by Joan Thomas
“East? I didn’t know what direction it was. I was just glad somebody picked me up.”
“Did you tell him you’d left your baby alone in the car and had to get back?”
Always the pause. “I tried to tell him. He didn’t speak English.”
“What language did he speak?”
“I don’t know.”
“What might it have been? Take a guess.”
“Indonesian?”
“Can you describe this individual?”
“He was maybe forty.” Pause. “He was just ordinary looking.”
“He didn’t speak English, and yet he had a driver’s licence. Frankly, that’s another puzzle to me.”
“He was driving. That doesn’t mean he had a driver’s licence.” She had a canny look.
“You could be right about that. But he had a truck. A big – what was it? – black truck. He stopped and picked you up in a truck and he drove south on Highway 11, and then he turned east and went out on Highway 44. Did he harm you at all? Make, er, sexual advances?”
“No. No.”
“And you stayed with him all the way to Kenora.”
“I was waiting for a town. So I could get out and call someone. And then I might have fainted.”
“You might have fainted?”
“I had been walking and crying all night. I had nothing to eat. Anyway, what was the hurry?”
“What was the hurry?” The cop repeated this without inflection, but he darted his eyes to the side as if to say, Where is the jury when you need it?
Sylvie, forced to speak the unspeakable, was scarlet. “If my baby was still in the car, it was way too late to help her.”
Aiden bikes through the traffic-clotted streets to work, a middle-aged professional man on a hybrid bike. At the office he showers and changes. They’re doing a Schubert hour on Classic 107. Christine Tolefson comes in looking alert, a little life in her painted face. Then it’s Norman Orlikow, his hair combed as if he’s just stepped out of the Mad Men dressing room, wearing saddle oxfords and what Aiden would call a bowling shirt. Sylvie would know whether his look is retro or just weird.
Norman is back after a six-month hiatus. He approached Aiden at the coffee kiosk in the lobby of Aiden’s building a few days ago.
“I’d like to make an appointment, Doctor Phimister,” he said. “But these are my terms.” He actually had only one term: they don’t go back to “that stuff that happened.” Aiden understood that Norman didn’t want to pay for the broken window. His eyes were fluttering nervously and Aiden was struck by what a tiny seed willingness is. But it’s all you need, really – or all you are likely to get.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
“You know,” he says now, “seeing we’re making a new start here, I want to clarify a few things. First off, I’m not a doctor. You can call me Aiden. Second, we need to be clear about why you are here. This whole process is about you learning to see yourself. So you can change. Get over certain things, think about yourself differently. It’s not about enlisting me to confirm how cruel the world has been to you. You will be in therapy forever if you don’t grasp that.”
“Wouldn’t you like that? At a hundred bucks a shot?”
“No. I’m not using you for my own ends. That’s not what this is about.”
Norman seems to be taking this in, turning his lips thoughtfully inside out. It’s a fascinating display, like watching an octopus emerge from its den. Then, as an illustration of how sincere he is in his efforts to change, he launches into an account of the work picnic he just attended, at which he tried hard to come out of himself by signing up for volleyball, a sport he’d enjoyed in high school. But sadly, he was ostracized during the game. Volleys that should have been his were scooped and tipped towards other, more popular personnel.
Aiden keeps his eyes on Norman through this whole sad saga, but he can’t entirely control the voices in his head. You keep up that crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.
He runs at noon, runs in the punishing heat. Two guys are sitting outside the shack on the riverbank, drinking beer. Aiden feels a lurch of longing as he peers through the trees. Could you subsist on cattails and catfish? Water – could you drink from the river? Not likely. The river is swollen, it’s menacing. You used to be able to trust it but you can’t anymore. It’s chewing at the banks, it’s full of phosphorus and spiteful alien species.
And the air is smoky. A hundred miles away, close to Minaki, close to Otter Lake, the forest is burning. Out of nowhere he thinks about his mother, the way she died. Did she see anything as obliteration flew towards her, as it brutally smashed through the windshield? Did she have a split-second of knowing? In a way he hopes she did. She always believed the world would end with a bang; it would have meant something to her to find out she was right.
Back in his office he jumps into cold water, a naked man soaping his balls in the heart of an office building. He pictures a woman in the next office, two feet away. Sitting at a computer entering numbers on a spreadsheet, eating machine-made sushi off a black foam tray. She lifts her head and says, “Is it raining?” The hot water hits and Aiden reaches in her direction, reaches for the shampoo.
Then he’s standing at his office window with damp hair, eating his sandwich – red pepper hummus and cucumber. The exercise endorphins have kicked in, his serotonergic system and his noradrenergic system briefly align. “An Indonesian-speaking individual?” he hears Liz say. He shrugs. Does it really matter at this point?
By midafternoon Liz is up on the stepladder, feeding Polyfilla into cracks on the western wall of the dining room. It’s thirty-four degrees but she’s full of jumpy energy, she’s got to do something. She stretches to reach above the window frame, scraping her trowel over a tiny crack like a bolt of forked lightning. Amazing how much shifting a hundred-year-old house will do.
Sylvie sits on the floor below her with a garbage bag, grooming Max. It’s strange and lovely to have her barefoot and cross-legged in the archway where she played all the time as a kid. She’s twenty now. They had a quiet birthday with an ice-cream log from DQ. She’s thinner than she was at this time last year; she’s lost her pregnancy weight and more, and her cheekbones add a new, serious character to her face. Her hair is caught up in an elastic and damp, wavy strands are plastered to the back of her neck in this heat.
For two weeks now the baby’s been in the foster home. Sylvie doesn’t talk about her. This morning they made a list of things she’s prepared to do, and she agreed to tackle one job a day, just to get moving. Plant the lupins Liz picked up at the greenhouse – there’s enough sun in the yard now for lupins. Organize their digital pictures into files. Go through her boxes of stuff from the dorm. “I miss Kajri,” she said when Liz mentioned the dorm. Call Kajri, Liz wanted to write on the list, but Sylvie wouldn’t let her.
Liz drags the stepladder to the north wall. This at least is a methodical job, a job you know will yield results: just let things dry and sand faithfully between coats. Against the chalky white of the filler, the old paint shows up dull and tired. It was some sort of ecru – although it would have had one of those designer names. Operation Desert Storm is the only phrase that comes to mind.
“My mother was so into pastels,” Liz says to Sylvie. “Remember? Her lavender room and her aqua room and her pink room? And every room had one wall papered with a floral print in the same colour. The feature wall, she called it. They bought that great big split-level just when Auntie Maureen and I were leaving home. It gave Mom something to do. She spent two years dithering over colours.”
You’re dithering over colours, Sylvie points out by her silence, and in silent rebuttal, Liz calls up a picture of her mom in her new home, setting a polished cherry-wood table with perfectly matched and aligned china and silverware. Her mom at the kitchen sink, scrubbing at pots with a martyrish zeal while the rest of them sit at the table eating their dessert. Wearing a pastel polyester pant suit with a coordinating
floral blouse – she looked like she’d been peeled off one of the walls of her own house. She was my age, Liz thinks with surprise. No. God. She was younger. There’s a mystery there – she catches a dizzying glimpse of it and wants to go closer, but an iron door clangs shut in her face. She puts a hand on the wall for balance, heedless of the fresh filler.
Just then Sylvie finds a tick on Max’s belly, latched on but not engorged. She pulls it off with a Kleenex and holds it up to show Liz.
“Oh, get that away from me!” Liz says. “You know, when I was young, finding a wood tick was a huge deal. We found maybe one a year. Now they’re all over the place. Bedbugs – it’s the same thing.”
Everything is changing, Sylvie seems to say by her silence.
Mom, she says these days, and Liz says, Yes, honey. Like the other day, when they were out on the deck, and she said, “Mom? How many condoms in a package?”
“Usually twelve,” Liz said. “Why do you ask, honey?”
“There were only seven in Noah’s bathroom at the lake.”
“He likely gave some to a buddy,” Liz said. “Guys do that.” It was an opening, and a better mother would have run with it. But, god knows, they all need a little reassurance at the moment.
Sylvie has an appointment to see a psychiatrist next week. The police are waiting to see the report; they want to know whether she fits the profile for postpartum depression before they decide whether they will charge her. “I’ll tell them a story and they’ll make up their minds,” Sylvie said at the table last night. “Is Sylvie okay or is she sick? Is she good or is she evil? Can she be a mom or can’t she?”
“Nobody is suggesting you’re evil, honey,” Liz said. But (though she’s been hounding the child welfare authorities) she’s stymied by the whole thing. Sitting on the deck night after night, she and Aiden go over it. Is it such a crime, Aiden says, to stroll a few yards away to bury a diaper? Anyone can get lost in the woods. There was no one around who was going to steal the baby. But Kenora? Liz says. How could she end up in Kenora, unless she was running away? Still, Aiden says. You’d think they’d want this infant with her family while they investigate. I agree, Liz says. I don’t get it. There is something going on that I can’t figure out. And Maggie? Where is the beauteous goddess of new-age parenting now that everything’s fallen apart?
On the floor now, Sylvie gives one last lick of the brush to Max’s haunch. He recognizes her farewell pat and walks stiffly away. She leans against the wall and closes her eyes. Instantly she’s back riding in a big white truck that smells like a chicken barn. There’s a leather satchel on the floor at her feet. The driver tells her to open it, and directs her to a cardboard folder with a photograph tucked inside, his hijas queridas. Two little girls with dark hair pulled back from their blunt faces. They were standing against a cement-block wall, pressed closely together: Anaclaudia, the taller one in the red sweater, eyes wary and her arm tight around her little sister, and Esmeralda, in a bright pink T-shirt and turquoise jacket, looking trustingly at the camera. “La luz de mi vida,” he says fervently. “Sí,” Sylvie says. She’s never studied Spanish but she’s been to Isla Mujeres.
She opens her eyes and sits up, sinking her fingers into the dog brush, gathering up a handful of coarse grey hair, which she drops into the garbage bag. This story has a happy ending. The man is kind, he does not harm her. After some hours of travel, they come to a town and he pulls up in front of a brick building and tells her to go in. She slides awkwardly down from the high seat of the truck and walks up to the door. It opens on its own, revealing a hospital. She goes straight up to the desk and tells someone who she is and what she has done. Then she sits in a chair with her head in her arms until a woman comes back and bends over her and says, “We talked to the police. Your baby is okay, someone found her in time.”
She scoots her butt back towards the wall. She feels so light these days. Because her breasts are vanishing … well, shrinking. She lays one hand on her scar, where pain blooms. Not the pain from her surgery – that’s gone, she’s totally recovered. She can do anything now, as long as she can cope with the feelings that grab at her whenever she moves quickly. Your baby is okay, the woman said. Sylvie sees her tiny, grasping hands, takes in the smell of spit-up milk. The light of my life, she says to herself, trying out the words. She stretches out her legs on the cool floorboards and the old panic rises. La luz de mi vida, she whispers, leaning her head back against the wall: it’s a little easier in Spanish.
If you talk to someone about what happened, you’ll get over it faster, her dad pointed out this morning, standing in the doorway of her room. I believe you, she said. But she knows the way she talks, the hateful sound of her voice when (for example) she is forced to answer the questions of the police. A voice she still hears screaming Baby into the bush, a bush that had fallen silent, no sound then but her own panting, and her own calling and screaming, which sometimes echoed.
If she could see the nurse from the Kenora hospital again, she would talk to her. The nurse in the aqua jumpsuit, who took Sylvie to a room and started an IV to get her fluids up, and who was standing with a policeman in the doorway when Sylvie woke up. The cop lifted his hand and said, “Bye,” and Sylvie said, “Are they leaving me without a guard?” and the nurse said, “Get a grip. He’s my boyfriend. He just dropped by on his break.” She came over to the bed and set about checking Sylvie’s blood pressure and temperature. Sylvie was feeling drugged from her short sleep, and she was filled with wonder at the sight of this woman planted solidly by the bed with her big feet in pink Crocs, larger than life, more fully realized, a heavy metallic zipper straining over her humungous breasts, a fat, bulging frog-throat with a little chin perched high above it, and a red rash on that throat with tiny black dots in it, as though she shaved. “So tell me,” the nurse said in a bold voice as she stuck a probe into Sylvie’s ear. “How exactly does a tiny baby end up alone in a car in the middle of nowhere?”
Sylvie rubbed her arms, which were chalky now with calamine lotion. “I had to bury a dirty diaper. And I didn’t take her with me because if I tried to put her in the sling I’d have woken her up.” Her own voice was hoarse from all her screaming. “I just walked a little way into the bush to check something out. Then, when I turned back, I came to the ridge, and I saw the sand where I’d buried the diaper, but the car was gone. So then I was running up and down, looking for the car, and I got all mixed up. I saw something white under some spruce – it was bright, I could see it from far away, and I thought it was the diaper I’d buried, like it had already been dug up by animals and dragged there. I ran all the way over to it, and here it was a disposable diaper somebody else had dumped there. It wasn’t even my diaper. And then I was so lost.” The nurse was watching her closely with little blue eyes. “It felt like hours might have gone by, or days. It was like there’s another world behind the world we’re in, and suddenly I was in it. Like I’d stepped through a portal.”
“You read too much science fiction,” the nurse said. “Your car was there. Nobody moved your car. If you’d stopped running around like a chicken with its head cut off, you would have figured it out. But I understand you walked to the road and you hitchhiked here?”
In the cold blue clarity of her gaze lay the things Sylvie was straining to see. “Are people saying I did this on purpose?”
The nurse lifted her big shoulders. “I haven’t heard a word on the subject.”
She was bundling up the blood pressure cuff, she was getting ready to leave. The terrible possibilities of the night still gripped Sylvie. But the nurse was going to refuse to utter a judgment, although there was judgment in every line of her body.
“I suppose you have children,” Sylvie said.
“I’ve got three.”
“Well, I didn’t even know I was pregnant until this baby was half-developed.”
“Oh, is that right?”
“And you know – I sort of feel like I didn’t really have her. I didn’t go t
hrough labour. All over the world, women labour when they give birth. But it’s like modern medicine used a shortcut with me.” The nurse was peering at her as if she was looking over reading glasses. Sylvie wanted to grab hold of her arm to keep her there, but she didn’t have the nerve. “I didn’t even learn the breathing. I treated the prenatal classes like a joke.”
“So you think that’s why you had a C-section?” the nurse said, provoked at last. “Because you didn’t learn the breathing?”
“Well, maybe. In some strange way.”
The nurse dropped her clipboard on the bed. “Listen, Sylvia. I was eighteen when I had my first baby, and I lived behind a gas station in Cochenor, way up in northern Ontario. I’d never heard of pain-control breathing. I had contractions for twenty-four hours and I screamed like a stuck pig through most of it. Second time, I was washing dishes and my water broke, and the next thing I know, I’ve got a little girl sucking on my tit. My third, I had a planned C-section because I’ve got uterine leiomyoma, also known as fibroids. So, am I going to be a good mother to one of those kids and not to the other two?”
She was practically yelling by the end of this speech, and she snatched up her clipboard and left the room as though she couldn’t get away from Sylvie fast enough.
Sylvie turns her head and looks at her mother, who is crouched now, scraping plaster into nicks along the baseboard. How strikingly graceful and slender she is compared to the larger-than-life woman in Sylvie’s mind. Close like this, Sylvie feels her anxiety. She tries so hard, Sylvie thinks. At everything. And still she gets it wrong. How can that be?