If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

by Leona Theis

  “Congratulations,” Steven said when he toasted her at the goodbye gathering in the school gymnasium. “I predict you’ll be bored.” She remembered trying to guess at hidden meanings. He was, she suspected, voicing an expectation and hoping she’d live up to it.

  She tells Robin hardly any of this on the way down the mountain. What she does tell him is that retirement suited her, until it didn’t. Until she read too many in-depth articles in Harper’s and The Walrus and Maclean’s and couldn’t stop thinking how the world would look by the time her own granddaughter and Lolly got to be her age. And so she’s once again a student and once again preoccupied with water. Water is where the questions most in need of answers are in Western Canada. “You can’t live here and ignore it.”

  They reach a break in the trees, Robin leading now. His movements on the descent over the snow are fluid, sinuous, while Syl does a less speedy but competent sidestep, mindful of her thinning bones, using her poles to steady herself. Time and experience have quelled the fear of falling that dogged her as a young woman, an internal lurch at the crest of a hill or the top of a flight of stairs. Her caution now has more to do with the practical fact a broken arm or ankle could set her research back months.

  “Well done,” Robin says when she catches up.

  “And you, you’re like a cat.”

  “It’s just I’ve more experience.”

  Syl heads toward a piece of deadfall, bench height, at the edge of the clearing. They brush away snow and sit. To avoid meeting Robin’s eyes, Syl takes a long time finding her second sandwich in her pack. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing. Just, I thought I’d be making this trek with a graduate student.”

  “Which I am.”

  “Just, you aren’t what I expected.”

  “Likewise, cub reporter.”

  “That’s mister cub reporter.”

  Syl shapes a tiny snowball and throws it soft against his cheek. There’s nothing to it, a spray of melt. If she were to raise her hand and wipe it away for him, she would feel the beginnings of afternoon stubble that show more salt than pepper in the sunlight.

  He brushes his face lightly with a glove, in no hurry, and says, apparently to the sky, “Truly, what a rare day. We could have run into any kind of weather.”

  Syl looks up. A feathering jet streak softens the blue. She thinks of the passenger flight that went missing a week ago. “That lost plane. There’s nothing yet, not a trace.”

  Robin bends toward his pack to pull his thermos free of its webbing, and when he resettles he’s closer to Syl than before. “All those souls.”

  “The people on board — that’s who I thought about, too, when it happened. But it’s the families I think of now. Waiting for the worst.” She’s glad he’s moved closer. “Not certain, but certain. Not knowing why or how.”

  “And here we are. The lucky ones. In near paradise.”

  “A compromised paradise.”

  “Granted.”

  BACK ON THE TRAIL Robin continues with his questions, less about her work and more about Syl the person. She makes sure to refer to Steven in several of her answers. She mentions Lolly, wonderful girl. She mustn’t be late, for she’s promised to take her out for pizza.

  When it’s time to take their snowshoes off they crouch side by side and take turns, using each other as props at wobbly moments.

  “What was it drew you to this research?”

  She’s glad he didn’t add “at this stage of life.” “A person has to do something. This is what I can do.” And it beats Netflix binges with a pan of apple cake on the end table.

  “I admire you for it.”

  “I don’t know. We’re greedy creatures, human beings. I’m as bad as anyone.” She’s talking too much. She meets his look. “This article you’re writing, I hope you’re not turning it into ‘Sylvia Salverson-Martins, graduate student at fifty-nine.’ Aren’t you supposed to be writing about the science, the climate modeling, the dire straits?”

  “You have to add the human side.”

  She sees how filaments of green run through his brown eyes close to the iris. I will not let this in, she thinks.

  On the final shallow grade before the pebbly slope above the parking lot, Syl puts her poles to good use while Robin, ahead of her, does without. He turns to look over his shoulder. “Honestly, then: let’s say I’m getting to know you because I wan —”

  — and he’s tumbling.

  Syl feels that old lurch of fear inside. “Oh!”

  His pack stops him from rolling far, and he manages to sit. “Talk about clumsy!” His pants and his long johns are torn, his knee skinned, blood trickling.

  She’s beside him, poles on the ground. “You’re all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right. I feel like a bloody fool.”

  Syl pulls out her first aid kit.

  “Really, you don’t need to bother with that.”

  She considers the hole in his long johns and uses her scissors to widen it.

  He puts a hand over hers. “It’s fine.”

  She slips her hand away and finds the Poly-To-Go in her kit. “Bear with me.”

  “Syl, can you meet me later? After pizza with your granddaughter. Tie up some loose ends?”

  “Hold on now.” She triggers the spray. Antiseptic trickles across his broken skin, and he winces. “Stings a little, I know,” she says, swabbing, “but it numbs in a second or two.”

  “Syl?”

  “I’ll have to see when I can manage it.” Let it settle. She’ll be here another month gathering data on the mountain, running it through computers, wrestling with refinements to her model. Long enough to take the measure of this man. Long enough to take her own.

  Before she and little Adam drove off to Saskatoon to start anew, the old boat of a Meteor packed to the roof and riding low on the road, her sister had hosted a goodbye lunch with everyone Syl still had within reach for family: Mavis and her husband with little Chad and baby Kayla, Aunt Merry from their dad’s side and Uncle Davis from their mom’s, all there to wish them well. “Go now,” Aunt Merry said as she gave her a final hug. “Go and find yourself. Is that what you kids say?”

  Syl slides her fingers inside the hole at Robin’s knee and fixes a gauze pad over the wound, feeling the warmth of his skin as she presses the edges of the tape. “I’ll be in touch.”

  SYL AND LOLLY have watched an episode from the boxed set of Gilmore Girls that came with the motel suite; Lolly’s conquered the KenKen in today’s Globe and four Sudoku on her phone and texted three girlfriends and one boyfriend. Now they’re reading side by side in bed like old marrieds.

  Lolly sets The Hunger Games face down on the duvet. “Granny S?”

  “Yes, Loll?”

  “I want to study water too. Like you.”

  “That’s terrific.” Oh, to know so early what you want to be when you grow up. “Maybe I can help you get started.”

  “Not your kind of water, Granny, no offence. I’ll do oceans.”

  “Ah. Good choice.”

  “I read in the paper about that search.”

  “The lost plane?”

  “They say the wreckage — if, you know, if they ever find it — they say it’ll be scattered maybe in the Indian Ocean. Or maybe way, way south, far away from anywhere, even Australia.”

  “Those poor families.”

  “Yeah no, but it’s so interesting, Granny S. The currents down there are totally iffy. And even if they find one piece of something, it doesn’t mean they’ll find anything else. They give this example, like if you had two things, like a purse and a backpack that belonged to the very same passenger, and they fall into that ocean, they’d be separated right away. By the time they get waterlogged and sink, they wind up hundreds of kilometres apart. Even if they start out exactly side by side.”

  “I can see how that could make a girl want to study oceans.”

  “Know what I’d do if I was at a university like you? I�
��d go there in a helicopter and drop a couple of, I don’t know, kayaks on the water and I’d watch what happens. How far they get from each other how fast.”

  Syl doesn’t tell her that universities don’t write blank cheques. She doesn’t tell her that in the real world of science the fascination and the beauty are wonderful and welcome, but grunt work is your life. She certainly doesn’t tell her that she has the same questions about life that Lolly has about the sea. You could be swept into a current and find yourself miles from where you left your backpack. Your pack and whatever of yourself you’d stowed inside it.

  “Something like that.”

  “What’s that, Granny S?”

  “Lolly, that would be a fascinating thing to work on.”

  OVER SKYPE a couple of nights later she tells Steven, “Lolly wants to ski Blueberry again.”

  “That’s great. She aced it the other day, you said.”

  “But that under-layer of ice. I —”

  “There’s new snow again, you said.”

  “Here and there, but hardly at all on Blueberry.”

  “Lolly’s the kind of kid that needs a challenge.” He gives her his most winning expression, the slight tilt of his head, crinkles at the corners of his pale blue eyes, and the curve of mouth that manages to transmit both understanding and expectation. “And she’s a natural athlete.”

  It’s settled then.

  “Goodbye, sweet,” he says.

  “You’re my perfect man, man,” says Syl, a rush to get that in before he disappears.

  “And you,” he says, with some surprise, “you’re my perfect woman,” sounding reflexive, but she knows he means it.

  TWO YEARS AGO, when Syl sat in Brian’s office at the university lobbying him to take her on as a graduate student, Brian had held his reading glasses between thumb and forefinger, swinging them so they tapped the inside of his arm repeatedly. She would later come to know this as body language for “you must be joking.”

  “Your degree is three decades old, and it’s in soils, not hydrology, and you want me to find a spot for you.”

  She gestured toward his computer screen where he’d called up their correspondence.

  He said, “Suppose I ask you one final question, then, and your answer will settle mine.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “What was your mark in first-year physics?”

  “Ninety.”

  He folded his glasses and set them on his desk. “I’m always looking for talent. File your application. Maybe we can catch you up.”

  When she presented her good news that evening Steven made a run to the liquor vendor close to home and returned with an approximation of champagne. “I was rooting for you all the way, sweet. Something to get your teeth into.” He poured a scant two ounces each and handed her a flute. “Congratulations. You’re my perfect woman, woman.”

  SHE ISN’T CERTAIN about taking Lolly back to Blueberry. Steven isn’t here, he doesn’t know the conditions. It’s more than that. It still surprises her sometimes, the things he doesn’t get, and maybe it’s the same in the other direction. You have to move out of each other’s way. He spends whole mornings rustling up someone to crew for him in his two-person Enterprise, for Syl has tried and failed to love sailing with him. It is, after all, his boat, and when you have a main and a jib and a rudder in play, one of you has got to be the boss, and always it must be him, and, frankly, Syl has a more natural feel for the physics of it than he ever will. That, and the damn Enterprise has a faulty gasket around the centreboard and when she’s out there with him she’s the one who bails and bails.

  “Is this supposed to be fun? All those hours with your epoxy and your shiny wooden finish, but what about where the water gets in?”

  “Heaven’s sake, Syl, don’t stop. Look, already.”

  “Fuck’s sake, Steven, promise me I’ll never have to get in this rig again.”

  DOZENS OF SKIERS have been over this hill already today, plowing the thin skiff of new snow to the sides, leaving ice exposed. There’s no stopping to rest on the steeper grades. Lolly and Syl score their way up herringbone style, Syl coaching herself silently the way Steven taught her, One more step, one more, one more, pressing her weight forward over the insides of her skis. Seven coats of wax in the kick. Every time they ascend an especially challenging stretch her thought is, We’ll have to get back down somehow.

  “She’s a natural athlete,” Steven said last night. That’s true. They crest another rise and step off the track to rest. Around the bend above comes a skier in a careful descent. He plows to a stop and raises his iridescent sun-shield. Robin.

  “Good day! Think twice before you go further.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s still that final slope. If I’d known how dicey coming down would be, I wouldn’t have gone up. And I do this hill twice a week.”

  “I’m sure you do,” she says. “After all, you’ve lived in one set or another of mountains all —”

  “— all my life, yes.”

  They laugh, and Lolly looks from one to the other.

  “Sorry,” says Syl. “Robin, Lolly.”

  She’s spent time with him twice now since their climb to the stations, once for lunch and once for drinks in the evening while Lolly was at the pool. She’s learned he’s in semi-retirement, left the editor’s chair two years ago; that he’s been divorced now seven years; no children. They’ve heard by this time a few of each other’s stories, the content less important than the ease of the telling and receiving, the accidental bumping of knees or elbows or shoes. Something about his manner of speech after a couple of beers feels comfortingly familiar, as if he grew up in a small town and never quite left it behind.

  “Sure, yeah, Coleman,” Robin said the other night. “Not so awful far from here. I drove down a couple of weeks ago and went snowmobiling with my brother. Yeah. The speed.” Was he sheepish about that reference to speed, or proud of it? Both, she decided. He described his brother’s new tattoo of a banana eating a monkey, and she burst into loud giggles and teared up. He took her hand and held it tight. “Settle down,” he joked, trying to keep a straight face. He kissed her knuckles as if this were the usual first aid for someone laughing too hard. The giggles travelled through her hand and into him and soon it was the two of them wiping tears and reaching over to wipe each other’s.

  His phone buzzed then, and he checked it and looked up in apology. “I’m sorry, dear Syl. Work. A cub reporter needs me.” He looked directly into her eyes for a quick moment. “We’ll do this again, yes?”

  “Yes.” She watched him wind away through the crowded bar. Chilly, she pulled her fleece close around herself. She felt something she couldn’t name leaving her, a twisting filament that followed him toward the door. He knows that’s happening, she thought.

  ROBIN LIFTS ONE of his ski poles and sets it down so the tip lands close to the tip of Syl’s. Hello on the snow. She feels Lolly’s eyes on her, on Robin. Lolly stamps her skis, her yellow jacket bright against the forest. Syl squints toward the bend that Robin came around.

  “Don’t be scared, Granny S.”

  “Thanks for the read on that,” Syl says to Robin by way of goodbye. Not that she wants to be rid of him; she wants to coax another laugh; she wants to tap his ski pole with her own and hear the click. We just clicked. But she and Lolly will settle their argument to better satisfaction once he’s gone.

  “I’ll be out of your way, then. Take care.” As he slides away, he says, “About that wrap-up interview?”

  “Yes, let’s.” She swishes her skis forward and back in the tracks to prevent them icing up. “Time to turn around, Lolly.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “We’ll be lucky to make it down even now without a spectacular crash.”

  “Mom and Dad would let me.”

  “I won’t.”

  Lolly takes a few smooth strides forward, then angles her skis and starts uphill.

  “We’re not goin
g up.”

  “I am.”

  “It isn’t you I’m afraid for, dear girl, it’s me.” Lolly stops, her skis braced in a V. She digs a pole in and flicks snow to the side. Her shoulders rise and fall. Slowly she lifts one ski and brings it around and sidesteps down. She pushes off and flies past on her way downhill.

  “Stay low!” Syl says, turning, sliding, still seeing that thread of green in Robin’s brown eyes. “Stay loose.” But the yellow jacket’s out of sight. Syl’s left ski has a mind of its own, and she flexes her ankle to get more edge. Watch yourself, Erik used to say. It was a joke they had, those many years ago. Why? she’d say, and he’d say, Someone has to. She’s giddy through and through. But I didn’t ask for this, she thinks. I wasn’t looking. Since meeting Steven, she’s known who she’ll grow old with. She’s living in Briarwood, even — not that she’s ever laughed out loud at a neighbourhood block party, not that she feels at home shopping in All for Women, with its repeated racks of black and white and the single new shade for fall, or for winter, or spring. But costume jewellery’s so easy there — you just leave your own rings at home, try on two from the open display and make a show of putting one back but only the one. Voilà. She shifts more weight to her stuttering left ski, wondering just when it will happen that she’ll fly out of a turn, smack into a tree, break an arm, a leg, a hip. Her neck. She must not, must not fall.

  She hears a shout from below: “Shit!” She’s never heard Lolly swear, but that’s her voice. “Fuck!” Syl hears, and then a shout of straight-up fright.

  She narrows her snowplow to get there faster, loses her edge, shoots into a snowbank, jars her back when she falls. One of her skis points to the sky, the other points right at sixty degrees. Pain flashes through a wrist, then disappears. “Are you all right?” she calls to Lolly, and she hears “No,” thin and soft. Her back throbs. From where she lies she looks across the track and down a little and sees a bright yellow heap that is Lolly, one red ski pointing high.

  “I’m here, sweetie, I’m coming.” Syl strains forward, reaching for the binding on her own skyward ski. Why can’t her arm be just one inch longer? She rests a second and then uses all she has to swing forward. She grasps the binding barely long enough to pull it open, and kicks herself free. The second ski’s a simpler matter.