If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

by Leona Theis

  “You know how to show a woman a good time,” she said, laughing as she changed her blister pads at the end of the first day.

  “You’ll find,” he said, “I’m not one for engine-powered amusements. I’m more about hiking boots, sails, pedals. Human locomotions.”

  “I can get used to that.” Neither she nor he referred in that moment to the obvious — that it was a fast night ride on a snowmobile that killed her first husband — but the knowledge freighted their silence as she gathered up her socks.

  HER BLACK TOQUE isn’t on the hook, so she borrows one of Lolly’s, pale blue with a dance of yellow snowflakes around the band, and snugs it over her short hair. Funny how wearing a young girl’s hat can make a person feel she’s shed ten years. One last pee and out the door, poles in hand. The reporter’s there ahead of her, waiting at the trailhead. It isn’t yet light, but she can see that the hair that curls out from under his toque is grey. He must be as old as she is, older even. Trim enough, though.

  “I’m Syl.” She shakes his hand.

  “I’m Robin. Hi.”

  “Does your editor often send you on day-long, back-country treks?”

  “Just this once, so far.” His teeth are white in the dimness, a confident smile.

  “It’s no walk in the park, this.” She settles her headlamp over her hat and clicks it on.

  “I expect not.”

  The start of the trail is a noisy crunch over a few metres of wet gravel with dirty patches of snow that last week’s rain didn’t finish off. Syl’s hiking boots are well seasoned but his show years’ more wear. “Old dogs,” he says. “Faithful.” Up a short, pebbly slope and they’re into more snow, slidey, like porridge underfoot. Very soon the cover deepens. When they stop to strap on snowshoes Robin’s quick into his bindings, she’ll grant him that. Syl leads, setting a good pace as they enter the forest, headlamps lighting the way, their route a white path through spruce and bony winter larch.

  “I like your snowflakes.” The closeness of his voice behind her is startling. So he’s having no trouble keeping up.

  “Oh, the toque. Thanks.”

  “I’ll take these trails in winter over summer any day, wouldn’t you? The sound of the shoes.”

  “It’s a good sound.”

  They say little for the next hour, their effort spent on advancing one foot ahead of the other. It’s comfortable, their silence. Robin keeps pace, stopping occasionally to take a photo as the sun lights the tops of the trees. He closes the distance afterward without difficulty. Realizing she’s been testing him at her own expense, not pacing herself for the distance yet to come, Syl relaxes. She turns to wait as he catches up after one of his pauses. He’s a natural, with a flowing stride she’ll never master.

  “I see you’re no amateur.”

  He smiles. “I’ve lived in one set of mountains or another all my life.”

  Now comes the toughest stretch, switchback after switchback to make the ascent manageable, but still it’s a test. Syl and the other grad students have christened this bit the TFS, Too Fucking Steep. They still say that, but they don’t mean it any more. It’s a wonder what training will do. Once past the TFS they’re into fresh snow, deep and unexpected. Syl sinks halfway to her knees with every step.

  Behind her Robin says, “I can go first, break trail.”

  She shrugs, physically shedding his offer. “There’s no need.”

  “Of course.”

  She turns to look at him.

  “Sorry.” His white teeth again, a nicely lopsided smile. “My father’s idea of what makes a gentleman still travels with me.”

  “No problem.”

  The look they’ve exchanged leaves her unsteady, and she pulls an antidote to mind, an image of Steven back in Saskatoon, tending home fires. Taking advantage of temporary bachelorhood, keeping the heated garage lit late into the night while he works on his wooden sailboat, his two-person Enterprise, gouging out dry-rot and mixing resin and hardener with filler to patch the wounds; drawing down over an evening in his measured way on two scant fingers of premium scotch.

  Syl pounds out a path, covering a respectable distance before stopping. “Let’s take five.” The forest is still. The spruce boughs are laden. White scarves of snow, long and soft, lie on the fallen logs to either side of the trail. The silence is as thick as the snow. “Listen.”

  “Yes.”

  She begins again, one step, another, another. Just when she’s about to suggest taking turns after all, the depth lessens. The band of fresh snow’s behind them, as if it was the work of a single cloud crossing through on its way to town. Syl and Robin have breath enough for conversation. He begins to ask his reporter’s questions about last year’s floods, about weather patterns and predictions of long-term drought. Having become something of an evangelist studying under Brian for the past two years, Syl has plenty to say. The days for debating climate change are years past. It’s here, and has been for some time now. The proper question, she tells Robin, is how to cope. She gives him facts, figures, guesses about when the dry times will arrive on the plains.

  “You bring a lot of energy to your work.”

  “So do you.”

  THEY’VE BEEN OUT more than three hours by the time they reach the first station, a tall, three-sided metal skeleton that resembles an obelisk in shape though not in mass, anchored to the mountain not far above the treeline. She and Robin exchange a smile of congratulations. He slips his thermos free of its webbing. “Tea?”

  “Thanks, no.” Syl shucks her pack, sets it at the station’s base, and immediately feels the chill on her back in the place where it rested. Standing on tiptoe she checks a gauge. Minus twenty. Humidity forty percent. The body cools fast up here, the sweat from the climb a wet liability. Wicking fabric, sure, but there’s a rivulet of sweat running down her spine and a trickle between her breasts. She faces away from Robin, strips to her sports bra and, covered in goose flesh, pulls on the fresh base layer she carried up in a warm inside pocket of her jacket. Now her soft-shell again, and now the down jacket from her pack. The grad students change in front of each other all the time, and Syl, older by decades than the others and not plagued with all they have at stake in the realms of appearance and competition, has felt separate and not even that embarrassed, for they do not look her way. They could be her grandchildren, she’s told herself, and don’t they know it. But now here’s Robin. She’s proud her body’s fit, but still she’s aware of the way the skin on her back creases above the waist no matter how slim she is, how muscled. She turns to see him facing the other way and putting on a layer of down as well.

  “So.” He turns and zips his jacket. “This is the measuring gear, all this?”

  Syl nods. “We measure snow, rain, wind. We look up the mountain and down the valley and, based on all these observations, we make our best guess of what we’ll have on our hands come April. Come May, June.” With bare fingers she fishes for the safety clip sewn into her pocket and frees the key to the metal cabinet that houses the datalogger.

  “The floods in Calgary,” he says. “Whole neighbourhoods underwater. People want to know what they’re in for this year.”

  “Of course. Yes.” She unlocks the cabinet. “We need the best numbers we can gather.” Her hand trembles a little as she opens the laptop she carried up, connects it by cable to the datalogger and starts the download. The best thing is to keep talking. She doesn’t look at Robin directly. “That’s why all this new equipment. So we can say to the folks in their spanking new houses that should never have been built in such a place, Watch out, people, the flood plain is going to, um, flood.”

  “I see you’ve thought about this.”

  Now she does look at him. “It’s my job.”

  “Sorry again.”

  “Never mind. We all have preconceptions. I do.”

  He picks up his thermos again, opens it. “Tea now?”

  “Not fond of tea. Thanks.” She wishes maybe she were. He holds the st
eaming thermos lid under his chin a moment, eyes not quite closed, and she can see this small performance even though she’s turned to check her laptop.

  But Steven. She visited him one evening in the garage, his sailboat overturned on blanketed sawhorses. He was using a small rectangle of beveled wood to press a gooey compound into a gash in the hull. Under the light from the unshaded ceiling bulb, the wedge of his brow cast shadows over his deep-set eyes.

  “Fairing,” he said. “Isn’t that just the perfect word for this?” He alternately pressed the filler into the gash and then scraped it flush with the hull, pushed and scraped. He took great care, and she could see the honest pleasure in the slow motion of his wrist.

  “Faring?” she said, thinking it was a word well suited for something to do with a boat, but hard to make sense of. “Like seafaring?”

  “No, silly, fairing. Making it fair to look at, to touch.”

  “It is the perfect word.”

  ROBIN SNAPS A PHOTO of the open cabinet. “What does that give you?”

  “Soil temperature, soil moisture, snow temperature. Ultrasonic measures of snow depth.”

  He leans in closer to look at the nest of wires and cables. His breath warms her cheek.

  “You didn’t say it was chai you had in that thermos.”

  When he shifts away, the warm scent of spices leaves with him, all but a hint of vapour. She straightens and points. “The cylinder hanging over there sends a chirp down through the snow and counts the time before it bounces back up. And those are radiometers. I’ll give you an info sheet once we’re back down.”

  He follows along as she cuts and weighs core samples, his camera busy but not intrusive, focused on her gloved hands, her tools. He shoots another photo of the datalogger, then does a slow half-turn. “What a view.” He steps back for a long shot of the station. “Say cheese.” Rather than look into the camera, and aware that she’s posing, Syl looks up at the lines of the aluminum frame against the clear sky, a stark and striking geometry.

  “Found art,” Robin says.

  She nods. “We have to move on, though.” She sets her gloves and her sunglasses on top of the cabinet and bends to organize her pack. Finally, she checks that the cabinet is well latched and locked. Her fingers are cold and not so steady. The key slides out of her grip and into the snowbank, slicing its way in near a guy wire, leaving only a tiny slit of shadow to show its track. “Damn!” The surface of the snow blasts her with white light. A sudden, sharp ache in her eyes, and she shuts them tight, feeling for the key with an ungloved hand. Snow bites her wrist. Damn, where is it?

  “Let me know if I can help.”

  “Got it.” Eyes still closed, she fishes in her pocket for the safety fob and clips the key onto it. She feels an unexpected touch at her temples, and her nerves jump. Robin is gently sliding the arms of her sunglasses back through her hair, settling them in place. Her hands are freezing. She reaches for her gloves.

  “Wait, Syl, let me.” Her own name sounds new to her, longer than its three letters, almost musical. He sets his gloves on top of hers on the cabinet and takes her hands between his warm palms. She begins to pull back, a reflex, but then she relaxes. It’s a comfort the way his skin draws the cold burn off her knuckles.

  “Better?”

  “Yes. Good of you.” She pulls out of his hands. “So.”

  “So.”

  “We need to get going.”

  They visit two more stations close by. At the last, standing in the snow, they wolf down a sandwich each with their gloves still on, laughing at the awkwardness. He touches his tongue to a glove to pick off a last crumb. She does the same and they giggle like kids. A drink of tea, a drink of broth to warm their insides, and they start back down. Her movements are steady but inside she quivers. Her skin underneath her clothing feels awake in a way it hasn’t since she can’t remember when, not only in the warm and wet places, but everywhere — where her sleeves hug her biceps, where her socks encircle her ankles, where her pants glide over her long johns as she takes a step.

  Once back on the gentle grade that follows the steeper descent, she asks, “Have I answered your questions, then?”

  “I’d love a single sentence to tell the people what the end result of all this data gathering will be.”

  “As I said. We’re refining models that help us understand the physics of snow and make predictions about water events. What will happen in the spring. Trends over time. The possibility of drought.”

  “But in a sentence.”

  “You’re the writer.” She means to open a distance with that remark, so it surprises her to understand, once she’s said it, that it sounded flirtatious.

  “Fair enough. And what about you. What’s your story, Syl?”

  “I have any number of stories. I’m not sure they’d be much help to you.” She smiles at him over her shoulder. “In terms of your article.”

  THE STORY OF THE PRESENT is Steven. Faring, fairing, fairness. A man committed to doing what’s right. Last summer he put in four weeks of unpaid consulting for a small contractor keen on rammed-earth construction and the optimal angle for solar panels in latitudes above fifty degrees north. If it weren’t for Steven’s support she might not be on this mountain trail. It’s he who’s taught her the most important things in life. The value of hope. Lasting love. The rewards of good work. Sometimes it’s hard to measure up.

  Vows. Do you take this man? I do, yes. And this one, and?

  THE STORY FROM LONG AGO is Erik. Syl was twenty-two, their son Adam toddling toward his second birthday one tantrum at a time, and Erik had his duffel bag packed for yet another weekend of snowmobiling out in Ripley.

  “You can’t leave me alone with a cranky kid all weekend.”

  Adam banged a yellow dump truck on the fake wood of the coffee table again and again.

  “That’s twice this month.”

  “But the snow’s going, babe.”

  “So’s my sanity.”

  “Just one night, then.”

  Teetering at the edge of her own tantrum, Syl stamped her foot three times, much the way Adam had done a day earlier when she’d tried to scoop him back into his stroller at the mall. “Will you look at your kid?!”

  Adam let go of his truck and it clattered on the tabletop. “Stop Mommy, please.”

  It was his very first sentence. His parents knelt on either side of him. Erik patted his back and Syl kissed his light brown curls. Erik tickled his neck. “Congratulations, my son!”

  Adam laughed.

  “That’s one for the baby book.”

  “You know what, Erik?”

  “Mmm?”

  “You go ahead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, the snow’s going. We’ll be fine.”

  On Saturday night he stayed later than the others at the Ripley bar. At closing time he mounted a borrowed snowmobile and went roaring along snow-filled country ditches on the way to his brother’s farm, a route he knew well. Whether disarmed by its familiarity or by too many beer in quick succession, he crashed into the rise where the side road to old Gary Panchuck’s place joined the main road. He flew off and landed on a rock pile.

  Not long after, Syl moved from Saskatoon back to Ripley. Both her parents were buried by then, but Uncle Davis invited her in to help around the farmstead. Room and board, salary too. They put up with each other, Syl, Adam, and Uncle Davis, shouting and laughing in love and exasperation, for over a year. Room and bored, she told her sister one Saturday morning as she poured coffee and Baileys. A few weeks later over Sunday pancakes and bacon, Davis, who’d done a vocational certificate at the College of Agriculture as a returning veteran in the forties, said, “If you were thinking of university, something along those lines, dear, I would help.”

  Syl had not been thinking along those lines. She hardly knew anyone who’d even been to tech, let alone university. Higher education wasn’t a common destiny for graduates of Ripley High.

  “Th
e College of Ag, Sylvia, that’s the place. There’s no healthier industry in the province. Diversification, good crops year after year. If you could find it in yourself to do an Ag degree, you with such good marks as a kid, I would stand you the tuition.”

  “Pfft. Me a farmer.”

  “Oh, honey, no. I’m talking about those other jobs. I’m saying study animals, study soil, study genes and breed a new strain of wheat. Professional type.”

  “But there’s Adam.”

  “I’ll pay for daycare.” He spread his arms to gesture at the square farm kitchen, and it seemed he meant to indicate much more, for he said, “I’ve got no kids of my own. Do you have any idea what this place is worth?”

  “No, Uncle Davis. No, I don’t.”

  She majored in soil science, led there by her childhood fascination, long hours crouched in the vegetable patch doing a kid’s experiments: the run of soil through her hands, the rivers of movement she could create by scooping together a hill of dirt and then starting a flow with a finger. The way she could change the course of that free-running river of dirt by setting a stone here, wiggling a twig there. At school she discovered the flow that’s truly of interest to a soil scientist is not that of dirt but of water. She grew to love that, too. Studying felt good, the way it had in early high school before she’d grown more interested in back roads at night, a cold beer, a hot joint. In the course of her four years of study in Saskatoon, the ag boom went bust. She graduated cum laude with what she called her dirt degree and never landed a job in her field. She parlayed her volunteer shift at Adam’s grade two classroom into a position as a teacher’s aid and bounced for years from school to school. At forty-four she married Steven Martins, architect for the renovations at her current school, and took early retirement at fifty.