The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  He walks by cabin two without once looking to the side. Her old self is in cabin two, lying on the bed slim and naked and propped up on one elbow, her hair falling over her face and her whole body rimed with sweat. The room is full of afternoon sun and Noah is naked too, sitting on the edge of the bed gazing at her. They’re not talking; they’re both stunned by what just happened on the saggy cabin mattress.

  She was hungry that night. When they got up, she made black bean dip, which they ate with taco chips. Noah pan-fried some pickerel. They had imperial cookies from the lake bakery – it was a three-course meal – and they lit a candle, sticking it on a saucer with melted wax.

  The baby has settled down by the time Noah gets back. They turn on the lights and sit on the couch, picking orange coins of stinking pepperoni off a convenience-store pizza, not talking. The couch is up against two big windows, and Sylvie feels the cool post-rain air on the back of her neck.

  When the last soggy piece is finished, Noah digs out a deck of cards and asks Sylvie politely if she would like to play rummy. She decides not to answer, but when he deals her a hand, she picks it up. They use the couch between them as a table. He plays intently, going for the discard pile every chance he gets. He never lays down, so there’s nothing for Sylvie to build on. His goal is to cash out big and stick her with a handful of points. And he does. After three hands the score is Noah 345, Sylvie minus 90. This is the conversation he promised her.

  He has an open beer on the floor beside him, but Sylvie has stopped drinking. The booze in her system feels like a strong current she has to swim against. She looks around the cabin, not bothering to sort her hand. The baby drops her pot scraper and tips her head to the side with a sharp look that is exactly like Noah. He doesn’t give any sign that he sees it – he’s too intent on sorting the hundreds of cards in his hand into tiers, searching for a discard so he can go out.

  Watching him, she finally gets it, the bitter truth this whole day has been trying to teach her: Noah is an android. This explains everything. How he’s never cold, how focused he is on the task at hand. His flat voice and the stiff way he moves, the impersonal look in his eyes. He’s an android, no doubt about it. She sits with her unsorted cards in hand, her chest squeezing and her eyes burning. The question is, did he just turn into one because of everything that’s happened, or has he always been one?

  “Excuse me,” she says. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  The bathroom is over-lit and has the sort of fake flush toilet you can’t put toilet paper down. Noah has burned incense by the sink. She puts her finger to the little cone and watches it crumble into ash. Then she opens the tin medicine cabinet. Everything is lined up and spotless. His razor and his shaving cream. His sunscreen and his inhaler. His toothbrush and toothpaste – he has one of those keys so he can squeeze his toothpaste methodically, without waste. On the top shelf, which she can’t see without standing on tiptoes, is a box of Band-Aids. And in the corner, behind the Band-Aids, a stash of condoms. Sylvie crinkles one of the envelopes and feels the perfect flexible ring inside.

  The baby is fussing when she comes out. Sylvie sits on the couch and ignores her until Noah finally picks her up. He walks methodically around the perimeter of the cabin, bouncing her up and down, moving her from one shoulder to the other. But she won’t settle and Sylvie has to take her. While she sits on the couch and nurses, Noah goes out to do his midnight checks. When he comes back, he lies on the bed with his laptop. He’s holding it conscientiously on one thigh, she notes, not on his crotch.

  After the baby is burped and changed and sleeping in the portable bassinette, Sylvie stretches out beside him and he pulls up a movie he’s downloaded. He seems to be totally engrossed in it, a black-and-white film about workers in a chemical factory gradually turning into lizards. They’re at the stage of losing their ears; within another minute they’ll have nothing but holes on the sides of their heads.

  “Why are you watching this?” she asks.

  “It’s a cult classic,” he says.

  They lie fully dressed on the quilt, their heads propped up by pillows that smell of mothballs. He’s wearing his five-toe rubber sandals – he looks like he’s starting to develop his own exoskeleton. Sylvie doesn’t even pretend to be watching the movie. The bare overhead light is still on and she has to close her eyes against it. Why do people ever talk? she thinks. Her legs are strangely heavy. She feels herself sinking into the bed as if it’s an air mattress deflating and there’s nothing she can do to keep herself afloat.

  A loon wakes her and she drifts on the oscillating sound, feeling a deep sense of recognition and relief at being at the lake. It’s stopped raining. The waves and the wind in the trees are all one sound. She’s alone on the bed – Noah has moved to the couch. From somewhere below comes whimpering. Sylvie’s jeans are cutting into her thighs; she gets out of bed and wiggles out of them and drops them on the floor. She has to pee badly. When she gets back from the bathroom, she stands at the end of the couch for a minute. Noah is on his side, still wearing his shorts. His long, strong legs are scissored – likely he’s cold. He had a blanket but it’s slid off. She sees herself nudging him onto his back, straddling him as he stirs awake and opens his arms for her. Lying over him, dipping in low to find his mouth, her new body moving with all its old joy.

  The whimpers from the bassinette are turning into wails. Sylvie stoops and picks up a hot, damp, stinking little bundle. The chemical gel in the diaper is so swollen up it’s like holding a roly-poly doll. She sits on the edge of the bed and pulls up her shirt. Her bra is stuck to her where milk leaked and dried; it’s like peeling a Band-Aid off a wound. The baby snuffles under her shirt, clamping toothless gums on the soft skin where Sylvie’s breast and armpit meet, and starts to suck like a lamprey eel. Sylvie pries her loose and arranges her properly, enduring the first painful chomp on her sore nipple. Then, on a sudden impulse, she levers herself up and tiptoes across the cabin in her T-shirt and panties, holding the baby cradled in both arms.

  Outside, the wind and the waves separate into two distinct tracks of sound. The ground is cold and wet under her feet. Bug bulbs drop cones of yellow light in five or six doorways along the cabin line. Sylvie can hear and sense the lake but she can’t see it. If she heads in that direction she might walk off the edge. So instead she moves cautiously around the side of the cabin. She makes out the dim shapes of two Adirondack chairs; she puts out her hand and feels the rough wood of one and lowers herself into it, trying to keep the baby horizontal. The dark wall of cabin ten is just a few feet away. She tips her head back. No moon and no stars. Clouds are hiding the stars.

  The baby is making a little squeak with each suck on her nipple. Sylvie pulls her off and makes her latch on again. The longing she feels for Noah is as sharp as a knife – she could cry for how much she wants him. Her breasts are all in lumps because there are little sacs swollen with milk inside them, like the seeds in a pomegranate. She can’t bear to think of him seeing her. Noah is one thing, whole; he’s like a tree that grew up in the shape it was supposed to have. And Sylvie … she’s crooked and mangled and grafted together, someone who wants so badly not to be who she is that she is no one at all. And yet, if you’d asked her anytime in the past year, “Does Noah love you?” she would have said yes without a second thought.

  A few inches away from her through the screen, he coughs. The door closing must have woken him. She hears the couch squeak as he turns over or sits up.

  “Hey, Noah,” she says.

  He gives a little grunt of surprise. “What are you doing out there?”

  “Just getting some fresh air.”

  “Are you warm enough?” His voice is close, right at her ear.

  “Not really. I’ll come in in a minute. As soon as the baby finishes feeding.”

  The loon cries again from the direction of the lake: a different cry, three liquid spurts of sound. “Hey,” he says, “we almost never hear loons in the south basin.”

>   She doesn’t answer.

  “Is there something I can do?”

  She runs her hand over the baby’s head. There’s the dent where the bones haven’t closed. The fontanelle. “Sure,” she says. “You can tell me why I feel so shitty.”

  “Yeah,” Noah says, “I know. It must suck. Always being on call.”

  The condoms in Noah’s cabinet, they’re a kind she’s never seen before. Durex Performax, black wrapping with a yellow swirl. Standing in the bathroom earlier, she counted them. Seven.

  “You want to know what sucks?” she says. “It’s trying to decide which is worse, liking you the way I always have or realizing that I really don’t. Like you.”

  He receives this in silence. Vividly, she sees his face when he was seven. They’re in trees, maybe down at Omand’s Creek, and he’s showing her something – a huge secret, some little stone carvings wrapped up in a cloth. George Stonechild made them. She remembers arrowheads, and tiny figures with four nubs for legs and knobs at each end for the head and tail. “This one’s a fox,” he said. “This one’s a bear.”

  “What’s this one?”

  “I don’t know, he didn’t tell me.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I’m not allowed to see him anymore.”

  It was only after Noah moved away from Wolseley that he finally ended up with a dad.

  The damp ground is freezing her feet, and she lifts one leg and tucks it up on the chair. “You know,” she says, “I have saved you in ways you don’t even know.”

  “Are you really pissed with me about something, Sylvie?”

  She hears the loon again and waits until it’s finished, and then it’s the hurt of the afternoon that washes over her. “You never told those guys about the baby, for one.”

  “It’s not like we talk.”

  “No, I’m sure you don’t.” Tears are drilling like nails in the corners of her eyes, but she’s determined not to cry. “They all have kids, you know. Their girlfriends all got knocked up. In grade ten. I guess you want to be different from them.”

  “I am different,” he says in a low voice.

  “Yeah, well. That’s nice for you.” In a minute he’ll mention the shining example of Einstein’s girlfriend. Sylvie’s got goosebumps on her thighs and arms. The baby might be cold too. She needs to go in, but first she will say the important things. “Listen, I know what I did was wrong, driving up here without a licence. But I had to see you alone, so I made a bad choice. All I have in front of me right now are less than fabulous choices.”

  She can read Noah’s silence: I didn’t have a choice at all. She tips her head back. The clouds have shifted; they’ve opened to disclose one little patch of stars, like another bright scrap of memory. The baby’s sucking has slowed, she’s almost finished this meal. “Are you going back to Guelph in the fall?”

  Noah doesn’t answer. Liz is obsessed about their having a written agreement. And why did Sylvie never talk to Noah about it? Because she’s been expecting that any minute now this will all be over, they will all wake up from the spell.

  “Noah, are you going back to university?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. They’re paying for everything. And the research I’m doing, it’s really important. Not just to me.”

  She lifts the baby to her shoulder and pats her back. The couch squeaks and a big square of yellow falls on the side of cabin ten. Then it goes black again and the screen door slams and in a minute he comes around the corner of the cabin. He’s put on jeans and runners and he’s carrying the quilt. Sylvie stands up and he drapes it around her and over the baby. They sit down side by side on the two chairs.

  What she needs to say is this: I should not be trusted with this baby. But they just sit listening to the moan of the waves and the rush of the wind, and then he’s the one who speaks.

  “I guess I wonder, are you trying to prove something?”

  “What do you mean?” Even with the quilt over her she’s shivering.

  “By keeping the baby.”

  Treetops move above the cabin, a darker black against the black sky. It’s a good question, she thinks. They could spend the rest of the night talking about it. But it’s not the sort of thing she wants to get into with a stranger, however kind he is.

  12

  Faun Vision

  THAT WHOLE DAY IN SOUTHERN MINNESOTA would have had nothing to do with Sylvie except that the lane winding through the forest was a trail she might once have followed in a dream. And the red house looked, as she sat in the front seat of her mother’s car with horns growing out of her head, as though it had grown up in the woods the way the trees grew. Two vehicles were parked at the end of the lane, a grey car and a big white van with alligators painted on the side – green alligators levitating on their tails.

  “Where’s the van from?” Liz asked.

  Sylvie read the plate. “Wisconsin,” she said. “Haslet Hygiene. Suppliers of hygiene, cleaning, and paper products.”

  Then they saw that a table had been set out under the trees, on ground sprinkled with early-fallen golden coins. People were sitting around it – two men and two women – with glasses and jugs and plates of picked-over food, and they lifted their heads, startled and annoyed by a strange car in the driveway.

  “What the hell?” Liz said. “Is it too late to back out?”

  “Yes,” Sylvie said. “They’re looking right at us.”

  One of the men got up from the table and walked over to greet them. Liz parked properly and they opened their doors. “You found it,” the man said.

  By the time Liz got out of the car, she had put on an arch manner that Sylvie despised. “We’re the only Luddites in the Western world without a GPS,” she babbled, letting her door close with its expensive plunk. “But I had a great navigator.” She introduced Sylvie as her “charming personal assistant.”

  The man glanced over the roof of the car and gave Sylvie a quick, unsmiling nod, like a celebrity trying not to encourage a fan. He was unshaven but not bearded: the bottom half of his face looked as though it had been shaded in with pencil. He stood close to Liz, talking in her ear, while the three people at the table watched curiously.

  “I’ve still got some hangers-on,” he said in a low voice. “Totally unforeseen.” And then, obviously afraid his friends might have heard him, he raised his voice. “Drifters,” he called. “Riff-raff. Fucking Yankee freeloaders.” One of the women at the table cheered and raised her glass.

  “Oh, no problem,” Liz said, smiling, and the man led her towards the table with a hand on her back.

  From somewhere Sylvie could hear children shouting. She hung back. The elastic of the horns she had bought at the festival was starting to call up a halo-shaped headache on her scalp, and the feeling she had grew stronger, that she was in a scene from something else, if she could just figure out what – the trees so stout and tall, thrusting clouds of yellow and green leaves up into a brash blue sky, and the shuttered house, and the table, the people lounging around it with their jugs of wine or cider. And on the edge of the clearing … but was it a clearing? It was more that the forest wandered carelessly around the narrow house and tossed flame-filled bushes at a shingle-covered shed, and then, as it gathered into darkness by the woodpile, slyly opened its verge to reveal, beautifully camouflaged from human eyes, a slight, brown, upright creature that Sylvie recognized with a leap of her heart as the faun she had seen at the Festival. Returned now to its natural environment, watching Sylvie with an appealing gaze. No one but Sylvie saw it.

  “We’re fortifying ourselves for an afternoon of cooking,” said the woman who had cheered, indicating two big jugs with homemade labels: Brookside Cider. 100% Natural. This woman had silverish blond hair cut as short as a man’s, and she was lavishly pretty, like the roommate in a sitcom. “Big feast tonight,” she said.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” Liz said about their empty-handed arrival.

  “How co
uld you know what you were walking into?” the woman replied. Her name was Adrienne. “We were supposed to be the hell and gone back to Madison today. Nine o’clock this morning we’re all crammed into the van. But we were so wrecked from last night, and the kids were fighting like beasts – one of our little monsters threw Liam’s shoes out the window – and we’re out on that maze of roads without a clue how to get back to the highway, and then we come across this awesome farmers’ market, and so we stop. It was so cool. They had, like, salads full of flowers. Fresh cheese curds. Puffed Wheat cake – do you remember Puffed Wheat cake? We ended up buying everything in sight – a bucket of salad and jugs of cider and wild game! We bought bloody game, for crying out loud, and we don’t even have a cooler. So then we set off again and we’re desperate for a bathroom by that point, and we come to a corner that looks kind of familiar, and Peter looks at me and I look at him and we tool back up the lane. You should have seen Krzysztof’s face when we pulled in! But what the hell, we thought, we’ve got the van until Tuesday and he’s got all the room in the world. Well, really, it’s because we felt sorry for Krzysztof, out here all on his own. Although, I guess he wouldn’t have been …”

  Her voice was trailing off because everybody was looking in the direction of the faun, who was coming across the yard. She was about Sylvie’s size. Her hair was brown, the brown of her body and limbs, and she had grey horns with furry brown and white ears standing up behind them. She walked straight up to Sylvie and stood staring at her as though they were animals in the forest and no one else was around. Her features were pert and her eyes were bold, tilted and golden – an eye colour Sylvie had never seen except in dogs.

  “Sylvie, this is Payton,” Adrienne said from the table. “Isn’t this a nice surprise, Payton? You’ve got somebody to play with!” And then Adrienne pretended to turn her attention back to the adults, but Sylvie could tell that all of them were holding their breath to see what the faun would do.