The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  “One o’clock.”

  “Will she be at the foster home?”

  “No, it’s an office on Stafford.”

  “Do you want to go for a ride in the morning?”

  “Yeah, okay. I haven’t been on my bike yet. All year.”

  “I’ll come over and pick you up. Your tires might be shot.”

  She looked at his tanned face for another long minute, and then she said, “Noah, I’m going to see a psychiatrist next week. It’s partly for the police, and for CFS. But also, the day I got lost, I hallucinated. I heard my name. Like God was calling me, or something.”

  “That was Gilles.”

  “Gilles?”

  Noah hitched his way along the bed so he could lean against the headboard. “After he found the baby, he walked around by the car, shouting for you. He has a really deep voice. You would have heard him.”

  It was as if the light in the room went up. She stepped over to the bed and sat down. At an angle, so she could keep her eyes on him.

  “Who was the guy who picked you up?”

  “His name was Enrique Mendez,” she said. What had really happened with Enrique Mendez had grown so slippery in her mind that she had to bear down hard to get it out.

  “Why didn’t you just tell the police?”

  She started to explain and found she couldn’t go on, for how fucking stupid it was. “Although it’s weird, you know, that he wasn’t curious about me. He never said, ‘What are you doing out here? Why are you so upset?’ He just picked me up and drove.”

  “He probably didn’t want to get into anything,” Noah said. “He had his own problems. But most people would have asked for his help right away.”

  She ran her finger back and forth along a seam of the quilt, a perfect straight line her mother had sewn. Finally she crawled up the bed and lay down. He swung his legs up and stretched out beside her. They lay side by side on the quilt, watching the ceiling fan wobble above them.

  “All the time I was lost, I tried not to think about the baby alone in the car. Because it freaked me out so much. And then, when I got into the truck, it was just there. The baby had been in the car for twenty-four hours, and no one had any idea where I had gone, and right then, I understood that she never could have survived. She had died because of me. And I couldn’t say it out loud. I couldn’t say it to that man. When we got to Kenora and he let me out at the hospital, well, then I finally said it.”

  She could feel the sweat along her hairline pricking coldly with each revolution of the fan. A door banged below and footsteps climbed the stairs to the loft.

  “Everyone thinks I should be happy because the baby was saved and it all turned out fine.”

  Noah reached over and took her hand. He lifted it to his chest and held it with both of his.

  “But you know, if you realize something that terrible could have happened, it’s almost the same as if it did. Like the possibility is still there, you’re always going to know that.”

  She let his hand go and turned onto her side, facing him. She wanted to tell him the whole story of that night, what she saw when she watched the sky clear and the satellites crawling among the stars: how infinitesimal she was, and yet, how one little thing she did could turn the whole world black. How could these things both be true? And she wondered whether Noah also knew this, about himself? Did he live in the same strange flicker?

  There was so much she could never tell him. But there was a lot that she could, and they had hardly made a start. Then he rolled over too and lay studying her face. It was not sympathy she saw in his eyes exactly, but interest. He was a person who wanted to know her, and who wanted to know the truth.

  “It’s not just that she could have died because of me,” she said slowly. She paused until she had enough breath for the rest. “It’s that, all those weeks I looked after her, I never really knew she was alive. I only started to get it that day in the truck, when I thought she had died.”

  What theatre or courtroom or temple would be adequate for the ceremony they enact that day? In fact it’s a three-storey cement-block office building they go into, a shell that could be torn down and erased from memory in a week.

  “Sorry, the air conditioning is nuts,” the receptionist says. She leads them to the frigid room where a social worker waits for them and where their baby lies. In a car seat on a table, clutching a teething ring in her perfect starfish hands, trying, with an infant’s optimism, to cram it into her mouth. She’s wearing a familiar red and purple dress, and Sylvie understands that, like the other strangers she’s encountered in the last few weeks, the foster mother is kind, she dressed the baby in one of the outfits Liz sent over.

  When she and Noah come back out, they lean against the building for a few minutes, not talking, not touching, just trying to get warm in the sun. Then they get on their bikes and ride through the streets to the Forks. To the point of land where people in deerskin jackets and moccasins met for centuries, paddling in from three directions in birchbark canoes. Cree and Saulteaux traded there and danced and feasted, leaving behind projectile points and pottery shards. One of them left a footprint, a single eight-hundred-year-old footprint in the river clay.

  A powwow is going on today. Sylvie and Noah cycle up to the sound of drumming. They can see red regalia and feather headdresses and the stoop and lift of the dancers. But they can’t get close for the crowd, so they lock their bikes and run down the limestone steps, out onto the riverside path. The brown surface of the river is dimpled with tiny whirlpools. Boats roar by on the water and cars stream over the midtown bridge, and above the city floats a red and blue RE/MAX balloon, so low they can see the intermittent blasts of its gas jets. To the far-off sound of the drumming they walk quickly along the river, weaving their way among joggers and dogs and bikes and happy families with children.

  They pass under the bridge, through a dark and dirty passage stinking of pee. On the other side the path becomes a trail, and they follow it to a secluded spot. A narrow stretch of bush where raccoons and squirrels and foxes and otters and even coyotes live out their wild lives in the heart of the city. Noah drops his backpack and stretches out, using it for a pillow. Sylvie slips off her sandals and eases herself down beside him, lying on her back in the dandelions and wild mustard.

  In the Child and Family Services office, she was the one who held their daughter first. In the weeks since she’d seen her, the baby she knew had vanished; their little girl had entered a new stage. She snuffled at them as though snuffling amused her, and she held up her head and pressed her strong little legs into Sylvie’s lap, determined to stand. Between her own two hands Sylvie could feel how frail the baby’s ribs were, she could feel her breath inflating the tiny balloon of her chest. But this little girl had already set out on her solitary journey through the world; she’d seen things her parents knew nothing about.

  “Oh, baby. Hey, baby,” Sylvie said shakily. She didn’t cry – she’d spent the last six months crying. But Noah did: she saw the skin around his eyes soften and redden as tears surfaced. Once you start crying, it’s hard to stop. They were side by side on a couch – in that office they dared to sit like a family for the first time – and she passed their daughter to him. The baby drooled over his shoulder, following Sylvie with her eyes.

  “She still knows my voice,” Sylvie said.

  “I see that,” said the social worker, whose name was Valerie Glover.

  Valerie Glover’s face and voice were kind. She was older than the social worker who had come to the house, and warmer. She’d often worked with young parents struggling with ambivalence, she said, and she took its strands apart with care, stressing what voluntary surrender meant, how open and revocable it was for a few months, and how closed and final after that. She read them the legal definition of adoption and offered three paraphrases.

  Sylvie was trembling from the cold. Please, she wanted to say. We’re not stupid. But of course Valerie Glover was watching them closely, and no doubt th
at’s exactly what puzzled her. Sylvie reached over and cupped the baby’s downy head with her hand. “We never even named her,” she finally said.

  “Have you talked over your intentions with your parents? No? Well, you need to do that. With your permission, I’d like to meet with them.”

  “My mother will be glad we’re doing this,” Noah said. “This is what she wanted all along.”

  The baby reached up a hand and grabbed Noah’s ear, and his eyes filled again. In the end, Sylvie thought, when all their visits were over and the papers were signed, that would be what she remembered best. And the baby’s steady eyes (Noah’s eyes), which met theirs curiously and neutrally. And her eggshell skin, and the way her lashes were fixed to her eyelids. Sylvie took it all in hungrily, trying to press it deep into her memory. She tried to be a responsible agent for her future self.

  At the Forks now, she can feel the baby’s phantom weight warm on her chest. As they were following the riverwalk, they saw a massive catfish lying on the ground, black and rubbery, mischievous whiskers drooping from its face. The fisherman turned his head and smiled at them, showing the gaps in his teeth, and she thought of Enrique Mendez, who came from a world where you have to do hard things – complicated, dangerous, ruthless things – because you don’t have privilege to insulate you.

  She closes her eyes and the smell of weeds and mud rises up around her. She can’t hear the drumming now, but if she’s very still, she can sense it in the ground. After they left her house this morning they cycled over to Maggie’s and went to Noah’s room to talk. Animals have babies, Sylvie said, sitting on the little bed where Noah used to sleep in his Astro Boy pyjamas. And they just love them and look after them. It’s all natural.

  I don’t know if we can use other animals as a model for everything, Noah said. Humans have kind of taken it to a different level.

  From the living room the television blared – Krzysztof’s mother was watching Judge Judy. Sylvie didn’t realize at first that Noah was crying. He was sitting with his elbow on his knee and his head in his hand, and then she heard the dry sounds of his weeping, and leaned against him, one arm around his waist. They sat there for a long time. It’s not a perfect way, they said to each other. There is no perfect way.

  When she finally lifts her head from the grass, she’s alone. She rolls over and props herself on her elbows. The drums have stopped and the sun is low, slicing in bands through the trees. The river seems to have vanished, having taken in all the green of the day.

  Noah is down on the bank, she can see his white shirt. He’s standing still under the office towers that give the sunlight back in gold. From the tilt of his head, he seems to be listening. Then, against a screen of trembling leaves, his hands float up. As though the force of gravity is reversed – it’s levitating them. Suddenly he pivots. Once, twice, three times he addresses the air, his fingers splayed like white flight feathers. He never quite rises to his full height; he’s fighting at a crouch.

  But is he fighting or is it a dance, or a prayer? Sylvie lies on her stomach and digs her fingers into the root-woven turf, watching as, over and over, he places his feet on the slippery clay of the riverbank and lunges, palms out, working to get it right. For a long time she watches, and then she scrambles to her feet and walks through the weeds towards him, feeling the clay under her bare soles, feeling it dampen and cool as she steps down the bank.

  Acknowledgements

  THE EPIGRAPH IS FROM THE POEM “RIVER EDGE:” in the collection Torch River by Elizabeth Philips.

  The koan “No Water, No Moon” is included in 101 Zen Stories (1919), compiled by Nyogen Senzaki.

  My deep appreciation to the team at McClelland and Stewart, especially to my editor, Lara Hinchberger – I am endlessly grateful for your commitment and good judgment. Thanks to Martha Magor Webb and everyone at Anne McDermid and Associates.

  Thank you to the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for financial support. I was also privileged to work on this novel in two wonderful residency programs: Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon, with the support of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, and the Winnipeg Public Library’s Writer-in-Residence program.

  For their suggestions and expertise, thank you to Dr. Karen Scott at the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium, Adelle Yanusyewski, Harry Daase, Mary Lou McGurran, and Winnipeg’s Pinhole Artist Collective.

  Warmest appreciation to Anita Lahey, Maurice Mierau, Sam Baardman, and Susan Israel, who generously put their minds to earlier versions of part or all of this novel, and a special thank-you to Sam for the title. Hazel Loewen, your insight enriched this book, as it has enriched my life for decades. Heidi Harms; my father, Ralph Thomas; Caitlin, and Bill – I am so grateful for your support and love.