Annabel - Kathleen Winter [113]
“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.”
27
Lotus
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