Over the next week Treadway cleaned and reassembled his Ski-Doo. He filled his sled box and his reading case. He packed his Collected Works of Robert Frost.
“Sometimes,” Jacinta told Wayne, “you looked at me like you knew.”
“But I didn’t!”
“I imagined you did. People think all kinds of things when they are alone with a secret. They think what they want to think. Maybe I imagined the whole look.”
Treadway wrapped fourteen extra pounds of flour and cornmeal, and he hoped the woods would be lovely, dark and deep.
There was a tiny travel agency on the main road in Goose Bay. Thomasina thought of it as a hidden gate. The agent, Miriam Penashue, had spent all her summers in the bush near the Quebec border and had not finished high school. Miriam had not even finished grade six, and she had no plans of ever going to school again until she found out that if you took the travel agent course at the community college in Goose Bay, the government would pay for you to see six travel destinations. Once she had seen them, Miriam Penashue was no ordinary travel agent. She did not put up posters of Dominican Republic resorts or offer deals to Disney World. Her shop had one handbill on the door; Miriam Penashue had made it herself. It read, COME IN AND TALK TO MIRIAM PENASHUE ABOUT WHERE YOU WANT TO GO.
After the Labrador East School Board sent Thomasina its letter of suspension, something about Miriam Penashue’s sign appeared so unpretentious and so promising, she went in. She was carrying a bag from Happy Valley Northmart with six grapefruit in it that she wished were better grapefruit. They would be all right once she had sliced their membranes down to the drupes, but in their trip from California a layer of air had developed between the rinds and the fruit. When you have received a letter that says you have not acted in the best interests of the children you are teaching, it is hard not to feel ashamed. Thomasina felt ashamed and angry at the same time: ashamed because she should have done things differently. She could have been more discreet, more patient, instead of getting all righteous and hauling Wayne to the hospital in a way that attracted the attention of people who had no sympathy. People like Mr. Henry, who had caught wind of the hospital trip and had made a point of inquiring about it at the school office. The principal herself, Victoria Huskins, with her white pants and her intercom.
“There are two reasons I have no choice but to have you disciplined,” Victoria Huskins had said. “Taking a child off school property without adherence to a single one of the regulations we have in place. And lesser, but pretty important to me as someone who has to keep a semblance of order here, publicly ridiculing my reprimand of the child who wilfully left poo on the washroom floor. Filth. You should know better, Thomasina Baikie. For the children’s sake. People are going to think we don’t care about the children. I can’t have that at my school.”
Shame was what Thomasina felt the day she noticed Miriam Penashue’s handbill. It was undeserved shame, but it did its job nevertheless. It dampened her heart, then burnt its edges so she was left with a mess of charcoal and saddened fire. From Miriam Penashue’s handbill came a puff of freedom: COME IN AND TALK TO MIRIAM PENASHUE ABOUT WHERE YOU WANT TO GO.
Miriam Penashue was halfway between the ages of Thomasina and her grade seven students. She wore her hair in a bob and kept bubblegum in her mouth and had a coffee mug that said GRENFELL HUSKIES. She hired no one and her office was painted with turquoise paint left over from the fish plant where her boyfriend worked. The thing Thomasina liked about her was that she really did want to talk to you about where you wanted to go, and not where she wanted to send you. It appeared that she did not care whether or not she sold you a ticket to anything.
“Some places,” Thomasina said, “you go and you just feel like sighing and sitting down in an armchair like the one you’ve put right here.”
“Watch out for the spring at the back.”
“Its lumps are in the right places.”
“How are you doing?”
“You’ve probably heard.”
“When a hundred kids are going around with the news, you don’t need a story in the Labradorian. ’Specially if it’s about poo. And what’s wrong with taking a kid to hospital? Didn’t he have appendicitis? Maybe it would’ve ruptured if you hadn’t brought him in. Maybe you saved his life.”
“I should have done it differently. Victoria Huskins is not a well woman.”
“None of the parents blame you one little bit. They should go down to that school board and have you reinstated. But they aren’t going to. They talk about it but they won’t do it. What kind of a trip do you want to take?”
“When I sold my house, I got twenty thousand.”
“That’s the house the Michelins live in now, right? How come you sold it?”
“I paid my way through teachers’ college with four thousand. And I travelled on my own with another four.”
“Did you ever regret selling it?”
“I had no intention of selling it at first.”
Thomasina had begun, right after the drowning of her husband, Graham Montague, and their daughter Annabel, to clear out everything that might trap sorrow within the walls. For weeks she worked in the yard with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge, washing clamps, wrenches, sockets, and hammers, feeling them carefully with her hands the way her blind husband must have done, but knowing her hands could never interpret their shapes the way his had done. Part of her wanted to keep certain tools: his staple gun, his spirit level, the sixty-yard measuring tape in its leather case. But she had not kept them.
“Just like I had no intention of coming in here today.”
Thomasina had gone into her drowned daughter’s room and collected the dolls, the lavender sachets, the books. She had smelled Annabel’s clothes, then given them to Isabel Palliser for children along the coast. She had not kept the salmon pink cardigan with dog buttons.
“It was a house I couldn’t empty. I thought if I got rid of it… You’d think a grown woman would know better.”
“I wouldn’t think that. I think a lot of grown women hide a lot of different kinds of sadness.”
Thomasina Baikie found it hard to accept consolation. “I have twelve thousand left and I heard there’s a kind of ticket you can get where you can go around the world. You go to Heathrow and you can fly to Portugal and from there you can go where you want.”
“But you have to decide your route. You can’t backtrack. And you have to complete your trip within twelve months. It sounds to me like you might not want that.”
“I don’t know what I want.”
“You might want to sit in public squares and people-watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you’re peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.”
17
A Real Little Man
“YOU CAN’T TELL ANYONE,” Jacinta said.
“Not even Wally Michelin?” Wally stayed to herself. She got the highest marks in the school and went around with her chemistry text against her chest the way she had once carried Fauré’s “Cantique.”
“Not a soul.”
Jacinta was thinking of Wayne’s safety. Part of him knew this, but the new-found part, Annabel, wanted to tell someone. Wayne closed his eyes in bed and saw the hidden part of himself in the schoolyard, in a dress with a green sash and shoes of red leather with a little heel like Gwen Matchem’s. There were lots of things that changed if you were a girclass="underline" not just your heels or the way you put your hair, but things you talked about and the way you looked at the world. Wayne felt this in waves.