Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“We have a fake baby in human dynamics class,” Steve said. “You want me to see if I can borrow it? It’s supposed to show us how bad it is having to get up at night and look after it. It’s supposed to scare us to death.”

“I’m scared without the fake baby, Steve.”

“Moira Carew was five months pregnant and she didn’t even know. Want me to buy you a pregnancy test? Mr. Caines has them hidden in his shop, down under the pork chops in the back freezer. When Moira had her baby, Miss Tavernor — she’s the human dynamics teacher and the gym teacher too — she made Moira take the fake baby home even though she already had a real baby.”

“That’s cruel.”

“Well, she made her. And Moira killed it. It registers dead if you don’t treat it right. It’s electronic. Would you keep yours?”

“My what?”

“Your baby, if you had one. Would you keep it?”

“Jesus.” Wayne began to regret telling Steve Keating what he had told him. Steve was too young, and once he got excited it seemed as if he could not stop talking.

“Would you give it up for adoption? Do you get periods?”

“I don’t have a place for the blood to run out. I had surgery, which I think I’ve got to get undone. I’m petrified, if you want to know the truth.”

“So she’s all backed up in there.” Steve touched Wayne’s abdomen. It was the first time anyone had touched his body since he had come to St. John’s.

“Yeah.”

“Plus you could be pregnant.”

“I’m hoping that’s not the case. But that is what I’m afraid of.”

“I can take you to the hospital. I take my mother’s car all the time when she’s down the shore at her sister’s. You know what you do? You put chalk marks on the driveway smack up against her back tires. Park her in that same spot when you get back. Right to the molecule.”

“I have my own van, Steve.”

“You do? I’m your man, then. Pass ’em over.”

“What?”

“Your keys.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on.”

“I wish you were a bit older.”

“How come?”

“So I could talk to you sensibly.”

“You know what you should do?”

“What?”

“You should take down that hood. Take it down and clean up your face and get some new clothes that fit. It’s weird — you had the same jacket on that other time I saw you, and now you look fatter but that jacket is way too big. It’s like you got bigger and smaller at the same time.”

“It’s muscle mass, Steve. The hormones gave me muscle mass like a man, and now it’s going away and everything is softer.”

“Take the hood down off you so I can have a look at your face.”

Wayne did not want to take the hood down, so Steve took it down for him. Wayne was glad there was darkness, though he knew Steve could see his face because he could see Steve’s, in the light from the ships and the dock lamps. Steve looked at him and frowned with the effort of trying to examine his face objectively.

Wayne had delivered a duck on Old Topsail Road earlier and a little girl had looked up at him from the doorway while her mother went to get the money. The little girl had stared at him, then shouted along the corridor, “Mommy, is that a lady or a man?”

Now he felt the fluid in his abdomen, accompanied by an ongoing ache, and he remembered the fetus that had formed in him before. He imagined its eyes and he easily imagined its face looking at him now. If it had happened before, what was to stop it from happening again? What was to stop him being haunted by one pair of eyes after another, just the same as that first pair?

“The thing I’m most worried about right now,” he told Steve Keating, “is not how my face looks.”

WAYNE DID NOT EXPECT, when he went to the Grace General Hospital, that the doctors would treat him as a model on which to train their students. He understood it in retrospect, but that did not make it any easier.

The Grace General was close to downtown. It was on a part of Military Road that sat on the descent to the harbour. It had black railings like the churches and it had impressive smokestacks with white smoke belching out, and a thousand blank, dark windows, narrow and small like the windows in a castle a child would draw, but not a beautiful castle. There was a Subway restaurant across the road, and a taxi stand, and a corner store and other one-storey businesses that looked hovel-like next to the big cream-and-soot-coloured building. What was the hospital burning, Wayne wondered, that caused all the white smoke? Gracie Watts had once told him that hospitals were constantly getting rid of dangerous waste, and he wondered if that was what was going up in smoke now over the traffic lights and the hamburger stand with broken clapboard. He wondered what kind of dangers were in the smoke.

He had a lot of explaining to do when he tried to tell the receptionist and the nurses why he had come in. He had to make not one but seven trips to the hospital before they understood his case, or thought they understood it. He brought in the forms his father had forwarded to him, outlining the medications he was supposed to take and their cost, and he gave the names of the doctors who had treated him in Goose Bay, or at least those whose names he remembered. Several times during this process he lost his courage and thought, These people are never going to be able to help me. He watched other patients in the corridors, and that made him want to run away. There was a man whose mouth sat perpetually open lying in a cot next to a bucket of grey water that had a mop standing in it. From a cafeteria somewhere in the bowels of the building came the smell of alphabet soup and meat pies. When doctors finally did listen to Wayne, sitting in an admission room holding clipboards, he realized they were not doctors but people who interviewed you before a doctor did. They interviewed him at length, then left him to wait a long time alone in the room.

He went through with all this because he feared the swelling and the tenderness in his belly. When, after several visits, his records finally arrived from Goose Bay, a doctor named Haldor Carr came in with two more doctors and seven interns. These observers all watched carefully, hoping to learn a great deal from Haldor Carr about a kind of case most interns never got to see.

His first real appointment involved the doctors telling Wayne he should not have done what he had done. They were unhappy that he had stopped taking the green pills, the white capsules, and the tiny yellow pills. He should at least, they said, have consulted with them first and agreed upon a timetable. He should not have taken matters into his own hands. Now they could guarantee nothing. They could not guarantee the safety of any medical intervention from now on, and had Wayne considered this before he had acted so rashly, they would not now all be in a position of risk. It was not just the patient’s own health that was at risk here, Haldor Carr said.

Wayne realized the doctor had stopped talking to him and was addressing his interns. Haldor Carr was a teaching physician, and he was teaching now. Wayne was an exhibit. He wanted to leave the room, but if he did that there would be no way to find out if his body had again become pregnant. He was terrified it had, so he stayed in the room with this crowd of people, none of whom looked at him directly except for one girl, an Asian intern, small and serious.

Wayne did not know what Dr. Haldor Carr was ready to do in the name of teaching and of medicine. He might remove Wayne’s penis, or his womb. Wayne heard him talk about these possibilities. Or Haldor Carr might do nothing but reopen Wayne’s vagina and ask each intern to insert a gloved hand and feel the cervix, the placement of it and its distance from the vaginal opening.