The Opening Sky (43 page)

He clambers up onto the dock, water pouring off his thighs and blackening the wood, and she hands him a towel. “Aiden,” she says.

T
HE OLD GARAGE WILL ALWAYS BE A SPECIAL place to Sylvie: the dense smells of motor oil and dirt and sheep manure, the windows overgrown with Virginia creeper, her father’s motorcycle shrouded by a tarp. They were in a grotto, as if they’d stepped down into it on moss-covered stones. It’s not the actual things they said to each other, although she’ll always remember what they said. It’s that her mother followed her out to the garage. That they met there, in dim green light, and passed secret tokens to each other. This is who I am. This is who
I
am.

The question that started it all – Sylvie had carried that question for years, with no expectation of ever asking it. But then a social worker came to the house and gave her a lesson in the power of questions. She came in the afternoon, the day before they were to go and see the baby, a hot, hot afternoon building towards rain. She was young herself, probably no more than twenty-five or twenty-six. She was wearing a grey skirt and a white blouse and she had a formal way of talking even during the casual part of the visit, as if she was still drawing on her course materials. She wanted to interview
Sylvie alone, so Liz poured them tall glasses of iced tea and they carried them out to the deck.

“Tell me about your baby,” the social worker said when they were settled in their chairs. “I know that even tiny babies have personalities. What sort of infant is Faun?” By then a white haze had settled over the baby in Sylvie’s mind, so there was really nothing she could recall and describe. “She seemed different at different times,” she said finally.

The social worker gazed across the yard to where clouds were growing in the west, and then she turned her eyes back on Sylvie. “What’s your experience been like as a mom?” she asked. What came forcefully back to Sylvie was being
touched
, constantly touched, on every square inch of her body, inside and out, the baby’s sucking mouth always on her. Then she remembered the way the baby would sometimes lift a tiny hand and lay it lightly on her breast, and grief shook her. How long would her baby have to wait to be loved?

A lawnmower roared to life nearby, and the chance to answer was past. The social worker picked up her iced tea. “I wonder if you feel a bit of relief now, not to have to look after her. It would only be natural. You must feel as though you have your life back.”

“No,” Sylvie said. “Not really.”

The social worker was small and neat and serious. Sylvie loomed beside her, exposed in all her pain to the young woman’s thoughtful eyes, and she understood that the guise of childhood that had been draped over her these past few weeks in her parents’ house had fallen away.

“Here’s the address where you’ll go for the visit with your baby,” the worker said finally, pulling a card out of her bag. “I won’t be the one handling the visit. It will be one of my colleagues, Valerie – this is her card. Will Noah be going with you?”

She stood up to go into the house, and then she turned and said simply, “You know, you just need to tell the truth.”

After supper Noah appeared in her bedroom doorway. He was sweaty from his ride over. Sylvie got up and tossed over a flannel baby blanket for him to wipe his face with. He looked different. “Hey, you’re trying to grow a beard.”

“I’m not trying. It’s doing it all on its own.”

“I like it.”

“Gracias.” He threw the blanket into the hamper.

The ceiling fan was on its lowest setting, and the dolphins in the baby’s mobile circled slowly in the breeze. “Are my parents outside?”

“Yeah, they’re smoking a joint on the deck.”

“What time did you get into the city?”

“Around two. Alison’s boyfriend was up at the lake and he gave me a ride. He was going to the Eco-Network, so I hung out there for a while. I ran into a lot of people.”

Alison’s boyfriend
, she thought, and one little strand of her anguish snapped, like an elastic breaking.

“Jason Stryker – I ran into him. Do you know him? I got the impression he knows you. He’s working on protection for the Seine River. They’re doing a public awareness campaign and they need people to write trail guides. I said I’d see if you were interested.”

“I might be. I’m not exactly busy at the moment.” Under that dark stubble, the planes of his face seemed to be in higher relief. It struck her that this might make it easier to know what he was thinking and feeling. “Is this what we’re doing now?” she asked.

“What?”

“Acting like it never happened.”

He reached up and waggled one of the little stuffed dolphins,
and the rest of the pod leapt around it. “I think people with babies still work as activists,” he said. “When they can make the time.”

“Are you a person with a baby? Is that the way you see yourself?”

“I’m trying. I’m trying to figure out how to do this. It’s hard having so much of your life laid out for you. But I guess you know that. And I guess it’s like that for almost everybody.” He walked over to the bed and sat down. He never had trouble meeting her eyes. She had made a lot of mistakes, but loving him the way she did was not one of them. “So,” he said. “Tomorrow we go to see her. What time?”

“One o’clock.”

“Will she be at the foster home?”

“No, it’s an office on Stafford.”

“Do you want to go for a ride in the morning?”

“Yeah, okay. I haven’t been on my bike yet. All year.”

“I’ll come over and pick you up. Your tires might be shot.”

She looked at his tanned face for another long minute, and then she said, “Noah, I’m going to see a psychiatrist next week. It’s partly for the police, and for
CFS
. But also, the day I got lost, I hallucinated. I heard my name. Like
God
was calling me, or something.”

“That was Gilles.”

“Gilles?”

Noah hitched his way along the bed so he could lean against the headboard. “After he found the baby, he walked around by the car, shouting for you. He has a really deep voice. You would have heard him.”

It was as if the light in the room went up. She stepped over to the bed and sat down. At an angle, so she could keep her eyes on him.

“Who was the guy who picked you up?”

“His name was Enrique Mendez,” she said. What had really happened with Enrique Mendez had grown so slippery in her mind that she had to bear down hard to get it out.

“Why didn’t you just tell the police?”

She started to explain and found she couldn’t go on, for how fucking stupid it was. “Although it’s weird, you know, that he wasn’t curious about me. He never said, ‘What are you doing out here? Why are you so upset?’ He just picked me up and drove.”

“He probably didn’t want to get into anything,” Noah said. “He had his own problems. But most people would have asked for his help right away.”

She ran her finger back and forth along a seam of the quilt, a perfect straight line her mother had sewn. Finally she crawled up the bed and lay down. He swung his legs up and stretched out beside her. They lay side by side on the quilt, watching the ceiling fan wobble above them.

“All the time I was lost, I tried not to think about the baby alone in the car. Because it freaked me out so much. And then, when I got into the truck, it was just there. The baby had been in the car for twenty-four hours, and no one had any idea where I had gone, and right then, I understood that she never could have survived. She had died because of me. And I couldn’t say it out loud. I couldn’t say it to that man. When we got to Kenora and he let me out at the hospital, well, then I finally said it.”

She could feel the sweat along her hairline pricking coldly with each revolution of the fan. A door banged below and footsteps climbed the stairs to the loft.

“Everyone thinks I should be happy because the baby was saved and it all turned out fine.”

Noah reached over and took her hand. He lifted it to his chest and held it with both of his.

“But you know, if you realize something that terrible could have happened, it’s almost the same as if it did. Like the possibility is still there, you’re always going to know that.”

She let his hand go and turned onto her side, facing him. She wanted to tell him the whole story of that night, what she saw when she watched the sky clear and the satellites crawling among the stars: how infinitesimal she was, and yet, how one little thing she did could turn the whole world black. How could these things both be true? And she wondered whether Noah also knew this, about himself? Did he live in the same strange flicker?

There was so much she could never tell him. But there was a lot that she could, and they had hardly made a start. Then he rolled over too and lay studying her face. It was not sympathy she saw in his eyes exactly, but interest. He was a person who wanted to know her, and who wanted to know the truth.

“It’s not just that she could have died because of me,” she said slowly. She paused until she had enough breath for the rest. “It’s that, all those weeks I looked after her, I never really knew she was alive. I only started to get it that day in the truck, when I thought she had died.”

What theatre or courtroom or temple would be adequate for the ceremony they enact that day? In fact it’s a three-storey cement-block office building they go into, a shell that could be torn down and erased from memory in a week.

“Sorry, the air conditioning is nuts,” the receptionist says. She leads them to the frigid room where a social worker waits for them and where their baby lies. In a car seat on a table, clutching a teething ring in her perfect starfish hands, trying, with an infant’s optimism, to cram it into her mouth. She’s wearing a familiar red and purple dress, and Sylvie understands that, like the other strangers she’s encountered in the last few weeks, the foster mother is kind, she dressed the baby in one of the outfits Liz sent over.

When she and Noah come back out, they lean against the building for a few minutes, not talking, not touching, just trying to get warm in the sun. Then they get on their bikes and ride through the streets to the Forks. To the point of land where people in deerskin jackets and moccasins met for centuries, paddling in from three directions in birchbark canoes. Cree and Saulteaux traded there and danced and feasted, leaving behind projectile points and pottery shards. One of them left a footprint, a single eight-hundred-year-old footprint in the river clay.

A powwow is going on today. Sylvie and Noah cycle up to the sound of drumming. They can see red regalia and feather headdresses and the stoop and lift of the dancers. But they can’t get close for the crowd, so they lock their bikes and run down the limestone steps, out onto the riverside path. The brown surface of the river is dimpled with tiny whirlpools. Boats roar by on the water and cars stream over the midtown bridge, and above the city floats a red and blue
RE/MAX
balloon, so low they can see the intermittent blasts of its gas jets. To the far-off sound of the drumming they walk quickly along the river, weaving their way among joggers and dogs and bikes and happy families with children.

They pass under the bridge, through a dark and dirty passage stinking of pee. On the other side the path becomes a trail, and they follow it to a secluded spot. A narrow stretch of bush where raccoons and squirrels and foxes and otters and even coyotes live out their wild lives in the heart of the city. Noah drops his backpack and stretches out, using it for a pillow. Sylvie slips off her sandals and eases herself down beside him, lying on her back in the dandelions and wild mustard.

In the Child and Family Services office, she was the one who held their daughter first. In the weeks since she’d seen her, the baby she knew had vanished; their little girl had entered a new
stage. She snuffled at them as though snuffling amused her, and she held up her head and pressed her strong little legs into Sylvie’s lap, determined to stand. Between her own two hands Sylvie could feel how frail the baby’s ribs were, she could feel her breath inflating the tiny balloon of her chest. But this little girl had already set out on her solitary journey through the world; she’d seen things her parents knew nothing about.

“Oh, baby. Hey, baby,” Sylvie said shakily. She didn’t cry – she’d spent the last six months crying. But Noah did: she saw the skin around his eyes soften and redden as tears surfaced. Once you start crying, it’s hard to stop. They were side by side on a couch – in that office they dared to sit like a family for the first time – and she passed their daughter to him. The baby drooled over his shoulder, following Sylvie with her eyes.

“She still knows my voice,” Sylvie said.

“I see that,” said the social worker, whose name was Valerie Glover.

Valerie Glover’s face and voice were kind. She was older than the social worker who had come to the house, and warmer. She’d often worked with young parents struggling with ambivalence, she said, and she took its strands apart with care, stressing what voluntary surrender meant, how open and revocable it was for a few months, and how closed and final after that. She read them the legal definition of adoption and offered three paraphrases.

Sylvie was trembling from the cold. Please, she wanted to say. We’re not stupid. But of course Valerie Glover was watching them closely, and no doubt that’s exactly what puzzled her. Sylvie reached over and cupped the baby’s downy head with her hand. “We never even named her,” she finally said.

“Have you talked over your intentions with your parents? No? Well, you need to do that. With your permission, I’d like to meet with them.”

“My mother will be glad we’re doing this,” Noah said. “This is what she wanted all along.”

The baby reached up a hand and grabbed Noah’s ear, and his eyes filled again. In the end, Sylvie thought, when all their visits were over and the papers were signed, that would be what she remembered best. And the baby’s steady eyes (Noah’s eyes), which met theirs curiously and neutrally. And her eggshell skin, and the way her lashes were fixed to her eyelids. Sylvie took it all in hungrily, trying to press it deep into her memory. She tried to be a responsible agent for her future self.