If Sylvie Had Nine Lives Read online

  Jack told Kyle we were good, but still the waiter stood there. I managed to slip my hand into the pocket of my scrunched jacket and deposit the two bills still in hand. I pulled a tissue from the pocket and dabbed at my nose.

  Finally Kyle spoke. “Did you see it? They got OJ. Cuffed him outside his house.”

  Jack said, “Anybody get killed?”

  “Sorry.” Kyle grinned. “Nobody besides Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.”

  What all this means about the murders and the chase I’m not sure, but I’m trying to tell the evening as I recall it. The allure, as if it was a movie, as if there weren’t real-life children and parents and grandparents in the picture. As if it was staged for the benefit of ourselves and CNN and the people lining that California freeway with their signs that said RUN and DIE and no one knowing which they hoped for most in the caves where they never looked.

  WATCHING THE SHADOWS move across Kyle’s back as he walked away, I thought, suppose I do turn over the money to the police? Jack wouldn’t need to know, ever. I could wad it into my pockets tonight and take it to the station in the morning and if no one claimed it I could tell him I’d saved up for the leather pants over months.

  He was monitoring the goings-on at the bar, making sure the whisky going into our glasses was Canadian Club. Don’t you dare try to slip an inferior second round past Jack. It hadn’t even registered with me that he’d ordered fresh drinks, and now here they were. Wondering if there were more bills in danger of being lost in the crevice, I let my hand wander behind me.

  “What’s bothering you, hon?”

  “Bothering me?”

  “Do you have a sore shoulder? Or are you scratching your butt and trying to be discreet about it?”

  “Just, my jacket’s —”

  “Anyway,” he said, “show’s over,” and for a silly instant I thought he knew what I was up to. Until he made a hitchhiker’s fist and pointed his thumb back over his shoulder toward the TV. “You should’ve seen at our shop this afternoon — everyone crowding in to listen on Ray’s office radio. You have to wonder what the hell kind of big-Jesus empty inner trench everyone’s trying so hard to fill.”

  I would be happier if Jack didn’t have the habit of saying things like that. Trenchant things, ha. He looked at me across the candle’s flicker, and I felt like I was writing an exam.

  “How would I know?”

  “It’s just a thing worth asking.”

  This from the man who was reluctant to talk about doors.

  “Jack —”

  “Maybe not a trench. Maybe a funnel. Stuff draining out the bottom while they pour stuff in the top.”

  I would never go so far as to say Jack brings out the worst in me. A person can’t say that. A person has to own responsibility for who she is. Suppose this, though: suppose he’s so honest it makes me want to punch honesty in the gut.

  “Jack, you were watching, too.”

  THE ELEVATOR DOOR slid open at the far end of the room, letting in a freak of light and showing the silhouettes of two slim women in short skirts and high heels. They made a beeline in the direction of our table — or it would’ve been a beeline except their eyes hadn’t adjusted to the change in light, and they bumped, one after the other, against a low table, the big hair of the second woman floofing forward then back as she regained her balance. The woman in the lead was in tears, and Jack would say later he thought it was because she’d banged her shins, but I knew better. She stopped beside our table. “Here, this one.”

  Woman number two said, “Are you sure?” Her cheeks were dusted with glitter, and the candlelight set it sparkling.

  “Pretty sure, pretty sure.” The first woman looked at my lap and then my face, and when those two things disappointed her she stretched her neck to one side to look over my shoulder. “Did you find some money? That’s where I was sitting. Earlier. I lost some money.”

  “Do you want to have a look?” I stood and turned and lifted my jacket, managing to drag it in such a way that it messed the neat stack of bills I’d been sitting on into the sort of scatter you might expect if a person had sat on all that cash unawares. I draped the jacket over my arm and peered at the chair as if it was hard for me to see much of anything in the dimness.

  “Oh thank God! ThankGod, thankGod.”

  I smiled. “That’s lucky.” I saw, nosing up from behind the cushion, an envelope my blind fingers hadn’t come across.

  The woman’s hands made me think of pale moths, quick creatures with hard-to-follow motions as they moved across the Ultrasuede gathering loose bills and pulling the envelope free. She knelt at the low table to count by the wavering light. The bills were almost all twenties. “Three hundred and forty …” She opened the envelope upside-down above the table, and a few bills fluttered down. “Three hundred and sixty … eighty … four hundred.”

  She turned toward her glittering friend. “Was it four, or was it four-forty?”

  “Didn’t you write it on the envelope?”

  “No, not, no. I didn’t.” The kneeling woman reached her fingers into the crevice at the back of the seat, found nothing.

  “Just wait.” I got to my knees as if to look under the chair, still holding my jacket. I thought I might fish out the couple of bills I’d slipped into my pocket without anyone seeing, make it look as if I’d just now found them on the carpet.

  “Here.” Jack lifted the jacket out of the way and out of my grip. “See anything?”

  “Sorry, nothing.” I stood and brushed my knees and felt the silken texture of my pantyhose and imagined the feel of the leather I wouldn’t be buying. I wanted to say, What’s it for, this cash? The take from a fundraiser? Rent money? Are you call girls? Do you not own a decent bag that doesn’t spill your valuables? “I’m glad you found it,” I said.

  It’s true I didn’t have time before the women arrived to entirely decide what to do, whether or not to take the money to the police or pocket the lot, but it’s quite likely I was tilting in the direction of honesty. And the fact that, there at the end, I was considering how to slide the pair of twenties out of my jacket and hand them over, there’s that.

  Last night Jack and I both pretended to go straight to sleep, and this morning as we quietly drank our coffee at the little round table in the corner of the kitchen, I wondered what thoughts had deepened the typically shallow crease between his eyebrows. Was he remembering the way I’d fidgeted in my chair, and was he about to conclude I’d discovered the cash and said nothing? But maybe it wasn’t — as he likes to remind me — maybe it wasn’t about me. He might have been spelunking inside himself, afraid of stumbling into a trench he’d never considered was there until he found himself in the grip of that Bronco chase.

  A walk might settle me. I edged past his chair and grabbed my jacket on the way out, not that it was a cold day, but I had forty dollars cash in the pocket, and my idea was to stop at the corner store for some little thing. Cinnamon buns or potato chips or a bag of pre-cooked shrimp. Something.

  I said earlier that I would try to relate the simple facts, as if I were recounting them to Aunt Merry. I wonder what a simple fact would look like, I would say now to her. I would ask her, Have you ever encountered one?

  The route to the corner store passes right by Andersen Drugs. Inside, I gave the display of sunglasses a slow spin. I flipped through a comic book. Then I saw the lit sign, “Greeting Cards” and it came to me that I shouldn’t have let the anniversary go by without so much as buying one for Jack. Twenty years. It’s easy enough to pay for a thing, I know. It’s easy enough to take it, too. You pick it up and slip it into a pocket or a purse or a waistband, and there you have it. You just have it.

  I don’t always remember, even, what I’ve taken or when. I’ll stash it in my separate room with everything else and close the door. Or I’ll leave it in a pocket and forget. Six months will go by and I’ll pull out a winter coat, and in there with a tissue and a couple of quarters will be my favourite merlot shade o
f lipstick, lifted last March and still in its shrink-sleeve, but in the meantime I’ve bought and paid for much the same shade twice over. Which means I have one for my pocket, one for my purse, and one for the drawer, in case.

  May Zeus Strike You with a Lightning Bolt

  THE YOUNG MAN behind the counter at the gas station had a shaved head and a Roughrider logo tattooed above his right ear. “Pump three?” His hand hovered near the cash register.

  Mavis scanned the magazine rack. She ought to pick up something to serve as a distraction for Sylvie. There: Canadian Living, the Christmas issue, on the cover a gingerbread house and the suggestion you recruit your kids and grandkids to help you build it. A poor choice, then.

  “Pump number three?”

  Hold it: House and Home. Decorator porn. But no, not enough muscle for the mood-lifting Sylvie would need.

  “Pump number three. Green Caravan.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Are you a professor? Absent-minded?”

  “Preoccupied, if you don’t mind. Just in town to get my sister out of jail.”

  “Twenty-six thirty-five, ma’am.”

  “I’m joking. She isn’t in jail, not really. Not yet.”

  “Don’t forget your receipt, ma’am.”

  As she steered away from the pumps, Mavis checked the dash clock. She’d made good time on the highway; she could afford a detour. Let’s turn right. She flicked the wipers on to chase a dusting of dry snow. Up along Broadway and across the bridge. At Midtown Plaza she found the leather store she and her sister had walked through the last time she’d visited, Sylvie mooning over “all the lovelies I can’t afford.” Now Mavis went to the far corner and found a rack of pants — black, brown, and a red that lost all hope of class by veering toward orange. She skimmed her palm along a top-stitched pant-leg, pale brown and butter soft. Waist 34. She took the pants to the change room, pulled them on and twisted so she could see in the three-way mirror how she filled them out in a way Sylvie with her ever-skinny butt would not. She quickened. It wasn’t often Mavis still thought of herself as a woman who might look sexy, given the opportunity. She widened the angle on one arm of the mirror. My. But leather pants were not the get-up for serving burgers at the rink in Ripley or attending fraught parent-teacher interviews — the special occasions of her evenings and afternoons.

  “Hell with it.” She opened the change room door.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Uh, sorry. I’m looking for a 29 waist. They’re for my sister.”

  A little “hair of the dog,” Mavis’s husband Pete might say, a folk remedy for what he’d taken to calling Sylvie’s “Illegal Acquisition Condition.” Mavis flung the shopping bag with its red rope handles into the back seat thinking, This is perverse. She almost threaded the seat belt through the handles to keep the pricey cargo safe. Definitely perverse. Maybe she wouldn’t take the bag into the house once she got to Sylvie’s. She could always return the pants day after tomorrow before heading back to Ripley.

  At Sylvie’s, after hugs, after “How are you really?”, after tears that welled but didn’t slip free, the two of them sat down at the little round kitchen table. Because the room was small, the table was shoved in a corner, which meant any two people were uncomfortably close even for immediate family. Or especially for immediate family. You had to turn either yourself or your chair to face the other person in a natural way. Maybe Sylvie and Jack were used to it. Her sister set two cups of black coffee in white mugs on the table and twisted the cap off a bottle of Bailey’s to serve as cream, but Mavis went to the fridge and helped herself to milk. All right, let’s tackle this. She started speaking before she got back to her chair. “When you told me that long story all those months ago about your night at Top of the Evening, the hundreds of dollars spilling out of your chair, you made it sound hilarious. As if you would never in fact have kept it, it was just something funny to think about.”

  “Why didn’t you bring Kayla with you? I thought you were bringing Kayla.”

  “Can we keep to the topic?”

  Her sister, looking at her lap, lifted a thin hand and tucked her limp hair behind her ear. “Kayla always likes a hit of the city.” She wore no earrings, not even a stud; no makeup, not even lipstick. Under the table her leg twitched up and down, her heel tapping the lino next to a slouchy leather bag, powder blue. Mavis wanted badly to set a hand on Sylvie’s pumping knee, to still it, but with one teenager still at home she knew better than to turn agitation back on itself. She managed to budge her chair back an inch and still not knock the wall. Space. When she was with Sylvie, Mavis had to work at finding space to call her own.

  “Is that a new purse? Nice.”

  “Never mind.”

  “On the handle there, is that one of those inventory tags?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Sylvie. How could I bring Kayla, given she’s got school, given the nature of the visit, given court tomorrow? Do you think I’m about to tell my kid, who loves you and who I’m pretty sure is nicking twenties from my wallet, that her aunt sauntered out of The Bay carrying a shopping bag with one pair of gym socks paid for and three necklaces not? Three. Do you even wear necklaces?”

  “It’s a teachable moment, don’t you think? An aunt should be a teacher.”

  Mavis laughed, they both did. She landed a quick slap on Sylvie’s arm and Sylvie gave her a quick slap back, their known vocabulary.

  “Besides,” said Mavis. “Kayla’s extra busy these days.” Busy was not the most accurate word. She’d taken to locking herself in her room. She would go thirty hours at a stretch, no food going in, nothing coming out either, other than she surely must sneak a trip or two to the bathroom in the dark. No school, no basketball, no babysitting for the family the next farm over and definitely no expressions of remorse. The only thing Mavis could hear through the bedroom door was music that reminded her of late seventies punk, but more cluttered. She’d stand listening for long moments, her ear to the door where Kayla had drawn a cartoon zeppelin in green permanent marker directly onto the white paint and printed the words BAD YEAR inside the airship. There was a girl in there, aching in nameless ways. Nights when Kayla was a newborn, Pete would mock Mavis when she pulled the standard parent trick of holding a mirror near the baby’s nose to check for breath. Maybe she should be at the farm this minute, listening at that door.

  “Sylvie-Syl. What made you think you’d get away with it?”

  “Nobody pays attention to the robot voice at the exit to The Bay. It’s always piping up. It makes the same announcement to every second person leaving the store.” Sylvie pinched her nose. “‘Apparently we failed to remove the inventory tag from your purchase.’” Her mechanical voice was funny, but Mavis managed not to laugh. “‘Please return to the service desk.’” In her normal voice Sylvie said, “People stand there looking embarrassed. Nobody comes, so they keep on walking.”

  “Which is what you did.”

  “Just my luck that on this day a man in black with his big important, um, walkie-talkie appears from nowhere. ‘If I could check your bag, ma’am.’”

  “Yeah, we’re ma’ams now.”

  “I know. Ma’am.” Sylvie slapped Mavis’s forearm and Mavis slapped back. Neither laughed.

  She should have brought the decorator magazine, anything. A show of care. A distraction for both of them. She ran a hand through her short hair and, with a quick small motion she hoped Sylvie wouldn’t notice, massaged her scalp. It was an old way she had of settling frustration before she spoke. “They’ll go easy on you, it’s a first offence.”

  Sylvie made a crooked line with her lips. “First offence on record.”

  “First offence on record and outside the family.”

  Sylvie looked away.

  “Joke,” said Mavis.

  “Laughing,” said Sylvie. “But I still feel bad about raiding your little tin globe of a piggy bank. In fact.”

  “You didn’t feel bad at the time.”


  “Remember how we loved the rattle? — all those nickels and dimes and quarters.”

  “Shake the world —” said Mavis.

  “— make a little noise,” said Sylvie.

  “Music, was the way we said it. Shake the world, make a little music.”

  “No: noise is how we said it.”

  “Be right back.” Mavis didn’t really need to pee, what she needed was to be in a different space. Now here she was at the head of the hallway she’d passed through dozens of times, at the other end of it the bathroom on one side and the main bedroom opposite, and before those, the doors to the separate rooms Jack and Sylvie maintained as their private spaces. The other spouse was never to look inside, hope to die. Jack’s had a plastic dollar-store sign that said Jack’s Room, and Sylvie’s had a piece of foamcore cut to look like a thundercloud and done up with markers. She’d printed on it, “May Zeus strike you with a lightning bolt.” Years ago Mavis had said to Sylvie, “But they’re not even properly locked. All you have to do is jimmy the doorknob and you’re in.” They were doors of the sort Mavis’s kids had on their bedrooms. A privacy door without a key. You could lock it from the inside, or you could twist the knob into lock position and pull it closed from the outside. To unlock it from the hallway, a person had to poke something skinny through a tiny hole to release the mechanism. “You even have to jimmy your own doorknob to get inside your own room.”

  “Yeah, but you have to bother. That’s the thing.”

  “I bet Jack’s looked inside your private domain the odd time.”

  “Jack isn’t one to bother.”

  “I bet you’ve looked into his.”

  “Boring boy stuff.”