Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“What I’m going to say might horrify you, Wayne. It might give you terrible dreams. I know it has given me dreams. And I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m sorry it happened, and I’m sorry I’ve known for years and not told you. I wrote to your father that I wanted him to tell you. I’m going to tell you now because it could happen again and it might be different. You might have to do something.”

Ptarmigans stayed in pairs. They roosted on adjacent branches, and when one foraged, the other was always somewhere near. But Wayne could not see the female. Had a hunter killed her?

“When I took you to the hospital, there was menstrual blood. You knew that.”

“I figured it out. It doesn’t sink in at first. What something like that really is. Even when they tell you, it doesn’t sink in. I know the medical terms. I know I’m supposed to take the white pills and the yellow pills and now one big green pill. There’s lots I don’t know though. It seems like no one knows. Not even the doctors.”

“There was menstrual blood, yes. But also, trapped in a Fallopian tube… it would never have lived. Wayne, there was a fetus.”

The ptarmigan cackled and shouted in short, angry barks, like a man shouting, “Get out!” over and over again to the silent woods.

“It can happen internally, Wayne. When the male and female reproductive organs are adjacent in the same body. It was nothing you thought or did. It has nothing to do with masturbation or ejaculating or anything people might think. The fetus could never have grown because of its location. Dr. Lioukras removed it with the rest of the lining and the fluid and blood. I asked him what the chances were of it happening again, and he said he didn’t know. He said it shouldn’t have happened. I asked if it did happen again, would the fetus always die? Or could it grow?”

There was the female ptarmigan, in the blackness under low spruce boughs. The male joined her and they walked into the darkness with their jerky little henlike movements, their fat bodies that made them so easy to shoot. But for now the couple was all right. Off they went to feed their young. The white on their bellies had already started to spread against their brown upper bodies. In winter they would be indistinguishable from the snow.

“Dr. Lioukras couldn’t answer me, Wayne. He couldn’t say yes or no.”

Wayne turned the radio on and started the truck. He took Thomasina to his parents’ house and gave her the unopened letter. He did not tell his mother he was giving back the letter. He told his mother Thomasina had come to have a look around old haunts, and after he gave her the letter he took her outside and drove her around Croydon Harbour. He slowed as they passed her old house, where Wally Michelin’s parents still lived, then he took her down to the beach where he kept his canoe for his outfitting jobs, as if this were an ordinary occasion of showing someone around the place, but he was thinking about that fetus.

“Why,” Gracie said that night, “do I always feel like you’re not here even when you’re sitting right there?” They were playing cribbage. He knew she had the seven of hearts because a corner was torn off it. He knew she had the queen of spades as well. Her little nephew had scribbled Magic Marker on it. She had borrowed three books from her cousin whose boyfriend had taken the paramedic course she wanted to take, and these were stacked on the windowsill. He had read the titles and marvelled that Gracie really meant to know everything in these books. Hollinshead’s Textbook of Anatomy . A big, expensive book on medical physiology by someone named Arthur Guyton, who Gracie said had polio and wrote the book after he realized the polio meant he could not become a surgeon. Basic and Clinical Pharmacology by Bertram G. Katzung. Wayne looked at the books, and he watched Gracie put down her queen of spades for two points, and he remembered what the willow ptarmigan had shouted. Get out! Get out! He wondered if there was anything in those textbooks that outlined his own physiology, his own anatomy. Would Gracie get to page 217 or page 499 and see a diagram of a person who had female and male reproductive organs in the same body? Would there be a cross-section diagram of a man who had a womb, or a Fallopian tube with a fetus trapped in it? Get out! Get out!

In his own bed he remembered the red world. The way the hospital room, the sheets and utensils and surgeons, had receded under the redness inside his eyelids. He remembered the masked faces, the gelled lens, the word blood . Then red, black-red, red-orange. Then dizziness; a red pool, whirling, and he was in it underwater, and something had been in there with him. He remembered that. Something had been in there looking at him, drowning and trying to speak, and he had not known what it was. It dawned on him that his father had known. His father had known all along that the doctors had found a fetus. Where was Treadway Blake now? He had disappeared into the same woods as the ptarmigan. Where was the fetus now? It had had eyes, and the eyes had watched him. He had been in the red world and the fetus and he had looked at each other. Had it wanted him to save it? If he had not lost it, if it had grown into a person, who would that little person be now?

“What I’m going to say might horrify you,” Thomasina had said. But it did not horrify him. He found it the saddest thing in the world. She had said it might give him terrible dreams. But he did not dream about it, because he did not sleep.

By morning he had made a decision to take the ptarmigan’s advice and get out of Labrador.

It would not be hard to tell Gracie. Gracie had her textbooks. She had her fierce little fist full of cards she was determined to play even if they were marked and torn. His mother would be the hard one. Wayne did not like to leave Jacinta alone. But he would leave her all the same, and his sadness over this was not bottomless like his sadness about the fetus.

Wayne’s sadness over Jacinta was the sadness all sons and daughters feel when their ferry starts moving and the parent stands on the dock, waving and growing tiny. A sadness that stings, then melts in a fresh wind.

IF THOMASINA HAD SPENT THE WINTER in Croydon Harbour instead of Goose Bay, she could have gone up the hill, climbed Jacinta’s three steps, knocked on the door with an apple pie in her hands, and stayed on the step until Jacinta answered the door. Thomasina would have seen, immediately, that things were not right. She would have touched Jacinta about the shoulders, turned her around, stuck the soiled teacups in hot suds, and opened some windows. Thomasina would have done a load of laundry and she would have lifted the tangled sea of yarn that covered the living room floor. She would have helped Jacinta wash her hair and she would have brushed it for her, and she would have held her in her arms and listened.

A lot of things can go out of order in a lonely house over a lonely autumn and the start of winter, without other people in the village knowing, especially if that village prides itself on an independent spirit. Jacinta’s neighbours could not see, on her windowsill, a doll the size of a thumb that Jacinta had made from clay out of her root cellar, clay she had mixed with water and a dinner spoon. Nor could they see the housedress and cardigan she wore all day and all night throughout the winter. Bread pudding was a thing Jacinta had eaten as a child. Her mother had kept a kitchen drawer especially for bread crusts. The crusts were what the family had left on their plates. Some had jam on them. You broke the crusts into a pan with milk and butter, nutmeg and an egg, and some sugar, and you baked the pudding. If you were a child and your mother was not looking and you were hungry between meals, you would open the drawer and steal a dried crust that had jam on it. There was never mould, because the drawer was airy, and a dry crust with jam on it tasted crispy and delicious between meals. This was what Jacinta ate now, and there was comfort in eating a childhood treat. You could live for a long time on crusts and tea, and you had a lot of hours to think about your son who had a girl hidden inside him.