The Opening Sky
Authors: Joan Thomas
Also by Joan Thomas
Curiosity
Reading by Lightning
Copyright © 2014 by Joan Thomas
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
ISBN
: 978-0-7710-8392-1
ebook
ISBN
: 978-0-7710-8393-8
The epigraph is from the poem “River Edge:” from the collection
Torch River
.
© Elizabeth Philips 2007. Used by permission of Brick Books.
Cover image © Christie Goodwin / Arcangel Images
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
In memory, with love
Joy
Nothing is more beautiful
than anything else: this is how April warns us
and breaks us down
.
E
LIZABETH
P
HILIPS
,
“River Edge:”
F
OUR CHILDREN WERE LOST THAT NIGHT, THAT’S what they thought at first. And at first this reassured them – how could anything terrible happen to four kids at once? Then an open Jeep drove into the clearing with two little boys in the back, the white-blond brothers from Wisconsin. Someone from a nearby cottage had picked them up on the highway. Their mother, a pretty woman with platinum hair cut as short as theirs, ran across the clearing and fell on them, hugging them, cuffing at them (“You brats, you stupid little jerk-offs,” she cried), and their father, who had spent the afternoon drinking cider and sleeping in a hammock tied between two trees, strode around the Jeep to shake the driver’s hand.
So then it was just Sylvie missing, and the dark-haired boy with the sick mother, Liam.
From where she crouched at a corner of the woodpile, Sylvie could hear most of what they said. She was thirsty, and lightheaded from hunger, and her feet were cold and hurting. She’d run barefoot up from the lake, avoiding the paths where the adults hurried back and forth, calling the kids’ names. The tops of the trees
were bright, catching the last of the light, but darkness had settled onto the forest floor. The nameless trees were wide enough to hide her, and in the dusk she’d scrambled from one to the next, stifling her yelps of pain when the twigs and roots hiding under the leafy carpet bit at her. Not a child, she was not a child. She was a dark forest creature, lost by her own hand.
At the edge of the clearing, she squatted in fragrant shreds of bark. Above her the forest canopy opened to a dome of brilliant evening sky; a minuscule jet from a different world lifted silently into it. She saw a police car roll up the lane, and then they were all around it, the blond boys and their parents, the driver of the Jeep, the filmmaker, the babysitter, and Sylvie’s mom. The faun was led forward. She was the fifth child, the one kid who had not been lost. Two policemen in Smokey the Bear hats (sheriffs, they were sheriffs) bent over her. She was wearing jeans now, and her hair had been taken out of its elastics and straggled down her back. She was talking now too, though Sylvie couldn’t make out what she was saying for her crying.
Then Sylvie heard her own name ring out. She shifted on her heels and pressed her face to a gap between the logs. Her mother was standing with her back to the woodpile. “Eleven,” she said to the officers. “Quite tall for her age. Her hair’s about to here, sort of reddish blond. She’s wearing a bathing suit.”
“No,” sobbed the faun, shaking her head.
“No,” said the mother of the blond boys. “She’s not wearing the swimsuit.”
So Liz tossed her head and began to describe Sylvie’s clothes in detail: her jeans, her sandals, her glittery belt, her white T-shirt with the turtle design.
“Yellow,” interrupted the faun. “It’s yellow.”
“White, yellow,” Liz cried. “I doubt you’ll mistake her either way.”
“Did you think of searching your own vehicles?” asked one of the sheriffs. Everyone started eagerly across the clearing in the direction of the cars.
In her yellow T-shirt Sylvie sprang from her crouch and slipped towards the house. There was a side door that opened to the kitchen. The house was quiet and full of warm light. She ran quickly up the stairs, heading for the front bedroom – and a man was standing there. She gave a little prance of fear. But no, it wasn’t a man at all, it was a shirt hanging on the back of the closet door. She was alone, in the room with the braid rug and the iron bed and the big wooden desk, where a family photo stood in its cardboard frame, and the boy with the falconer’s sleeve gazed out at her with neutral brown eyes.
She went to the desk and opened the drawer. In a tray of pens and paperclips lay a retractable knife, the sort of blade people use to cut open a cardboard box or hijack a plane. She fished it out and slid back its casing. The point of the blade bit boldly into the photograph, slicing through it and through the cardboard backing.
More
, the blade ordered,
deeper
, so when she was done excising the boy from his family, she went to the bedside table and picked up the book she had looked through earlier, a beautiful gilt-edged book. First she slashed its cover with jagged lines, and then she turned to the colour plates inside and took the blade to them. It was a furious relief, this slashing and gouging; it felt natural, like a language she used to speak when she was little.
When she’d had enough, she slipped the picture of the boy into the pocket of her jeans and went to the window. Night had fully fallen. She could hear the squawk and stutter of police radios. A revolving light revealed and then erased the trees at the edge of the forest. Car doors slammed and strangers stepped into the clearing; they sprang up in brilliant detail and vanished. The faun, wearing
a jean jacket now, stood with the parents of the blond boys. The father reached for her, and in spite of her size (she was almost as tall as Sylvie), he picked her up. She clung to him, drooping over him. Then headlights caught Sylvie’s mother. Alone, perched on the edge of the picnic table, her white capris gleaming. Standing in a fold of the dust-smelling curtain, Sylvie pressed her forehead against the cold glass and peered down, through hot tears willing her mother to turn and look up.
In the Deep Midwinter
S
IX O’CLOCK, AND IN THEIR ATTIC BEDROOM THEY open their eyes wordlessly to each other, roll in opposite directions, and lie on their backs dozing. Aiden hears the traffic start rumbling up Portage Avenue, but he’s still his nighttime incarnation, and when his eyes open again, he catches sight of
meaning
darting across the skylight like a bird. Then he’s awake, looking up at a curved square of Plexiglas dotted with snow. Still dark out, but they’re prey to decaying light from ten thousand sodium-vapour street lamps. Liz has dipped back into real sleep, breathing deeply, her mouth slightly open as though she’s about to say something. She’s angled in the bed, crowding him. He turns onto his side to give her another inch or two. Sleep’s over for him anyway, it’s moving on to the nocturnals.
To the cats and coyotes and paramedics, and to his daughter, who’s a mile away in her dorm room, propped up in a nest of photocopies and muffin papers. Celebrating the solstice by pulling an all-nighter, dozing now in the light of her laptop … and in her dream, a girl says,
Loser
, and she opens her eyes. 6:23.
God
. She stretches her legs and feels a Red Bull can under the duvet.
She’s been working since yesterday afternoon, since four-thirty to be exact, which is when the sun went down. Sixteen hours of darkness last night, courtesy of the tilt of the earth. Oh, astronomy – if only she could have fitted it in.
Her eyes slide back to her screen and she tries to pull her botany project into focus. Around three she was totally in the zone, ideas coming so fast she could hardly get them down. But now her words have morphed into something she can’t read – Cyrillic maybe, or Cree syllabics. With a sigh she saves the file, drops the lid of her laptop, and turns her cheek towards her pillow. Instantly she’s back on the fast chute to sleep, falling heavily into it, greedy for it, roaming through its tangled garden, a hungry scavenger gobbling sleep up.
It’s ten-thirty by the time Sylvie makes it to the Notion, the new café where she’s meeting her friends to work on their Fringe show. They’re all standing out on the street.
“We’re not going in,” Nathan says. “It’s a stealth Starbucks.” He just read this on Twitter and they’ve been texting her. She was rushing, she didn’t check her messages.
As they cut across to the cafeteria in Lockhart Hall, she glances at their faces. No one’s sulking. Sylvie can get away with almost anything.
They take a table along the side, leaving a trail of salt and sand from the mucky sidewalks, and spread out their gear. Emily buys a bottle of green tea from a machine and passes it around, but Sylvie’s desperate to eat. She pulls her mug out of her backpack.
The usual guy is working the counter. Bacteria have colonized the pores on his forehead since Sylvie saw him last. She gives him a nice hello. “Brown toast,” she says. “Peach yogurt. And I’ll have an Americano – make it a triple.” She slides her mug across
the counter. Tea tree oil, she thinks, that’s what he should try. It’s counterintuitive because it’s an oil, but it works.
While he makes her toast, she turns and looks back at her friends, sitting there like the undead, waiting for her:
Emily, their Fringe director, in a blue
MEC
anorak that no doubt belongs to her mother.
Thea, Sylvie’s friend from Wolseley. Who hasn’t brushed her pale hair in two years. They’re proto-dreads, she keeps insisting, she’s using the neglect method.
Nathan, their only guy. Sylvie can still picture him back in grade six, standing sweetly under a trellis with a plastic rose pinned to the lapel of his Value Village suit jacket. They would stage weddings in someone’s backyard on Saturday mornings. They had bouquets, a veil, and Celine Dion on the ghetto blaster, because Nathan was in charge of the music. He had zero sense of irony then and he has zero now. But he’s all theirs – the guys have no claim on him.
And Kajri, her beautiful roommate for three semesters now, turning a warm and funny look in Sylvie’s direction.
Sylvie smiles back.
Kajri, Kajri
, she says in her mind, savouring the sound. She has her precious mother to thank for Kajri. When Sylvie won the argument about moving to Laurence Hall, she really wanted a private room and her dad was willing to pay for it. But Liz was being a cow – not because she wanted Sylvie at home, and not even because of the money, but because it bugged her that Sylvie was getting what she wanted. The argument she came up with was “It’s not a bad experience, when you’re young, to have to live with someone who doesn’t love you.” And then Liz must have been totally, totally burned, because the minute Sylvie walked into their room in Laurence Hall and her new roommate looked up from the box she was unpacking, she and Kajri
loved
each other.