Annabel - Kathleen Winter [64]
“I know a really cool place inside.”
“You do?”
He had found it the last time he was here, while he and Jacinta waited for tests. He had left his mother eating pea soup with salt beef and dumplings floating in it, which she had said was pretty good for soup in a Styrofoam bowl. He had gone exploring along the corridor with the green footprints, way into the west wing, to a place where a handpainted sign said SISTER ROSITA BONNELL PALLIATIVE CARE WARD. At the end of the ward was a blue door. He led Thomasina to it now.
There were couches upholstered in material with blue fish. A window depicted a woman with a crescent moon and the earth under one foot, and a falcon on her arm. A candle burned. The window was gold and green. The colours were rich and not too hot.
“That’s not even Mary,” Thomasina said. “It’s Isis. Sister Rosita Bonnell must have been a renegade.”
“Is that like a bandit?”
“She must have gone to Bolivia and got herself a splendid education, then come back and done things the Pope would hang her for if he knew.”
“What was the thing you wanted to tell me?”
“When you were born, Wayne, I was there. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Well I was. I was there, and I saw something.”
“I was born in my house. Not here.”
“I know.”
“I came to the hospital after I was born.”
“Do you know why?”
“Because of my blood disorder. That’s why I have to take all the pills. It’s some rare thing.”
“I wouldn’t call what you have a disorder. I’d call it a different order. A different order means a whole new way of being. It could be fantastic. It could be overwhelmingly beautiful, if people weren’t scared.”
“What was the thing you saw when I was born?”
Thomasina wanted to say, A daughter. You were a daughter as well as a son. But what would Wayne do with the truth? He would need more than the truth. He would need a world that understood. What had she been thinking?
“What was it?”
The door opened and a young woman came in wheeling a bearded man with a rose in his hand and an intravenous unit hooked up to his arm. They looked at Thomasina and Wayne for a second, then sat together in front of the candle. The man was dying. He looked as if he wanted the woman to love him, but she looked too tired to love anybody. She looked as if she might die before he did. The room turned into a container for weariness, and Thomasina took Wayne’s shoulder and herded him out. They walked around a bucket full of water with a mop in it, then around a trolley with covered dishes smelling of fried ham and instant potatoes.
“What?” Wayne insisted.
“It’s not the right time.”
“You should have told me before those people came in.”
“We’ll go see Dr. Lioukras.” Thomasina had lost her courage. Prudence. That was what everyone had been trying to exercise. That was the quality she herself lacked.
“What?” Wayne stopped under a pane of wobbly glass. There was no Isis, no nurse, no ham or potatoes. Just tiles with specks in them, and a corridor that led from the dying to the living. He could not hear the rest of the hospital from here.
“I’m not going to see Dr. Lioukras until you tell me.” He put his hand on the sill, which was cold and bumpy and had been painted years ago. This place was like the root cellar his father had shown him at a house out near the Black Cliffs. They had gone in on one of the few hot Labrador days, when little orange moths clustered on thistles and there was a haze over the hay. The root cellar was cool as a plunge in the pond under the big overfall. If Thomasina wanted to tell him a thing, why didn’t she just do it?
Wayne tried to see out the window. It had been made for adults to look out of. It had been made to shed light on this corridor from a height. The light cascaded and made you feel like you were about to realize something. Wayne closed his eyes and tried to discern if he could feel light on his head the way he could feel warmth, or the touch of a hand. Light felt like a thin layer of water. But the door at the end of the hallway clicked open and someone came through but did