The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  Don’t start thinking about arctic ice. What about the ice on Otter Lake? No hope of a ski-in to the cabin this week. He should have scheduled some clients between Christmas and New Year’s; two or three really wanted an hour. But when he was setting his schedule in November, he was counting on being up at Otter Lake.

  Aiden was a kid when Rupert built the cabin in north-western Ontario, on land made available to CN employees. They went in every summer weekend on a train called the Campers’ Special, two or three passenger cars full of railway families, hitched to an eastbound freight train. Rupert had scored a prime lot, a tiny, rocky island in a tiny lake, a five-minute boat ride from the train stop. Aiden’s parents were matter-of-fact about the property, almost gruff: they’d both grown up in the country. But an island – this amazed and thrilled Aiden. He still remembers the first time he saw it, a ten-year-old in too-small runners who had thought the city’s north end was the whole world. And then there was this island, with its continuous rocky margin, its resident turtle and visiting eagle. The private, intricate beauty of its lichens and mosses. He was the only one in the family the island really spoke to – that’s what he believed from the beginning – except that at certain times it seemed to take them all in. In the evenings especially, as the sun slid behind the spruce trees on the mainland and their parents sat out on the rocks, the embers of their cigarettes glowing red, and he and Carl and Ken dove off the end of the new dock, over and over, their shoulders felted with sunburn and their arms goosefleshed with the cold. Sloughing off the city, sloughing off their enmity, they’d be slotted into the night, merged into one black shape shouting over the shining water. He never lost it, what he felt about the island that first summer.

  One day eight or ten years ago, Aiden was over at his dad’s, rebuilding his back fence, and Rupert let drop that he’d been talking to a realtor at Minaki about selling the cottage. Back in the eighties CN had stopped the Campers’ Special, and without the train, you had to be a diehard outdoorsman to get in. Aiden set down the picket he was fitting and straightened up. “I thought you might sign it over to your kids, Dad,” he said, aiming for a lightness of tone.

  “Aw, they’re not interested,” Rupert muttered around the home-rolled cigarette dangling from his lower lip. Aiden’s mind cried out for witnesses: he wanted somebody from the Cosmic Tribunal on Parental Malfeasance to note how unconsciously Rupert’s mind leapt to the two sons he considered his real progeny, totally blind to the existence of the chump who’d just spent two days in this yard breaking his back with a posthole digger. But on the facts, Rupert was right; they weren’t interested. Aiden’s older brother, Carl, had moved to Fort McMurray and hadn’t been in touch in two or three years. And Ken, the last time they’d seen him, had a mob of creditors waving tire irons on his tail.

  That was the summer Aiden entered the master’s program in counselling. His pension from the group home was just about to vest, so he started the paperwork to pull it out and he bought the property. For the price his dad was asking, as a point of pride. Obviously he and Liz could have spent that money ten different ways, but he made what at the time he called a unilateral decision. Well, maybe every marriage has its black holes – differences so fundamental you just have to back away from them – and they did, they did back away. She was beyond angry for about a month and then she dropped it. The issue’s still alive somewhere, no doubt, but she’s packed it away in some storage facility for undetonated resentments. It’s still there for Aiden, for sure: the island’s always on the rim of his consciousness, gleaming with his knowledge of how much he was prepared to pay for it.

  Anyway, there’s no hope of a winter road out of Minaki for weeks now. Aiden lowers himself into the Mission chair and contemplates the mess in the fireplace, three charred logs that failed to burn last night because he failed to stoke the fire. Liz was pissed off with him that entire summer, and it wasn’t just the Otter Lake thing. He’d gone back to university with her full and generous support after fifteen years of working in group homes, and he was almost at the end of the long road to a Ph.D. in English. But he was hating it, finding it hard to breathe the rarefied air of the semioticians, and fed up with departmental politics. If he’s honest, he stopped believing in his dissertation about a year into it. You can make decisions based on an outdated understanding of yourself and the world, and that’s how you get trapped. Then one day at the library he ran into the director of the counselling program and she encouraged him to apply for a master’s of individual and family therapy (the deadline was just a few days away), and that’s what he did.

  This eleventh-hour career change surprised everybody, and it broadsided Liz. But she was finally on solid professional footing herself, and he couldn’t see any practical reason why not. God knows, he never had much hope of a tenure-track position in English. So he followed his instincts and applied for the MIFT program and he got in, and discovered to his surprise that psychotherapy picked up what you might call the bright thread of his interior life in much the same way as reading did. Literature was always more a private delight for him than an academic vocation, a furtive pleasure after the belligerent redneckism he grew up with. He still remembers the moment he understood that poetry is not bullshit, that it is maybe the antithesis of bullshit. He was in first-year English, standing in the stacks reading an assigned poem (Yeats? Or maybe earlier George Herbert?), when a light rose up off the page and cast something essential he’d been feeling into high relief, something he had never tried to articulate. When he started the MIFT program, he sensed right away that therapy drew from the same well. It was rigorous in ways he hadn’t expected. The human psyche, like the poem, tends to tell things slant (is how he came to think of it). Readers of both have to keep their wits about them.

  One of the program’s premises was that therapists in training needed to do personal work on their own issues. Aiden arrived at his first group therapy session uneasy and suspicious, but by the end of the day he was completely disarmed. It was a gift in your middle years, he saw, this chance to probe your experiences with astute listeners. He was moved by his group’s struggles to disclose themselves honestly, by the risks they took, and by how forthright they were in their responses to each other. He felt as though he were reading a brave and original text and the even braver gloss on it (it was a fact that, in his previous studies, a piece of intelligent criticism often lit him up more than the literary text itself). He was the only man in his group, but his colleagues let it be known there’d be no hiding behind some ideal of male reticence. Like a woman learning heavy-duty mechanics in a class of men, he’d be held to an even higher standard: he had to make up for the privilege that no doubt had gotten him into the program in the first place.

  In a workshop held in an old convent, in a stale-smelling room with a crucifix and dried reeds over the door, they talked about their primary relationships. Aiden told the group about an incident with Liz from the early days, before Sylvie was born. He owned a motorcycle, a Honda Interstate, and one day he and his buddy Glen went out for a highway ride. The big Harley-Davidson rally was happening that week in Sturgis, South Dakota, and when they stopped to grab a bite to eat, Glen suggested going, just for a laugh. Aiden had a chunk of time off, so he said, “Sure.” He called Liz from a payphone at the gas station and ended up leaving a cryptic message, intending to call again later. Somehow it didn’t happen that first day, and then it didn’t happen at all. When he got home, every muscle shaken to mush after four days on the road and sporting a WHAT WOULD JESUS RIDE? T-shirt, Liz’s sister Maureen, who lived in Toronto, was at the house. She and her husband both came to meet him at the door, as though they lived there and Aiden didn’t. It turned out that Liz’s father had suffered a heart attack the night Aiden left for Sturgis, and he’d passed away just that morning. He was sixty, an insurance salesman, about to retire.

  Possibly the crucifix over the door had encouraged Aiden to mistake his therapy group for a confessional, but that’s the first
story he told them. Edith Wong was the one who spoke into the silence when he was done. “How did your wife react when she saw you?”

  “She said, ‘I’d throw you out if I had the energy.’ She got over it eventually. But I felt like a true piece of shit.”

  “And why didn’t you call her?”

  “Well, obviously, if I’d had any idea what was happening—”

  Edith cut him off. “Come on,” she said. “This isn’t about your father-in-law’s death. This is about the disrespect you show your wife when you take off for four days and don’t even let her know where you are.”

  “I had every intention of calling again the first day. And then when I realized I’d forgotten … I guess the idea of not calling began to take hold.” This was more than he had ever admitted to Liz.

  “So it made you feel good to think of her in distress?”

  Well, all right, this was the sort of ballsy response he came to value in that group. With all those thoughtful female eyes on him, he acknowledged something he’d never seen before: how afraid he was of being sucked into something that would drain the life out of him. But he also took a stand for a high degree of autonomy in relationships, as a matter of principle, as a counterbalance to all the compromises you have to make. His own quasi-marriage was better off for a bit of breathing room, he insisted, though he didn’t go so far as to mention the great sex he and Liz sometimes had after a nasty standoff.

  But the women in his group got the picture. “Woo-hoo, Aiden,” somebody called. “Treat her mean, keep her keen.”

  Okay. He came out of that group understanding that few relationships would have survived what he put Liz through in their early days. But he never cheated on her and he never lied, not about anything big. And she was feisty as well. If he didn’t come home when she expected, she never whined, she never said, I was terrified. I thought you were dead in an alley somewhere. She got what it was about and she met it square on.

  And as provocative as his behaviour might sometimes look from the outside, as unlucky as the timing of that Sturgis trip turned out to be, somebody had to draw a line in the sand with Liz. When he first met her, she had him over for an amazing meal – Moroccan-style lamb cooked in an authentic tagine dish. Sitting in an armchair afterwards, finishing off the Beaujolais and soaking up the quirky charm of her apartment, he said to himself, It could be like this every day. But of course that sort of comfort comes with a pile of domestic expectations. Liz came by it honestly – you spent an evening with her mother and by eight o’clock you were ready to stick pins in your eyes.

  And there was this: if Liz had had power of veto over his entry into the MIFT program, she would have used it, and she’d have been wrong. His move to counselling made no external sense but it had a deep internal logic. He was doing something hopeful and he was better at the work than he would have predicted. He’d found a profession that asked him to bring to it everything he was. You didn’t need to have worked through all your own issues – well, you did, to the point that your ego needs didn’t intrude in the relationship with the client – but beyond that it was a matter of listening intelligently and being real.

  He swallows the last of his coffee. It’s stone cold. He feels weighed down by sadness. For his lovely daughter and for himself as well, because her energy and spirit have buoyed him up for two decades. He can trace his funk right back to the Grandparents’ Summit, to that moment at the end, the Annunciation. All night he brooded on the angel’s terrible message: Business as usual, over the brink.

  He glances at the clock on the mantel. It’s after eleven. He’s got to muster his energy, get into some reading, start a project of some kind. Be the sort of person who charts the squirrel population in his spare time. Work would have helped him today. Every tiny step a client takes, negligible in itself, helps to build the dike that holds back the deluge. Or maybe it’s just that work lifts him out of himself. Is out of himself where he wants to be?

  To forestall getting sucked into that particular loop, he leans over, picks up the phone, and calls his message function. He can hardly recall who he saw just before Christmas, what with all the chaos at home. Odette Zimmerman. And there’s fallout, a message left on Christmas Day.

  “Mr. Phimister,” she says (already he knows she’s in a rage), “I need a therapist who understands that feelings are honest and need to be affirmed. Not a moralist who thinks in black and white. On Thursday I paid you a hundred dollars to be told what a bad person I am. I’ve been sitting here wondering why I would keep doing that. This message is to cancel my standing appointment.” An intake of breath. Click.

  Oh shit. Aiden sinks his fingers into Max’s ruff and stares at the ashes in the fireplace. He has to talk to Edith Wong.

  And then worry for a different client starts up – for Jake Peloquin, a.k.a. Defrag, who is never far from Aiden’s thoughts, especially when he cancels so abruptly. He’s been a client off and on since Aiden started his practice. He takes a break when he’s maxed out his benefits package, and then when he’s eligible again or has enough cash, he phones Aiden and says, “Can you fit me in for a defrag?”

  Jake makes it sound like a discretionary thing, but Aiden has been his lifeline for years. He’s alone. His long-time girlfriend was someone Aiden knew by reputation, a woman named Jessie Alwin who had started a terrific transition-to-employment program for youth in the North End. She was very highly regarded in the city. But she had one of those diseases where your body turns against itself, and it eventually killed her. Her death was the tipping point for Defrag. When he first came to see Aiden, he had serious slashes crosshatching the insides of both arms. For a while he was also seeing a psychiatrist, who had him on antidepressants, and Aiden and the psychiatrist consulted. But now it’s just him and Aiden.

  Defrag has a job at the university, some arcane singular position related to data flow, but he’s always got an art project on the go. He’s into the sort of work where the artist surrenders any role in shaping the image. Lately he’s been taping pinhole cameras to trees. They’re 35-millimetre film canisters with a hole pierced in them using the finest needle available, an acupuncture needle. The little bit of light leaking through that tiny hole is enough to leave a ghostly impression on the film or paper or whatever’s inside. Defrag’s hidden these cameras all over the city. He’s going to leave them up for six months and see what they have to show him.

  Defrag has a project. A little gust of hope and energy accompanies this thought. Seizing on it, Aiden climbs the stairs to the loft and gets dressed. When he comes downstairs in his running gear, the dog is thrilled. “Sorry, buddy,” Aiden says, pushing past him out the door.

  It’s a relief to be outside. He walks up to Portage Avenue, catches a westbound bus, and gets off at the park. Standing by a bench, he bends over his extended femur, counts to thirty. Lifts his head, looks up through the trees into space, at garbage from satellites falling into the ether. Straightens, gives himself a shake. Does a little prance, impersonating a runner, just to get his blood up. Picks his gravel path and sets off. One of Defrag’s cameras is along this trail. He first located it about a month ago – Defrag told him how to triangulate to find it.

  It’s still there, duct-taped to the trunk of a native basswood almost bereft of branches, about eight feet up. It looks undisturbed. As Aiden runs by he can’t resist lifting a hand in a two-finger wave.

  When he gets home, Liz is in the kitchen, just hanging up the phone. “So that’s that,” she says, aggrieved, which is always her way when she’s fighting tears. “I guess I was hoping Sylvie got it wrong.”

  “Sylvie’s doctor? You tracked her down?”

  Liz nods.

  “What did she say?”

  “She wouldn’t talk to me about it, as I’m not the patient. But she said, ‘I can’t refer for an emergency ultrasound unless the case is urgent. Like, if the pregnant woman is in the first trimester and termination is still an option.’ ”

  So. They stand an
d look at each other for a long minute.

  “She sounds about twelve,” Liz says. “But I can only assume she’s qualified.”

  “Are you going to tell Sylvie you called?”

  “Of course not. I’m going to go upstairs and email the child support guidelines to Maggie. Then I’m going to break the news to Vacances françaises and beg them to refund the deposit for Sarlat. After that I’m going to cancel our airline tickets and get a voucher from Air Canada. Then I’m going to check out the private adoption websites.”

  They turn down two invitations and they even bow out of the New Year’s Eve party on the next street. Noah’s still in Calgary and Sylvie is working on her take-home exams and her botany paper. Her friends come calling – the big-haired little troll and others he doesn’t know. They crowd into the hall with suppressed excitement on their faces, never mentioning the baby, as though Sylvie is pulling a fast one on her parents. Sylvie comes up from the basement wearing a big sweater that hides what her friends likely call her bump. She looks as though she’s run out of nerve.

  On a day when hoarfrost blossoms over the city, Aiden walks up to the little house north of Portage where he was raised. He chips the ice off Rupert’s sidewalk and then he starts up Rupert’s old Chevy and takes him grocery shopping. It’s been five years since Rupert lost his licence but he’s stubbornly hung on to the Chevy Caprice Brougham he bought new in 1986 and considered the fulfillment of all his earthly ambitions. His wife died in that car, and he just kept on driving it.

  After the groceries are hauled in and unpacked, Aiden collects the garbage and takes it out, in the process locating the source of the stench in the kitchen, a hamburger patty rotting on a saucer in the cereal cupboard. He cleans the bathroom, scrubbing at the dried piss spackling the floor. How long can this go on? Nobody else is going to step up. Carl is three thousand miles away and apparently doesn’t own a phone, and Ken – who knows? A few years back he did time for boosting merchandise off the loading dock at Home Depot, and then he dropped out of sight altogether.