The Opening Sky Read online

  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.

  She turns back into the clinic, but before she can sit down, the receptionist calls her name and leads her into one of the examination rooms. A mirror’s been hung behind the door and she raises her upper lip and checks for bits of granola caught in her front teeth. Sleepy, scruffy, silly Sylvie, she hums, neatening her eyebrows with a finger.

  She sits down and checks her cell again. Nothing. She’s been at the clinic almost an hour. Benedictor will be done. He’ll have found it, she knows in her heart. But it’s crazy to be waiting here while she has so much work to do. I’ll just leave, she’s saying to herself when the door opens and Dr. Valdez comes in.

  A woman, young. Hard to guess her age – she’s wearing a plastic hair band, and Sylvie knows instinctively that she looks exactly the way she did when she was a fourteen-year-old sitting in the front row of science class with her hand up. Dr. Valdez is a nerd. They will be able to talk through the whole contraception dilemma.

  “I’m on the pill but I want to talk to you about going off it,” Sylvie begins. “My boyfriend’s away for months at a time, so it’s a stupid method of birth control for us. It’s kind of complicated why I agreed to it in the first place. I know there’s a big issue with hormones entering the water table. I knew this all along, but I just saw a documentary about the fish in the Great Lakes, and I kind of got it in a different way. So, I need something else. Also it’s making me feel weird. And it didn’t work the way it was supposed to.”

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Valdez asks.

  Sylvie tells her how she stopped after the first three months but she didn’t have a period like they said she would. And how Dr. Rodham, when she came to see him again, said this was not uncommon and she should just restart anyway after a week.

  The doctor is reading Sylvie’s chart, and Sylvie realizes with disappointment that she’s not really interested in her concerns about the pill. She may be a smart woman but she’s not looking at the big picture. She sends Sylvie into a little room to pee into a bottle, telling her to put on a paper gown afterwards and get up on the examining table. When she comes back she sets about doing a complete physical. She checks Sylvie’s blood pressure, she hits her knees with a little hammer to test her reflexes, she makes her stick out her tongue and say “Ahh.” She is thorough just for the sake of being thorough. She’s the sort of person you always want in your group for projects – picky and annoying, someone the whole group subtly resists, but in the end, when Little Ms. Perfect pulls out a spreadsheet with all the data no one else bothered to keep, you worship her.

  Sylvie lies down as requested and sticks her heels into the stirrups on each side of the examination table. She endures the insertion of a freezing cold clamp thing. There is something reassuring about being handled and examined in this neutral way, having all your orifices inspected. I am going to be a doctor, she thinks. I’ll be a doctor who looks at the big picture. She tries to merge the image of herself in a white coat and stethoscope with the picture that took hold in her heart during the fall: herself standing in a terraced field backed by blue mountains, clasping hands with grateful subsistence farmers.

  “You still have a few tags,” Dr. Valdez says.

  “Tags?” Sylvie asks.

  “From your hymen,” the doctor says. Then she presses hard all over Sylvie’s abdomen, asking question after question. You’re nineteen? Are you living at home? How much alcohol do you drink? Are you in a steady relationship? Your boyfriend’s also a student? Did you ever miss a pill? When is the last time you were intimate with your boyfriend? It’s like she’s trying to develop a profile of young adult sexual behaviour. Her voice is pleasant but expressionless. Sylvie feels an overwhelming curiosity about her, about her sex life. Just for a clue about what she’ll be in for if she becomes a doctor. Dr. Valdez has clean, smooth skin. She is pretty in the way of serious women who have absolutely no interest in their looks. A lot of people disregard that kind of beauty. Her hazel eyes drift to Sylvie’s face and Sylvie smiles encouragingly.

  Aiden’s desk phone is blinking when he comes in from his run. The first message is from Jake Peloquin, terse, cancelling his four o’clock appointment. The second is Sylvie.

  “Dad? I’m going to come by your office. Five o’clock, okay? Don’t go home before I get there.” She’s crying.

  Aiden tries her cell but she doesn’t pick up. While he’s still at the desk, the phone rings.

  “Hey!” Liz says.

  “Hi. I was just going to call you.”

  “Well, I got in first! So guess what? We got the apartment!”

  “The apartment.”

  “In Sarlat? The flat in Sarlat?”

  “Oh.”

  “We got it! That New York couple cancelled. Somebody died. I got an email from the agency. I can’t believe it! We’ve got it for the last week of April. That’s perfect, don’
t you think?”

  Aiden produces a sound about halfway between wow and well. He reaches for the venetian blind rod and twiddles it, peering down into the street, as though Sylvie might already be out there, walking up to the entrance with her backpack over one shoulder.

  “So I’ll put the deposit through on my card?”

  “I guess that’s the plan.”

  “And I’m thinking maybe I should just book our flight this afternoon. Fares are going way up in January. Cheryl Ogilvie told me – her husband works for Air Canada. What do you think?”

  “Makes sense. Listen, Sylvie called, she’s coming by the office later. Do we have anything planned for supper? In case she wants to come home?”

  “I took something out of the freezer this morning.”

  “Any eyes floating in it?”

  “Oh, quite possibly. It’s lamb stew. But that lamb ate grass until they killed it.”

  “We’ll stop for something. We’ll go to DeLuca’s on the way home.”

  “Aiden,” Liz says, “if Sylvie wants to come for dinner, she can pick a few slivers of lamb out of her stew.”

  “You’re a hard woman,” Aiden says.

  He steps into the shower, a narrow stall he had retrofitted into what used to be a closet. Drop your soap and you have to open the door to bend for it. The water hits and the morning’s anxiety lifts a little. The endorphins are humming from his run, and Liz is in his mind, her excitement about April in the Dordogne. She’ll dress up every night and they’ll prowl the cobblestones for an hour, scrutinizing menus at thirty euros a pop. He can see it all, extrapolating from Provence where apparently no one goes anymore, he can see the amber carriage lights, the awnings, and the candles in their little jars, the maitre d’ in his white jacket, staring at them with avarice and contempt. Cassoulet au canard, confit de canard, canard à l’orange. We’re the offspring of labourers, Aiden thinks, reaching for his shampoo. We’re totally broke end of the month and we live like potentates.

  Dry and dressed, he fishes his lunch out of the bar fridge, drops down on the couch, and sets into it, a piece of leftover grilled salmon with mayo on that seedy bread from Gunn’s Bakery. A can of V8, that’s his veg. “O Holy Night” is labouring its way to a dreary climax in the waiting room as he chomps on his sandwich, shaking the crumbs off the front of his shirt onto his lunch bag; the radio’s always on, so a client who shows up early can’t make out what’s being said in the office. When Norman Orlikow flipped out this morning, flinging his boot like a Cossack dancer, some sort of rousing symphony was playing, Rimsky-Korsakov maybe.

  Normally Aiden can tune out the music, though a client called him on it once. Carol Feldman was sitting there itemizing her husband’s faults and Aiden had one ear tuned to the waiting room, trying to figure out which movement of The Four Seasons he was hearing. Carol finally said, “Am I boring you?” Well, he paid her the respect of a frank response. “Yes,” he said. “You’ve been saying the same thing for almost a year. It’s time to listen to yourself.” An important moment for both of them.

  He shoves the last corner of the sandwich into his mouth and drains his juice. As he tosses his sandwich bag towards the garbage can, worry stirs in his chest. For Sylvie, who rarely cries. She’s got a fierceness about her, her mother’s fierceness, though (and this is not like Liz), Sylvie doesn’t care a lot what other people think. Even when she was tiny, riding around on Aiden’s shoulders with her hands in his hair, she was absolutely clear about what she wanted; it was like she took her counsel from a white bird perched in a pear tree. And now, though they live a twenty-minute walk from the university, she’s on her own, in student housing. He hates it, he loathes that fucking co-ed dorm with its dust balls the size of rats, and holes in the walls, and crates of empties stacked outside the doors, and bad rap blaring day and night, and in the morning, testosterone-crazed nogoodniks dragging themselves into the toilets bare-chested, their pyjama bottoms sliding down their butts (just snagged up by their morning boners), while his daughter with her sleepy face like a flower walks past them in her pink bathrobe to take her morning pee.

  He shifts, recrosses his legs. They don’t actually have communal toilets in Sylvie’s dorm.

  But she’s got a boyfriend now, and a guy will do it: he’ll steal away a young woman’s poise and independence. This boy’s been out of town all fall, in grad school – apparently he’s a bright light in science – but they seem to have lasted. Sylvie has never brought him home, and Aiden and Liz might not have known he existed except that, last August, Aiden ran into them in Osborne Village. They were standing outside the Gas Station Theatre eating roasted corn from a cart. “Busted!” he said, sliding up beside Sylvie. She swung around, and he could see that she did feel caught out.

  Noah Oliphant, that was the guy’s name. “Sorry,” he said, gesturing with his corncob that he couldn’t shake hands.

  “Noah just got off a boat,” Sylvie said. “The Namao.” It was a social smile she gave Aiden, but he forgave her – she was trying to compose herself.

  Aiden knew what the Namao was, a research boat on the big lake. “What was your job?” he asked.

  “Benthos,” Noah said. “I’m the benthos guy. I’m spending my summer screening mud from the bottom.” He pushed his shades up on the bridge of his nose with the back of his wrist.

  “What’s in the mud?”

  “Tiny invertebrates mostly. Mayflies – what we call fish flies. We’re monitoring how the eutrophication of the lake affects their growth.”

  “How big are the little buggers at the moment?” Aiden asked.

  “Practically microscopic,” Noah said, not missing a beat, though Aiden knew he’d been talking about population growth.

  “But he saw bald eagles! And moose. And bears! Three different times, on the shore.” Sylvie was wearing a miniskirt and a bright green T-shirt, and her lips shone with butter. “He’s still walking like he’s drunk. Show Dad, Noah.”

  Aiden could see their eyes sharing a joke behind their sunglasses. He felt a little stab; he couldn’t help it. “They’re dating,” he told Liz when he got home. “He isn’t just a friend. It was obvious.”

  She was pissed off that he’d had the luck to run into them. “I’m the one with the powers of observation,” she pointed out.

  “I took careful note.” But Aiden was at a loss to describe the kid. What could you say? He looked fine – tall, tanned, wearing the right sort of cap. “There’s something funny about his face,” he finally said. “His features are good, separately, but they don’t cohere. He looks like a police sketch.” That got a smile out of her.

  Noah came home for Thanksgiving and Aiden and Liz didn’t see Sylvie all weekend. And now he’s due back for Christmas and she’s in tears. Aiden knows it in his gut: the boyfriend is being a dick.

  He’s got an hour at the end of the day to wait for Sylvie – Jake Peloquin’s hour – and he stands for a long time looking out into the twilight. Below him Portage Avenue glistens, a long furrow opening the city all the way to the prairie, where the sun scored a red gash in the horizon when it sank. The park’s vanished; all you can see is cars idling their way to the mall, bumper to bumper, exhaust rising. Three more days of work and then Christmas, and then, with any luck, the cold will finally come and they’ll get a decent snowfall and he’ll make it up to the cabin. You have to drive partway in from Minaki on the ice – they plow a winter road. And then you ski across to the island, pulling your grub on a toboggan. Just when you’re about to perish, you see the solitary lost cabin hove into sight against horizontal lines of white and blue and the rock faces thrusting up through the snow, everything transfixed by winter.

  He moves to his desk and turns on the lamp. The cabin makes him think of Jake – Defrag, as he calls him privately – a guy who likes the wilderness as much as Aiden does. He picks up the phone and punches in his number, lets it ring a long time. Defrag doesn’t have an answer function.

  Okay, the notes. He boots u
p the computer, gets comfortable, and turns his mind back to the morning. To Norman Orlikow, slim and neat and intense, like a bit player in a Shakespearean tragedy. Vengeful fantasies, Aiden types. Grandiose ideation, resistance to insight. Suddenly he can’t be bothered to go into their little drama. Invoice for broken window, he instructs himself.

  Odette Zimmerman – he’ll write her up after he talks to Edith.

  Christine Tolefson, a new client today. Forty-three. She gave her age as if Aiden was forcing her to admit to a criminal record. She’d been referred by her GP for anxiety. She wore a fake animal-hide jacket and fake lashes that clung to her eyelids like insects, and her square-ended claws were a jumbled heap of plastic in her lap. Only her eyes were real, and sad. He told Christine how they would work, what he expected of her. She sat for a minute without speaking, and then she said, the words wrenched out of her in pain and fear, “I don’t know if I can say anything honest. I don’t really know what that would be.”

  Thank you, Christine, he thinks as he types. You could spend all night at a party, standing by a bay window with a glass of wine in your hand, and you would count the evening special if you had just one moment like that, one moment of true connection with another human being.

  It’s ten to five. He closes his files and turns off the computer. He rinses the mugs and cleans the grounds out of the coffeemaker and sets it up for the morning, and then he takes his V8 can out to the recycling bin. The hall is silent and empty, ceiling lights blazing.