Kathleen Winter - Annabel

The coffee smell filled the staff room. Thomasina looked out the window at gold clouds. Everyone had such a small life it nearly drove her crazy. Perhaps it had driven her crazy.

“You told Miss Huskins I had the stomach flu?”

Thomasina looked at the floor and shoved her glasses up her nose. “I let her think it, didn’t I.”

Wayne thought Thomasina might stop the truck at his parents’ and tell them she was taking him to see Dr. Lioukras. He thought they might go get a couple of Teenburgers and a root beer at the A&W in Goose Bay. But Thomasina drove fast down the main road and did not stop. The main road was featureless. Wayne hated it. It had a dark green stretch that went on forever between Croydon Harbour and Goose Bay. Thomasina did not speak and he wondered if she was making a mistake. What would happen when Miss Huskins realized they had taken off in her pickup without his mother and father signing that form?

“What does P-47 stand for?”

“Bureaucracy. Victoria Huskins’s world. A world in which — do you know what a morgue is?”

“I saw one on TV.”

“Every corpse has a ticket.”

“Around its feet?”

“We’re in a world where every person, or plant, or animal, or any entity whatsoever, has an explanatory ticket on it. P-47s are part of that.”

“Do you think we should try to phone my mom again, when we get to the hospital?”

“Are you afraid of Miss Huskins?”

“She already freaked out about the poo.”

“Do you feel like I’m kidnapping you?”

“Kind of.”

“I guess it could seem like that.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll be thirteen next March the seventh.”

“You know my birthday?”

“I do. So you’re twelve. I’d call twelve the age of reason. So would every major civilization since the dawn of humanity. Twelve is when you wake up and you look around and you understand things. You know if your parents died that night you could figure out how to live in this world. I remember that about being twelve.”

Thomasina had four vertical lines going down her face. Sometimes they were laugh lines and sometimes they weren’t. Wayne found them serious and good. They made him trust her even though she was taking him from school in her truck in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.

“I remember the clarity of being twelve. Do you feel it?” She put the radio on. With music in the cab, the road out of Croydon Harbour was not so lonely.

“I don’t know.” Wayne did not know whether he felt clarity or not, but he was glad Thomasina was addressing questions about his body, questions his clothes, his parents, his school had covered up. He had seen Dr. Lioukras not that long ago and the doctor had not explained anything. In fact, the doctor had put him to sleep.

“How do you know Dr. Lioukras? Did you see him in Greece?”

“I saw him before I went to Greece. I went to see him and asked him to give me a local’s itinerary. I didn’t want to take a bus tour. He’s the one who told me how to get a pass to run the original Olympic track. He told me his favourite lunch counter in Athens and said to order the vine leaves stuffed with rice and mint, and some tiny lamb meatballs. He told me what kind of coffee to drink at what time of day, and he gave me the name of his daughter’s bookstore. That’s where I got the Greek bracelets and the music for our dance.”

“I don’t like lamb.”

“I never met a child who did. I guess eating it seems like one of the more barbaric adult practices.”

“It’s sad.”

“I guess it is, in a way.”

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.”