Annabel (22 page)

20

Willow Ptarmigan

T
HOMASINA'S POSTCARD FROM LONDON
took only two weeks to arrive.

“I guess there comes a point,” it said, “when your feet just say they don’t care to do it any more. They don’t want to do the lonesome trek. I had to go to a Boots chemist shop and buy myself a couple of donuts. You put them in the heel of your shoes. London is my favourite of all the places I’ve been, Wayne, as a place to live. But very expensive. I can’t get over the fact that when you sit on a bench in Kensington Gardens, a man in a uniform comes and asks you for ten pence. You have to pay to sit in the park. It looks like I’ve got to make a bit more money if I don’t want to be like George Orwell, living on tea and bread and margarine. The school board has told me I can substitute at Goose High. I arrive in Goose Bay on September sixteenth, and Nelson Meese is on the lookout for an apartment I can rent for the winter. Did your father get the letter I sent him from Bucharest? When I gave it to the postmistress, she threw it in a container that looked like it came out of the Dark Ages.”

It was already September thirtieth. The Labrador telephone book was six by eight inches and less than half an inch thick, including the yellow pages. Wayne decided to phone Nelson Meese Junior. but he should have phoned the other Nelson Meese.

“It’s my father,” said Nelson Meese Junior. “But I know who you’re talking about. He took her over there on Thursday. She’s over at Daniel Lavallee’s apartments on Michelin Street.”

Wayne got in his father’s truck. He was supposed to be packing bait and supplies for three members of the House of Assembly to go fishing in Rigolet. They liked locally cured meat and they did not like to run out of alcohol. He needed to go to Roland Shiwack’s to buy caribou sausage, but he needed to go to Goose Bay for rum as well. He would visit Thomasina and then go get the rum.

But she was not at her apartment. He stood on the landing of the four-unit building and looked out at the small parking lot, where Kit Kat wrappers and Hostess chip bags blew against the chain-link fence that bordered the shortcut between Goose High and the main road. The three other doors had nameplates but the door to apartment four did not. He knocked on the other doors but no one answered. The building had a dead feeling, and he was disappointed. He went to the liquor store and bought a case of El Dorado for the members of the House of Assembly. It was three o’clock. He decided to go over to the school and wait in the parking lot. At three ten he watched all the high school students pour out the main doors. He felt much older than them though he had been in high school only a year ago. He waited until they had filed into their school buses then he continued to watch the door. But maybe she would come out another door. He stopped idling the truck and he went in. The office was at the head of the corridor, near the wall with the hockey and basketball trophies, and he went in.

“Is Thomasina Baikie teaching here today?”

“Who?” the secretary said. But a man, a young teacher, had seen her.

“She was in yesterday. She’s a substitute. I didn’t see her today.” He was trying to get jammed paper out of the photocopier. The principal’s office door was open but no one was inside. Teachers rushed in and out looking for staplers and the new grade eleven map of the world. Had his own high school felt this disorganized? Wayne felt he had walked into a world where people barely noticed each other. They sped around, resentful that they had to be there at all, and could not find the simplest things, like the three-hole punch that was supposed to be fixed to the front desk by a chain.

“Can I use the phone?” Wayne asked the secretary.

“There’s a pay phone in the lobby.”

“Have you got change for this?”

“The lunch money’s gone down to Beaver Foods and I’ve been asking for Pay Records to set up petty cash for six days now.” She handed him the receiver from a fixed telephone. The cord was short but he pulled at it. “What number?”

Wayne gave her Nelson Meese Junior’s number and she dialled it, but it kept ringing. When he got back to his truck, someone had broken the window and the case of El Dorado was gone. A hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I should have stopped looking before now, he thought. I should have known in the apartment building that I wasn’t going to find her today.

He went on the Rigolet trip with the members of the House of Assembly and almost lost one of them in the marsh. The men liked to think they had gone into the wilderness without Wayne. They liked to ignore everything he told them, so that when they returned to the House of Assembly they could tell their colleagues they had caught the fish by their own ingenuity. This time there was a story in the St. John’s
Telegram
about how one of them had had a brush with death. There was no mention that Wayne had saved his life. If the life had been lost, Wayne would certainly have been mentioned. He had built a web of black spruce boughs and flattened himself on it and hauled the member of the House of Assembly to safety, but the Telegram article implied that the member had called upon the same resources that made him such a wonderful minister of fisheries. Everyone said wilderness outfitting was one of the big new Labrador jobs. A real opportunity for anyone who wanted it. Wayne wasn’t so sure.

When he got back to Croydon Harbour, the utility bills lay stacked against the toaster. Among them was a letter from Thomasina, from Bucharest, but it was not for Wayne. The letter was addressed to Treadway.

“You don’t want to open it?” Wayne asked his mother. She had not opened the bills either. Wayne opened bills and he dealt with them in the months his father was in the bush. His mother would not look at the letter. She did not want to look at anything these days except
As the World Turns
on channel six, which she had always told him was pathetic.

“Watching daytime television is a kind of death,” she had said. “I don’t know how anyone can stand it who calls themselves alive.” But now she kept watching it, and she said, “Your father can open that letter and read it himself, if ever he decides to come home.”

Every night after the six o’clock news there was an ad for Minute Auto Glass that promised same-day service, but Wayne had never heard of anyone getting a truck window fixed at the Goose Bay franchise in less than five days. There was always some factor that made your glass a special order. He had to visit Goose Bay three times before his truck was ready, and on the third time, which they had promised would be the last or he would get the work done for half price, they asked him to wait two more hours. He went across the road to the A&W and sat by the window with his onion rings and Teenburger special, and that was when he saw Thomasina Baikie walking along the main road carrying two ShopRite bags.

In grade eight Wayne had believed Thomasina strong. Now she was smaller. In her late forties when he had last seen her, she had now entered menopause, and the thing that happens to a lot of women had happened to Thomasina. You might as well call her a different person. What happened to women, Wayne wondered, and why did it happen to some but not others? If you did not know Jacinta, for instance, and you looked at a picture of her the day she married Treadway and another one of her now, you would not be able to match the two. If you entered a contest and could win a million dollars by picking out the old and young Jacintas, you could win only through random luck. Thomasina was more recognizable than that, but still there was a shift when Wayne looked at her face. The shift between Who is this stranger? and, Now I see my friend inside this stranger. The direction her hair grows is the same. The temperature of her eyes. But the background has shifted. What, Wayne wondered, did Thomasina see when she looked at him?

There were two Teenburgers in a Teenburger special, and Thomasina accepted Wayne’s offer of his second one. He bought her a root beer. They heard Mark Thevenet’s sister on her drive-through microphone asking if someone wanted fries with that.

Wayne saw things in Thomasina’s face he had not seen in grade seven. He saw the day blind Graham Montague went out in his white canoe with their red-haired daughter. He saw the silver undersides of new leaves on the aspens overhanging Beaver River.

“Did you get my postcards?”

“They were great. I don’t know if I got them all yet. Some took a long time to get here.”

He knew it was stupid to call a burger a Teenburger. Anyone could eat it, not just a teenager. But he couldn’t help thinking Thomasina should not be eating something called a Teenburger. He wished he had bought something else to give her, like one of the warm apple tarts.

“Did my letter arrive?”

“There’s a letter from you for my father.”

“Has he read it?”

“He’s on his trapline. He’s always there now.”

“Has anyone read it?”

“It only came the other day. My mother didn’t want to open it.”

“Did you open it?”

“No.”

“Do you think I could have it back?”

The last time Wayne had gone over the road between Goose Bay and Croydon Harbour with Thomasina, she had been driving, and he had thought she had all the answers. It was not so now. His new window was tight and clear. He realized the other windows needed a wash. He put the radio on to cover the silence. Why would anyone want a letter back after they had sent it? The postcards Thomasina had sent him spoke of the bridges and cities she had seen, but hearsay had given him pieces of her personal life, though the pieces were as fragmented as any postcard.

“She went too far,” Treadway had told his wife in bed after the school board fired Thomasina. “It’s not like she’s twenty-one and straight out of college.”

“She was only trying to help Wayne.”

“If Thomasina Baikie had her way we’d all be driven around the bend. Wayne wouldn’t be fit for anything but the fourth floor.”

“Ssh. His door is open.”

“I’m just saying the woman doesn’t know when to stop.”

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.”