The Matter of Sylvie (16 page)

She walks down the dim corridor to the lit doorways. Peers into the wire-meshed window, sees a man swaying in the bright light of the day room like a sailor on an unsure ship. Another man, alarmingly large and primatelike, beats some unseen repeated path around the perimeter of the small room. Another still, clothed in nothing but a white towel wrapped loosely around his waist, sits with his naked back to her. Lesa doesn't pause at the door, knows the rooms are no longer co-ed as they were in the past but segregated now.

The women must be on the other side. She tries the knob on the other door, which is unlocked. She glances down the corridor, relieved to see the man still there, still ten metres out, the dark vacant corridor vaguely worrisome, though if push came to shove, she's sure she could defend herself. Regardless of the unlocked door, she knocks, a dull thud within. At first no one responds, then the short quick footsteps approaching. A caregiver, roughly the same age as Lesa's mother, looks out the caged window, unlocks the door from the inside, and pulls it open. She's dressed in a boisterous yellow smock plastered with happy faces.

“I'm sorry,” Lesa says, “I wasn't sure if I could just come in.”

The woman waves her hand to enter, retrieves her keys from the door.

The two of them stand in the doorway. Several women are in the room, none of them Sylvie. One, broad-shouldered like a swimmer, wanders around, talking to no one that Lesa can see. The woman's arms circling in time to Reba McEntire singing on the radio:
Oh, why is the last one to know, the first one to cry and the last to let go?
Lesa's eyes water, surprised at how close she is to letting go. She takes a deep breath to keep herself in check. The woman swims toward them.

“Watch the arms, please, Sherry,” the caregiver says.

Sherry front-crawls back across the room.

“I'm not sure if I'm in the right place,” Lesa says, spots another woman lying on a garish orange and brown flowered sofa, no doubt left over from the 1960s and kindly donated. The woman is watching
Murder, She Wrote
, soundless on a television housed in a huge wood cabinet also from the 1960s. This woman gets up swiftly and comes over to Lesa, stands uncomfortably close, examines the thick knit colours on Lesa's Alpaca sweater with her long, wizened fingers.

“You have a very nice sweater,” she says crisply.

“Personal space, Barb,” says the caregiver.

Barb doesn't flinch.

The caregiver eases her back a foot. Barb stands staring at Lesa as if waiting for some secret signal, a wink, a smile between them so that she might carry on with the Alpaca inspection.

“I've come to see Sylvie Burrows,” Lesa says, avoiding Barb's intense face.

Barb steps forward.

“I would like to see that sweater again,” says Barb.

“Not now, Barb. Come, let's talk out here.” The caregiver moves out into the muted hallway, shuts the door so that Barb is forced instead to peer out the small rectangular window.

“And you are?” asks the caregiver.

“Her sister,” Lesa says.

The caregiver extends a peach-flesh hand. Lesa shakes it, tries to release, but the caregiver hangs on, pumps her hand eagerly.

“How great! Sylvie will be so excited. She's having her morning bath at the moment. Can you wait? Are you in town for a while? Are you the older sister or the younger? How is your mother? We heard your poor father died. He came like clockwork once a month for ten years, and then suddenly, nothing. We miss him. Sylvie misses him. She likes men, doesn't get to see too many regular ones up here, although she had no idea he was her father, any more than she'll know you're her sister, but she'll be glad to see you all the same. She enjoyed your father's company, having tea and cookies, walking the grounds, especially when he pushed her on the swings. She loved that.”

Seeing the dazed look on Lesa's face the caregiver stops.

“I'm sorry,” she says.

“No, it's fine,” says Lesa, her head swimming with questions, no forthcoming answers. He came like clockwork once a month? His entire last decade?

Lesa hadn't known. She doubts her mother knew. Why hadn't he told them? Although if Lesa digs deeper to Wednesdays past she knows why: he came for the sake of her mother, his Sylvie, himself.

“I'm Marge Mabley.” Still holding Lesa's hand, Marge pats it like a long-forgotten aunt.

Lesa clears her confused head.

“I'm Lesa, the older one. My mother is fine, and yes, I can wait, I'm sorry to have not called, I didn't know I was coming.”

“No trouble there, why don't you come inside and I'll round up some tea and digestive biscuits. Do you like those? Or Peak Freans, maybe there's some leftover in the kitchen, I'll check with Cook. It's almost lunch; perhaps you'd like to join the ladies in the dining room? We only have eight ladies now, used to be we had a full house way back when, some thirty-two women, four to a room. What a circus that was! But we've expanded. Come I'll show you Sylvie's room. We've recently decorated, purple is her favourite colour, with rainforest, animals, parrots, you'll see. Sylvie loves it, spends a good portion of her day there. Oh, she'll be so happy you're here! They don't get many visitors. Either the family lives too far away, or the parents are long deceased with our population here aging themselves, or the memory is too painful, better left scabbed over and forgotten. What did you say your name was again?”

Lesa draws a breath, can't think for the flash flood of Marge's words. Guilt slips across her tired face like a noticeable cloud.

“Lesa,” she says, adding softly, “Lesa Burrows.”

“Not married?” Marge Mabley asks, searching her peach-plump body for something: a jangle of metal. Lesa looks down at the ring of keys attached to the loop of Marge's purple cotton pants. And there also, below Marge, next to her soft white-soled nurse's shoes is the small man from the other end of the corridor. Lesa doesn't know how he managed to sneak up on them, slipping, sliding, possibly skimming the smooth surface of the cool granite floor. Not so much a whisper of his clothing or the deep, even breathing she can hear now coming from him, like that of a loyal, slumbering dog. Her body relaxes suddenly with the simple in/out of his measured breath. She feels extraordinarily calm in this moment, not guilt, nor alarm, hardly startled by this small man lying coyly on his side, his long legs thrust out as if posing for
Playgirl
. He extends his hand up to Lesa. And though Lesa doesn't understand the significance of it, she knows it's important that she take his flat, smooth-knuckled hand in hers.

“A regular Burt Reynolds, aren't we, Jimmy?” Marge laughs.

Marge reaches down, ruffles the man's thick tousled hair.

“Come, Sylvie awaits you.”

Marge pushes the door, has to instruct Barb to back, back, back up another foot so she can get the door open.

“We have a lunch guest, Sylvie's sister.”

Barb's face lights as does the woman's on the orange sofa.

Lesa hesitates a moment, holds the man's hand, waits instead for him to release her, not the other way around. When he does, he gazes up at her in the dim corridor, his grin entirely grateful.

Jacqueline moves purposefully through the darkened house gathering toys, wiping the peanut butter from the walls, cupboards, off the kitchen table. She's in charge; this is her ball game, her baby, her first and last act. She's the driver now, no longer the passive passenger in someone else's car. She considers checking Nate and Lesa once more. But then—no. What would be the point?

Out of habit she goes down the hall, checks them anyway. They are both asleep on top of their covers. The house is sweltering with the closed windows, locked doors, impending storm. She stands a moment in the doorway looking at the back of Lesa's dishevelled strawberry-coloured hair, Nate's tan limbs splayed in every direction like an octopus. She could stand here all night, but she knows what she needs to do.

Jacqueline tiptoes into the living room to gather peanut-buttered-covered Sylvie from the chesterfield, carry her surprisingly lightweight, heavy-soiled body through the darkened house, past the hi-fi. No Ted Daffan singing the tragic anthem to someone's life, hers possibly. It doesn't matter now, all that matters is that Lesa and Nate don't wake, don't interrupt her action. She glides silently through the dining room, catches her reflection in the dining room window. She's light, transparent like a ghost, a wingless angel, a merciful God perhaps. She doesn't stop to choose.

Furtive, she makes her way through the kitchen to their garage. Pushes the door open with her back, is greeted by the heat, the humidity, the rumble of thunder in the distance, the mounting trace of exhaust in the closed garage, the mechanical growl of her husband's Plymouth Fury. She glances down at Sylvie in her arms. She's breathing deeply, evenly, the sleep of the dead, Jacqueline thinks. Sylvie always slept that way, even as a baby.

Jacqueline shifts Sylvie to her left arm so that she can open the door of the Plymouth with her right. She pulls the car door open wide, the smell of car exhaust assaults her nostrils, mixed in with the carbon monoxide that she can't see, smell. Odourless, invisible, the silent killer, killer of silence—all Jacqueline wants. Silence as measured against the endless, difficult matter of uncertain children, absent husbands, sketchy fetuses—her future led out in a kind of living hell. The silence of killers, her, Jacqueline. She holds her breath momentarily, then inhales deeply, decisively, welcomes the cloudy stupor of monoxide into her lungs as she does that first lingering cigarette in the morning, only this more effective, faster.

She slides into the vinyl seat with Sylvie in her arms and quietly clicks the driver door shut.

Corporal Lloyd skirts around the province's capital, not wanting to stop, wanting to make up for time lost, perhaps never found. But more than that Jimmy is calm in the back seat of the Camaro Z28 wolfing down the burger, both his and Lloyd's fries, the hot chocolate with the mile-high whipped cream. And, of course, the aftermath of the whole Burger Baron bedlam scene that neither one mentions. Lloyd thanks his lucky stars, the double V of his corporal insignias, that no one called in extra police to assist or Lloyd would have some complicated explaining to do.

After the burgers, Jimmy needs to go to the washroom. Lloyd bypasses the brief strip of gas stations, opting instead for the
wide-open prairies and the cold shoulder. He pulls the car over
and stops on the side of the road. Jimmy scrambles out of the back seat, clutching his groin like the child he is. Lloyd keeps his eye on Jimmy, not wanting to leave anything to chance. Jimmy may have a whole bag of tricks yet to revile the trusting public
with. Corporal Lloyd surveys the white void of the February
prairie. Something comforting in that, a blank slate, a clean bill in which to begin again, each day fresh, anew. Although this Wednesday feels like the Twilight Zone, time without end.

He lights the remnants of his cigar butt in the ashtray, watches Jimmy relieve himself. A yellow streaming spray arced into the lightless day along the desolate highway to Red Deer. How long since he was last at Michener? When Sylvie was admitted, Lloyd calculates. Fall 1961. Though he has never been inside Michener himself, can barely stand the thought of Sylvie's skewed features, so sweet, so flawed, so unfair—let alone set foot into an entire world full of God's imperfections.

Even then, when they admitted Sylvie in 1961, Jacqueline and Lesa did that. His wife and young Lesa walking hand in hand with small, buoyant Sylvie skipping along in the middle, like she was simply off to playschool. While Lloyd remained outside the low brick building with Nate and brand-new baby Clare. The three of them crouched beneath the barred windows in the heatless sun, the autumn air cool around them. Lloyd's breath in short gasps, his dark eyes wet beneath his impenetrable sunglasses.

Like offering your child up to strangers. Driving her out to the middle of a deserted field and leaving her there, Lloyd thinks, surveying the bleak prairies. But that wasn't the case for Sylvie. Sylvie required the special care, the medical expertise, a safe place, although no amount of rationale fully convinces Lloyd.

He feels his intestines shift, not from the burger or the black coffee but something else. He can do this, for the love of God; he's a grown man, a corporal in charge of a detachment, six constables beneath him, an entire town in his care, a wife, three, no four children, if he counts Sylvie. And Sylvie does count, thinks Lloyd, despite the unease he feels inside whenever he thinks of her, like an unfastened latch, a loose door in a windstorm. At the very least he can do this for Jimmy. If not for Sylvie, always Sylvie, in all ways his Sylvie away at Michener, but ever-present in his mind.

Jimmy opens the passenger door, climbs into the back seat. His stomach filled, bodily functions gratified. He curls onto his side, falls immediately into deep oceanic sleep.

Lloyd glances at his watch, shortly past three, just over an hour to Red Deer. He rolls the window down a crack to clear the glutinous haze of fatigue from his head. He needs to keep himself alert, get there before administration closes. He pulls onto the highway shortcutting through Beaumont, then onto Highway 2. Leduc on the left, Wetaskiwin farther east, and later the sign for Red Deer. The nearer he gets to Michener the more the disquiet rises in his intestines, the low pulsing of the live wire increasing beneath his shallow skin. Michener is the test, and Sylvie his last act.

Lesa's lunchmates at Michener consist of Sherry the swimmer, personal-space-issues Barb, and a tiny woman in a wheelchair at the end of the wood table whose lunch will be consumed through a large red straw.