Annabel - Kathleen Winter [7]
“Everything,” she told Treadway, “is all right,” and she believed that this was about to become true.
“All I need,” she had said earlier to Thomasina, “is a little more time, and everything will become clear. Everything will straighten itself out. The baby will, in some way we still have to learn about, be just fine.”
Treadway persisted. “Baby’s healthy?” Jacinta knew he never spoke idly, and he was not speaking idly now, and he was asking her for an honest answer. But what was the most honest answer?
“Yes.” She tried this in a normal voice but it came out as a whisper. The strength of her voice, her real tone, which was a tone of plainness, like rain, which Treadway loved but had not told her he loved, did not inhabit the whisper. She wished she could go back and say yes again. Heat still radiated from Treadway’s hand deep into her belly.
“He’s a big baby,” Treadway said, and the heat stopped.
Jacinta wanted to blurt, “Why do you say he? Are you waiting for me to confess?” But she did not. She said yes, louder than normal this time because she did not want another whisper to betray her. Her yes was a shout in their quiet room. Their bedroom was always quiet. Treadway liked a place of repose, a tranquil sleep with a white bedspread and no radio music or clutter, and so did she. She lay there waiting for his hand to heat her belly again, but it did not. Had he moved it away consciously? Treadway was a man whose warmth always heated her unless an argument stood between them.
In the morning Jacinta told Thomasina, “I went stiff as a hare. What are we going to do?”
Any time fortune came to Thomasina — acceptance of her grass baskets by the crafts commission, the flowering of a Persian rose in this zone where no one could grow any rose, not even the hardy John Cabot climber — she knew happiness was only one side of the coin and the coin was forever turning. She had been single until she was well past thirty, when Graham Montague had told her he didn’t care that she had a curved spine and felt old — he wanted to marry her if she would marry him. Annabel had been born the following year and Thomasina had every reason to be happy, but instead she held her heart at the same level she had always held it, because she did not trust extremes of feeling. Now she told Jacinta, as they spread jam on toast thinly, the way they both liked it, so gold shone through, “We will love this baby of yours and Treadway’s exactly as it was born.”
“Will other people love it?”
“That baby is all right the way it is. There’s enough room in this world.”
This was how Thomasina saw it, and it was what Jacinta needed to hear.
For days after the birth Treadway knew there was a secret, and it was only a matter of opening his attention in a way he was used to doing out on the land before the truth about the baby came to him. He did not need to investigate with his hands or move close when no one was looking. In the wilderness when he opened his attention, it was a spiritual opening, a way of seeing with your whole being, and it helped him see birds and caribou and fish that were invisible to anyone who was not hunting and had not opened their second eyes. He felt the secret in the house exactly as he felt the presence of a white ptarmigan behind him in the snow, and he understood the secret’s details, its identity, as easily as he would know the bird was a white ptarmigan before he turned around and saw it. He knew his baby had both a boy’s and a girl’s identity, and he knew a decision had to be made.
Where had their baby come