Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“Dr. Simon Ho.”

“The surgeon?”

Jacinta stood on a little pile of rubble and thistles, and Tana put an arm around her. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can come.”

“Okay.”

Jacinta let Tana bring her along a hallway that had blue footprints leading north and yellow ones facing south. They went through the X-ray section and down a warren of narrow corridors where ancient women and men lay with no one attending them, their toothless mouths open, then through an orange door where there were colours again and a smell of coffee and toast, and brightly lit information desks.

“What’s your last name?” Tana asked, as if she and Jacinta shared a confidence against the world.

“Blake.”

“Wait here and I’ll go see you won’t have to wait in the waiting room.” Tana went behind the information desk and spoke to the woman working there, who lifted her glasses and looked across the lobby at Jacinta. Tana flipped through file cards, picked up a phone and spoke for a few seconds, then came back out of the booth, brought Jacinta to the cafeteria and bought her a coffee, then showed her into a small waiting room with armchairs in it. “I can go,” she said, “or I can wait here with you. Would you like me to wait here with you?” Jacinta looked at the square green stone in Tana’s ring. It was a dull stone. Jacinta liked this better than a stone that glittered.

“Dr. Ho has you booked for ten thirty,” Tana said. “The good thing about him is that he does only three surgeries a day, one in the morning and two in the afternoon, so you never have to wait.”

Jacinta looked at a Pediatrics Today magazine lying on a table. On its cover was a photograph of a baby with tubes coming out of its nose, arms, and head. Why did hospitals think people coming in with their babies wanted to look at magazines like that? A tiny television hung tilted on a metal arm near the ceiling, and a newscaster proclaimed that forty-seven Chinese coal miners had been suffocated in an explosion earlier in the day. There was footage of their families screaming and banging at the gate of the mine, which officials had locked for their own protection. The wall under the television had a dent in it, and Jacinta wondered if someone had kicked it. A door opened that she had not noticed and a nurse in gelatinous lipstick called, “Jacinta Blake?” in a voice too loud. Tana put her hand on Jacinta’s shoulder, and her hand was so warm Jacinta did not want it to leave her. But she had to follow the other nurse. Tana’s voice had calmed her. Voices were like that. You could lose or save a life with the sound of a voice. White corridors, windows, big silver and white room, Dr. Simon Ho next to four trolleys full of shelves, implements laid out on white cloths. Jacinta noticed the seriousness of Dr. Ho. She liked that he looked at her steadily, that he was young and slim and not aggressive.

Blades glittered on the trolleys, and she thought how Treadway would like to get his hands on some of those for fish and seals and skinning porcupine and stripping bark and just having on him for any event that might need a strange two-pronged blade with a graceful curve, or a stainless steel razor-edged file with a nice fat handle. It occurred to her to steal one, though Jacinta had not stolen a thing in her life.

The parents’ waiting room was beyond a side door and it had comfortable couches in it and a painting on the wall of an old mill and weeping willows and some ducks, but Jacinta did not want to go in there. “I’ll stay with my baby.”

The nurse did not like this but Dr. Ho watched Jacinta respectfully and said she could stay in the operating room. The nurse tried to take the baby.

“I want to see. What exactly are you planning?”

“The point,” the doctor said, “is to create a believable masculine anatomy. You can lay him on the operating table yourself if you like. I’ll show you the exact procedure. We will show you how to wash your hands and arms and you can wear a mask and you can watch until the point where we do the surgery itself, if you think you can stand it.”

Jacinta realized the nurse was chewing gum.

“What do you mean by believable?”

“I mean we try to make the baby comfortable as a male in his own mind, and in the minds of other people who are in his life now or will be in the future.”

The nurse chewed as if she intended to grind her teeth to powder.

“I liked the other nurse,” Jacinta said. “Not this one.”

“This nurse’s name is Alma Williams,” Dr. Ho said softly.

“She’s chewing gum. Her voice is jarring and I don’t like her. I liked the other nurse. The one who showed me here. She came all the way out to the back of the hospital to ask if I was okay. She bought me a coffee. She has warm hands. I like her and I want her instead of that one. I really don’t want this nurse in here when I could have the nice one. I like the look of you and that you’re serious, and I think you will be honest with me, but if that nurse stays here I am going out and taking my baby with me, because I don’t like her.”

“Alma, can you please ring the third floor and have them send Tana down here, and then be kind enough to abide by Mrs. Blake’s request?”

“It’s a pretty strange request.”

“Thank you, Alma.”

“Seeing as how I am a registered pediatric nurse.” Alma said the word pediatric as if she were about to define it to a kindergarten class.

“It’s all right, Alma.”

“Whereas Tana is—”

“I appreciate you fetching her, Alma.”

Alma left Jacinta and her baby and the doctor alone in the room, and that was when Jacinta handed Wayne to him. She felt that in Dr. Ho’s presence any thought, any fear or wish, was understandable. He would not dismiss her.

“You think,” she said, “a child’s sex needs to be believable. You think my child — the way he is now, the way she is — is unbelievable? Like something in a science fiction horror movie? And you want to make her believable. Like a real human.”

“We want to give him a chance. As soon as possible after the birth.”

“Have you done it before?”

“True hermaphroditism happens, Mrs. Blake, once in eighty-three thousand births. I haven’t done this before. But what we are doing today is the normal medical response.”

“Normal?”

“And I think it’s the most compassionate one. We try to decide the true sex of the child.”

“The true one and not the false one.”

“We use this phalometer.” He picked up a tiny silver bar from the trolley. It had black numbers on it.

“It’s a tiny ruler.”

“It is. See?” He pointed to a mark three-quarters of the way down the phalometer. “If the penis reaches or exceeds this length, we consider it a real penis. If it doesn’t meet this measurement, it is considered a clitoris.”

Jacinta strained to read the tiny marks. “One point five centimetres?”

“That’s right.”

“What happens if it’s less than that?”

“When a phallus is less than one point five centimetres, give or take seven hundredths of a centimetre—”

“Seven hundredths?”

“Yes. When it’s less than that, we remove the presentation of male aspects and later, during adolescence, we sculpt the female aspects.”

“What if it’s right in the middle? Right straight, smack dab down the precise centre? One point five centimetres with no seven hundredths.”

“Then we make an educated guess. We do endocrinological tests but really, in a newborn, as far as endocrinology goes, we’re making a best estimate. Penis size at birth is the primary criterion for assigning a gender.”

“Measure her, then.”