The Matter of Sylvie (20 page)

The caregivers stop, mill about the lit entrance before going inside. Lloyd can see the burning red embers of the caregivers' cigarettes in the dark. Small talk, laughter from the caregivers, the patients themselves waiting, some wandering in circles, most content enough to be outside in the dark, in the falling snowflakes. One of them lies down in the snow drift piled high from the shovelled walks, the building light illuminates him or her. He can't tell. A small man? No, Lloyd thinks, not male, but female, a young girl, surely by the pink parka she's wearing. A male caregiver goes over, stands beside the girl on the ground.

“You all right down there?” the caregiver asks the girl.

She doesn't answer. The caregiver glances over at Lloyd on the bench.

“You all right?” he asks.

Too weary to make conversation, Lloyd nods.

“Business?” The caregiver spots the RCMP insignias on Lloyd's parka.

“In a matter, yes,” Lloyd says.

The caregiver raises a brow.

“Good business,” Lloyd reassures him.

The caregiver goes back to the business of the girl on the ground. She sticks her tongue out to catch the drifting flakes of snow. And without asking, without the caregiver saying her name, Lloyd knows. The visual clues: the glint of black hair in the yellow light, the skewed face, her pointer finger jabbing pointedly at the sky, the snow, the blue halo around the streetlamps, the sheer excitement of being out at night, likely. But even more, Lloyd
knows
by the tightening in his paternal chest, the live wire coursing fully through his body now, electrifying.

Of course it's Sylvie. His Sylvie, like a paradoxical gift from heaven, like the falling snow, the blackening night, his growing strength, his failing body—his fate folded up in his back pocket. He sits up, watches her intently. She's older by twelve years. Her teenage face the ghost of his four-year-old daughter, but present at his feet, alive, a shimmer in the cold light he's been missing: Sylvie, not four feet away, her arms and legs swimming X, making angels in the snow possibly for him?

Lloyd makes no move to get up, traverse those four crucial feet across the frozen ground. So close, so far, too much, too little his strength. He doesn't know if his trembling legs can bear the exhilaration, the tangibility of this beautiful moment. Everything he's lived for, everything he'll die for, here and now, present, accounted for, accountable. Almost enough.

Not now, he decides on this fleeting Wednesday. He'll be back—that he knows, so that he'll have something precious to hold on to.

Too little, too late? He doesn't think so.

He watches the snow float down from the black sky glinting like fallible stars when they catch the streetlamp. Sylvie sprawled on her back, arms and legs in constant motion, catching the yellow lights on her tongue.

The caregiver finishes his cigarette, crushes it out on the sidewalk beneath his rubber heel. He guides Sylvie gently to her feet, brushes the snow off her back, her pink parka.

“Let's get you inside, Ms. Sylvie,” he says, nods at Lloyd.

Lloyd smiles in the dark. The live current coursing through him warms his weary core.

The caregivers round up the wandering patients, cajole, shepherd them kindly toward the low-slung brick buildings. Sylvie's soft, ceaseless chatter in the quiet dark. The straight line of her delicate shoulders as her caregiver soothes her, steers her toward the open door. Sylvie's dark mouth catching the snow one last time before she goes inside, looking back, laughing, pointing, waving, watching the man on the bench (him) while Corporal Lloyd watches her disappear down the long narrow corridor.

This picture he'll file away along with the living faces of all his children. Sylvie's shimmering hair, her face alight, excited, oblivious of who he is, but content enough he sees. He'll carry this image in his head like placing a photograph in an album that he can refer to later on, when he lies eleven years from now in a colourless hospital bed identifying his tinted past so acutely, so vividly, so bright, so dim, fast, slow—a silent private movie intended just for him. So that when he's finished, when his past catches up to his present moment, then he's done enough.

Corporal Lloyd stands up in the black night, the yellow light, the white falling snow melts on his face. He looks at his watch, thinks of Jacqueline's violet eyes in wait of him, he hopes. He's a man of some luck. He knows it now. If he hurries he can make it home before midnight, before he misses yet another Wednesday.

She arrives late at her mother's house, well past dark, well past the time of her father's memorial, her mother's dinner. Doesn't bother ringing the bell or knocking, she knows the front door is unlocked, now that Sylvie no longer lives at home. Before she goes in, Lesa stands on her mother's front step gazing at the sky, no stars, no moon, no light. No lights on in the house either. Has her mother gone to bed?

She opens the screen door, pushes hard on the wood door that normally sticks, but releases easily this time with a silent
whoosh
. Her mother must have gotten it fixed since she was last home. Perhaps other things have changed over the course of her absence? A good thing? she wonders. No that's a bad thing, she hears Barb's pointed words in her head. She draws a sharp breath to steady her nervous stomach, takes her tennis shoes off, places them neatly aside the welcome mat. When she rises she sees the red burning ember of a cigarette in the dark of the living room. Not Nate, he doesn't smoke.

“Mom?” she asks but knows instinctively the breadth of her mother's smoking, the same measured pause and ensuing hesitant quiet when her mother calls long distance, smokes on the other end of the receiver. Lesa waits in the living room for her mother's inhale, the exhale, the quiet, but nothing comes after.

What can she say? How can she explain? She can't. She's here. Better late than never? Possibly better never? She doesn't know. Her mother is hesitant. Lesa traverses the lightless room she knows so well, takes a seat on the sofa across from her mother who sits in the familiar/familial green chair. The synthetic fabric of the chair looped in so many tiny razors that cleaved into their predisposed skin over the years like finely honed tools of torture. The same torturer's chair her father used to sit in late at night. The same chair her mother is sitting in now.

“Mom,” Lesa says, wishing her mother wasn't in that chair.

Lesa hears her mother's uneven, ragged breath in the dark. Her mother doesn't answer. The darkness prevents Lesa from rising up, going across the carpet to her mother, throwing her arms about her, inhaling the strong scent of Chanel No. 5 her mother wore like a sheltering moat amid the rank of her father's cigars.

No rising, no arms tonight, no perfume that Lesa can discern, only the indiscernible silence, the dark room. Lesa watches her mother's inert cigarette, no doubt the ash growing long, the red glowing ember waning in the blackness in danger of burning out entirely.

Without permission Lesa reaches across the fake wood coffee table, turns on her mother's imitation Tiffany lamp. The light is minor, slight, without fortification. Lesa can't bring herself to look at her mother's face. Not yet. Looks instead at the dining room table. Her mother has gone to the trouble of using the white crocheted tablecloth Lesa's grandmother made, the matching stiff-starched swan in the centre holds the last remaining chrysanthemums from her mother's garden. Her best silver, her Noritake China, the black and white picture of her father in his RCMP dress serge rests against the white swan. Two candles untouched, unlit. One place setting remains. Her mother has pulled out all the stops: dead fathers, departed grandmothers, declining flowers. Nate's likely gone back to Ottawa. Lesa's missed him, her mother's memorial dinner. The memory of her father lies in the room like fall frost. She wraps her arms about her body for warmth. She's sorry now, so sorry for those years of defiant rancour, her stubborn daughter doggedness, her mother's solitary grief, her father's regrets, the complicated matter of Sylvie.

What now? She doesn't know. Her fierce heart rises at the back of her throat. She knows not where to begin, but only to begin.

“Did you know he went to see Sylvie every month his last decade?” Lesa asks, looking for the first time in three years at her mother.

Her mother's lowered head, the grey strands dominant now over the normally red-hennaed hair. In the silence the forced air from the heat vents, the sudden catch of her mother's breath. She hadn't known either. Her mother raises her head. The black mascara from her eyes a moist charcoal river down her cheeks.

“Your hair,” she says, breaking the awful silence.

Lesa reaches up, touches the blunt crop of her black-dyed hair. She'd forgotten.

“For Sylvie,” Lesa says.

“I told Nate I thought you'd gone there,” her mother says. The shiftless ambiguity of Lesa's day, not so much the risk in her mother's mind, only Lesa's. The realization that her mother knows her better than she does.

“Nate?” Lesa asks.

She's sorry to have missed him.

“He's gone out with friends,” her mother says. “He'll be back.”

Her mother lowers her head. Lesa can smell the burning filter of her cigarette.

“Sylvie?” her mother whispers.

“She's fine,” says Lesa. “You'll see.”

Tears well up again in her mother's lovely violet eyes. Her mother no longer hiding behind darkened sunglasses. Remorse so deep that her mother can't even think of Sylvie without going back to that Wednesday in July? Lesa can only guess, but it doesn't matter, what matters is the release. Lesa remains on the sofa, waits/wades in the depth of her mother's rivers.

Watching her mother across the room, Lesa gleans only now, only after Lesa's own dreadful Wednesday—that it wasn't any lack of love for Sylvie on her mother's part, but too much love: scared love, safe love, the sweet/despondent love only a mother can have.

Lesa crosses the carpet, takes her mother's duty-bound hands in hers, tries to wipe the river away from her mother's face, but once flowing, it doesn't stop.

“Did you love him, Mom?” Lesa scarcely whispers, afraid to say her father's name outright, afraid of what her mother might say. That long-remaindered embrace with the constable that lived next door to them in the row housing when Lesa was five, her mother essentially alone with three children, including high-wire Sylvie, baby Clare on the way, her father seldom home. Was their marriage sheer
need
, outright necessity, without choice—loveless? Did her mother stay despite herself for the sake her of children? Lesa doesn't want to know, but
needs
to know for the sake of the things she will carry forward from her mother's past—the sake of her own future.

“Yes,” her mother says, as if she can read Lesa's interior mind.

“I didn't always like him, but I always loved your father. At the core your father was a good man.”

The ash from her mother's expired cigarette drops to the hardwood floor. Neither of them bothers with it.

“Things have a way of evening out over time,” her mother says softly.

Lesa wraps her mother in her arms like the child she doesn't have. The children she will one day hold in this limitless/faultless way that her mother has for all of them. Her children's father? Lesa hasn't thought about it until now. Neither blue, nor burnt toast, she decides, but more, much more.

When her mother quiets, Lesa releases her, goes into the large kitchen to retrieve a box of tissue. The stove light is on. She pulls open the warm oven, smells fried chicken, gravy. Not something Nate would have preferred, but Lesa's favourite. She lifts the glass lid on the casserole dish, pulls out a piece, picks the seasoned meat off the bone, and pops it into her mouth. Realizes how wholly empty she is after this day, feels her knees give into fatigue. She steadies herself against the Frigidaire in the dim light of the stove, the warmth of her mother's chicken in her belly. She eats slowly, purposefully, until the strength comes back into her. She shuts the oven door. On her way back into the living room she takes her Bic lighter out of her jean pocket and lights the candles on the dining room table.

Her mother is silent, spent, mascara stains down both cheeks.

“Come,” Lesa says, taking her mother by the shoulders.

Her mother rises from the green torture chair. Lesa leads her past the dining room, into the small bathroom off the large kitchen, sits her down on the closed toilet seat, and opens the medicine cabinet. Fishing through her father's leftover medication that her mother can't bring herself to throw out, Lesa finds her mother's meagre bag of makeup. A single tube of red lipstick leftover from Lesa's childhood, she's sure, can recall the few times her mother wore it. A plastic case of red blush the colour of clown's cheeks, no eye shadow ever, a slim tube of clumpy black mascara. Lesa leaves the bathroom, comes back with two Johns and her own makeup bag.

“Let's start over,” she says to her mother, who accepts the cigarette, lets Lesa light it after her own. Her mother inhales deeply, so does Lesa.

Lesa takes out her cleanser, gently wipes the mascara from her mother's face with a cotton ball. Up close Lesa sees the minute fissures of red blood vessels, a lifetime of them broken across her mother's freckled skin that Lesa never noticed before. Had they always been there? Lesa wipes harder, hoping they'll be magically erased, but she knows better. She looks into her mother's glassy eyes, digs out her purple eyeliner.

“Shut your eyes,” she says.

Her mother does so, obediently. Lesa notes the creased lines running crossways on her mother's forehead, her unplucked eyebrows, her mother never one to take time for herself. Lesa cups her mother's soft aging face in her hands, the same way her mother used to in the bathtub, gently catching the small of Lesa's child head in her steady palm, likely also Sylvie's, Nate's, and Clare's, while she rinsed the shampoo out with the large plastic measuring cup. As if her mother could measure the love she felt for all of them each time she bathed them, washed their hair, clothed them, tucked them into bed each night.