Kathleen Winter - Annabel

But the hawk used an argument Treadway had used many times himself when Jacinta had asked him to explain or justify a decision he had made. The hawk used the argument of one lone proclamation followed by silence, and in that silence, Treadway knew, he could protest all he liked, but he would not win the argument.

WHEN HE GOT ONN THE TRAIN from Portland to Boston, Wayne felt what his father had promised he would feel.

“Don’t go in the van,” Treadway had said. “Leave your van and get on the bus to Port-aux-Basques. Get the ferry to North Sydney but don’t get on the train there. Go to Yarmouth and get the Yarmouth ferry to Portland, and then you’ll be almost in Boston. You don’t want to be in the van, navigating.”

Treadway had carefully studied a map he had bought in the gift shop at the Newfoundland Hotel. “You want to sit back and look out the windows at everything. You don’t want the trip to be one road sign after another and a maze of overpasses. Trains and ferries will give you a real journey to Boston. Your van is a responsibility. Navigating is a chore. A train will take the weight of the world away.”

The train went through what seemed to Wayne to be private sections of ordinary people’s lives: balconies and backyards where shovels had been left against fences, and clothes hung in a damp wind that made them tremulous, so that the clothes appeared intimate. The balconies had chairs on them: wooden chairs and a few upholstered chairs that no one minded leaving in the rain. Some balconies held small tables and the people who lived there had left pitchers and coffeepots on them, and had done so recently, so that the balconies, as Wayne passed them on the train, felt as if remnants of conversation hung inside them. There was a tumbledown feel to the flowers that clung to trellises at the backs of American towns, and in blue clematis or scarlet runner beans against red brick lay a feeling of peace Wayne found unaccountable, yet he felt it as he looked out the train window. His father had been right.

Wally Michelin’s aunt Doreen had answered the phone and told Wayne to come down. She had a small spare room. Wally was excited about having been accepted into the Boston Downtown Community Choir. Yes, the ticket had been for Thomasina, and no, Wally would not mind that Thomasina had given it to Wayne.

“Thomasina wrote and told us,” Doreen said. “She told us to look after you.”

In the weeks following Treadway’s visit, summer had turned. No leaf had changed colour but the sky had changed. It was silver and leaden and it brought out the colours beneath it in a way the summer sky did not. Summer sky swallowed colour, but the sky of late August made colour ricochet back to earth, and there were sharp edges on all the buildings and curbs and even on the leaves of the trees and on the impatiens in the flowerbeds of all the towns through which Wayne travelled to reach Wally Michelin. The closer he got to Boston, the sharper this light grew, and the more he feared he had done the wrong thing in coming. It was one thing to have a ticket in your pocket for a choir performance. That gave you permission to go into the theatre and take your seat. But did it give you permission to re-enter the life of a beloved friend after you and she had left each other behind?

Wally’s aunt Doreen had told him that Wally was happy he was coming, but as the train approached Boston Wayne worried about meeting her again. He looked again at the light wool coat he wore, and the thin scarf and the corduroy pants, which were the colour of malted milk and caught light from the train window so that there were pale and dark stripes. No one looked at him twice on the train. He had a haircut that made him look like any young person. He had gone to a salon on Duckworth Street that cut both men’s and women’s hair and had asked the girl to give him a haircut that suited his face. There were students on the Boston train, and he looked like one of them.

His train was delayed for an hour outside the city because something had gone wrong with the switches. A conductor announced that the switches had to be done by hand. By the time the taxi brought him to Wally’s address her aunt Doreen welcomed Wayne alone.

“She’s gone to choir practice. Are you hungry?”

“I had a sandwich on the train.”

“I’ve got a cup of broth for you. Have that and I’ll take you to watch the rest of her practice, then when you both come back, we’ll have a real supper.”

Wally’s aunt, Wayne discovered, was a gracious woman who looked through your eyes and into whoever was in there. Certain things were visible to her that were not visible to other people. He felt at home with her, and he felt nervous when they pulled up to the building where Wally was practising and her aunt told him to go in alone.

The place had been a church hall but was no longer affiliated with a church. The whole church and the buildings with it were rundown, but a group called the Appleton Street Neighbourhood Association was working to revitalize it. Wayne read this on a plaque in the hallway. He could hear chairs dragging across the floor inside double doors that each had a tiny pane, and he looked through the panes and saw the choir on a stage, and he saw the conductor and a piano player. They were between songs and the conductor was talking about the purity of consonants. Wayne waited until the choir resumed singing so that there was a wall of sound. There was not much light and he was glad of this as he quietly entered. The choir director kept starting and stopping the music. He told the choir to skip pages, and sometimes they skipped ahead to an entirely different song that they began singing but did not complete. It appeared to Wayne that the entire practice was all about ripping the songs into pieces and working on those pieces as if they would never again belong to the original song, as if fragments of music were all the conductor hoped for. He saw Wally Michelin in the back row, second to last. He recognized her not so much from her features, which he could not see, but from the way she stood, and had always stood, and from the rippling hair and the shape of her face. It occurred to him that Wally Michelin was singing, though she had been told she would not sing again, and he marvelled at that though he did not know if he should believe it, as her voice was not alone but was part of the choir’s sound.

When the practice was over, she came to his seat as if she had known he would be there, and as if it were ordinary that he should be in Boston with her. She sat beside him, and there was so much activity around them — people taking date squares and deli sandwiches out of purses and unwrapping them and eating them and talking about Linda’s new grandson and George’s holiday in Florida, which meant George would not be here for the concert — that Wayne felt he and Wally were alone in a sea of sound.

“You came.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No. I’m glad you came.”

He was not alone with her but he felt as if they were alone. He felt they recognized each other in a way that no one else recognized either of them. Other people could look at him but they did not see what Wally Michelin saw, and perhaps others saw in her the same thing he did, but he did not think they saw it. What it was was limitlessness. When you were with an ordinary person, you could draw a line around the territory the two of you covered, and Wayne had found that the territory was usually quite small. It was smaller than a country and smaller than a town and sometimes smaller than a room. But this room, the room they were in, did not really exist. Boston did not necessarily exist either, although Wayne could sense it, fizzing with the unfamiliarity of its lights, its parks and streets, beyond the practice-room doors. The way he responded to Wally’s presence was that he felt as if life at this minute was blossoming inside him instead of lying dormant. He felt the electric presence of his own life, and he did not want that feeling to end, although he knew it had ended in the past and that it would end again. She whispered into his ear and the piece of her breath was warm with cool edges.