The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  “Why don’t you call her?”

  “I tried, but there’s no answer.”

  “They’ve likely gone to Presley Point to be with Noah. To join the search. Are you going back up?”

  “As soon as I hear from CFS.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Would you stay here instead? The police want someone here – they have this crazy theory that Sylvie might come home.”

  The phone rings. The social worker sounds pleasant enough. “Sorry I took so long. It’s been that kind of morning. But I’m happy to say that I’ve just been to see your little granddaughter and she is fine. A bit of diaper rash, but otherwise she’s doing very well, all things considered.”

  “Is she taking a bottle okay?”

  “Yes. Yes, she seems to be.”

  “Because she’s been entirely breastfed up till now. My daughter has been very conscientious about that.” She explains that the baby’s been living with them since birth, that they’ve been actively involved in her care. She manages to drop in a mention of their professions. “My husband is out with the search, but I can pick up the baby right away. She will be missing her mother, but she will have us. Of course we all want to make sure she’s not traumatized by a long separation.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid that won’t be possible. We’ve authorized a transfer to an agency in your region.” Just for the time being, she explains, until they get a clearer picture of what happened. Apparently this is usual when a child is found alone in a car. Does Liz have a pen handy? She’ll give her the number of Faun’s new worker.

  Liz can hardly believe her ears. “You’re keeping this infant in care?”

  “As I said, we are for the time being.”

  “Why in the world would you do that? When she has a stable, loving home? How can that be in the best interest of the child?”

  The voice on the phone moves into bureaucratic overdrive. Liz presses the phone to her ear and hunches away from Wendy, who is right in her face, mouthing, What? What?

  At the fire tower they’re handed sandwiches of mystery meat and Cokes from a soft-sided white cooler. Wind moves the branches of the spruce around them, shaking fresh scent down on them. Eighteen searchers in this crew. Aiden approaches three local guys he hasn’t talked to yet, wanting to shake their hands and thank them. They’re sharing a joke, but they shut up the second they see him. “Good day for a search,” he says, trying to project an air of confidence in defiance of the cap he’s wearing: a black Motorola high-dome with mesh vents that Rupert left under the driver’s seat of the Caprice.

  “So your daughter’s a good walker?”

  “Great walker. Zero sense of direction, though.”

  “Wasn’t your wife here earlier?”

  “She went back to the city. The police wanted somebody at the house.”

  Noah is sitting at the edge of the clearing, and Aiden lowers himself down beside him. “Liz wanted to get back to call Child and Family Services. She figures the longer this goes on, the more bureaucracy we’ll have to deal with.”

  “I get it,” Noah says.

  “So you saw the baby last night.”

  “No, I just met with the worker. She said the baby’s with a family in Pine Falls.”

  “She’ll be fine. Listen, I didn’t mean to take this out on you before.”

  “No. I get it.”

  Aiden watches covertly while he spreads his anorak on the ground and stretches out on it. A guy of few words, a guy who gets it, and a fastidious guy. All this would be so much easier if they really knew him. It strikes Aiden as peculiar they haven’t made a bigger effort in that regard. A whole other side to this story has been playing out for Noah and his family, and Aiden hasn’t thought too much about it.

  Noah lifts an arm and lays his elbow over his face. He’s breathing evenly, sinking into a deep rest. He exudes such a calm sense of self, as if he doesn’t have anything to prove. Aiden lifts his eyes to follow a crow drifting over the clearing. He has to watch his tendency to idealize people when he first meets them, especially when he’s under stress. Think of how he latched onto Edith Wong at the start of their counselling program. Tagging along at coffee breaks, searching out her eyes to share the laugh every time somebody said something funny. She was baffled by it.

  On Aiden’s other side is Gilles, the baby’s rescuer, a francophone from St. Lazare. Gilles was driving up the trail when he spied the car, and he knew who it belonged to. Then he saw the baby fussing in what he called her bucket and he took her out and walked her, calling for Sylvie. Finally he drove to the cabin. But he couldn’t find Noah, and by then the baby was crying hard, so he went in to the RCMP detachment at Powerview. He’s up on his elbow now, one boot balanced on the rim of the other, plucking at the grass with his big hands, searching for new details he can share.

  “Had to put her bucket on the floor of the truck. Seatbelt don’t work.”

  “What were you doing up here, anyway?”

  “Checking out the blueberry crop. Should be ripe in three weeks.”

  “Well, we got lucky yesterday, Gilles. My god.”

  He finishes his sandwich and lies back beside Noah, angling his cap over his face and closing his eyes against the pinpricks of sun burning through the mesh. He should have taken off Tyrone’s boots so his feet could dry. They tramped through a marsh an hour back and he felt the water worming in. The boots weigh a ton and he’s beyond exhausted. Two bad nights in a row, because he lay awake Saturday too, full of chagrin about his evening with Defrag.

  When they couldn’t get into the Sexsmith concert after all, and decided to go for a drink at the Forks, Aiden feeling like a chump, as though he’d lured Defrag out under false pretences. They walked the concrete byways behind the Westin Hotel and out onto Waterfront Drive, where the museum rose like a vision from a grand and permanent world – the city on the hill – and Defrag was dogged and silent, his face pasty white. Across from the museum he veered into a parking lot and sagged against a car, folded himself over, and tried to vomit.

  “God, I wish I’d brought the car,” Aiden said. “Let’s get a cab and get you home.” But just as they started walking again a bus pulled up, and without a word to Aiden, Defrag stepped onto it, flashing his pass. Aiden stood and watched Defrag lurch up the brightly lit aisle and slump into a seat. He waited for a goodbye wave, but Defrag’s chin was on his chest. As the bus swung up Waterfront, he saw the number on the back. It was a Salter bus – it wouldn’t take Defrag anywhere near where he lived.

  Aiden opens his eyes under his cap. Can you love the world and want to leave it? You can, if you see yourself as a blot on it.

  “Been in three searches out here.”

  It’s Gilles again. Aiden sits up. How did they turn out? Don’t ask.

  “We got a good day for this one,” Gilles offers, his black eyes fixed on Aiden.

  “It’s going to be hot.”

  “Yeah, but it’s long.”

  It’s the solstice, Aiden realizes.

  They get back to walking. Aiden is belching processed meat. Sylvie steps vividly into his mind, her new soft, bereft look. She seems glazed these days. Like the girls in the group homes where he used to work, although in their case it was sniff and drugs. We failed her, he thinks. It’s a fairly new notion. Just being ourselves with her and loving her, it wasn’t enough. We needed some sort of method.

  They climb a rise and a low vista stretches before them. Ragged spruce, dead aspen. He feels shaken by its indifference, and the band around his diaphragm tightens. Just for a sec (as though his field of vision has expanded, like a camera lens that gives you more than your naked eye can take in), he sees the whole panorama hurtling towards annihilation, shrivelling at the edges as though a match has been put to it, and he tries to look bravely. He has no choice but to look. But already the vision has narrowed – it’s something his brain can’t sustain – and he’s back in the ordinary bush, where chickadees lift out of the scrub as he adv
ances.

  The road, when she comes across it in the white light of noon, is straight and wide and empty. She stands on the gravel shoulder with her one torn flip-flop in hand. Almost at once the haze of heat in the distance resolves into a big red truck. Its brakes thud and it looms beside her, diesel fumes and a wall of sound. The door opens. A man leans across the passenger seat, his face shaded by a cap. “Oh, god, thank god,” she cries in a voice hoarse from screaming. He doesn’t make any move to get out. He’s jerking his head, urgently signalling. Are you in or not? She sees a metal hand-grip and clutches it, putting her bare foot on the running board to haul herself up.

  He waves her onto the passenger seat. She can’t make out what he says. It’s cold in the truck and the smell is acrid. He unscrews an aluminum water bottle and holds it out. Lentamente, he counsels as she drinks, dribbles running over her chin and onto her T-shirt. He hands her the cap and then he works a gear and the truck is moving again. She screws the cap on and lets the bottle roll to the floor. On either side she sees the bush that called her name when she was crouched by her square metre of earth the day before. Sliding past the dirty windows, already sunk back into itself, low and scrubby, a sea of trees. The bush that rearranged itself as she stumbled through it hour after hour, offering up bewildering ridges, identical and facing in contrary directions. Swamp where silt welcomed and comforted her feet and leeches attached themselves hideously to her ankles. The slopes where light lay in heartless beauty on the aspen as the sun sank, and coyotes prowled yipping in the dark. (Dad, she said. Try to sleep, he said. It’s not you they’re after).

  The cab bounces and pain from her breasts sears through her. Oh, she gasps. The driver’s dark eyes turn in her direction. Kind eyes. He notices her arms, how chewed up they are. From the stings and bites of the insects that were her torment in the bush, drilling into her, over, over, and over, the brutal, obscene question: Did you leave the car window open? Se terminó, se terminó, the man says comfortingly and firmly, as though he knows exactly what happened and how to deal with it. With his eyes fixed on the road, he reaches down and fumbles in a leather pouch between the seats, spilling out its contents on the floor, and thrusts a flat tin at her. He means for her to open it and dab what’s inside on her bites. A painted medallion lies among his things, a beautiful Virgin in a blue robe sprinkled with golden stars. Her lovely face is cast down, her hands folded in prayer. A howl gathers in Sylvie’s throat – the horror is chewing through the lid she’s been holding over it. She sees the silent car sitting by the trail, the baby’s white face in the narrow frame of the rearview mirror. The man talks on in a rapid mixture of English and Spanish, and she braces her shoulder against the dusty door of the truck, blindly clutching the open tin of sticky brown salve in one hand and the top in the other, breathing in the ammonia stink of chickens, hearing the stream of his words like a radio playing in the distance, seeing what it means to be found.

  15

  The Light of My Life

  SUNLIGHT IS POURING THROUGH THE SKYLIGHT by six a.m. They call it a loft, but of course it’s an attic. The attic … you think of madwomen. Or Europe’s Jews hiding from the Nazis, or flood victims peering in terror at the black water creeping up the stairs. One day we might be glad of the skylight, Aiden thinks, lying in bed while Liz sleeps. I can pry it open when the water rises, we’ll be rescued by boat, or helicopter. If there are helicopters. Fuel, what fuel do helicopters use? He rolls onto his stomach. If he worked at it he might doze off again, but he doesn’t have the concentration. Lying on his stomach puts a strain on his back. And the mattress isolates and magnifies his heartbeats, which seem to be arranged in arrhythmic sets of five.

  They started the night with a summer-weight duvet, but it’s been trampled down to the footboard. He rolls back over and looks at Liz, lying on her side facing him, masked like a bandit. She has a pillow tucked between her knees and she’s wearing black panties and a pale green tank top. Through the fabric he can make out one breast stacked softly on the other. In spite of her thinness, a little pad of fat is forming under her chin. His penis is stirring – it’s always been a free agent. Maybe Liz senses him, maybe that’s what the panties and T-shirt are about.

  Last night Thea called to invite Sylvie to a Fringe party. “Sorry, she’s not up to it,” Liz said. She didn’t even call Sylvie to the phone.

  “That’s not right,” Aiden said.

  “Look at her, Aiden. She’s blotto.”

  It’s true that Sylvie has some sort of time delay happening. You speak to her and she’s like a foreign correspondent via satellite from the Middle East, watching you expressionlessly while the message works its way through the mess of synapses. The doctor at the Kenora hospital prescribed Xanax and the hospital gave her a supply to tide her over until she can get in to see her own doctor. She’s not taking it. “Is this all about the water?” Liz says to her. “Because, just for a little while, you could decide to make some fish happy.”

  They have a Tower of Babel thing happening, Liz and Aiden: they’ve woken up from their nightmare speaking entirely different languages. And yet he’s tempted to tease her awake, lie close and run his tongue along her temple. Apparently one of the pseudo-experimental tortures in the concentration camps was to put a naked man and woman in a wintry hut and watch them freeze to death. They always copulated before they died. That’s what Ben Rosen claimed: proof of the primary nature of the sex drive. Ben Rosen, Aiden’s first and most irritating roommate, wore a yarmulke on a daily basis – how could you challenge him? He had a seduction routine that involved lemon drop martinis, but Holocaust lore was at its heart.

  Aiden sits up, reaches for the shorts he dropped by the bed the night before, and eases his working parts into them. He pulls on his jeans and shirt and goes down the stairs to the second floor, where the oak boards squeak and a baby briefly slept and sleeps no longer. He walks past the doorway of his broken-hearted, brave, and troubled daughter. Her door is open about a foot. She’s sleeping on her tummy, her hair tousled, her arms thrown up like a saguaro cactus.

  He goes into the bathroom and uses the toilet, glances while flushing at his turd, ancient and greenish in this blazing light, possibly mossy. He washes his hands and face, brushes his teeth. He’ll shower at work; he’s got clothes there. He makes coffee and flax toast and sits at the counter in the kitchen, eating his toast with honey. The air conditioner is already on, at seven-thirty in the morning. It’s so hot, says the city. And soon it will be fucking cold. Make yourselves comfortable, you suffer enough.

  Peas lie near the gas jets on the range, perfect balls of pure black carbon. Sylvie refused dinner last night, and then she came down to the kitchen and made the dish known in this house is as Indian fried rice. Aiden and Liz sat on the deck the whole time, which required no small exercise of will on Aiden’s part, because his impulse is to never stop talking to her until he figures this out.

  Kenora is a couple of hours east of the lake, just across the Ontario border. Aiden and Noah made the drive there to pick Sylvie up. On the way home she stayed awake. She said she’d been sleeping at the hospital while she waited for them, she would help Aiden watch for deer. She asked him if he knew who was looking after the baby, if he had seen her.

  “So, honey, you stopped to bury a diaper?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And then?”

  “I walked up the ridge. I just went for a minute. She was sound asleep. I was thinking about field school.”

  “Could you see the lake?”

  “I could see the lake once in a while, and at first I could see the hydro line. But I think I must have followed them in the wrong direction.”

  “I can see how you might get lost. But I don’t get how you ended up so far away.”

  “Neither do I,” she said in a small voice.

  “You remember somebody picking you up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then?”

  “I guess I fainted.”
r />   Noah had slept most of the way to Kenora, and from the stillness in the backseat, Aiden wondered if he had fallen asleep again. She’ll tell me when we’re alone, he said to himself. He was disappointed, because the three of them talking this through together felt like a good idea. He’d felt such a bond with Noah by the end of their long day of walking side by side through the bush. And they shared that moment of exhilaration and relief when the cruiser drove up to the search site, just when they were marshalling for supper, and the ponytailed cop announced that Sylvie had been located. By the time they had picked up the Jetta in Powerview, by the time he’d called Liz with the good news, Aiden was high as a kite. As he was buckling up for the drive to Kenora, he looked over at his passenger and it seemed that Noah was haloed, his even, tanned, unexceptional features edged with the late evening sunlight coming in through the dusty windshield. How moved he was that Noah wanted to come along, that he was giving himself to their confused family. Son, he wanted to call him, the way men do on TV.

  He gets up and stands at the window, looking at an empty sky never until this year seen from this yard. A few weeks back, Liz hired a man with a grinder to chip the stumps of the elms. He charged them a fortune and drove away in a blue truck, leaving three massive golden pyramids behind. Somebody has to shovel up that sawdust and haul it away. It’s too hot; it’s been too hot all week. Anyway, Aiden’s instincts are to sit still, keep everything the way it was, so that when the baby comes back and opens her wide, dark eyes in this property they call her home, there won’t be any continuity errors, nothing she can latch on to as proof that she was ever away.

  When he got home from work last night, a police car was parked on the street in front of the house. Sylvie’d already given a statement, but an officer with a blond brush cut wanted to ask her a few questions. He was initially professional and neutral – Aiden noted his efforts to avoid terms such as hitchhike and abandon. But after they’d gone through the story of how she managed to get herself lost, he said (as if his was the first brain shrewd enough to have picked this up), “Here’s what I don’t quite get: You stumble out of the woods around noon the next day. You stand on a secondary road until a motorist stops. And you let this individual drive you south and east, out onto Highway 44, away from where you left your baby. You let him drive you as far as Kenora.”