If Sylvie Had Nine Lives Read online

  The row house had been pristine when Catherine moved in with the kids, bright white walls, fresh pages. Then the first flood a year ago, and the cleanup. Then the second flood this past June. Catherine had cashed the insurance cheque for that one only seven days before the late August deluge that sent them packing to the Sleep Well. Sears Canada had installed the replacement washer, dryer, furnace and water heater just in time for all four to drown. Too much water in her daughter’s life, going all the way back to an afternoon at the beach in 1979 when Catherine was the size of a bean sprout curled inside Sylvie’s own warm lake of womb and her father, dancing under a hot disco ball of a sun, hadn’t even suspected her existence.

  TWINKLE, TWINKLE LITTLE STARS

  River Crossings, Your Community Newspaper Supplement, September 6, 2009

  Families from a flooded west-side housing complex, living temporarily at the Sleep Well Hotel, will stage a pageant based on nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and they have a clown to thank. The pageant is the inspiration of Mrs. Sylvie Callaghan, grandmother to two of the displaced children, and a mainstay of the local amateur theatre scene. I stand with Mrs. Callaghan beside a row of cardboard boxes lining one wall of a banquet room the hotel has given over to be used as a playroom. She wears a pinch-on clown’s nose, a bright plaid shirt with a ruffled collar, and loose pants with a lively print, the ensemble she’ll wear when she takes the stage as mistress of ceremonies for the pageant.

  The boxes are filled with toys and necessities donated by members of the congregation of nearby St. Bride’s Anglican Church. Mrs. Callaghan shows me shoes, plush animals, diapers, T-shirts in sizes that range from infant to adult. Many of the families lost toys and clothing in the floods. “Mould and contamination,” says Mrs. Callaghan. “We had to bag it and toss it.”

  She wants to show me the contents of one donation box in particular. It’s full of Hallowe’en costumes. “When I saw this dress that surely was meant for Little Bo Peep, bows and frilly bloomers, that’s when the idea came to me. Somewhere in all this —” she gestures at the cartons — “we can find white shirts, make a few sheep. Something for a Red Riding Hood, faux fur to make a wolf, a plaid shirt for a   Please see Stars, p. 6

  IN THE BANQUET ROOM Sylvie used her pocket knife to slit the tape along the top of a box. Little Sooze was a warm weight wrapped around her lower leg. “Gran, Gran.” She folded back the box’s flaps. Aprons. Not even a useful kind, but tea aprons, the sort her mother’s generation tied over their skirts after a wedding or a funeral to set out butter tarts and brownies. She put a hand to her granddaughter’s hair, so fine in her fingers it might melt. “Sweetie, sweetie.”

  All this passel of displaced kids running in the hallways with their giggles and screams, their flying soccer balls, the dramas of their shifting anger, love and jealousy. She’d whirl at least some of that verve into a different sort of drama. She would need a Bo Peep and willing sheep. A Miss Muffet, how about seven dwarfs? Could she put Snow White in a tea apron?

  She glanced at James, a volunteer from St. Bride’s. He was gently balding and wore glasses so strong they distorted his face, though the lenses looked expensively thin. She’d heard he was a grandfather of six. He’d begun by delivering boxes; now he showed up every day, sometimes with more, sometimes to help sort and distribute the contents. But there were so many children, and so many among them whose most urgent need was for a willing grown-up to simply spend time with them, and Sylvie often saw James cross-legged on the floor, listening to a child.

  Now here was Logan, delivering his two to Sylvie. They were next-door neighbours both at the hotel and back at the waterlogged complex. She would watch his little ones this afternoon, as she did every Monday, while he put in a few hours at the food bank. On Wednesday morning he would look after Sooze while Sylvie did her own shift. Toddler Cody, squeezed into a too-small onesie, rubbed an eye with his fist as Sylvie reached up to take him from his dad and sling him onto her hip. Preschooler Desirée stood beside her father, swaying side to side and punching his leg, her black curls long and loose and bouncing. Logan looked toward James, who was holding a striped shirt to his chest as if to guess the fit, then looked at Sylvie and rolled his eyes. “Do-gooder.” He didn’t bother to lower his voice.

  Sylvie was a do-gooder herself, she supposed. When Catherine quit work at the ShopEasy and started classes for her education degree in hopes of one day moving her kids to a house less vulnerable to flooding, Sylvie had found a renter for her own place and moved over to help with the kids. She diverted the rental income toward tuition, groceries, the rent on Catherine’s unit. Her three separate pensions from sequential, lower-rung jobs at the university, the school board, and the public library added up to just enough to allow her to retire early. The job of full-time grandma hadn’t been how she’d expected to fill her days at this stage of life, but the responsibility grounded her. Living in as housekeeper/nanny was more than grounding, in fact — it felt fair and just. The sense of a debt outstanding had eddied around her all of Catherine’s life.

  “Who is that joker, anyway?” Logan was tall enough to point with his chin.

  “Retired professor, I’ve heard.”

  “What’s he want with our mess?”

  “Like you said. Do some good.”

  “No thanks.”

  “The kids like him.” Little Sooze had grabbed Desirée by her chubby hand and was pulling her toward James. “Tell me, Logan, do you think your girl would be our Bo Peep?”

  “Long as the dress is pretty.”

  Sooze was on her way back already, legs churning. She charged Sylvie’s calf, slammed into it, raised her arms, “Uppie!” Sylvie took her up and the girl buried her face, her sweat and tears and snot, in the hollow between her gran’s neck and shoulder. Sylvie’s shirts were damply sweet and sour in several places morning to night.

  “Get the do-gooder to find something for Cody to wear.”

  “Will do. Bye.”

  Sylvie slid her knife through the tape on another box. “James, hi.”

  “Afternoon. How are you?”

  “I heard a rumour you’re a prof.”

  “Was a prof. Philosophy.”

  “I have a few of those. Philosophies.”

  “Yes?”

  “Here’s one: It never rains but it pours.”

  “That’s apt. On the other hand, It’s an ill wind that blows no good.”

  “So they say.” She pulled from the box the first thing that came to hand, a hoodie, deep red, man-sized. She laughed and shook it out. “You might just be our Red Riding Hood.”

  He held it to his chest, and he laughed too. “Are you serious?”

  “Actions speak louder than words — that’s something else they say.”

  “Fools rush in.”

  Stars, continued from p. 1   wood-cutter and, well, all those fairy tale characters.”

  Older children will read the narration, and Mrs. Callaghan will direct the younger ones through enactments. “Or maybe acting will be too complicated,” she says with a wry smile. “We might just have them stand up front in their costumes.”

  Mrs. Callaghan introduces me to her daughter, Catherine, who tells me about the flood. “I was in the basement when it started. First it came down the dryer vent and into the dryer. Full load of my son’s T-shirts and underwear. The water came in the basement windows at the same time, and the cracks in the walls. Then I hear the gurgle, and I turn around and it’s [sewer] coming up the floor drain and soaking the pile of jeans that’s waiting to be washed. So I run up to the main floor. The smell, it was just overpowering. That filth came up and up.”

  SYLVIE AND JAMES SAT cross-legged on the floor at some distance from the other parents and volunteers, taking a break. Logan’s little Cody, now wearing a Superman costume, slept with his head at the crook of Sylvie’s hip.

  “How’s your house?” James asked. “Inspection done?”

  “Yeah. A mess. It isn’t my place, it’s m
y daughter’s. My own house is elsewhere. It’s fine, rented out.”

  “Ah.”

  Desirée and Sooze sat close by, building walls out of plastic blocks. Sometimes they couldn’t wait past six or seven in a stack before they knocked them down, squealing. Sylvie looked at James, his classy glasses, his face framed by the red hoodie he’d been wearing since she pulled it out of the box. She would have liked to lean her head for a moment against the soft red fabric on his chest.

  Without forethought, she blurted, “I bought my own place decades ago when houses were cheap enough that the payout on a working-class life insurance policy plus a couple years’ savings could land a three-storey in City Park.”

  “Ah.”

  That was all. Ah. Did she wish he would ask about the why of the insurance payout? Yes, because it was a tangible mass in the air between them now, where earlier there had been only breathing space. No, because she was embarrassed to have hung it there. There was more that she wanted to say, and not to say — both those things at once. Inside herself was another Sylvie, and the two of them had been in a wearying wrestling match for decades. Maybe she hoped professor James would mediate a truce. Don’t: there were so many strays already that he felt obliged to listen to. Do: she swallowed and spoke past her hesitation. “I wonder if everyone’s done something they can’t forgive themselves for.” He sat completely still. An open stillness. Her cheeks burned with heat. In an airy voice that asked not to be taken seriously, she said, “Nor should they.”

  James turned his head and looked directly at her.

  A wall of plastic blocks came crashing down and Cody woke and pushed himself to standing, bracing his little hand on a toy cash register.

  “Do you need to talk?” said James.

  The cash register swayed under Cody’s weight. He swayed too, then fell smack on his bum, whimpering. “We are talking.” Sylvie held James’s look. “We are. It’s fine.” She turned away and raised a hand for an instant to her hot cheek, then took a charity apron from the pile beside her on the floor and wiped drool from the baby’s chin. She patted his saturated diaper and pulled the boy onto her lap. Wet. Everything was wet.

  The little girls approached, each with a tea apron on her head and draped in front of her eyes, weaving blindly, giggling. Pretending not to see James, they fell onto his crossed legs. He almost swore — she could see the F in the press of his teeth to his lower lip — but he stopped himself. He grasped the hems of both aprons and looked at Cody, eyebrows raised. “What could be under here?” He lifted the fabric away with a magician’s flourish. Cody laughed and threw his arms wide. James reached and gave Sylvie’s hand a light squeeze, which she returned.

  The truth was, she had never succeeded, after the fact, in piecing together the specifics of that afternoon thirty years ago. A sense that the lake was so cold it slowed her limbs and even her thoughts as she did her best to tread water. But no, it was July, it couldn’t have been that cold. Still: her muscles remembered a chill that left her without heartbeat enough to move, without will enough to call the other four away from their antics. She remembered — or did she? — the sense that not a soul was watching to see what she might do or not do in that moment.

  Our city has a reputation for generosity, and donations have poured in, so many that, for the time being, Mrs. Callaghan has asked that people hold off until the families’ remaining needs have been better assessed.

  STAN CLANKED HIS CEREAL BOWL into the sink.

  “Ten o’clock at the courthouse,” Sylvie told him. “Wait for your mother before you go in.”

  He opened the door onto the racket of the hallway soccer game.

  “And be polite!”

  “Gran, you take everything so seriously.”

  The door closed behind him and the noise cut to a muffle. Sooze was curled over the coffee table concentrating with her crayons and paper. The soccer ball thudded against the door. Enough, already! Sylvie yanked the door open, looked for the ball and went after it, but a kid almost her height won it away with superior footwork.

  “Don’t you have school?” she shouted. She slammed back into the suite, looked for Sooze, found her on the floor in the bedroom scribbling a bird’s nest of red squiggles low on the wall and burbling her joy. Sylvie grabbed the crayon. Sooze’s mouth made an O, but she had a crayon in her other hand too, and she started making left-handed zigzags further along the wall. Sylvie dropped the red crayon and gripped Sooze’s wrist, tried to pry her stubborn fingers. The child screamed her grief, and the noise set off a strident pulse in Sylvie’s temples. She fetched the other crayons, spilled them onto the floor beside her granddaughter. “Knock yourself out, Picasso.” Sooze laughed, still with the shine of tears on her pink cheeks. Jack’s grandchild.

  THE BANQUET ROOM cum playroom was quiet this morning, school agers off to school, preschoolers not yet tumbling in. James was there with a dozen gaping boxes, puddles of clothing on the floor, angular stacks of unsorted toys. He wore an apron over his jeans, extra-long tie-strings wound around his back and knotted in front, dangling. Sylvie held back from making an obvious joke.

  He said, “I’ll tidy this. Never fear.”

  “Don’t worry, be happy.” Sylvie set Sooze down near a plastic post with a rainbow of rings a child was meant to slide onto it. She pulled her clown nose from the pocket of her sweatpants and hooked it into her nostrils.

  James tweaked the nose. “Become the change you want to see.”

  Sooze picked up a red ring and a purple ring and banged them together. She bit into one then the other. Sylvie bent forward to touch her limp curls. “‘Most of life is choices,” she said, “and the rest is pure dumb luck.’”

  “Are you working up your stage patter, Ms. Clown?”

  “I worry about that. I don’t know a single joke suitable for a family audience.”

  “You don’t need jokes. Go for the style where the clown’s the only one on stage who gets to tell the truth.”

  “Commedia dell’arte. Is that what you’re getting at?”

  He widened his eyes.

  “Stock characters. Italy some number of centuries ago, I forget. Don’t look so surprised. I worked in libraries all my life.”

  He blushed.

  Upper-middle-class do-gooder. “Anyway — telling the truth … doesn’t that require that the truth —” She held out a hand, palm up. A person didn’t even need to finish that sentence, the empty hand seemed to say — the ending was obvious; but Sylvie herself wasn’t sure how to fill in the blank. That the truth was out there waiting to be uncovered? That it didn’t change from minute to minute, person to person? That the truth was even useful?

  James took up the apron strings hanging from his waist and pulled them lightly across her open hand. “Spoken like a true clown.”

  SYLVIE LAY IN THE DOUBLE BED cuddling a sleeping Sooze. Stan was on the fold-out in the main room, Survivor playing on the TV. Her mind went soft and dark. She drifted, then startled, her legs twitching to save her from some half-dreamed stumble. She drifted again. Twenty people were seated at a dinner table, Jack among them, but Sylvie had nothing to offer. She checked the microwave, the hollow oven, the empty pots on the stove. She must do something. Wait, she tried to say, but no voice came. She jolted awake. “Shush, Sooze, Gran didn’t mean to.”

  The dreams full of expectant guests would come and go in cycles that lasted weeks or months, but fewer and less often with the years. Now they were back, as if washed in by the flood.

  “Shush, shush.”

  There they were in her own backyard — though not a backyard she’d ever seen — Margo, Penny, Benj and a grinning Alex — the other four who’d been at the lake with Sylvie and Jack — all of them holding up their glasses, and her with nothing to pour.

  The opening and closing of the door to the suite woke her. Catherine, home on the last bus from campus, because how could she study here? Her backpack made a soft thump as it hit the floor. The itty bitty fridge out there
opened and closed, and Sylvie heard the spill of cereal into bowls and the mother-son music as their voices ranged from soft to tense to soft again. Catherine was a kid herself when she had him, nursed him in the back row of English class and toted him along the hall to and from the in-school daycare. TV light flickered across Sylvie’s face as Catherine came into the bedroom. Dark, then, and the soft rustles of her daughter undressing and pulling on her T-shirt. Catherine slid in on the other side of the bed, her day’s-end breath coming closer as she kissed Sooze’s head.

  “Night, Cat.”

  “Night, Mom.”

  Sleep.

  Catherine’s legs scissored under the sheets. She whimpered. She flung an arm, hitting Sooze, who let out an unwoken wail. Sylvie pulled the child toward her, out of range, and reached a hand to touch her daughter’s shoulder. Philosophies, sure: She who fails to save a life may yet save a moment.

  AT THE FOOD BANK, Sylvie sorted soup to the soup bin, beans to the protein bin, dented cans to the box in the middle aisle. Mac and cheese had its very own container, as big as all the others. Next week Stan would be sorting too, later in the day after high school was out, putting in community service to work off his fine.

  People did experiments where rats would press the reward lever over and over for a sweet treat until they died. Nothing was enough. Could a child inherit a craving disposition from two generations back? Was it fused right into the genes, the compulsion to take and take? At the food bank, Stan would discover he could pocket chocolate bars left and right, atone for his sins and repeat them all at once. The organization was there to supply people with real food, not candy, which never went into the food boxes but into a catchall the volunteers raided on their breaks.