What Can't Be Undone

by dee Hobsbawn-Smith

  Sylvain shakes his head, his lips pursing in a way I haven’t seen before.

  Andreas kisses my cheeks as usual before he leaves. “A surly lad,” he whispers. “D’you trust him?” He seems unconvinced when I nod.

  But Sylvain is not to be bought so easily. “Eh, il est un poppy fleuri, like those men, Maman’s patrons,” he says grimly as Andreas closes the gate behind him and strolls down the street. It’s his first admission of his mother’s true income source, of her meetings, not with movie stars or yoga enthusiasts, but with clients of a different sort. After a few days, he tires of moving the jacket from chair to kitchen counter to chair, and finally, he tries it on, then parades in the narrow hallway, the irony completely lost on him. “Hmmm, what you think, ma tante? Why he bring me gifts?”

  I consider. The unexplained nephew. Andreas would have no interest in Sylvain. He’s just a child. But still I avoid giving Sylvain a straight answer, and take the easy road. “Sylvain, he’s generous. He’s been my friend for a long time.”

  Sylvain looks at the jacket and wrinkles his nose. A few days later, he begins to wear it, and has it on one afternoon when Andreas stops by with freshly roasted coffee beans.

  “Sylvain,” I urge, “say thank you to Andreas.”

  Sylvain’s black eyes appraise Andreas, a frank sweeping study, then slide away.

  In the mornings, over café au lait and pain au chocolat, I harangue him. “Trade school, Sylvain. Maybe music classes, hmm? Or baking? Learning to make good pastry like Elise? You can’t be on the street all your life.” Street life will kill you. I can’t bring myself to say it. “You could learn from Elise. Her new shop needs apprentice bakers, now that Patrice has died.” I almost have him there: croissants from her new location farther up Cambie Street are a morning staple that Sylvain looks forward to.

  “Why I learn to bake? I have you. And you have Elise. Perfect. No school. I make the sausages for you, and music.” He brushes his hands clean of crumbs and picks up his guitar. “À bientôt, ma tante.”

  No trade school. No job with Elise. The day he comes home with a new black hoodie, he stubbornly turns his face away from me and will not say how he came by it.

  “Did you steal this, Sylvain? We do not steal!”

  “No, ma tante.” His face is impassive. He refuses to say anything else. Finally, frustrated, I drop the matter. A few days later, it’s a new shirt. Then expensive jeans. Each time he walks in with new clothing, he evades my eyes, but will admit nothing. “I am no thief,” is all he says.

  He teaches me a few French words, but I stop using them when I realize, after a few horrified glares from francophone customers, that they’re gutter slang. Weekdays at my cart, I listen for his voice and his guitar drifting from the far end of the park where he busks, singing in French and then English. But some evenings, he comes in late, falling onto the couch without his customary “Good night, ma tante.”

  Those nights, I’m plagued by chest pains and fear. I lie without moving in my narrow bed, watching the shadows advance across the thin draperies. I try to pray, but the Mother seems a world removed. In the morning light, my cheeks in the mirror are wan. Sylvain sleeps late and wakes sluggish and irritable, his face stretched and thin, scowling at me as I pack my cooler for the noon rush of park-side walkers. I catch the whiff of scent on his skin when I hug him, and I wonder. But I don’t have the heart to confront him.

  I spot him one day, across the street from my cart one afternoon, heading to the SkyTrain with another youth. Both are lustrous otters, Sylvain in a silver-studded t-shirt and tailored pants I don’t recognize. I call and wave, and both heads swivel toward me, then quickly away.

  I know they see me.

  The slight cuts worse than any knife. When he comes in to sleep, I don’t leave my bed to enquire where they went. I don’t know how to ask, and I don’t want to know.

  His face is changing, its narrow hawkish cast becoming more pronounced and secretive. Life as a nun and a park-side vendor has not prepared me for tough-love parenting. The next day after lunch winds down, I take the SeaBus by myself, across the choppy inlet to see Francesca.

  “Do you have a nephew?” I ask as soon as I enter her office where she is bent over paperwork. She rarely works in the kitchen anymore.

  “No, of course not,” she says in surprise.

  “A son?”

  “No! You know that. I am as you see me. Come outside, to the garden, sister. You have something on your mind beyond Sylvain?”

  “Yes, and no,” I say.

  We drink our tea, tidying the raised beds in their wooden frames as we speak.

  “Sylvain has money. Clothes. I think he’s having sex. For pay. With strangers,” I say, and I’m surprised, both at my bluntness and at how easily the words come to me.

  “Ah. I suspected that might happen,” Francesca says. “Children sometimes go wrong no matter what their families do, sister. We all have our own karma.”

  I look at her in surprise. My friend has never spoken like this before.

  “He wouldn’t come along today?” she asks.

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Maybe I should ask Andreas to have a word? No? Leave it to me, then. Make sure Sylvain is at your cart on Friday.” She pulls a few late onions, brushes off the soil. “Here. Put these in your tote bag.” She sends me home with a benediction, but the calm is torn out of me by the wind as I board the SeaBus.

  I hardly lay down my head at night all week, waiting. I can’t talk to Her, and Sylvain is rarely around. When he appears, he wears a shell as impervious as my raingear. “Yes, ma tante,” he says to any question I ask, his voice mechanical and rigidly polite. I want to shake him, ask, where is the lovely boy I adore?

  On Friday, the autumn wind chases up the slope from False Creek. Over breakfast, as Francesca has suggested, I ask Sylvain to meet me at the cart after lunch. “The awning is sticking in the wind,” I say, “I can’t reach the ratchet to roll it down.” He nods, looking down at the table, aligning croissant crumbs with his fingertip. His fingers are smooth, their nails immaculately shaped.

  At noon, Francesca meets me at the cart. I sit her down on the bench out of the breeze and hand her lunch. An hour later, then two hours, and the day’s customers are long gone, with no sign of Sylvain.

  Francesca is tight-lipped. “So sorry, my dear,” she says, hugging me. “I thought this might be how it would go. He is leaving you slowly. Best to be ready.” My chest feels perforated, my breath leaking out.

  No sign of him at home. Guitar, his fancy clothes, gone. Just a note, scrawled and cocked against a water glass on the kitchen table. “Bye-bye, ma tante.”

  I stand in the echoing kitchen, crying. Then I rage, peppering Her with my anger. Why did he have to go? You are no true Mother!

  I post signs, offer a reward. I even go to the police. But they just shrug. Another street kid, I can see it in their faces. Finally I mourn, sit in my apartment drinking espresso, listening to my sad Verdi. My sparrow has flown.

  Andreas loses patience, and becomes territorial about his apartment after I spot a gold-trimmed black jacket hanging among his scarves on one of my visits.

  “Is that … ?” I almost run from room to room, banging doors open.

  Andreas hesitates, then catches himself, and me, as I pass him. “What? You mean Sylvain’s? Of course it is, you know he’s been here half a dozen times with you! But I haven’t seen that ungrateful boy since he left you high and dry. He just forgot it here. Calm down, sister.”

  Several weeks later, he meets me at the door. “Let’s go down the street for coffee. A new cleaning lady,” he says smoothly. “She is such a tyrant, she swears she can smell garlic after you have been here.” I sniff, insulted, and stop dropping by unannounced.

  I owe Andreas and Francesca more than loyalty. But faced with what feels like his waning friendship and the risk of expulsion from his family circle, I retreat. Long days creep by, the rainy season endured as I drink m
y bitter coffee alone at Elise’s new bakery. She commiserates, but has no time to talk. If I didn’t still owe money to Andreas, I’d sell the cart and leave the park, but I refuse to return to the convent. I have nowhere to go.

  Life carries on. I make sausages, sell them. The plum and cherry trees bloom, then turn green. A year passes. My grief dulls. I see Andreas every month, but only when he comes by my apartment to collect my payment, his voice formal. I turn back to the Mother, and visit Francesca whenever I can, feeling as grey as the water of Burrard Inlet splashing across the bow of the ferry. The sound of my whining heart dismays me, but I can’t set it aside.

  Francesca is less brusque than I expect. “There is no schedule for pain, or for healing,” she says one bleak afternoon, her hands gentle on mine. “The therapists say, a year for this loss, six months for that one, but we heal when we are ready to heal, sister.” She holds out a bag, fronds of fresh dill weed peeking out from the top. “Are you eating? Here are new potatoes and herbs. And don’t fret so about Andreas. He is worried about you. He simply has small patience with suffering. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that he doesn’t care for you.”

  I adopt the habit of staying late at the cart, unwilling to go home to my empty suite, preferring to watch the summer sky, the birds, the late stragglers walking out of downtown. One bright evening, I am surprised to see Andreas, resplendent in a plaid linen jacket, complete with trilby, striding toward my cart.

  “Hello, sister.”

  “Alone tonight, Andreas?”

  “Hopeful of your company, sister. I’ve been remiss in attending to my business interests. My apologies. Your chest, any pain lately? None? Good. Very good. Pack up quickly, and I’ll take you to the ball game.” He holds up a pair of tickets.

  I feel a twinge at being relegated to “business interests.” But I’ve never been to a ball game and the Mother advocates faith, and gratitude: he’s my benefactor, and Francesca’s brother.

  Whistling, he perches on the bench as I pack the sausages into my cooler and lock the storage cupboard on the bottom of the cart, crank the umbrella to rest, and wrestle with the chain, tangled in the wheels of the cart, until my chest begins to throb. I stop, drew a breath, and wait for it to fade, my back turned to Andreas.

  We take a cab to the stadium. Andreas hands me into the bleachers and goes off for pretzels. I’m content to sit in the sun. The field glitters like emeralds, the pure white of the lines etched in a diamond around the grass. The players, long shadows in the evening light, are joking and laughing, playing, and glad of it.

  “What’s he doing?” I ask when Andreas returns, pointing at a youngster dragging a sack onto the field.

  “He’s the batboy. See, he’s hauling out all the baseball bats for the hitters to choose from.”

  Immersed in watching the batboy, my heart rises and falls. When I first spotted him, I’d thought for a half-breath that it was Sylvain. But that’s impossible; this is a child, fair-haired, younger than Sylvain had been when we met. He has the same deft way of going that Sylvain had, though, as if he’s leaping for the moon. Same grin, I see him break it out only once, a wide beam as light as his feet, when the first batter comes over to him and collects a bat. The first pitch.

  As the innings unwind, I watch effortless catches and mighty strikes and the irresistible game of stealing bases, my eyes going back to the boy. Longing fills my mouth. Mother, wherever he is, keep my boy safe.

  At the top of the fifth inning, Andreas flags down a vendor and buys me a beer and a hotdog. “My treat, sister. Forget you are the sausage queen and try this.” Sitting in the late evening sunlight, I want things to be other than they are. I want the cheap hot dog to taste like my bratwurst, and the watery lager to remind me of Francesca’s youthful Munich pilsner. Most of all, I want Sylvain, and things to be as they had been. Tears dribble down my cheeks.

  Andreas notices, and gently puts a folded cotton handkerchief into my hand without fuss.

  When the game winds into the final inning, he nudges me. “You know you can go right down to the field and say hi to the ball players. I bet some of them have bought sausages from you.”

  Too big a group of strangers to face alone. But the thought of a closer look at the boy is irresistible. After the final pitch, I carefully make my way down the steps. The sun is going down and I have the last rays in my eyes as I step down each riser, my sight set on the field. Four steps from the bottom, I see the batboy, in his hand a ball hypnotically tossed up and down, like a falling and rising charm.

  My chest feels flayed open, the knife again, through my ribs. I topple down the remaining steps, pain arcing into my shoulder and arm. From the corner of my eye I see the boy, standing by the players’ bench a few strides from the seats at the foot of the staircase, his face turning to me in slow motion as I tumble to his feet.

  I open my eyes and find myself under a blanket on an ambulance stretcher, staring into a pair of brown eyes behind wire glasses, their owner kneeling beside my hip, a clipboard in his fingers. Andreas stands beside him, hands clasped behind his back, his face anxious. At his shoulder, I can see another slim figure. I want the unknown one to take that half step forward into my life, but he stands immobile.

  The paramedic’s voice draws me back. “Ma’am? Do you have a history of stroke? Heart disease? Embolism?”

  “Maybe.” My voice like a raven’s. More knives. My eyes fly past the medic’s cap, trying to focus on the sparrow-like figure behind Andreas.

  “I’m going to start you on blood thinners. Okay?” I nod carefully. It hurts to breathe or move.

  The batboy finally steps into view and speaks, an unfamiliar soprano. “You gonna be all right, lady?”

  I try to move my head, and I can’t help myself, I begin to weep, dry sobs that tear at my chest, more of relief than suffering. Sylvain, his quick smile, his charm, such a miracle. He’s not coming back, my boy. But this boy’s innocent face tells me of the many other children in the world. I’ve loved once; I might again find a child who needs to be loved.

  “You know each other?” The paramedic’s voice is gentle.

  Andreas intercepts the medic’s query. “She is my sister.” He looks down at me. His eyes are as blue as Francesca’s. “And this time, it is to the hospital. I will come, and I will call Francesca. Haven’t I always taken care of you? We are family.”

  He lays his hand on my wrist. Comforting me, I know, as I contemplate all the answers I want to give.

  Exercise Girls

  I WAS FIFTEEN WHEN I TRESPASSED up the long driveway to visit the horses grazing behind the fence. I’d studied those horses all spring while walking the half-mile home from the bus stop with my little sister Jill. Thoroughbreds, I guessed, what I’d want to be if I were a horse, so elegant and spare — a far cry from my own compact frame, more like a Welsh pony. The horses reminded me of Dad.

  Dad had called me his pit pony whenever I’d drop my head and plug away at homework I didn’t quite get. “You don’t quit, do you, Fanny?” he’d tease, stroking my unruly hair as if it was a mane in need of grooming. I missed him so much my bones ached, a dull intermittent pain. Forty years later I still miss him, and I wonder how that year would have played out if he’d been alive.

  One horse, long-legged, a dainty head like an Arab’s, perked his ears at me. I dropped to my knees beside the gate and was rummaging in my backpack when a man in faded Levis and denim jacket, tall and narrow as a hinge, strode from an adjacent field milling with Hereford cattle. He stood watching me from the far side of the gate. Beneath the tilt of his cowboy hat, his eyes were the brown of the slow-moving water in the nearby canal, and his hatchet face was creased like linen dried on the clothesline. Frayed cuffs left his wrists naked and I could see black hairs threading toward his knuckles. My breathing rasped unexpectedly and I could feel the skin of my throat get warm as I looked up at him. I had to look away, forty yards down the lane to where Jill was flipping the red flag up and down on the rusty
mailbox at the driveway’s end, shifting from one foot to the other. I mouthed warnings at her, then turned back to the lanky man in blue.

  “No sugar,” he said sharply as I pulled something from my pack. He half-smiled when he saw the carrots in my hand, lit a cigarette, talked around it. “That’s fine, girlie.”

  The red horse stood aloof and wary, watching as I leaned over the barbed wire and held out the carrots, but the fine-boned bay approached me willingly. I was stretching out a cautious hand to stroke that black muzzle when the rough voice resumed.

  “You grow up with horses?”

  “My daddy was a rodeo bullfighter,” I said, surprised when my voice didn’t break. “He bought me a mare five years ago, she’s part Arab. Meara.” He looked blankly at me. “From Lord of the Rings,” I added, uncomfortably aware I was blathering, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “You got the hands.”

  I flushed and dropped a carrot, shoved the remaining one and my freckled hands with their gnawed nails out of sight. He didn’t say anything else. But I felt his eyes until I reached Jill, took her hand and turned west. All I could smell were the possibilities of spring in the Fraser Valley, wet alfalfa’s green funk, musky sedge leaking into early bloom, the old-socks rankness of cattails.

  At home, we fed Meara the last carrot. I breathed in her sweet breath, feeling somehow guilty, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Meara had carried me on a loose rein in the long year since Dad died, my unquestioning friend in my struggles to fit into a new school and a new house. Mom had sold our Aldergrove home, its fields and big white barn, right after the funeral last spring. “We’ve got to cut expenses,” she’d said curtly when Jill and I protested. “We need something smaller, closer to Chilliwack.” She’d just started at the York canning plant, working the evening shift, and after I spent that summer taking care of Jill, I started to think about getting a summer job of my own, looking ahead to university. I couldn’t do anything yet but take care of little kids and ride horses, but I didn’t want a life like Mom’s, her skin and body wearing away to nothing, overshadowed by the sickly-sweet scent of overcooked asparagus or peaches or corn that clung to her.