The Matter of Sylvie

by Lee Kvern

  “God, yes, give the man whipped cream, please,” Lloyd says.

  Lloyd hears the abrupt click of the speaker. He laughs. In the back seat Jimmy Widman rubs his smooth hands together. Nice to see him alive, awake, receptive.

  Lloyd pulls the Camaro forward. The disembodied woman from the speaker stands by the closed window tallying Lloyd’s order on the side of a foldout box. Lloyd studies the paper napkin from Judge Wade, which he hopes will suffice. He hasn’t got many options left. He waits for the woman to open the window, studies her face. The woman’s face like her voice, acidic, wearied, carved out like an aging farmer, too many bad years, failed crops, older and nothing much to show for it. He knows the look, has seen it in Jacqueline’s eyes, his own.

  “Six dollars, fifty-eight cents, sir,” the woman says, her breath visible white in the frigid air.

  Lloyd passes her a twenty. Her thin eyes run over the RCMP insignia on his parka, the thick black racing stripes up the hood of Pete’s orange Camaro. Jimmy, battered and suspect in the back seat. She raises her brow but doesn’t ask. Nor does Lloyd offer. Nonetheless it doesn’t change a thing between them, just another order, another customer, the woman overaged and underemployed at Burger Baron. And Lloyd, status-clad as he is in his navy RCMP parka, is tired, bone weary as this Wednesday is long.

  Jimmy pushes the passenger seat forward, tries to manoeuvre the door handle.

  “Where you headed, Jimmy?”

  “Bathroom,” Jimmy slurs.

  Lloyd leans over, helps Jimmy open the passenger door.

  “Make sure you come right back,” Lloyd says, surveying the vast nothingness of the frozen prairie around them, the stand-alone Burger Baron. No place really to go.

  Jimmy gets out, winks his one good eye at Corporal Lloyd.

  Amazing he can even walk, considering, Lloyd thinks, and shuts the door to keep the heat in.

  Lloyd hangs his hand out the window to retrieve his change from the woman.

  “Waiting on the fries,” she says, handing over his change, then snaps the take-out window shut before Lloyd can thank her.

  Lloyd rolls his window up, glances over the restaurant to locate Jimmy, but he’s nowhere in sight. Must be in the men’s room. A few older men sit in the plain wood booths sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups reading the Edmonton Journal likely, not much else news-wise going on north of the province’s capital. Over in the corner, a birthday party in progress, for a girl from the looks of the bright pink and red shiny balloons. The gaggle of smiling, laughing children, their warm-faced mothers. Helium balloons in abundance, tied to the tables in bunches, around the kids’ skinny wrists, floating in a row along the top of the coat rack, a veritable balloon fest.

  Oddly, sadly, it makes him think of Sylvie. All he ever wanted for her. All any father wants for their children: bright, shiny, floating on top of this world happy. Or at the very least, a solid chance at it. Not too much to ask for, is it? He envisions Sylvie housed in Michener, imprisoned in her own mind. Hopes to some charitable God that’s not the case. Hopes instead she possesses the fleeting memory of a goldfish. Doesn’t recollect her family on each loop around her large shared bedroom. Around the fish bowl of the small crowded day room at Michener. Lloyd hopes she has no recollection whatsoever: of Jacqueline, their two-door Plymouth Fury, his unpardonable absence. The swift chill beneath Lloyd’s shirt has nothing to do with the weather.

  He wills himself to quit thinking, watches the birthday children chase one another around the Burger Baron in between french fry breaks, gulps of pop, hugs from their mothers, a simple game of child’s tag.

  Lloyd glances at his watch, almost 2:30. They’d better get a move on if he’s going to get to Michener before the administration office closes at 4:30. Wouldn’t do him or Jimmy Widman any good to have to spend the night in Red Deer. Besides that, there’s anxiousness in the pit of his belly, something to do with the day, getting home to Jacqueline, his children, some part of him not ready to face Sylvie after all this time.

  He rolls down his window, knocks on the drive-thru to get the older woman’s attention. He can’t see her. But over by the coat rack with the plethora of birthday balloons taped above it, he spots Jimmy in his powder blue ski suit with his back to him. He’s jerking about. What is he doing? Lloyd hopes it’s not some sort of standing seizure. Though he knows from Sylvie that’s not possible. Petit mal, yes, but anything grand would require the full co-operation of the body and always on the floor. Maybe an after-effect to hypothermia that Lloyd doesn’t know about? Jesus Christ, will this day never end?

  Lloyd raps sharply on the takeout window, rouses the attention of one of the birthday mothers, young, pretty, dark short hair, pleasing green eyes. She smiles at Lloyd, waves. Lloyd doesn’t know if she’s waving at him, his RCMP-ness, or the Z28 Camaro, all things being equal, or so he imagines.

  From his vantage point in the Camaro he can see Jimmy from the waist up, and whatever Jimmy’s busy with over there in the corner by the coat rack, it must be enthralling because he can’t get Jimmy to notice him.

  “Goddamn.” He shuts the motor off, climbs out of the car; the affront of the burning cold seizes his breath. He zips up his parka. And all at once, at precisely the same time, Lloyd sees, too, what the pretty mother, the other mothers, their gaggle of children, the men reading newspaper, the acidic woman who has reappeared—he sees what they see. They all watch Jimmy’s back: the ski pants dropped around his ankles. His legs, two pale-coloured sticks like flamingos. The flat of his exposed buttocks, the accompanying herky-jerky motion.

  Lloyd sees the young mother’s face in a muted howl through the closed window of the Burger Baron as he bolts to the entrance. Hopes he can get there in time, avert an all-out disaster. The children scrambling back to their mothers, the older men rising from the wood booths, but not one makes a move toward Jimmy. He could be live, like a grenade, go off unexpectedly. And Jimmy, Jimmy Widman in all his glory, in his women’s ski suit, the shiny pink and red birthday balloons, full, round, curved in such a way that the colour pales ever so slightly at the peak of each balloon like delicate nipples. Not one, not a pair, but ten, fifteen, twenty almost bursting, rousing balloons floating in the over-heated air above the coat rack.

  At the last possible moment, and before Lloyd is able to traverse the short distance across the restaurant, Jimmy Widman turns his head, no doubt in response to the combined wailing of children and mothers alike. Jimmy turns for the grand finale. His closing moment, the pin from his live grenade. He smiles eagerly, innocently at the birthday crowd, the men, the vinegar-faced woman with the hot chocolate in her hand, his whipped cream a mile high. He ejaculates onto the concrete floor of the Burger Baron.

  Like breasts, is all Lloyd can think of as he tackles Jimmy to the floor, broken ribs and jaw, hypothermia aside. Good Christ Almighty, who thought that up?

  Wednesday, October 1987 » Lesa, age 31

  Lesa parks her mother’s Toyota in the handicap spot in front of the administration building at Michener. She’s not sure where exactly to find Sylvie. She may have to run inside and find out. She surveys the immaculate grounds gone winter yellow. Such an extravagant sprawl of space you rarely see in cities these days. Oddly reserved for the invisible, forgotten people inside Michener, her sister Sylvie included.

  She recalls in past times these grounds were filled with men, women, children, fourteen hundred strong across the meticulously kept grounds. Deceptively open, no fences or barriers separating Michener from the magnificent sway of willow, fir, and birch trees in between. The winding paths and picnic tables, sun chairs and children’s playground, the suburban neighbourhoods adjacent. Stark contrast to the locked-down brick buildings, the metal-barred windows. All the aberrant bright-faced children housed within. She’s since learned the ABCs of mental illness: autistic, bipolar, compulsive, Down syndrome. The order and disorder of the impulsive, the obsessive, the paranoid and schizoid—and the catch-all when none of the other labels woul
d suffice: the clinically depressed, too many of them children.

  She climbs reluctantly out of her mother’s car, not ready to go inside yet. Her distant memory of Michener some same sad river. Lesa sinks down on the curb, feels a sharp stab in her right lung, hopes she hasn’t fractured something from her ditch roll. She tests each rib gingerly with her fingertips, though the ache seems to be deeper, interior. She worries about her marijuana use, her half-a-pack-a-day cigarette habit. Possibly that? She wonders if she’s imagining it? She doesn’t know—could be the whole place makes her achy inside, clinically depressed.

  She pulls out a John, lights it in spite of herself.

  Mostly it’s the children, the beleaguered children Lesa can’t forget. Their medicated, glassy eyes skipping over one another crowded thirty-odd in an eight-by-ten room, one worn-out caregiver in their numbers. The confused, perplexed faces of the children. Why were they here? Where were their parents? Their families, their brothers and sisters? Who were all these strangers? Or perhaps those were the questions that eddied through Lesa’s childhood mind the few times they made the pilgrimage to see Sylvie after she was admitted.

  The details of those few pilgrimages: her father silent, morose, waiting outside in their Plymouth Fury with young Nate and baby Clare. While Lesa, neither young enough to remain behind nor old enough to comprehend, went inside with her mother. Her mother’s large dark sunglasses that hid the tears that trickled off her high cheekbones, spilled down her face regardless when she spotted Sylvie sitting at a table filling sheets of lined paper with meticulous rows upon rows of circles within circles within circles. The antithesis of Sylvie herself. And for Lesa that same past image of Sylvie embedded in her cells like DNA: Sylvie delicate-shouldered, dark-eyed, oddly quiet in the middle of the room. While all around her, the room was teeming with people, rocking in every corner, every chair, gesturing wildly behind the secured windows. People on the move, their hands and arms flailing in perpetual motion, moving silent, loud mouths. The combined gabble of the young/old/male/female.

  Her sister Sylvie frozen in time, perfectly still in this space—oblivious to the chaotic, catatonic nightmare around her. The alien closed culture of the mentally ill hidden from public view in a government institution. Or so it seemed to young Lesa.

  And later in the car, her father would take them to Dairy Queen, and they went inside and ordered a round of french fries and root beer, chocolate-dipped cones as if in celebration of Sylvie—of her new life away from theirs. Her father looked across the orange plastic booth at her mother, tried to smooth his hand over hers on the table. Only her mother pulled away, tucked her hand on Nate’s soft belly, played the elusive surface of Clare’s baby face. Only once did she leave it there that Lesa could recall. Years beyond those days at Michener, after her father had been diagnosed with the covert cancer that occupied him from the inside out in silent military precision. Then he reached across their kitchen table for her. Her mother’s hand beneath her father’s. The resigned look of some unvoiced sadness in both their eyes. And then, only then, could they forget, forgive themselves for a short time, go back to some semblance of married life for my father’s remaindered time. Not uncomplicated, never easy, but necessary in some way.

  Lesa takes a final drag from her cigarette, feels the insular pain deep in her lung, knows she’s not imaging it. She may have to give up smoking altogether. She flicks her cigarette butt into the flowerbed in the front of building, among the tall dried stalks of poppies, the colourless dead chrysanthemums. Remembers the bright bit of Sylvie’s face—that almost serene gap between everything that was going on around her, her parents, and Michener. She remembers the river, she remembers the adage: You cannot step into the same river twice.

  She’s not sure that’s true. Yesterday’s river is still raging, deep and silent, bleak despite the brilliant surface.

  The concrete cold beneath her, Lesa stands up outside the administration building, willing but unable to will herself inside. She sees the curl of smoke from her discarded cigarette thickening. The smoke changing from white to yellow as the desiccated flowers catch on. She watches through eyes half shut, and just at that moment when the smouldering is no longer a magician’s smokescreen, but the real thing, fire and heat, the heart of the matter, Lesa sprints across the lawn, stamps out the hungry flames beneath her white tennis shoes.

  Perhaps the same sad river but not the same woman.

  Wednesday, July 1961 » Jacqueline, age 27

  Coldly, methodically, the dis-ease in full control now, with intent, as if she had thought it out meticulously in her head, planned, deliberate, premeditated, but no, the idea hadn’t occurred to her until this precise moment: a solution, reprieve, respite. She walks through the dead quiet of the house with purpose she hasn’t felt in years. Lesa and Nate are sleeping in their room. Sylvie, peanut butter and all, has fallen asleep next to the tartan chesterfield on the living room carpet among the drying Lego. Jacqueline goes into her bedroom, pulls down two of her husband’s beige RCMP shirts that she irons every Sunday night for the week ahead while the children watch Walt Disney Presents on the television. Then she goes into the kitchen and fishes around in the orange ceramic bowl by the sink for the keys to her husband’s ’57 Plymouth Fury. She doesn’t drive. He mostly drives the company cruiser.

  Jacqueline tiptoes down the hall so as not to wake Lesa or Nate, peers into the dim light of Sylvie’s room. The lone bed, the locked closet, the windows she had her husband reinforce shut so Sylvie couldn’t climb out at night. No pictures on the walls for Sylvie to pull down and possibly smash the glass when the black moods, Jacqueline calls them, overtake her. Then there is nothing to be done but hold the bedroom door shut knowing Sylvie’s safe inside and wait it out until she falls into a shattered heap on the floor. Then Jacqueline goes in and sits on the floor, holds Sylvie in her arms until she quietens, returns to the present world. The bleak austerity of Sylvie’s room not so different from the holding cells at the RCMP barracks.

  God, that’s depressing.

  God?

  She’s tired.

  She needs someone to hold her in his arms.

  Jacqueline pushes her dishevelled hair off her face, realizes she hasn’t so much as brushed her hair today let alone her teeth. Her stomach reels with fresh nausea, perhaps the anticipation of a resolution made. For a brief moment she feels buoyant. Almost, but then the import of her decision pulls her back down. She treads softly into the living room where Sylvie is snoring lightly on the carpet. Jacqueline sifts through the magazines, comic books on the coffee table, finds her cigarettes, lights another in the dark. She smokes standing. She doesn’t want to sit. She’s doesn’t want anything to impede this last momentum, this final bit of courage, despair that she feels in the pit of her stomach along with the unknown of her unborn child. She watches Sylvie, her breath calm, measured, deep in sleep. Jacqueline inhales, exhales in sync.

  She takes a last drag, drops her cigarette into her leftover coffee from this morning. The cigarette hisses, sends up a poof of smoke like a magician’s trick in order to distract the audience from the real action, the real trick she is about to perform.

  In the bedroom closet she unhooks the flexible hose from the Electrolux vacuum, then pulls down one of her husband’s neatly pressed shirts and walks back through the silent house into their attached single garage. She stuffs the pressed shirt into one tail pipe, then pushes the vacuum hose into the other tailpipe of his Plymouth Fury, a two-door sports coupe model. He didn’t even have the sense to buy a four-door. She threads the hose through the back window, does the window up as much as she can. She slides in the driver side. The vinyl seats sticky with the impending thunderstorm. Jacqueline puts the keys in the ignition, hesitates for a moment, a crucial split second in which things could go either way, wholly irreparable, or else largely unnoticed like the thousands of splintered thoughts that pass through her head on any given day except for today, this Wednesday in mid-July.

>   With intent she starts the car, leans across and rolls the passenger window up tight, cranes her neck around to see that the windows in the back are also done up. She turns the heater on full, goes back into the house.

  Wednesday, February 1973 » Lloyd, age 40

  Corporal Lloyd has Jimmy Widman pinned to the concrete floor of the Burger Baron, minimizing any further damage that Jimmy may have to offend this small community. At least that’s the hope. Lloyd feels winter seeping through the cement in direct opposition to the sated heat coming off Jimmy’s body like a smouldering campfire. The pandemonium in the restaurant is fever pitch: sobbing children, crying mothers, the older men shaking their heads like they’d seen it all before, but wait, not yet, here’s something new to go home with to tell their shocked wives. Balloons, go figure.

  Lloyd figures the logistics in his fatigued head. A room full of people, Jimmy half-naked beneath him and squirming to be released—how to get him out? He looks up to see vinegar-faced woman standing above them, her indignant hands perched on her wide hips, glaring down as if she knew from the start he was trouble in his ’73 Camaro Z28 with the battered suspect passenger in the back seat. As if she can’t believe he brought this powder blue ski-suit-packaged repulsion and the flimsy excuse of his RCMP parka upon them, at a birthday party no less. Lloyd thanks Christ he’s still in uniform or things could be worse, much worse.