If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

by Leona Theis

  “It’s the bumf that sells the story,” he said. “Promise tears and laughter, promise audacity and wit. Tightly framed, two hundred words or fewer. Consider using the verb to limn,” he said, to make her laugh again, and she did. “What might the story of your life so far, Sylvie, limn?”

  “How to be happy in spite of yourself.”

  “Because of.”

  “As you wish.”

  HAPPY IN SPITE OF HERSELF. He will not tell her daughter, supposing they find her, how Sylvie appeared so easy with the lie as she walked the aisle in her bridesmaid dress those many years ago. A hot day in late summer and Will, wearing the navy sportcoat he’d worn to his high school grad the year before, slipped in and took a seat at the back. “You have to stay for the whole entire ceremony,” she’d said that morning. “I might need you.” Okay but still, a person needs air.

  Forty-odd guests clotted in pairs and singles under the vaulted ceiling. Sylvie did enjoy playing to the crowd, such as it was, and the pale apricot satin brought the brightest tones of summer to her skin. Glossed lips and her hair just long enough for salon-set ringlets that grazed her chin on either side. She performed a pretty, measured march, pausing with every step before swinging the next foot through. Behind her another bridesmaid draped in apricot, then a third. The church had a wide centre aisle, picturesque in the traditional way. Now here came the bride, and Will remembers wondering if she, at least, was actively practising birth control.

  Best he not say much to Sylvie’s daughter about her biological father. Best he not say that, sitting in the back pew, Will had studied the cleavages, the tanned arms, the postures of bridesmaids two and three and wondered if the groom had been in them as well. He’d stepped out, then, taken off his jacket, slung it over his shoulder and waited in the shade of a ragged maple till Lisa and Dave emerged through the double doors under showers of confetti and lashings of rice. Did he think about how he would never do that, duck that white rain? He doesn’t remember.

  He drove Sylvie back to her suite for a beer break after the ceremony and before the reception. Shed of her dress for the moment but still in her full-length slip with Will’s sportcoat overtop, still wearing her white pantyhose, her ivory shoes kicked off, she told him she’d been running to the bathroom again and again all day to check, it could still happen, she was only three weeks late.

  “Only,” he said.

  At the dance that night at the Ukrainian Hall on G, she disappeared yet again into the Ladies for a few minutes, then came out and sat beside him smoothing her yards of bridesmaid skirt, brushing at the grey creep of floor dust that rimmed the hem. “Nothing.” A couple of months earlier she’d told Will that she’d tossed her dial pack of pills because they gave her an extra jiggle around the middle.

  “What’ll you do though?”

  “I’ll just hold back at a certain time of the month.”

  “And you know that time for sure.”

  “I can count,” she’d said.

  “Can you count on not being horny?”

  “I can count.”

  His question a week before the wedding when she modeled the satin dress for him and told him of her worries was, “I still don’t understand — he’s a grade-A jerk. Why?”

  “Curiosity. Come on. I held back for a long time.”

  “Alice went through the looking glass and there she saw a sign that said Drink Me and so she did.”

  “This bodice is tight. If it isn’t a baby then I still have to solve the jiggle.” She even laughed. So young. Nothing serious could happen to them, nothing that would last.

  FINAL WORDS that Will has had the privilege of hearing:

  Seth: “We sure did laugh that time, didn’t we?”

  Drew: “I love you a thousand miles wide.”

  Doug: “God damn it all to fucking hell.”

  Trent: “Is it spring yet?”

  Sylvie: “Can you reach —?”

  “I PROMISED SYLVIE I’d find her daughter,” Will said to Mavis the day she landed in Ioannina after the accident. “It was the last thing I said to her.”

  “No, but it’s best I be the one to do that. Isn’t it.” Not a question.

  Certainly, yes. The sister is the one with the chance of gaining access to official channels, adoption records, registries. If she succeeds, will she let Will know? But maybe the young woman won’t care to meet an ersatz uncle when she has an aunt by blood. Maybe he’s redundant.

  You weren’t there, Will thought as he stood with Mavis in the lobby of the Hotel Politia, both of them looking down at the marble floor, his scuffed loafers, her patent sandals. You weren’t in the car. The lowering sun, the dust, the curve, the narrow road they were following in search of the sea. It might have happened to anyone. The tail of the truck swinging round when the driver tried to miss them, the leftways skid of Will’s little rental with his sudden stomp to the brake.

  This morning at the Politia, as he swirled the dregs in his cup and stood to leave the small table he’d claimed in the corner of the noisy breakfast room, Mavis had come through the doorway, spotted him and looked away, as if she had to shift her emotions a few degrees before she could bear to acknowledge him, bandaged but walking and breathing. You don’t know, he wanted to tell her. He wished her good morning and offered his table. “I’m just on my way.”

  “Well, then,” Mavis said, her fingers fidgeting through her highlighted hair. “It’s Edmonton, you said? I suppose I’ll have to —”

  “I have your number.”

  The cab ride to the airport was startle after startle, thighs tensing at near miss after near miss, each of which the cabbie managed with swerve and horn and equanimity. Once, braking hard, he looked over at Will with an uneven grin: such a jumpy creature, this foreigner.

  THE KID FROM THE SEAT next to Will’s sways her way back along the aisle of the plane after a trip to the toilet, squeezes in and plunks her lanky self down with a thump. Will traces his thumb around the ring on his mp3 player, pretending concentration. To meet the eyes of anyone, even a half-grown stranger, would leave him raw. The bones at his temples feel steeped in ache. He clicks to call up the CSNY album from the summer they listened to music together, the year this one came out on vinyl. A haunted hollowness in the sound, a signature of longing. Sylvie’s sister blames him, sure. She’s right to.

  SYLVIE HAD RETURNED his question the other night: “And you? The story of your life, so far?”

  He had to take a moment to invent a word: “Vanishment.”

  “You’re very much here.”

  “Every time someone close died, something of me vanished.”

  “I’m here, Will.” The soothing swoosh of the sea through the open window.

  “Yes. I’m so glad.”

  BACK-COVER BUMF. Promise love and sorrow, promise struggle and redemption. Consider using the adjective resilient. Professor Sylvia Fletcher, from library clerk at University of Saskatchewan to tenured professor at UBC. An authority on ancient classical theatre. Refer to defining character traits — be they heroic or flawed or both at once — curiosity, for instance.

  He pauses his player, then starts it again. Stephen Stills with a mournful lyric about four and twenty years ago. It’s more years than that since Will bought Déja Vu upstairs at Eaton’s. Rolling Stone savaged the album, the song. So little at stake, the reviewer said, it’s hard to care. Will and Sylvie sat on her outside stairs in the summer dusk and he held the magazine in the light coming through the open door and read the choicest parts aloud.

  Sylvie held her lighter to the curling corner of the front page. “Tell you what I don’t care about. I don’t fucking care about that obnox and his opinions.” Will loved her for that and wished he could say the same. There: that’s something he might tell her daughter about.

  He will not tell her how Sylvie made a joke of blaming the pregnancy on him: “If you would’ve let me seduce you, I wouldn’t have resorted to the grade-A jerk.” She used to pretend that much of what
she said was a joke, but he didn’t find it funny, the idea that the existence of a child was a fault to be pinned somewhere.

  “Yes but Sylvie, you know I don’t feel that way about you.” It was rote by then, a joke in itself, and Sylvie nudged him sideways on the stairs so his shoulder knocked the wall.

  THE TRUCK DRIVER — gesticulating and spitting — raged above Will after the accident as he cradled Sylvie’s bloodied head with his left arm, his right arm askew and flaming with pain. It’s been a week now, but still he hears the tirade in a language he doesn’t understand, still lives out the moment before the accident repeatedly, wishing he could wrench the steering wheel fast enough to swerve time in a new direction. Why Sylvie and not him? Why all those others?

  “SOMETIMES YOU ACT like you’re some kind of homo,” she said once when he told her he didn’t feel that way about her. Exactly that. She made a lot of homo jokes in those days, everyone did. Will certainly had. The one how, if you drop your keys on the street in San Francisco, don’t bend over, just kick them all the way back to your hotel and get the doorman to pick them up. He told that one over and over, as if at nineteen he’d known anyone who had the means or the nerve to get to San Francisco.

  Both his feet are numb now. He flips his seat belt undone and negotiates his way past the girl next to him to walk the aisle up and down, lugging his right foot, then his left; right, left. All these faces, and every one a someone and behind their features a labyrinth of thoughts and half-thoughts, memory and certainty and puzzlement. The plane skids over a quick series of bumps and he gets his good arm up and clamps his hand over a seat back to steady himself, accidentally pulling a woman’s long brown hair. She turns, wincing, then musters a half smile to show it’s all right. About thirty, is she?

  What will she look like, this girl of Sylvie’s out there in the world?

  He will not tell her — he’d never even told Sylvie until they reconnected — that sometimes in those young moments when she brushed his hand with hers in invitation he very nearly clenched her fingers and pulled her hard against him. That what made him want to do so was in some part bodywant but also this: If he slid onto her mattress, slid into her, could he dissolve and reappear in an alternate world, or nowhere?

  The girl angles her knees to allow him to step past and fold back into his seat. His good arm is next to the window. The shade sticks, but with patience he coaxes it up. He wants to see the tops of the clouds, what can’t be seen from earth. Sunlight sears in. The kid, distracted from her Game Boy, flashes him a look. She’s right, the brightness is eye-watering. Will works the shade back down till only a narrow knife of light cuts in below it. He leans his head, the side without the bandage, against the cabin wall, and the firm curve above the window presses hard into his skull. It’ll be eighteen hours and two more airports before he’s home.

  ANOTHER THING he certainly can’t mention: how he’s bounding up those rickety outside stairs and thinking that what Sylvie needs is to come back with him to yoga, the quieting of it, the slowing; and what Will needs is a friend to come along, to help him open the door at Animesh and Satya’s little bungalow and walk in, get to that space of empty mind, the body reaching away from itself, and a drawn-out chant, wave after wave, to wash fear off the edge of the world. He’s bounding up those stairs, the startling bit of give when his foot lands on the rotting step third from the top, the one they used to say they should knock right out so they wouldn’t forget to skip it. Her door wide open in the heat, her roommate away on the Greyhound to see her folks in Langenburg, and on the couch Sylvie’s flushed face visible past Dave’s shoulder, her heels bouncing against his naked ass.

  THE KID IN THE NEXT SEAT fell asleep a while ago, and now her torso lists and her head comes to rest on Will’s shoulder above the sling that cradles his elbow. He sits forward, “Hey,” but she doesn’t wake, just shifts in her sleep. She looks even younger now, open-mouthed, her fingers slack around her Game Boy. She’s just a kid, this kid. Will eases quietly back, resettles her lolling head into a position that doesn’t annoy so much.

  When he landed in Ioannina what he wanted most was to rediscover a single friend from long ago who hadn’t gone and died. And then she did, and it’s he who made it so. He will find her daughter because he promised. He’ll find her because as soon as he found Sylvie again, he lost her. Careful now, don’t hope to put the daughter in that empty space. Careful. Now you think you need her, need someone, anyone, more than ever.

  “Take pains with tone,” he said to Sylvie, riffing a week ago at Villa Stavros. “Consider echoing the author’s style. Wry like Dali with an eyebrow raised; sharp like a paper cut; blurred, as if through a lens smeared with Vaseline.” Sylvie’s tone could be any of those at different times.

  “Consider silence,” she said then, closing her eyes and turning on her side. “Consider getting some sleep.”

  He is not redundant. A life is large, with many rooms, and people in every one. There are things that only he knows. The night before the accident, their chaste but intimate hours on a twin bed, dozing and waking and dozing again, separately and together, and when the sunrise roused them they sang all the words they could remember to the melancholy tune from that young summer, filling in lost half lines with humming. He broke off partway through, remembering her response to the critic’s review. “I don’t fucking care about that obnox and his opinions,” he said, to make her laugh, and she did. The lyrics were beside the point; they could have been anything; the power of the song was the amount of ache you could soak into every note. Will and Sylvie did their best. When he broke down in tears before they finished, she said, “Oh, honey, my honey,” and stroked his arm in a tender way. Might he, one day, tell her daughter that?

  Philosophies

  STAN’S GANGLY TEENAGE FRAME was hunched over a cereal bowl, spoon clanking on crockery as he shoveled his breakfast at the counter of what passed for a kitchen in the cramped quarters of the Sleep Well Hotel. Sylvie sat down on the stool next to him, the vinyl upholstery giving off a fabulous fart as it took her weight. She laid a light hand on her grandson’s shoulder and took in a side view of the downy beginnings of whiskers, the sprinkle of under-ripe pimples on his chin, the oily sheen on his face from the nonstop pump of teen-juice. Thirteen and ahead of himself in more ways than one. “Could you. Possibly. Crunch your Harvest Crunch less crunchily?”

  Sylvie, her daughter, and her daughter’s two kids had scored what was generously called a suite at the Sleep Well. The counter where they perched acted as room divider, separating the sink and the microwave and the itty bitty fridge from the living room with its perpetually pulled out pull-out couch. There was a separate bedroom with a door that closed, small mercy, where toddler Sooze was sleeping now. Some among the two dozen displaced families had to make do with single rooms.

  “And might you please fold back your bed before you leave for school?”

  “Love you too, Gran. I’ll miss my bus.” Stan kissed the top of her head, lifted her coffee cup right out of her hand to take a slurp and handed it back. Shouldering his backpack, he made for the door. Hand on the doorknob, he stopped. Dropped his pack, slouched across to the window that looked onto the parking lot and knelt in front of it. Sylvie’s gaze rested on his bent knee where the denim folded into shadows. She thought of his long-gone grandfather, skinny legs like that with the jeans slumping loose around them, running shoes he rarely used for running. May Stan be safe in this world.

  “Lookie, Gran, Thomas showed me this thing.” Stan pressed his left cheek, the entire side of his head, really, ear and all, against the window, then slowly rolled so that now his face squished hard against the glass, his slick forehead, nose, lips, and chin, flattened. He rolled further, pressing his right cheek and temple, his right ear, to the pane. He backed away then, leaving a wavy fun-house mask translucent on the glass, an oily ribbon extra wide from ear to ear, with a stretched grin a person could read just about anything into.

  “You be h
ome in good time,” Sylvie said as he got up to leave. “Court tomorrow.”

  When he opened the door the noise of the soccer game going on in the long hotel corridor, already in swing at this time of the morning, rabbled in. Then he was gone. A whimper floated out from the bedroom, but Sooze had a pattern of falling back to sleep after stirring for a moment when her brother left. Sylvie thought of folding up the sofa bed, but no: she pulled the blanket over the smell of teenage sheets and lay down. The truth was, he was a good kid.

  A PRESENCE IN THE ROOM. She opened her eyes, hefted herself onto her elbow. Stan stood by the door, about to exit. “Sorry, Gran, missed my bus.”

  “Where did you get that Pop-Tart?”

  “Itty bitty freezer.”

  “You bought Pop Tarts. With what for money?”

  He chewed, grinned.

  “And why are you always putting something in your mouth?”

  “I get hungry.” He flashed his tongue, covered in bits of goo.

  “Well, deny yourself a little for once.”

  “Gran, you are preachy. Preachy, preachy, preachy.”

  SOOZE IN HER ARMS, Sylvie waited in the parking lot at the housing complex for the insurance investigator. A ragged watermark a metre high ran along the fences and the outside walls of the row houses. Sooze wanted down. She arched her back in a way that, if Sylvie weren’t hyper-alert, would have landed the child on the asphalt with a broken head. What the girl wanted was to go exploring in the filthy heap by the bins. Of course she did. Among the trash were a baby-blue baby swing, two kitchen stoves, boxes of whatnot soaked in shit. A Christmas wreath, a basket of Easter eggs, a child-sized Big Bird with a brown stain across his yellow belly.

  They waited. They waited so the inspector could see for herself, take pictures for the record of the warped floors, stairs, window frames, the filth in the carpets. The swollen section of kitchen wall where, over her daughter Catherine’s objections, Sylvie had given Sooze and her crayons free range. She’d promised to paint over the doodles herself once a month. Two times at least she’d followed through.