If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

by Leona Theis

  “I’m okay, okay?” She slipped free of Penny’s hold. On her back in the water now, she gathered herself and pushed out a single, sudden frog-kick to propel herself to the dock, but she misjudged her own power and bumped her head on a post.

  “Ouch, Sylvie. Let me help you up.”

  “I’m fine.” She wanted to say, Leave me the hell alone. “But thank you.” She hoisted herself onto the boards, clumsy with the effort, suffering the scrape of the wood against her bare midriff. She made her way on hands and knees to where Jack lay shuddering on his stomach, spitting onto the silvered timbers.

  Alex stood and used the side of his hand to squeegee water from his belly and his legs. “Are you gonna live, Callaghan?” He shook his head to scatter drops across Jack’s back, where they caught the light like a party going on. Sylvie felt a clench in her gut, a swelling in her eyes.

  “I gotta go take a crap,” Alex said. As he made to leave, Jack grabbed at his ankle with little ambition and missed. Weak and hollowed out, Sylvie lay down on the warm dock and curled an arm and a leg around Jack. “Stupid trick for a guy who can’t swim.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “People who can’t swim shouldn’t throw glass at houses.”

  She put her lips to his spine and kissed a bump of bone. Her main trouble wasn’t that she’d seen, for an instant, a clear space. Her main trouble was how familiar the moment was, the wanting: afternoons when he was hours late getting home from work and she waited at the kitchen table for The Knock. Nights he crashed on a buddy’s sofa without calling. Hunting season. She pressed her mouth harder against his spine.

  Behind her Benj laughed. “Get a room!” Sylvie felt the shake through her hip and her shoulder and her quivering thighs as he stomped past on the dock, and she felt it diminish as he walked away.

  IN A PARKING SPOT Sylvie paid nominal rent on, in back of a bungalow near their apartment building, sat the rumbly Meteor Erik had sold her years ago for a dollar after watching her struggle with the manual transmission of Jack’s Corolla. Maybe he’d expected, even as he tossed her the keys, that she’d one day use it as a getaway car. Last week she’d purged her closets and heaved into the back seat a giant garbage bag bound for the thrift store at the YW — flared jeans and wraparound skirts, blouses with Peter Pan collars, a pair of pink panties with red lettering — enter to win — that she’d stuffed in the pocket of her coat on an amble through the Army & Navy Store. That bag was still in the car. She could be gone tonight, wouldn’t even have to enter the apartment.

  Last Sunday when Jack went out the door on the way to Uncle Walter’s acreage to cut grass, she’d locked the deadbolt behind him and even slid the chain into its slot. He might be gone three hours. She’d felt a letting-go in the muscles of her upper back. She was on her way to the bedroom to get back into her pjs and slump into bed to experience the spread of the entire mattress to herself, and the expanse of air above, where her breath and thoughts could rise and meander without hindrance — when she heard him in the hallway again. He tried the door, resorted to his key, and was stopped by the jerk of the chain. “The hell?”

  She opened for him. He’d brought his mug in from the truck, and he filled it with coffee for the road and poured in a drizzle of rye, one corner of his mustache sucked into his mouth in a way that made her want to reach and pull it out for God’s sake. He was teasing when he said, “You locking me out, Syl?”

  No. Trying to lock possibility in. She took the bottle from his hand and splashed rye and then coffee into her own mug and thought, there’s something we have in common, whisky. Leaving could take years. It already had.

  ON THE DOCK she tucked Jack’s wet hair back around his misshapen earlobe and whispered, for her own sake, “I saved your life.” She felt the hot spot of soreness where Benj’s angry pinch had twisted her flesh. If he hadn’t startled her just then, would she have woken to the moment? She tried going back for a second to check how that moment had felt, but the door was closed. She couldn’t imagine being a person who would let another person drown. Some things you just had to act on: saving a life, leaving a life. There were other things that would happen if you did nothing. All it would take was for Sylvie to do nothing and this cell division, this multiplication going on in her womb would change itself from accident into person. Let life happen. The money they’d saved for Hawaii would have a new use. She moved her hand along Jack’s arm, her palm fitting itself to the small bulge of his biceps. This is my husband. These are the people who know me, or think they do.

  Jack had his job at the bus yards; he had his personal cause in helping out old Walter, which seemed to come naturally: Uncle Walter who’d handed over the keys for this Sunday afternoon to the cabin Jack hoped to one day own, along with sixty feet of shoreline and the mossy, rotting roof and the septic tank that was possibly, probably, cracked. Being written into Walter’s will was more in the nature of bonus than calculation. But he did have his plan, Jack.

  Spooned together, they fell asleep on the unforgiving boards and woke to the sound of jangling keys, and Alex’s cool shadow falling over them. “I do believe,” he said, “I’ve stumbled upon the keys to Walter’s formidable ninety-horse cruiser. Just hanging inside the shed, they were, as if on offer.”

  Jack raised himself on one elbow, leaned over the edge of the dock, hocked and spit. “Get me something to drink.”

  Alex offered the beer he was holding, a third full.

  “Water was what I had in mind.” Jack reached for it, chugged what was left, and let the bottle roll. “Put the keys away. You’re in no shape.”

  He lay back down and Sylvie circled her arm around him, her fingers memorizing the feel of him for the times she would need it. From over on the sand she heard the indistinct voices of the others trailing through the threadbare afternoon. None of this would go into the Meteor: not Alex and his loud Booyahs, nor Benj’s breath on her neck, nor Margo’s hot and cold friendship, nor the smell of the lake nor the rise and fall of Jack’s belly against her palm. She would have to replace these with other things. Her hip relaxed against the dock as she allowed her weight to shift and settle.

  She was almost asleep again when she heard the motor rumble. Jack jolted upright and shouted over the noise — did Alex know the definition of asshole? Penny was on the run from the beach. She vaulted into the boat before it veered away. “I got him!” she said, fighting for balance, breasts swinging.

  Jack held his hands to his temples. “Christ.”

  Alex ceded the wheel to Penny, who steered the boat back around in a wide arc. “Everything’s all right,” Sylvie said to Jack, and she was struck by the familiar shape of the lie. “Everything’s okay.” She felt the hard slap of water against the dock from the turn of the boat. She ran her hand along the weathered planks, rough under her palm. She was hoping for a fat splinter, the kind that’s easy to pull out once it’s quickened your blood.

  Three Mothers

  “I NEED A LITTLE HELP.” The long-distance call came at a quarter past noon, when her niece knew Merry would be home for her half-hour lunch break. Sylvie delivered two pieces of news, fastened like a hook and eye. After Merry hung up, half a dozen old troubles, old joys, stuttered to mind, a jumpy reel of sad and glad, and one image in particular she could barely look at sidelong. For the moment she flicked them all away but this: Sylvie ten and more years ago, midway through junior high, limping into Merry’s yard wrangling a fender-bent bicycle that belonged to the banker’s daughter. Howard had told her time and again she wasn’t allowed to borrow that bike. Her forearm and her shin were pocked with tiny ground-in pebbles, but she was trying her darndest, and crookedly, to smile.

  “Jeez and crackers!” Merry said as Sylvie laid the bike on what passed for a lawn. “Let’s see that skinned leg. Like poppy seeds in rising dough.”

  Sylvie’s mouth lost its grin and found it again. She’d made it all the way, she told her aunt — head high so that her hair fell back and Merry could see a bright, berry-sized gas
h on her forehead — she’d made it the eight miles to Flat Hill and the same eight back without a sniff of trouble until she was halfway down the slope the other side of Ripley’s railroad tracks.

  “Why that road? You could’ve avoided the hill altogether.”

  “Help is what I’m looking for, Auntie.”

  “You don’t make it easy. Inside, now, and scrub yourself up. I’ll find the salve.” Merry had helped Sylvie knock the fenders straight again and repaint them, in league with her in the lies they told both Howard and the banker’s daughter, whose trip to summer camp had been the only reason she’d agreed to loan the bike.

  Today on the phone when Sylvie broke the news she was leaving Jack, had already left him in fact, and Merry said right off the top, “This will not go down well with your father,” Sylvie came right back with, “Help is what I’m looking for.”

  At the garage after lunch Merry lay on her back on the Jeepers Creeper underneath the jacked-up Dart that belonged to the school principal. The radio at the other end of the shop sent out a slender skein of country music. Glen Campbell yet again. She reached toward the oil plug, and the odd little bump at her tailbone dug into the hard platform of the Creeper, a little stab of pain to keep her awake. What Merry loved about her work was not this tedium, but all the business that couldn’t be seen through the undercarriage — the intricate anatomy: engine-bone connected to the crankshaft, crankshaft connected to the tranny, tranny connected to the drive shaft. The life of the thing. But here she lay, only inches above the floor, while Howard monopolized the hoist replacing a differential.

  The Dart’s underbelly was caked with mud, baked on solid. Drives it like he stole it. Merry pictured the principal, his Peter Fonda hair, his aviator sunglasses, the way he’d spin out and make for the highway as if with the next clutch and shift he’d manage liftoff and leave the plain old plains receding. Any other man in Ripley who owned a set of wheels like this would take it to the alley, slide underneath on a piece of cardboard and change his own oil, but not Bert Siding.

  With any luck Merry would be looking at more than dirty oil. When Bert handed over the keys he’d mentioned that his noisy car was even more noisy lately, and not in a good way, and could she let her brother know about that? Well no wonder — the way he bossed the transmission it was sure to be shredded. Once she’d finished the oil change she’d take it for a spin, town and highway, take a listen, play through the gears, talk to Bert about an overhaul. Hustle the job for herself.

  She used a gloved forefinger to flick away a pebble embedded in the grey crust of dried mud that surrounded the oil plug. Another image of Sylvie: age six, standing on the back step and offering a mud pie, silver grey and sunbaked, stretching her twiggy arms to hold it high. “For you, Auntie.” On the top, embedded with care, were swirling ferny fronds from the yarrow that grew in the ditch.

  “It’s beautiful, honeypickle.” The sudden catch in Merry’s own voice had surprised her. She motioned for Sylvie to back onto a lower step, then swung the screen door open. Gingerly she lifted the pie from her niece’s grubby hands and set it on the table. “It’s as fine as feathers on an elephant.”

  Just the night before, when he heard Merry tell the girls their backyard cleanup effort was as pleasing as trout in a jellyroll, Howard had said, “They don’t think it’s funny, you know. When you call on your Muffins from Heaven or your Princess Meg in a Wheelchair or your Fish in a Christly Jellyroll.”

  “They know love when they hear it.”

  Her mud pie delivered, Sylvie scampered off, letting the door bang shut. Merry nabbed an ant speeding away from the pie and washed the critter down the sink. Out the window she saw the small curved backs of Sylvie and her sister Mavis hunched side by side in the bare triangle at one end of the garden where she’d meant to seed late lettuce. Borrowed miracles, the two of them. She watched as Sylvie, without breaking her crouch, measured out tiny steps sideways, crowding her sister. When Mavis pushed back Sylvie braced herself on hands and knees, determined to claim all the earth her four limbs could reach. Mavis, older by a year, conceded finally and wheeled away on her oversized tricycle. It was the younger girl with her fierce attachment to that patch of dirt who made Merry ache to go outside and win a reluctant hug. “Look,” she wanted to say, “what is it you want? Just ask.” Sylvie lowered her face closer to the dirt and stayed that way for a long moment. Maybe she was watching an earthworm, but she might just be breathing in the mix of odours the hot sun pulled from the soil. A tonic. Merry understood. For her, the heady traces of gas and oil and grease that met her at the door of the shop said Welcome home.

  Merry left those few square feet of garden unplanted for several years. After a time Sylvie lost interest in mud pies, but she was still a dirt girl. Summer evenings she’d squat there shaping a hill with her hands, driving toy cars around the base, then straight up the slope, watching how the wheels left a flowing wake. The mechanics of soil. Merry, nearby, thinning carrots and slapping mosquitoes, said, “Little scientist.” The girl didn’t hear or didn’t care, lost in her head until Howard three houses down whistled her in for bedtime snack.

  “When might you help with the weeding, Your Exalted High Princess of Dirt?”

  “Um. Tomorrow?”

  UNDER THE DART, Merry worked the tip of a screwdriver around the lug to loosen the dried mud, turning her face to the side to avoid the fine sift. It had taken her years to convince Howard the garage was more than a hobby for her. Hadn’t they both inherited the place from their father?

  “A girl mechanic?” he’d said. “We’ll lose business.” They had, and then they hadn’t.

  “You’ll never find a husband.”

  “Second husband,” she’d reminded him, and that was true so far, but marriages fail anyway. A man can vanish in a minute to the sounds of the back door falling shut and the engine of his Studebaker catching and tires on gravel as he makes for the city, where he might already have a job and almost certainly has a woman. And the babies you’d always expected to birth from him and hold and love can vanish in that same simple minute. Vroom. Merry took up the ratchet that lay across her stomach, loosened the plug, and listened to the glug of oil as it began its long drain into the catch-pan. She could inch her way out from under, or she could relax a minute and listen to yet one more Glen Campbell song. She bent her knees further to take the pressure off her back. Rhinestone Cowboy.

  “HELP IS WHAT I’m looking for.”

  “Yes, honey, sorry. Whatever I can do.”

  “Being as how I’m pregnant.”

  “A baby, oh. Honey. Listen, how about I come to the city for a day or two. Later in the week, say. We’ll get a few things figured out? Your dad can bring in one of the young fry to cover for me. Honey, I’ve got to get back, but I’ll call again just as soon as I’m home for supper. A baby, that’s — it’s wonderful.”

  “Are you going to tell my Dad?’

  “No, dear. Aren’t you?”

  She didn’t mean to make a tally of her envy, but there it was. Children: Howard two, Merry zero. Grandchildren: Mavis with six-year-old Chad whooping and running about and two-year-old Kayla studying her picture books; now Sylvie with a wee bean floating warm inside. Howard three, Merry zero. Once tallied it was fact, and manageable. She would do what she’d always done, hammer it into help. Swords to ploughshares, that was the teaching. Still: Sylvie one, Merry none.

  AS THE WEDDING DANCE was winding down those years ago, Merry and Sylvie had slipped out the side door of the town hall into the fresh June night, Sylvie still catching her breath after a frantic round of butterfly where she’d twirled counter-clock-wise with Jack, then clockwise with Erik Salverson, her friend since mud pie days. She bent and lifted the skirt of her long dress and used it to wipe her forehead. “I finally feel like I’ve left home for good.”

  “That you have.”

  “Mom always told me the best thing to do was get out of this town. It’s the most important thing, she said.”<
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  “It isn’t all misery, you know — Ripley.” But the mom is the mom and the aunt is only the aunt. Even on the wedding day, and with the mom gone — and tragically — almost two years, the aunt was only the aunt.

  “‘Leave it behind,’ she told me.”

  “Is that why young Erik never figured into your plans?” In his high school years, Erik had hung around the shop in the late afternoons just the way Merry had years before, hoping for jobs, hoping for something, picking up an old piston or a piece of broken tie rod just to thunk it back on the bench. Fetching a tool the moment before it was asked for. His wishbone leg — the left one, was it? — seemed to crank his steps with restlessness. He might have this town inside him, but he had other things inside him too. He was here for the moment, but soon enough he’d be knocking Ripley’s dust off his workboots, you watch. Merry wondered, not for the first time, what life she might have found if she herself had left. But for her brother’s girls needing her, she would have. Wouldn’t she? The pulse of unfamiliar streets, department stores with shelves and racks and dressed-up windows, high-ceilinged rooms downtown where a man might ask a woman to dance.

  Sylvie reached up and began pulling hairpins out of her updo. “Erik was never that big a deal.” Her side ringlets were limp, brought low by the hours and the dancing.

  “Is that right?”

  “And I did it, you know. I moved to the city and I found a job, and I met a pretty good guy, and now look.” She swirled her ivory satin.