Annabel (15 page)

“Stop it,” Wally Michelin said. “Give it up, Donna. Agatha, don’t worry about it. Donna Palliser can’t tell the future just because she’s wearing a stupid bathing suit wrap around her head and looking at a fishing ball. Donna Palliser is an idiot.”

“We’ll reserve judgement on the death. Maybe there isn’t going to be a death. I never said it was for sure. Let’s do Wayne’s dream.”

Wayne knew Donna Palliser could not see into the glass ball. He knew she was in the business, tonight, of being cruel. He did not like to see Agatha Groves made fun of and did not mind giving Donna Palliser a change of topic. “I dreamed I was a girl,” he said. “I could see my sweater. It was a green sweater with glimmery buttons, like light changing underwater. I looked at my sandals and they were white. I was walking by a river. I tried to see my face in the river but I couldn’t. No one was with me. I tried to run with the river. I picked one peak of water and ran beside it and I thought it was the same peak. But then I wasn’t sure. I didn’t realize I was a girl in the dream until I woke up. While I was waking up I remembered I’m a boy, and I was surprised for a minute, until I remembered that’s what I always am when I’m awake.”

Donna Palliser rubbed the glass ball and her mouth twisted. She rubbed it until Wally Michelin kicked it and shattered it against the wall. Donna picked a handful of shards off the carpet and flung them back at Wally, and one of the shards flew in Wally’s mouth and stuck in her throat, and there was blood coming out from between her lips and it dripped on her blouse, and she was terrified. She could breathe but she couldn’t talk, and the only sound she made was loud, constricted panting through her nose. Even Donna Palliser knew she had to call a grown-up.

Donna ran upstairs and brought her mother down and they called an ambulance, and Wally Michelin went to Goose Bay and a doctor took the glass out of her throat, but it had lacerated one of her vocal cords. There was a lot of parental interrogating, and a policewoman even came in from Goose Bay and asked everyone separately and in groups to explain what had happened. In the end all the grown-ups wanted to believe this was a tragic outcome where no one was to be singled out for blame. The grown-ups wanted to avoid blame at all costs, and agreed this could have happened in any group of young people. It was unfortunate and terrible and everyone had had a part to play, and they would hopefully never find themselves in such a situation again, and they could at least take comfort in the fact no one had been blinded, or killed.

Wally came back to school a week later. Wayne wanted someone to tell him she would still be able to sing, to study the “Cantique de Jean Racine” if someone could find it for her, to go away to Vienna and become an opera singer like Lydia Coombs. But no one mentioned Wally’s singing, and Wayne had to think hard to remember if anyone but he had known of her singing plans, and he realized he might be the only one Wally had told. He couldn’t catch her eye, and she did not wait for him in the hall at recess or lunch. He got the idea he was the only one who remembered about her singing, and he got the idea she somehow hated him for this, and would hate him forever until he forgot what he knew about her.

This was all in his imagination but he felt it as strongly as if she had written a placard and come to his window at night and held it up: “Get lost, and forget about my singing. Forget anything you ever thought you knew about me.”

14

Dr. Lioukras

W
AYNE WAS PASSABLY GOOD
at parts of gym class, but not at soccer or basketball, which required quick connection. Brent Shiwack and the other boys had radar that let them know the instant one needed to pass a ball. There they were, in the right place, before the ball. In basketball their hands looked to Wayne like some kind of ocean anemones with invisible suckers that drew a ball in and made it stick. Brent stuck a hand in the air, and no matter which way the ball had been headed, it changed trajectory and was attracted to his hand. The ball was not attracted to Wayne’s hand. Still, his was not the last name called if teams were chosen. The last was Boyd Fowlow, who couldn’t see the ball because his mother had written Miss Baikie a note saying he was not allowed to wear his glasses in gym.

Wayne managed to avoid outright disgrace because of his competence in individual sports. He was not a fast sprinter and could not pull himself up by the arms on the chin-up bars. But he could run distances because he ran steadily, which was not glorious but it meant he did not let down his team. He could do a pretty good long jump, though not a high jump, and he liked pole vaulting and, for some reason no one could explain, beat just about everyone else at it. His father said it was too bad they had pole vaulting only once a year, on sports day.

“I like the part after you get halfway up,” Wayne told Thomasina Baikie. He sat on the edge of the gym stage, kicking his sneakers against the wall. “You take off in a kind of slow motion, and you feel like you go way higher than you thought you would.”

“Does it hurt now?”

Wayne nodded. His stomach ache had given him sharp pains while everyone else was doing cool-down laps. Now it was lunchtime and the others had gone to the cafeteria. He put his hands under his sweatshirt and laid them on his abdomen because their warmth felt good.

“I’m going to go get a heating pad and sit you down in the staff room for a few minutes.”

They went in the staff room and Thomasina got him the pad and gave him strong tea with sugar in it. He did not want to eat his potted-meat sandwich or his jam cookies.

“Here?” Thomasina touched his stomach. “Or here?” She placed her hand over his abdomen.

“Yeah. Right there. It’s kind of swollen.”

“How long has it been like that?”

“It started when my feet started peeling.”

“Your feet?”

“At the end of the summer. The skin on my feet peels off. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just weird. The stomach aching started around then too.”

“Can I see your belly?” His abdomen protruded. She put her hand on it and it was full of fluid, but she did not call the school nurse. The nurse did not know what Thomasina knew. That Wayne had a womb, and that it was acting up.

“Does your mother know about the pain?”

“I told her I had a stomach ache.”

“Has she seen it?”

“No.” He had not let anyone see or touch his body since the swelling. Thomasina looked at the little nubs on his chest and looked away again.

“When was the last time you went for a checkup with the doctor in Goose Bay?”

“Dr. Lioukras or Dr. Giashuddin?” His specialists were always changing. They came to Labrador for two-year positions, then moved to Toronto or Boston.

“Whichever one you saw last.”

“I saw them both. Dr. Lioukras gave me my new pills and Dr. Giashuddin did something else, but I had to be put to sleep.”

“When?”

“Just when summer started.”

“And you weren’t swollen then.”

“No. And my feet weren’t peeling.”

Thomasina thought at first that she could not bear to bring up the subject of Wayne’s chest. She felt to do so might crush him. He must have noticed it himself. Had no one helped him understand anything about what was happening to his body? Did he look at other boys and try to imagine their chests were no different from his? Thomasina saw there was no one in the staff room or in the hallway beyond the door.

“Wayne, it looks to me like we have to go see about the swelling. Do you think there’s swelling on your chest as well?”

Tears blipped over Wayne’s bottom lids. He had lain in his bathwater and sunk just enough to see if the small nubbins would make islands, and they had.

Thomasina put her strong hand on his shoulder. She did not have a feminine little voice like other teachers in the school, and Wayne was glad. She did not gush at him about his few tears. She was listening to him. She listened to his whole story, spoken and unspoken. She could hear parts of the story he did not know about. He sensed this, though he did not fully understand it. He trusted her. When she said, “Let’s phone your mother and get you to the doctor and find out what is happening here so you won’t have to worry any more,” Thomasina was angrier than she had been in a long time. A child’s worry was not like an adult’s. It gnawed deep, and was so unnecessary. Why did people not realize children could withstand the truth? Why did adults insist on filling children with the deceptions their own parents had laid on them, when surely they remembered how it had felt to lie in bed and cry over fears no one had bothered to help you face.

Thomasina got Mr. Stack to cover for her in health class. When she called Wayne’s house from the staff room phone, there was no answer. Treadway was at the back end of the garden scraping rust off his traps and rubbing seal fat on them, and Jacinta was at the Hudson’s Bay store, walking up and down the cleaning products aisle, looking for a bar of Sunlight to wash Treadway’s socks before he went on the trapline. Wayne sat on the couch next to the coat rack with his hands up his shirt, warming his belly.

“How much does it hurt, on a scale of one to ten?”

“Five. I’m waterlogged. I’m ready to burst.”

“I can see that.”

“Am I weird?”

Thomasina rubbed her hands and laid them on his abdomen. She was glad no other teachers were in the staff room. “Do you mind if I take you to Goose Bay to see Dr. Lioukras?”

“Is he Greek?”

“Guess what his first name is.”

“I don’t know.”

“Apollo.”

“It’s not.”

“It is. In Mexico there are all kinds of guys named Jesus. And in Greece there are Apollos and Athenas all over the place. I had a taxi driver called Hermes.”

“Did he have wings on his feet?”

“Wayne, there are things I wish someone had told you when you were small. But they didn’t. And it’s not my place to tell you now. But you know what? It looks like no one else is going to. I’m going to take you to see Dr. Lioukras. If your father isn’t going to deal with it, well, that’s his problem. And your mother . . .”

The principal, Victoria Huskins, came in looking for her stash of coffee filters. Thomasina Baikie went silent and Wayne knew he and Thomasina had embarked on a clandestine adventure.

“Hi, Wayne.” Miss Huskins thought children could not hear her unless her voice pierced their layers of dull incomprehension. How she had come to be principal Thomasina Baikie did not know. Rather, she knew and wished she didn’t. Wayne was not scared of Miss Huskins like some of the younger students were, but he felt uncomfortable when she was in the room. The previous week, when she was checking the washrooms, she found excrement on the floor behind one of the toilets and announced her discovery over the school PA system. “Someone . . .” The speakers cracked and hissed over the heads of the kindergartens, grade ones, twos, threes, and fours. The grades fives, sixes, and sevens heard it too, though their bathroom was on the second floor. When Miss Huskins made an example of anyone, she wanted the lesson broadcast to all. “Some student has deliberately done their poo and left it on the floor against the wall in the first-floor bathroom. Who has done this?” She left a long pause. The students were silent. “I will find out. The person who has done this had better come to my office and own up now. It is filthy, and it is wrong, and whoever has done this will not get away with it.”

Thomasina sighed, looked at her class, and said, “I hope that woman goes into treatment soon.” Everyone but Donna Palliser and her attendants had felt sorry for the anonymous child who had obviously had an accident. Why did the principal not know it had been an accident? But no one discussed it. Everyone but Thomasina was afraid to speak up.

Victoria Huskins licked her thumb and blew on the coffee filters to separate one, and said, “So you’re sick today, Wayne?”

He nodded.

“Stomach flu is going around.”

“It is,” Thomasina said.

“A couple of Gravol should keep you out of trouble till you get home. Have your parents been called?”

“We’re trying to get hold of them now.” Thomasina said nothing about driving Wayne to the hospital.

Miss Huskins got the coffee machine gurgling, then moved the pot aside and slipped her cup under the stream. Drips hissed on the hot plate. “Hopefully the whole class will not get it. Hopefully the entire school will not come down with projectile vomiting. Try to come back before you miss too many math classes. What are you doing in math right now, Miss?”

“Decahedrons.”

“Don’t forget to have his parents sign the P-47.” Miss Huskins went off with her mug that had a happy face on it from last year’s winter carnival.

Thomasina said, “I’ll take you in the truck.”

“Are we allowed?” Wayne liked the idea of escaping in the middle of a school day. But he did not know what his parents would think. “I can walk home. I can tell my mom you looked at my stomach in gym class and thought I should go see Dr. Lioukras and she can take me tomorrow.”

The coffee smell filled the staff room. Thomasina looked out the window at gold clouds. Everyone had such a small life it nearly drove her crazy. Perhaps it had driven her crazy.

“You told Miss Huskins I had the stomach flu?”

Thomasina looked at the floor and shoved her glasses up her nose. “I let her think it, didn’t I.”

Wayne thought Thomasina might stop the truck at his parents’ and tell them she was taking him to see Dr. Lioukras. He thought they might go get a couple of Teenburgers and a root beer at the A&W in Goose Bay. But Thomasina drove fast down the main road and did not stop. The main road was featureless. Wayne hated it. It had a dark green stretch that went on forever between Croydon Harbour and Goose Bay. Thomasina did not speak and he wondered if she was making a mistake. What would happen when Miss Huskins realized they had taken off in her pickup without his mother and father signing that form?

“What does P-47 stand for?”

“Bureaucracy. Victoria Huskins’s world. A world in which — do you know what a morgue is?”

“I saw one on TV.”

“Every corpse has a ticket.”

“Around its feet?”

“We’re in a world where every person, or plant, or animal, or any entity whatsoever, has an explanatory ticket on it. P-47s are part of that.”

“Do you think we should try to phone my mom again, when we get to the hospital?”

“Are you afraid of Miss Huskins?”

“She already freaked out about the poo.”

“Do you feel like I’m kidnapping you?”

“Kind of.”

“I guess it could seem like that.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll be thirteen next March the seventh.”

“You know my birthday?”

“I do. So you’re twelve. I’d call twelve the age of reason. So would every major civilization since the dawn of humanity. Twelve is when you wake up and you look around and you understand things. You know if your parents died that night you could figure out how to live in this world. I remember that about being twelve.”

Thomasina had four vertical lines going down her face. Sometimes they were laugh lines and sometimes they weren’t. Wayne found them serious and good. They made him trust her even though she was taking him from school in her truck in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.

“I remember the clarity of being twelve. Do you feel it?” She put the radio on. With music in the cab, the road out of Croydon Harbour was not so lonely.

“I don’t know.” Wayne did not know whether he felt clarity or not, but he was glad Thomasina was addressing questions about his body, questions his clothes, his parents, his school had covered up. He had seen Dr. Lioukras not that long ago and the doctor had not explained anything. In fact, the doctor had put him to sleep.

“How do you know Dr. Lioukras? Did you see him in Greece?”

“I saw him before I went to Greece. I went to see him and asked him to give me a local’s itinerary. I didn’t want to take a bus tour. He’s the one who told me how to get a pass to run the original Olympic track. He told me his favourite lunch counter in Athens and said to order the vine leaves stuffed with rice and mint, and some tiny lamb meatballs. He told me what kind of coffee to drink at what time of day, and he gave me the name of his daughter’s bookstore. That’s where I got the Greek bracelets and the music for our dance.”

“I don’t like lamb.”

“I never met a child who did. I guess eating it seems like one of the more barbaric adult practices.”

“It’s sad.”

“I guess it is, in a way.”