Annabel - Kathleen Winter [71]
Jacinta went down the basement stairs and lit the fire herself. She cut soaked apricots into the little pot of oats and made fruit porridge for herself, and tea with the bag in the cup. When Treadway was in the bush for months at a time, and Wayne at school, she got into a routine of being alone. But this day she grew lonely, so when Treadway came in the door in the afternoon she was glad to see him. But he was not glad. He did not light up at all when she hugged him. His body felt like one of the cold logs out by the fence. He told her what had happened: the blood, the surgeon, the loss of their secret. But there was a new part he did not mention.
“Thomasina Baikie,” he said, “told Wayne everything. And told me more besides.”
“Where is he?” Jacinta felt elation, even while she could see her husband’s face might not recover from its careworn collapse. The life that had drained out of Treadway began filling her face. He saw it. Why was life coming into her when he felt this way?
“Goose Bay.” He opened the fridge, took out his bread, made himself a Maple Leaf bologna sandwich with mustard, and put the kettle on. He sat at the kitchen table, ate the sandwich, and waited for his kettle to boil.
“Is he by himself?”
Treadway shrugged, his mouth full. “There were nurses.”
Jacinta had slung her coat on Treadway’s La-Z-Boy when she came in, and now she put it on. The keys were beside his saucer, and she grabbed them and shoved on the easiest shoes and went out with no scarf, which she never did. Even in summer Jacinta wore a silk scarf or a thin cotton one around her collarbones, but not this day.
When she reached the hospital, she went straight to Wayne’s room and saw that he was so pale his freckles looked as if they were floating in cream. She hugged him and he clung to her, and it was the first time since he was a baby that she could allow love unimpeded to escape her heart and flow to her child. It buzzed like the power line on her old back lane in St. John’s. She had not freely loved the girl part of Wayne, as the girl had not been acknowledged to exist. Jacinta kissed her child on the forehead. She rubbed her own tears into her face and they stung the nicks that the wind had chafed, and she brought her child home.
But the falling away had started. When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tears, and anger: “Why do you want to go out in minus-fifteen-degree temperatures in that T-shirt when you could wear the wool I’ve warmed for you over the woodstove? It’s so cosy.” Or they can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either.
“Why does Dad watch the stock market report every night?” Wayne asked his mother. She was peeling carrots and he had been writing a poem about Remembrance Day for the annual school contest. “You know what his slippers remind me of?”
The blade on the carrot peeler was loose and it rattled. Jacinta kept the tap running to rinse fluffs of peel off her knuckles.
“You know the holes in them? Dad’s brown socks poke out right where a mole’s nose would be. I pretend his slippers are moles.”
Treadway ordered a supply of Torngat Heavy-Spun work socks from the Hudson’s Bay Company every spring and fall. “You don’t mind if you lose one,” he said, “when they’re all the same. I can never understand why people have socks in a dozen colours and sizes. People like to make work for themselves, I guess.”
“Why does he, Mom?”
“What?”
“Watch the stock market every night.”
“Your dad bought some gold and he likes to track it.”
”Dad bought gold?”
“A little bit. Enough to get by if there’s some sort of crisis in the world. Not for long. Just enough to pass through the crisis. So he likes to keep up on how the price fluctuates, and he likes knowing what’s going on with prices of other things while he’s at it. He’s just interested in it. People can be interested in things.