The Opening Sky (32 page)

The faun continued to look at Sylvie with imploring eyes. Sylvie considered getting up in response to her unspoken plea, but she felt confused and abashed by her gaze and she was insulted by Adrienne’s term
play
. So she just sat as though she were part of the adult conversation, trying to figure out the meaning of this scene she had found herself in, which was not immediately evident.

The other man at the table wore clip-on sunglasses flipped up, like awnings over his regular glasses. He was nice-looking but totally silent. He was married to Adrienne, Sylvie deduced from the flat tone of her voice when she spoke to him and the fact that her feet were in his lap. The other woman Sylvie judged to be the age of a university student. She had long golden hair and beautiful big eyes and a sad and lifeless air, and she never spoke.

From their seats at the table they could see a tree house where three little boys were playing. One had a rope with a plastic milk jug tied to it; he was dangling it from the platform and the other two were below with sticks, hitting the jug like a piñata. They were slightly different sizes, but from their similar childish behaviour Sylvie judged them all to be about eight. Adrienne explained that the blond kids were hers and the kid up on the platform was
Payton’s little brother, Liam. She seemed about to say something else, and then she changed her mind.

“These comely Canadian wenches have been on their own pilgrimage, to the Renaissance Festival,” Krzysztof said, pouring Liz some cider and gesturing to ask whether he could give some to Sylvie (Liz shook her head). “That crude commercial rite of Bacchus down the road. Dowagers streaming in by the thousands to show off their goods. The plunging décolletages! The boobs thrust out like howitzers over laced corsets – my god!”

“I beg your pardon,” Liz said, putting a hand to the neckline of her top. She had on skinny white capris and a new top, very low-cut, in a pattern that was not quite an animal print. Enlarged tree bark maybe. “You weren’t actually there yesterday, were you?” she said.

“Took the kid a while back,” he said.

“We were there yesterday,” Adrienne said. “It was the longest afternoon of my life.”

“I hear you,” said Liz. Talking in a bubbly but secretly nervous way, she went on to tell them how she had struck up a conversation with a woman. In the
Chateau Vino
, she said, making fun of the name. “Just this ordinary woman. I mean, she was dressed like Maid Marian and she still managed to look like a soccer mom. I asked her where she was from – I figured she’d say, ‘Minnetonka. I’m a clerk at Walmart,’ or something – and she says, ‘I’m the second daughter of the Earl of Blackmoor. When I was sixteen, my father tried to marry me off to a cruel baron. So I escaped to Bristol in a turnip cart, and then I became the mistress of Captain Kidd.’ ”

They all laughed. They talked about the cybergoths who were starting to take over the festival, and about the mishmash of costumes you saw there, mythological creatures such as centaurs and unicorns walking around with people in Elizabethan dress. “It’s sort of like the Flintstones riding dinosaurs,” Liz said. And Krzysztof
said, “It’s not in the least like that,” and Liz put her hand on his arm and laughed flirtatiously into his face.

They talked about the cider and tilted their glasses up to the sun, and Krzysztof and Adrienne argued about whether this cider was cloudier than the cider they had drunk the day before. Adrienne’s husband and the university student laughed along with the others, but Adrienne’s husband hardly spoke and Melody, the young woman, never did. She was wearing cut-offs and a tiny lacy black top, and she sat tightly, as though she was too cold to move. Sylvie could not figure out who she was connected to, though it was Krzysztof she watched with her big, sad eyes.

And all the while the faun stood by Sylvie’s chair, gazing at her with an intense expression of appeal. When Sylvie looked in its direction, it took a step backwards. It was trying to lead her away but it would not make a
Come here
gesture. And so finally Sylvie got up and the faun turned and led her towards the house. They were about the same height, but the faun’s hoofs raised it a few inches. The hoofs looked exactly like real hoofs, split and brown and glossy. The faun was wearing brown shorts and light brown tights with fur sewn on them, fur that curled prettily down over its hoofs. It had a tail that grew naturally from the back of its shorts. She –
it
– was perfect.

The door to the house was painted a deep red and had an old-fashioned iron handle. The faun tilted its head and looked at the handle curiously, so Sylvie went ahead and opened the door. The house was dark after the sunshine of the yard. A hunting lodge, it would have to be. Hoofs clicking against the wooden floor, the faun turned mincingly around, as though in wonder at discovering a human abode. It looked with surprise at the big stuffed sofa and chairs, at the tall grandfather clock, and at the fern, into which it buried its face for a moment. Then it tripped around the kitchen,
looking shyly at the white appliances, and cunning came into its eyes. Come here, it said by tilting its head. Sylvie walked across the kitchen. There were shelves crowded with bottles of all colours and shapes, and piles of vegetables on the wooden sideboards, and a big old-fashioned stove, and a deep white sink. Where a
body
lay. A long, pinkish brown body with tiny arms, curled piteously to fit into the sink. Headless. The faun smiled over it, enjoying Sylvie’s horror.

Sylvie ran outside and sat again on the chair beside her mother. She put her feet on the rung of her mother’s chair. Above them the trees breathed and dropped sunlight in patches on the table. A tray of Puffed Wheat cake was brought out and broken into chunks and the little boys ran over from the tree house and grabbed it up. Lemonade was poured for them and cheese was cut. Wasps discovered the table and the boys began to whine.

Sylvie said no to the cake. She felt too sick to eat. What was it in the sink? It was dead and skinned. Bloodless, neat, muscle-bound. It was not the shape of any animal she knew. It was a life form that had fallen from another world and been slaughtered in this one.

Payton had come back outside and taken her spot at the edge of the forest. She also ignored appeals to eat. Sylvie could not look at her. She was appalled by the graceful, innocent way she stood and moved, when in fact she was so knowing and so cruel.

Then there were efforts to get Payton to take Sylvie to the lake. “All of you can go,” said Adrienne. The boys hooted and ran to fetch their things. “I guess this is why we pay you the big bucks,” she said to Melody, and Melody stood up reluctantly.

“I don’t have a bathing suit,” Sylvie said, and Adrienne laughed.

“Payton has two,” she said. “Payton, you’ll lend Sylvie one of your swimsuits, won’t you?” and Sylvie understood that what was funny was the word
bathing
.

“Are you coming?” Sylvie asked her mother in a low voice. Liz gave her head a private shake, not meeting Sylvie’s eyes. She moved slightly on her chair to shut Sylvie out.

“They’re in the canvas bag in the back of the van,” Adrienne said, but Payton gave no sign that she’d heard. “Sylvie, come and pick out which one you want,” Adrienne said loudly.

So Sylvie got up and followed Adrienne to the alligator van. Adrienne opened the big door at the back and beckoned Sylvie closer. “I just wanted to talk to you for a minute,” she said in a low voice. “I wanted to tell you their mother is very sick. Payton and Liam’s mother. Well, she’s dying, actually. It’s harsh to say it that way, but it’s the sort of thing that happens, and you’re a grown-up girl, I can see how mature you are. She has breast cancer. The poor kids don’t have a father. God knows where they’re going to end up. We brought them with us to give everybody a breather. I thought I’d tell you in case Payton is a little hard to take. She can be, I know. But will you cut her some slack?”

“Yes,” Sylvie said. They were standing under the door, looking through the van windows at Payton, tiny and motionless under a tree, as though they were looking at her through the wrong end of binoculars.

“It’s really nice that she has you to hang out with today,” Adrienne said. “I hope you can get her to go swimming. I don’t know if she’ll take that costume off. Her mother made it – her mother was very talented that way. She always intended to take Payton to the festival, and then things got really bad really fast.” Adrienne pulled two bathing suits out of a red canvas bag. An orange two-piece and a blue and white striped one-piece. “Just take these upstairs. I bet she’ll follow you. You can grab towels from the bathroom.”

First Sylvie went to the car and got her overnight bag, and then she walked alone into the cool, dark house. She saw a steep
staircase and she climbed it. Upstairs, she went into the first bedroom she saw. It had a large brass bed and a big wooden desk and a round rug made of rags, braided and coiled in a way that Sylvie knew how to do herself. The whole house, with its solid and simple furniture, reminded her of the big house at the Fort. Three or four books were scattered on the desk, and Sylvie picked one up.
The Golden Bough
, with a beautiful thick cover of moulded leather. Inside were old-fashioned illustrations in soft colours, as though hand-painted. In the first, a barefoot woman in an animal-skin dress led a goat away from a forest. She had her head turned back regretfully and she was blowing on a long horn. Sylvie turned the thick pages slowly. She recognized an adult version of the sort of stories she loved, but the text was dense and resisted her.

Also on the desk was a photograph, a family portrait. It had been taken at the booth Sylvie and Liz had visited at the Renaissance Festival. To Sylvie’s surprise she knew all three people in it. The woman was Mary Magdalene, who used to come to their house and whom Sylvie loved. Once when she was little, when all the mothers were sitting around talking in the dining room, for no reason Mary Magdalene reached out and lifted Sylvie onto her lap. Then she got up from the table and carried Sylvie to the couch, where she sat and read to her, a story about a mouse dentist who dared to fix the teeth of a fox. It was the only time Sylvie ever heard that story, but she remembered it perfectly. And there in the picture sat Mary Magdalene with her curling dark hair, a happy childhood memory resplendent in a blue velvet gown.

And beside her was her son, Sylvie’s old friend Sparky, wearing a leather vest laced at the front. He was taller, of course, but it was him, with his hair and eyes exactly the same warm shade of brown and his happy interest in the world showing on his face. He was holding one arm so that it showed off a beautiful sleeve of
overlapping silver leaves. He must be thirteen. He looked willing to be in the picture, not sulky and aloof like a teenager. It was a beautiful picture, as though they truly were a family living in a stone house in a valley with mist rising around it and sheep grazing on the hills.

“Krzysztof’s family,” said the faun, at her elbow. She laughed at how startled Sylvie was. “It’s feathered mail,” she explained then, as if she could read Sylvie’s thoughts. “Falconers wear it so the falcon can land on their arm and not tear the skin.”

“They didn’t have anything like that at the photo booth,” Sylvie said.

“I guess it belongs to the kid, then. He must be a falconer.” Then Payton pointed to Krzysztof, the man sitting outside at this moment with her mother. “What a pig. Well, that’s an insult to another hoofed beast. What a
human
.”

Sylvie put the photograph back on the dresser. “I thought you didn’t talk.”

“Fauns talk among themselves,” Payton said. “What did you think? Did you think we’re just what humans see?” Her freckles were perfect little brown ovals drawn on with a makeup pencil. Her breath had a mushroomy smell. “Go and change,” she said. “Go into the other room.” She picked up the blue and white bathing suit and thrust it at Sylvie. “Take this one. Put it on under your clothes.”

As Sylvie walked across the hall, Payton called, “You’ll like it. It’s got a hole in the crotch.”

Adrienne and her husband were in the kitchen working when Sylvie and Payton walked through with all their clothes on. “My, aren’t you the modest pair,” Adrienne said. “Well, have a fun time
bathing
.”

Sylvie did not look over at the harvest table. Melody was standing by the step and they followed her across the yard and onto a
path that opened into the woods. She had on a black bikini under a long, see-through shirt of pale yellow, and she was carrying her purse and a big canvas beach bag. Her body was thin but curvy; her breasts looked like two apples rocking on the narrow board of her chest. The trail they followed was covered with fallen leaves and sank gradually lower. The three little boys ran ahead and Sylvie walked silently beside Payton. They had to walk slowly because of Payton, who plodded along in her hoofs, holding her hands in front of her like kangaroo paws.

Sylvie was not wearing a bathing suit and she suspected that Payton was not either. When she went back to the big bedroom after tucking the bathing suit under a pillow in the second bedroom, Payton was still dressed in her faun costume, standing at the window looking through Sylvie’s binoculars.

“Cool,” she said.

“Are binoculars allowed in your faun act?” Sylvie said.

“Actually, little sucky Canadian girl, binoculars were invented to give faun vision to humans.”

She handed them to Sylvie in a sneering, check-it-out-for-yourself way. Sylvie raised them to her face and, without having to refocus, saw the temple of a man’s bent head with a vein twisting along it. She located the arm that belonged with this head and followed it down to where Krzysztof’s hand, a big, expressive hand with dark hairs on the backs of the fingers, was exploring the white fabric covering a slender thigh. Then she handed back the binoculars.

None of them spoke on that long walk to the beach, except Melody, who called once for the little boys to wait. As she walked, Sylvie thought about Sparky and Mary Magdalene, about how terribly she had missed them since they moved away, without realizing it and without thinking about them very often. But suddenly
her grief blurred her eyes and squeezed her chest, and she understood that she’d been
waiting
, as though they’d promised to come back for her and were late.