The Matter of Sylvie Read online

  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.

  Wednesday, October 1987 » Lesa, age 31

  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.

  God, she doesn’t know how to do this. She wonders how her father did it? Surely a few uncut shots of tequila/rye/whisky would make this go down smoother. Seriously, how do people do this straight ? She surmises that they don’t. She pulls the solitary joint out of her Escher case, tries to light it, but the howling wind extinguishes her every lit match.

  Mr. Green is silent on the other end, as if he knows she must come to this destination on her own accord, unlike the fettered cattle that don’t have the luxury of choice, unlike her fettered mother.

  “Mr. Green?”

  “Storm?” he says evenly.

  “Yes,” says Lesa.

  She knows what her destination is.

  Wednesday, July 1961 » Jacqueline, age 27

  After fried pork chops and mashed potatoes with mushroom soup gravy, Nate throws up on the Lego in the middle of the living room carpet. Jacqueline picks him up and runs him like a football down the hallway to the bathroom. His tiny face is flushed, a touch of hyperthermia.

  “Too much sun, too much play, too much excitement.” Jacqueline holds him over the toilet.

  Someone has forgotten to flush and the water is murky and yellow, filled with too much toilet paper. Sylvie. Jacqueline flushes while Nate vomits into the roiling mess. The water and fresh bile rise to the rim of the toilet. Jacqueline feels her all-day morning sickness rise too. She’s eighty-nine on the mother-Richter scale of zero to one hundred, and if the toilet bowl overflows Jacqueline will hit the hundred and fifty mark and then there will be no accounting for anything.

  The acidy smell of Nate’s vomit mixed with the too-rich odour of Campbell’s mushroom soup makes Jacqueline feel like throwing up alongside Nate. She forces the bile back down her throat as the water in the toilet eddies and skirts the outer edge of the porcel
ain, then sucks down as quickly as it rose. Jacqueline lets out a deep, harsh breath.

  In between vomiting, Nate lays across her lap and wonders why the policeman from next door spent so much time in the alley out behind their house and where was daddy? How come he wasn’t the policeman that came?

  “It’s not safe in the alley for little children.” Jacqueline strokes his red face. She doesn’t mention his father’s inconceivable absence. She is careful also not to mention the station wagon or Sylvie or why Lesa is holed up in her bedroom and didn’t come out for dinner. Nate hangs his head over the edge of the toilet and vomits once more.

  “There, there, little man,” she says, pressing a cool washcloth to his forehead. She can hear Sylvie twisting the front door knob, but she knows Sylvie hasn’t mastered it yet.

  “Lesa,” she hollers from the washroom. “Go see what Sylvie’s doing.”

  Lesa comes out of her room and storms past the bathroom without even glancing at her mother.

  Jacqueline sits on the floor holding Nate until he feels the need, then she steadies his shuddering body while he throws up.

  “You’ll feel better once you’re done,” she says, but she’s not so sure.

  Sylvie flits by the open bathroom door once, twice, five times from the living room to the end of the hall and back again.

  “Lesa! Get Sylvie to sit down and play Lego,” Jacqueline yells.

  “There’s throw-up on the Lego,” Lesa yells back.

  Yes, she’d forgotten. Throw-up on the Lego, on their turquoise carpet. Sylvie is running like a mad child around the house, Nate is sick with sunstroke. It’s a hundred and five degrees in the locked house, her husband is missing in action, and Lesa is, well, she’s defiant. And if it weren’t for Nate’s sickly, overheated face staring up into hers, flecks of mushroom on his chin and down the front of his T-shirt, then she’d simply get up and walk out of the house for good, for real this time, like Charles the cat from next door, like so many passing foster children.

  Instead she fills the tub with lukewarm water and pours in a cap of bubble bath, which produces a see-through shade of army green. She gently tugs Nate’s Superman shirt over his head, careful not to get vomit on him, then pulls off his Batman shorts and his Fantastic Four underwear and slides his small, hot body into the cool bath. For the moment, he’s her superhero, her saviour.

  Wednesday, February 1973 » Lloyd, age 40

  Safely off the highway, and loaded in the back seat of Lloyd’s cruiser, Jimmy lies near fatal in the fetal position. Lloyd has the heat cranked to hell and hot. Christ, it’s a saving kind of day, not the usual sit, drive, sit, drink, sit some more, followed by too many late-night shots in Neville’s lounge followed by too many early morning coffees in Neville’s café.

  Lloyd cracks the window in the cruiser open slightly to keep alert, awake in the hell-fire heat, his fatigue. There’s no hospital in the town; he drives Jimmy to the doctor’s house across the alley from his detachment. The veterinarian is next door. The doctor’s waiting room and single treatment room for small emergencies are on the bottom floor of his three-storey house, the only walkout basement in the town. Seemingly extravagant where the rest of the town’s houses are modest bungalows with giant yards, prosperous gardens in the summer that sustain them through these harsh winters north of Edmonton. Long cold months of protracted, uninterrupted miseries on the flat white prairies, snow up to your waist, perma-cold beneath your skin until spring comes, miraculously it seems. Then the hard snow melts, the ice flows in the North Saskatchewan River, the hardening around Lloyd’s heart, and then, only then can he foresee himself doing his job for another year. He wipes his hand across his drawn face, glances into the back seat at Jimmy. No movement.

  He backs the cruiser up to the doctor’s door, leaves the car running while he gets out to find the waiting room door locked. Lloyd bounds up the front steps of the residence, rings the bell, but the doctor’s wife, who acts as receptionist, triage nurse, and mother of four, isn’t home either.

  Damn, not much time here. He sprints across the alley to the veterinarian’s house. The vet is in the middle of euthanizing a huge white animal the size of a small polar bear lying on the metal table. Its elderly owners are standing reverentially in the corner when Lloyd bursts in.

  “Got a problem, hypothermia. Can you help?”

  “Calf ?” The vet doesn’t look up.

  “Man.”

  The vet glances over at the owners as he injects the last needle into the giant animal, a dog, a grand-something-or-other. A final twitch from the white dog on the table produces an audible sob from the white-haired woman in the corner. Her elderly husband puts his arm around her.

  “I’m sorry,” Lloyd offers.

  “Is life,” the elderly man says or asks, Lloyd doesn’t know which.

  The bald man wags his head as the vet tries to gently lift the dog off the table, but it’s too large, too heavy. Lloyd takes the dog’s gigantic head and the vet its rear. They engineer the dog into the next room while the elderly man and his wife scrutinize their every slip and near drop. The man leads his weeping wife out and they sit in their car watching as Lloyd scrambles back across the alley to his cruiser. He waits for them to depart. They don’t, so Lloyd pulls the cruiser directly up on the frozen tundra beside them.

  The vet comes out, and he and Lloyd carefully pull the inert body from the back of the cruiser. The elderly man rolls down his window.

  “Is live?” he asks.

  “That’s the hope,” Lloyd says, his breath heavy with the exertion of first the dog and now Jimmy. The man and woman remain in their car, watching as if at a drive-in movie. Lloyd gives them a sharp look. The bald man reverses the car, but then sits at the end of the driveway, the car idling great columns of carbon monoxide in the bitter air.

  Once on the table, the vet strips off Lloyd’s RCMP parka, the one glove. Tries Jimmy’s radial artery, nothing. Listens with his stethoscope, then straightens up, nods at Lloyd. Faint pulse on the carotid. Goes into the back room where the large white dead dog is, comes out with an armload of blankets, which he wraps in layers around Jimmy’s naked body.

  “See any clothes along the way?” the vet asks.

  “A regular breadcrumb trail on the highway,” says Lloyd, baffled.

  “Hypothermia fools its victims into thinking they’re warm, hot like a Mexican beach,” the vet says, filling the dog-grooming tub with lukewarm water.

  “Christ almighty, who makes these things up?” Lloyd shakes his head, a freezing man discarding his clothes at minus twenty-two Fahrenheit, the north wind making it minus thirty?

  “No rhyme,” the vet says, tight-lipped.

  After the tub is full, the vet peels the layers of blankets off until he reaches Jimmy’s emaciated body curled inside like the caraway seed in a jawbreaker; Jimmy’s jaw hangs implausibly.

  “Dislocated,” the vet says, gently testing the abnormal range of movement.

  “Help me get him into this tub.”

  The vet lifts Jimmy by the shoulders, Lloyd takes his legs. Carefully they lower him into the tub, the vet laving the warm water over the core of Jimmy’s body, stopping only to take his pulse, more laving, pulse, stethoscope to Jimmy’s chest until he hears the regular, dull thump-thump of a functioning heart. He checks the carotid artery again, feels the blood chasing through Jimmy’s veins. The vet reaches for a bottle of dog shampoo above the tub, tenderly washes Jimmy’s matted hair, cleans the coagulated blood off his face, from his ears, takes a good look at his swollen eye.

  “He’ll live,” the vet says. “But he’s going to need some stitching up, some kind of aftercare. Any family?”

  Lloyd shakes his head, thinks of Jimmy alone at his father’s farmhouse with only wild turkeys for company. That won’t do. He could drive him down to Edmonton General Hospital, but then they’d just release him after a week or two, and to whom? Where would Jimmy go? Spring still months shy this side of merciless February. No shor
t-term solution is going to work for long-term Jimmy. He needs something more substantial.

  Lloyd helps the vet take Jimmy out of the dog-grooming tub. They dry him off, wrap him in warm blankets that the vet has heated in the gas dryer. The colour back in Jimmy’s mashed face, skeletal arms, legs, a few indecipherable words out of his mouth, not nearly the dead man Lloyd initially brought in, but warm and alive, a regular windfall.

  “Can I leave him with you for a bit?” Lloyd asks. “I’ve got an errand to tend to.”

  The vet checks his animal roster in the black binder beneath the metal table. Flips through a couple pages, runs his finger down the lined page.

  “He’s good till 2:00, then I’ve got a feline op coming in.”

  Lloyd checks his watch, 11:27. If he hurries, he can catch Judge Wade before he leaves town.

  “I’ll send Constable Pete over to retrieve him; he can help you with the dog. See if you can track down the doctor, get him to take a look at that jaw of Jimmy’s, his eye, see what he can do.”

  “Will do,” the vet says, puts his hand on Jimmy’s fetal, no longer fatal body, curled and undersized like a motherless calf on the metal table.

  Wednesday, October 1987 » Lesa, age 31

  Lesa sits a quiet moment in her mother’s car on the side of the highway, listening to the yowling wind as she exhales cigarette smoke out the open window, aware that she’s smoking too much these days, will have to make a conscious effort to cut back once she returns home, but her stomach is jittery, her hands shaky. Should she call him back, call him off before it’s too late? She doesn’t know what she wants, just that she wants mindlessly to fill the hollows of herself. She considers again the precious and solitary joint she brought along but doesn’t want to waste it too soon. Pre–Mr. Green? In-between Mr. Green? Post–Mr. Green? This is absurd; she doesn’t even know his first name. Who sleeps mindlessly with Misters? She knows the answer to that. She stubs her John out in her mother’s ashtray, pulls the joint out, lights it, takes three permissive drags, holding them in her lungs like for as long as she can bear, then breathes out slowly. The thick release of white smoke fills the air in her mother’s car. She pinches the end off the joint with her bare fingertips, flicks it out the window, only just feels the burn, replaces the joint back in her silver case for later, for the disapproval on her brother’s face, the hurt on her mother’s, her already guilty conscience. She doesn’t look at herself when she checks for traffic in the rear-view mirror, heads down the highway toward the next anonymous town on her map to nowhere.