The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  “Oh, Sylvie,” her mother says wearily. “Is this the way an adult talks?” She turns back to the mushrooms. “All right,” she says after a long minute.

  When Thea appears at the door on Saturday morning, it’s obvious she hasn’t been to bed. Sylvie texted her, BRING JAMMIES, and she’s got her backpack with her.

  Before either of them can speak, Liz pops up on the front walk. “You travel light,” she says.

  “I don’t have a kid,” Thea says, instantly perky. “Not like some lucky people.”

  Liz has been to the pharmacy; she’s dragging a humungous bale of disposable diapers.

  Thea peers at the label. “Polypropylene, cellulose, and chemical gel,” she reads out in a bright and shiny voice.

  Liz turns a shoulder to Thea. “Think about it, honey,” she says. “Are you going to schlep stinking cloth diapers back from Presley Point?”

  “Actually,” Sylvie says, “I’m going to get a carrying board – what are they called? – a tikinagan. You fill them with sphagnum moss. It’s crunchy and dry. It absorbs pee.”

  “Like kitty litter,” Thea says.

  But nothing can deter Liz from dragging that bale of landfill out to the car. She’s already loaded the bassinette. Standing in the driveway after the baby is strapped into the car seat, she tries to get both Sylvie and Thea to lock eyes with her for a lecture about weekend traffic on the cottage highway. “Dear,” she says (or possibly deer) as she presses the car keys into Thea’s hand, “you really need to watch. Don’t be out around dusk. And text me when you get there.”

  “I can’t. They’re out of cell range at the cabins. Noah can only text from the research station.”

  Liz turns back to the car. She waves through the window at the baby. “We should get one of those Baby on Board signs,” she says.

  Thea smiles reassuringly at Liz. “We will be so careful.” She has a great trustworthy face. Well, actually she looks like a feral child, but all the mothers congratulate themselves that they are smart and open-minded enough to look past that and recognize her true qualities.

  “God, I’m glad to be out of there,” Sylvie says the instant they’re on the street. “You have no idea. They’ve turned me into such a child. If I hadn’t escaped for the weekend, I’d have been about twelve by Sunday.”

  “God,” Thea says. “Really.” At the stoplight at Broadway she lifts the weight of her caramel-coloured hair in two hands and twists it into a knot, and it’s so close to Velcro that it stays in place. “The deer! Maybe if you got a Baby on Board sign they’d think twice about running onto the road.”

  She turns right and barrels up Broadway. “What will she do? If she finds out.”

  “I can’t even feel guilty,” Sylvie says. “As if I’d be taking you along. Hey, this is the first time I’ve got into these jeans since the baby. They’re the jeans I wore up at Presley Point last summer. I love having my old clothes again.” They’re in the left lane, and then Thea crosses Memorial towards downtown. “Where are we going? Aren’t we taking you home?”

  “No, I’m meeting everyone for breakfast at the Don Deli.”

  “Shit! I don’t want to drive through downtown.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll be fine.” Two kids were once caught driving a car on the Arlington Bridge. They were eight. One of them sat on the floor and worked the pedals while the other steered. “Weird that my dad put the car seat on the right side.”

  “Why is it weird?”

  “Well, I’ll be able to see the baby while I’m driving. It’s almost as if he knew I’d be alone.” She was in the bathroom when he went out this morning. She called goodbye to him through the door, so glad she didn’t have to look him in the eye.

  Thea lurches to a stop in the loading zone in front of the Don Deli. They both get out. “Come in for a minute,” she says.

  “Are you having a Fringe meeting?”

  “Yeah. We’ve got a script. A really good one. Benedictor is in now, and he’s amazing. Actually, we got the idea from something you said.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What you said about doing an allegory. We’re doing a thing about slavery – about the British ending slavery. Like, it’s about changing the whole system to do the right thing, even if you have to rebuild your economy.”

  “That’s cool. It could be awesome.”

  “Well, come in and we’ll tell you about it. Bring the baby.”

  “No, I want to go and see Noah.”

  “Yeah!” Thea says. “I bet you do!” She looks at Sylvie with glittering eyes that say Make it a good one. Then she slings her backpack and walks away. Sylvie opens the driver’s door and sinks into the seat.

  It’s cold to be out on a terrace, but Aiden and Defrag end up in the courtyard of a café-slash-used-bookstore on Westminster, where, over an exceptionally good cup of coffee, Aiden sits expounding on Jehovah’s Witness doctrine regarding the End Times.

  Heaven with its golden streets has a capacity of 144,000, Aiden explains, and it’s now officially full up. So the Witnesses have had to propose an overflow paradise on planet Earth. In this paradise, children will keep on growing until they reach their prime, and as for old guys like Aiden, the film will flip into reverse – you grow young at the same pace that you grew old.

  Aiden takes a sip of his coffee and leans back in his chair. Shit, it’s a great thought! One morning he’ll wake up to silence: the ringing in his ears will be gone. The day after that he’s got full range of motion in his left big toe, the joint that kills him now when he cross-country skis. First thing you know he’s having sex twice before breakfast, and outside his window a western meadowlark pours out its astonishing song. Because the earth is going to heal too. The hole in the ozone – mended. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch – vanished. The obscene wounds of the Athabasca tar sands, the Three Gorges Dam – well, some of those things will take a while. But we’ll have eternity, won’t we, here in this beautiful world.

  “Pretty cool,” Defrag says.

  “Well, you know, people scorn the Witnesses,” says Aiden. “They’re like the trailer trash of Christian cults. But they got all that right. They know where the heart lies: here, in this world, not in some gated community in the sky.”

  Defrag’s in his scruffy old pea coat, and their server, a kid with a white towel tucked into his belt, is wearing a leather jacket. Aiden tries to warm his hands on his coffee mug. This is his second refill; he’s having trouble prying himself fully awake. The baby was up a couple of times in the night. Her crying is a comforting sound, though, like hearing a train whistle in the dark.

  “You should see our little sweetheart,” he says. “You know, I’m not getting a lot of sleep, but I still wake up in the morning feeling like all’s right with the world. We’d never have chosen for this to happen, but it’s been good for us.”

  “You know how wasps live?” Defrag laughs. “On sucrose excreted by their larvae.”

  Defrag’s coverage ran out two weeks ago; it was Aiden who phoned and suggested coffee. Technically this is a violation of professional boundaries, but Aiden can hardly start working pro bono, which in any case would embarrass Defrag. Anyway, he tells himself craftily, you’ve been brewing coffee for the guy in your office, for years.

  “So, how you doing?”

  Defrag shrugs. “Without.”

  Aiden can’t help but laugh. He resettles himself, trying to get comfortable on the little cast-iron chair. “What’s your Saturday usually like?” Actually, he has a pretty good idea. He once lived in the apartment block Defrag lives in now. It’s a rambling red and grey edifice at the foot of the Osborne Bridge, with working fireplaces you’re not supposed to use and treacherous outdoor corridors that run like scaffolding along the upper storeys. There’s something fitting about it for Defrag. It’s like a den, or a tree house.

  “Saturday,” Defrag says. “Oh, you know,” and Aiden regrets the way he’s been yammering on
. Defrag is pale, he’s laughing like a hyena. He’s got bare feet shoved into his runners and his eyes are red-rimmed. There’s a sore on his bottom lip. Malnutrition, Aiden thinks. “Order a muffin,” he says.

  “Don’t believe in the muffin.”

  “How about a croissant?”

  Defrag doesn’t answer. It’s obvious that the way Aiden usually operates with his clients constitutes being a pain in the ass in a courtyard café.

  He cranks his head to scrutinize the limbs of the boulevard trees above. “Ever think about the Wolseley Elm?” he asks. “That tree that grew in the middle of the street and was saved by protestors when the city wanted to take it out?”

  “I think about it,” Defrag says. “I think about what happened to it.”

  “I don’t actually know what happened.”

  “An anti-tree-hugger blew the sucker up. In the night. Some pro-development asshole went and shoved dynamite into a knothole.”

  “God,” Aiden says. “After all that.”

  They sit in silence, mentally tossing that pathetic little vigilante into a pit along with Dick Cheney and the captain of the Exxon Valdez. Then for a while they kick around their thoughts about activism. Aiden learns that Defrag was big in the disarmament movement at one time, the chair of an umbrella organization. Good for Defrag. Aiden’s own political efforts were more along the lines of delivering anti-American diatribes at parties. A fellow traveller, you might call him.

  “Well, Jake,” he says, “they haven’t blown us up yet. I think it worked.”

  “Yeah.” Defrag laughs. “We thought the bomb was going to do us in. Turns out it’s the eating and the fucking. How do we protest that?”

  Aiden hitches his chair a little farther from the table so he can stretch out his legs. “You know,” he says, “I had a conversation with a filmmaker a few weeks ago and I think he gave me an out. I made some comment about how every thinking person is scared shitless by climate change, and he just dismissed it – said it was, like, apocalyptic thinking. That people in every age think the world is coming to an end. But actually it’s all about us, we’re just projecting our own mortality onto the world. When we were religious, we dreamed up a religious apocalypse. Now that we’re into science, we muster up scientific data to freak ourselves out. But it all comes down to the same thing.” He rubs his knuckles against his jeans, warming them. “I’m expressing this quite a bit better than he did, actually.”

  Defrag opens the hatch to let a couple of black-coated chuckles escape. “I think he’s on to something,” he says. “Just give me a few weeks to wean myself off empirical thought.”

  Aiden watches him affectionately. He so completely knows the guy. He knows his politics and his music and his drugs. He knows his twenties especially, the squalid apartments and the stoned roommates, the Salvador Dali posters, the stacks of sci-fi paperbacks, the stupid non sequiturs that passed for wit, endless petty defiances against The Man – he can see that history in every gesture, just as he can see the fears that flicker now on the edge of Defrag’s vision. When he was training, when they talked about professional boundaries, none of his profs or supervisors ever said, One day a client will walk into your office and you will recognize a true friend.

  The kid in the leather jacket comes to refill their coffees. When he’s gone, Defrag reaches into the pocket of his coat and pulls out a little shard of paper. “You want to see my first image? It was captured by the pinhole camera in Assiniboine Park.” He hands it to Aiden. It’s about half the size of a playing card.

  “How did you develop it?”

  “You don’t develop it. It’s photographic paper to begin with.”

  Aiden pulls his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket. The wiry mass that fills the bottom half of the picture will be trees, trees that went bare and moved their branches a million times in various winds, and then leafed out again. Astonishingly, there’s a familiar arc in the sky above them. A rainbow – a wonky rainbow, as though each colour in the spectrum had to make its separate lonely effort to scale the sky.

  “How long was your camera up?”

  “Six months.”

  “Well, how the hell did you catch a rainbow?”

  Defrag chokes on a huge burr of a laugh; it’s going to take him a few minutes to cough it up. Aiden sits studying the picture, feeling like an idiot. Finally it clicks. That arc is the tracks of the sun, struggling to rise morning after morning.

  He passes the paper back to Defrag. “So where’s your old buddy Aiden? I hammed for that camera every time I went by.” This gets Defrag laughing again.

  Aiden downs his coffee. Then he hears himself say, “Hey, Sexsmith’s in town. Did you know?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He’s got new material. He’s playing the Walker, and apparently the house is still half-empty. I was thinking about going tonight. Are you up for it?”

  After the girls drive away, Liz goes back into the kitchen and stands still, listening to the silence. God help that tiny baby. Well, Noah will be there, and Thea – such a funny girl with her overeager face and her hair like a chenille plant, the tendrils a pale dirty pink as if they’ve picked up dye from things she’s rubbed against. But she was queen of the babysitters’ brigade in high school, she practically raised the Callaghan kids across the back lane. Their baby will be all right.

  The quiet is wonderful. Aiden is out too; he rode off while Liz was at the drugstore. Before he left, he emptied the dishwasher and cleaned up the kitchen, and he even scrubbed the pots from last night’s dinner. Too bad she never saw this sort of effort when his own daughter was born. When Liz was hormonal and almost psychotic from lack of sleep and Sylvie wouldn’t latch on properly, and awful women from La Leche League were in the house day and night, not quite prepared to deny a starving baby a bottle of formula but eager to imply that Liz was a total failure for the situation, as she had declined to walk around during pregnancy with her nipples clamped by clothespins to reshape them for a woman’s supreme task. And what was that silent shape floating like a blow-up doll over their heads, bumping now and then into the crown moulding? Aiden I’m-too-sexy-for-my-life Phimister, poetry book in hand. Twenty years of parenting have changed him, there’s no doubt about it. He’s like the foxes she saw in a documentary not long ago. You fed them, you cuddled them, and by the third generation they’d started to change physically. Their ears no longer stood up, their tails were curling, their feverish hatred of humans had been stolen away – they’d turned into dogs.

  She starts to put the kettle on for tea and then changes her mind. She’ll go for a walk to celebrate her freedom, that’s what she’ll do. She hasn’t made it to yoga in weeks, but at least she can walk. She takes her Rockports out of the boot chest, and in a flash, Max is at the door, wagging his whole back end. His tail thuds against the wall. “Hey, Max,” Liz says. “Cool your jets.” She lifts his leash off its hook and snags a plastic bag from the bin.

  Out on the street, she turns in the direction of the river. It’s cool, but she’ll warm up if she walks fast. The neighbourhood is finally starting to bloom. The house next to Wendy’s has tiny blue flowers naturalized in the front lawn. Those are scillas; they’re in the hyacinth family. A great idea for a lawn. She’ll plant some in the fall.

  Max is panting with his passion to move. Liz glances at her watch and thinks again about the kids in the car heading north. Her prickly, pebble-eyed daughter, no doubt still ranting to Thea about Liz. She’s still rocked herself by the shock of what happened the night of the party, the night Krzysztof came to the house and Sylvie was so upset. Liz had finally mustered up the courage to go down to her bedroom, determined to have it out at last, and found Sylvie sitting in her white terry robe with the baby at her breast, looking in the dim light from the hallway like a Catholic icon, and it seemed as though the scene Liz had imagined for so long, the explaining and the pleading and the longed-for reconciliation, would finally take place. But that was not remotely what hap
pened, and now Liz has something new to carry around with her: a rough little pellet of pain and shame. An end to the thing (please god), a stinging, biting end to the thing. She can hate me if she wants, she says stoutly to herself, fingering the pellet as she strides up the street, but she asked for me, and we will always have that. She knows about Krzysztof, she’s always known. And yet, when it mattered, the day of her baby’s birth, Sylvie needed her mother.

  She’s on Wolseley Avenue, where the finest houses are. Always a pleasure to walk along Wolseley. She sticks the plastic bag in her pocket and thinks about a conversation she had when Sylvie was tiny. Somebody (it must have been one of the GAP women) said, “If you pay attention to what your baby is telling you, she will make you into the sort of mother she needs you to be.” Liz was overcome with despair, hearing that. People talk about how helpless babies are, how vulnerable, but it never felt that way to her. From the day Sylvie was born, she was a force to contend with. She resisted anything you tried to give her. If you indulged her whims, she’d flip to wanting the exact opposite. If you tried to cuddle her, she’d squirm frantically away. She was not powerless – she had the power to demonstrate to the whole world what a lousy mother Liz was. Well, now she’s a mother herself and they’ll see how that turns out. This new baby, luckily for Sylvie, has a softer way about her, more of an inquiring presence. You can already see it in the way she opens her round eyes and looks thoughtfully at them.

  Liz doubles the leash around her hand. It’s cold, a humid sort of cold with no promise of warmth in it, and she walks quickly, darting glances into the gaps between houses where dogwood and saskatoon and high-bush cranberry compete for the sun. Sometimes when the baby opens her eyes, she seems to ask, Who are you? Then her eyes glaze over and she falls back to sleep. But the question remains, as though her very appearance in their house asks it. “Who are you?” Liz says to Max as she follows him along the street. The boulevard elms arch, their buds all soft and pale, and the green points of iris poke from the flower beds: everything waiting brightly for its meaning to be revealed.