Annabel - Kathleen Winter [46]
The phantom music had first happened to her on the school bus trip to Pinhorn Wilderness Camp, on their way home, after the bus had stopped at Mary Brown’s Fried Chicken in Goose Bay and continued on the road to Croydon Harbour. Sometimes she could catch a tiny fragment and pull it until the rest unrolled in her mind, but usually she had no control over the phantom music. She loved it and wished she could hear it always. Treadway had read all of this.
Any parent can scan any piece of writing, even writing done in an unfamiliar hand, and quickly discern the name of his own child, and Treadway had done this. Wayne had brought hot chocolate to the tree. Wayne had sung melody for Wally so she could try out harmonies. Wayne read while she practised writing treble clefs, half notes, whole notes, eighth and sixteenth notes, flats, naturals, rests, and accidentals. Wayne was copying triangles from Thomasina’s postcard of Andrea Palladio’s bridge over the Cismone. None of this was what a normal Labrador son would do, but none of it frightened Treadway until the part of Wally’s diary that detailed Wayne’s recurring dream.
“Wayne dreamed he was a girl again last night,” Wally had written beneath a list of supplies. String. Oreos. A shoebox. Scissors. The foot out of an old pair of pantyhose. A cup of cold bacon fat with sunflower seeds in it. “If you saw my diary, you saw my music,” Wally said.
“There might have been some pieces of wet paper. I didn’t think they looked like music.”
“Can I see them?”
“I threw them out.”
“I need to look in your garbage.”
“They’re burnt.” Treadway never threw paper in the garbage. He threw it in the stove. He did not like filling garbage bags with anything you could burn.
He felt sorry about the music, but he did not say so.
11
Old Love
JACINTA AND TREADWAY WERE POLITE with each other during the shortening days after Treadway took down Wayne’s bridge. Jacinta made the bed the way Treadway liked it; Treadway wanted no air to touch his feet, and Jacinta could not sleep unless her feet breathed through an opening in the blankets. She no longer woke him when he snored, and he picked up and washed teacups she left in the grass. The politeness was unbearable. They avoided touching each other, careful as strangers on a train. But there was one thing they had always done, and they did not stop doing it now, because to stop would have been to acknowledge their marriage had broken, and they were not able to acknowledge this. The thing was that when each took a bath, at the end of the bath the other took the sponge that hung on the shower head, soaped it with a cake of Ivory, and lathered the other person’s shoulders and back. They had never thought of this as an expression of love. It was something they had started early in their days together, and now it continued. They had always done it without speaking. The silence was nothing new.
A family can go on for years without the love that once bound it together, like a lovely old wall that stays standing long after rain has crumbled the mortar. Where was Jacinta going to go? Back to St. John’s? She berated herself for not having the courage. It is amazing how small things keep you anchored in a place — the cake of soap on its little mat with rubber suckers, the moulded plastic shower stall. The bathroom cabinet with Aspirins in it, and blue razors, and Tiger Balm. The plastic runner to stop dirty tracks on the cream-coloured hall carpet. The television with its rabbit ears and its reruns of Bewitched and Get Smart that give you something predictable at four thirty every weekday. None of these things were what Jacinta loved, or even liked, but she could count on them, and she could not count on what might happen if she left