The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  “So does she tie both her kids into a carrying cloth?”

  “No!” Sylvie laughs. “It’s nuts – she gives me this advice, but actually she has all sorts of plastic shit. Mobiles and swings and Jolly Jumpers. She grew up in a refugee camp in Kenya and it makes her happy to be able to buy that kind of stuff. But it doesn’t mean we have to do it that way.”

  We, she hears herself say. She can’t see how he’s reacting because he’s on his cell. She can hear a crowd in the background, as if he’s standing in a hallway. Will he be a part of the baby’s first summer? He hasn’t heard whether he got into the Lake Malawi project. She feels so sad about never seeing him. She felt especially bad in the first prenatal class, where all but one of the other women had their partner there. “I really miss you,” she says.

  “I miss you too,” he says politely. “But I’ve got to go, my lab is starting. I’ll try to call tomorrow.”

  Well, they have never been part of each other’s university life. He stayed in Guelph for reading week. He said he would come home but he’s so against flying that Sylvie told him not to. He won’t come now until his exams are over and the baby is due.

  Not that Sylvie is really into the prenatal classes. In the first class, after they had all introduced themselves, they were asked to do a matching exercise to learn the correct names for reproductive body parts. Sylvie left at the juice-and-cookies break and skipped the next few weeks. She goes back when they’re scheduled to start the breathing exercises, because Kajri says her mother says the breathing is the most important part.

  Thea ends up coming as her coach. The mothers lie on mats with their coaches sitting cross-legged at their heads. Sylvie lowers herself slowly because bright pinpricks of stars sparkle around the edges of her vision when she moves fast. She’s beside Dahlia, the only other mother who doesn’t have her partner with her. She is only twenty but she already has a two-year-old at home. Dahlia is clutching a stuffed cloth doll dressed in camouflage gear. When she sees Sylvie looking at the doll, she passes it over.

  “Sylvie, meet my husband, Lance. Lance got me through the last delivery and he’s going to get me through this one.”

  “Hi, Lance,” Sylvie says. “Wow.” She looks closely into his silk-screened face and then steals a glance at Thea, holding Lance so Thea can see the white stuffing leaking out of a hole in his thigh.

  “You’ve never seen these before?” Dahlia says. “You’re kidding! They’re called Hug-a-Hero dolls. I got this one made in the mall in Fargo. You take in a picture of your guy on a flash drive and they screen it onto the face. My daughter loves it. But I said to her, ‘Tonight you’ll have to cuddle with Buster Bear because Mommy needs her hero.’ ”

  Dahlia has fine natural blond hair clipped back with aqua plastic barrettes. She has gentle eyes of the palest green. She and Sylvie are lying with their faces six inches apart, keeping their voices low because the teacher is talking.

  “You should get one,” Dahlia whispers. “It was $29.99, but that includes the uniform, and they have, like, army, navy, air. Although the uniforms are American.”

  Sylvie passes Lance back, ashamed of her unkindness. The real Lance may be overseas, or he may already have been killed. “My boyfriend’s a student,” she says softly. “He’s doing his master’s at the University of Guelph.”

  “Oh. I thought for sure you were a service wife.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You just look like one.”

  The breathing has started. Sylvie and Thea are supposed to lock eyes and puff their breath into each other’s faces, and right away they start to laugh.

  “Remember the pregnant psychic?” Thea gasps. “That George Costanza went to? She was going into labour?” It’s true, they’re panting just like the pregnant psychic.

  By the time they get to the second breathing pattern, in which you go hee-hee-hoo, they’re both streaming with tears. All around them fat, earnest women in sweatpants huff and puff with their eyes wide and their mouths in slits, concentrating as if it’s rocket science.

  “Hee-hee-ha,” Sylvie laughs helplessly, gripping Thea’s hands, trying desperately not to pee. “Ha, ha, ha,” she hears Thea reply, and then she slides into the dark.

  They keep Sylvie in the hospital overnight. The next day her blood pressure is normal and they discharge her, with the understanding that she will stay on bed rest. Aiden takes Liz’s car and picks her up. She’s sitting in a wheelchair by the obstetrics ward nursing station, already dressed. She’s never been sick, never, since her own birth, been in a hospital.

  The resident comes by and leads them into an alcove for a chat. “So, you think you get the picture?”

  “Yeah,” Sylvie says. “My body is freaking out because it views the placenta as foreign tissue.”

  “That’s about the size of it. So we’re just trying to get your body to chill out for a bit longer. Every week you can last is a huge benefit to your baby. That means no more classes, no working at the computer, no going out. You can get up to go to the bathroom, but move slowly. No break dancing. No slasher flicks. No Facebook … Well, maybe Facebook.”

  Aiden interrupts. “We’re going to insist that Sylvie move home to her old bedroom, where we can keep a better eye on her.”

  “Absolutely,” says the doctor.

  It really is a beautiful room. It was meant to be the master bedroom. It has three wide windows overlooking the street, and it had a walk-in closet before such things were even heard of. Liz redecorated the room when Sylvie was in high school, in an effort to lure her back into it. She bought new furniture, made a tiny-paned quilt in shades that look like wheat and sand and willow branches. On the windows she hung blinds made of some sort of unbleached fabric.

  “Your mother did a great job with this room,” Aiden says.

  “Yeah,” Sylvie says. “It’s true eco-chic.” She walks slowly over to the bed and sits down. After a minute she lies on her side and says into the pillow, “That dresser – it’s rainforest teak.”

  Above the bed hangs a picture Sylvie drew when she was little. Liz had it laminated onto a board. It’s a drawing of their family. All three of them have huge, U-shaped smiles that go up past their ears. The mother has spokes radiating from her head, like the Statue of Liberty. Aiden can only assume they are rays of power, from an era when Sylvie worshipped her mother. Doesn’t every kid go through a stage like that?

  “I’m going to lose my courses,” Sylvie says, again into the pillow. “Friday was the last date for voluntary withdrawal. They’ll be on my transcript as incompletes. Or failures.”

  “I’ll talk to the dean.”

  He and Liz bring in their suppers on trays and eat with Sylvie, and then Aiden sets up the old television and DVD player. From the basement he hauls up the two Coke crates of books Sylvie saved from her childhood. “You are so set up, chicken!” he says. “For the next month you can live the life of Riley.”

  “Who is Riley, anyway?”

  “Fucked if I know.” He puts in a DVD and sits on the wicker chair while they watch Mr. Bean dash around with a rubber turkey on his head. Tears of laughter run down Sylvie’s cheeks. When it’s over, he goes downstairs to make her some hot chocolate. She’s lying down with her eyes closed when he comes back.

  “Thanks, Dad,” she says, but she doesn’t make any move to sit up and drink it.

  “What’s up?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Tell me what you were thinking, honey.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “You know,” he says, “you’re going to get back on track. You’ll do the things you always wanted to do. It might just take a little longer.”

  She opens her eyes. “There’s a war going on inside me.”

  “I guess you could look at it that way. But just lie still, think happy thoughts. The armies are going to call a truce.”

  Upstairs he and Liz lie three feet apart. “Where the hell were you tonight?” he finally says.
>
  “I was in the basement going through those boxes of old baby things. I am the hewer of wood and drawer of water in this family, if you haven’t noticed.”

  He rolls over, reaches a hand towards her. “You know, this is not normal.”

  “You got that right.”

  “I mean this tension between the two of you.”

  “Your teenage daughter is eight months pregnant,” Liz says. “She has pre-eclampsia and she’s on bed rest just below us. Would this be a good time for a big, cathartic cry fest? Is that what you’re looking for?”

  “No, I guess it’s not,” Aiden says, and forces himself to close his eyes.

  Sylvie lasts until the Thursday of week thirty-seven, when her blood pressure goes nuts again and Liz and Aiden take her to the hospital. Her doctor decides on an emergency C-section. While she’s being prepped for surgery, Liz and Aiden sit in a waiting room at the end of the ward.

  A nurse comes by and says, “You’ll want to be with your daughter through the delivery. I’ll be back in a while to get you ready.”

  “What does you mean?” Aiden says after the nurse is gone. “Both of us?”

  “I have no idea.” Liz fishes her cellphone out of her purse. She walks quickly down the hall towards the elevator to call Maggie.

  “So?” he says when she’s back.

  “She’ll try to get Noah on a flight. It probably won’t be till tomorrow.”

  She gets some change from her purse and slips it into the slot of the coffee machine. A Styrofoam cup falls crookedly and rights itself, a stream of chemical whitener trickles out, a stream of coffee. She picks up the cup and swirls it to mix it. She takes a sip. Then she walks up the hall to the drinking fountain to dump it.

  Aiden gets up and moves to the window. There’s no sill for him to lean against. He tips his forehead against the glass, looking down at the flat roofs of the building next door, where furnace vents and air conditioning units compete for space. His dad is two floors up, in the extended care unit, in a locked ward because of his wandering. They’re waiting for a bed in a nursing home. Meanwhile, he’ll have these roofs to look at.

  The window faces north and he can’t gauge the time from the light. Sylvie was lying on her side when they left her room, about to have a catheter inserted. Her face was so puffy he could hardly recognize her. God knows, he doesn’t want any part of this. Somewhere in the world there still exist maternity hospitals where families wait outside on the street, clutching flowers and stuffed animals. He read about one not long ago, in Kazakhstan or somewhere. When it’s all over, a nurse comes to the window with the baby in a pink or blue blanket and gives them a wave.

  He turns back from the window. Liz is sitting on a couch with her legs crossed, one foot swinging. Her face is cold. Everything is hard-edged in the light of his own anxiety – it’s clear to him that he’s failed to protect. He’s always had an ease with Sylvie, he’ll give himself that; he’s always felt a sort of awe at this separate being who is so much like himself. The best tack, it seemed, was not to impose his own notions on her, not to impinge on the beautiful blossoming of her personality.

  In point of fact, he seldom had a clue what was going on. One night at the lake they sat by the firepit all evening, not talking much. Eventually the mosquitoes drove Liz into the cabin, but Aiden and Sylvie sat on in the dark, still mostly in silence, dropping a log onto the fire now and then. There was no moon, and an owl was hooting softly across the narrows. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she dropped her head and began to cry. She sobbed and sobbed and she wouldn’t talk. She was tall by then but she still had those wispy bits of hair along her hairline, the most tender hanger-on of childhood, and he was startled by how adult her weeping sounded, how perfectly it voiced what he felt about the end of her childhood. He wanted to carry her piggyback up to the cabin, the way he always did at night. When they got up to go in, he turned his back and stooped, but she just touched his shoulder in a gesture that seemed strangely mature and then walked up the path ahead of him. Still, he came in to tuck her into bed. Right away she curled up with her face away from him. He had to let her go – that’s how he felt at the time. Into whatever it was, however much it scared her. But does any parent know for sure how to play something like that?

  Four nurses, two on each side, roll Sylvie from her stretcher onto a narrow board. She has a tube up her nose and a tube in her arm and a tube wormed into her bladder or maybe even her kidneys. The operating room they call this place, but it’s not a room. It’s a sinister bright spaceship, or the inside of a freezer. It’s cold, freezing cold, and music is playing. Celine Dion. That’s what the baby will hear the instant she’s born.

  “Turn the fucking radio off!” Sylvie shrieks, and someone does.

  She lies on the narrow board and people mill around her, all eyes. They lift her legs and arms, make small adjustments. Everything is known in this vicious light: How she likes to show off. How everything is a game to her. How secretly greedy she is, how hateful, her heart like a cold, hard stone.

  Sylvie reaches out with her free hand and grabs a nurse’s arm. “My mother,” she says. “I want my mother.”

  8

  The Good Life

  THERE WOLSELEY LIES IN GOOGLE EARTH, A segment of orange tucked into a curve of the winding Assiniboine. Twenty-four streets, three blocks deep at most, bordered by the river on one side and Portage Avenue on the other, and close enough to downtown that you can walk. Close enough that you can skate, now that the city takes a Zamboni down onto the ice in the winter.

  The neighbourhood was built more than a hundred years ago, for white-collar workers with aspirations. Its lots are narrow and on some streets the houses are resolutely simple in the Arts and Crafts tradition. But on the east–west avenues you see the money and ambition, the Queen Anne embellishments, like fish-scale patterns on the gables. In the course of things, many of the two- and three-storey houses were divided into suites and the usual atrocities were committed. Liz and Aiden bought into the area in the late eighties, a brick three-storey on a street that was mostly frame houses, a house with a wide veranda and an eyebrow window that surveyed the street from just above the eaves. It had beautiful mature elms in the yard and a brick garage on the back lane. They bought before the market heated up, they paid nothing for that house, and then they poured their money into restoring it.

  Like it or not, they were part of a wave of gentrification. Everybody on the street was hauling construction materials out of Beaver Lumber on a daily basis, trying to contend with plaster-and-lath walls and galvanized plumbing and knob-and-tube wiring. So they had a lot in common, and some of their neighbours got right into the communal thing, tearing down the fences between those narrow lots, barbecuing bison burgers together on summer evenings, and feeding each other’s roaming cats. Collectively, they fought the ugly monoculture of Kentucky bluegrass, transforming the boulevard into an exuberant block-long banner of lupins and poppies and bleeding heart and peonies.

  Aiden was cautious. It irked him to think they’d bought a package – real property, lifestyle, friends, politics – all in one transaction, and after growing up in the city’s working-class north end, he was embarrassed by Wolseley’s earnestness, the bookstore full of crystals and tarot cards and Tibetan prayer flags, the women lying down in the street to stop Malathion trucks from rolling in when the city wanted to fog for mosquitoes, and all the petitions and charity drives and backyard clothing exchanges. They thought of themselves as socialists, but half of them owned cottages on some lake or other. For Christ’s sake, they were living in houses built for families of ten and a hired girl.

  He and Liz bought in Wolseley for two reasons: because Liz was keen – where else could you get this much character home for that kind of money? – and because the day she spotted the listing and talked Aiden into going to see the house, a strange thing happened. He parked in front of 385 Augusta and was instantly pulled back to the days when he’d been taken door to door witnessing for
Jehovah, back when Wolseley seemed exotic to him. He followed the real estate agent up the front steps, and he remembered ringing the doorbell of a house with a veranda, and a woman inviting them in. He stood in a hall much like this one while his mother and her partner launched into their spiel, proffering The Watchtower. But all the woman’s frowning attention was focused on him. “How old is this boy?” she asked, and then she bent over so she could look Aiden right in the eye. “Your mother should not be using you like this,” she said. “It’s very wrong. But one day you’ll see a chance to get out. Make sure you take it. Run like hell, the minute you get the chance!”

  Thirty years later, as the agent led them through the sunlit rooms of 385 Augusta, Aiden found himself thinking, with an agreeable sense of sliding towards the inevitable, This house. It was this house.

  All in his mind, no doubt. But he couldn’t deny that life in the granola belt was comfortable. On the tree-lined streets of Wolseley, beauty and goodness merged in a most pleasing fashion. He was glad to give his daughter all that, glad to spare her the cold pragmatism of the North End, even gladder she hadn’t spent her childhood watching TV in a garage-faced monster home in a treeless suburb with no sidewalks.

  And Sylvie was the sort of kid who occupied Wolseley fully. A vivid strawberry blond with a mobile face, rollerblading up the centre of the street, running their old dog Oscar off leash. Handing out brochures on how to lure swifts into your chimney. Tobogganing at the creek, walking with her hoe over her shoulder to the community gardens. Making friends right and left. Wolseley was a gift to a child, a place where people knew and loved her and believed in a better future, with communal beehives and chicken coops. When Aiden grasped (a bit late, he’s prepared to admit) the primacy of those early years, he was relieved by how terrific a kid Sylvie had turned out to be, and he gave a lot of credit to the good-hearted countercultural vibe hanging over the neighbourhood, like chords from an acoustic banjo.