By grade eight his sequined bathing suit was far too small; its straps cut his shoulders and the crotch was tight, and the time had passed in which he had enough innocence to order another in a larger size. He longed to wear it, but he left it crumpled in its box under his bed. He missed Wally, and he wondered what would happen if he could tell her they were both girls, at least in part. He wished he could ask Wally to call him Annabel. They could be best friends like Carol Rich and Ashley Chalk, who passed battleships-and-cruisers paper to each other in Mr. Wigglesworth’s class and ate hickory sticks on the fire escape. Wally and Annabel.
But Annabel ran away.
Where did she go? She was inside his body but she escaped him. Maybe she gets out through my eyes, he thought, when I open them. Or my ears. He lay in bed and waited. Annabel was close enough to touch; she was himself, yet unattainable.
There was a piece of information about Wayne’s night in the hospital that Treadway had not told Jacinta.
When Treadway went on the trapline, his family did not hear from him, nor he from them. Some men made themselves reachable. Before Graham Montague had died, he had always told Thomasina how she could find him if she needed to get a message to him in the woods. Eliza Goudie’s husband could radio in and out from his cabin. Even Harold Martin, despite his Innu woman, had come out of the woods in two days the time Joan got third-degree burns on her foot from tipping her canning pot as it came to a boil around her winter’s supply of bottled rabbit. Jacinta had never tried to get in touch with Treadway.
“I thought,” Dr. Lioukras told her on a follow-up visit, while Wayne was in the hematology lab having two vials of blood drawn from his arm, “you knew.”
“No.”
“Your husband knew. The woman who was here that night — Wayne’s teacher, I believe — she knew.”
“Thomasina. She’s not Wayne’s mother. I’m his mother.”
“And it’s true I never spoke to you about it.”
“I wasn’t here. I was at a stupid party getting drunk with my friends.”
“I assumed you knew. But I shouldn’t have assumed it.”
“A normal husband would have told me.”
“Perhaps when you go home now, you can discuss it.”
“Treadway won’t discuss anything with me until spring.” Jacinta assessed the Greek doctor. He was a man who could love a woman. Not a closed, cold, unreadable machine. She slumped in the chair. He put a hand on her back and his hand felt warm.
“I know it was drastic.”
“No one told Wayne?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Will I tell him?”
“No.”
“I’m so sick of not telling him things.”
“I can’t stop you. But in my experience — I know my experience is limited — he isn’t mature enough to understand.”
“How could anyone understand a thing like that? Moses couldn’t understand that. I’d like to see you understand it if it happened to you.”
“He might not get as big a shock if he were older.”
Jacinta did not think Treadway had an Innu woman like Harold Martin did. But she thought he had begun to think like the animals he trapped. He had begun to walk like them, and sleep like them. He had become wild, and there was no way you could send a message to him if you did not know the wild language. So Jacinta was alone with the new piece of information.
What Jacinta spoke about, alone for the winter with Wayne, was not the mystery of his body. Treadway had told her, before he left, he wanted her to begin training Wayne to make and use money wisely. “It’s time,” he said, “Wayne started learning how to keep body and soul together. For his own good. How much does he make with those cod ears?”
“I’m not sure,” Jacinta said, though she knew the exact amount. In the summer before grade eight, Wayne had learned how to make twenty-five dollars a week. He peeled shrimp for Roland Shiwack and he cut out cod tongues at the Croydon Harbour wharf and sold them for fifty cents a dozen door-to-door. While he was at it, he cut out the pretty white, shell-like bone in the cod’s head that people called the ear, and soaked these in a pot of water with a few drops of Javex. He sold them to the craft co-op at the new museum in North West River, where they made earrings out of them.
“I’d say he’s saving twenty-five dollars a week.” Treadway was a good judge of how much work a person did, and how much it was worth. “Let him save half. But let him contribute the other fifty dollars a month to the household.”
“You want me to charge him for the electricity he uses listening to his record player?”
“He can start helping pay his own expenses. His books and clothes. He can put a bit on the household bills after Christmas. It’s the principle. It won’t hurt him one little bit. I might stay out longer this spring. I might do the whole spring hunt up the river. Now he’s older he can give you more of a hand.”
When Wayne brought home the school bill for his new chemistry book, Jacinta gave him the money but said, “Your father wanted me to ask you to pay for part of it.”
“Pay for my books?”
“He said keep half your money and give me the other half for books and clothes and the household.”
All his life Wayne had deferred to Treadway’s pronouncements, and he did so now. As far as he knew, other boys’ fathers gave them more money as they grew older, not less. Brent Shiwack’s father bought him an Arctic Cat, and Mark Thevenet’s dad was ordering Mark his own Sea-Doo, which cost more than a car. Wayne did not expect Treadway to act like the other fathers, and he didn’t protest. There was a restrained economy under Treadway’s roof, part self-denial and part moral exercise, and Wayne had been trained into it. There were things he wanted, but a Sea-Doo was not one of them.
“Do you need more money, Mom? The co-op is always after me for more cod ears.”
“Your father just wants you to be self-sufficient. It’s his way of—”
“It’s okay, Mom. I can get more money. Roland Shiwack wants me to work more hours. He doesn’t like giving work to Brent. I could make eighty-five a week easy right now.”
“You don’t have to make that much. Your school work—”
“I’m fine, Mom. My school work is fine.”
Wayne did extra work for Roland and his feet began to peel again, as they had done the summer before grade seven. He told Roland, who said it was because of the shrimp.
“That’s why I can’t do it myself. That and the fact it takes too long and I have a million other things to do. There’s a substance in there that causes my hands to peel red raw. Funny it affects your feet. I guess it migrates. Can I have a look?”
Wayne shoved off his sneaker. The skin on his soles had broken into sheets and curled at the edges. He peeled off a sheet of skin.
“That’s it. That exact same thing, only on my hands.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“My hands sure hurt.”
“Well, my feet don’t. But I’m glad to know the cause.”
Wayne had always associated his peeling feet with the day Thomasina rushed him to hospital. He had thought it had something to do with his swelling abdomen. This time, he had been afraid the whole thing was starting again.
“It’s a relief to know what it is. That it’ll pass when I get the shrimp done.”
“If you want to stop, I’ll certainly understand. I can get you to shave the ends of that pile of fenceposts instead.”