Kathleen Winter - Annabel

And it is true it is hard to know how much anesthetic to give a young person. Wayne’s doctors had not been in agreement about it and had given him a measurement between the doses allotted a child and an adult. It put him in a state between waking and sleeping, and dulled the pain from the cut Dr. Lioukras made to open the vagina that had been hidden. The flesh was a centimetre deep, and when he cut it, Dr. Lioukras asked the nurse to get a stainless steel bowl from the trolley immediately.

Wayne had not seen the blood, which was copious, because the staff had erected a sheet the way they did with all gynecological operations. He saw the masked faces move in slow motion through a gelled lens, and heard their voices as a stretched, continuous murmur, with now and then a word plopping out whole. He heard blood and anomaly and oh . He heard rush and no and never . He heard Thomasina say, “No,” and he heard the staff ask her to stand back, and he heard her cry out. But the sounds were muted. What came close, what rushed head-on at him, was the colour red. Red can be black-red, and this was. It can be scarlet, and it was this too. When you close your eyes in a field in the sun and you are young and the world has not imposed memories on you that can’t be erased, there is a red-orange that sits against your closed eyes and contains the warmth of all future summers, and the red rushing headlong behind Wayne’s closed eyes included this red too. It scared him, the swirling red world, yet it thrilled him too, and the anesthetic had pinned his arms and legs to a soft, soft cloud. He could not get up from the dizzy red world no matter what looked out from it at him, and, like the words rising from a murmur of sea-sound, there was something half-formed in the red world, looking at him, and he did not know what it was, though he felt it was drowning in blood and trying to speak, but the red whirlpool was going too fast. In his anesthetized world, sound from the unconconscious rose up, a sound that normally comes to the waking world only through portholes like the northern lights, or the voice of an owl, or the ground whispering.

Wayne heard the sound become louder and drown the voices of the staff. The inchoate red world took form: a red trench, a tunnel, a map of the womb inside him and the passageway leading from it, which had all been closed and that he had no idea existed. The red world knew everything in him, and it showed him the map of his own feminine parts, and they were the most vivid, living, seductive red he had known in waking or in dreaming life. He heard the sound of himself falling into this tunnel, a long, low moan, then a shout. The staff heard it, and none of them had heard this before outside a birthing room. The youngest nurse ran out of the operating room, downstairs to the walk-in fridge in the back of the cafeteria, and drank a carton of Old South ruby red grapefruit juice mixed with crushed ice.

THERE IS A FALLING AWAY IN all little families: families having a mother, a father, and one child. There is a new world for every child, sooner or later, no matter what kind of love has lived in the home. Strong love, love that has failed, complicated love, love that does its best to keep a child warm through layers of fear or caution. One day the layers begin to fall. Before his night in hospital, Wayne had not broken from his mother, but he had begun to yearn for the unnameable mystery young people want.

The morning after Wayne’s operation, Jacinta had woken on her own couch with a hangover. Why was the house cold? It was cold in a way she remembered from uninsulated houses of her friends, in winter, in St. John’s. A cold that pried into your joints and tormented you. Treadway never let the house get like this. Five thirty in the morning was late for him to rise. Every night he made sure there were dry splits ready in the box beside the stove. He twisted newspaper and set the splits in a pyramid. Then came pieces of slab from Obadiah Blake’s sawmill, and junks of the same black spruce that sent incense from every chimney in the cove. Jacinta rose, still in her party clothes. She had stumbled uphill at three in the morning and had noticed the truck was gone, but Treadway was always leaving it with Maynard White for one reason or another. He had said something at Eliza’s door about valves. And he had told her Wayne was sleeping over at Brent Shiwack’s, which was unusual. Wayne was not the most popular boy in Croydon Harbour, and Brent Shiwack was not his friend.

Jacinta went down the basement stairs and lit the fire herself. She cut soaked apricots into the little pot of oats and made fruit porridge for herself, and tea with the bag in the cup. When Treadway was in the bush for months at a time, and Wayne at school, she got into a routine of being alone. But this day she grew lonely, so when Treadway came in the door in the afternoon she was glad to see him. But he was not glad. He did not light up at all when she hugged him. His body felt like one of the cold logs out by the fence. He told her what had happened: the blood, the surgeon, the loss of their secret. But there was a new part he did not mention.

“Thomasina Baikie,” he said, “told Wayne everything. And told me more besides.”

“Where is he?” Jacinta felt elation, even while she could see her husband’s face might not recover from its careworn collapse. The life that had drained out of Treadway began filling her face. He saw it. Why was life coming into her when he felt this way?

“Goose Bay.” He opened the fridge, took out his bread, made himself a Maple Leaf bologna sandwich with mustard, and put the kettle on. He sat at the kitchen table, ate the sandwich, and waited for his kettle to boil.

“Is he by himself?”

Treadway shrugged, his mouth full. “There were nurses.”

Jacinta had slung her coat on Treadway’s La-Z-Boy when she came in, and now she put it on. The keys were beside his saucer, and she grabbed them and shoved on the easiest shoes and went out with no scarf, which she never did. Even in summer Jacinta wore a silk scarf or a thin cotton one around her collarbones, but not this day.

When she reached the hospital, she went straight to Wayne’s room and saw that he was so pale his freckles looked as if they were floating in cream. She hugged him and he clung to her, and it was the first time since he was a baby that she could allow love unimpeded to escape her heart and flow to her child. It buzzed like the power line on her old back lane in St. John’s. She had not freely loved the girl part of Wayne, as the girl had not been acknowledged to exist. Jacinta kissed her child on the forehead. She rubbed her own tears into her face and they stung the nicks that the wind had chafed, and she brought her child home.

But the falling away had started. When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tears, and anger: “Why do you want to go out in minus-fifteen-degree temperatures in that T-shirt when you could wear the wool I’ve warmed for you over the woodstove? It’s so cosy.” Or they can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either.

“Why does Dad watch the stock market report every night?” Wayne asked his mother. She was peeling carrots and he had been writing a poem about Remembrance Day for the annual school contest. “You know what his slippers remind me of?”

The blade on the carrot peeler was loose and it rattled. Jacinta kept the tap running to rinse fluffs of peel off her knuckles.

“You know the holes in them? Dad’s brown socks poke out right where a mole’s nose would be. I pretend his slippers are moles.”