Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“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.

FOR 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.