The Matter of Sylvie (15 page)

Coldly, methodically, the
dis
-ease in full control now, with intent, as if she had thought it out meticulously in her head, planned, deliberate, premeditated, but no, the idea hadn't occurred to her until this precise moment: a solution, reprieve, respite. She walks through the dead quiet of the house with purpose she hasn't felt in years. Lesa and Nate are sleeping in their room. Sylvie, peanut butter and all, has fallen asleep next to the tartan chesterfield on the living room carpet among the drying Lego. Jacqueline goes into her bedroom, pulls down two of her husband's beige RCMP shirts that she irons every Sunday night for the week ahead while the children watch
Walt Disney Presents
on the television. Then she goes into the kitchen and fishes around in the orange ceramic bowl by the sink for the keys to her husband's '57 Plymouth Fury. She doesn't drive. He mostly drives the company cruiser.

Jacqueline tiptoes down the hall so as not to wake Lesa or Nate, peers into the dim light of Sylvie's room. The lone bed, the locked closet, the windows she had her husband reinforce shut so Sylvie couldn't climb out at night. No pictures on the walls for Sylvie to pull down and possibly smash the glass when the black moods, Jacqueline calls them, overtake her. Then there is nothing to be done but hold the bedroom door shut knowing Sylvie's safe inside and wait it out until she falls into a shattered heap on the floor. Then Jacqueline goes in and sits on the floor, holds Sylvie in her arms until she quietens, returns to the present world. The bleak austerity of Sylvie's room not so different from the holding cells at the RCMP barracks.

God, that's depressing.

God?

She's tired.

She needs someone to hold her in his arms.

Jacqueline pushes her dishevelled hair off her face, realizes she hasn't so much as brushed her hair today let alone her teeth. Her stomach reels with fresh nausea, perhaps the anticipation of a resolution made. For a brief moment she feels buoyant. Almost, but then the import of her decision pulls her back down. She treads softly into the living room where Sylvie is snoring lightly on the carpet. Jacqueline sifts through the magazines, comic books on the coffee table, finds her cigarettes, lights another in the dark. She smokes standing. She doesn't want to sit. She's doesn't want anything to impede this last momentum, this final bit of courage, despair that she feels in the pit of her stomach along with the unknown of her unborn child. She watches Sylvie, her breath calm, measured, deep in sleep. Jacqueline inhales, exhales in sync.

She takes a last drag, drops her cigarette into her leftover coffee from this morning. The cigarette hisses, sends up a poof of smoke like a magician's trick in order to distract the audience from the real action, the real trick she is about to perform.

In the bedroom closet she unhooks the flexible hose from the Electrolux vacuum, then pulls down one of her husband's neatly pressed shirts and walks back through the silent house into their attached single garage. She stuffs the pressed shirt into one tail pipe, then pushes the vacuum hose into the other tailpipe of his Plymouth Fury, a two-door sports coupe model. He didn't even have the sense to buy a four-door. She threads the hose through the back window, does the window up as much as she can. She slides in the driver side. The vinyl seats sticky with the impending thunderstorm. Jacqueline puts the keys in the ignition, hesitates for a moment, a crucial split second in which things could go either way, wholly irreparable, or else largely unnoticed like the thousands of splintered thoughts that pass through her head on any given day except for today, this Wednesday in mid-July.

With intent she starts the car, leans across and rolls the passenger window up tight, cranes her neck around to see that the windows in the back are also done up. She turns the heater on full, goes back into the house.

Corporal Lloyd has Jimmy Widman pinned to the concrete floor of the Burger Baron, minimizing any further damage that Jimmy may have to offend this small community. At least that's the hope. Lloyd feels winter seeping through the cement in direct opposition to the sated heat coming off Jimmy's body like a smouldering campfire. The pandemonium in the restaurant is fever pitch: sobbing children, crying mothers, the older men shaking their heads like they'd seen it all before, but wait, not yet, here's something new to go home with to tell their shocked wives. Balloons, go figure.

Lloyd figures the logistics in his fatigued head. A room full of people, Jimmy half-naked beneath him and squirming to be released—how to get him out? He looks up to see vinegar-faced woman standing above them, her indignant hands perched on her wide hips, glaring down as if she knew from the start he was trouble in his '73 Camaro Z28 with the battered suspect passenger in the back seat. As if she can't believe he brought this powder blue ski-suit-packaged repulsion and the flimsy excuse of his RCMP parka upon them, at a birthday party no less. Lloyd thanks Christ he's still in uniform or things could be worse, much worse.

Nothing left to do but attend to the already seen crime scene and follow procedure. Lloyd hauls Jimmy to his feet, instructs the crowd to step back, though everyone is spread out in a circle as far away as the walls of the Burger Baron will allow. Young mothers clutching their young children, shielding their innocent eyes; no one wants anything to do with it, but given the sudden absurdity of the situation, they don't have much choice. Certainly not something Lloyd could anticipate, no prior behaviour that he knows where Jimmy is involved. He wonders if Judge Wade had anything like this before his bench. He'd have to ask him, also make mention of it to the Michener people. No balloons, please.

But no one is hurt here. Certainly Jimmy meant no malice, intended no harm, just an erratic child's impulse, and nothing to do with the children, everything to do with balloons, however X-rated it may appear to the stunned onlookers, obliged by his adult body. Hard to reconcile where the birthday children are concerned, but given some distance over time, coffee gossip being what it is, this could conceivably go down in history as one of those things you didn't see coming but got to anyway.

With Jimmy's hands secured in cuffs behind his back, not that Lloyd believes Jimmy is a danger in any way, the handcuffs more for the sake of the mothers, the wailing children, the indignant Burger Baron woman, Lloyd shields Jimmy's emaciated body while he pulls the ski pants up and fastens the silver heart clasp around his waist. Jimmy's warm skin flushed the colour of the pink balloons, the shut black eye, his excited, distended face, rough stitches across his left brow. His cauliflower ear, too long someone's punching bag. The balloons float languidly above Jimmy, above the coat rack as if nothing happened, ready to continue on with the birthday party. The room calmer, under control now, less wailing, sobbing, streaked tears drying on the children's faces. The grateful mothers reassured by the All-Canadian Dudley Do-Right to the rescue (no idea that what Jimmy inflicted on them was indirectly Lloyd's doing). The dark-haired mother smiles at Corporal Lloyd, who hangs on tight to Jimmy as he steers him across the restaurant, stopping to pick up their order and Jimmy's hot chocolate from the counter, no chance whatsoever for a repeat performance.

Offside outside the Burger Baron, Lloyd slides the handcuffs off Jimmy, guides him gently into the back seat of the Z28. Jimmy rubs his wrists, his chin to his chest. Lloyd turns the ignition, the 383 Crate engine roars to life. The Burger Baron woman scowls out the window at the pair of them, the rough rumble of Constable Pete's Hedman headers confirming what the woman already knew.

Jimmy leans into the front seat.

“Jimmy's in the soup, huh?” he says, his face close to Corporal Lloyd's, the smack of Wild Turkey mixed with the faint trace of antiseptic, dog shampoo, semen.

Lloyd can't help but smile beneath his parka. Funny in a way that only Lloyd can locate in this moment. Knowing, also, it's the only thing that keeps him on the job—the searching, finding, in fact requiring the humour, the tinfoil lining, however crumpled or tarnished in any number of the unforeseen, bizarre circumstances that Lloyd comes up against. Because the times when neither humour nor tinfoil are present, it makes the job unbearable.

Traversing the straight road that connects the south side of Michener to the north, Lesa sees the military precision of the flat-topped brick buildings laid out in a long row on Medley Drive. The first building, the windows are heavily barred, same with the doors. Reserved for the dangerously ill, the high behaviours, the clients within escorted by paired staff, usually men. She knows Sylvie was never housed there. She walks along the wide swath of sidewalk in front of the buildings, the October air brisk on her face, reaching beneath her Alpaca sweater to her already chilled skin. She hugs her body for warmth, hopes her childhood instincts will kick in, give her some intuitive familial signal that she's found the right building, the place where Sylvie resides. When she gets to the end of the row with no such insight, she goes around to the back, hoping that might trigger some past recollection.

The invisible sun even more so on the backside of the buildings, the faint shadows barely purple on the yellowed lawns, the air distinctively colder. She stands a moment surveying her surroundings: the brick buildings look identical, though she knows from early experience, from the identical row housing they used to live in, from her parents slanted marriage, she knows that looks can be deceiving.

Arbitrarily she chooses 218B, this door open to outsiders but closed to the residents inside. The lukewarm smell of hospital food assaults her nostrils, beneath that, the floor wax, bleach, the thin trace of human urine. The main floor corridor is empty, save for the second set of doors that Lesa knows will fully admit/commit her to Michener. If she enters those, then she is officially locked in and can't get out without a staff member to release her. She stands on the tips of her tennis shoes and peers through the small rectangular window on the second set of doors. No one seems to be around. She knocks on the heavy door, no response. She turns, sees a maintenance man at the elevator. The door of the elevator opens, the man steps inside, inserts a key into the panel.

“Wait,” Lesa calls, strides across the floor.

The man straightens his arm, prevents the door from closing on her.

“I'm looking for—” Lesa stops, realizing how unreasonable she might sound. Fourteen hundred clients, one random maintenance man, what are the odds? Surely a hit and miss where Sylvie is concerned? The maintenance man holds the elevator door. Lesa reads the sign taped to the elevator:
Please do not encourage Melinda Carberry to use elevator unless supervised.

“Going up?” he asks.

She smiles. How does he know she's not Melinda Carberry?

Lesa tilts her head.

“Melinda doesn't read,” he tells her.

“Who are you looking for?”

“Sylvie,” says Lesa. “Burrows, Sylvie Burrows.”

“You're close. She's one building over.”

He points east.

“Second floor,” he says, holding the door a moment longer than is necessary.

Lesa raises a questioning brow at him.

“Twenty-seven years,” he explains. “Not many I don't know here.”

She nods.

“Mind you'll have to take the stairs over there, those elevators won't go without a key.”

He lets the door slide shut.

Lesa goes back outside, crosses the frozen grounds to the adjacent building. Same corridor, same hospital smell, same second set of locked doors. She goes through, commits herself, fully, completely. Sylvie is here, she can feel it, as if Sylvie's warm, moist breath is once again on Lesa's bare child-neck. Sylvie's stringy arms clung tight round Lesa's sturdy waist on the tricycle. Sylvie's heart racing in her chest, the thudding echo in Lesa's ear. Sylvie ready to bolt at any given moment, but Lesa, faster, always able to catch, calm Sylvie, rein in her aberrant impulses where her mother couldn't. Sylvie's unintentional guardian whether she wished it or not. The trepidation in Lesa's chest as she mounts the stairs swiftly two at a time, afraid that if she slows or, worse, stops, then she won't go any farther. So long away, so far ago.

The door at the top of the stairs shuts with a final metal click behind her, the same jarring mechanical click of her father's throat when he breathed in deliberately, deeply, as if preparing to dive beneath some watery surface while all of them, her mother, Nate, Clare, Lesa, waited for him to surface once more, but he didn't. His still, quiet chest. Goosebumps on Lesa's skin then, now as she thinks about the ashen colour of her dead father's skin, his Sylvie-dark eyes wide open, blankness registering nothing/everything. The memory of him a heavy purple shadow on Lesa's soul, her grief returning again and again, seemingly indefatigable. Lesa shrugs the cold off her skin, sets her mind to present rivers.

The hallway is dim, dusklike. The overhead lights muted so she doesn't immediately notice the man lying on the floor as she stands in the corridor allowing her eyes to adjust to the semi-dark. She can see light from two doors at the end of the hall. When she does notice the small man curled at her feet, she starts. Lesa's heart thudding in her ears, she reaches behind, tries the door handle, locked. She looks down at the man. He's lying on his side, casual-like, as if on a Sunday picnic, his legs stretched out languidly, his hands busy with the peas-and-corn pattern of the stone floor. She notes the cauliflower ear, the serrated scar on his left brow, the mashed nose, the rough skin of a person who has spent too much time outdoors, the warp of his distorted face not unlike Sylvie's.

“Excuse me,” she says, stepping cautiously over him.

He doesn't reply, doesn't move. His smooth fingers pulsing, pushing at the immovable light corn–dark pea pattern on the floor as if assembling a complex puzzle.