Annabel (16 page)

Wayne liked that Thomasina could admit this. His father would not have done so, nor would his mother. They did not admit that it was sad to eat rabbits either. He wouldn’t mind their eating these animals if part of them could admit, as Thomasina did now, that it was sad in some way. He didn’t like that they pushed all sadness away.

“Why do you eat it, then?”

“There’s something ancient about the flavour of lamb. People have been eating it for centuries. Grown-ups put the sadness out of their minds because to them, appetite is stronger.”

“Being hungry makes you forget it’s a lamb?”

“Appetite is king.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I need to think about it.”

Wayne did not know any other grown-ups who would admit they needed to think about something. They all came up with some kind of answer, even if it didn’t make sense.

They were on the wildest part of the road now. Wayne knew there were animals in the woods, and birds. Treadway would have found a story in the land that bordered this long, lonely road, and it might even be a story about meat, appetite, hunger. But daily meat, daily appetite, daily hunger. Not the kind Thomasina meant.

When Goose Bay appeared through the trees, there was nothing thrilling about it. The buildings were low and square, with no architecture. They were utilitarian and sat inert against the sky. The hospital had some feeling in it because it stood taller. It had many windows and a sense of mystery, but not an inviting mystery. Every time he had come with his mother, Wayne had sensed that something frightened her. He was not afraid of the hospital but he was afraid of what it did to his mother. It made her retreat from him in the days around his appointments. Thomasina was different.

The closer her truck got to the main gate, the more he felt she wanted to talk. Thomasina believed he was as sensible as she was herself. He could feel that. You can feel the degree to which anyone thinks she knows more than you do. Thomasina might know more facts than Wayne did, but her face told him she believed he was capable of understanding anything she understood. He felt something pop like ginger ale bubbles in his hands. Other parts of his body fizzed too: his scalp, and his cheekbones. His body fizzed like a wave. With Thomasina that was how you felt. You were riding somewhere, and it was exciting.

They parked under the pole with an M on it and walked across the lot.

“Everyone is a snake shedding its skin,” she said. “We are different people all through our lives. You even more so. No one has told you this thing, and I’m going to ask you, do you want to know?”

A woman helped a child out of a van into a wheelchair. There were puddles, and Wayne smacked his sneaker sole into their edges. The hospital hummed and there was a smell of French fries and canned gravy.

“What?”

“If you had a choice between knowing a scary truth and a comforting lie, which would you choose?”

“About me?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“You’d want to know?”

“I’d want to know what?”

“I wish we weren’t in a parking lot.” Nurses and cashiers and candystripers smoked at the entrance, jiggling their feet and rubbing their bare arms. “I wish that inside there weren’t puke green corridors with painted footprints.”

“I know a really cool place inside.”

“You do?”

He had found it the last time he was here, while he and Jacinta waited for tests. He had left his mother eating pea soup with salt beef and dumplings floating in it, which she had said was pretty good for soup in a Styrofoam bowl. He had gone exploring along the corridor with the green footprints, way into the west wing, to a place where a handpainted sign said
SISTER ROSITA BONNELL PALLIATIVE CARE WARD
. At the end of the ward was a blue door. He led Thomasina to it now.

There were couches upholstered in material with blue fish. A window depicted a woman with a crescent moon and the earth under one foot, and a falcon on her arm. A candle burned. The window was gold and green. The colours were rich and not too hot.

“That’s not even Mary,” Thomasina said. “It’s Isis. Sister Rosita Bonnell must have been a renegade.”

“Is that like a bandit?”

“She must have gone to Bolivia and got herself a splendid education, then come back and done things the Pope would hang her for if he knew.”

“What was the thing you wanted to tell me?”

“When you were born, Wayne, I was there. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Well I was. I was there, and I saw something.”

“I was born in my house. Not here.”

“I know.”

“I came to the hospital after I was born.”

“Do you know why?”

“Because of my blood disorder. That’s why I have to take all the pills. It’s some rare thing.”

“I wouldn’t call what you have a disorder. I’d call it a different order. A different order means a whole new way of being. It could be fantastic. It could be overwhelmingly beautiful, if people weren’t scared.”

“What was the thing you saw when I was born?”

Thomasina wanted to say, A daughter. You were a daughter as well as a son. But what would Wayne do with the truth? He would need more than the truth. He would need a world that understood. What had she been thinking?

“What was it?”

The door opened and a young woman came in wheeling a bearded man with a rose in his hand and an intravenous unit hooked up to his arm. They looked at Thomasina and Wayne for a second, then sat together in front of the candle. The man was dying. He looked as if he wanted the woman to love him, but she looked too tired to love anybody. She looked as if she might die before he did. The room turned into a container for weariness, and Thomasina took Wayne’s shoulder and herded him out. They walked around a bucket full of water with a mop in it, then around a trolley with covered dishes smelling of fried ham and instant potatoes.

“What?” Wayne insisted.

“It’s not the right time.”

“You should have told me before those people came in.”

“We’ll go see Dr. Lioukras.” Thomasina had lost her courage. Prudence. That was what everyone had been trying to exercise. That was the quality she herself lacked.

“What?” Wayne stopped under a pane of wobbly glass. There was no Isis, no nurse, no ham or potatoes. Just tiles with specks in them, and a corridor that led from the dying to the living. He could not hear the rest of the hospital from here.

“I’m not going to see Dr. Lioukras until you tell me.” He put his hand on the sill, which was cold and bumpy and had been painted years ago. This place was like the root cellar his father had shown him at a house out near the Black Cliffs. They had gone in on one of the few hot Labrador days, when little orange moths clustered on thistles and there was a haze over the hay. The root cellar was cool as a plunge in the pond under the big overfall. If Thomasina wanted to tell him a thing, why didn’t she just do it?

Wayne tried to see out the window. It had been made for adults to look out of. It had been made to shed light on this corridor from a height. The light cascaded and made you feel like you were about to realize something. Wayne closed his eyes and tried to discern if he could feel light on his head the way he could feel warmth, or the touch of a hand. Light felt like a thin layer of water. But the door at the end of the hallway clicked open and someone came through but did not walk towards them. Who was it? He realized Thomasina was staring at the person, who was in shadow, and that she looked guilty. Then the person opened the door again, a door with diagonal planks like a dungeon door, and the person went back out. When it closed, the door echoed, and Wayne wanted to get back to the modern part of the hospital. Whatever Thomasina wanted to tell him, she could keep it to herself. He didn’t have to listen to her. He wouldn’t mind a hot dog. He wouldn’t mind a plate of fries and gravy.

“My stomach doesn’t hurt right now. I might be better. I’m fine.”

“It’s not that you’re ill.” Thomasina looked defeated. “Dr. Lioukras is the one who should talk to you. I’m no good at the facts. I hate them, to tell you the truth”

Dr. Lioukras’s hands felt warm on Wayne’s belly. “That fluid will have to come out.” His hair had big loopy curls that should have been cut, according to the nurses, but they would have liked to get their hands in them. Dr. Lioukras liked Labrador. There were berries and fat ducks and there was wine, and there was more sunshine than in many warmer places, because high-pressure systems floated over the land here. Dr. Lioukras had a little camera he was always using. He would interrupt an operation to snap a shot of geese he heard honking past the window. Thomasina sat under that window now, in a chair parents normally sat in. Dr. Lioukras took pictures of the children he saw in his surgery, and nobody minded, as he was such an optimist. Nobody ever said, “Hey, Dr. Lioukras, make sure you get the parents to sign a release form.”

“How do you get the fluid out?” asked Wayne.

“I’ll deaden the area and make a small incision and drain it. You’re going to lose that bloatedness.” Dr. Lioukras managed to suggest that he deadened areas and drained fluid out of boys’ abdomens every day, and that nothing could be more normal or upbeat.

“My stomach will be flat?”

“Flat as a pancake.”

“What about my chest?”

“Let me see it.”

Wayne lifted his Trans-Labrador Helicopters T-shirt. His breasts were like tinned apricots that have not broken the surface tension in a bowl of cream. No flicker of alarm or warning crossed the doctor’s face. He looked at Wayne’s chest as if it were the most ordinary boy’s chest in the world. Thomasina loved him for it. She could not have looked directly at Wayne’s chest without Wayne’s knowing she felt there was a deep, sad problem. When Dr. Lioukras looked at Wayne’s breasts, he saw beauty equal to that which he would have seen in the body of any youth, male or female. It was as if he saw the apricots growing on their own tree, right where they belonged.

15

Boreal Owl

F
OR ALL HIS FATHERLY TALK
about how Labrador boys had to be part of a pack, Treadway Blake was the most solitary man in Croydon Harbour. The families of solitary people don’t always know they are living with someone unusual. They think maybe lots of families have someone quiet like this. A person who can go days without making any sound other than the scrape of a knife on sinew, the scrubbing of boots on the brush mat, the clink of a cup put back in its saucer. But then they go into someone else’s house and realize other people have husbands, wives, children, who yell and laugh and wrestle with each other and cry out over a foolish thing the cat has done.

When Treadway had anything on his mind, he spoke not to Jacinta or Wayne, and not to any man. He did not go down to Roland Shiwack’s shed to drink with the other men on a Friday night, and he did not hang around the door of the community centre talking to husbands who had come to walk their wives home from bingo. If he had to talk to anyone about what was on his mind, he went into the woods, far from the community, and he spoke there. He did not speak to a god in his mind like the god of the Old Testament, nor did he envision the young, long-haired Jesus from the
Child’s Treasury of Bible Stories
, which had been the only book in his house, outside of the Bible itself, while he was growing up. When Treadway needed to speak his mind, he spoke it to a boreal owl he had met when he was seventeen. He and the boreal owl shared physical traits. Both were small for their species. Each had a compact, rounded shape, efficient and not outwardly graceful. The boreal owl was one of the quietest, most modest birds. It roosted in tall, shady thickets of black spruce and drew absolutely no attention to itself. Treadway had met the owl as he rested halfway between the Beaver River and the trail back home. He had been in the same spot more than half an hour when the tiny owl caught his eye, twenty feet over his head. He didn’t know what had caused him to look up at that spot. A silent impulse of recognition. Treadway often discovered wildlife like that, as if an invisible bubble had burst and somehow it made you look in that spot.

The owl had made no sound and no movement. It looked like a piece of tree. He saw it, then he couldn’t see it. Then he could. He started talking to it in his quietest voice, and he hummed a tune to it. Which he would not have done for any other living being; not his mother, not his father, not his brothers, not himself. He liked, about the owl, that it asked nothing from him, and he had spoken to it ever since as if it were listening to him, though he never saw it again. It calmed him to talk to the owl, and he spoke to it now about Wayne.

“Everyone thinks,” he told it, “that I know what I’m doing. For God’s sake, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. You know that.”

The owl listened from wherever it was. Deep, deep in the woods, past Beaver River, past the pond, which was the pond in the interior where the waters changed direction and began to run magnetically north to Ungava Bay, the pond whose name was a secret.

“I should have let well enough alone,” Treadway said. “I think that now. What would have happened if I had let Wayne become half little girl?”

The owl allowed Treadway to see Wayne as a girl child. So Treadway stood there in the woods and saw a vision of his daughter. She had dark hair and a grave face. She was an intelligent girl, and Treadway loved her.

“You’re a beautiful child.” But the child could not hear him as the owl could. The owl listened, and Treadway felt, for the first time since his wife had given birth, pain flow out of his heart and into the moss. It sank into the moss and became part of the woods. The owl took some of it. This had not happened to the pain before.

“I could stay here,” Treadway said. “You’re a brave little owl.” He thought of the owl as alone. He thought of it, really, as himself, although he did not think he was brave at all. People call their friends admirable in this way or that way — brave, honest, loyal — but they do not see these qualities in themselves, even if they are present in greater quantity than in the friends. Treadway could not see the good in himself. His wife thought he could, but he could not. He knew he was not as self-contained or as brave as the owl, but he identified with how it had chosen to live. If only the world could live in here, deep in the forest, where there were no stores, roads, windows, and doors, no straight lines. The straight lines were the problem. Rulers and measurements and lines and no one to help you if you crossed them. His owl was not going to come out of the deep woods. It was not going to come near the fences and doorsteps of Croydon Harbour. It knew better than to try and live in that world.

“I wish,” Treadway told the owl, “I could bring him in here with me for a good six months. Longer. Forget about the medicine that keeps him being a boy. Hospital medicine, no. The medicine in these trees. The turpentine. The smell of the blasty boughs. What would happen?”

Where was the owl?

“If I brought him here and never took him back? We could live here.”

The owl had its back to the man.

Treadway stayed out until dark. He navigated home the way he always did, by knowing the contours of the land, by the moon, by parts of Orion and the Dog Star, which appeared in certain clearings. He came home to a note on the table and two plates of dried-up salt fish and congealed drawn butter. The stove had gone out. The phone rang and it was Thomasina.

“I’ve been trying to get you.”

“Why?”

“We’re in Goose Bay. Wayne had to have pressure taken off his belly. There was a lot of built-up fluid. You weren’t home. But Treadway, I’m asking you to do something for me.”

“What’s that, Thomasina Baikie?”

“Tell Victoria Huskins I called you from the hospital and you gave me permission to bring Wayne in. She’ll have my head on a plate if you don’t.”

There are degrees of trust and mistrust. Treadway mistrusted a woman like Victoria Huskins much more than he mistrusted Thomasina. When you have known someone thirty years, even if you have different personalities and even if you would approach the same problem differently, at least you know where you both came from. There is a bedrock of respect. Victoria Huskins was not, in Treadway’s mind, basic. Thomasina was. There was a basic person in there to whom you could talk, in a worst-case scenario. Victoria Huskins, in a worst-case scenario, Treadway thought, would not be basic. Her concerns would be that the correct papers be filled out, that her skirt have its back seam running directly up the middle, that any stranger or pilgrim who sat in her pew be re-educated right away. He had seen this.

“What kind of built-up fluid?”

“Blood.”

“Blood?”

“A lot of it, Treadway.”

“Is he injured?”

“It’s normal blood that flows out of a girl’s body when she reaches Wayne’s age. Menstrual blood trapped inside. And there is another thing, but I would have to tell you in person.”

“Should Jacinta . . . ?” Treadway was not happy talking about menstrual blood. He did not know what to do. “She’s out. With Eliza and Joan. Where’s Wayne now?”

“He’ll be home in the morning. I’ve been trying to call you. Visiting hours are over in five minutes. If you talk to the head nurse they will give me permission to stay here with Wayne. I can stay for the night, or you and Jacinta can come. He’s asleep. If you talk to them now they’ll let me stay. Otherwise I have to leave.”

“I’ll be there.” He was not going to let anyone but himself or his wife stay by Wayne’s bed overnight in the hospital. He did not phone Jacinta. He put his woods coat back on, though it was damp, and he got in his truck and went to get his wife.

One difference between Eliza Goudie and Joan Martin was that when they were drinking with the women for the night, Eliza bought piña coladas from the liquor store and Joan brought over a bottle of her husband’s single malt Scotch. Eliza liked fizzing concoctions with pineapple and coconut flavouring and palm trees on the bottle, while Joan just liked to get quietly wrecked. Joan heaved herself onto the loveseat and Eliza sat in the big old rocking chair near the television, which was a big television because her husband had liked to sit watching it while she was out at all hours with the geography teacher, or with the lovers she had had before that. He had liked to watch Bob Barker on
The Price Is Right
, and after that,
Jeopardy
.

“He hums,” Eliza told Joan and Jacinta, “the theme from
Jeopardy
while we’re making love. Dum da da diddle dum da daaaaa, dum, dadumda dee dee diddle diddle . . . talk about unconscious. Could you have an orgasm with that going on? Could you? Because I can. And do you know why? Because I imagine he’s gone to sleep on his surfboard and really I’m in bed with Dudley Moore and my hair is all in cornrows like, you know, what’s her name?”

“I dunno,” Joan drank from the bottle. “This is on the peaty side of single malts. It was made in a cave. Some tiny cave in the north of Scotland, more remote than we are here. My husband picked it out because of the cave. My husband, the caveman.”

Jacinta had a bottle of Mateus that had been in the freezer for half an hour. She liked how frost steamed around the gold label, the fffftz and the puff of fruity scent. If she was going to drink, Jacinta wanted fizz. She wanted Spain. She wanted celebration and the word
rosé
.

Joan had made the sour cream and onion soup mix dip from the new Kraft commercial, and had brought a huge bag of rippled chips. Eliza had brought a plate of Cheez Whiz on celery sticks, and Jacinta had made marshmallow cookies with melted chocolate chips and Parawax.

“What’s her name? Dolores?” Jacinta asked. “It’s not Dolores, is it?”

Joan said, “I can’t remember her name in the movie, but her real name’s Bo Derek.”

“I don’t see how anyone can go to see movies in that ratty old cinema in Goose Bay,” Jacinta said. “Half the time they put the last reel on first or the projector breaks down altogether.”

Eliza said, “You know what really pisses me off about that movie?”

“Um,” said Joan, “could it be the fact that the only thing that happens in it is they play Ravel’s
Bolero
ninety-nine times and the women have no personality, just a number given to them by men like prize pigs at a county fair?” She took a swig of her Oban.

Jacinta said, “I want to ask you something.” The third glass of wine was for her the magic glass. At a Christmas party or an evening out with other families, she had two glasses. The third glass was the glass that floated her above. She did not have that glass as a rule, but this was not a night when the rule applied. “I know you’re having sex with your husband again,” she said to Eliza. “I know all about the leopard-skin boots and the Valium. What I want to know is you, Joan, you’re not on Valium? You’re not on anything that artificially enhances your sex drive?”

“My what?”

“I just want to know if anyone besides me here looks at an erect penis as a ludicrous object all of a sudden.”

Joan looked at Jacinta as if she were finally seeing the light.

“I mean, I have no problem with Treadway. As you know, he is a good man.”

“Yeah, he’s that,” Joan said.

“He’s a really good man. I figure if I can’t get along with him, I might as well go crawl off by myself into a little hole somewhere.”

“But you don’t want to have sex with him.”

“It’s menopause, right? I mean, one month I was ‘Hello Mister Penis, how are you tonight, happy to see you in all your cheery Mister Penisness. Good job, Mister Penis, yes, I like you.’ Then the next month, ‘Whoa there, bucko, you most ludicrous of creatures, what in the name of God do you think you’re trying to do? Go near my vagina? Get in it? Why would you want to do that? Oh, most ridiculous idea.’ If it wouldn’t have mortified Treadway I’d have burst out laughing.”

“Valium will fix all that.”

Joan settled into the cushion with the needlepoint windmill on it. “I didn’t need menopause. One night when I was twenty I looked at Harold and his cock was a nose, his nipples were eyes, and his little bush of hair was a woolly moustache.”

Eliza spit pina colada on the floor. Harold walked around Croydon Harbour a neat little man. If you had to explain to an alien what a human man was like, if you wanted the straightest, neatest definition, you might pick Harold Martin as your example.

“From October to July,” Joan said, “he never takes his insulation off.” She had explained to them that Harold had made himself an undergarment out of house insulation, the silver kind that has a layer of bubble wrap between two layers of foil. Harold tied this around his torso with Velcro. “So the effect is enhanced.”

“I don’t mean to ridicule my husband,” Jacinta said. “I’m just sorry that I seem to have gone through a gate and he’s still on the other side.”

“What’s on your side?” Joan asked.

“I’m hanging around the gate looking back at my husband, waiting for him to even see the gate. He just thinks it’s another part of the fence.”

“Don’t you go feeling sorry for him,” Joan said. “You think he’s puttering around there in the dandelions in the same old field, but he’s not. You think he can’t see where you are, but he can. He can see just fine. He just isn’t talking about it. Rest assured, though, that if you passed away tomorrow, Treadway would suddenly become the liveliest man in Croydon Harbour. You would look down from your new home and be amazed. You’d say, ‘How come he wasn’t like that when I was with him?’ He would suddenly become everything you’ve wished him to be for years.”