Annabel - Kathleen Winter [29]
For her part, Jacinta thought her loneliness her own fault. If she had been a wife who had not been brought up outside Labrador, she thought, perhaps she would have been more content to live in isolation under her own roof. So she suppressed her loneliness, and it resided in her heart along with the suppressed certainty she felt that, while Wayne was being brought up as a young boy, part of him was as feminine as she was. On days when Wayne was home sick from school, she played word games with him, and they sang and drew pictures of funny, random things together: trousers with spots, flying umbrellas, circus dogs they had read about in books, the pyramids of fruit Jacinta remembered in the shop windows of her childhood.
“Can we get Thomasina’s tin out?” Wayne asked when they had made pages of drawings. “I want to look at the bridges.”
Thomasina had sent a card showing a drawing of the old London Bridge. “They didn’t plan this one at all,” she wrote. “They just kept adding on a new section when they got around to it. It was so heavy the river had to fight to get around the pillars. It pushed through the arches so fast people crashed into the bridge in their boats.”
Many of the bridges on Thomasina’s postcards were incomplete. They had been destroyed by centuries or had vanished altogether and existed now only in the frail form of drawings on the postcards. Jacinta liked this. The fragments reassured her. Her own life felt full of incomplete pieces. She remembered the Bible story where Christ gathered fragments of crusts, small pieces of fish, and somehow made them whole again, enough to feed thousands. She liked thinking about the fragments more than she liked the story of the eventual miracle. There was something sacred about the fragments, about hunger, about unfinished bridges or bridges that had crumbled. She did not like the postcard that showed a Stone Age bridge in Somerset in England, where Neolithic men had dragged massive slabs onto boulders that still stood. There was something brutal about their permanence that made her feel afraid, and she wished Thomasina had not sent that card.
“Where’s the one from Turkey?” Jacinta loved that the broken Turkish arch was the oldest stone arch left standing in the world.
But the bridge Wayne loved was Italian. It was Florence’s Ponte Vecchio. “I didn’t know a bridge could have buildings on it, and shops full of gold.” He loved how there were people in the buildings right on the bridge, with light in the windows that reflected on the water. He had not known you could live on a bridge, but Thomasina wrote that you could.
“I want to live on a bridge like that,” Wayne told his mother. “I want to hang a fishing line out the window and catch a fish.”
“There was music on the Ponte Vecchio,” Thomasina had written. “I gave the violin player some coins and he played something he said he had composed.”
Jacinta sat in Treadway’s armchair with Wayne and they read to each other from copies of A. A. Milne and Lewis Carroll that Jacinta had brought to Labrador in the last corner of her trunk. To Jacinta all of this felt like what it must mean to have a daughter, but she kept this feeling pooled within herself, and she did not know what would cause the most harm: to let that pool become a free-flowing stream or to starve it of water gradually, so that one day it might dry completely.
In grade five Wayne became silent until spoken to because that was the way he learned