The Opening Sky (3 page)

Steve Earle in his earbuds now, and Aiden’s by the English Garden, the flowers are mounds under the snow, and he turns his mind to the most troubling hour of this troubling morning, to Odette Zimmerman. Who appeared in the doorway annoyingly early, while Aiden was still picking glass out of the carpet in the waiting room. “Don’t ask,” he said.

She lowered herself into a chair and watched him, amused in her haughty way. She looks like the woman who walks into the private eye’s office at the beginning of a film noir: she’s got the widow’s peak, and the scary eyebrows, and the severe, dramatic way of dressing, and you know without a doubt that what you’re about to hear has bugger all to do with the real story. She’s a cultural historian,
Odette, though she doesn’t have a position at the moment, she’s reduced to displaying her erudition to bus drivers and the paper boy and, of course, to Aiden. She was caught shoplifting – that’s why she’s in therapy. A filet of Arctic char, then a lava lamp from a second-hand store. As acting-out behaviour, none of this interested her much. She tried to intellectualize it: wasn’t the lava lamp about something called
thing theory
?

This morning she launched into one of her pontifications as soon as they’d moved to the office, holding her gaze aloft as though she were reading the words off the ceiling. One minute Aiden was listening for the vital thread, then the next minute he was completely at sea. “Anyway, last night it came to me, crystal clear,” he surfaced to hear her say. “And I don’t know why it took me this long to see it. I need to tell him. We’d both be so much better off if I just spoke my truth.”

“Come again?” Aiden said.

“Dante,” Odette said, lowering her gaze to the altitude of Aiden’s forehead. “I just need to tell him how I feel. The way we are with each other right now, it’s always there. It’s the elephant in the room. It’s not good for either of us.”

Dante. It was her son she was talking about, her eighteen-year-old son. A month into therapy she’d announced, “I’m very tuned in to my sexual attraction to Dante. Very. He walks into the room and I am instantly aroused.”

The shock and revulsion Aiden felt, it wasn’t just for what she’d said. It was the exhilaration in her eyes, the level of self-involvement that would let her reveal something like that with no inhibition. He knew she read psychoanalytic theory for fun; in her mind, she and Aiden were consulting, peer with peer, over a fascinating patient. This lust for her son she seemed to regard as her Freudian bona fides. “You can’t control what you don’t own,” she
was fond of musing, a sentiment Aiden could hardly dispute. Since she dropped that bombshell, he’s worked hard to keep the focus on her, on how she can deal with her sexuality in healthy ways, but she’s always been more interested in parsing the strands of this anarchic attraction, as though there might be a treasure at the end, some big psychoanalytic payoff.

So, this morning. “Better it should be clear between us,” she said.

“Odette,” Aiden said. He leaned forward and took her hand, something he never did – in six or eight years of counselling he had never before touched a client. But he held her wrist hard to get her attention. She finally met his eyes, already resentful.

“Listen to me,” he said. “That would be a huge mistake. It would be extremely damaging to your son. It would deprive him of his mother. These feelings of yours have nothing to do with him.” He could feel his anger in his nostrils. “Tell me this,” he said. “You chose your last appointment before a two-week break to drop this. Why?”

“It just came to me.”

“I don’t believe that. You’ve set your mind on this. You don’t want to give us a chance to work it through. You’re asking me to ratify a decision you’ve made to act destructively.”

“So feelings are bad? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Acting on them can be. You’re an adult. It’s infantile to think we’re entitled to act on every feeling.”

Finally she promised not to talk to Dante about it over the holidays. That was the most Aiden could extract from her.

As soon as the door closed behind Odette, Aiden picked up the phone, punched in Edith Wong’s number, and left a message. She’s a good colleague; they do a lot of consulting. Don’t obsess, he tells himself now, plodding between stands of red dogwood poking through the snow. Have a little trust. She brought it to therapy first.

He overtakes two women, passes them in a show of strength. He jogs by the shack – the homeless shack hidden in the trees on the riverbank. Simple living. His thoughts jump to his daughter, to Sylvie at Lower Fort Garry, the job she had as a kid. As a historical re-enactor – what a great job – it was 1832 the whole summer. He was away a lot, doing the intensive for his counselling program, but when he could, he got up in the morning and drove her there. She’d sit in the car braiding her hair with nimble fingers, holding each pigtail in her mouth while she fixed it with a white ribbon. No elastic bands back then.

“Was that in your handbook?”

“Nope,” Sylvie said. “I figured it out.” She was about eleven at the time, she was under some sort of child-labour contract.

The path curves into the forest and the city falls away – just him in the bush. Twelve trees per person in this city. He reaches up and squelches his iPod. Sometimes you hear chickadees along this path. Today all he hears is his Adidas on the gravel, plod, plod, plod, plod. His feet
have trod, have trod, have trod, and all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil, and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell
. Ah, fuck Hopkins, you can’t run to Hopkins, all those sprung rhythms. Running, you gotta have the old iambic. Ta-
da
, ta-
da
, ta-
da
, ta-
da
.
With tears he fights and wins the field, his naked breast stands for a shield, his camp is pitchèd in a stall, his bulwark but a broken wall
.

Then he’s back in traffic, he’s jogging on the spot at the stoplight, and then he’s at his building. Sweat worms down his face and his runners are sopping. Somebody’s plastered cheap Christmas crap all over the elevator; tinsel droops like cobweb onto his head. He’s riding up with an
MBA
in a tailored suit. Sixteen floors of tax lawyers and marketers and accountants and real estate tycoons in this building – the whole block hums with mercantile intrigue.
And there at the centre of it, in a cloister of secrets and tears, sits Aiden Phimister, Bachelor of Arts (Psych./Eng.), Master of Arts (Eng.), Master of Family and Individual Therapy. The
MBA
sharing the elevator doesn’t look at him, but no doubt he smells him, he feels Aiden’s heat. They’re two different species, sensing each other in the woods and veering in opposite directions.

T
he winter sun is a white disk behind the clouds when Sylvie slings her backpack over one shoulder and starts down Ellice Avenue. Christmas wreaths hang from the light poles, shreds of limp plastic, the colour of camouflage gear. Who thinks that sort of thing is a good idea?
Pine boughs
, Sylvie thinks as she walks swiftly along the slushy street, refreshed by her tiny nap on the toilet, and her mind veers to her botany project, her brilliant permaculture design – the globe artichokes and borage and Swiss chard and kale growing in free and happy collaboration, the strawberries for groundcover and the flowers to attract predator insects to keep the pests down, and no wasteful rigid rows like the garden she planted when she was young. A warm light fills her mind, the light of Dr. Hillsborough standing in his office doorway, saying, “I think you have a gift for this.” And then an ugly image snaps its jaws, a flash of recall from just before sleep swamped her this morning. The words “Replace Existing File,” and
herself clicking on them
. She’d opened a new window with her rough draft – her lame, pathetic rough draft – looking for a paragraph she’d deleted. Had she ever, once in the night, saved all the new work she had done?

She’s just past Lockhart Hall. She wheels around, runs back, and dashes up the steps. On a bench in the wide, empty common area she yanks her laptop out of her pack, boots it, taps frantically
on the control pad.
Neglected_garden.doc
. She scans the first paragraph. “Oh god!” she gasps.
UNDO, UNDO
.

Benedictor is where she hoped he’d be, working in a study carrel just outside the library.

“Oh god, Benedictor,” Sylvie cries. “I’m so glad you’re here! I did something so, so stupid!” Her laptop is still on; she’s been running through Lockhart Hall with it open in front of her like an accident victim. She sets it on his desk. “Look. My botany paper. It’s due tomorrow. But look.” She scrolls down. “Oh my god, it should be twelve pages! My tables – where are my tables?”

He gets it instantly. “You saved an old version on top of your new one.”

“Oh god!” She weaves her fingers through her bangs, clenches them. Now she does feel like puking. “I did so much great work yesterday and in the night. Oh god. Oh, I’m so stupid! It’s like, I saw Replace and my brain was on drugs or something.”

“That’s bad, Sylvie. That’s really bad.” He looks at her gravely.

“I know, but it was six o’clock in the morning. I haven’t slept since, like, last week. Oh, Benedictor, can you get it back?”

“I don’t know. I can try. Can you leave it here?”

“Yes. Yes!”

There’s a half-eaten egg sandwich on plastic wrap in front of him. He was probably up all night too. She can see his kindness in his face. She can see him wanting to reassure her, but he’s so honest he can’t. Instead he raises a hand to give her a high-five. When their two hands touch, they could be an Olympic symbol, his so black, hers so white. She loves him. She should date him. If she hadn’t found Noah, she would.

At the clinic she asks for Dr. Rodham. He’s away, but she can see someone named Dr. Valdez if she’s prepared to wait an hour.
She’s prepared – she can study anywhere. She finds a chair in the crowded waiting room and pulls out her Evolutionary Development handouts.
Evo-Devo, Evo-Devo
, her mind chants. It would make a great name. Or, like, Eva Diva.

Dr. Roadster, she calls Dr. Rodham.
Of course
he’s away. He’ll be driving along the California coast in a convertible with a blond beside him. Sylvie’s seen him twice. The first time, last August, when she came to ask about going on the pill, the nurse put her in an examination room to wait. Through the wall she could hear a guy talking on the phone. He was trying to rent a car at
LAX
. “Honda Fit?” he said in a disgusted tone. “What do you have in the Porsche line? What about a
BMW
? A Z4? You don’t have a single bloody roadster?” Finally he hung up and then the door opened, and he came in flashing a smile that had nothing to do with happiness or friendliness. His teeth were over-whitened.

She told him she wanted to start on a contraceptive pill and he gave her a sales talk about a pill you took for three months straight without having a period.

“Is that natural?” she asked. “For your body?”

“Natural?” he said. “Cave women didn’t menstruate. They were either malnourished or they were pregnant or they were lactating.”

It felt like a trick. Normally people in a doctor’s position want to make things harder for you. But the next thing she knew he had printed the prescription and was holding it out to her. “Fun, fun, fun,” he said.

Or possibly she added that when she told her friends that night, when they were having a big conversation on Jenn’s deck.

“Wouldn’t your mother know all about this?” a girl named Ella asked. “Isn’t this, like, her thing?”

“My…
mother
?” Sylvie said, as if it were a word she’d never heard before.

“Yeah, doesn’t she run a birth control clinic or something?”

Thea started laughing like a maniac. “
PMS
! Think about the
PMS
you’re going to have!”

“I saw an
SNL
bit,” Jenn said, suddenly remembering. “About a
twelve
-month pill. Tina Fey was in it – she was crazy with
PMS
, she was swinging an axe around.”

But that actually reassured Sylvie. In the afternoon she’d googled the drug. Somebody had posted a comment:
I would wait till its been on the market longer and not let yourself be a ginny pig
. But this pill had been around a long time – since when Tina Fey was on
Saturday Night Live
. The more they talked, the more Sylvie could see that it was absolutely the most responsible thing to do. Tampons every month made a lot of garbage. And then there was the land given over to growing cotton, which is a terrible crop for the soil. Of course, Dr. Roadster was likely being bribed by the drug company. That’s not something she thought about then, though she thinks about it now.

She reads her Evo-Devo handouts for half an hour and then takes a break and goes out to a machine in the hall to buy some pseudo-food. It’s now afternoon, only four more hours until sunset. When she was a kid, she’d made a model of the solar system, with a beach ball as the sun and a dried cranberry stuck on a crooked silver pin as Earth.
THE AXIS OF THE EARTH IS JUST AN IMAGINARY LINE BETWEEN THE POLES
, she wrote on the legend. But all the same, she used a protractor when she bent the silver pin, careful to get the angle right. Because Earth is a
slave
to that imaginary line: it spins at a tilt around it, which is why, minute by minute, everybody’s being carried deeper into the cold and the dark, whether they like it or not.

Everybody. That is so North-centric, as Noah would point out right away.
Noah is coming
. She stands in the hall chewing sugary glued-together oatmeal and thinks of them wedged together on her
narrow bed. How cool would it be if they could evade their parents for a few days, hide out at Laurence Hall after Kajri leaves for the holidays. They’ll do it. Sylvie will
kidnap
him. She sees him riding down the escalator at the airport, everyone but him carrying huge shopping bags spilling over with wrapped gifts, his alert eyes scanning the crowd of families hugging hello, and here it’s
her
leaning against the back wall of the arrivals area.