Annabel - Kathleen Winter [65]
“My stomach doesn’t hurt right now. I might be better. I’m fine.”
“It’s not that you’re ill.” Thomasina looked defeated. “Dr. Lioukras is the one who should talk to you. I’m no good at the facts. I hate them, to tell you the truth”
Dr. Lioukras’s hands felt warm on Wayne’s belly. “That fluid will have to come out.” His hair had big loopy curls that should have been cut, according to the nurses, but they would have liked to get their hands in them. Dr. Lioukras liked Labrador. There were berries and fat ducks and there was wine, and there was more sunshine than in many warmer places, because high-pressure systems floated over the land here. Dr. Lioukras had a little camera he was always using. He would interrupt an operation to snap a shot of geese he heard honking past the window. Thomasina sat under that window now, in a chair parents normally sat in. Dr. Lioukras took pictures of the children he saw in his surgery, and nobody minded, as he was such an optimist. Nobody ever said, “Hey, Dr. Lioukras, make sure you get the parents to sign a release form.”
“How do you get the fluid out?” asked Wayne.
“I’ll deaden the area and make a small incision and drain it. You’re going to lose that bloatedness.” Dr. Lioukras managed to suggest that he deadened areas and drained fluid out of boys’ abdomens every day, and that nothing could be more normal or upbeat.
“My stomach will be flat?”
“Flat as a pancake.”
“What about my chest?”
“Let me see it.”
Wayne lifted his Trans-Labrador Helicopters T-shirt. His breasts were like tinned apricots that have not broken the surface tension in a bowl of cream. No flicker of alarm or warning crossed the doctor’s face. He looked at Wayne’s chest as if it were the most ordinary boy’s chest in the world. Thomasina loved him for it. She could not have looked directly at Wayne’s chest without Wayne’s knowing she felt there was a deep, sad problem. When Dr. Lioukras looked at Wayne’s breasts, he saw beauty equal to that which he would have seen in the body of any youth, male or female. It was as if he saw the apricots growing on their own tree, right where they belonged.
15
Boreal Owl
FOR ALL HIS FATHERLY TALK about how Labrador boys had to be part of a pack, Treadway Blake was the most solitary man in Croydon Harbour. The families of solitary people don’t always know they are living with someone unusual. They think maybe lots of families have someone quiet like this. A person who can go days without making any sound other than the scrape of a knife on sinew, the scrubbing of boots on the brush mat, the clink of a cup put back in its saucer. But then they go into someone else’s house and realize other people have husbands, wives, children, who yell and laugh and wrestle with each other and cry out over a foolish thing the cat has done.
When Treadway had anything on his mind, he spoke not to Jacinta or Wayne, and not to any man. He did not go down to Roland Shiwack’s shed to drink with the other men on a Friday night, and he did not hang around the door of the community centre talking to husbands who had come to walk their wives home from bingo. If he had to talk to anyone about what was on his mind, he went into the woods, far from the community, and he spoke there. He did not speak to a god in his mind like the god of the Old Testament, nor did he envision the young, long-haired Jesus from the Child’s Treasury of Bible Stories, which had been the only book in his house, outside of the Bible itself, while he was growing up. When Treadway needed to speak his mind, he