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wanted to call a daughter.

4
    Phalometer
    J ACINTA LEFT PILOT OBED WILSON on the tarmac and walked in the hospital entrance as if she were taking her child for a routine weighing and measuring with the public health nurse. She walked down the first-floor corridor to the back exit, saw it would not open without setting off an alarm, walked to a side entrance where the cafeteria workers went to have their smoke breaks, opened that door, which faced a deserted lot full of expired thistle and St. John’s wort, and ran. She ran to the chain-link fence that surrounded the hospital and stopped when she got to its interlocking wire, which rose eight feet, as if women were always trying to escape with their babies. Beyond the fence was a ditch, then waste ground: rubble and corrugated pipes where men had dug to lay a new drainage system around the hospital. There were errant snowflakes, and no colour save for brown, white, grey, and a green so dark it might as well have been black. In the woods, Jacinta knew, if she managed to find a way around the fence, she would find Innu tents, fragrant with boughs and woodsmoke and steam swirling from sugared tea, the men hunting and the women plucking geese and digging firepits to singe the pinfeathers. Grandfathers rested on their bough beds and the children played outdoors with duck and goose bills and bones and claws, making puppets out of whatever parts of the bird did not get eaten. Once Jacinta had wandered into a camp like this when she was berry picking, and there had been a mother and small baby in one tent, and that baby had had something wrong with him.
    He had been born with a genetic anomaly but his mother had held him and sung to him, a lullaby in Innu-aimun, and no one had tried to take that baby to the Goose Bay General Hospital and maim him or administer some kind of death by surgery. No one had found fault with him at all. His family had cared for him as he had been born. The encampment had been at Mud Lake, where a little schoolhouse stood for the children and you could go only by helicopter in spring because the ice was too thick for boats but too thin for sleds. Jacinta had canoed to the place and had felt afraid of its isolation but comforted by its womb-like softness and enclosure. But she had gone in berry season: a warm, golden day when the sun from the whole summer remained, soaked into every berry and leaf. You could get the wrong idea about a place in the fall, before the snow. You could get the idea that it would always welcome you. If Jacinta found her way back there now, frost lying in the seams of the land, who would welcome her? The Innu had given her tea and bread that day, but she would need more than that now.
    Jacinta had always been a person prone to bolting, strongly tempted to escape when overwhelmed. She imagined herself running to the desert of New Mexico and finding an uninhabited dwelling. She imagined going back to St. John’s and living in a tiny bed-sitter and cooking a mash of oats and sweet carrots for her baby. But she was thirty-four, not twenty, and knew that beyond the romance of an escape, beyond the first euphoric flight, there was a second day that brought a return of ordinary burdens, the burdens you thought you had fled. Now, with her baby, she stood at the chain-link fence and hated that there was no opening, no place for her and her baby to run. She sat on the ground and picked pieces of lambkill and made them into the kind of tiny corsage she had made of clover in her childhood. She kissed her baby’s head and sang to him the same Innu lullaby she had heard in the tent. At least that little baby and her own would hear the same song.
    At a window of the hospital, on the third floor, stood a blur, a nurse looking out. Jacinta heard Obed Wilson’s helicopter lift off and fade. If that nurse hadn’t noticed Jacinta she could have sat on the ground until hell froze over and no one would have known where she or her baby had gone. The