If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

by Leona Theis

  “Granny, help me!”

  On her feet now, Syl looks up the hill, runs across the track when she ought to have waited and hears a skier curse as he speeds past. “Get ski patrol!” she calls after him, not knowing if he hears. The next skier stops long enough to shed a jacket and drape it over Lolly. She pulls out a phone and tries it while Syl snaps Lolly’s boots free of her skis.

  “Just one bar, no luck. I’m on it, though!” Swish, and she’s gone. Syl tugs at Lolly’s hat to bring it lower at the back of her neck, then takes off her own and snugs it overtop of Lolly’s.

  “My shoulder hurts so bad.”

  “I know, my girl.” Syl takes off a mitt and wipes tears from Lolly’s cheeks. “But you’ll be all right. You will.” She is prickly hot with relief.

  “Owwwww!”

  “I know. I know.” She unzips her fanny pack, pulls out her tiny bottle of Grand Marnier and brings it to Lolly’s lips.

  “World’s best granny.”

  Syl takes a shot herself, rubs her lower back, wipes sweat from the back of her own neck. She puts a tender hand to Lolly’s forehead. “Someone will be here soon.”

  A LITTLE AFTER NINE, Steven rushes into Lolly’s room at Canmore General, his jacket smelling of cold air and coffee, waves of body warmth floating out the front where it’s unzipped. “Made the drive in just over five.”

  Syl and Lolly have been through much by now — the excruciating moments as the doctor set Lolly’s shoulder back into its socket, the positioning of the sling, the tears and frustration and ice packs. The girl’s half-stoned on pain killers now. The two of them hold hands like sisters, a female sort of club, watching the end of an episode of Gilmore Girls on the laptop Syl rushed home for during one of Lolly’s dozes. Steven leans between them to hug his granddaughter. Lolly and Syl both shrink.

  He backs off, slips out of his jacket and holds it clasped at his waist. “Sorry. Bit of an ambush?”

  “It’s okay. Here, sit here. It’s tough to make that drive nonstop.” Syl reaches a hand underneath her chair for the tiny, almost empty Grand Marnier bottle and slips it into her purse. She kisses Steven’s cheek, then circles to the other side of Lolly’s bed and strokes her forehead. “We’re so lucky, Lolly and me.” The girl is drifting off again.

  Steven looks across at Syl. “This, today — this adventure, shall we call it — are you all right? You must have been almost as shaken up as Lolly.”

  “I’m okay.”

  He reaches over, takes her hand, holds it high so not to bother Lolly. “Because I know how —”

  Syl feels a strain in her shoulder and takes her hand back. “I’m fine.” Setting a spare key to the motel suite on the bedside table, she says, “I should stop in at the lab. I’ll leave you two.”

  “How long will you be?”

  “Good question. I have some catch-up.”

  “See you in a bit. Love you.”

  Syl’s inner thighs as she walks the corridor are weak and shaking, as if they’re made of elastic and have been stretched to the limit, then let go. For all these hours she has smiled and hugged, held hands and made small jokes. Rearranged pillows and puzzled out the workings of the bed to achieve a satisfactory tilt, but she is angry. With Lolly. For falling. Not angry a lot, angry a little. But stop: a person takes a fall, it’s not their fault. Or not necessarily their fault. For most of Syl’s life, she’s wondered about exactly that. About fault. Intention. About why her mother, twisted and half-lame, tried to negotiate the narrow basement stairs that long-ago June day. Syl had three theories, and she gave them even odds: some forever unknown errand; the wish for an exit after years of despair; or surrender — to set out on an errand and let the stairway itself decide her success or failure.

  How dare life be so arbitrary? Who does it think it is, sending you this way or that in the blur of a moment?

  Yes, she’s a little angry with Lolly.

  Watch yourself, Syl, you’re taking aim at the handiest target.

  All right, it’s her mother she’s angry with.

  Watch, now, you set that to rest years ago.

  Who does that leave?

  IN THE PARKING LOT, one hand braced against the door of her Jeep, she doubles over with a quiver in her stomach. Looking up, she sees the lit white ellipse of a Tim Hortons sign. For a moment it’s as if she floats a little above her body, watching, waiting to see what she’ll do next, as if she doesn’t know for certain she’s about to take out her phone and tap on Robin’s name. Human beings, she thinks as she lights the screen: is there no stopping us from squandering what we have? Rivers drying, glaciers disappearing, and that’s not the half of it. Then there’s me. Isn’t that the problem, though: me me me? No matter how much, how many, the human animal is not satisfied. She drains the final few drops of Grand Marnier. Sugar and oranges.

  Tim’s, then, because it’s a family restaurant, noisy and neutral. A place to answer his further questions about her research. Who do you think you’re fooling, Syl? You’re my perfect man, man, she heard herself say last night on Skype to convince herself she didn’t need this fresh attention Robin gives her, when in fact she could drink it till she drowned. But you can’t have everything, all at once. Everyone knows the heat of the beginning fades. Everyone knows you take what’s left and fold it into something that will keep. There’s no sense starting over only to end up miles away a year from now in a place the same but different.

  Fault, intention, surrender.

  An extended family group has colonized one corner of the restaurant, a couple about the same age as Syl surrounded by adult children along with grandkids ranging from babes-in-arms to teens. Fourteen or so, and they’ve pulled two long tables together and strewn ketchup-bloodied napkins and remnants of garlic toast on the floor. The elder man, the grandfather/dad, reminds Syl of the long-ago fiancé she took a powder on not forty-eight hours before the wedding. Jack might be bald by now in much the way this man is, a tonsured look. The elder woman, the grandmother/mom, is greying at the temples just as Syl is, though her hair is shoulder-length while Syl keeps hers short and easy. They even share the same body type, though Syl is more trim. It’s as if she’s looking at another version of herself. She has the urge to wave a greeting. Across the table from this grandmother/mother, a boy of about ten is using a comic book to hit a girl a few years younger over the head. The grandmother reaches long and takes the boy’s arm. “I do wish you would act your age.” The boy shakes free and leaves his chair and stomps over to the condiment counter, where he fills a tiny white paper cup with ketchup and stands there swirling his tongue into it, letting it smear his nose, his chin.

  Robin, just arrived, slides onto the bench beside Syl. “What’s this?” He nods toward the ketchup lover.

  “He’s acting his age.”

  “No kidding.” He touches her arm, a hesitant touch, then takes his hand back. “So. Um, thank you for the call, Syl, but why in God’s name Tim’s? Why not the Cave, where it’s quiet?”

  “Close to the hospital.” She cannot steady her hands. She holds them in prayer position between her knees a moment, then unclasps them and rests her warm palms on her thighs and feels her own heat through the denim. A surge of arousal.

  Robin lays his hand on her forearm again and leaves it there. “Syl?”

  “What’s happening here?”

  “Something out of the ordinary.”

  “Suppose it isn’t.” She takes his hand. “Suppose all it is, is new. That old story. Middle-age itch.”

  He laughs gently. “We’re both past middle age.”

  “Sixty’s the new fifty.”

  Sometimes, like now, she’s felt as if he looks straight into her. She isn’t sure what’s in there to see; things that used to be certain have shifted. If it isn’t this man, now, how long before it’s another? When does a person’s final chance come around to taste someone, something, new?

  “What I’m saying, Syl, I’m saying this feels good.” He lifts their joined
hands then lets them rest on his leg. “It feels right, not wrong.”

  She allows herself a nod. “It’s true that —” What? — that she likes the shiver at her centre when those eyes of his take her in? That when he says her name it’s like a drug? This woken thirst. She says, “If this were real life you wouldn’t be saying things like that.”

  “This isn’t real life for you? Because it is for me.”

  “I have a husband. I love him. This isn’t happening.”

  “It already has.”

  She isn’t sure when she let go, but they aren’t holding hands anymore.

  “Can we at least get out of Tim’s? Get a drink at the Cave?”

  “Yes. Okay.” She pulls her jacket on, picks up her purse. As she passes the condiment stand she palms two packets of pepper and one of salt and slides them into her pocket, where her fingers meet the pleasant surprise of a forgotten pair of pewter wishbone earrings still fastened to their plastic card. Outside, their elbows touch, a jolt of current between them before they head for their separate cars. “Meet you there,” they say at the same time.

  She buckles in. The unlikely power of that touch, just one elbow to another through layers of jacket. She slides her window partway down and calls to him, “Robin, wait.”

  He stops, turns.

  It’s wrong, and impossible. “Where do you live?” she says.

  “Not so far. Follow me.”

  “This is bound to end badly.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  No, she doesn’t. What she does know is that Lolly is lying not far away in a hospital bed, her grandpa beside her. Syl’s nerves are a samba of hesitation and anticipation. She waits to see Robin’s lights come on and she swings her Jeep out, ready to follow. Shifting into drive, she catches sight of the two hats lying on the passenger seat, enfolded, her own black one on the outside and, peeking out, the dance of yellow snowflakes around the blue band of Lolly’s. Holding her foot on the brake, Syl fishes in her purse for her phone, pecks out a text: Sorry. Would love to come to your place tonight. You have no idea, dear Robin. But Lolly left her hat behind. I fear she’ll need it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m deeply grateful to many people and organizations for their support.

  Thanks to the following, all of whom read early versions of one or more chapters, in some cases several years ago: Kim Aubrey, Brenda Baker, Bev Brenna, David Carpenter, Terry Jordan, and Alice Kuipers. Special thanks to Brenda Baker, a generous soul whose work inspired a key moment in “The Last Days of Disco.” One scene in her story “Puerto Escondido” so intrigued me that ultimately I had to explore it from Sylvie’s point of view. Thanks also to Gordon Vaxvick for helping me sort out background and details in several areas where I had questions.

  Special thanks to John Pomeroy, Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change, University of Saskatchewan, and Director, Global Water Futures Programme, for reviewing short excerpts and answering questions to do with research at hydrometeorological stations in the Rocky Mountains. His work, and that of his colleagues, inspired the setting and the context for some of the questions raised in “Blueberry Hill.” The Petrina Ridge station is fictional, and any inaccuracies to do with research and practices at such sites are my own. Other vital members of the inspiration crew for “Blueberry Hill” were intrepid Nordic ski buddies Miranda Jones, Maya Moore, Aldona and Brian Torgunrud, and Judy Winchester.

  Under the guidance of Nino Ricci, the Sage Hill Fiction Colloquium 2016 was a valuable — and fun — ten days in the valley. It came at just the right time for Sylvie. Deep gratitude to Mr. Ricci and to Patti Flather, Lisa Guenther, Maria Meindl, and Catriona Wright. The singing and dancing were important, too!

  Heartfelt thanks to freelance editor Lara Hinchberger for her care, insight, encouragement, and faith in the book. Truly one of the best manuscript development experiences I could ever hope to have.

  Thanks to the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the Canada Council for the Arts for grants that helped me along the ten-year road.

  Thanks to the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild for the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award, and to Marina Endicott and Ibi Kaslik, 2016 award judges.

  Chapter 1, “High Beams,” under an earlier title, was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Award. It appeared in Grain Magazine and in The Journey Prize Stories 26.

  Chapter 2, “How Sylvie Failed to Become a Better Person through Yoga,” won the American Short Fiction Contest and appeared in American Short Fiction, Summer 2016. I’m grateful to the magazine and to Elizabeth McCracken, judge for the award. My thanks also to Exile Editions, where the same chapter was longlisted for the Carter V. Cooper award.

  Two important venues where I drafted and redrafted portions of this book were Studio 330G in Saskatoon (thank you, Marie Lanoo) and the retreats organized by the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild at St. Peter’s Abbey in Meunster, SK.

  Heartfelt thanks to everyone at Freehand Books, including managing editors Anna Boyar and Kelsey Attard, and designer Natalie Olsen. What a pleasure you’ve made this experience. Deep gratitude to editor Deborah Willis for her insight, skill, and dedication. She was a joy to work with.

  Thanks also to my sisters Beth, Margaret, and Nancy for their support and encouragement. I do hope Sylvie will strike a chord with you.

  Thanks to Michael Fulton for love, encouragement, and, of course, valuable technical support.

  Finally, to Murray Fulton, it’s hard to find words for the depth of my gratitude. For your insights as we talked through ideas and writing challenges, thank you. More importantly, for the decades of love and support in ways too numerous to list, and too big to name, thank you.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  For the purpose of storytelling, I played a little with the time of day for portions of the OJ chase referred to in “Honestly,”.

  In “What Erik Saw” I refer to a certain commercial and song associated with Coca-Cola as being important to Sylvie during an “everything-sixties” phase. In fact, the commercial is from 1971, which is close enough for Sylvie and her paisley mini dress.

  LEONA THEIS’S first book, Sightlines, linked stories that form a portrait of a town, won two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Excerpts from her novel The Art of Salvage were shortlisted for novella awards on both the east and west coasts of Canada. Her personal essays have been published in literary magazines in Canada and the United States, won creative nonfiction awards from the CBC and Prairie Fire Magazine, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Stories, and American Short Fiction, where her work won the story prize. She lives in Saskatoon.