After Sylvia Read online

  “Yes. That’s right,” Sylvia said, in clear agreement with the facts as stated.

  Owen left the room then and came back in with the bowl of cheese biscuits, which he nearly dumped on Sylvia’s lap while holding it out to her.

  “Thank you,” she said, choosing one biscuit from near the edge. She bit into it without getting orange cheese dust on her lips.

  “It wasn’t easy settling into a new school,” Sylvia offered then. “I didn’t know anybody and it was hard, at first, to make new friends.”

  “But you were able to,” Margaret said, sitting down beside her. The horrible nervousness of the moment seemed to pass. Soon Eleanor and Sadie had pulled up chairs as well, and the four of them were talking about changes and friendships and how difficult it can be when you are the odd one out. Lorraine came by with trays of crackers and dip and paper plates and napkins, and Margaret told her to not do any work, hot in her condition. But Lorraine didn’t listen, and Margaret didn’t leave her seat, she seemed to be so interested in talking with Sylvia.

  Owen was still standing around holding the bowl of cheese biscuits.

  “When is your baby due?” Sylvia asked, sounding just like a grown-up.

  “Any day now,” Margaret said for Lorraine. And then, again, she told Lorraine to sit down and stop making people nervous.

  “I’ve always been late,” Lorraine said, pulling up her own chair now, so that all the females were in a huddle in the middle of the room. Horace and Lorne had disappeared, and Owen didn’t know what to do with the bowl of biscuits.

  He took it back into the kitchen, finally. A few days before the party he had pulled out an old set of tiddlywinks, in case Sylvia might want to play. Now Owen led his brothers upstairs to set up the world’s most difficult course. They used lamps and pillows and old shoes and all three family baseball bats as obstacles and traps, and ran the course right into the bathtub where the wooden tiddlywinks cup sat surrounded by scratched and stained white enamel.

  It suddenly seemed extremely important that they should play and not think at all about the females downstairs who were so happy with themselves as company anyway.

  Andy suggested they not take turns at all but make it a race with everyone firing simultaneous­ly. Owen agreed but almost immediately recog­nized his mistake. Andy had larger elbows and was able to use his big body to get in the way of a lot of Owen’s and Leonard’s shots.

  One of Leonard’s pieces fell into a running-shoe trap.

  “You can’t pick it up!” Andy said. “You have to shoot it out!”

  “But it’s stuck in the tongue!” Leonard said and knocked the shoe over. Andy charged him with a two-minute penalty. But after only thirty seconds Leonard threw his pieces down the hallway.

  “I hate this game!” he declared.

  Some of the pieces hit Andy on the side of the face and one bounced down the stairs toward the living-room.

  In Andy’s moment of distraction Owen managed to pull up to him and launch a few pieces ahead toward the bathroom. But Andy simply fired them back.

  “You can’t shoot my pieces!” Owen said.

  “Of course I can!” Andy said.

  Eleanor came up the stairs then with Sadie and

  Sylvia just behind. Eleanor held Leonard’s way­ward piece.

  “That’s not how you play Tiddlywinks!” she announced.

  “We’ve made up a new version,” Andy said.

  “But there are official rules!” Eleanor said. “You need a special mat. Play proceeds from the corners with the pot in the middle. And you certainly cannot squidge another competitor’s winks.”

  “Squidge their what?” Andy asked.

  “Their winks,” Eleanor said. “That’s the proper term.”

  “Well, I’m not squidging anything!” Andy said.

  Owen watched Sylvia take in the mess of shoes and bats and scattered lamps on the floor, the ongoing argument, the red faces on Leonard and Andy and Eleanor.

  “Do you play tiddlywinks?” Owen asked her.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “These boys don’t either,” Eleanor said. “They don’t know what they’re doing!” And she marched up the rest of the stairs, found the pot in the bathtub and then cleared an area in the hallway.

  “The proper mat size is six feet by three,” she said. “Leonard, can you find a yard stick?” Leonard went off as if ordered and came back in a moment with an old worn measuring stick from the kitchen. Eleanor used it to plot out a playing area in the hallway and placed the pot in the center.

  “This will do,” she said, “in the absence of a proper mat. We start with the winks in the different corners. Blue is always opposite red, and green is always opposite yellow. Now, we can play sin­gles or teams. Singles play two sets of winks, and teams—”

  “All these rules are ruining it,” Andy said.

  “No, they’re not,” Eleanor snapped. “They’re making it better. What’s the point of playing if you aren’t going to adhere to the rules?”

  A sound came from downstairs then that made them all turn. It was human, but just bare­ly. It sounded sharp and wild and eerie, as if it belonged out on the river or in the woods.

  No one said a thing, and then it erupted again.

  It was from downstairs, and it was coming from Lorraine.

  Owen heard Margaret say, “Oh, my God, is it now?

  All the children gathered at the bottom of the stairs and looked into the living-room where Lorraine was clutching her side on the sofa and Margaret was kneeling beside her.

  “Get Lorne!” Margaret ordered.

  Owen wasn’t sure what he was doing. He grabbed Sylvia’s hand and then together they ran outside down to the garage, Sylvester bounding beside them. Owen hadn’t bothered with coats for either Sylvia or himself and felt the chill immediately. He didn’t know how he knew that Lorne and Horace were in the garage.

  But there they were throwing darts.

  “Lorraine’s sick!” Owen called out as soon as he saw them.

  “What’s that?” Lorne asked, his face suddenly ashen.

  “Mom said to get you now!” Owen said.

  Both men ran past them without another word. Owen found himself racing back to the house with Sylvia still holding his hand.

  “She must be having the baby,” Sylvia said.

  When they got back inside everyone was crowding around and it was difficult to see.

  “Start the truck, Lorne!” Owen heard Horace say.

  Lorne blundered past them and out the door.

  Lorraine made more noises then, wild and startling, and Margaret said, “I’m not sure there’s time to get to the hospital!”

  “Of course there’s time!” Horace said. “If Lorne doesn’t take forever!”

  But Lorne was taking forever. Owen waited to hear the roar of the truck engine but all was quiet outside except for Sylvester’s worried barking.

  “Go see what’s taking him!” Horace ordered.

  This time Sylvia dragged Owen out by the hand. They raced around the house and saw Lorne stretched out on the ice in front of the truck, not moving a muscle. Sylvester stood above him, still barking, but stopping sometimes to sniff and lick at the blood that was seeping from a grav­elly cut on the side of Lorne’s head.

  So Owen and Sylvia ran back in and told Horace and Margaret that Lorne had slipped on the ice and wasn’t moving.

  “That’s it! Now we have to go to the hospital!” Margaret said, and in a moment she and Horace were helping Lorraine out to the truck. All the children followed in the cold. Andy grabbed Lorne from under the armpits and tried to lift his heavy body, but only managed to raise him a few inches. Owen and Sylvia took the feet and Eleanor and Leonard grabbed the middle, but they still couldn’t lift him.

  Horace pushed them off. He kne
eled down and cradled Lorne’s bloodied head, then gently tucked his other arm under his larger brother’s long legs. Owen watched his father close his eyes for a moment, then rise with one explosion of breath — “Ha!” — like a cork popping from a bottle. As if Lorne weighed nothing, Horace carried him to the truck and laid him down on the flat bed. Owen and Sylvia ran back into the house to get a blanket for him, and when they returned, Margaret was behind the wheel and Lorraine was sitting in the passenger seat, her eyes clamped shut and sweat dripping down her cheeks.

  “You stay in the back with Lorne!” Margaret ordered Horace. “I’m driving!”

  Owen thought Horace might argue, but he didn’t say a word. In seconds he was kneeling beside his brother as Margaret gunned the engine and the truck tires fired back gravel at the aban­doned children who stood in shock, not even waving.

  Then the truck bounced up the driveway and disappeared down the road, leaving the dust to settle slowly.

  More of Us

  IN a crisis, it’s important to carry on as if all were normal,” Eleanor announced when they were inside again. “Very soon, I am going to have a new sibling, but there’s noth­ing that any of us can do to help right now. So we might as well continue with the birthday. Sylvia, will you help me serve the cake?”

  Sylvia nodded while Sadie looked on, crestfallen.

  “Oh, come and find the ice cream, if you must,” Eleanor said to her.

  All three boys went, too, to make sure the girls knew where everything was.

  Eleanor said to Sylvia, “You’re lucky to be an only child. It must be nice to have all that peace and quiet.”

  “Yes, it must be,” Sadie muttered, and she stepped closer to Leonard when Eleanor gave her a dirty look.

  Leonard said, “There was blood on the gravel where Uncle Lorne fell. I thought maybe his brains were going to fall out.”

  Sadie said, “I thought Mummy was going to die on the sofa.”

  “She left a stain,” Andy said quietly. “She was leaking.”

  “Men are incapable of dealing with childbirth,” Eleanor said to Sylvia. She had found the candles and was placing them on the cake. “Everyone must leave!” she announced suddenly. “Especially Owen! It’s got to be a surprise!’’

  Owen returned to the dining-room where the big table and the extra card table were set elaborately for a crowd often. Margaret had folded the napkins so they looked like flowers spilling out of the glasses, and the silver cutlery shone atop the white linen tablecloth last seen at Christmas. Eleanor came out with the cake blazing like a comet and everyone sang, even Sylvia, who looked at Owen as if she wanted to tell him the funniest joke as soon as they were alone.

  Owen had to blow four times to put out the candles, and when he finally pulled them out he counted thirty-eight.

  They ate piece after piece, until the cake — a triple-layered, chocolate-frosted monster-— was nothing but a few crumbs and smudges on the platter. Leonard and Sadie moaned on their backs on the floor, holding their bellies. Andy and Eleanor sat glassy-eyed on the sofa, looking out the window at nothing. Owen took Sylvia back into the kitchen where he sat her at the table and put a bowl in front of her and cracked an egg into it expertly, without breaking the yolk or spilling its guts on the floor. Then he let out a soft, romantic loon cry.

  Sylvia looked on, at least a little bit impressed.

  “What did you wish for when you blew out the candles?” she asked in almost a whisper, as if she didn’t want the others to hear.

  “Nothing,” he said. And then he thought about it some more. “I didn’t feel like I needed to wish for anything.”

  “You have a great family,” she said. “I like them a lot.” She looked at the egg in the bowl. “Everything’s so unusual here.”

  “I hope Uncle Lorne is all right,” he said, and the words started to pour out of him. “Last summer he married Lorraine. She used to be the widow Mrs. Foster and she would come by with these plates of cookies. Uncle Lorne would look like someone had just shot him in the throat and he’d run down to the basement. He used to live down there. Before he fixed it up it was so soggy we could hear the Bog Man gurgling. But now he’s married. Uncle Lorne, I mean. So is the Bog Man, but then his wife died because of the radioactive bog minerals. It makes a difference.”

  “Radioactive bog minerals?” Sylvia said.

  “Being married. Having someone to sit with you on the red couch.” And she looked at him a dozen questions at once. “It’s a long story,” he said.

  While he was trying to think of what else to say, she thanked him for the tractor calendar and Owen felt his face turn into an electric burner.

  “I wasn’t sure you would like it,” he said shyly.

  “I don’t,” she said with a sudden, big smile. “But thank you anyway. You were nice to remember me.”

  He wanted to tell her then that of course he would remember her, that she was burned into his bones and the back of his eyes and most of his brain.

  After a time Eleanor divided them into teams for proper tiddlywinks, as she called it. Owen and Sylvia played together, and Owen missed nearly every shot because he was trying so hard to impress her, but it didn’t matter. He was just happy to kneel beside her and watch her copper ring swing gently on its chain when she took a shot — squidged a wink, as Eleanor insisted. They played other games too: a snake-crawling contest in the living-room, with Andy as the trainer and Eleanor as judge, and then a Mount Everest competition that involved making it all the way to the boys’ bedroom without touching the floor.

  Eventually the clock drove round the afternoon. Then they all heard the sound of tires on gravel in the driveway and ran to the door for news.

  But it was Sylvia’s parents, come to take her home.

  “Aunt Lorraine almost had her. baby right here in the living-room!” Leonard told them. “Then Uncle Lorne smashed his head running for the truck and they’ve all gone to the hospital!”

  “All the adults left?” Sylvia’s mother said uncertainly.

  “Did you see the blood on the gravel?” Leonard asked.

  Sylvia’s parents looked around at the coffee table in the hallway, the chesterfield cushions scattered in the living-room, the overturned lamps, the crumbs and plates and baseball bats, the crooked pictures on the walls.

  “Why don’t we just do a little clean-up?” Sylvia’s mother said.

  They all went to work while Sylvia’s father called the hospital and learned eventually that Uncle Lorne was okay, but there was no baby yet.

  Mr. and Mrs. Tull seemed like nice people, and they stayed to organize some dinner for everybody, starting with Owens egg in a bowl.

  Owen cracked more eggs, and Andy looked after the toast in the tricky toaster, and Leonard set the table. They were all squeezed around the kitchen table, eating and talking at once. It was strange to see Mrs. Tull buttering Leonard’s toast and Eleanor passing the ketchup to Sylvia as if they were all part of a big, rambling family with a few different sets of parents, and substitute sisters and cousins who stayed for a while and then went away and came back.

  Owen looked over at Sylvia and she looked at him.

  And she changed in an instant.

  She didn’t turn into Sylvia Pork-pie. But she wasn’t Sylvia the untouchable anymore either. She was Sylvia who spat out bits of egg when she laughed after Leonard spilled his milk, Sylvia who looked like she might have wanted to go home with Eleanor and Sadie and be part of a big gang for a time.

  She was Sylvia who wasn’t so hard to speak to, Sylvia who would have taken his hand and run with him all the way to the haunted house if only there weren’t all these other people around.

  After dinner and another clean-up, and some more games and phone calls, Horace finally came back in the truck. He thanked Sylvia’s parents profusely and said that all was well, but there was still no news.<
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  “Lorne has a concussion so has to stay overnight anyway,” Horace said. “And babies... they come out on their own schedule, now don’t they? I’m planning on getting a good night’s sleep!”

  Owen walked Sylvia and her parents to their car. It was dark now and the wind was blowing cold blasts.

  “You didn’t open my present,” Sylvia said suddenly when they were at the car.

  “I completely forgot!” Owen said.

  “Open it in private,” she said. “You can tell me later.”

  Sylvester came bolting up to her from out of the shadows. Owen thought that he was going to leap upon her once more, but then he noticed that there was something dark and large in his mouth.

  Something familiar.

  “Sylvester! You found your rock!” Owen cried. But Sylvester ignored him and left the rock — it was the same one, Owen could tell in an instant — at Sylvia’s feet.

  “What’s this?” Sylvia asked, and she kneeled down to pick it up. She didn’t even seem to mind that it was coated with mud and slobber.

  “He likes you. He’s crazy about you!” Owen blurted. “That’s his special rock that’s been lost for months and—”

  Sylvia hurled it then into the darkness and Sylvester galloped after it, wheezing with excitement. Owen took Sylvia’s hand and wiped it clean on the sleeve of his coat.

  Then Sylvia got into the car, and Owen couldn’t see her for the glare of the headlights. He waved as they drove off, but he didn’t know if any­one was waving back.

  He walked slowly inside despite the cold.

  “Sylvester found his rock!” he announced.

  Eleanor and Sadie were staying the night. Horace said that since they were guests they would get the big bed upstairs and the boys could sleep in their camping bedrolls downstairs on the living-room floor. The girls didn’t have nightgowns or toothbrushes and were not pleased about having to sleep in the boys’ bed. But Horace rounded up some things from Margaret’s drawer, and Leonard showed them where the crystal radio had been back in the fall when the fire broke out. There were still a few scorch marks on the walls, too.