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.”
“Look over by that birch.” Wayne did not like remembering that night in the hospital. A willow ptarmigan had been sitting on a low branch, and now it had descended and walked on the ground. “He’s looking for insects. He must have a late hatching of young.”
“Isn’t it a she?”
“It’s the male. They’re vegetarian except when they feed the babies, and male willows are the only kind of ptarmigan where the father looks after the young.” Treadway had taught him this, along with thousands of other pieces of information on Labrador birds and mammals and fish. He remembered more than his father thought, but something about the knowledge made Wayne feel lonely now.
“What else do you remember, Wayne?”
“The word hermaphrodite. One of the doctors saying it. Me thinking, Why is he talking about the Greek myths we learned in your class? Me not knowing what he was talking about until Dr. Lioukras explained it to me. Even after that, not really knowing. Long after.”
He meant now. He meant things had not fallen into place even now. He looked at his hand on the steering wheel. His arm. With the last round of hormones it had become more like other young men’s arms, but in school his arms had been thin, his body lanky. He had tried to conceal his slightness from his father, who had wanted him to have breadth. Wayne had walked as if covering a smaller boy with his arms, protecting him. He had walked with his arms away from his body, as if they encircled the smaller boy. You don’t need to keep doing that, he thought now. You can walk like a man. But he had to keep reminding himself. He was always the smaller boy, the girl-boy, in his mind.