The Matter of Sylvie

by Lee Kvern

  She slides into the vinyl seat with Sylvie in her arms and quietly clicks the driver door shut.

  Wednesday, February 1973 » Lloyd, age 40

  Corporal Lloyd skirts around the province’s capital, not wanting to stop, wanting to make up for time lost, perhaps never found. But more than that Jimmy is calm in the back seat of the Camaro Z28 wolfing down the burger, both his and Lloyd’s fries, the hot chocolate with the mile-high whipped cream. And, of course, the aftermath of the whole Burger Baron bedlam scene that neither one mentions. Lloyd thanks his lucky stars, the double V of his corporal insignias, that no one called in extra police to assist or Lloyd would have some complicated explaining to do.

  After the burgers, Jimmy needs to go to the washroom. Lloyd bypasses the brief strip of gas stations, opting instead for the

  wide-open prairies and the cold shoulder. He pulls the car over

  and stops on the side of the road. Jimmy scrambles out of the back seat, clutching his groin like the child he is. Lloyd keeps his eye on Jimmy, not wanting to leave anything to chance. Jimmy may have a whole bag of tricks yet to revile the trusting public

  with. Corporal Lloyd surveys the white void of the February

  prairie. Something comforting in that, a blank slate, a clean bill in which to begin again, each day fresh, anew. Although this Wednesday feels like the Twilight Zone, time without end.

  He lights the remnants of his cigar butt in the ashtray, watches Jimmy relieve himself. A yellow streaming spray arced into the lightless day along the desolate highway to Red Deer. How long since he was last at Michener? When Sylvie was admitted, Lloyd calculates. Fall 1961. Though he has never been inside Michener himself, can barely stand the thought of Sylvie’s skewed features, so sweet, so flawed, so unfair—let alone set foot into an entire world full of God’s imperfections.

  Even then, when they admitted Sylvie in 1961, Jacqueline and Lesa did that. His wife and young Lesa walking hand in hand with small, buoyant Sylvie skipping along in the middle, like she was simply off to playschool. While Lloyd remained outside the low brick building with Nate and brand-new baby Clare. The three of them crouched beneath the barred windows in the heatless sun, the autumn air cool around them. Lloyd’s breath in short gasps, his dark eyes wet beneath his impenetrable sunglasses.

  Like offering your child up to strangers. Driving her out to the middle of a deserted field and leaving her there, Lloyd thinks, surveying the bleak prairies. But that wasn’t the case for Sylvie. Sylvie required the special care, the medical expertise, a safe place, although no amount of rationale fully convinces Lloyd.

  He feels his intestines shift, not from the burger or the black coffee but something else. He can do this, for the love of God; he’s a grown man, a corporal in charge of a detachment, six constables beneath him, an entire town in his care, a wife, three, no four children, if he counts Sylvie. And Sylvie does count, thinks Lloyd, despite the unease he feels inside whenever he thinks of her, like an unfastened latch, a loose door in a windstorm. At the very least he can do this for Jimmy. If not for Sylvie, always Sylvie, in all ways his Sylvie away at Michener, but ever-present in his mind.

  Jimmy opens the passenger door, climbs into the back seat. His stomach filled, bodily functions gratified. He curls onto his side, falls immediately into deep oceanic sleep.

  Lloyd glances at his watch, shortly past three, just over an hour to Red Deer. He rolls the window down a crack to clear the glutinous haze of fatigue from his head. He needs to keep himself alert, get there before administration closes. He pulls onto the highway shortcutting through Beaumont, then onto Highway 2. Leduc on the left, Wetaskiwin farther east, and later the sign for Red Deer. The nearer he gets to Michener the more the disquiet rises in his intestines, the low pulsing of the live wire increasing beneath his shallow skin. Michener is the test, and Sylvie his last act.

  Wednesday, October 1987 » Lesa, age 31

  Lesa’s lunchmates at Michener consist of Sherry the swimmer, personal-space-issues Barb, and a tiny woman in a wheelchair at the end of the wood table whose lunch will be consumed through a large red straw.

  “A selective mute,” says Marge Mobley.

  “Selective?” Lesa asks. She’s not heard that term before.

  “She can talk, but she chooses not to.”

  Marge makes wide eyes at the tiny woman in the wheelchair as if to incite conversation. The woman returns her gaze evenly, calmly, mute.

  Not seated yet is Rosalind, newcomer to the brightly lit dining room, who judders around like a caught dragonfly at a window. Rosalind comes with her own bottle of rosewater hand lotion that she carries from day break to day gone until she collapses in a worried heap onto her rose-coloured bed in her pinkened room across the hall from Sylvie’s purple rainforest room.

  “Everything coming up roses,” Marge says in reference to Rosalind.

  “Until age twelve she was perfectly normal, a promising pianist, a child prodigy. You should hear her play. Isn’t that right, Rosie?”

  Rosalind, intent on the lotion, ignores Marge, displays the pink-coloured bottle in her hands like a professional demo woman at

  the mall.

  “May I interest you in some rosewater?” she asks Lesa.

  Lesa looks across the table at Marge. Marge shakes her head, advises against it.

  “No, thank you,” says Lesa.

  “Then she got hydrocephalus, that’s water on the brain, you know, and she’s been with us ever since. Has no memory of anything before that, her childhood, her heartbroken parents, everything gone, except for the piano, and now, of course, the lotion. No one knows where that came from.”

  Rosalind squirts a small knoll of pale lotion out onto her palm, smoothes it on her forearms.

  “May I interest you in some rosewater?” she asks, sitting down next to Lesa.

  “No, thank you,” Lesa says, looking to Marge.

  “Short-term memory loss.” Marge tries to distract Rosalind by miming piano keys on her rose-softened arm. Rosalind pulls a dour face. She wants to interest someone in her lotion.

  “Rosie, why don’t you play something for us on the piano?”

  Rosalind gets up off her chair with a force, stomps out. Then the piano starts up in the other room, and so do Sherry’s circling arms. Lesa hazards a glance over at Barb across the table, who’s been watching her the whole time. Barb’s face nervous, intent, twitching with anticipation, waiting, it seems, for Rosalind to exit. She rises from her chair.

  “Have a sit, Barb, lunch will be here soon,” says Marge, without missing a beat. The caregiver so conditioned, so accustomed with the everyday happenings of the place, she needn’t even glance over at Barb to know what’s going on.

  Barb shrinks back down into her chair, her keen face deflated.

  “I have a dog,” Barb says suddenly to Lesa, her voice clipped, sharp.

  “What kind of dog?” asks Lesa.

  Barb doesn’t answer.

  “What color is your dog?” Lesa tries again.

  “White and black and some white.”

  Lesa smiles at the syntax of that.

  “Big or little?”

  No response, Barb’s eyes a blank stare.

  Then: “I have some super news to tell you,” Barb says commandingly, an odd smile on her lips.

  Lesa leans forward.

  “I’m having a seizure right now.”

  “Is that a good thing?” Lesa asks, confused by the smile.

  “No that’s a bad thing.”

  Barb is silent, stares off into the kitchen.

  After a moment she returns to herself: “What is for lunch?”

  “Smells like meatloaf,” Marge says. “Hold your horses, it’ll be ready shortly.”

  Barb goes back to monitoring the kitchen.

  Sylvie enters with a whoosh of freshly bathed scents, lavender, eucalyptus. Her black hair blow-dried and shining as if she knew today was the Wednesday Lesa was coming. Lesa stands up as Sylvie rushes the tab
le.

  “That purple lady give Sylvie some lunch?” Sylvie pointing her outstretched finger at Marge.

  “That purple lady wants you to meet your sister,” says Marge.

  Lesa smiles expectantly at Sylvie. It does feels as if she’s meeting Sylvie for the first time since they were both children.

  “Sylvie’s a sweet soul,” Marge says, smoothing her hand across Sylvie’s back. “I worked with her when she first came to Michener, on Ash Villa.”

  Lesa recalls her father driving past the forest area in between. Past the wood villas on the south side of Michener named for the trees: Juniper, Birch, Elder, Ash, Tamarack, Pine and Spruce. Her father driving their Plymouth Fury slowly, slowly as if to stall, as if he didn’t want to reach their final destination. Ash Villa where Sylvie would live. Where her father would wait outside in the car. Lesa can’t shake the jumble of trees and villas, childhood memories fresh in her mind. Instead envisions limbs and trunks and branches twisted up, wild, messy like the magpie nests of her youth—akin also to the crowded, moving mass of bodies in the day room when they came to see Sylvie as a child—like a kinetic, forsaken forest vying for space, for place, for illumination.

  “Now, of course, Sylvie’s on the north side with us,” Marge says, tucking a black strand of stray hair behind Sylvie’s elfin ear.

  Sylvie pauses, looks bewildered. Some long ago remembered recognition? Lesa hopes. But no, Sylvie goes back to poking the air with her busy finger, her skin steamy, rose-coloured like Rosalind’s wares. Then she makes her way to the end of the table next to the selective mute in the wheelchair. Lesa watches Sylvie; in fact, she can’t take her eyes off her largely forsaken sister.

  “And I told that girl she had red socks and my yellow shirt,” Sylvie says, directing Lesa’s caught eyes to her ill-fitting salmon sweatshirt and too-large black pants.

  Then Sylvie opens her mouth and hauls out the set of pink plastic gums and white porcelain teeth to reveal the dark cavern inside. A backward wince, Lesa remembers when her father took Sylvie away, pre-Michener. Then for days after everywhere Sylvie went in their house the smell of burnt toast followed her.

  “She had to have all her teeth removed, her gums cauterized because of the drugs,” Lesa’s mother explained at the time. Head down, her mother braided her fingers across her forehead and smoked one Peter Jackson after another in the grim silence of their living room.

  Lesa imagines the residual smell of burnt toast lingering in the air above them, not only Sylvie’s past, but her boyfriend’s current burnt toast exhibit on Granville Island. The significance not entirely lost on her, although the status of her relationship with him remains adrift.

  Sylvie waves the dentures over her head until Marge says she can set them on the table if she doesn’t want to wear them right this moment. Sylvie lays the teeth down, strokes them ever so lightly with one finger like a small mouse, a pet hamster. Her dark, glittery eyes so like their father’s, it makes Lesa’s blood quicken through her body.

  Sylvie sits down unceremoniously at the other end of the table.

  Lesa’s expectant face like Barb’s deflated.

  “Sylvie, come give your sister a hug!” Marge says.

  Sylvie looks around, finds Lesa’s strange face in the familiar room. She gets up, unsteadily, lurches over, and rests her head briefly on Lesa’s chest. Lesa puts her arm around Sylvie, which Sylvie thrusts off with considerable strength.

  “Yeah you give that Sylvie some lunch now?”

  Marge laughs. Lesa wants to cry.

  “Yes, Sylvie, lunch is here,” answers a woman in a long white apron, coming into the room with a low silver dining cart. Her skeletal shoulders bent as if from constant service even when she straightens them to remove the beige plastic lids. She sets down plates of steamed meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy, limp tossed salad, see-through plastic cups of fruit punch in front of each client. The woman singing their names half loud, mezzo forte, a cooking–singing prodigy like Rosalind playing the piano expertly in the other room. For the mute in the wheelchair, the bent cook slides the entire plate, salad, punch, and all into a blender, purees it, then pours the swampy brown liquid into a metal cup with a red straw. Sylvie makes for her chair.

  “Milkshake à la meatloaf for Ms. Mira,” the woman belts out, fortissimo.

  “She’s not deaf,” Marge informs her.

  The aproned cook winks at Lesa.

  Lesa stands at the empty chair next to Sylvie.

  “Mind if I sit here?” Lesa asks.

  “Yeah okay that girl sit here.” Sylvie jabs the meaty air with her pronged fork.

  “Mind the weapon, Sylvie,” Marge says.

  Sylvie considers Marge for a moment, then lowers her fork submissively to eat her instant mashed potatoes and gravy. Lesa sits down, nauseated by the smell, the blendered food, stunned by the sight of Sylvie after all these years. Speaking Sylvie. Sparkling Sylvie. Grown Sylvie. No longer the frenetic, high-wire child Lesa recalls so vividly, the wild, impulsive, sometimes impossible sister. But here now a woman, not a year and some younger than Lesa herself. The same height, but slimmer through the hips, Sylvie’s cheekbones finer, the backs of her delicate hands picked over in a self-obsessive layer of red scars that makes Lesa feel dark, cavernous, achy inside. Sylvie’s slick, shiny, short-cropped black hair like a consolation prize.

  Lesa watches Sylvie work systematically through the mashed potatoes, finishing them wholly before she begins on the salad. Obvious that she’s saving the best for last, the steamed meatloaf. Lesa’s head down, she can’t eat, can’t look at the selective mute in the wheelchair sucking tossed salad through a straw. Or Barb across the table watching her with all the desperation of a struggling swimmer, drowning perhaps in her trapped silence, Lesa can’t tell. Or Sherry, the true swimmer, one hand still circling in the tainted air in harmony to Rosalind’s Ode to Joy, the pace cheerful, fast, allegro. Pitch-perfect, yet so out of tune with how Lesa feels at this moment. Marge Mabley talking brightly, surreally to the apron-clad cook, both of them oblivious it seems to the despondent, trapped sorrow around her.

  And Sylvie sitting next to her after so long, so many missed years. Her sister’s freshly bathed flesh warm, welcome; Lesa’s head down, tears drip into her mashed potatoes, the coagulated gravy.

  Marge reaches over, lays her hand gently on Lesa’s back. Lesa covers her face with her hands. Rosalind’s Joy from the other room, in spite of her hydrocephalus, her short-term memory, her lost parents/leftover life, the music rising, surging. Rosalind’s rosewater fingers building crescendo after crescendo on the ivory white keys, some black. Then the music stops—the silence in the dining room is raw, palpable. Lesa takes a ragged breath, feels her blood slow, hears the even cadence of her heart in the unexpected stillness.

  When she is able, Lesa raises her head. So weary of guilt, remorse, of not being able to change things, she observes with fresh eyes. What does she see? She sees Sylvie’s toothless gums, her hollowed cheeks. The small, quiet, pointed movements of her scarred hands accompanying the soft constant chatter, the innocent gaze across her sister’s mature face intact, whole, despite that laden Wednesday so long ago in her mother’s arms, her father’s car, rigid in Lesa’s mind. Despite her sister’s life away from them at Michener.

  She surveys the other women around the table. Neither helpless, nor the haphazard children at Michener, they, like Sylvie, are all grown up and hiding out in their adult bodies, concealed beneath wrinkled skin, failing flesh, falling hair, removable teeth. Living, breathing, growing older like everyone else—like Lesa, her mother. She glances at Barb, whose emotions shift across her face like clouds, a moving, visible mist. Sherry’s unrestrained delight when Rosalind starts up again from the other room. This time softly, gently, pianissimo, a song Lesa doesn’t recognize but is thankful for. Ms. Mira placid and selective in her speech, her wheelchair. Sylvie’s dark eyes like a child’s.

  Lesa sees it now, couldn’t before. Theirs holds a
hidden prize. God’s iconic/ironic gift: the child remains within. Ever-present and, with luck, Lesa hopes, inextinguishable.

  The room fills again with noise, action: Marge goes back to her conversation. Barb wonders out loud what’s for dessert. Ms. Mira sucks, Sherry swims, Sylvie eats her prized meatloaf. Rosalind finishes playing the piano, flutters back into the room with her bottle of rosewater.

  Before Rosalind can ask, Lesa extends her hands.

  “Yes, thank you, I need that now.”

  Rosalind’s fervent smile as Lesa accepts a squirt on each palm, rubs the pink lotion in humbly, gratefully in the midst of Sylvie, in the company of fine women.

  Wednesday, July 1961 » Jacqueline, age 27

  For a brief moment Jacqueline must have dozed off, nodded and bobbed in the exhaust of a long, hot troubled day, jerked back into being there by the weight of her heavy head sliding down the warm glass of the driver’s window. She feels the weight of Sylvie shift from her arms. The almost imperceptible swelling of baby in her thickening belly. She shakes her head; woozy, dizzy, weedy as the weak light seeping through the open garage door that she’d thought she’d shut. She squints sideways, and sees that, indeed, on her own volition, Sylvie has removed herself and instead slid down in the passenger seat next to her like a tourist along for the ride, a holidayer-in-arms ready for the road trip ahead, come what may. Jacqueline looks at Sylvie’s small, thin face, brown from the sun, the jagged line dissecting her otherwise pink-child lips, the clumps of peanut butter in her normally seal-black hair. Sylvie’s eyes closed, her body sticky with the close summer heat, the heat of the closed car.