The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  Also by Joan Thomas

  Curiosity

  Reading by Lightning

  Copyright © 2014 by Joan Thomas

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  ISBN: 978-0-7710-8392-1

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-8393-8

  The epigraph is from the poem “River Edge:” from the collection Torch River.

  © Elizabeth Philips 2007. Used by permission of Brick Books.

  Cover image © Christie Goodwin / Arcangel Images

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  In memory, with love

  Joy

  Nothing is more beautiful

  than anything else: this is how April warns us

  and breaks us down.

  ELIZABETH PHILIPS, “River Edge:”

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  1. In the Deep Midwinter

  2. Never Explain, Never Apologize

  3. Glad Tidings

  4. There All Along

  5. Begin as You Mean to Go On

  6. Transition Species

  Part Two

  7. Rogue Thoughts

  8. The Good Life

  9. Goodnight Moon

  10. Free Will

  11. All You Need

  12. Faun Vision

  13. A Square Yard of Turf

  Part Three

  14. The Wilds

  15. The Light of My Life

  16. Spontaneous Combustion

  17. The Base Coat

  18. White Crane Spreads Wings

  Acknowledgements

  FOUR CHILDREN WERE LOST THAT NIGHT, THAT’S what they thought at first. And at first this reassured them – how could anything terrible happen to four kids at once? Then an open Jeep drove into the clearing with two little boys in the back, the white-blond brothers from Wisconsin. Someone from a nearby cottage had picked them up on the highway. Their mother, a pretty woman with platinum hair cut as short as theirs, ran across the clearing and fell on them, hugging them, cuffing at them (“You brats, you stupid little jerk-offs,” she cried), and their father, who had spent the afternoon drinking cider and sleeping in a hammock tied between two trees, strode around the Jeep to shake the driver’s hand.

  So then it was just Sylvie missing, and the dark-haired boy with the sick mother, Liam.

  From where she crouched at a corner of the woodpile, Sylvie could hear most of what they said. She was thirsty, and lightheaded from hunger, and her feet were cold and hurting. She’d run barefoot up from the lake, avoiding the paths where the adults hurried back and forth, calling the kids’ names. The tops of the trees were bright, catching the last of the light, but darkness had settled onto the forest floor. The nameless trees were wide enough to hide her, and in the dusk she’d scrambled from one to the next, stifling her yelps of pain when the twigs and roots hiding under the leafy carpet bit at her. Not a child, she was not a child. She was a dark forest creature, lost by her own hand.

  At the edge of the clearing, she squatted in fragrant shreds of bark. Above her the forest canopy opened to a dome of brilliant evening sky; a minuscule jet from a different world lifted silently into it. She saw a police car roll up the lane, and then they were all around it, the blond boys and their parents, the driver of the Jeep, the filmmaker, the babysitter, and Sylvie’s mom. The faun was led forward. She was the fifth child, the one kid who had not been lost. Two policemen in Smokey the Bear hats (sheriffs, they were sheriffs) bent over her. She was wearing jeans now, and her hair had been taken out of its elastics and straggled down her back. She was talking now too, though Sylvie couldn’t make out what she was saying for her crying.

  Then Sylvie heard her own name ring out. She shifted on her heels and pressed her face to a gap between the logs. Her mother was standing with her back to the woodpile. “Eleven,” she said to the officers. “Quite tall for her age. Her hair’s about to here, sort of reddish blond. She’s wearing a bathing suit.”

  “No,” sobbed the faun, shaking her head.

  “No,” said the mother of the blond boys. “She’s not wearing the swimsuit.”

  So Liz tossed her head and began to describe Sylvie’s clothes in detail: her jeans, her sandals, her glittery belt, her white T-shirt with the turtle design.

  “Yellow,” interrupted the faun. “It’s yellow.”

  “White, yellow,” Liz cried. “I doubt you’ll mistake her either way.”

  “Did you think of searching your own vehicles?” asked one of the sheriffs. Everyone started eagerly across the clearing in the direction of the cars.

  In her yellow T-shirt Sylvie sprang from her crouch and slipped towards the house. There was a side door that opened to the kitchen. The house was quiet and full of warm light. She ran quickly up the stairs, heading for the front bedroom – and a man was standing there. She gave a little prance of fear. But no, it wasn’t a man at all, it was a shirt hanging on the back of the closet door. She was alone, in the room with the braid rug and the iron bed and the big wooden desk, where a family photo stood in its cardboard frame, and the boy with the falconer’s sleeve gazed out at her with neutral brown eyes.

  She went to the desk and opened the drawer. In a tray of pens and paperclips lay a retractable knife, the sort of blade people use to cut open a cardboard box or hijack a plane. She fished it out and slid back its casing. The point of the blade bit boldly into the photograph, slicing through it and through the cardboard backing. More, the blade ordered, deeper, so when she was done excising the boy from his family, she went to the bedside table and picked up the book she had looked through earlier, a beautiful gilt-edged book. First she slashed its cover with jagged lines, and then she turned to the colour plates inside and took the blade to them. It was a furious relief, this slashing and gouging; it felt natural, like a language she used to speak when she was little.

  When she’d had enough, she slipped the picture of the boy into the pocket of her jeans and went to the window. Night had fully fallen. She could hear the squawk and stutter of police radios. A revolving light revealed and then erased the trees at the edge of the forest. Car doors slammed and strangers stepped into the clearing; they sprang up in brilliant detail and vanished. The faun, wearing a jean jacket now, stood with the parents of the blond boys. The father reached for her, and in spite of her size (she was almost as tall as Sylvie), he picked her up. She clung to him, drooping over him. Then headlights caught Sylvie’s mother. Alone, perched on the edge of the picnic table, her white capris gleaming. Standing in a fold of the dust-smelling curtain, Sylvie pressed her forehead against the cold glass and peered down, through hot tears willing her mother to turn and look up.

  ONE

  1

  In the Deep Midwinter

  SIX O’CLOCK, AND IN THEIR ATTIC BEDROOM THEY open their eyes wordlessly to each other, roll in opposite directions, and lie on their backs dozing. Aiden hears the traffic start rumbling up Portage Avenue, but he’s still his nighttime incarnation, and when his eyes open again, he catches sight of meaning darting across the skylight like a bird. Then he’s awake, looking up at a curved square of Plexiglas
dotted with snow. Still dark out, but they’re prey to decaying light from ten thousand sodium-vapour street lamps. Liz has dipped back into real sleep, breathing deeply, her mouth slightly open as though she’s about to say something. She’s angled in the bed, crowding him. He turns onto his side to give her another inch or two. Sleep’s over for him anyway, it’s moving on to the nocturnals.

  To the cats and coyotes and paramedics, and to his daughter, who’s a mile away in her dorm room, propped up in a nest of photocopies and muffin papers. Celebrating the solstice by pulling an all-nighter, dozing now in the light of her laptop … and in her dream, a girl says, Loser, and she opens her eyes. 6:23. God. She stretches her legs and feels a Red Bull can under the duvet. She’s been working since yesterday afternoon, since four-thirty to be exact, which is when the sun went down. Sixteen hours of darkness last night, courtesy of the tilt of the earth. Oh, astronomy – if only she could have fitted it in.

  Her eyes slide back to her screen and she tries to pull her botany project into focus. Around three she was totally in the zone, ideas coming so fast she could hardly get them down. But now her words have morphed into something she can’t read – Cyrillic maybe, or Cree syllabics. With a sigh she saves the file, drops the lid of her laptop, and turns her cheek towards her pillow. Instantly she’s back on the fast chute to sleep, falling heavily into it, greedy for it, roaming through its tangled garden, a hungry scavenger gobbling sleep up.

  It’s ten-thirty by the time Sylvie makes it to the Notion, the new café where she’s meeting her friends to work on their Fringe show. They’re all standing out on the street.

  “We’re not going in,” Nathan says. “It’s a stealth Starbucks.” He just read this on Twitter and they’ve been texting her. She was rushing, she didn’t check her messages.

  As they cut across to the cafeteria in Lockhart Hall, she glances at their faces. No one’s sulking. Sylvie can get away with almost anything.

  They take a table along the side, leaving a trail of salt and sand from the mucky sidewalks, and spread out their gear. Emily buys a bottle of green tea from a machine and passes it around, but Sylvie’s desperate to eat. She pulls her mug out of her backpack.

  The usual guy is working the counter. Bacteria have colonized the pores on his forehead since Sylvie saw him last. She gives him a nice hello. “Brown toast,” she says. “Peach yogurt. And I’ll have an Americano – make it a triple.” She slides her mug across the counter. Tea tree oil, she thinks, that’s what he should try. It’s counterintuitive because it’s an oil, but it works.

  While he makes her toast, she turns and looks back at her friends, sitting there like the undead, waiting for her:

  Emily, their Fringe director, in a blue MEC anorak that no doubt belongs to her mother.

  Thea, Sylvie’s friend from Wolseley. Who hasn’t brushed her pale hair in two years. They’re proto-dreads, she keeps insisting, she’s using the neglect method.

  Nathan, their only guy. Sylvie can still picture him back in grade six, standing sweetly under a trellis with a plastic rose pinned to the lapel of his Value Village suit jacket. They would stage weddings in someone’s backyard on Saturday mornings. They had bouquets, a veil, and Celine Dion on the ghetto blaster, because Nathan was in charge of the music. He had zero sense of irony then and he has zero now. But he’s all theirs – the guys have no claim on him.

  And Kajri, her beautiful roommate for three semesters now, turning a warm and funny look in Sylvie’s direction.

  Sylvie smiles back. Kajri, Kajri, she says in her mind, savouring the sound. She has her precious mother to thank for Kajri. When Sylvie won the argument about moving to Laurence Hall, she really wanted a private room and her dad was willing to pay for it. But Liz was being a cow – not because she wanted Sylvie at home, and not even because of the money, but because it bugged her that Sylvie was getting what she wanted. The argument she came up with was “It’s not a bad experience, when you’re young, to have to live with someone who doesn’t love you.” And then Liz must have been totally, totally burned, because the minute Sylvie walked into their room in Laurence Hall and her new roommate looked up from the box she was unpacking, she and Kajri loved each other.

  The guy with the bad skin is back with her toast. He hands her the coffee in a Styrofoam cup. “I gave you my mug,” she says. So he reaches for her mug and pours the coffee into it and drops the Styrofoam cup into the garbage. Without a second thought!

  “Wait,” Sylvie says. “Why do you think I’m carrying a mug?” But he’s turned away. She wants to make a fuss but she’s no better than he is. All night she was aching for a Starbucks latte. She can’t help it, she’s been socialized like everybody else, she was born the year the Starbucks mermaid lost her nipples.

  Emily has her laptop out when Sylvie gets back to the table. Sylvie sits down beside her and starts to eat her toast, keeping her eyes on the screen.

  Adieu, Les Isles Maldives, Emily types. She frowns briefly over the font, picks Tahoma and then switches to Shruti. She takes the title up to seventy-two points and swivels her laptop around so the others can see.

  “Adieu, Les Isles Maldives,” Kajri reads out. “That’s the name of our show?”

  “Why is it French?” says Nathan.

  “It makes it more pitiful,” Emily says. Less banal, she must mean. Words are not Emily’s strong point. On the lid of her laptop is a sticker: Earth as a ball of ice cream melting over its cone.

  They sit in silence. Emily is waiting to hear from Sylvie and Thea. But Thea has zoned out; she’s gazing down at something. Sylvie leans over to see. It’s her tights. They’re lime green and purple, an intricate pattern that may actually be tessellation. Where did you get them? Sylvie mouths. Pico’s, Thea mouths back, batting her eyes.

  “Also,” says Emily loudly and firmly, “adieu means ‘to God.’ These islands are being given back to god, for eternity. Not God-god – you know what I mean. Anyway, forget the name. The name doesn’t matter for now. What did you all bring?”

  “I found a piece about the Maldives government,” says Kajri. She got up around five and went to work in the common room, but still she found time to put on gel eyeliner, perfectly, top and bottom. “The cabinet of the Maldives government actually held a meeting underwater. They were wearing oxygen tanks and wetsuits, to dramatize what rising sea levels will mean to their country.”

  “No shit!” says Sylvie in admiration. She sips her coffee. She’s finished her toast and yogurt and she’s still ravenous.

  “Well,” says Emily to Kajri, “so that’s been done. And for real. Good for them.” She produces a tense, insincere smile. She’s their director because she did the Fringe application; they’re all grateful to her for that, and Sylvie is not going to undermine her. She’s not, although it’s stupid and unnecessary to be working on this during Christmas week. Emily is testing her power and they’re letting her.

  Sylvie is waking up now, she is tuning in to the fact that this day has actually started, the shortest day of the year. Think of all the other things she should be doing! Noah: She should be getting ready for Thursday, when he’s arriving from Guelph (doing her laundry, shaving her legs, finding her only tube of lip gloss). Christmas: She has to make her gifts (the little cactus gardens). School: Her Evo-Devo take-home; her Human Impact on the Environment paper, currently overdue; the permaculture project she worked on last night. All these jobs are flashing in her mind like icons on a task bar, yet here she sits, staring at Emily with her frizzy hair and her dorky jacket and that look of parental anxiety – a monster they’ve created themselves.

  Thea finally comes to life. She lifts her eyes from her tessellated tights and reaches for her backpack. “Observe,” she says. “I went to the trouble and expense of printing this in colour. At Staples. It was in a magazine at my oma’s, and she wouldn’t let me tear it out because it belonged to someone else.” She spreads a two-page article on the table.

  It’s about a restaurant at a resort
in the Maldives. An underwater restaurant – an acrylic dome five metres below sea level. In the picture, tourists seem to be sitting in a slice of aqua water filtered with light. Silver fish dart around them, hundreds of fish, moving together like a lithe comet. This restaurant is so exclusive it seats only twelve diners. Flat rate US$250 per person, before drinks.

  Sylvie and her friends stare in awe. “Lamb,” says Nathan, reading upside down. “They copter in lamb for a restaurant with twelve customers. Fuck, that’s obscene.”

  Thea sits with her big head tilted, soaking up their amazement. “So,” she says, “I thought we could do a scene in the restaurant. The customers order all these imported things, they sit with fish swimming around them, they’re all like, ‘Awesome! Wow!’ and then gradually the fish disappear and the walls are smeared with tar balls.”

  “How would we do that? The fish, the tar balls.”

  “Black light.”

  “Is there even offshore drilling in the Maldives? Does anybody know?”

  “Or is it on a tanker route?”

  “That’s not the point,” says Sylvie. “We’re totally missing the point.”

  Thea throws a dark look in Sylvie’s direction.

  “Okay,” Emily says. “Before we get too obsessed with the restaurant, let’s finish going around.”

  It’s Nathan’s turn. “All right,” he says. “Get this. I found an article where the journalist is like, ‘These beautiful islands are being destroyed by the excesses of the Western world.’ And at the end he goes, ‘This is a paradise. Go and see it, jump on a carbon-spewing plane today, because it won’t be there tomorrow.’ ”

  Silence settles over them. This is their problem: reality always tops them. Behind them the espresso machine roars on. Nathan’s eyes dart eagerly from one of his friends to another. And our other problem … thinks Sylvie, but then she can’t think. Her mind goes back to high school grad night, a year and a half ago, when they went to the Pancake House in the grey light of dawn. Over a platter of French toast Nathan suddenly teared up and asked them not to call him “The Groom” anymore. And so they don’t. Now they call him “Ken,” behind his back.