If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

by Leona Theis

  Sylvie worked her way through a waist-high carton of foodstuffs, and there in the bottom rested a twenty-four-deck of beer. More accurately, it was a twenty-three-deck: someone had pilfered a single can and closed off that corner with a criss-cross of packing tape. She looked at the signs above the bins, as if, somewhere to the left of Protein, Soup, Vegetables and Miscellaneous Dry, she might find Booze. Dean, a volunteer who seemed always to be there — Sylvie suspected he often had fines to work off — stood close by puzzling out expiry dates on canned goods.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “What you got?” He bent at the waist and leaned close over the open carton in the way of a person who would be better off with glasses. “Yeah. They use it for gas.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Drain it. They get the deposit on the cans and use the money to fuel the van. Big sink in the back.”

  “Want one for your pocket first?”

  He shook his head but not before a moment’s hesitation during which he inspected and then reknotted the tie at the waist of his sweatpants.

  The sink was two feet deep, two feet wide and four feet long. It had a slight, unfortunate tilt, with the drain at the higher end. Sylvie popped the tabs on two cans and held them upside down close to the drain. The beer foamed and swirled, a pesky trickle running off to the low end. Jack used to make beer. One night when he was out and she was alone in the basement suite she’d heard a bang, loud and close, and feared it was a gun going off out on the street. It spooked her, but she’d settled back in. Another shot, and she pulled her pyjama top tight around herself. The upstairs people were away in Regina at a football game. When she heard the third bang, it came to her that Jack’s new batch of brew was exploding one bottle at a time in the laundry room. She wasn’t about to peek in, risk a blast of slivered glass. She read her book and counted explosions, reporting thirteen to Jack when he got home around midnight.

  Too much sugar, he said. The yeast had gone, as he put it, logarithmic. He was in the laundry room in his rain jacket and safety goggles till three, uncapping brew and pouring it down the floor drain, no doubt sliding his mouth over the bottle-tops to suck up the rise of foam. She could hear his laughter through the door. When he crawled into bed he was soaked inside and out in under-ripe beer. That had been the first time she’d left him to sleep on the couch. The slippery cushion she tried to use as a pillow kept sliding onto the living room floor, and she’d gone back to the bedroom to fetch her real pillow, found Jack hugging it and tried to slide it gently out of his grip. He held it close and mumbled into it, “Come on back, my sweet, sweet love, to your intrepid chemist.”

  “Not tonight, honey.”

  “But I’m full of yeast, and rising.”

  “You’re full of something.”

  IN THE BACK ROOM Sylvie slid a can of beer into the left-hand pocket of her fleece vest. Its weight sent the vest off-kilter, and she slid another into the right-hand pocket for balance. She finished emptying the others and tossed them into the recycling bin. On her way out she slipped into the office of the warehouse manager, empty at the moment, and left a loonie on the corner of the desk to make up for the lost deposit on the cans she’d pocketed. She was no thief, anymore.

  After Jack drowned, the throb of want that had always lived within her changed its nature and became an amorphous longing, not centred on things. It was no easier to tame than her earlier yearnings. Just as she’d never been able to satisfy herself with a liberated T-shirt when she was twenty-four, she couldn’t satisfy herself by not taking one now; nor by volunteering with community theatre; nor by sitting at the big oak table in the library helping adults who’d never learned to read decipher prescription instructions or household bills or the provincial driving handbook. Nor by nor by nor by.

  SOOZE WAS A WARM WEIGHT against her chest, her belly, her thighs as she leaned back in an armchair in what passed for a lobby at the Sleep Well. The ersatz leather chair was hardly meant for grandmothering in but Sylvie’s own soft body, more ample with the years, made a comfy bed for a toddler’s nap, Sooze’s head on one slack breast and her small hand clutching the fabric above the other. Before sitting down, Sylvie had taken a complimentary newspaper from the stack on the check-in desk. She had it open now to the editorial page, folded back on itself and back yet again so she could hold it one-handed and read the letters to the editor Logan had been griping about.

  I would like for those people from the flooded housing complex to stop their whining. My taxes subsidize that housing. If they would smarten up and stand on their own two feet, just maybe they’d find a better place to live.

  So Logan had a point.

  These people are sucking the system dry. Now we’re putting them up in hotels. Hotels! They’re on vacation at my expense and still they complain. God, I hate whiners!

  God, Sylvie hated whiners. She let the newspaper drop to the floor. The best advice to Logan would be to stop reading the letters. Better yet, write his own:

  Dear fellow taxpayer, I cannot go home. The housing you are so unhappy to subsidize — so that I can get a break so as to stand on my own two part-time jobs, neither of which I can go to since the daycare has flooded as well — that housing was built on low ground, unfit, and all the water that might otherwise flood your house, in these times of extreme weather events, has flooded mine. Dear fellow taxpayer, my daughter is running at both ends, vomit and diarrhea for days now because she walked through sewer water to get to the bus to get to the hotel while I carried the baby. Dear fellow taxpayer, it is impossible to police a child’s hands, pants, shoes, whathaveyou, enough to keep the germs from spreading. Dear —

  Maybe don’t bother. You had to laugh or else you’d cry.

  Cradling the sleeping child, Sylvie walked her butt cheeks forward on the vinyl upholstery. Life with a little one, lurch, lurch. The friction raised rude noises from the vinyl, and she laughed. The clerk looked across the desk, his face backlit and bearing a slight scowl. Then he laughed too.

  The corridor soccer game was once more in swing, preschoolers now. The ball rolled slowly along the carpet toward Sylvie. Holding the still-asleep Sooze close to her chest, she bent forward and kicked it gently toward an eager, black-haired girl in a pink T-shirt that said Playgirl in silver glitter. The little Playgirl wound up and kicked hard, her straight black hair swinging forward with her effort. The ball smacked into Sooze’s head.

  Searching inside the freezer of the itty bitty fridge as little Sooze screamed and screamed, Sylvie found a single, empty ice cube tray underneath the Pop-Tarts. The bump above Sooze’s temple rose. Ice bucket, where? She grabbed a cereal bowl, opened the door and shouted, “Stop with that soccer ball! Hear me?” She made for the ice machine, the child hot and screaming in her arms. The ice cubes melted in Sylvie’s fingers, melted into Sooze’s hair. A trickle ran into her ear. Water ran down Sylvie’s wrist and streamed along her forearm inside her sleeve.

  SHE WASN’T LIFESAVER MATERIAL, hardly kept her own head above water, but any one of the others horsing around in the water might have managed it, would have, surely, if Sylvie had shouted, “Help him! He can’t swim!”

  To Jack’s funeral she’d worn an A-line shift, pale green, that she’d chosen because among all her home-sewn wardrobe it was the item with a cut generous enough to hang loose over her thickening belly. The colour was inappropriate for the occasion, but that was Sylvie for you, or so she was certain she heard Margo whisper to Penny over tea and dainties in the church annex. You had to wonder about Sylvie, didn’t you?

  Yes, you did. Uncertain guilt leaves a person up for grabs. She could be this, she could be that. Had she willed things to come to a bad end? The truth was, she didn’t remember exactly the events of the afternoon — Alex tossing Jack off the dock in what he assumed was harmless play, what she herself tried or hadn’t tried to shout to the others, what she might have wished for in whatever inner reach.

  The uneasy dreams were with her a
lmost nightly now, never to do with the day at the lake, always to do with finding herself unready, inadequate. They spun a mist of anxiety that circled the rim of her consciousness through the day. What did they serve, that they wouldn’t go away? How would they help her daughter, her grandkids? How would they help Jack? The years had taught Sylvie a strategy: lose herself in something, anything, whatever might be handy at the time. It hardly worked and it hardly worked for long, but it was a relief, of sorts. Thus, the pageant. But leading the children through rhymes and fairy tales had failed, so far, to conjure the magic.

  LOGAN’S DAUGHTER DÉSIRÉE left the stage leading her herd of seven sheep, who shuffled on all fours, the oversized white shirts that served as costumes hanging low under their bellies, shirttails draping their little bums. Sylvie the clown took up her mic. “That marks the end. Or” — she made a show of counting the receding bottoms — “that makes seven ends.”

  Could someone please laugh? So many faces out there expecting more from her, the little ones on the floor up front, the grown-ups and the older kids behind, looking imprisoned in their rows of chairs. James was off in the wings, sheep milling around him behind a portable room divider. The full-grown man skipping on as Red Riding Hood singing tra-la had been the one gag that earned an unforced laugh. As resident clown, was Sylvie now supposed to come up with an appropriate truth, as James had suggested the other day?

  Everyone in the room had already swallowed an overdose of truth. Even the children — the adorable little ones in their fairy tale costumes, the older ones with their practised readings — had taken the occasion too seriously, every gesture hesitant, and even wearing this pinchy damn red bulb on her nose Sylvie had coaxed only a trickle or two of laughter from all the tight throats out there.

  She gestured toward the room divider. “Let’s get our do-gooder out here.”

  James came out to a scatter of applause, and bowed. He’d taken off his hoodie and put on one of the big white shirts. “Feeling kind of sheepish,” he said. So easily, he could call forth laughter. He made for the wings again, but Sylvie grabbed his arm.

  “I need a volunteer. You’re one of those, aren’t you? We’re going to have a wheelbarrow race.” She took off her red nose and held it high like a badge of authority. “Yes, everyone! Not just the little ones.” A vivid image of Jack flashed through her mind: sunburned in his swim trunks, clapping out a beat, playing emcee and coaxing their lolling friends onto the dock to dance the Hustle. “Everyone!” She clipped her nose back on, adjusted it to minimize the pinch. “And you, James, will help me organize it. See all that empty space at the back?”

  The younger kids were up already and scrambling over each other, but the grown-ups and teenagers shifted in their chairs. Fine for the children, said their bent heads, their thigh-tapping hands, but I’ll stay put. The kids paired off and made themselves into human wheelbarrows without urging or instruction, the kid in back holding up the ankles of the one in front while the forward end of the barrow hand-walked across the room. They started across the carpet, not a race but a free-for-all. They collapsed and recovered, laughing so hard Sylvie was sure some had peed their pants already. She implored her own Catherine with a look, Logan as well, and Stan. Logan lifted his baseball cap and resettled it. Catherine looked at her lap. Others in the audience performed variations on those same gestures. Oh, my girl, my heart, if you knew your father’s talent for getting folks to loosen their lacings, for a moment at least.

  Well, she wouldn’t plead. They could be their own worst enemies. She made for the back of the room, where the kids were falling over each other, and James followed close behind. His arms in their white shirtsleeves, cuffs undone and flopping, came from behind and grabbed her around the waist. He pulled back and she swung forward, and before she knew it he’d lifted her parallel to the floor, so that she landed on all fours when he lowered her. She planted her hands, felt her knees touch down. He took hold of her ankles, and her weight shifted as he lifted her legs off the carpet. She slapped a hand forward, fast, so she wouldn’t fall on her face.

  Laughing, sucking a string of drool back in through her lips, Sylvie walked forward with her hands, James following, holding her ankles, letting her set the pace. The posture tipped her forward, and she fought the feeling she might land on her forehead. They skirted the mêlée of raucous children, heading back toward the rows of reluctant adults solid in their seats. The carpet’s pattern of whirls dizzied her, and she bent her neck to look up, toward the people she wanted to shake loose. She saw their shifting expressions as she and James barreled toward them — embarrassment, laughter, resistance. One skinny woman wore the face a person makes when someone close by has let one rip. Forget it, let them sit. The kids are having a whale of a time. They were always the best reason to go to this trouble anyway.

  Looking up was a strain. She needed to swallow and could only manage a choke. She lowered her head again, reaching further with each step of her hands. James was slower to change pace, and she felt the drag on her legs. Then he sped up and her elbow buckled and she fell, laughing. A pain shot through her shoulder and then it was gone. James lurched and landed heavily on top of her. She felt her bladder let go, relief both sweet and searing. Heat rose to her face, and sweat trickled into an eye. Oh, she could make her own window mask now, like the one Stan had made, couldn’t she? — a grimace you could read anything into, stretched across the pane. She could be this, she could be that. A person really can laugh and cry at the same time. Maybe once she stood up and all those stifled folks saw the places where the wet had deepened the colours on her clown pants, maybe something would let loose inside them, too. Her red nose had come off in the fall, and it rolled across the carpet. A little dark-haired girl wearing a baggy white sheep shirt scooped it up and peered inside. In just a moment Sylvie would stand up and make her way over and show her how to put it on.

  Blueberry Hill

  SPEEDING DOWN the wickedest stretch of Blueberry Hill their skis scrape through yesterday’s two fresh centimetres of snow to a layer of week-old ice. “Stay loose!” Syl shouts ahead. “Stay low, use your edges!” It’s all she can do to keep from falling, and she’s no novice on cross-country skis. Lolly, well, she’s just audacious. Syl’s lost sight of the girl in her bright yellow jacket. There’s a final long turn to negotiate before the grade will level out. Rain should not fall at this altitude in the Rockies at this time of year, or not in the amount it fell last week. A “rain-on-snow event” is the term she and the others on the research crew use. The new normal, Brian is fond of saying, is that when it comes to weather there’s no such thing as normal. He’s the expert, the lead scientist.

  Syl manages the treacherous turn and there’s Lolly, stepped to one side of the track and waiting.

  “Relax, Granny S.”

  The other two grandmas, Lolly’s grandmothers by blood, are Gran and Nan. Syl would have preferred her plain first name, but never mind, just don’t break some part of yourself on this hill, precious girl.

  To calm her jittery knees she snaps out of her bindings, stretches one leg and then the other, knocks the snow off her boots and snaps back in. She could wallop her fellow grad student Kirby, who said, “Take her up Blueberry, she’ll love it! Stop somewhere on the way down, listen to the birds.”

  “What sort of birds?”

  “Dunno. The sort that sing.”

  Syl doesn’t hear birdsong as well as she used to. “Lolly, do you hear birds?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What sort?”

  “Dunno.”

  “The sort that sing?”

  EARLY MORNING, and it’s time to get out there. Don’t keep the reporter waiting in the cold. Syl dresses in the dark so as not to wake Lolly. She hopes this guy won’t be a nuisance. None of them make the climb to the Petrina Ridge sites alone, they buddy up, but yesterday Brian asked if she’d be all right with a different sort of buddy. Could she take this person from the newspaper along? It’ll be go
od for the project, he said. Probably some cub making his newsman’s bones at the local weekly. Well, he’d better be fit. These mountains will lob something new at you on any given day. Up on the slopes you’re only as strong as your weakest link. Your leakest wink, her first husband used to say. With a wink.

  Last year’s floods were catastrophic, and now TV and the papers and the news blogs want to know what Syl and the others on Brian’s team hope to accomplish with their high-altitude weather stations, their windspeeds, their sounding of snow.

  Groping through a drawer in the dark to find her socks, Syl stubs her toe on the dresser. “Shit!”

  Lolly stirs.

  “Sorry.” A whisper. The young, so vulnerable with their defenses given over to sleep. Last night Syl came in late from revisiting the lab after supper. Getting undressed in the wedge of light from the main room, watching the girl breathing through open lips, she thought what a child she looked, closer to eleven than fourteen. She remembers her own Adam at that age, fatherless, breakable, how many times she risked waking him because she couldn’t stop herself from tucking his long hair behind his ear and setting a wrist to his forehead to feel for health or fever. Adam’s daughter Em, an indoors girl with drama club commitments and a burning need for down-time to balance the drama, showed no interest in the fact that her grandmother was living in a motel suite near the mountains for three months. Lolly, however, begged to come for the week of her high school break.

  “I can look after myself when you’re busy. Promise and hope to die.” Lolly’s mom and dad, Steven’s daughter and her husband, are on a beach in Costa Rica this week trying to reheat their marriage.

  “I love you to pieces. Of course you can come.”

  She eases the bedroom door shut, flicks on the light in the larger room, hears the first hollow sputter of the coffee pot and catches the wake-up smell of it. She eats porridge, toast, an egg. A person needs a strong start for such a day. Into her backpack she stows a thermos of hot broth, two peanut butter sandwiches, granola bars, toolkit, and a down jacket stuffed into a compression sack. Laptop at the back. First aid kit, check. She straps her snowshoes to either side of the pack. Steven was the one who taught her to snowshoe, their first vacation together, Christmas fifteen years ago.