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
WAYNE 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.