It was late evening when he next came and sat beside the closet door. He’d showered, yet the sour smell of whisky on his breath belied the freshness of his damp curls.
Mother was coming, he told me. Mother was coming. Now. There. To that hotel suite. She was landing right about now at the airport. This is what he told me, that Mother was coming to get me. That he’d called from the hospital, that he had to call, that he couldn’t allow too much time to pass without my mother knowing, for he remembered when his mother’s sister had died in Toronto, and Suze hadn’t been called till the next day, and how Suze had been playing bingo at the community hall that night, and how the greatest part of her grief was that she’d been playing bingo at the community hall while her sister lay dying. No, he couldn’t wait for me to call Mother, for he knew I would never be ready to call Mother, and then there would be another guilt for me to take upon myself, my only guilt, for thus far I hadn’t made a wrong move in my life, and this little deed here—well, this was the least he could do for me.
I fought. When Ben told me, I fought hard, that thing inside of me near busting free. I clawed at his face to get at the door, to get away. I was surprised at how hard I fought, how heavily he was breathing from holding me back in the closet now. I wanted Gran, I wanted Gran, I told him, and he said he would call Gran. And he did, he dragged the phone off the night table to the closet door. One of Mother’s sisters answered the phone. She said Gran couldn’t come to the phone just now, nor could Father. They were both in bed, she said. They were both in bed and unable to get up just yet.
“They’re like you,” Ben pleaded as I curled around myself like a dog searching for comfort, “they’re like you, they don’t have strength—they’re feeling it, they’re feeling it too.”
I heard his words. They swirled outside of me like a foreign alphabet, their meaning blocked by that split-off thing that was weeping and weeping inside of me over what I had done that had taken Gran and Father to their beds, that was keeping them from talking to me.
“Your mother’s come though,” said Ben, “she’s come all this way just to get you, she’s come all this way—I told her you weren’t coming home, and she’s come all this way just to get you.”
“She’s coming for him.”
“No, for you, she’s come for you.”
“I can’t be here.”
“You will be, she’s come all this way.”
“She’s come for him.” I nestled onto the floor, head buried beneath my arm, seeing Mother, seeing Chris, the both of them in the graveyard, Mother rocking him, brushing the dead leaves off his face, rocking him. Another cross now, two more pieces of wood notched together, for Mother hadn’t wanted no fancy headstones for her three babies—nothing could be more dear than those three little crosses Father had cut and notched together and painted white, every year he painted them anew, painted them white against the greying rain and the greying, salty wind.
I shivered, drawing my knees up tighter to my chest. My mind latched onto Chris’s drawings, trying to reap comfort, for I’d always believed they hinted of another place, a sense of safety from this world where everything shifted, where things rotted and died and then rotted again, leaving nothing behind, not a trace, except memories that died too with the mind. His drawings excited me as dreams excited me—more than dreams, for even they were but memories by the time they reached the tongue.
But he wasn’t there, Chris wasn’t there and I couldn’t bring any of his drawings to mind. I grasped at the emptied air, feeling as though I truly had transformed into something phantom-like.
Mother’s voice sounded from a distance, calling my name. The thing inside of me quivered. I crouched deeper into the closet, pressing my face into the pillow. I willed myself into silence. I held my breath. I could hear my heart hammering. My lungs pounded for air. Mother’s voice drew closer and the thing quivered harder. It kicked and fought. I pressed harder into the pillow. My head became light. I felt dizzy. I felt myself fading, fusing into the wall, the singing started. The thing was screaming, screaming in terror, it heard Mother’s voice drawing closer, it screamed and screamed, it sluiced through my veins like iced water—
“Sylvie!”
The pillow slackened. I gulped for air, harsh, racking gulps. A small band of yellowish light fell before me. It lit lightly upon my back. It crept around my shoulders, it tightened, then grazed the back of my neck like a whisper.
“Sylvie.”
The thing was all through me now, leaping like fire through my veins, scorching my heart, burning through my throat like a breath of hell as I screamed to Mother’s touch. I beheld with a flash of clarity the thought that surely those who have not felt death have not felt God, for only in grief can eternity be felt; that such depth of pain, unconnected to skin and bones, exists in such magnitude it renders time and the tearing of flesh into nothingness.
Many other thoughts were to come to me that night as I crouched in the closet with Mother holding me from behind—some were mine, some from that crazy mix of dreams and consciousness, but mostly they came from my mother as she spoke in bits and pieces about so much. A mesh of words Mother cried that night, a mesh of words that I would form someday into a picture but that were too tangled now, too embroiled with Mother’s tears and torment as she spoke of things known only to her: how the second I was brought into the world and cut from the cord she had named me—so’s to anchor me to the living, and to stave off the unmarked tombstone, the one unseen beside her bed, the one she always dreamed about since the burying of her third baby. She had taken me from the midwife’s hands, full of blood and gurry, and passed me to Gran, commanding, Bless her—bless her with the waters and say her name out loud, real loud, as loud as the cross so’s to mark her place amongst the living. Sylvia. Sylvia Now. Then she took me to her breast and cried some more because her nipples wouldn’t milk.
“Come out now, come, we’ll have some tea,” Mother kept pleading. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t remove my arms from around my belly, couldn’t look into my mother’s eyes, was frightened of them, frightened of seeing that look of wariness, of trepidation. Mother pleaded some more, her hands all the time caressing my shoulders and stroking my hair as she lay soft against me from behind, talking in quiet tones about faith, about hope, about how she should’ve named me Hope, not Sylvie, for she had lost faith with her three dying babies, and then I was born and I lived, “and you brought me hope. Each day you grew, my faith grew with you; least, that’s what I thought it was back then—faith. And when Chrissy was born, I trusted—trusted that he would live; that you, my girl, was my seal from God, that he’d forgiven my sins, and I was now freed to love, to be a mother like all others. Each time I saw you popping around a corner I was awed that you still lived. The silliness of it—that I always believed if another was taken from my breast, it would’ve been you. And so I let Gran keep you, and I was afraid to love you. And I poured my love into Chris, but no matter how tightly I held him, I never felt full. I was the mother who cleaved her baby in half; I sacrificed one half for the other, and prowled every living day since, pining for them both. No matter how much I loved you, how hard I hugged you, I could never feel your heart. And I know you’ve never felt mine. And I wonders now if I ever really had faith, or was it hope of faith. We’ll be tested now then, won’t we,” she cried, “for it’s not real in our hearts just yet, is it—our Chrissy—only the shock of it.”
They weren’t the words of a mother soothing a hurt, lost child, but of the hurt, lost mother groping for her child. They caught my heart. They circled around me like rafts in a sea of pain. They trilled like songbirds through the stuffy darkness of the closet. They held the same bitter sweetness as the nightingale singing her song of love, impaled upon the thorn of a rose.
“Come. Come out,” Mother sobbed into my ear.
“I want to die.”
“Then who would mourn him?” she cried. “If we all gave in to feeling and jumped off the wharf, who would
mourn him? Fault,” she scoffed with a touch of her old stridency as I whimpered something about fault, “we speak of fault, yet we speak of God. You think He leaves us to the other’s will? What of His will? Perhaps His plan was aborted too, aborted by chance. Perhaps accidents are the way of life, and it’s for us to bring them meaning—”
“I said that once,” I broke in with a cry, “I said that to him once, that suffering helped us find meaning.”
“Then it’s for us to give him meaning, his life. It’s a hard matter, but I’ve always felt it’s what we do with things that’s the most important. It’ll be hard, my baby, it’ll be hard,” sobbed Mother, “but we must try—we’ll do it together, all of us. So, come on now, come out. We’ll pour a bath and have tea. And I’m tired. I need you to help me sleep. It was so long on that plane, I thought I was going to the moon—my, Sylvie, it was a frightening thing being on that plane—will you come out now, help me make some tea?”
“Were you afraid?” I whispered.
“Yes, yes, I was afraid. But fear falters like everything else now, before the love of one’s own. You come out now, we’ll have some tea, will you please come out?”
I bore the same fear as when I stepped inside Chris’s hospital room after they’d laid him out. Uncurling my arms, my legs, I turned slightly towards my mother. I rose upon my knees, but then pulled back, holding down my head like a frightened child, one hand on the closet door, ready to pull it shut.
“Here, I’ll stand back,” said Mother. “See, I’ll stand back here. I’m going to turn on the light, just this small one here. There, it’s just a small light. Look up now, will you please look up.”
I looked up. Mother was standing by the bedroom door. Her face was pale, so terribly, terribly pale. She looked small, and was holding her hands. And for all that, she looked the fabled queen with her hair pretty in combs, her chin regal, defying death, her eyes glittering with tears. She flung apart her hands, reaching for me, her voice strong as she called me to her. And in that moment she was the mother of my youth, ruling wherever she stood, her senses seeking out each of her youngsters from our hiding spots, commanding the boys to her side, Gran back inside the house to rest, Father out of his cursed boat and rubber boots, and me to the garden to help with the weeding. Once, as I hid behind the sheets flapping on the line, I watched in amazement as she even challenged the crows that had just snatched another seed from her soil and were lurking now in the nearby branches.
HOURS LATER, after we’d shared tea with Ben and I’d bathed and was curled onto the bed, facing the wall, Mother came in and curled behind me, speaking of other things—one of them being how she used to crawl inside the darkened hollow of the tuckamores upon the cliffs of Cooney Arm after her third baby had died. And how, after she curled there long enough, the dark overtook her—no sight, no hearing, no touching and thinking, rendering her no more than an unborn soul. And then, after many, many days of everything shut down around her, and her thoughts taking up no more of her, she started feeling again.
“For that’s what happens,” Mother whispered, “when something hits us too hard, we stop feeling. And then we get scared, because without feeling it’s like we’re nothing but air, and things flow through us without even a twitch, and how fair is that, for them babies to die, and it all to flow through me without even a twitch. Things must have meaning. We love that which brings us joy, and yet we wouldn’t know joy without sorrow, would we? Perhaps meaning goes no deeper than that, finding love. I think I’m learning that—my babies taught me some of that, they had purpose through death. How anyone with a child in the ground can sleep without knowing there’s a purpose to death is beyond me. Their stay was brief, but they created much; they created a different kind of life in me, and it was from that life you came, and then Chrissy, and Kyle. I would never have known love if not for you, for Chrissy. No, my girl, the second coming is no mystery to me when I’ve been dead and born agin myself. And perhaps this will take me again—I don’t know just yet; but right now there’s a hard pulse in my veins as I lie here with you. And I don’t care, I don’t care nothing for me; it’s for you that I lie here, I’ve not done right by you. I’m a hard learner, but if it was you lying dead in that hospital there wouldn’t have been a hole big enough to bury my sorrow, for I’ve not done right.”
Long after Mother slept I lay there, hearing her words, feeling them, thick and soft and entangling around me like a skein of Gran’s wool. I tried to think back over the years, to try and see them through different eyes. But, unlike my mother as she cradled amongst the tuckamores all those years ago, thought was coiled too tightly around me just yet, leaving me with no frayed ends to follow back through the past and separate the pettiness from the passion, the girl from the woman.
The soft murmurs of the TV started up from the living room.
Ben.
I rose carefully, so’s not to wake Mother, and crept down the hall. He was sitting on the floor, as he’d been the night before—or day—I wasn’t sure, anymore, of time. He was fully dressed, with his boots on, his knees drawn up to his chest. His jacket was hanging on the back of a chair alongside.
He didn’t look up as I sat beside him. I whispered his name. I whispered it again, as he hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked to the sound of my voice. I touched his arm. It felt as though it were me now, drawing him out of some closet, some locked-away place.
A muscle throbbed in his jaw. He swallowed hard, then nodded as though he’d been waiting for my arrival. “Push has everything arranged,” he said, his voice hoarse like a rusty hinge. “You’ll have a driver—he’ll take you around in the morning. The hospital. Your mother will want to see him.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, then drove his fingers roughly through his hair. “He’ll take you to the airport after. The driver. It’s all arranged. Push arranged everything.” He fell silent, his eyes fastened onto a mound of baggage by the door—Chris’s knapsack, his sleeping bag. My knapsack and sleeping bag were there as well, and a couple of other bags. One of them had a jacket laid atop of it, Trapp’s jacket.
His shadow stained the blackest of nights.
“He didn’t report the kick,” I said coldly. “To Push. It was his job to report to Push.”
Ben looked at me, his eyes bleary. He was still drinking, I could smell it. “If it’s fault you’re looking for, then make it mine—and I wish you could,” he ended harshly. “I wish you could make it mine. Or Trapp’s. I wish I could give you that. But you don’t believe it. You rather the fault was yours.
“Guilt,” he mumbled into my silence and lifted his head towards the room where Mother was sleeping. “More than you wanting the guilt for this one, Sylvie.” He lapsed into silence then, his eyes falling inward onto himself. “Should’ve gotten you out,” he mumbled. “Should’ve gotten you both out.”
“I can hear Gran now,” I whispered. “She’d say none of us can rightly claim it—for there’s no knowing where one thing leaves off and another begins. Or if we can even look at things that way.”
He rubbed his eyes again, rubbed his temples, pulling his hands down over his face. “You thought I jumped, didn’t you. You thought I jumped. Left him behind.”
I stared mutely at Chris’s sleeping bag.
“You didn’t say it, but I heard you think it. I didn’t jump without looking for him, I’m a stun fuck, but I looked for him—thought he’d gone to the doghouse—thought I seen him heading for the doghouse, grab a sandwich—he must’ve been down, he must’ve been already down!” He gripped his knees with his hands and I leaned towards him, laying my forehead against his chilled fingers.
“You loved him,” I said. “I know you loved him.”
He pulled me against his chest, cradling me, cradling me hard. “Not just him, not just him that I love,” he muffled into my hair. “When I told you about Trapp, it was the biggest thing—yesterday it was the biggest thing, I know it means nothing to you now, it means nothing to me now, but yesterday it
was the biggest thing, I needed you to know me, to understand—”
“I do, I do understand, why do you say it means nothing?” I drew back, looking at his face, at the dark beneath his eyes, almost bruised from repeatedly burrowing his face into the heels of his hands.
“He’s left the camp,” he said. “He’s took only his truck. He’s took it on. You know the weight of that.”
And then I understood. He was leaving. He was leaving again. He was going for Trapp.
I drew my knees to my breasts, covering myself.
“There’s no one,” he said listlessly. “He’s got no one. He’s only got me—and he’s out there somewhere—he’s out there lost somewhere. Sylvie!” He grasped my arm as I lowered my forehead onto my knees with a groan of dejection. “Sylvie, what would you have me do?”
I looked at him. I snorted. “You saved his ass, what more will he have you do? You saved the rig, too—it was his job, but you saved it, him—you saved all of them—” My voice choked, it choked on a quiver of fear. “You can’t leave me,” I whimpered. “He’ll come home, he’ll just come home after a while.”
He didn’t speak. He hadn’t heard me. My words were tiny, he hadn’t heard them, for I’d spoken them in a whisper; the little-girl whisper that I used talking to Mother once in the quiet of my bedroom after I’d near frightened her to death in the abandoned house, and was then afraid of what I’d done, was afraid of my mother’s fear, that my mother would leave me, that my mother would go into the graveyard with her three little dears who were once little girls like me and sink into their graves alongside of them and never come back.
“I hate change,” I whispered. “I hate how things are all the time shifting, like Chris’s lines, going from one thing to another, to another. Ohh, my,” I choked on a sob and it was just then, sitting there alongside of Ben, with my mother sleeping in the other room and Chrissy laid out in some morgue across town, I saw that as much as I revered Chris’s lines I feared them too. I feared those waves curling into fish, into nets, into our father, into the stars. As much as I loved them, drew comfort from their foretelling of another place, a nicer place for those three little dears than a dark, ugly grave, I was frightened of how life can be here by morning, gone by evening, and as I sat there crumpled beside Ben, I desired to make things concrete around me, like one of his bricks, like one of Ben’s damn stupid bricks.
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