The Matter of Sylvie (7 page)

Lesa glances at herself in the rear-view mirror, touches the newly dyed sheen of her jet-black hair like Sylvie's was as a kid, the black cape tied around her neck. She isn't sure what her intent is, just knows that neither her mother nor Nate has seen her hair yet, and with it the matter of Sylvie. Always that. Regardless, she cranks the radio, accelerates, digs through her purse for a peppermint, finds instead the Air Canada vomit bag and pulls it out, chants the phone number along with Peter Murphy's
undead undead undead.
She wishes she were. The phone number is local, perhaps there's still time to play. She doesn't fly out until tomorrow afternoon. Although she doesn't see how with the dinner, her mother, Nate. She wishes her younger sister, Clare, was going to be there. She's undead and in parties in Las Vegas at the moment. Too bad, Lesa thinks. She likes Clare a lot. Even though Lesa was only six, she remembers her mother bringing mild-mannered, happy-go-baby Clare home. Her delicate features, the small round of her lightly speckled face that made Lesa press her cheek alongside Clare's until Clare got older, lost patience, and squirmed free, wanting instead to see the world for herself, not Lesa's guided version.

Clare gave their mother a reason to roust herself out of bed in the morning again. For months after Sylvie left, and before Clare was born, their mother scarcely came out of her bedroom, and if she did, it was to wander through the house in her Tang-coloured nightgown that was tight around her still-pregnant belly in search of matches to light her cigarette or perhaps burn the row housing down. Lesa didn't know which. Or her mother would spend entire vacant days on the sofa in front of the television, as long as a box of wooden matches lasted, getting up only to find more. She would fly off the handle about the toys on the living room floor, or dirty dishes left on the coffee table. A stray bobby pin on the kitchen counter-top could throw her into a sudden rage. Directed always at Lesa, never Nate, and later certainly not baby Clare. Lesa thought it had something to do with her being the oldest, or with Sylvie. Their father, of course, was still alive, but Lesa doesn't recall him being at home much, even less so once Sylvie was gone.

Peter Murphy's voice fades out. Lesa turns the radio off, tucks the vomit bag in the glove compartment. She scans the horizon, the smaller surrounding town of Airdrie fades away, leaving nothing other than the wide open lowlands that are yellow, flat, outwardly tedious, but above that a prairie sky so immense/intense blue that anything might be possible. A sky she could lose herself in.

Jacqueline knocks softly on Lesa's bedroom door. No answer. She knows Lesa is not asleep, not in this heat, not this early, it's only 4:30 PM. She's likely waiting incommunicado on the other side of the wood door, having removed both of the already loosened glass knobs so Jacqueline can't get in.

“Lesa, please come out and talk to me.” Jacqueline breathes against the door, trying to calm her quickened heart.

Nothing.

“Lesa, Mommy has a surprise for you. We can make cookies together,” Jacqueline says, even though the idea of turning on the gas oven in this heat is preposterous.

“We'll make peanut butter or chocolate chip, if you like. Come on out, I'll meet you in the kitchen.”

Jacqueline stands in the dim hall, listening, the silence nearly unbearable. If she stays a minute longer, she might simply kick the door down and then she doesn't know what will happen. She is amazed at how she teeters from the void to rage with nothing in between. She walks into the sweltering kitchen and pours herself a black cup of coffee. She sits down at the table and lights a Peter Jackson. Ridiculous to bribe a five-year-old, she knows, but she just wants to explain to Lesa about Sylvie, about life and need and want, how much she misses her husband, however diminutive all this may seem. She waits five, ten, twenty-seven minutes over the course of two cigarettes and her cup of coffee, but Lesa doesn't come.

She looks at the telephone and, in a wave of bravery, picks up the receiver and dials the RCMP office.

“RCMP. How may I help you?” a woman asks.

Jacqueline recognizes the voice as Teresa, whom she met last year at the RCMP annual Christmas ball. Teresa had on a full-length taffeta dress, cream-coloured like a not-so-new bride might choose or an opera singer would wear, her creamy cleavage on display like a Sunday buffet. She recalls they laughed together over an off-colour joke that one of the officers told the commanding officer's wife.

“Teresa?” Jacqueline says.

“Yes?”

“Has anyone been able to reach my husband?”

Teresa pauses, exhales audibly over the telephone. Teresa knows, the whole damn office probably knows. Why is the wife always the last to find out? Jacqueline's face burns red on the other side of town with the heat and shame and humiliation.

“Teresa?”

“I'm sorry we've been unable to reach him at the moment. Would you care to leave a message?”

Jacqueline doesn't answer. How can she? What could she possibly say that would make this reparable? Yes, I know my husband is momentarily indisposed in his infidelity. And you do too. Has
he slept with you yet? she wants to ask Taffeta Teresa.

“Any message?” Teresa says.

“None,” Jacqueline says and quietly replaces the receiver.

The snow is falling in large white flakes—the kind that blanket Smoky Lake, cover the desolate prairies all around, soften the North Saskatchewan River momentarily, make Lloyd's town seem gentler, kinder, if only for a short while—the kind of snowflakes his kids like. He gets a vision of young Sylvie, her dark, crooked eyes, her outstretched pink tongue catching white flakes, the seal-bark thrill of her laughter. The thought makes him hollow. He can't remember the last time he saw Sylvie, can hardly hold the picture of her in his mind anymore. Doesn't know if he could pick her out of the rash of people that were admitted in the 1950s and 1960s to the government-run Michener institution. His small, sweet Sylvie housed in the severe two-storey brick buildings laid out on sprawling grounds in precise rows like an army base along with fourteen hundred other patients, unwanted, discarded, placed, and forgotten. Or so it seemed at the time. The windows barred, doors locked from the inside, thirty-odd people crowded into a small day room, one caregiver in their midst. Difficult choices in those days for challenged clients, the equally challenged parents.

Not unwanted, or discarded, certainly not forgotten, Sylvie always on his mind, beneath his skin. But his Sylvie placed where she could be cared for medically, properly, safely. Lloyd watched as Jacqueline, pregnant at the time with Clare, and Lesa led skipping Sylvie hand in hand through the barred doors of the institution while Lloyd stood outside in the chill of the autumn air, the culling of his children. Three-year-old Nate at his side, gazing up at him, no comprehension on his face. Lloyd couldn't bring himself to step inside the institution. He knows that betrayal was worse than any other woman. He pushes the image from his mind, watches the swirling snow all around him bend everything white.

As he drives toward town, he notices something on the highway. A blanket, clothing, perhaps? He can't tell, can barely make out the road let alone the bright red something poking through the thick snow. Farther on a dark pile almost completely covered, farther still he makes out the snowy shape of boots? He thinks about the Fleck brothers always cleaving down the highway to and from town, the back of their pickup filled with work clothes, tool boxes, muddy boots, cases of beer, them fool selves. He catches a larger shape in his periphery as he passes, swollen by the snow on the side of the road. He glances in the rear-view mirror. Likely roadkill: deer, moose, coyote, but that doesn't explain the series of snow-covered piles on the highway.

He slows his cruiser, doesn't really want to stop, wants to go home instead, fall with pounding head, mindless into his double bed. Could be a simple case of negligence, the Fleck brothers spewing their jetsam all over his highway, then hitting a deer and not bothering to report it. He watches the swollen shape disappear in his mirror, go white like everything else on the austere landscape.

But duty calls the better of him. He pulls the cruiser around, doubles back down the highway, squinting out the windshield through the falling snow until he spots the swollen dark shape beneath the landed snow. He stops, pulls on his one glove, gets out of the car, walks over to the shape, and squats beside it. Lloyd realizes it's no animal, not roadkill, but something else entirely. He brushes the snow gently off the lump, knows before he reveals the naked figure, the purple bruised ribs exposed to the elements, the mashed nose, the missing front teeth, the single leather glove on the man's left hand: the only piece of clothing he's wearing. Lloyd looks away, draws the searing cold through his nostrils, prepares himself for the inevitable, this time when he finds Jimmy Widman dead. The bile rises at the back of his throat, his pounding head pounds harder.

Lloyd exhales harshly, his breath hanging like a funeral shroud in the February air. He rolls Jimmy over onto his back, leans close to his mouth. He can't discern air or breath, warm-blooded animal or otherwise. And why is Jimmy naked? Doesn't make sense. If the Fleck boys have anything to do with that, he'll drive out to see them himself. Lloyd checks his radial pulse but can't find it. Jimmy's skin cold like the snow, like the ice floes that catch rootless boys' bodies in the North Saskatchewan River. Lloyd lays his ear on Jimmy's chest, catches a faint
thud thud thud
, irregular like arrhythmia beneath his ear. Hallelujah, hypothermia! It's the best Lloyd can hope for, the theory being you're not dead until you're warm and dead. Warm he can do.

Lloyd peels off his parka yet again, wraps Jimmy's freezing body in it. He runs back to the cruiser, radios in for an ambulance.

“We talking Widman?” the paramedic asks.

Lloyd hears the disdain in the man's voice.

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” asks the paramedic.

“Listen, we're not talking twenty questions, get off your goddamn butt and get down here.”

“Yessir, Corporal Lloyd,” the paramedic drawls like he's Texan.

Lloyd doesn't respond.

The radio rides static on the empty airwave. Lloyd radios Constable Pete in case the ambulance doesn't make it or gets conveniently sidetracked.

“What's up?” Lloyd asks.

“Helping Bill pull a stuck calf,” Constable Pete says breathlessly.

“You at Bill's?”

“No, we're east of that on Crown land. Dang mother wandered off through the fence,” says Constable Pete.

“How long you figure you'll be?”

“Another twenty on the calf, another forty back to town. You need me to come in now?” Constable Pete asks.

“No, I can manage, meet you back at the detachment.”

Lloyd hangs the radio up, backs the cruiser as close as he can to where Jimmy is, opens the back-seat door. In the space of two minutes Jimmy's body has been completely covered in snow again. Lloyd brushes him off as best he can, drags Jimmy by the collar of his RCMP parka through the deepening snow to the cruiser. By the time he reaches the car, Lloyd's pushing a frigid sweat beneath his thin beige shirt. He lifts Jimmy into the car, slides him gently across the back seat, worried more about Jimmy's irregular heart than his broken ribs; that'll be the least of Jimmy's worries.

A change of heart, a sudden presence of mind, not the aimless driving away from her mother's house in search of yet something else she doesn't need, Lesa pulls over to the payphone just beyond Airdrie. She deposits her coin in the silver slot, chants the memorized phone number, presses the metal buttons that are October cold to her touch. The phone rings on the other end. A woman's voice answers, not what Lesa expects, should she hang up?

“Good morning, Stewart and Green Barristers and Solicitors,” the woman says.

Lesa pauses, doesn't know what to say.

“Hello?”

“I'm looking for a lawyer, I'm sorry, I've forgotten his name. He's tall, slim build, brown hair—” Lesa stops short of mentioning his boyish hands.

“That's Mr. Green. Please hold while I put you through.”

Blue-suit man is Mr. Green. Lesa smiles. A large cattle truck rattles by on the highway, the whoosh of cold air up her back, the instant stench of manure in the air. She glimpses the blur of cattle inside, silent, morose as if they know what their destination is, first the feedlot, then the slaughterhouse. Despite the rank smell, the roar of the truck's engine sounds like applause/approval in her ears.

“Mr. Green speaking.”

His voice is different than she anticipated, deeper, more businesslike. God, he sounds like a father, not hers, thank goodness, but someone's possibly. Then she realizes they hadn't exchanged so much as a single word between them during their carnal game of hide 'n' find at the airport.

“Mr. Goodtime Green?” Lesa says.

She hears him hesitate on the other end of the receiver.

He lets his breath out slowly.

“Would this be Storm?” he asks.

“Yes!”

She's surprised he knows who Storm is from the X-Men comic series that her boyfriend uses as wallpaper to cover over the crumbling plaster walls of his studio on Water Street. Now it's her turn to hesitate. She presses the phone into her ear over the sound of the traffic, the twisting wind, the swift thought of her boyfriend, her storm, her mind peeling away like the crush of cars on the highway, all bound for some place other than here.

“Nice to hear from you, Storm,” Mr. Green says.

His voice loses the depth, the business, sounds soothing, washes over Lesa like a warm bath, glides over her whole body, makes her legs feel as if someone else will take charge, hold her up if only for a short while. She catches her knees from buckling. Speechless, she can't find the right words, any words.