Annabel - Kathleen Winter [61]
“Wayne, it looks to me like we have to go see about the swelling. Do you think there’s swelling on your chest as well?”
Tears blipped over Wayne’s bottom lids. He had lain in his bathwater and sunk just enough to see if the small nubbins would make islands, and they had.
Thomasina put her strong hand on his shoulder. She did not have a feminine little voice like other teachers in the school, and Wayne was glad. She did not gush at him about his few tears. She was listening to him. She listened to his whole story, spoken and unspoken. She could hear parts of the story he did not know about. He sensed this, though he did not fully understand it. He trusted her. When she said, “Let’s phone your mother and get you to the doctor and find out what is happening here so you won’t have to worry any more,” Thomasina was angrier than she had been in a long time. A child’s worry was not like an adult’s. It gnawed deep, and was so unnecessary. Why did people not realize children could withstand the truth? Why did adults insist on filling children with the deceptions their own parents had laid on them, when surely they remembered how it had felt to lie in bed and cry over fears no one had bothered to help you face.
Thomasina got Mr. Stack to cover for her in health class. When she called Wayne’s house from the staff room phone, there was no answer. Treadway was at the back end of the garden scraping rust off his traps and rubbing seal fat on them, and Jacinta was at the Hudson’s Bay store, walking up and down the cleaning products aisle, looking for a bar of Sunlight to wash Treadway’s socks before he went on the trapline. Wayne sat on the couch next to the coat rack with his hands up his shirt, warming his belly.
“How much does it hurt, on a scale of one to ten?”
“Five. I’m waterlogged. I’m ready to burst.”
“I can see that.”
“Am I weird?”
Thomasina rubbed her hands and laid them on his abdomen. She was glad no other teachers were in the staff room. “Do you mind if I take you to Goose Bay to see Dr. Lioukras?”
“Is he Greek?”
“Guess what his first name is.”
“I don’t know.”
“Apollo.”
“It’s not.”
“It is. In Mexico there are all kinds of guys named Jesus. And in Greece there are Apollos and Athenas all over the place. I had a taxi driver called Hermes.”
“Did he have wings on his feet?”
“Wayne, there are things I wish someone had told you when you were small. But they didn’t. And it’s not my place to tell you now. But you know what? It looks like no one else is going to. I’m going to take you to see Dr. Lioukras. If your father isn’t going to deal with it, well, that’s his problem. And your mother . . .”
The principal, Victoria Huskins, came in looking for her stash of coffee filters. Thomasina Baikie went silent and Wayne knew he and Thomasina had embarked on a clandestine adventure.
“Hi, Wayne.” Miss Huskins thought children could not hear her unless her voice pierced their layers of dull incomprehension. How she had come to be principal Thomasina Baikie did not know. Rather, she knew and wished she didn’t. Wayne was not scared of Miss Huskins like some of the younger students were, but he felt uncomfortable when she was in the room. The previous week, when she was checking the washrooms, she found excrement on the floor behind one of the toilets and announced her discovery over the school PA system. “Someone . . .” The speakers cracked and hissed over the heads of the kindergartens, grade ones, twos, threes, and fours. The grades fives, sixes, and sevens heard it too, though their bathroom was on the second floor. When Miss Huskins made an example of anyone, she wanted the lesson broadcast to all. “Some student has deliberately done their poo and left it on the floor against the wall in the first-floor bathroom. Who has done this?” She left a long pause. The students were silent. “I will find out. The person who has done this had better come to my office and own up now. It is filthy, and it is wrong, and whoever has done this will not get away with it.”
Thomasina sighed, looked