Annabel - Kathleen Winter [96]
“Why,” Gracie said that night, “do I always feel like you’re not here even when you’re sitting right there?” They were playing cribbage. He knew she had the seven of hearts because a corner was torn off it. He knew she had the queen of spades as well. Her little nephew had scribbled Magic Marker on it. She had borrowed three books from her cousin whose boyfriend had taken the paramedic course she wanted to take, and these were stacked on the windowsill. He had read the titles and marvelled that Gracie really meant to know everything in these books. Hollinshead’s Textbook of Anatomy. A big, expensive book on medical physiology by someone named Arthur Guyton, who Gracie said had polio and wrote the book after he realized the polio meant he could not become a surgeon. Basic and Clinical Pharmacology by Bertram G. Katzung. Wayne looked at the books, and he watched Gracie put down her queen of spades for two points, and he remembered what the willow ptarmigan had shouted. Get out! Get out! He wondered if there was anything in those textbooks that outlined his own physiology, his own anatomy. Would Gracie get to page 217 or page 499 and see a diagram of a person who had female and male reproductive organs in the same body? Would there be a cross-section diagram of a man who had a womb, or a Fallopian tube with a fetus trapped in it? Get out! Get out!
In his own bed he remembered the red world. The way the hospital room, the sheets and utensils and surgeons, had receded under the redness inside his eyelids. He remembered the masked faces, the gelled lens, the word blood. Then red, black-red, red-orange. Then dizziness; a red pool, whirling, and he was in it underwater, and something had been in there with him. He remembered that. Something had been in there looking at him, drowning and trying to speak, and he had not known what it was. It dawned on him that his father had known. His father had known all along that the doctors had found a fetus. Where was Treadway Blake now? He had disappeared into the same woods as the ptarmigan. Where was the fetus now? It had had eyes, and the eyes had watched him. He had been in the red world and the fetus and he had looked at each other. Had it wanted him to save it? If he had not lost it, if it had grown into a person, who would that little person be now?
“What I’m going to say might horrify you,” Thomasina had said. But it did not horrify him. He found it the saddest thing in the world. She had said it might give him terrible dreams. But he did not dream about it, because he did not sleep.
By morning he had made a decision to take the ptarmigan’s advice and get out of Labrador.
It would not be hard to tell Gracie. Gracie had her textbooks. She had her fierce little fist full of cards she was determined to play even if they were marked and torn. His mother would be the hard one. Wayne did not like to leave Jacinta alone. But he would leave her all the same, and his sadness over this was not bottomless like his sadness about the fetus.
Wayne’s sadness over Jacinta was the sadness all sons and daughters feel when their ferry starts moving and the parent stands on the dock, waving and growing tiny. A sadness that stings, then melts in a fresh wind.
Part four
21
Caines Grocery
IF THOMASINA HAD SPENT THE WINTER in Croydon Harbour instead of Goose Bay, she could have gone up the hill, climbed Jacinta’s three steps, knocked on the door with an apple pie in her hands, and stayed on the step until Jacinta answered the door. Thomasina would have seen, immediately, that things were not right. She would have touched Jacinta about the shoulders, turned her around, stuck the soiled teacups in hot suds, and opened some windows. Thomasina would have done a load of laundry and she would have