Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“You are sitting here,” Victoria Huskins said, “the picture of misery. I know what happened at the hospital, Wayne. When you were with me in junior high. Did you know that?”

Wayne had not thought of himself as “with” Victoria Huskins in junior high. He had not thought of her as knowing anything. His father had always made it plain that he should not say a word about his condition to anyone in Croydon Harbour.

“I know everything that happened that day and night, because I made it my business to know. My job meant I needed to be on top of what was going on. It was all confidential, but I do know what happened and I know how it has led to where you are now.”

“How did you know?”

“I asked a friend, Wayne. A friend who had a long history of working at the hospital. I asked Kate Davis. She was the nursing administrator there her whole life, and a very close friend before she died last winter. Kate was my dear companion, and I asked her to get a copy of your file because I needed to know what was going on. I needed it to help me know how to deal with you as a student, and with Thomasina Baikie too.”

“But you fired Thomasina.”

“I didn’t fire her, Wayne. The Labrador East School Board wanted to fire her, because someone saw her in the hospital with you during school hours and she had not notified your parents or followed any of the correct procedures.”

The lip gloss that had been applied by the man who resembled Robin Williams had begun to bother Wayne.

“I convinced them to temporarily suspend her. I told them that while she had broken rules she had done it because it was an emergency situation, and I couldn’t have told them that if I had not believed it in my own mind.”

The lip gloss felt gooey on his mouth. He took a napkin and wiped it off, and he thought about the other makeup that the artist had applied to his face and his eyes. He could feel it on his skin.

“That’s the reason I needed to see your file. But Wayne, that’s not important now. What’s important now is why you aren’t at the university, or at college, or doing anything at all with your mind and your talents.”

Over Wayne’s face were two layers of makeup: the foundation and the daubed powder. He began to feel as if his face was smothering under the paint.

“Youth has carried you so far. That’s what I say about all the children passing through my school.”

Wayne remembered how he had not been sure what to think about the eye makeup when the artist had shown it to him in the mirror. He had wondered if it gave him a harrowed look, a kind of false vulnerability that invited people to look at his face in a way different than anyone had looked at it when he presented himself as male. He had these thoughts now as Victoria Huskins questioned him about his mind and his talents, and he did not know what to tell her or what to tell himself. All he knew was that he had to get to a sink and some water and wash the makeup off his face. Why was it called makeup? Did it claim to make up for some deep failing inside a person, and if it did claim to do so, how could the claim be anything other than a façade and a lie? The makeup exaggerated something. Wayne was not sure what it exaggerated. It exaggerated something and diminished something at the same time, and the green shoes had begun to pinch his feet. He felt as if his feet were growing larger with every moment, and his body too, pressed against the seams of the new pants. He knew his body was not really growing, but he knew too that it did not want to be confined in the new outer casing he had found for it at this mall, and it did not want to listen any more to Victoria Huskins, whose voice surrounded him like a third layer of something clammy and alien, on top of the makeup and the clothes. He knew she meant him no harm, and neither had the makeup artist or the salesgirl at Fairweather. But he remembered a cotton shirt and his favourite jeans at home, if you could call it a home, on Forest Road, and he ached to go there and wash the mask off his face and put cotton next to his skin and let it breathe.

“You start out with all the potential,” Victoria Huskins said, “and you’re young. But what happens is, one day you wake up, Wayne, and potential is a thing of the past.”

He did not want to hear this because he already knew it. What was more, he felt that if potential had existed in Victoria Huskins’s other students, it had perhaps not had a chance to exist in himself. Had it? He felt his father had never believed in him. His mother had hoped but had lived under a layer of sorrow throughout his childhood. The only person who knew whether he had ever had potential of any kind, the only one who had ever told him the truth, was Thomasina Baikie. He did not want to sit here talking to Victoria Huskins. He wanted to see Thomasina.

“DAD?”

“Wayne, I’m going to describe to you where I am and I’m hoping you’ll know where that is.”

“Dad?”

“I’m not lost but I’m in a situation where I can’t figure out where to go.”

Wayne heard car horns behind his father. He heard the engine of a truck and he heard a siren and someone shouting, “Gary! Meet me over at the Fountain Spray.”

Treadway Blake had been in the Labrador woods all his life and had not become lost. He could go to a place in the woods that he had never before visited and could travel deep into the new mystery of it, encountering streams that criss-crossed and turned back on themselves. He could turn back on his own path and follow such streams, and it did not matter how many figure eights his path took or how many miles he ventured from territory he had known — he could always find his way home. He had only to look at the tops of the trees to see how they had been shaped by the prevailing wind, or at the direction in which a stream flowed, or the sky above the trees and the sun’s path in it, or the paths of the moon and stars. The wilderness of Labrador was home to him, and he could have explored thousands of miles there and not worried about losing his way. But the seven square miles of downtown St. John’s were a different tale.

He knew the downtown was small because he had seen most of it from the terrace on Military Road below the basilica. It dropped down like a pop-up card full of steeples and coloured houses leading down to the ships’ masts and the harbour. But the fact that it was small did not help Treadway find his way around in what felt like a maze. The only part of it that did not fill Treadway with a sense of claustrophobia was the hourglass exit to the harbour, whose little piece of horizon he gazed at to get his bearings, and when he gazed at it he felt he could breathe again. There were shorebirds out there, some related to shorebirds he knew at home. There was also a hawk: he had seen it from Military Road, circling the top of Signal Hill. Was it a red-tailed or a rough-legged hawk? He had watched its flight pattern but from that distance he had been unable to discern. Then he had looked back at the street, and his own path on it, which he had hoped would lead to the Forest Road address where he knew his son rented an apartment.

Treadway Blake had received two visits: one from Wayne’s old principal Victoria Huskins, the other from Thomasina. He did not know what to make of the first visit. He could not imagine his son looking the way Victoria Huskins had said he looked, and he did not know whether Victoria Huskins’s view of anything was a view he could trust. Thomasina Baikie was a different story. She came to him after a phone call from Wayne.

Wayne had asked her to come down to see him; he had a job and he offered to pay her fare down. There was a place in the cliffs, he said, called Ladies’ Lookout. On it was a giant slab of stone in a patch of grass, surrounded by rock that opened onto the sea. He told Thomasina he watched the cranes on the harbourfront every night after work, then he walked to Ladies’ Lookout and sat there alone. He told her what had happened on Signal Hill with Derek Warford in the van, and he said that sometimes he wondered what would happen if, instead of sitting on the stone at Ladies’ Lookout and watching the ocean, he stood and relaxed into the darkness and let his body drop over the edge. He did not think anything worse could happen than what had already happened.