Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“Thomasina wants you to see your old friend. The trip won’t cost much, and even if it did, what else is money for?”

“Dad, I don’t want to take your gold.”

“As I said, son, you’ve had a lot more to contend with than I have ever had. I want you to take that. Your mother and I want you to have it and we want you to do something with it that will mean we don’t have to worry about how you are going to make a living. It’s pure selfishness on our part.”

“Does my mother know?”

“Does she know what, son?”

“Does she know I’ve gone off the drugs? And what about what Derek Warford did? She doesn’t know about that?”

“No. I didn’t say a word about Derek Warford. Your mother would not have been able to stand hearing that.”

“I know.”

“But she knows about the drugs. Your mother has always — part of her — wanted you to be who you are now. She has always been the one who felt the drugs might not be the right thing. Ever since you were little. So yes, I told her about that. And she was happy.”

They were at the intersection that led up Signal Hill and, to the east, along the Battery.

“She was happy?”

“Well she cried, but she said she was happy. And I almost forgot to give you this. I hope to God it’s not bent. She’ll kill me if I’ve bent it.” Treadway took a small square out of his pocket. It was two pieces of cardboard measuring no more than two by three inches and held together by a rubber band, and when Wayne took the band off, he saw it was a photograph. There had been a newspaper clipping that showed the moment Elizaveta Kirilovna had won her gold medal for synchronized swimming, when Wayne was eight years old. Jacinta had clipped it at the time, and they had looked at it together and felt Elizaveta Kirilovna’s joy.

“But this is not newsprint,” Wayne said. “It’s a real photograph.” Elizaveta Kirilovna was waving and her face was wet. You could see a drop of swimming pool water on her mouth. Wayne had, when he was eight, told Jacinta he could almost imagine that Elizaveta Kirilovna was waving to him personally.

“Your mother took it to Sooter’s in Goose Bay and asked them to reprint it on photo paper. They do that now. They can make a poster if you want it. But your mother wanted it small. She asked me to go into S. O. Steele on Water Street and have it put in a sterling silver frame for you, but I didn’t get around to it. Could you do that yourself, son? Your mother doesn’t need to know. I don’t tell her everything, and I sometimes have the feeling there are details she keeps from me.”

They walked past the convent and past the coloured houses that straggled up the hill and petered out before you got to the Battery Hotel, the front all white on the hillside like a cruise ship, though it was dilapidated at the back. Then came the hill’s steepest bend and around it emerged Cabot Tower.

“Deadman’s Pond is in here,” Wayne pointed into the bushes. There were blueberry bushes that had flowers on them: modest pink bells and new green and white and pale purple berries, and on a few, one or two berries that had turned blue. Water peeped through the bushes and they saw the worn-down shrubs where people had driven vehicles to get closer to the pond. Wayne did not know why his father wanted to come here, and he felt uneasy. He had not walked up here since his attack, and he did not want to see the pond.

“I want you to leave me here.”

“Why?” Wayne was afraid someone might come and challenge his father. He knew Derek Warford was unlikely to come here in the daytime but he pictured it anyway. He did not know what his father planned to do and he did not like leaving him here alone.

“I want to have a careful look at the place and I have something I want to do here by myself. I’ve got the key you gave me and I’ll use it to get back in the apartment when I’m done.”

He knew Wayne had to go to work. It was late afternoon. Wayne stood on the side of the road and watched his father walk into the bushes and stoop down and eat a few blueberries as he would have done in the blueberry bushes around home. He saw that his father’s hands were big around the berries, but his thumb and finger had no problem aiming for the delicate berry and picking it.

“All right, Dad.” Wayne did not move.

“Go on, son.”

Once Wayne had turned to go back down into the city he did not look back at his father, though he wanted to, and his back felt exposed and sensitive as if it were a naked screen and the image of his father alone at Deadman’s Pond was projected on it.

THE GROUND UNDER THE BLUEBERRY bushes was, Treadway thought, drier than ground under similar bushes in Labrador, and the berries had a different perfume. But the pond was like a pond he knew back home called Bottomless Pond. This one was called Deadman’s Pond, he figured, because a dead man could disappear in it for a good long time. Of course Bottomless Pond at home had a bottom, and so did this pond, but it was a deep bottom. Treadway could tell how deep from the contours of the pond, from the sediments he saw between the shrub roots and the surface, and from its colour.

He had not been able to stop seeing what Thomasina told him had happened here to his son. But now that he was here the scene changed, as scenes always do when we visit their real setting in person. He had pictured the trampled bushes where vehicles came as being on the pond’s other side, and he had not thought the terrain would be this steep. He walked around the pond looking for the place where it plunged most abruptly to its greatest depth, and he found it next to some boulders on the north side. He dislodged a small boulder from the nest in which it had sat for perhaps hundreds of years and rolled it over the lip of the pond, and it disappeared. He sat on one of the bigger boulders and thought about what he had planned to do.

He had hunted countless times in terrain that was not much different from this terrain. He looked at the path, the twigs on the path, their dryness and how they cracked. He looked at the available boulders and their sizes, and at the diameter of the shrubs and the hiding places underneath the shrubs. He felt the direction of the wind and was glad it was a cold wind, and that it had a sound and a deep loneliness. He was glad this place was as lonesome as he had imagined it might be. He saw evidence of several kinds of small animals and he saw moose droppings.

Treadway did not want to go over in his mind the conversation Thomasina had had with him, but it was the kind of conversation that haunted a father. Though Treadway had never called Wayne anything but his son, he knew and had always known that within his son lay hidden a daughter. He had seen this daughter in the past day here in St. John’s. He had seen Annabel in Wayne’s face, and he had wanted to come to Deadman’s Pond to see if coming here, where this thing had happened, would change his mind or confirm in his mind that he wanted to remove the possibility that Derek Warford could ever do this again to his son, or daughter, or to anyone else’s daughter. He could remove that possibility, he saw now, looking at the landscape. There was little difference in a wilderness like this between trapping a wild animal and hunting a man. There were several ways Treadway could do it. He could use a trap like those he used at home, but that would mean he would have to go buy the trap, and he did not want to go to Wilson’s outfitting shop on Water Street and meet any of the Wilsons or have them remember him. What he had thought about doing, the possibility that seemed most careful to him now, was a thing he had done one winter when he came across a live lynx caught in a trap belonging to Roland Shiwack.