Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“I’m going to go get a heating pad and sit you down in the staff room for a few minutes.”

They went in the staff room and Thomasina got him the pad and gave him strong tea with sugar in it. He did not want to eat his potted-meat sandwich or his jam cookies.

“Here?” Thomasina touched his stomach. “Or here?” She placed her hand over his abdomen.

“Yeah. Right there. It’s kind of swollen.”

“How long has it been like that?”

“It started when my feet started peeling.”

“Your feet?”

“At the end of the summer. The skin on my feet peels off. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just weird. The stomach aching started around then too.”

“Can I see your belly?” His abdomen protruded. She put her hand on it and it was full of fluid, but she did not call the school nurse. The nurse did not know what Thomasina knew. That Wayne had a womb, and that it was acting up.

“Does your mother know about the pain?”

“I told her I had a stomach ache.”

“Has she seen it?”

“No.” He had not let anyone see or touch his body since the swelling. Thomasina looked at the little nubs on his chest and looked away again.

“When was the last time you went for a checkup with the doctor in Goose Bay?”

“Dr. Lioukras or Dr. Giashuddin?” His specialists were always changing. They came to Labrador for two-year positions, then moved to Toronto or Boston.

“Whichever one you saw last.”

“I saw them both. Dr. Lioukras gave me my new pills and Dr. Giashuddin did something else, but I had to be put to sleep.”

“When?”

“Just when summer started.”

“And you weren’t swollen then.”

“No. And my feet weren’t peeling.”

Thomasina thought at first that she could not bear to bring up the subject of Wayne’s chest. She felt to do so might crush him. He must have noticed it himself. Had no one helped him understand anything about what was happening to his body? Did he look at other boys and try to imagine their chests were no different from his? Thomasina saw there was no one in the staff room or in the hallway beyond the door.

“Wayne, it looks to me like we have to go see about the swelling. Do you think there’s swelling on your chest as well?”

Tears blipped over Wayne’s bottom lids. He had lain in his bathwater and sunk just enough to see if the small nubbins would make islands, and they had.

Thomasina put her strong hand on his shoulder. She did not have a feminine little voice like other teachers in the school, and Wayne was glad. She did not gush at him about his few tears. She was listening to him. She listened to his whole story, spoken and unspoken. She could hear parts of the story he did not know about. He sensed this, though he did not fully understand it. He trusted her. When she said, “Let’s phone your mother and get you to the doctor and find out what is happening here so you won’t have to worry any more,” Thomasina was angrier than she had been in a long time. A child’s worry was not like an adult’s. It gnawed deep, and was so unnecessary. Why did people not realize children could withstand the truth? Why did adults insist on filling children with the deceptions their own parents had laid on them, when surely they remembered how it had felt to lie in bed and cry over fears no one had bothered to help you face.

Thomasina got Mr. Stack to cover for her in health class. When she called Wayne’s house from the staff room phone, there was no answer. Treadway was at the back end of the garden scraping rust off his traps and rubbing seal fat on them, and Jacinta was at the Hudson’s Bay store, walking up and down the cleaning products aisle, looking for a bar of Sunlight to wash Treadway’s socks before he went on the trapline. Wayne sat on the couch next to the coat rack with his hands up his shirt, warming his belly.

“How much does it hurt, on a scale of one to ten?”

“Five. I’m waterlogged. I’m ready to burst.”

“I can see that.”

“Am I weird?”

Thomasina rubbed her hands and laid them on his abdomen. She was glad no other teachers were in the staff room. “Do you mind if I take you to Goose Bay to see Dr. Lioukras?”

“Is he Greek?”

“Guess what his first name is.”

“I don’t know.”

“Apollo.”

“It’s not.”

“It is. In Mexico there are all kinds of guys named Jesus. And in Greece there are Apollos and Athenas all over the place. I had a taxi driver called Hermes.”

“Did he have wings on his feet?”

“Wayne, there are things I wish someone had told you when you were small. But they didn’t. And it’s not my place to tell you now. But you know what? It looks like no one else is going to. I’m going to take you to see Dr. Lioukras. If your father isn’t going to deal with it, well, that’s his problem. And your mother…”

The principal, Victoria Huskins, came in looking for her stash of coffee filters. Thomasina Baikie went silent and Wayne knew he and Thomasina had embarked on a clandestine adventure.

“Hi, Wayne.” Miss Huskins thought children could not hear her unless her voice pierced their layers of dull incomprehension. How she had come to be principal Thomasina Baikie did not know. Rather, she knew and wished she didn’t. Wayne was not scared of Miss Huskins like some of the younger students were, but he felt uncomfortable when she was in the room. The previous week, when she was checking the washrooms, she found excrement on the floor behind one of the toilets and announced her discovery over the school PA system. “Someone…” The speakers cracked and hissed over the heads of the kindergartens, grade ones, twos, threes, and fours. The grades fives, sixes, and sevens heard it too, though their bathroom was on the second floor. When Miss Huskins made an example of anyone, she wanted the lesson broadcast to all. “Some student has deliberately done their poo and left it on the floor against the wall in the first-floor bathroom. Who has done this?” She left a long pause. The students were silent. “I will find out. The person who has done this had better come to my office and own up now. It is filthy, and it is wrong, and whoever has done this will not get away with it.”

Thomasina sighed, looked at her class, and said, “I hope that woman goes into treatment soon.” Everyone but Donna Palliser and her attendants had felt sorry for the anonymous child who had obviously had an accident. Why did the principal not know it had been an accident? But no one discussed it. Everyone but Thomasina was afraid to speak up.

Victoria Huskins licked her thumb and blew on the coffee filters to separate one, and said, “So you’re sick today, Wayne?”

He nodded.

“Stomach flu is going around.”

“It is,” Thomasina said.

“A couple of Gravol should keep you out of trouble till you get home. Have your parents been called?”

“We’re trying to get hold of them now.” Thomasina said nothing about driving Wayne to the hospital.

Miss Huskins got the coffee machine gurgling, then moved the pot aside and slipped her cup under the stream. Drips hissed on the hot plate. “Hopefully the whole class will not get it. Hopefully the entire school will not come down with projectile vomiting. Try to come back before you miss too many math classes. What are you doing in math right now, Miss?”

“Decahedrons.”

“Don’t forget to have his parents sign the P-47.” Miss Huskins went off with her mug that had a happy face on it from last year’s winter carnival.

Thomasina said, “I’ll take you in the truck.”

“Are we allowed?” Wayne liked the idea of escaping in the middle of a school day. But he did not know what his parents would think. “I can walk home. I can tell my mom you looked at my stomach in gym class and thought I should go see Dr. Lioukras and she can take me tomorrow.”