Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“You can’t run out,” he warned, “and you can’t let it slide.”

“Fine, Dad.”

“And Wayne, don’t worry about how much the medication costs.”

“I wasn’t worried, Dad.” It had not occurred to Wayne that his parents had to pay for his drugs.

“You’ll have time enough to worry about that when you’re older.”

“How much do they cost?”

“Hundreds of dollars, son. But MCP covers ninety percent of it until you’re eighteen. Then they cover forty percent until you’re twenty-one, unless you’re in university. Then they keep covering the forty percent until you’re twenty-five.”

“Hundreds of dollars?”

“They’re pretty strong drugs, I guess, son. And I guess they don’t have them in great supply for a whole lot of people.”

Wayne took his pills but was always on the lookout for symptoms: swelling abdomen, abdominal pain of any kind, the appearance of breast tissue. Any change in facial or pubic hair. If any of these things happened he was to get Jacinta to drive him to Goose Bay and see Dr. Lioukras right away. Almost every day Wayne imagined such changes had occurred. It was hard to know if he had a real or an imagined ache. He was so relieved that his peeling feet came from the shrimp and not from some new health crisis, he was able to gulp more air.

As his father grew more distant, Wayne cleaned fish and cut staves for Roland and for other men in the cove whose sons had got part-time service jobs or work with the military base in Goose Bay and did not want to do the traditional work of Labrador sons. He sold cod ears, earring bones, and beaver teeth.

Now and then tourists came from Maine or Newfoundland, and Wayne took them hiking or snowshoeing on trails along Beaver River, or he helped them hook half a dozen trout using flies Treadway had left neatly labelled on a strip of sheep’s wool nailed to the shed wall.

“Wayne is a great help to you, isn’t he?” Eliza Goudie asked Jacinta. “Never stops thinking of ways to add to the household. Getting to be a real little man.”real

AT SEVENTEEN WAYNE TOOK DOWN the wallpaper border in his bedroom and persuaded his mother to let him buy a gallon of maroon paint. He spent a lot of time alone in there fooling around on a mandolin he had bought from a guy named James Welland, who had hoped to take it in his kayak on a trip he was doing for National Geographic up the old Mina Hubbard route. Outdoors journalists were forever trying to follow in the footsteps of Hubbard and George Elson, and they all had to get rid of half their gear as soon as they realized what Labrador was really about.

“You can paint three walls,” Jacinta told him. “Leave the other one white.”

“Why three? What’s so big a deal about the fourth wall?”

“It’s too dark. And will you put that Spirograph away if you’re not using it?”

“Fine.”

“There’s another wheel in the vacuum cleaner hose. Just clear them up off of your closet carpet. As a matter of fact there’s a whole pile of stuff on the floor of that closet that you never look at anymore. All your drawings, for one thing.”

“Don’t go in my room with the vacuum cleaner.”

“Two saucers of cheese and pickles under the bed. The cheese had fur on it. If I don’t go in there…”

“Fine.”

“Do you want that Spirograph? You used to love it.”

He had loved its purple and green pens and flat wheels with holes and cogs for drawing circles that whorled and intersected in an infinite number of symmetrical designs.

“The ink dried up a long time ago, Mom.”

He had bought his mandolin for seventy-five dollars, and as soon as he started playing it he threw away the old Elizaveta Kirilovna swimsuit. You could do the same thing with mandolin notes without making a fool of yourself. He plucked notes and left a space around each one. He made patterns with the notes. A note was like a synchronized swimmer: elegant on its own, part of an exquisite language when it floated with the others. No one would know, as you tried out sounds, that you had a girl’s body inside you. No one would think there was anything weird about playing a musical instrument. Brent Shiwack and Mark Thevenet practised guitar in the Shiwacks’ shed every Friday night. They knew how to play everything on side one of Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty and were working on side two. A mandolin was unusual for Croydon Harbour, but its first owner, James Welland, had been in the paper, and people thought he was a normal guy. Donna Palliser’s sister had made him poppyseed muffins for his trip.

Wayne could play the mandolin alone in his room and no one would suspect the things that were going on in his mind. No one would know he lay awake imagining what would happen to his body if he stopped taking the pills: bones of his hands rearranged, longer, thinner; his shoulders slight instead of looking like the framework of a big kite. His waist longer and his breasts the shape they had wanted to begin a few years earlier, before the extra hormones. His Adam’s apple no longer riding an elevator up and down his neck whenever he swallowed. His feet inside Gwen Matchem’s Cuban heels and no one saying anything if he wanted to dance.

Wayne danced in his room in the light from one street lamp. If he looked at his shadow in the pool of gold the street lamp spilled on his wall, and if he turned his body certain ways, it could be the body of a woman.

No one in Croydon Harbour knew he had his mother’s eyeliner on, or that if he turned his face a certain way his cheekbones looked almost like the cheekbones of Wally Michelin, still easily the most beautiful girl in the school, in Wayne’s mind. At seventeen he could have fallen in love with her easily. It didn’t matter if you were a girl or a boy. You could fall in love with her either way.

But Wally had not come back to him. She had not told him when the new edition of Gabriel Fauré came for her at the post office, and she did not appear to miss Wayne, though he missed her so terribly that when he saw her now, his chest felt like his mother’s pincushion with a darning needle lodged in it.

Wally Michelin had floated into her own new universe. There was a tall boy, Tim McPhail, whose father had become the new minister at St. Mark’s Anglican Church when the old reverend, Julian Taft, had gone back to Kent to grow champion roses. Wally was the only one, had always been the only one, with whom Wayne wanted to spend time. Wally stood in front of Tim McPhail’s locker, a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in her hand. As far as Wayne could tell, Tim McPhail wouldn’t know it from The Password to Larkspur Lane by Carolyn Keene, which Wayne had seen Gracie Watts reading on the bus. Wayne had read The Rainbow . He had read Sons and Lovers . Wally Michelin reminded him of Gudrun. She wore the same bright stockings; Wayne was sure Tim McPhail had no idea. Tim got hundreds in physics and he played chess. He was almost good enough for Wally Michelin if Wayne compared him with everyone else, but he was far less than she deserved. He might not hang around the smoking entrance with Brent Shiwack plotting to get his skin on grad night, but he thought about it all the same. Wayne heard boys talking. Grad night, for the boys of Croydon Harbour, was about beer, hot knives, parking, figuring out how to unhook bra straps, and getting girls drunk enough to have sex. He heard girls talking too. For the girls it was about falling in love, and before that, finding the right dress.

Gracie Watts asked Wayne to the graduation dance.

Every second day she asked him if he promised he would have a boutonniere to match her gown. He was sick of hearing about it and wished he had told her he was not going. But you had to go. This year Donna Palliser had announced they had to call it a prom, like in the States.