Annabel - Kathleen Winter [75]
“Are they still?” Wayne peeled his socks off.
“Certain parts of you were so feminine I used to think people were going to stop me on the road and tell me they knew you were a girl.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, Wayne. Kate Davis for one, I guess. What mother can remember everything?”
“What parts, then?”
“What?”
“Parts. You said parts with an S on it. Other parts of me that were like a girl.”
“Before you started taking all the pills.”
“Then I wasn’t like a girl any more?”
“Not as much.”
“But before then, what parts?”
“Your face. Your whole face. I don’t know why the whole town couldn’t see what I could.”
“Because you were my mother and they weren’t.”
“I guess.”
“And they weren’t looking.”
“Maybe.”
“My clothes were boy’s. And everyone called me Wayne, except for one person.”
“Thomasina was the only one.”
“Annabel.” It was the first time Wayne had said the name out loud to anyone but Thomasina. “Mom?”
“What?”
“Are they going to let Thomasina come back and teach us?”
“I don’t know if she wants to come back, Wayne.”
“How long did Miss Huskins suspend her for?”
“Miss Huskins didn’t suspend her, Wayne. The Labrador East School Board did.”
“How long for?”
“A month.”
“That’ll be over soon.”
“But sometimes when there’s a break, a change in the way things are, even for a little while, it’s really a chasm.”
“Like the Gulch?”
“Yes. The change is only for a month, or even a week or a day, but it breaks something. It breaks the pattern and things aren’t the same.”
“I love Thomasina.”
“I know you do, Wayne.”
“I hope she comes back.”
“I know.”
“Mom — could you call me my girl name?”
“Annabel?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
“Mom?”
“I can’t — what?”
“Do you remember anything else?”
“Your dad might hear.”
“Dad’s taking his Ski-Doo apart. We’ve got lots of time.”
“I thought he was packing.”
“I heard him laying out his wrenches.” Wayne’s ear was attuned to the clinking of metal on cement, and to all the sounds Treadway made inside and outside the house.
“When you were in kindergarten you cut a tarantula out of a National Geographic. Its legs were as slender as my hair. The teacher said no other boy could do that.”
Attuned though his hearing was, there was one thing Wayne did not hear Treadway do, one thing his father had vowed to do before his months on the trapline. It happened while Wayne was in school and Jacinta was buying sugar cubes, which Treadway preferred to loose sugar. Cubes cost more per weight, and it was not like Treadway to prefer a less economical choice. She had asked him, long ago, “Why do you want me to buy cubes?”
“I like cubes,” he said. “I like the way they fit together in the box. One cube is exactly the right amount in my tea, every time. You can’t spill them. If a rat puts a hole in a bag of sugar, you lose whatever spills out. Humidity will ruin a bag of sugar, but to ruin cubes you’d have to drop them in the river.” He had gone on like this, outlining the advantages of sugar cubes, astonishing Jacinta with his seriousness regarding such a small thing.
So Jacinta was buying sugar cubes, and this gave Treadway a chance to look at the phone book, which was difficult for him to do. Treadway could read Voltaire. He could wait eight hours in silence for a lynx and read the tracks of a dozen duck species and know each by name. He could find them in Roger Tory Peterson’s guidebook, and had read the journals of James Audubon, but the phone book was a torment to him, as were government documents, tax forms, insurance policies, bank statements, and telephone or hydro bills, all of which Jacinta dealt with. She looked things up for him in the phone book when she was at home, but he wanted to do this thing without anyone knowing.
He phoned the library in Goose Bay first. They told him to phone the A. C. Hunter Library in St. John’s, and A. C. Hunter said his best bet was to call Memorial University. By the time he found a woman named Augusta Furey in the office of the dean of music, almost an hour had gone by, and he was worn out as he wrote down the New York address she gave him out