma, also known
as fibroids. So, am I going to be a good mother to one of those kids and not to the other two?”
She was practically yelling by the end of this speech, and she snatched up her clipboard and left the room as though she couldn’t get away from Sylvie fast enough.
Sylvie turns her head and looks at her mother, who is crouched now, scraping plaster into nicks along the baseboard. How strikingly graceful and slender she is compared to the larger-than-life woman in Sylvie’s mind. Close like this, Sylvie feels her anxiety. She tries so hard, Sylvie thinks. At everything. And still she gets it wrong. How can that be?
Sylvie scoots over to make room and their eyes briefly meet. Liz turns back to the wall and reaches to fill another nick. All these marks, she thinks, from the careless way we swing the chairs around. My mother crocheted little booties for her dining room chairs, to avoid exactly this sort of damage. Oh, and marks on her hardwood floor. She smoothes the plaster with deft cross-strokes, and her mind drifts to dinner. To the snow peas in the fridge and the tofu in the freezer. She’ll make a stir fry. No, not a good idea to turn on the stove – they’ll order from The Bangkok. And tomorrow or the day after, she’ll drive to Western Paint and pick up colour chips. She’ll ask for a
green
product. To please Sylvie, who’s still on the floor in the archway, hugging her knees, deep in thought.
Though Sylvie is not thinking, exactly. She’s back to listening for her baby. At five this morning, she woke up when somewhere, in a crib in a stranger’s house, the baby started crying for her morning feed. It was around six by the time she let herself fall back to sleep. I made myself stay awake for my baby, she explains to the nurse, who’s standing at the counter in the nursing station in her bubblegum Crocs, counting pills. The nurse looks up with those knowing little eyes. Get a grip, she says.
L
ATE ONE AFTERNOON, WHILE SYLVIE IS UP IN her room, a worker from Child and Family Services calls and Liz answers. When that conversation is over, Liz stands looking out the kitchen window for a minute, and then she snatches up her keys and goes out to the car.
The Maryland Bridge is already backed up. She inches her way across it, her hand tapping the steering wheel in a furious percussion and her conviction growing with each tap: that since the day Mary Magdalene glided up these steps in a red coat and a cranberry caftan, a systematic
attack
has been going on. And Liz has been too preoccupied to realize it. She’s been like someone slumbering in bed, hearing the small sounds of a crime being committed in the dark rooms of the house, and lazily weaving it all into her dream.
It’s an old neighbourhood, River Heights, with wider lots than Wolseley and brick houses set back from the street, a smugger attitude to money. The house is not what Liz expects, though. It’s an infill property circa 1964, a modest stucco bungalow with that most pathetic of suburban affectations, a fake brick façade on the front. But the concrete steps are painted purple and a batik sunflower
banner flutters from the eaves, and on a wrought-iron bench at the edge of the yard, among the goutweed and spent lily-of-the-valley, Liz spies Krzysztof Nowak’s mother, her black babushka tied under her chin and her hands stacked on the head of her cane.
“Is Maggie home?” The
baba
glowers and doesn’t answer.
Liz climbs the purple steps. She ignores the doorbell and thumps on the aluminum screen door with the side of her fist. She can smell mown grass and grilling meat. Somewhere nearby, little girls are shrieking. She thumps again, staring back boldly at Krzysztof’s mother.
Krzysztof opens the door, clearly startled to see her. He launches into a concerned friend routine and she cuts him off. “Stop the fucking act. My daughter’s in crisis. She was lost in the bush. And this is what you people think of – running to the social workers to tell lies about her?”
“What are you talking about?”
“
CFS
just phoned. So Maggie’s behind this! Trying to have our daughter declared an unfit parent. Charging her with all sorts of negligence. She’s been into the child welfare office. With a list. In
writing!
We were named, Aiden and I. Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”
But he frowns in a lame approximation of surprise and confusion and steps back to invite her into the house. She steps back as well, off the steps and onto the front walk, so he doesn’t have much choice but to come out. He’s wearing tasselled slippers and dorky-fitting chinos. He’s changed in eight years, Liz thinks. In the hard summer light she’s seized with a new conviction, that
Mary Magdalene knows everything
. Only the wrath of a wronged wife can account for this. “You’ve told her,” she cries. “About us.”
His face hardens. “Us?” he says. He’s changed in eight years, but he hasn’t changed enough. Back then, when she was in the kitchen of that retreat house in Minnesota making coffee for the searchers,
she glanced over her shoulder to see Krzysztof and Melody, the babysitting grad student, together in the hall. She saw Melody reach for Krzysztof’s hand and cling to it, trying to lift it to her face, and she saw Krzysztof twist his wrist away with a patronizing smile.
Over at the bench, his mother is hoisting herself to her feet. “Dat man,” she calls in a harsh voice. “Cutting bottles over baby! Why you give him knife? Eh, missus?” She lifts her cane, a parody of the granny from central casting. “
Missus!
Why you give him knife?”
“Hush, Mama,” Krzysztof says. “I mean it. Sit down. Keep your mouth shut.”
A car pulls up behind Liz’s, a little red car with two women in it. Liz can see Maggie’s grey mop on the passenger side. She and the driver lean into a lingering embrace, and then Maggie straightens up and opens the door, still talking. She steps onto the curb and waves goodbye to her friend, turns, and sees Liz on the front walk.
“Oh, Liz,” she cries, “how
are
you?” And instantly Liz can see that she’s got it wrong. This is not revenge. It’s just Mary Magdalene being Mary Magdalene. “What are you all standing out here for?” she says warmly. “Let’s go inside.”
Liz takes in her rayon dress with its uneven hemline, her generous breasts in their saggy little hammocks, her tangled silvery hair. “I’ve just been talking to the
CFS
worker. I understand you’ve been into their office trying to have our daughter declared an unfit parent. Feeding them a list of lies to make sure they don’t let the baby come home.”