Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“When I sold my house, I got twenty thousand.”

“That’s the house the Michelins live in now, right? How come you sold it?”

“I paid my way through teachers’ college with four thousand. And I travelled on my own with another four.”

“Did you ever regret selling it?”

“I had no intention of selling it at first.”

Thomasina had begun, right after the drowning of her husband, Graham Montague, and their daughter Annabel, to clear out everything that might trap sorrow within the walls. For weeks she worked in the yard with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge, washing clamps, wrenches, sockets, and hammers, feeling them carefully with her hands the way her blind husband must have done, but knowing her hands could never interpret their shapes the way his had done. Part of her wanted to keep certain tools: his staple gun, his spirit level, the sixty-yard measuring tape in its leather case. But she had not kept them.

“Just like I had no intention of coming in here today.”

Thomasina had gone into her drowned daughter’s room and collected the dolls, the lavender sachets, the books. She had smelled Annabel’s clothes, then given them to Isabel Palliser for children along the coast. She had not kept the salmon pink cardigan with dog buttons.

“It was a house I couldn’t empty. I thought if I got rid of it… You’d think a grown woman would know better.”

“I wouldn’t think that. I think a lot of grown women hide a lot of different kinds of sadness.”

Thomasina Baikie found it hard to accept consolation. “I have twelve thousand left and I heard there’s a kind of ticket you can get where you can go around the world. You go to Heathrow and you can fly to Portugal and from there you can go where you want.”

“But you have to decide your route. You can’t backtrack. And you have to complete your trip within twelve months. It sounds to me like you might not want that.”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“You might want to sit in public squares and people-watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you’re peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.”

“YOU CAN’T TELL ANYONE,” Jacinta said.

“Not even Wally Michelin?” Wally stayed to herself. She got the highest marks in the school and went around with her chemistry text against her chest the way she had once carried Fauré’s “Cantique.”

“Not a soul.”

Jacinta was thinking of Wayne’s safety. Part of him knew this, but the new-found part, Annabel, wanted to tell someone. Wayne closed his eyes in bed and saw the hidden part of himself in the schoolyard, in a dress with a green sash and shoes of red leather with a little heel like Gwen Matchem’s. There were lots of things that changed if you were a girl: not just your heels or the way you put your hair, but things you talked about and the way you looked at the world. Wayne felt this in waves.

By grade eight his sequined bathing suit was far too small; its straps cut his shoulders and the crotch was tight, and the time had passed in which he had enough innocence to order another in a larger size. He longed to wear it, but he left it crumpled in its box under his bed. He missed Wally, and he wondered what would happen if he could tell her they were both girls, at least in part. He wished he could ask Wally to call him Annabel. They could be best friends like Carol Rich and Ashley Chalk, who passed battleships-and-cruisers paper to each other in Mr. Wigglesworth’s class and ate hickory sticks on the fire escape. Wally and Annabel.

But Annabel ran away.

Where did she go? She was inside his body but she escaped him. Maybe she gets out through my eyes, he thought, when I open them. Or my ears. He lay in bed and waited. Annabel was close enough to touch; she was himself, yet unattainable.

There was a piece of information about Wayne’s night in the hospital that Treadway had not told Jacinta.

When Treadway went on the trapline, his family did not hear from him, nor he from them. Some men made themselves reachable. Before Graham Montague had died, he had always told Thomasina how she could find him if she needed to get a message to him in the woods. Eliza Goudie’s husband could radio in and out from his cabin. Even Harold Martin, despite his Innu woman, had come out of the woods in two days the time Joan got third-degree burns on her foot from tipping her canning pot as it came to a boil around her winter’s supply of bottled rabbit. Jacinta had never tried to get in touch with Treadway.

“I thought,” Dr. Lioukras told her on a follow-up visit, while Wayne was in the hematology lab having two vials of blood drawn from his arm, “you knew.”

“No.”

“Your husband knew. The woman who was here that night — Wayne’s teacher, I believe — she knew.”

“Thomasina. She’s not Wayne’s mother. I’m his mother.”

“And it’s true I never spoke to you about it.”

“I wasn’t here. I was at a stupid party getting drunk with my friends.”

“I assumed you knew. But I shouldn’t have assumed it.”

“A normal husband would have told me.”

“Perhaps when you go home now, you can discuss it.”

“Treadway won’t discuss anything with me until spring.” Jacinta assessed the Greek doctor. He was a man who could love a woman. Not a closed, cold, unreadable machine. She slumped in the chair. He put a hand on her back and his hand felt warm.

“I know it was drastic.”

“No one told Wayne?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Will I tell him?”

“No.”

“I’m so sick of not telling him things.”

“I can’t stop you. But in my experience — I know my experience is limited — he isn’t mature enough to understand.”

“How could anyone understand a thing like that? Moses couldn’t understand that. I’d like to see you understand it if it happened to you.”

“He might not get as big a shock if he were older.”

Jacinta did not think Treadway had an Innu woman like Harold Martin did. But she thought he had begun to think like the animals he trapped. He had begun to walk like them, and sleep like them. He had become wild, and there was no way you could send a message to him if you did not know the wild language. So Jacinta was alone with the new piece of information.

What Jacinta spoke about, alone for the winter with Wayne, was not the mystery of his body. Treadway had told her, before he left, he wanted her to begin training Wayne to make and use money wisely. “It’s time,” he said, “Wayne started learning how to keep body and soul together. For his own good. How much does he make with those cod ears?”

“I’m not sure,” Jacinta said, though she knew the exact amount. In the summer before grade eight, Wayne had learned how to make twenty-five dollars a week. He peeled shrimp for Roland Shiwack and he cut out cod tongues at the Croydon Harbour wharf and sold them for fifty cents a dozen door-to-door. While he was at it, he cut out the pretty white, shell-like bone in the cod’s head that people called the ear, and soaked these in a pot of water with a few drops of Javex. He sold them to the craft co-op at the new museum in North West River, where they made earrings out of them.

“I’d say he’s saving twenty-five dollars a week.” Treadway was a good judge of how much work a person did, and how much it was worth. “Let him save half. But let him contribute the other fifty dollars a month to the household.”