The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  Payton stood in a patch of weeds, her face remote. Sylvie was shocked by how alike the two of them were. She knew exactly who they would be at school, both of them hanging around the fringes in their own grades, with their furtive faces and their dark talents that nobody admired, and the awkward yearnings that everybody recognized and mocked.

  “Listen,” she said to Liam. “Why don’t you just play with something else?”

  He recoiled from Sylvie. He was old enough to be ashamed of crying in front of a strange girl. He reminded her of a famine victim in the uneven knobs of his backbone and the thin slats of his ribs, and in his knees, which were bigger around than his skinny legs. He turned back to batting at his sister, bleating, “Payton. Payton.” He was too thin to hold up his swimming trunks properly, and the crack of his ugly little butt was visible.

  Sylvie suddenly loathed him as though he were her own disgusting little brother. “Fuck off and play by yourself, loser,” she said in a voice she had never before heard coming out of her chest. She reached over and swatted his butt hard with the back of her hand, and that was what finally drove him away.

  With Payton silent beside her, she picked up the binoculars and turned back to her joyless spying. It was an ugly lake, long and marshy. It smelled of rotting snails and of toilets. No cottages were visible on its margins, but rickety docks had been built out into the lake. She checked out the next sunbathing couple, and she began to hate faun vision, which revealed black bristles on the woman’s legs and the birdlike dart of the woman’s eye down the page of a stupid magazine, and the man’s balls (crinkled skin with sparse and piggish hairs) nudging out one leg of his shorts, and the chewed chicken bones he had tossed towards the bush, lying now with sand sticking to them and flies crawling over them.

  She lowered the binoculars and turned to look for the boys. Liam was nowhere to be seen, but Adrienne’s blond sons were towing the beach toys up onto the sand. Apparently they were leaking. The boys went looking for the pump. While they were retrieving it, Liam appeared out of nowhere at the shoreline. The blond boys spied him and ran down to chase him off. Then screams of outrage rose and the two boys pounded back to where Melody was lying motionless on her towel.

  “Liam pissed on our floaters!” they shrieked. “He pissed on the Hummer and then he pissed on the turtle! He did it so we can’t play with them! He did it on purpose!”

  Melody craned her head. Liam was standing at the edge of the water facing them, a small, malevolent figure with his swimming trunks pulled up crookedly and the corner of a beach toy clutched defiantly in each hand. “Oh Christ,” she yelled. “What a little shit!”

  “What a shit!” the brothers cried, picking up the theme and dancing to it on the sand. “What a fucker! He’s a goddamn fucker! Do something, Melody!”

  But instead of getting up and dealing with him, Melody flopped over onto her stomach. She lay absolutely still, ignoring them all. One of the brothers kicked sand at her and she ignored that too, and finally they ran back towards the water, yelling threats at Liam.

  Sylvie got up helplessly and began to cut across the beach towards the path. Payton came hobbling along after her. The sun was lower now and fell in visible shafts through the trees, lighting up separate clumps of leaves on the forest floor. The trail was clammy under her feet. At a certain point she became aware that Payton was close behind her. Barefoot now, wearing ordinary footless tights. She no longer had fur; it must have been attached to the hoofs.

  The clearing was silent. No one was sitting at the harvest table. Between two trees hung a hammock, and in it Adrienne’s husband lay sound asleep. No one was in the kitchen. A pot bubbled on the stove and cooking smells hung in the air. The Puffed Wheat cake sat uncovered on the counter. Sylvie snatched up a piece and shoved it hungrily into her mouth, and Payton did the same.

  Then Sylvie crept soundlessly up the stairs and Payton followed. The bedroom doors were open and both bedrooms were empty. They could hear water splashing in the bathroom and the squeak of someone’s butt on the floor of the tub. Sylvie swallowed the last of the Puffed Wheat cake and turned to go back down the stairs, and just then a pure, beautiful voice lifted into the hall. “As I went down in the river to pray,” someone sang. “Studyin’ about that good ole way.” It was Adrienne. Sylvie could picture her holding up a sponge, squeezing water onto her white shoulder while she lifted her voice with the careless joy of a song-filled bird. She finished and then she began again, singing more slowly now, her voice filled with longing. They stood listening on the stairs, clutching the smooth banister. “Good Lord, show me the way,” Adrienne prayed, and then her voice died out and silence filled the house.

  The building Sylvie understood to be the studio was down a path that branched off the trail to the beach. A little stream ran alongside, and the mud of the path was slick and studded with rough-capped acorns that bit viciously into Sylvie’s feet. The studio was made almost entirely of glass, and it was so deep in the woods that no sunlight reflected off it. Sylvie stopped when she saw it and stepped away from the path and into the trees. From where she stood, all she could see inside was something small and white.

  It was Payton who crept up, who raised her head and looked. Then she ducked, crouching below the window, and turned her small, knowing face in Sylvie’s direction. A foot, Sylvie thought. There’s a bed up against the window, and someone is bracing themselves against the glass with their foot.

  Back at the beach, the sunbathers were gone. Just their outsized footprints left behind, and the immaculate impressions of their towels. Their drink cans and chip bags. Little nests of cigarette butts. Melody was lying on her side, rolled in her towel like a blanket, sound asleep with her blond hair tangled in the sand. The little boys were nowhere in sight.

  It was cold now; no one would think of swimming. The wind had started to blow up waves. But two coloured shapes bobbed halfway down the narrow lake. Sylvie lifted the binoculars to her face, and after a minute a curve of purple plastic moved into the frame. It was the inflated turtle. No one was on it. Then she picked up the Aqua-Hummer; the two mattresses seemed to be tied together. And in the Hummer she made out a small human arm. It was Liam’s. Liam, who lay with his white face propped against the edge, like a castaway who had been several weeks at sea. He was closer to the far shore than to this one. She saw his arm move, but he did not appear to be paddling.

  Sylvie handed the binoculars to Payton. Gooseflesh had come out on her arms and on Payton’s too. Payton knelt beside her and lifted the binoculars to her face, which was white now, all its freckles rubbed off. With her turned-up nose and her high little cheeks, it was not a hoofed creature she resembled but a squirrel. Not a real squirrel, Sylvie saw – a Disney one. While she scanned the lake, Sylvie sat on the sand, her head bowed, not looking out at the water. Somewhere in the course of the afternoon she had lost her sandals and her horns, as well as the gift of speech. Her legs were covered with scratches and her bare feet were rimmed with mud from the path. She wrapped her arms around her rib cage and bent over them, digging her feet deep into the dirty sand.

  13

  A Square Yard of Turf

  EVERYTHING IS EASIER WITHOUT A MOTHER, contrary to what the fairy tales say.

  She came back at the end of that summer and the neighbourhood appalled her. The sun glinting off the casement windows, the red vines heavy with purple berries. Bronze flowers in their autumn mounds and the ghostly stencils of fallen leaves on the sidewalk. And on the weekend when they raked the yard, her father lurching around the elm trees carrying her mother piggyback, Liz shrieking with laughter, tossing her hair from side to side. It was sinister in the worst way: it covered its wickedness with beauty.

  In her second-floor bedroom Sylvie dreamed of a little boy’s body in a sink, hands and feet tied with vines. The next night she slept on the futon in the basement, and she never moved back upstairs. It was the year she put away childish books and did not take other books up – nothing as dangerous as
stories.

  It was the year their dog Oscar came home from roaming the streets and crawled up the veranda steps, vomited, and died. The year she was out walking with her grandfather and he spat in front of the 7-Eleven and said, “Goddamn rug-riders.” The year she was sitting eating buttered popcorn and saw, on their flat-screen TV, a sea of skeletal children in Darfur waiting on the ground for the aid trucks. The winter she started slipping out of the house in the night, walking the silent snowy streets (leaning on the railing of the Maryland Bridge and picking out the black line of open water between the snowy riverbank and the ice, thinking for one terrified minute, I’m not really here, until the cloud of her breath on the dark air reassured her). It was the year the polar ice cap shrank to its lowest size yet, the year she had Ms. Lewinski for science and they all went around putting bumper stickers on the teachers’ cars and on their parents’ cars that said: I’M CHANGING THE CLIMATE. ASK ME HOW. The year her body turned both slim and lush, the year she got sick on vodka-spiked Slurpees down by Omand’s Creek, the year of the co-ed sleepover at Jenn’s, when a boy from Kelvin squirmed onto the mattress between her and Jenn and in the dark lay a hand sweetly on her right breast. The year she discovered Value Village and never again wore clothes bought by her mother. The year she started calling her mother Liz. The year she realized a rubbery black coating had grown over her heart.

  It was the year she untethered herself from Wolseley and started hanging out with the tradespeople on its edges. She got to know Iris, the hoarse-voiced woman who ran the laundromat and lived above it and dressed in clothes people left behind in the dryers. She met three brothers from Vietnam who called themselves “velo engineers,” and she sat with them on the back steps of their chop shop on Sara Avenue, chewing sunflower seeds and spitting the hulls on the ground. She made friends with Tat Sing Lee, who owned a convenience store on Portage. He had a plot in the community gardens, and in the spring she started helping him. The next year he was sick and on chemo and she did all the work while he sat on a plastic chair and told her what to do. That winter he died, and she talked the clerk at City Hall into letting her keep the plot, even though there was a waiting list.

  All through high school she gardened, as though it might save her. Her garden was a row garden – that’s all she knew. She grew carrots, beets, kale, peas, onions, and green beans, and she gave all the produce away. She never grew anything as frivolous as flowers, and she never bought bedding plants, she grew everything from seed. Sprinkling minuscule grains along a trench and then digging up the stout, firm roots in the fall – it made her feel like a wizard. Carrots were her specialty. She loved them for the tininess of the seeds and the feathery tops, and for the fact that wild carrot, also known as Queen Anne’s lace, will find garden carrots and breed with them.

  She knew enough to leave the carrots to sweeten in the ground until the first frost, and then she dragged her wagon over on a Friday evening, wearing her blue hat with the fat braids. Crickets chirped from the edge of the allotment. Marigolds like knots of yellow yarn were scattered on the cleared plots, and broken tomatoes rotted here and there. She bent over her carrots, the noise of the city around her. The tops lay dead on the ground, marking the rows. She loosened the earth with her spade and then wiggled out each root. In the morning she’d carry a bag to Iris at the laundromat. A bag to Nathan and his mother, and to the Nguyen brothers. That family from Somalia who’d moved onto Spence Street – she’d given vegetables to them before. She’d leave the wagon outside their apartment building while she was inside. If hungry people came along and stole her vegetables, obviously that would be great. But if they didn’t, she’d take a bag to her grandfather, who lived on canned soup and bologna.

  “Scarlet Nantes” her carrots were called. They were lovely and straight because she had thinned them faithfully, and with their rounded tips they looked like new candles. She nestled them in rows on a blanket in the wagon, and then she shoved the dirt back into the trench and raked her plot. By the time she turned up Westminster Avenue, her wagon wheels squeaking, a harvest moon was lifting itself over the tall trees of Wolseley.

  That night at Presley Point, while Sylvie and Noah and their baby sleep, fish flies wriggle out of the muddy bottom of the great lake and swim up through fathoms of black water. At the surface they sense the warmth of the dark air and they cast off their fishy disguises and rise into the starry sky with cellophane wings. Then daylight overtakes them and they spiral helplessly down, glomming onto the asphalt shingles of cabin eleven.

  Noah goes outside to do his tai chi and a minute later he’s in the doorway, saying, “Come outside for a minute.”

  Sylvie comes to the door with the baby on her shoulder. It looks as though a frilly curtain has been hung over the front of the cabin.

  “They’re what I was screening for on the boat last summer,” Noah says. “When they were in the nymph stage.” He’s holding a wriggling worm with wings you can pinch like handles between your thumb and forefinger. So many emerged from Lake Erie a few years ago, the Doppler radar picked them up – Alison, a woman he works with, told him this. They live only a day, just long enough to mate and lay their eggs.

  Alison, Sylvie thinks. She shoves his hand away, revolted by the antenna-like hairs sticking out of the fish fly’s tail.

  Miles away on the horizon, you can see the tufts of waves blown up during the night. Sylvie is bleary from lack of sleep and from the beer, and from the light that lies uneasily over the lake and the bush, bleaching away their nighttime conversation. A cheap red kayak struggles along the shoreline, the kayaker banging his paddle against the plastic sides with every stroke.

  Noah turns up the path. “I’ll run up and talk to Alison before I do my tai chi. I want to catch her before she hitches a ride with someone else.”

  Alison has today and tomorrow off. She has a driver’s licence, and Noah wants to see if she will ride into the city with Sylvie. Sylvie was eating a bowl of granola when he sprang this news on her. “Today?” she said. “It has to be today,” he said. “There’s nobody going in on Monday.” The baby was sitting in her car seat with a little trail of spit-up on her chin and was indifferent to this news.

  “I’ll try to talk her into hanging around until noon,” he says now. “We can do something this morning. Take the canoe out maybe.” He frowns as he says this, hearing how stupid it is.

  The minute he’s out of sight, Sylvie runs back into the cabin and puts the baby in the car seat and begins to shove her things into her bag. Her clothes from yesterday, the baby’s blankets, her hairbrush and makeup bag. She takes the big bale of disposable diapers because she doesn’t want Noah looking at it and thinking of her. While she’s strapping the car seat into the back, the baby bats impersonally at her face. She looks like a stranger’s baby this morning, rounder faced and bigger headed than usual.

  Noah is still nowhere in sight. “Bye-bye, Daddy,” Sylvie says in the baby’s voice as she heads the car up the little trail that runs to the main road.

  She can see the sun shining in a wintry way behind thin clouds. A hydro line runs along the lane, and a crazed blue heron is trying to perch on a wire, like a tightrope walker on stilts. When she reaches the main road, she turns the wrong way, she turns north. This is to throw them off. She can picture them chasing her down, this Alison person in wild confederacy with Noah, the two of them skimming over the landscape like the canopy walkers in kung fu movies and throwing themselves on the hood of the car, pressing their accusing faces against the windshield. Sylvie drives quickly, nimbly away from them, taking pleasure in the snap of gravel under her tires. When she can peel her eyes away from the road, she glances in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes meet the baby’s, and in an instant the baby is crying. Mile after mile, she cries. In her rage she’s worked her way to one side of the baby seat – all Sylvie can see now is a tiny fist shaking.

  This is the road they took the night Sylvie met Noah, almost a year ago. Thea was driving her dad’s old mi
nivan. It was late – they couldn’t leave until Sylvie’s shift at Stella’s finished – so Sylvie was designated to stay awake and talk to Thea and help her watch for deer. Thea could hardly see over the steering wheel and she drove very strangely, with her right foot on the gas pedal and her left foot ready to hit the brake. It was after two before they got to Zach’s road. They had slowed right down, shining Thea’s big flashlight out the window, looking for a sign that said MO’S MARINA AND ENGINE REPAIR, and they spied deer – two does, standing still on the gravel edge. The spotlight caught their eyes.

  “Holy shit,” Thea said, braking.

  “I wish I knew what that is,” Sylvie said. “In their eyes, that makes them gleam like that.”

  “They’re throwing death rays at us.” Thea drove cautiously past them and turned up the lane to the cabin. “Wakey, wakey,” she called to their three friends sleeping in the back seat. Nobody moved.

  “You know fauns?” Sylvie asked. “Like from mythology?”

  “Yeah,” Thea said. “Mr. Tumnus. Standing by a streetlight holding an umbrella. That was James McAvoy – did you know? The guy from X-Men?”

  “It was a lamppost in the forest,” Sylvie said. “I always think about fauns when I see deer. Because fawn, right?”

  “Well, duh, fauns are deer. Half deer.”

  “No, they aren’t, Thea. They’re half goat.”

  The baby’s crying is plaintive – it’s hard to shut it out. On either side the bush is scrubby, she’s driving through a stretch of muskeg. Not like the forests she dreamed about as a kid: the massive trees with their limbs lacing overhead, the forests where you went in as one thing and came out as something else. She sees the faun crouching in the filtered light, talking in an ecstasy of sibling viciousness, unhinged but galvanizing, her eyes golden. Just an ordinary girl whose mother was dying.