Annabel - Kathleen Winter [78]
By grade eight his sequined bathing suit was far too small; its straps cut his shoulders and the crotch was tight, and the time had passed in which he had enough innocence to order another in a larger size. He longed to wear it, but he left it crumpled in its box under his bed. He missed Wally, and he wondered what would happen if he could tell her they were both girls, at least in part. He wished he could ask Wally to call him Annabel. They could be best friends like Carol Rich and Ashley Chalk, who passed battleships-and-cruisers paper to each other in Mr. Wigglesworth’s class and ate hickory sticks on the fire escape. Wally and Annabel.
But Annabel ran away.
Where did she go? She was inside his body but she escaped him. Maybe she gets out through my eyes, he thought, when I open them. Or my ears. He lay in bed and waited. Annabel was close enough to touch; she was himself, yet unattainable.
There was a piece of information about Wayne’s night in the hospital that Treadway had not told Jacinta.
When Treadway went on the trapline, his family did not hear from him, nor he from them. Some men made themselves reachable. Before Graham Montague had died, he had always told Thomasina how she could find him if she needed to get a message to him in the woods. Eliza Goudie’s husband could radio in and out from his cabin. Even Harold Martin, despite his Innu woman, had come out of the woods in two days the time Joan got third-degree burns on her foot from tipping her canning pot as it came to a boil around her winter’s supply of bottled rabbit. Jacinta had never tried to get in touch with Treadway.
“I thought,” Dr. Lioukras told her on a follow-up visit, while Wayne was in the hematology lab having two vials of blood drawn from his arm, “you knew.”
“No.”
“Your husband knew. The woman who was here that night — Wayne’s teacher, I believe — she knew.”
“Thomasina. She’s not Wayne’s mother. I’m his mother.”
“And it’s true I never spoke to you about it.”
“I wasn’t here. I was at a stupid party getting drunk with my friends.”
“I assumed you knew. But I shouldn’t have assumed it.”
“A normal husband would have told me.”
“Perhaps when you go home now, you can discuss it.”
“Treadway won’t discuss anything with me until spring.” Jacinta assessed the Greek doctor. He was a man who could love a woman. Not a closed, cold, unreadable machine. She slumped in the chair. He put a hand on her back and his hand felt warm.
“I know it was drastic.”
“No one told Wayne?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Will I tell him?”
“No.”
“I’m so sick of not telling him things.”
“I can’t stop you. But in my experience — I know my experience is limited — he isn’t mature enough to understand.”
“How could anyone understand a thing like that? Moses couldn’t understand that. I’d like to see you understand it if it happened to you.”
“He might not get as big a shock if he were older.”
Jacinta did not think Treadway had an Innu woman like Harold Martin did. But she thought he had begun to think like the animals he trapped. He had begun to walk like them, and sleep like them. He had become wild, and there was no way you could send a message to him if you did not know the wild language. So Jacinta was alone with the new piece of information.
What Jacinta spoke about, alone for the winter with Wayne, was not the mystery of his body. Treadway had told her, before he left, he wanted her to begin training Wayne to make and use money wisely. “It’s time,” he said, “Wayne started learning how to keep body and soul together. For his own good. How much does he make with those cod ears?”
“I’m not sure,” Jacinta said, though she knew the exact amount. In the summer before grade eight, Wayne had learned how to make twenty-five dollars a week. He peeled shrimp for Roland Shiwack and he cut out cod tongues at the Croydon Harbour wharf and sold them for fifty cents a dozen door-to-door. While he was at