Annabel (4 page)

4

Phalometer

J
ACINTA LEFT PILOT OBED WILSON
on the tarmac and walked in the hospital entrance as if she were taking her child for a routine weighing and measuring with the public health nurse. She walked down the first-floor corridor to the back exit, saw it would not open without setting off an alarm, walked to a side entrance where the cafeteria workers went to have their smoke breaks, opened that door, which faced a deserted lot full of expired thistle and St. John’s wort, and ran. She ran to the chain-link fence that surrounded the hospital and stopped when she got to its interlocking wire, which rose eight feet, as if women were always trying to escape with their babies. Beyond the fence was a ditch, then waste ground: rubble and corrugated pipes where men had dug to lay a new drainage system around the hospital. There were errant snowflakes, and no colour save for brown, white, grey, and a green so dark it might as well have been black. In the woods, Jacinta knew, if she managed to find a way around the fence, she would find Innu tents, fragrant with boughs and woodsmoke and steam swirling from sugared tea, the men hunting and the women plucking geese and digging firepits to singe the pinfeathers. Grandfathers rested on their bough beds and the children played outdoors with duck and goose bills and bones and claws, making puppets out of whatever parts of the bird did not get eaten. Once Jacinta had wandered into a camp like this when she was berry picking, and there had been a mother and small baby in one tent, and that baby had had something wrong with him.

He had been born with a genetic anomaly but his mother had held him and sung to him, a lullaby in Innu-aimun, and no one had tried to take that baby to the Goose Bay General Hospital and maim him or administer some kind of death by surgery. No one had found fault with him at all. His family had cared for him as he had been born. The encampment had been at Mud Lake, where a little schoolhouse stood for the children and you could go only by helicopter in spring because the ice was too thick for boats but too thin for sleds. Jacinta had canoed to the place and had felt afraid of its isolation but comforted by its womb-like softness and enclosure. But she had gone in berry season: a warm, golden day when the sun from the whole summer remained, soaked into every berry and leaf. You could get the wrong idea about a place in the fall, before the snow. You could get the idea that it would always welcome you. If Jacinta found her way back there now, frost lying in the seams of the land, who would welcome her? The Innu had given her tea and bread that day, but she would need more than that now.

Jacinta had always been a person prone to bolting, strongly tempted to escape when overwhelmed. She imagined herself running to the desert of New Mexico and finding an uninhabited dwelling. She imagined going back to St. John’s and living in a tiny bed-sitter and cooking a mash of oats and sweet carrots for her baby. But she was thirty-four, not twenty, and knew that beyond the romance of an escape, beyond the first euphoric flight, there was a second day that brought a return of ordinary burdens, the burdens you thought you had fled. Now, with her baby, she stood at the chain-link fence and hated that there was no opening, no place for her and her baby to run. She sat on the ground and picked pieces of lambkill and made them into the kind of tiny corsage she had made of clover in her childhood. She kissed her baby’s head and sang to him the same Innu lullaby she had heard in the tent. At least that little baby and her own would hear the same song.

At a window of the hospital, on the third floor, stood a blur, a nurse looking out. Jacinta heard Obed Wilson’s helicopter lift off and fade. If that nurse hadn’t noticed Jacinta she could have sat on the ground until hell froze over and no one would have known where she or her baby had gone. The lullaby had the kind of tune everyone thinks they’ve heard before but can’t remember where. A tune like that floats in the air all the time and now and then you catch it.

“You like the tune, baby?” Jacinta kissed Wayne’s nose. He looked at her and trusted her with his black eyes that were changing into another colour. “Nothing about you is the way it’s going to be,” Jacinta told him. “Nothing about you will stay the same.” The nurse came out the exit Jacinta had found. She was short, with black hair, around thirty. She stepped over the mud and snow seams and thistles in her white shoes pricked with a hundred breathing holes.

“Are you all right?”

Jacinta looked only at her baby.

“I’m Tana. Are you here for her three-month needle?”

“No.”

“Are you okay? Do you want me to take her? Do you want to come in for a cup of coffee while we get her signed in?”

Jacinta got up and walked with Tana away from the chain-link fence, away from the land that had nothing on it but weeds and stones and drainage pipes. It was not beautiful, but it had space and an undefined air. Everyone was trying to define everything so carefully, Jacinta felt; they wanted to annihilate all questions. As they got close to the door she felt the walls of the hospital lean forward and close in, and she stopped.

“What are you here for today?” Tana asked. She sounded as if she had to come out onto this waste ground every day and round up bolting mothers. “What’s your name? Which doctor do you have to see?”

“Dr. Simon Ho.”

“The surgeon?”

Jacinta stood on a little pile of rubble and thistles, and Tana put an arm around her. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can come.”

“Okay.”

Jacinta let Tana bring her along a hallway that had blue footprints leading north and yellow ones facing south. They went through the X-ray section and down a warren of narrow corridors where ancient women and men lay with no one attending them, their toothless mouths open, then through an orange door where there were colours again and a smell of coffee and toast, and brightly lit information desks.

“What’s your last name?” Tana asked, as if she and Jacinta shared a confidence against the world.

“Blake.”

“Wait here and I’ll go see you won’t have to wait in the waiting room.” Tana went behind the information desk and spoke to the woman working there, who lifted her glasses and looked across the lobby at Jacinta. Tana flipped through file cards, picked up a phone and spoke for a few seconds, then came back out of the booth, brought Jacinta to the cafeteria and bought her a coffee, then showed her into a small waiting room with armchairs in it. “I can go,” she said, “or I can wait here with you. Would you like me to wait here with you?” Jacinta looked at the square green stone in Tana’s ring. It was a dull stone. Jacinta liked this better than a stone that glittered.

“Dr. Ho has you booked for ten thirty,” Tana said. “The good thing about him is that he does only three surgeries a day, one in the morning and two in the afternoon, so you never have to wait.”

Jacinta looked at a
Pediatrics Today
magazine lying on a table. On its cover was a photograph of a baby with tubes coming out of its nose, arms, and head. Why did hospitals think people coming in with their babies wanted to look at magazines like that? A tiny television hung tilted on a metal arm near the ceiling, and a newscaster proclaimed that forty-seven Chinese coal miners had been suffocated in an explosion earlier in the day. There was footage of their families screaming and banging at the gate of the mine, which officials had locked for their own protection. The wall under the television had a dent in it, and Jacinta wondered if someone had kicked it. A door opened that she had not noticed and a nurse in gelatinous lipstick called, “Jacinta Blake?” in a voice too loud. Tana put her hand on Jacinta’s shoulder, and her hand was so warm Jacinta did not want it to leave her. But she had to follow the other nurse. Tana’s voice had calmed her. Voices were like that. You could lose or save a life with the sound of a voice. White corridors, windows, big silver and white room, Dr. Simon Ho next to four trolleys full of shelves, implements laid out on white cloths. Jacinta noticed the seriousness of Dr. Ho. She liked that he looked at her steadily, that he was young and slim and not aggressive.

Blades glittered on the trolleys, and she thought how Treadway would like to get his hands on some of those for fish and seals and skinning porcupine and stripping bark and just having on him for any event that might need a strange two-pronged blade with a graceful curve, or a stainless steel razor-edged file with a nice fat handle. It occurred to her to steal one, though Jacinta had not stolen a thing in her life.

The parents’ waiting room was beyond a side door and it had comfortable couches in it and a painting on the wall of an old mill and weeping willows and some ducks, but Jacinta did not want to go in there. “I’ll stay with my baby.”

The nurse did not like this but Dr. Ho watched Jacinta respectfully and said she could stay in the operating room. The nurse tried to take the baby.

“I want to see. What exactly are you planning?”

“The point,” the doctor said, “is to create a believable masculine anatomy. You can lay him on the operating table yourself if you like. I’ll show you the exact procedure. We will show you how to wash your hands and arms and you can wear a mask and you can watch until the point where we do the surgery itself, if you think you can stand it.”

Jacinta realized the nurse was chewing gum.

“What do you mean by believable?”

“I mean we try to make the baby comfortable as a male in his own mind, and in the minds of other people who are in his life now or will be in the future.”

The nurse chewed as if she intended to grind her teeth to powder.

“I liked the other nurse,” Jacinta said. “Not this one.”

“This nurse’s name is Alma Williams,” Dr. Ho said softly.

“She’s chewing gum. Her voice is jarring and I don’t like her. I liked the other nurse. The one who showed me here. She came all the way out to the back of the hospital to ask if I was okay. She bought me a coffee. She has warm hands. I like her and I want her instead of that one. I really don’t want this nurse in here when I could have the nice one. I like the look of you and that you’re serious, and I think you will be honest with me, but if that nurse stays here I am going out and taking my baby with me, because I don’t like her.”

“Alma, can you please ring the third floor and have them send Tana down here, and then be kind enough to abide by Mrs. Blake’s request?”

“It’s a pretty strange request.”

“Thank you, Alma.”

“Seeing as how I am a registered pediatric nurse.” Alma said the word
pediatric
as if she were about to define it to a kindergarten class.

“It’s all right, Alma.”

“Whereas Tana is —”

“I appreciate you fetching her, Alma.”

Alma left Jacinta and her baby and the doctor alone in the room, and that was when Jacinta handed Wayne to him. She felt that in Dr. Ho’s presence any thought, any fear or wish, was understandable. He would not dismiss her.

“You think,” she said, “a child’s sex needs to be believable. You think my child — the way he is now, the way she is — is unbelievable? Like something in a science fiction horror movie? And you want to make her believable. Like a real human.”

“We want to give him a chance. As soon as possible after the birth.”

“Have you done it before?”

“True hermaphroditism happens, Mrs. Blake, once in eighty-three thousand births. I haven’t done this before. But what we are doing today is the normal medical response.”

“Normal?”

“And I think it’s the most compassionate one. We try to decide the true sex of the child.”

“The true one and not the false one.”

“We use this phalometer.” He picked up a tiny silver bar from the trolley. It had black numbers on it.

“It’s a tiny ruler.”

“It is. See?” He pointed to a mark three-quarters of the way down the phalometer. “If the penis reaches or exceeds this length, we consider it a real penis. If it doesn’t meet this measurement, it is considered a clitoris.”

Jacinta strained to read the tiny marks. “One point five centimetres?”

“That’s right.”

“What happens if it’s less than that?”

“When a phallus is less than one point five centimetres, give or take seven hundredths of a centimetre —”

“Seven hundredths?”

“Yes. When it’s less than that, we remove the presentation of male aspects and later, during adolescence, we sculpt the female aspects.”

“What if it’s right in the middle? Right straight, smack dab down the precise centre? One point five centimetres with no seven hundredths.”

“Then we make an educated guess. We do endocrinological tests but really, in a newborn, as far as endocrinology goes, we’re making a best estimate. Penis size at birth is the primary criterion for assigning a gender.”

“Measure her, then.”

Dr. Ho took Wayne from her arms so gently she thought he must love babies, even if he did merciless things to them. He must have bad dreams. He must wake up in the middle of the night just before the part of the dream where he cuts the baby. His wife, if he has one, must have to get up and give him brandy. But maybe not. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he only looked like he cared.

Tana, the first nurse, came into the operating room. Tana cared. Anyone could see that about her.