Annabel - Kathleen Winter [130]
“I’m not at Memorial.”
“Are you at one of the technical colleges?”
“I’m not at any kind of college. I’m working.”
Victoria Huskins had unwrapped her burger but now she looked at it, wrapped it again, and put it in her purse. “People don’t know this,” she said, “but you can reheat a burger and it is every bit as good as it was fresh. What kind of work, Wayne?”
“I’m working for one of the wholesalers on Thorburn Road.”
“What kind of wholesaler?”
“Food. I have my own refrigerated van. I make deliveries all over St. John’s and part of Mount Pearl.”
“What do you deliver, Wayne?”
“Meat. Fish. Different kinds of sausages.”
Victoria Huskins looked him in the eye. She did not linger on his hair or his clothing or his makeup. “So you are selling meat from a van.”
She had not asked him about his appearance. They were a thousand miles from Croydon Harbour. She waited for him to tell her more but did not appear to be curious about his maleness or femaleness.
“I never thought of going to Memorial,” he said. “I’m working on figuring out a lot of other things.”
Now her face changed. “What kind of things?”
Wayne felt his own story amass as a cloud. He could not be coherent about it. He wanted to talk to someone but he did not know how, because somehow the facts, with their tidy labels and medical terms, reduced his whole being to something that he did not want it to be. How could he sit here and tell Victoria Huskins what the doctors had labelled him without reducing himself to the status of a diagram like the one she had mentioned: his grade six diagram of the North Atlantic Tealia anemone? He could not begin to explain, so he sat without words. He did not know if he could trust her, and even if he could have trusted her he could not explain his whole being with words. The cloud rose in him and reached his throat, where it amassed as a blockage that felt leaden and sorrowful. He felt it as a lump that threatened to silence him.
“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