Annabel - Kathleen Winter [70]
Wayne had not seen the blood, which was copious, because the staff had erected a sheet the way they did with all gynecological operations. He saw the masked faces move in slow motion through a gelled lens, and heard their voices as a stretched, continuous murmur, with now and then a word plopping out whole. He heard blood and anomaly and oh. He heard rush and no and never. He heard Thomasina say, “No,” and he heard the staff ask her to stand back, and he heard her cry out. But the sounds were muted. What came close, what rushed head-on at him, was the colour red. Red can be black-red, and this was. It can be scarlet, and it was this too. When you close your eyes in a field in the sun and you are young and the world has not imposed memories on you that can’t be erased, there is a red-orange that sits against your closed eyes and contains the warmth of all future summers, and the red rushing headlong behind Wayne’s closed eyes included this red too. It scared him, the swirling red world, yet it thrilled him too, and the anesthetic had pinned his arms and legs to a soft, soft cloud. He could not get up from the dizzy red world no matter what looked out from it at him, and, like the words rising from a murmur of sea-sound, there was something half-formed in the red world, looking at him, and he did not know what it was, though he felt it was drowning in blood and trying to speak, but the red whirlpool was going too fast. In his anesthetized world, sound from the unconconscious rose up, a sound that normally comes to the waking world only through portholes like the northern lights, or the voice of an owl, or the ground whispering.
Wayne heard the sound become louder and drown the voices of the staff. The inchoate red world took form: a red trench, a tunnel, a map of the womb inside him and the passageway leading from it, which had all been closed and that he had no idea existed. The red world knew everything in him, and it showed him the map of his own feminine parts, and they were the most vivid, living, seductive red he had known in waking or in dreaming life. He heard the sound of himself falling into this tunnel, a long, low moan, then a shout. The staff heard it, and none of them had heard this before outside a birthing room. The youngest nurse ran out of the operating room, downstairs to the walk-in fridge in the back of the cafeteria, and drank a carton of Old South ruby red grapefruit juice mixed with crushed ice.
16
Falling Away
THERE IS A FALLING AWAY IN all little families: families having a mother, a father, and one child. There is a new world for every child, sooner or later, no matter what kind of love has lived in the home. Strong love, love that has failed, complicated love, love that does its best to keep a child warm through layers of fear or caution. One day the layers begin to fall. Before his night in hospital, Wayne had not broken from his mother, but he had begun to yearn for the unnameable mystery young people want.
The morning after Wayne’s operation, Jacinta had woken on her own couch with a hangover. Why was the house cold? It was cold in a way she remembered from uninsulated houses of her friends, in winter, in St. John’s. A cold that pried into your joints and tormented you. Treadway never let the house get like this. Five thirty in the morning was late for him to rise. Every night he made sure there were dry splits ready in the box beside the stove. He twisted newspaper and set the splits in a pyramid. Then came pieces of slab from Obadiah Blake’s sawmill, and junks of the same black spruce that sent incense from every chimney in the cove. Jacinta rose, still in her party clothes. She had stumbled uphill at three in the morning and had noticed the truck was gone, but Treadway was always leaving it with Maynard White for one reason or another. He had said something at Eliza’s door about valves. And he had told her Wayne was sleeping over at Brent Shiwack’s, which was unusual. Wayne was not the most popular boy in Croydon Harbour, and Brent Shiwack was