Annabel - Kathleen Winter [94]
Now, on the truck radio, a voice streamed: a mercurial line. It was a sound that pulled you to itself.
“You don’t often hear a voice like that,” Thomasina said.
The voice was high but golden. It was hard to do that, Wayne knew. Wally Michelin had told him. You could rise high but lose the body of sound. “Remember Wally Michelin?” he said now.
“Maybe it’s a measure of how long I have been away that you can ask me that, Wayne. I don’t think of it as remembering her. She has her own chair in my heart, just like you do. Are the two of you still in touch?”
“No.”
“Do you know there’s a clinic in London, the Harley Street Clinic, where they repair all kinds of voice injuries? Wally Michelin is saving up every cent she can make in her aunt’s shop in Boston to go there.”
“You heard from her?”
“We’ve talked on the phone, Wayne, and I’ve written to her, the same way I’ve written to you.”
Wayne thought of the postcards that had come across the Atlantic Ocean from Thomasina to himself, and other postcards going from Thomasina, in England and Paris and Bucharest, to Wally Michelin in Boston. He saw the two lines across the ocean, like pencil lines, one each leading to Wally Michelin and to himself. He tried to draw a third line in his imagination, a line that connected Wally Michelin and himself, but there was only Boston, and the eastern seaboard, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence stretching past Newfoundland’s west coast, then Blanc-Sablon and Pinware and Battle Harbour, and the land between these Labrador settlements and Croydon Harbour: land he saw at this moment, for the first time, as a place of emptiness. And he was in this land now.
The song on his truck radio persisted, and its beauty connected with the stark treeline moving past the windows, the way music becomes a soundtrack when you are moving with it across a landscape.
“The letter, Wayne, I know it seems odd to want it back. The thing is, I wrote it after I had three glasses of wine.”
“It’s okay.”
“And really, though I wrote it to your father, it contained something I wanted to say to you. Now I’m looking at you here, I can see . . . you’re older. It’s not like I need to talk to your father anymore.”
They were approaching a part of the road that looked out on the sandy flats of Hamilton River and a stretch of the Mealy Mountains almost as transparent as the sky, painted with snow. It was the only part of this road that held a feeling of height and perspective, and Wayne stopped the truck so they could look at it.
“I asked him,” she said. “I asked your father in the letter to tell you this thing. I wrote that if he didn’t tell you I wanted to tell you myself.”
“What thing?” He turned off the engine.
“The hospital, that night I took you. What do you remember, Wayne?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anything at all? The colour of the walls?”
“Green.”
“Any other thing?”
“There was a boy in the next bed with a plate of fish in batter. I could smell it.”
“Then what?”
“The doctor became afraid. His face. He didn’t like getting my blood on him. He ran to the sink and washed his cuffs. I thought doctors got blood on their clothes all the time. I thought they were used to it. I thought they had a big supply of extra clothes in the cupboard and it didn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Look over by that birch.” Wayne did not like remembering that night in the hospital. A willow ptarmigan had been sitting on a low branch, and now it had descended and walked on the ground. “He’s looking for insects. He must have a late hatching of young.”
“Isn’t it a she?”
“It’s the male. They’re vegetarian except when they feed the babies, and male willows are the only kind of ptarmigan where the father looks after the young.” Treadway had taught him this, along with thousands of other pieces of information on Labrador birds and mammals and fish. He remembered more than his father thought, but something about the knowledge made Wayne feel lonely now.
“What else do you remember, Wayne?”
“The word hermaphrodite. One of the doctors saying it. Me thinking,