The Matter of Sylvie (18 page)

She turns her attention back to Sylvie's face. So sweet, so simple, so utterly
trusting
. This last thought causing black thunderheads in the otherwise white stratosphere of her brain to seep, leach white over everything, like colourless candy floss in a white parade. Those high, puffy clouds where angels loll and God exists, perhaps even listens—like carbon monoxide. The black of her mind dissipates into the larger white before Jacqueline can retrieve it. Wait, she thinks, don't leave. But as swift as the objection came, it's gone.

Perhaps she'll just rest her eyes a minute; she's so damn lousy-drowsy. Her eyes are burning; she can hardly keep them open. She leans her head on the driver's window despite the perplexing figure that is now in motion moving around the side of the Plymouth Fury in slow time, not real. The figure's actions measured, deliberate. Jacqueline can't make out who it is. Her head is pounding from the colourless monoxide and she can't stop coughing, choking on the card exhaust. She tries to breath shallowly through her nose to quell the cough, she doesn't want to wake Sylvie.

In the distance Jacqueline hears the
tug tug
of the metal door handle, locked on her side. She shakes her head, tries to keep her eyes open, make out the figure at her door. Her head rolls wildly; all she wants to do is sleep, certainly that's easy. Not too much to ask for, is it? God knows she deserves it. She peers down at Sylvie, who is well on her way, her face already at peace. Her peaceful, trusting face. Wait, wait, Jacqueline thinks, recalling a vague idea, a black mark hanging in the whitened air before her smouldering eyes, palpable, visible so she thinks she can reach out and touch it. She tries, but it eludes her, disperses white again. But every time she opens her eyes, it's right there in front of her, why can't she touch it? She can see it as plain as Wednesday.

She struggles with the lassitude of her laden body, calls back the levitation games she played in her teen years: your body is heavy, your arms and legs like water-saturated logs, you're dead, you're dead, your head like—what? She can't remember. Her limbs
are
like logs, her body
is
seriously heavy, but her head oddly light as if someone is trying to force her back down into oblivion.

She hears Sylvie's door open, feels the whisper of not-so-thick air mixing with the monoxide. Someone far away is coughing. Who? She can't turn sideways; rather she rests her loglike limbs against the vinyl seats. The coughing persists, although hers has stopped, must be smoking all the livelong day that has quelled hers. Sylvie hasn't coughed once. With great effort she lifts one arm and drapes it across Sylvie's shoulders. She can feel Sylvie's small hands clutching her arm, pulling, pulling so that Jacqueline opens her eyes briefly and glances down at Sylvie, who for all intents and purposes seems fast asleep. She must need to go pee, Jacqueline thinks. Sylvie does that sometimes, rousts Jacqueline from her never-deep sleep to take her down the darkened hall to the bathroom.

Weary as she is, Jacqueline goes through the required motions in her mind. She pushes against the locked door and then rests from the exertion. Opens her eyes again to see that irritating black mark hanging in the air. She needs to get rid of that. She paws at it, it won't go away. Someone is in between her and Sylvie, moving, pushing Sylvie's silent body across the vinyl seats. Jacqueline hears the thunder outside fracture and split, the
plink plink plink
of rain, quickening, then pummelling down on the garage roof so hard that Jacqueline can scarcely breath amid the metallic roar. Heavy in herself, she glances over at Sylvie, instead sees a confusion of strawberry hair—vaguely familiar. She smiles lethargically, listens to the throbbing rain.

Then the tugging again. All right, Jacqueline thinks. Mother of mission, force of habit: get up, get moving, that's all she has to do. She's forgotten why they were in the car in the first place. Were they going somewhere? She doesn't drive. Something about the ball game, a play, someone's first act? She doesn't recall, but Sylvie needs to go to the washroom and if they don't do it now, there will be a much bigger mess to deal with after. Despite the miasma coalescing in her head, she unlocks the door. Oh yes; she needs to turn the engine off. She clicks the ignition, pushes the driver's door wide, watches as the interior cloud of car exhaust diffuses visibly, then vanishes into the larger air like magician smoke.

One leg out, then the other. Jacqueline rests another moment. Sylvie yanking her arm: Let's go, Mom, let's go, she says. Jacqueline doesn't pause to consider that Sylvie rarely speaks directly to anyone, let alone calls her Mom. She rises, her legs shaky, her mind a twirl like the Ferris wheel, like the Strawberry Swirl she took Sylvie and Lesa and Nate on last summer at the exhibition grounds, like—she loses her train of thought, feels Sylvie's tight grip on her hand, guiding, leading, pulling Jacqueline out of the car, the garage. Outside: the close heat, the unbearable humidity, a long hot troubled day. In its place, the rain pounding, the deep night air pulsing into her lungs breathable, bearable. Jacqueline inhales deeply, gives into her buckling knees, drops down to the wet grass, lies on her back. Feels the damp soak through her husband's sweatshirt to her freckled skin: cool, welcome. She can smell his scent again: musky, ambiguous. Regardless she misses him.

On her left, peanut-butter-slathered Sylvie is alert, awake, her black eyes glittering in the dark. On her right she just now realizes is Lesa. Lesa squeezes her hand, won't let go. The three of them lie on the soaked grass in the hammering rain, heavy limbs akimbo, their backs pressed firmly to the ground.

The rain lessens, the rudderless sky goes pitch-black, lucid, gradually clearing. They recline in the quiet aftermath. Sylvie chatters softly, points up at the first elusive stars that emerge, hardly yellow or discernable light, but
there
nonetheless; by her next-door neighbour's
God
, they are there. Though all she sees—when she looks over the narrows of her twenty-seven years—are people. The people she loves: her children, her husband, despite his shortcomings, the kind constable and his wife whose name she can never remember. Nary the ambiguous God. Only the godless imperfection of ordinary people. That she can manage, comprehend.

Jacqueline holds Lesa's hand, finds Sylvie's small, funny hands in the dark, squeezes them both, hangs on for bitter, dear, sweet life, like some shipwrecked sailor to hull. It's all she's got, everything she needs. She clings to her children, born, unborn, come what may, lets the tears run fiercely down her face.

This Wednesday passing like any other day of the week.

Coming into Red Deer on Gaetz Avenue, Lloyd's stomach is queasy from the greasy burger, the coffee, the prospect of Sylvie after all these years. His out-of-sight, out-of-mind method where Sylvie is concerned is no longer effective. The closer he gets to Michener Centre the more exacting is his mind. How many years since he laid eyes on his Sylvie? 1973 minus 1961. Twelve years. Beyond a decade now, well beyond the time when Jacqueline was pregnant with Clare, overwhelmed, despondent, alone, and adrift in the swirling mass, the Plymouth Fury, the man in the sage-coloured station wagon—the details of that day drilled into him by the constable from next door in his unspeakable absence. And where was he? Is he?

He doesn't even remember the name of the woman, like some God-abandoned rock star, like Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones,
what was your name again, luv?
Some woman he met some place, the both of them topped up with Crown Royal or vodka screwdrivers, or for him, the RCMP pile driver of the exhausting hours away from home. The things he's witnessed on the job that make him feel hopeless, a cart without wheels, make him believe the world
is
going to hell in a handbasket, coming to a Jehovah's Witness end, the soldier going to war, nothing to live for, nothing to die for, except for the moment. The beautiful quixotic tangibility of a strange woman, the pervasive skin of the unknown, like alcohol, addiction itself. Nameless, anonymous, a shadowy place he can bury himself in.

No excuse, Lloyd knows, not then, not now. He glances in the mirror, his dark eyes tired, unreadable, incomprehensible even to himself, his wife. Lloyd knows Jacqueline is not obtuse; she has to have known all along. How could she not? Why she stays with him he doesn't know, but he's enormously grateful in this moment, this present pilgrimage to his cagey past. He bears the glut of his guilt, along with the weight of Sylvie behind him on his wheel-less cart.

Corporal Lloyd follows Gaetz over the bridge; the Red Deer River below frozen completely, nothing moves, nothing yields to the unforgiving Wednesday. Lloyd checks the rear-view mirror again, not for himself, but for Jimmy. It's been a good hour since he's heard a peep or whale blow from him. He doesn't see him. What the hell? No place to go, no stops along the way.

At the next red light Lloyd leans into the back seat, sees Jimmy Widman sleeping on the floor. His body curled round itself like a dog, the humped centre of Pete's Camaro is Jimmy's pillow. Must be what Jimmy's used to, doorways and alleys and floor mats, at least Michener has beds, warm, safe beds, a proper place to rest one's head.

Past the frozen river Lloyd accelerates up the hill, turns onto the road leading into Michener. The sprawling grounds are covered in snow. The low, flat brick buildings, north side, south side, the wooded area in between. He knows instinctively where the administration building is, that part of his exhausted brain suddenly alive, clear-thinking, purposeful as if his twelve-year absence was mere weeks, a month, lying dormant in quiet readiness for his to return to Michener, Sylvie, himself.

The administration building is tall, grand, red brick encasing a white stucco front spanning four storeys. He pulls up in front and stops, Pete's orange car idling pale exhaust in the stiff air.

“Stay put.” He swivels around to see Jimmy on the floor.

Jimmy doesn't respond. Lloyd sits a moment considering his options, then decides his only option is to take the matter by the horn, Jimmy by the hand, and escort him inside. No sense taking chances at this point. He doesn't want Jimmy wandering the enormous grounds on his own, too cold out, and there's the forest-for-the-trees area he can't see beyond. He leans over, rouses Jimmy's shoulder. Jimmy looks up at him through his one good eye.

“Yes, ma'am,” Jimmy says.

“Not your mother,” says Lloyd.

“Yes, boss,” says Jimmy, a rare moment of humour.

“Let's go on inside and see what we can come up with.”

Lloyd shuts the ignition off, pushes his car door open. The cold air swings in, rouses the both of them. Jimmy exits the car like a dog, all fours on the frozen ground. Lloyd guides him gently to his feet, feels Jimmy's lightness lean into him. Together they walk the short flight of stairs into the grand entrance of the administration. The salt-and-pepper-haired woman at the front desk is on her feet before they even get through the double set of doors. She holds the door open, her face open, kindly, older than Lloyd by twenty years.

“Thank you,” Lloyd says, leading Jimmy to a bench along the wall.

Jimmy slumps down; his fingers immediately busy tracing the grain of the wood. The woman gazes at Jimmy's worked-over face, the serrated line of stitches across his brow, the shut swollen eye, cauliflower ear. She mouths a voiceless
ouch
to Lloyd.

“He's all right, he'll be all right, if we can help him,” Lloyd says.

“Nice ski suit,” she says to Jimmy.

Jimmy grins without making eye contact.

The woman goes behind the desk, spreads her veiny hands across the mahogany top. The clock behind her reads 4:29. A full minute to spare.

“How can we help you?” she asks, speaking for herself, all of Michener.

Lloyd pulls the napkin out of his breast pocket, his flimsy excuse of a note, like an unofficial prescription from a dodgy doctor. He lays it on the desk in a crumpled mess, then he smoothes it out. She takes the napkin and reads it out loud.

“Michener Services: Please find Jimmy Widman intact, incompetent, and in need of psychiatric care. Sincerely, Judge Wade.”

Corporal Lloyd watches her intently, the softened lines on her face, the delicate skin over her cheekbones slightly sunken, hollow. The strength of her jaw, the greying hair, the hilltop vantage of her settled years. Has probably seen everything from eternity and back. Inside, Lloyd's bowels are churning, the low live wire pulsing, increasing, charging through his every artery, pathway to his pumping heart. Lloyd hopes. He hopes for Jimmy, for Sylvie, himself even.

The kindly woman looks at him.

“Jonathan Wade, former lawyer?” she asks.

Lloyd nods; he'd forgotten Judge Wade practised mental health law in Red Deer prior to his appointment as a judge in Edmonton. Likely the reason why the judge chose Michener over Ponoka for Jimmy. Here the judge is a known, trusted quantity.

“Jimmy Widman?” She motions toward the bench where Jimmy was, is now curled on the floor, examining a real estate brochure someone has left behind.

“He's your man,” Lloyd says.

She picks up the phone, waits while it rings rings rings, Lloyd can hear it in an office down the hall. No answer. The woman leans forward to gaze down the corridor. All the doors are shut; possibly everyone has vacated the premises. She looks at Lloyd. He drops his head to his chest. He can't look her in the eye in case she tells him there's nothing to be done today, tomorrow, perhaps? He can't wait, feels a sudden sense of urgency that he's not experienced before, a do-or-dire state of affairs. So used to pushing things down, so mired with the not-enough, seemingly never-enough of his work life, his personal life. He and Jacqueline unravelled, unravelling, his children he misses on a daily basis, might miss them forever if something doesn't give, doesn't change, doesn't
be
enough. This he knows today. He's sure of it. Jimmy's life depends on it. His too.