The Matter of Sylvie Read online

  The doorbell rings. Jacqueline slides the kitchen window shut and goes into the living room. She parts the drawn curtains and peers out. It’s the officer from next door. He must have forgotten something, or perhaps he’s got news to tell her. She opens the door and lets him in. He stands in the living room without saying anything.

  “Is everything all right?” Jacqueline asks.

  The officer avoids her eyes.

  “Did you find him, that man?”

  Oh, God, she sounds like Sylvie now.

  “No,” the officer says.

  “Is it my husband, is my husband all right?” Jacqueline asks, bewildered.

  Why is he making her guess?

  “Your husband is fine.” The officer reaches out and puts his hand lightly on her shoulder. She looks him in the eye. She knows they are trained to do this. Reach out and touch someone before delivering the bad news.

  “No,” he says, sensing her body tense up. “It’s not that.”

  “Where is he?” Jacqueline asks. “Where is my husband? How do you know he’s all right?”

  The officer takes his hand off her shoulder and looks at her directly.

  “He’s indisposed,” he says. “I don’t know where. I tried to find him. A few of the guys at the office thought they might know . . .”

  He stops.

  “He’s MIA,” he says, no smirk, no pun.

  Jacqueline regards the officer for a moment, notes the depth of his green eyes. She doesn’t ask why or how, nor does her face crumble or her chin quiver. She knows. Her heart, her belly, her groin; in some distant past she’s always known. Dis-loyal. But her dis-ease is strong, stronger than even this understanding, her salvation of sorts. Where it was sporadic before, now it reaches systematically inside and shuts her down like a light burning too long into the night, a slow gas leak from the kitchen stove. She reaches up impulsively and puts her arms around the officer’s neck. His smell is alarmingly different than her husband’s, not in a bad way, but different, earthy like dirt, so she is immediately aware of the consequences of her actions, but she’s not thinking right now.

  She needs to know she’s present, accounted for, alive in the moment. It doesn’t matter if the officer pulls her body against his, if she feels the round metal buttons of his uniform pressing into her unfettered breasts beneath her husband’s sweatshirt, the thick leather of his gun holster straining in opposition to her left hip, his hands on her shoulders, her back, her thighs. None of that matters in this primal moment. She simply needs someone. Anyone. She feels his hands on her back, making small circles, gestures of comfort. She holds him taut, waiting for him to release her, but he doesn’t. He lets her hold him in this way while she clings to him like a starfish to a stone. She inhales the summer damp of his skin beneath his uniform like the sea itself: close, humid, salty as she lightly kisses his neck, thankful for his civility. Then she releases him and he stands before her as though nothing had happened.

  He’s not so much older than her, she realizes as she surveys his unmoving, tanned face, but old enough to know what it’s like to stand at the edge of a high bluff, your losses circling below you like alligators waiting for your downward plunge. The officer watches her carefully. She sees no lust, no carnal knowledge on his lined face, nothing but the shared loss in the shape of children, your own, other people’s forgotten children, kittens, jobs, lives, spouses.

  Jacqueline glances down the hallway and sees Lesa standing there.

  “Lesa,” Jacqueline says, tilting her head, once, gratefully toward the officer as he makes his way to the front door, then leaves. The quiet click of Lesa’s bedroom door as she shuts her mother out.

  The metal burrs that form beneath the surface of Jacqueline’s mother-skin.

  Wednesday, February 1973 » Lloyd, age 40

  Lloyd drives the kids out to the Métis Crossing to their aunt’s house. The house is small, a Please Take Your Shoes Off sign scrawled on a piece of blue-lined paper at the back door. Lloyd bends down, baby in arms, struggles to unlace his brown Strathcona boots, sets them neatly on the hand-woven mat in the corner. A spattered black and orange cat that looks as if Jackson Pollock painted it sniffs the leathers of his boots, swarms Lloyd’s legs.

  The rest of the children have already removed their shoes, scattered through the house and disappeared. No doubt they’ve spent some time here. Lloyd stands in the middle of the living room holding the baby, surveys the aunt in the wheelchair, the immaculately groomed poodle in the woman’s lap, a pink bow in the dog’s caramel-floss hair. No furniture to speak of, save for the wheelchair, the single rocker, and a yellow marbled table in the kitchen with two chrome-legged chairs like Lloyd’s mother had in the 1950s. Lloyd nods at the aunt: early fifties, he speculates. She doesn’t seem surprised, smiles back at him toothless like the baby, the remedial smell of infirmity about her person.

  “Mind if I look around?” Lloyd asks.

  She gestures to make himself at home.

  A couple mattresses tucked into the corners of a couple bedrooms in the back of the house. Downstairs the basement cement, bare wood framing. The kids piled together on some blankets watching cartoons on a small black and white television. Lloyd pauses, watches Dudley Do-right on the television struggle to untie his sweetheart from the railway tracks, a theme played out over and over again on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, in Lloyd’s job, his life, present moment included, endless, he thinks. He winks at the kids, the oldest boy smiles.

  Upstairs is the heavy, rich scent of game meat simmering on the stove. Lloyd peers into the pot, a large chunk of dark meat inside. The counter tops are clear, clean, immaculate, no alcohol insight.

  “Husband?” asks Lloyd.

  “Not today,” the aunt says, a slight smile on her lip.

  Lloyd isn’t sure how to take that. A pot of coffee on the counter that the aunt offers him, but he’s had four too many already. He looks around the sparse room, the lone woman in the wheelchair, her poodle. Yes, he decides, he does need one more. The aunt points at a cupboard, Lloyd shifts the baby to his other arm, opens the cupboard, pulls out a mug.

  “You?” he asks.

  She nods. He pours two cups, stirs a spoon of sugar into hers, and sits with the baby at the kitchen table while he drinks his.

  “You have children?” Lloyd asks.

  She shakes her head, references the two kitchen chairs.

  “Are these kids your sister’s?” asks Lloyd.

  “Yes,” she says, no opinion on her face.

  “Can you manage the baby?” he asks, unwrapping his coat from around the sleeping child. He isn’t as concerned about the other children. They seem used to managing. Yes, she can manage the baby; the older ones will help.

  “Social Services will be coming,” says Lloyd.

  The aunt nods, again no surprise, no opinion. Lloyd looks around. Outside the living room window slim poplars have been strung together in an open fort structure, the tan skin of a deer hanging amid the slow, curling smoke in the cold white air.

  “Recent?” he asks.

  “Last week,” she says. “Take some, it’s in the freezer by the back door.”

  Lloyd sifts around in his parka pockets for something to give her, jostling the baby as he does. The baby smiles in her sleep. All he comes up with are three cellophane-wrapped cigars from Neville’s lounge last night, the slim kind, tipped in rum. He hands them to the aunt, along with the sleeping baby. The aunt smiles toothlessly, shamelessly, thanks Lloyd for his kindness, her nieces and nephews, the rum-tipped cigars.

  At the door Lloyd pulls his boots on, laces them up while the aunt watches. When Lloyd turns to wave, she points at the large white freezer next to the door. He opens it, finds the freezer full of brown wrapped packages, pulls one out.

  “Take more,” the aunt says. “The meat is rich, good. You have children?”

  “Yes,” Lloyd says. “Three.”

  He doesn’t count Sylvie. She hasn’t lived at home for more
than a decade now. He can’t remember if he ever counted her

  “Tell your wife to soak it in sweet milk, less wild that way.” The aunt’s lips curve.

  Lloyd retrieves another small package from the freezer, nods at the aunt.

  The aunt doesn’t see him; her attention already turned to the sleeping baby.

  Outside in his cruiser, Lloyd sits a moment in the quiet space, the still of the sparse land, the spare house. Nothing much to look at, he thinks, but more than meets his eye. This stripped-down world so different than his, the woman inside so far removed from the marginal few that wander in to spend their days staggering around town until Lloyd or one of his constables pick them up, drive them home or, like this morning, back to his detachment to spend the daylight hours in the drunk tank. But for the townspeople who see only those few gone adrift that wreak havoc on the rest of the barrel; they are erroneous ambassadors. He’s guilty of adrift himself, of mistaken opinions. Not like the fifty-some-year-old, toothless woman in the wheelchair with a groomed poodle and a slumbering baby in her arms, a freezer full of deer, a basement full of children whom she will look after until her sister and brother-in-law return home, return to themselves. She’s the fort holder, the one who strings it all together when things go sideways, askew. Lloyd knows the world needs more people like that, like the warm, steady core of his Jacqueline. He doesn’t know why she stays with him, but he knows why he stays with her. He fishes his cigar butt out of the ashtray, relights it, puts the cruiser in gear, and drives off the reserve.

  Wednesday, October 1987 » Lesa, age 31

  North now of the oil-affluent city readying itself for the Olympics only a few months away, the buzz of hurried construction, overhead cranes, closed-off roadways, the prairie city sprawls for miles in all directions in Lesa’s rear-view mirror. Lesa amid the cars, the truckers, the farmer/ranchers barrelling down the black highway in their Chev/Dodge/GMC pick-up trucks and horse trailers. Lesa turns the radio on, scrolls through the stations till she finds, amazingly(!), Bauhaus. The black-clad, emaciated Peter Murphy singing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” and on the brown prairies no less. His deep, sonorous voice fills the airless void of her mother’s Toyota Camry.

  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.

  Wednesday, July 1961 » Jacqueline, age 27

  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.

  Wednesday, February 1973 » Lloyd, age 40

  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.