The Matter of Sylvie

by Lee Kvern

  Nothing left to do but attend to the already seen crime scene and follow procedure. Lloyd hauls Jimmy to his feet, instructs the crowd to step back, though everyone is spread out in a circle as far away as the walls of the Burger Baron will allow. Young mothers clutching their young children, shielding their innocent eyes; no one wants anything to do with it, but given the sudden absurdity of the situation, they don’t have much choice. Certainly not something Lloyd could anticipate, no prior behaviour that he knows where Jimmy is involved. He wonders if Judge Wade had anything like this before his bench. He’d have to ask him, also make mention of it to the Michener people. No balloons, please.

  But no one is hurt here. Certainly Jimmy meant no malice, intended no harm, just an erratic child’s impulse, and nothing to do with the children, everything to do with balloons, however X-rated it may appear to the stunned onlookers, obliged by his adult body. Hard to reconcile where the birthday children are concerned, but given some distance over time, coffee gossip being what it is, this could conceivably go down in history as one of those things you didn’t see coming but got to anyway.

  With Jimmy’s hands secured in cuffs behind his back, not that Lloyd believes Jimmy is a danger in any way, the handcuffs more for the sake of the mothers, the wailing children, the indignant Burger Baron woman, Lloyd shields Jimmy’s emaciated body while he pulls the ski pants up and fastens the silver heart clasp around his waist. Jimmy’s warm skin flushed the colour of the pink balloons, the shut black eye, his excited, distended face, rough stitches across his left brow. His cauliflower ear, too long someone’s punching bag. The balloons float languidly above Jimmy, above the coat rack as if nothing happened, ready to continue on with the birthday party. The room calmer, under control now, less wailing, sobbing, streaked tears drying on the children’s faces. The grateful mothers reassured by the All-Canadian Dudley Do-Right to the rescue (no idea that what Jimmy inflicted on them was indirectly Lloyd’s doing). The dark-haired mother smiles at Corporal Lloyd, who hangs on tight to Jimmy as he steers him across the restaurant, stopping to pick up their order and Jimmy’s hot chocolate from the counter, no chance whatsoever for a repeat performance.

  Offside outside the Burger Baron, Lloyd slides the handcuffs off Jimmy, guides him gently into the back seat of the Z28. Jimmy rubs his wrists, his chin to his chest. Lloyd turns the ignition, the 383 Crate engine roars to life. The Burger Baron woman scowls out the window at the pair of them, the rough rumble of Constable Pete’s Hedman headers confirming what the woman already knew.

  Jimmy leans into the front seat.

  “Jimmy’s in the soup, huh?” he says, his face close to Corporal Lloyd’s, the smack of Wild Turkey mixed with the faint trace of antiseptic, dog shampoo, semen.

  Lloyd can’t help but smile beneath his parka. Funny in a way that only Lloyd can locate in this moment. Knowing, also, it’s the only thing that keeps him on the job—the searching, finding, in fact requiring the humour, the tinfoil lining, however crumpled or tarnished in any number of the unforeseen, bizarre circumstances that Lloyd comes up against. Because the times when neither humour nor tinfoil are present, it makes the job unbearable.

  Wednesday, October 1987 » Lesa, age 31

  Traversing the straight road that connects the south side of Michener to the north, Lesa sees the military precision of the flat-topped brick buildings laid out in a long row on Medley Drive. The first building, the windows are heavily barred, same with the doors. Reserved for the dangerously ill, the high behaviours, the clients within escorted by paired staff, usually men. She knows Sylvie was never housed there. She walks along the wide swath of sidewalk in front of the buildings, the October air brisk on her face, reaching beneath her Alpaca sweater to her already chilled skin. She hugs her body for warmth, hopes her childhood instincts will kick in, give her some intuitive familial signal that she’s found the right building, the place where Sylvie resides. When she gets to the end of the row with no such insight, she goes around to the back, hoping that might trigger some past recollection.

  The invisible sun even more so on the backside of the buildings, the faint shadows barely purple on the yellowed lawns, the air distinctively colder. She stands a moment surveying her surroundings: the brick buildings look identical, though she knows from early experience, from the identical row housing they used to live in, from her parents slanted marriage, she knows that looks can be deceiving.

  Arbitrarily she chooses 218B, this door open to outsiders but closed to the residents inside. The lukewarm smell of hospital food assaults her nostrils, beneath that, the floor wax, bleach, the thin trace of human urine. The main floor corridor is empty, save for the second set of doors that Lesa knows will fully admit/commit her to Michener. If she enters those, then she is officially locked in and can’t get out without a staff member to release her. She stands on the tips of her tennis shoes and peers through the small rectangular window on the second set of doors. No one seems to be around. She knocks on the heavy door, no response. She turns, sees a maintenance man at the elevator. The door of the elevator opens, the man steps inside, inserts a key into the panel.

  “Wait,” Lesa calls, strides across the floor.

  The man straightens his arm, prevents the door from closing on her.

  “I’m looking for—” Lesa stops, realizing how unreasonable she might sound. Fourteen hundred clients, one random maintenance man, what are the odds? Surely a hit and miss where Sylvie is concerned? The maintenance man holds the elevator door. Lesa reads the sign taped to the elevator: Please do not encourage Melinda Carberry to use elevator unless supervised.

  “Going up?” he asks.

  She smiles. How does he know she’s not Melinda Carberry?

  Lesa tilts her head.

  “Melinda doesn’t read,” he tells her.

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “Sylvie,” says Lesa. “Burrows, Sylvie Burrows.”

  “You’re close. She’s one building over.”

  He points east.

  “Second floor,” he says, holding the door a moment longer than is necessary.

  Lesa raises a questioning brow at him.

  “Twenty-seven years,” he explains. “Not many I don’t know here.”

  She nods.

  “Mind you’ll have to take the stairs over there, those elevators won’t go without a key.”

  He lets the door slide shut.

  Lesa goes back outside, crosses the frozen grounds to the adjacent building. Same corridor, same hospital smell, same second set of locked doors. She goes through, commits herself, fully, completely. Sylvie is here, she can feel it, as if Sylvie’s warm, moist breath is once again on Lesa’s bare child-neck. Sylvie’s stringy arms clung tight round Lesa’s sturdy waist on the tricycle. Sylvie’s heart racing in her chest, the thudding echo in Lesa’s ear. Sylvie ready to bolt at any given moment, but Lesa, faster, always able to catch, calm Sylvie, rein in her aberrant impulses where her mother couldn’t. Sylvie’s unintentional guardian whether she wished it or not. The trepidation in Lesa’s chest as she mounts the stairs swiftly two at a time, afraid that if she slows or, worse, stops, then she won’t go any farther. So long away, so far ago.

  The door at the top of the stairs shuts with a final metal click behind her, the same jarring mechanical click of her father’s throat when he breathed in deliberately, deeply, as if preparing to dive beneath some watery surface while all of them, her mother, Nate, Clare, Lesa, waited for him to surface once more, but he didn’t. His still, quiet chest. Goosebumps on Lesa’s skin then, now as she thinks about the ashen colour of her dead father’s skin, his Sylvie-dark eyes wide open, blankness registering nothing/everything. The memory of him a heavy purple shadow on Lesa’s soul, her grief returning again and again, seemingly indefatigable. Lesa shrugs the cold off her skin, sets her mind to present rivers.

  The hallway is dim, dusklike. The overhead lights muted so she doesn’t immediately notice the man lying on the floor as she stands in the
corridor allowing her eyes to adjust to the semi-dark. She can see light from two doors at the end of the hall. When she does notice the small man curled at her feet, she starts. Lesa’s heart thudding in her ears, she reaches behind, tries the door handle, locked. She looks down at the man. He’s lying on his side, casual-like, as if on a Sunday picnic, his legs stretched out languidly, his hands busy with the peas-and-corn pattern of the stone floor. She notes the cauliflower ear, the serrated scar on his left brow, the mashed nose, the rough skin of a person who has spent too much time outdoors, the warp of his distorted face not unlike Sylvie’s.

  “Excuse me,” she says, stepping cautiously over him.

  He doesn’t reply, doesn’t move. His smooth fingers pulsing, pushing at the immovable light corn–dark pea pattern on the floor as if assembling a complex puzzle.

  She walks down the dim corridor to the lit doorways. Peers into the wire-meshed window, sees a man swaying in the bright light of the day room like a sailor on an unsure ship. Another man, alarmingly large and primatelike, beats some unseen repeated path around the perimeter of the small room. Another still, clothed in nothing but a white towel wrapped loosely around his waist, sits with his naked back to her. Lesa doesn’t pause at the door, knows the rooms are no longer co-ed as they were in the past but segregated now.

  The women must be on the other side. She tries the knob on the other door, which is unlocked. She glances down the corridor, relieved to see the man still there, still ten metres out, the dark vacant corridor vaguely worrisome, though if push came to shove, she’s sure she could defend herself. Regardless of the unlocked door, she knocks, a dull thud within. At first no one responds, then the short quick footsteps approaching. A caregiver, roughly the same age as Lesa’s mother, looks out the caged window, unlocks the door from the inside, and pulls it open. She’s dressed in a boisterous yellow smock plastered with happy faces.

  “I’m sorry,” Lesa says, “I wasn’t sure if I could just come in.”

  The woman waves her hand to enter, retrieves her keys from the door.

  The two of them stand in the doorway. Several women are in the room, none of them Sylvie. One, broad-shouldered like a swimmer, wanders around, talking to no one that Lesa can see. The woman’s arms circling in time to Reba McEntire singing on the radio: Oh, why is the last one to know, the first one to cry and the last to let go? Lesa’s eyes water, surprised at how close she is to letting go. She takes a deep breath to keep herself in check. The woman swims toward them.

  “Watch the arms, please, Sherry,” the caregiver says.

  Sherry front-crawls back across the room.

  “I’m not sure if I’m in the right place,” Lesa says, spots another woman lying on a garish orange and brown flowered sofa, no doubt left over from the 1960s and kindly donated. The woman is watching Murder, She Wrote, soundless on a television housed in a huge wood cabinet also from the 1960s. This woman gets up swiftly and comes over to Lesa, stands uncomfortably close, examines the thick knit colours on Lesa’s Alpaca sweater with her long, wizened fingers.

  “You have a very nice sweater,” she says crisply.

  “Personal space, Barb,” says the caregiver.

  Barb doesn’t flinch.

  The caregiver eases her back a foot. Barb stands staring at Lesa as if waiting for some secret signal, a wink, a smile between them so that she might carry on with the Alpaca inspection.

  “I’ve come to see Sylvie Burrows,” Lesa says, avoiding Barb’s intense face.

  Barb steps forward.

  “I would like to see that sweater again,” says Barb.

  “Not now, Barb. Come, let’s talk out here.” The caregiver moves out into the muted hallway, shuts the door so that Barb is forced instead to peer out the small rectangular window.

  “And you are?” asks the caregiver.

  “Her sister,” Lesa says.

  The caregiver extends a peach-flesh hand. Lesa shakes it, tries to release, but the caregiver hangs on, pumps her hand eagerly.

  “How great! Sylvie will be so excited. She’s having her morning bath at the moment. Can you wait? Are you in town for a while? Are you the older sister or the younger? How is your mother? We heard your poor father died. He came like clockwork once a month for ten years, and then suddenly, nothing. We miss him. Sylvie misses him. She likes men, doesn’t get to see too many regular ones up here, although she had no idea he was her father, any more than she’ll know you’re her sister, but she’ll be glad to see you all the same. She enjoyed your father’s company, having tea and cookies, walking the grounds, especially when he pushed her on the swings. She loved that.”

  Seeing the dazed look on Lesa’s face the caregiver stops.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “No, it’s fine,” says Lesa, her head swimming with questions, no forthcoming answers. He came like clockwork once a month? His entire last decade?

  Lesa hadn’t known. She doubts her mother knew. Why hadn’t he told them? Although if Lesa digs deeper to Wednesdays past she knows why: he came for the sake of her mother, his Sylvie, himself.

  “I’m Marge Mabley.” Still holding Lesa’s hand, Marge pats it like a long-forgotten aunt.

  Lesa clears her confused head.

  “I’m Lesa, the older one. My mother is fine, and yes, I can wait, I’m sorry to have not called, I didn’t know I was coming.”

  “No trouble there, why don’t you come inside and I’ll round up some tea and digestive biscuits. Do you like those? Or Peak Freans, maybe there’s some leftover in the kitchen, I’ll check with Cook. It’s almost lunch; perhaps you’d like to join the ladies in the dining room? We only have eight ladies now, used to be we had a full house way back when, some thirty-two women, four to a room. What a circus that was! But we’ve expanded. Come I’ll show you Sylvie’s room. We’ve recently decorated, purple is her favourite colour, with rainforest, animals, parrots, you’ll see. Sylvie loves it, spends a good portion of her day there. Oh, she’ll be so happy you’re here! They don’t get many visitors. Either the family lives too far away, or the parents are long deceased with our population here aging themselves, or the memory is too painful, better left scabbed over and forgotten. What did you say your name was again?”

  Lesa draws a breath, can’t think for the flash flood of Marge’s words. Guilt slips across her tired face like a noticeable cloud.

  “Lesa,” she says, adding softly, “Lesa Burrows.”

  “Not married?” Marge Mabley asks, searching her peach-plump body for something: a jangle of metal. Lesa looks down at the ring of keys attached to the loop of Marge’s purple cotton pants. And there also, below Marge, next to her soft white-soled nurse’s shoes is the small man from the other end of the corridor. Lesa doesn’t know how he managed to sneak up on them, slipping, sliding, possibly skimming the smooth surface of the cool granite floor. Not so much a whisper of his clothing or the deep, even breathing she can hear now coming from him, like that of a loyal, slumbering dog. Her body relaxes suddenly with the simple in/out of his measured breath. She feels extraordinarily calm in this moment, not guilt, nor alarm, hardly startled by this small man lying coyly on his side, his long legs thrust out as if posing for Playgirl. He extends his hand up to Lesa. And though Lesa doesn’t understand the significance of it, she knows it’s important that she take his flat, smooth-knuckled hand in hers.

  “A regular Burt Reynolds, aren’t we, Jimmy?” Marge laughs.

  Marge reaches down, ruffles the man’s thick tousled hair.

  “Come, Sylvie awaits you.”

  Marge pushes the door, has to instruct Barb to back, back, back up another foot so she can get the door open.

  “We have a lunch guest, Sylvie’s sister.”

  Barb’s face lights as does the woman’s on the orange sofa.

  Lesa hesitates a moment, holds the man’s hand, waits instead for him to release her, not the other way around. When he does, he gazes up at her in the dim corridor, his grin entirely grateful.
>
  Wednesday, July 1961 » Jacqueline, age 27

  Jacqueline moves purposefully through the darkened house gathering toys, wiping the peanut butter from the walls, cupboards, off the kitchen table. She’s in charge; this is her ball game, her baby, her first and last act. She’s the driver now, no longer the passive passenger in someone else’s car. She considers checking Nate and Lesa once more. But then—no. What would be the point?

  Out of habit she goes down the hall, checks them anyway. They are both asleep on top of their covers. The house is sweltering with the closed windows, locked doors, impending storm. She stands a moment in the doorway looking at the back of Lesa’s dishevelled strawberry-coloured hair, Nate’s tan limbs splayed in every direction like an octopus. She could stand here all night, but she knows what she needs to do.

  Jacqueline tiptoes into the living room to gather peanut-buttered-covered Sylvie from the chesterfield, carry her surprisingly lightweight, heavy-soiled body through the darkened house, past the hi-fi. No Ted Daffan singing the tragic anthem to someone’s life, hers possibly. It doesn’t matter now, all that matters is that Lesa and Nate don’t wake, don’t interrupt her action. She glides silently through the dining room, catches her reflection in the dining room window. She’s light, transparent like a ghost, a wingless angel, a merciful God perhaps. She doesn’t stop to choose.

  Furtive, she makes her way through the kitchen to their garage. Pushes the door open with her back, is greeted by the heat, the humidity, the rumble of thunder in the distance, the mounting trace of exhaust in the closed garage, the mechanical growl of her husband’s Plymouth Fury. She glances down at Sylvie in her arms. She’s breathing deeply, evenly, the sleep of the dead, Jacqueline thinks. Sylvie always slept that way, even as a baby.

  Jacqueline shifts Sylvie to her left arm so that she can open the door of the Plymouth with her right. She pulls the car door open wide, the smell of car exhaust assaults her nostrils, mixed in with the carbon monoxide that she can’t see, smell. Odourless, invisible, the silent killer, killer of silence—all Jacqueline wants. Silence as measured against the endless, difficult matter of uncertain children, absent husbands, sketchy fetuses—her future led out in a kind of living hell. The silence of killers, her, Jacqueline. She holds her breath momentarily, then inhales deeply, decisively, welcomes the cloudy stupor of monoxide into her lungs as she does that first lingering cigarette in the morning, only this more effective, faster.