Kathleen Winter - Annabel

I could surprise him, Wayne decided as he approached home. I could put it on layaway and carry it home and let Dad find it propped against the shed door.

Wayne saw the neatly stacked two-by-fours and did not realize where they had come from. He saw the jar of screws and did not recognize those either. He walked into the house, looked around, and wondered where everyone was. His father was not home, and neither was his mother, and there was no cooking, which was unusual, because at five o’clock there was always something sizzling in the cast iron pan or cooking in the boiler. So he went outside and looked around the back, and then he knew the two-by-fours were from his bridge, and he knew it had not been destroyed by an animal or by wind or by anything accidental. He ran inside and saw the string, untangled and carefully wound, hanging on a chair. He went out the back door and looked at the creek with its naked posts that he and his father had taken weeks to pour and set. The creek frilled around reeds and stones. The creek was not thinking of him. It had left him alone.

Treadway walked into the house carrying a mandarin orange box that held a golden Lab puppy on a piece of brocade from the bridge. He laid the box by the woodstove, and Wayne knew what he had done.

Wayne had never felt two such conflicting feelings in his body: devotion for the puppy, who whimpered and tried to peer over the side of the box, and an utter, bereft betrayal. Treadway looked at Wayne for a second, then at the puppy. The puppy was a safe place to look. You could look at the puppy all day and your feelings could sink into the puppy, and the puppy would not reproach you.

Wayne could not ask Treadway about the bridge, and Treadway said nothing. It was five o’clock, and Jacinta came in the door with a bag from Eliza. It contained a hot loaf. Eliza had rubbed the crust with butter until it glittered and cracked. Jacinta laid it on the table. She got butter out, and a tin of oysters, and corned beef, and some mustard, and an onion which she sliced thin, and some milk and pickled beet, and she opened the tins and sliced the corned beef, and no one mentioned the puppy.

Wayne went upstairs and looked out his window, where he could see the back corner of Wally’s house, and he guessed he would have to go down in the morning and see her. He could not believe his father had gone out and found a puppy to make up for what he had destroyed. It gave Wayne a new insight into the character of his father, one he regretted knowing with all his heart. It would have been better, he thought, if his father had just done what he wanted to do and not tried to pay for it. It was the paying, with a live puppy, that Wayne found unforgivable.

At six in the morning Wally Michelin knocked on the back door and Treadway opened it, his kipper with Keen’s mustard steaming on the table. He thought Wally looked like a strong little person on his step, her hair making her face narrower, her pale skin and thousand freckles. She was starting to grow tall and she was bony; her shoulder blades stuck out, and she marched around with her head a little bit forward like someone forever ducking raindrops. She had watched him dismantle the bridge from her bathroom window and had come for the most important thing in it.

“It’s twelve pages. The paper is yellow.”

“I don’t remember it.” Treadway was honestly mystified. He remembered his son’s Hilroy scribbler. He had saved that. It sat now on the chair visitors used. Wally’s green diary was under it and she took it, and looked around to see if her “Cantique de Jean Racine” was sticking out from under the TV guide or wedged behind the toaster.

“It was with this.” She held up her diary, which still had its key. “Did you read my diary?”

Treadway had searched for what she might have written about Wayne. He hated himself for doing it, especially when most of the parts he read were about music. They were about the northern lights; how she had sung to them and they had sung back to her; and about how she had found out the name of something that happened to her but did not happen to any of the friends she had asked, including Wayne. It was called phantom music: some people heard music replayed inside their heads, every note accurately. It could be something they had heard before, on the radio or somewhere, or it could be music no one had ever heard. It happened when Wally was tired, especially if she was in a vehicle or if something near her were moving, like the creek under the bridge.

The phantom music had first happened to her on the school bus trip to Pinhorn Wilderness Camp, on their way home, after the bus had stopped at Mary Brown’s Fried Chicken in Goose Bay and continued on the road to Croydon Harbour. Sometimes she could catch a tiny fragment and pull it until the rest unrolled in her mind, but usually she had no control over the phantom music. She loved it and wished she could hear it always. Treadway had read all of this.

Any parent can scan any piece of writing, even writing done in an unfamiliar hand, and quickly discern the name of his own child, and Treadway had done this. Wayne had brought hot chocolate to the tree. Wayne had sung melody for Wally so she could try out harmonies. Wayne read while she practised writing treble clefs, half notes, whole notes, eighth and sixteenth notes, flats, naturals, rests, and accidentals. Wayne was copying triangles from Thomasina’s postcard of Andrea Palladio’s bridge over the Cismone. None of this was what a normal Labrador son would do, but none of it frightened Treadway until the part of Wally’s diary that detailed Wayne’s recurring dream.

“Wayne dreamed he was a girl again last night,” Wally had written beneath a list of supplies. String. Oreos. A shoebox. Scissors. The foot out of an old pair of pantyhose. A cup of cold bacon fat with sunflower seeds in it. “If you saw my diary, you saw my music,” Wally said.

“There might have been some pieces of wet paper. I didn’t think they looked like music.”

“Can I see them?”

“I threw them out.”

“I need to look in your garbage.”

“They’re burnt.” Treadway never threw paper in the garbage. He threw it in the stove. He did not like filling garbage bags with anything you could burn.

He felt sorry about the music, but he did not say so.

JACINTA AND TREADWAY WERE POLITE with each other during the shortening days after Treadway took down Wayne’s bridge. Jacinta made the bed the way Treadway liked it; Treadway wanted no air to touch his feet, and Jacinta could not sleep unless her feet breathed through an opening in the blankets. She no longer woke him when he snored, and he picked up and washed teacups she left in the grass. The politeness was unbearable. They avoided touching each other, careful as strangers on a train. But there was one thing they had always done, and they did not stop doing it now, because to stop would have been to acknowledge their marriage had broken, and they were not able to acknowledge this. The thing was that when each took a bath, at the end of the bath the other took the sponge that hung on the shower head, soaped it with a cake of Ivory, and lathered the other person’s shoulders and back. They had never thought of this as an expression of love. It was something they had started early in their days together, and now it continued. They had always done it without speaking. The silence was nothing new.

A family can go on for years without the love that once bound it together, like a lovely old wall that stays standing long after rain has crumbled the mortar. Where was Jacinta going to go? Back to St. John’s? She berated herself for not having the courage. It is amazing how small things keep you anchored in a place — the cake of soap on its little mat with rubber suckers, the moulded plastic shower stall. The bathroom cabinet with Aspirins in it, and blue razors, and Tiger Balm. The plastic runner to stop dirty tracks on the cream-coloured hall carpet. The television with its rabbit ears and its reruns of Bewitched and Get Smart that give you something predictable at four thirty every weekday. None of these things were what Jacinta loved, or even liked, but she could count on them, and she could not count on what might happen if she left Treadway and went back to St. John’s, especially if she took Wayne with her. The thing that had prevented her from running out of Goose Bay Hospital when Wayne had gone for his baby surgery existed in her now, larger and stronger than it had been then. Material things were important. Her slippers. Her sewing basket with sinew in it and needles with the right-sized eye for sewing leather. The cribbage board and the deck of cards that had a toreador swirling his glorious cloak in the bullfighting ring. Any of these things, Jacinta knew, she could find for less than two dollars apiece in St. John’s, or in any other place in North America to which she might escape.