Annabel - Kathleen Winter [95]
He meant now. He meant things had not fallen into place even now. He looked at his hand on the steering wheel. His arm. With the last round of hormones it had become more like other young men’s arms, but in school his arms had been thin, his body lanky. He had tried to conceal his slightness from his father, who had wanted him to have breadth. Wayne had walked as if covering a smaller boy with his arms, protecting him. He had walked with his arms away from his body, as if they encircled the smaller boy. You don’t need to keep doing that, he thought now. You can walk like a man. But he had to keep reminding himself. He was always the smaller boy, the girl-boy, in his mind.
“Do you remember your father came to the hospital, and we had a fight?”
“You argued. In the corridor. Not like arguments between my mother and father. Your voice is a lot lower than my mother’s. Dad was meaner than at home. Then you left.”
“I did.”
“My father sat under the window on a radiator with slits in it and paint that had dried in drips down the side. He didn’t talk. You never said goodbye. After being with me the whole time. I never saw you after.” Wayne looked for the female willow ptarmigan. She should be somewhere in the undergrowth.
“What I’m going to say might horrify you, Wayne. It might give you terrible dreams. I know it has given me dreams. And I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m sorry it happened, and I’m sorry I’ve known for years and not told you. I wrote to your father that I wanted him to tell you. I’m going to tell you now because it could happen again and it might be different. You might have to do something.”
Ptarmigans stayed in pairs. They roosted on adjacent branches, and when one foraged, the other was always somewhere near. But Wayne could not see the female. Had a hunter killed her?
“When I took you to the hospital, there was menstrual blood. You knew that.”
“I figured it out. It doesn’t sink in at first. What something like that really is. Even when they tell you, it doesn’t sink in. I know the medical terms. I know I’m supposed to take the white pills and the yellow pills and now one big green pill. There’s lots I don’t know though. It seems like no one knows. Not even the doctors.”
“There was menstrual blood, yes. But also, trapped in a Fallopian tube . . . it would never have lived. Wayne, there was a fetus.”
The ptarmigan cackled and shouted in short, angry barks, like a man shouting, “Get out!” over and over again to the silent woods.
“It can happen internally, Wayne. When the male and female reproductive organs are adjacent in the same body. It was nothing you thought or did. It has nothing to do with masturbation or ejaculating or anything people might think. The fetus could never have grown because of its location. Dr. Lioukras removed it with the rest of the lining and the fluid and blood. I asked him what the chances were of it happening again, and he said he didn’t know. He said it shouldn’t have happened. I asked if it did happen again, would the fetus always die? Or could it grow?”
There was the female ptarmigan, in the blackness under low spruce boughs. The male joined her and they walked into the darkness with their jerky little henlike movements, their fat bodies that made them so easy to shoot. But for now the couple was all right. Off they went to feed their young. The white on their bellies had already started to spread against their brown upper bodies. In winter they would be indistinguishable from the snow.
“Dr. Lioukras couldn’t answer me, Wayne. He couldn’t say yes or no.”
Wayne turned the radio on and started the truck. He took Thomasina to his parents’ house and gave her the unopened letter. He did not tell his mother he was giving back the letter. He told his mother Thomasina had come to have a look around old haunts, and after he gave her the letter he took her outside and drove her around