Every Time We Say Goodbye (14 page)

Might be better to just take the pounding from Wharton. It would be over quicker.

The light bulb trick was a recent addition to his repertoire: the toilet paper blizzard, a midget in the closet, pennies from heaven, Magillicutty’s ghost. His parents called them antics and acting up. He called them pieces and tricks, although that made them sound like common magic, of the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t variety, which he despised. There was actually no word for what he did. Someday, though, he would record the details in a black leather book with only his last name in raised script on the cover; he would make sure just enough people saw it to establish its existence so that when it went missing, they would tell their kids, and their kids would tell their kids, and people would look for the Turner Black Book forever.

Rumours would circle him and reporters would follow him out to his limousine, clamouring to know what he had planned next and was he was the one behind the Christmas baskets hung in the trees outside the orphanage, and where did he get his ideas. His parents wanted to know the same thing, only they phrased it differently.

“What is putting this nonsense into your head?” his mother demanded when he was sent home from school for climbing out the detention closet window, sliding down the drainpipe, sprinting back into the school and slipping into his seat before Mr. Harrison had finished writing quadratic equations on the board.

“It was about a thousand degrees in there,” he began, “so I opened the window to get some air, and—”

“But why were you in detention in the first place?” she’d cried. (Spitballs, but he wasn’t going to tell her that now.) “Why do you always have to act up?”

The truth was, the ideas just came to him, he didn’t know from where, in flashes, all joy and bedazzlement, burning away that queasy, uneasy feeling he had so much of the time. Working on a piece made him feel sharp and bright, like when you brush against the radio and the thin film of static you hadn’t even noticed disappears. “I guess it’s in my blood,” he told her, which made her mad as hornets.

Some of his pieces still needed practice, but the light bulb trick was perfect. Last year he’d made five dollars at the church social. How it worked: you stood at an open second- or third-storey window looking reflective, and then you said, like it had just come to you, “You know, I’ll bet I can drop a light bulb out of this window in such a way that it will hit the pavement and not break.”

“Sure, if you wrapped it in a pillow,” someone would say. “And it landed on a mattress.”

“No, I mean a naked bulb. There’s a way of holding it so that when you drop it, when it hits the pavement, it doesn’t break.”

After the jeers and snorts, you narrowed your eyes and said, “Uh … anyone care to bet?”

That afternoon, Wharton had stepped forward right away, bet ten and unscrewed the bulb from the cloakroom himself. Everyone else went silent, and Dean felt their faith waver. He should have known right then and there that something was up. No one would bet ten bucks straight away like that.

Dean held the end of the bulb with his thumb and forefinger. “This is the trick,” he told the crowd. “It’s all in the grip. This way, the wind currents act as a buffer.” He licked a finger and held it up, frowning as he calculated. This was the part he loved: when the tide began to turn, waves of disbelief curling helplessly against the incoming current of desire. Their doubt was drowning in their hope, their longing for a story they could take away with them: guess what Dean Turner did today.

He shook his head and asked for something to practise with, a pencil, a comb. They watched the comb fall and bounce, and that was the signal for Dave Stanghetta downstairs, pressed against the wall with his baseball glove, to get ready to catch the bulb, hold it half an inch from the pavement and let it drop with the smallest clatter.

But Wharton must have heard about it from someone. He sent his goons to waylay Dave, and upstairs, they all listened to the bulb explode on the frozen concrete below.

It wasn’t the money that got to him; it was the wave of disappointment that went through his crowd. They had believed, and nothing had come of it. Dean Turner had collected their hopes and tossed them out a window.

And now he was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling like an idiot while his pounding ticked ever closer. He leapt up. Options: attic or the parental bedroom. Nothing in the attic except old furniture and the Christmas decorations, plus it was always freezing up there. Their room was his best bet; he was certain they had money socked away. They would miss it, of course—Dean would bet ten bucks that every single penny in this house was accounted for, including the eighty-two cents he had just scrounged up—but he’d worry about that later. He fetched his flashlight from his bedside table.

He’d been through their room countless times before, not always looking for money, just looking, and he knew the smells by heart. The wooden trunk at the foot of the bed exhaled a cheerful whiff of forest, followed by the stench of mothballs. Nothing in there except the good linens and knitted baby hats and boots threaded with green ribbon. His mother must have put them away for the next baby, but no baby had ever materialized. Once he’d asked for a brother for Christmas—an older brother; he thought you ordered them from the catalogue—and
his mother got something caught in her throat and left the table, and his father told him angrily to hush with that kind of talk. They were embarrassed, he thought, at the possibility of having to explain the facts of life to him—or the impossibility, given their use of directions to refer to body parts (down there, backside). He replaced the baby things and started in on the closet (more mothballs, laced with lavender).

Behind his mother’s Sunday dresses and his father’s one good suit, against the back wall, were the hat boxes and shoeboxes containing receipts and sewing patterns. He ran the beam of light over the shelves, wondering what he could turn a pounding into that people would be talking about years from now.

Nothing came to him, but he saw, for the first time, that the wall under the last shelf was a different shade of plywood. His heart sped up. He knocked against it.
Hello?
He yanked the plywood away and aimed his flashlight into the dark. Metal glinted back.
Hello!

It was an ordinary tool box, except it was locked, which was a good sign—actually, it was great, because a lock could only mean money. Not only that, but it was a puny little lock, easily snapped off. And not only
that
, but having just searched the house, he knew where there was another lock just like it. He flew down to the kitchen and then back up with a pair of pliers and the lock’s twin brother.
You want your ten bucks, Wharton, you’ll get your ten bucks
.

Smiling at how easily the lock yielded, he threw open the lid. Spit filled his mouth. Nothing! A bunch of papers. He pawed through them angrily. Not a dollar, not a single goddamn dime. What the hell was so important that it had to be locked up? Bank statements, his parents’ wedding certificate. The deed to the house. Maybe he could pay Wharton with that.
Here you go, Wharton. Keep the change
.

A faded photograph of his mother, younger and thinner, with her hair in a bun, and some other woman with short hair, in front of the rose bushes out front, holding a baby between them. He turned it over, but the back was blank. A yellow envelope with a card inside from the Province of Ontario.
Certificate of Birth. Required Surname: Turner. Registered Given Name: Daniel. Mother: Grace Turner
. Who was Grace Turner? Some relative he’d never heard of.
Father: Not Given
. He knew what that meant. Poor kid was a bastard. No wonder he was locked up.

From the bottom of the box, he lifted out a brown folder. Inside was a long, cream-coloured paper with heavy black print. He saw the title at the top of the page, with its ornate, curling A, and his name typed in plain letters at the bottom. He tried to read the document, every
hereby
and
wherefore
and
on this day
, but it made no sense. His ankles gave out under him and he sat down hard on the wooden floor.

Downstairs, the back door opened. His mother. He threw the papers back into the box and snapped the lock into place. He had barely made it to his room when she called up the stairs. “What are you doing up there, Dean?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, you should be doing your homework. I’m going to start dinner.”

“Okay.”

He actually took out his science textbook and stared at the blur of black lines. His chest was an iron-banded barrel. He couldn’t count how many times he’d been through that closet. How many times he’d been within a foot of that metal box.
So that was what I was looking for all along
.

The plan was to wait until after dinner, until they were sitting in the front room, his father reading the paper, his mother
knitting.
Either after dinner or never
, he told himself, but he couldn’t eat. He sat watching them butter their bread and pass the potatoes and chew their food. His mother’s light brown hair, freshly set in pincurls, gleamed in the yellow light. She was telling his father that Mrs. May’s sister-in-law was actually related to them, because she was a Butler and the Butlers and the Turners were related.

Dean’s father helped himself to another pork chop. “What are you waiting for, Dean? Your dinner is getting cold.”

Dean squeezed his hands into fists in his lap.

His father said, “Are you sick?”

His mother said, “Are you in trouble?”

Dean said, “Am I adopted?”

For a moment, all he could hear was a storm of blood, whirling and rushing in his ears. Then a clatter of cutlery. “What on earth!” his father exclaimed, and his mother cried out, “What kind of talk is that?”

He kept his eyes on his plate and took shallow breaths through his mouth. The blue clock above the sink tapped out the seconds. The refrigerator hummed. He would wait all night if he had to.

When he looked up, he realized:
they
were waiting for
his
answer.

What kind of talk is that
.

Oh, he could tell them: it was the talk of the metal box at the back of the closet, the talk of a flashlight in the dark and a twisted-off lock. It was the typed and signed certificate talk: hereby, wherefore. He could tell them, but he would not. The whole thing had gotten turned around: he should be the one with his arms folded and his mouth set in a straight line and sparks shooting out of his eyes; they should be the ones with sore throats and cold, wet hands, their limbs weighed down by thick, dark dread.

He gave them another chance. “Am I?”

“Of course not,” his mother said. “What put that idea into your head?”

Whereby, on this day, I saw my name filled in
.

If he said it, he could never take it back. But if he didn’t say it, it could still be untrue, and everything could be sorted out. He swallowed hard. “The teacher was talking about it at school today. A kid in my class was adopted.”

They looked so relieved, he wanted to cry.

“Well, you most certainly are not,” his mother said.

His father picked up his knife and fork.

“Eat your dinner, Dean,” his mother said.

“Do as your mother says,” his father said.

Your dinner. Your mother
. Everything looked the same—the red and white tablecloth, the blue-faced clock against the yellow wall, his mother and his father in their places—and yet he was seeing it all for the first time. He was sitting at the table, but he was also watching himself from somewhere else, crouched in dark, tangled underbrush, the wind howling all around him.

Dean picked up his fork and began to shovel potatoes into his mouth. “I need ten dollars by next Friday,” he said. He did not look at either of them. “I made the hockey team, and I have to buy all the equipment.”

H
e had to wait until they went to church without him on Sunday morning. He had to say he was sick on Saturday night. Not that it was difficult to convince them. He had hardly touched his food all week. He could see them looking at each other. They were still wondering.
Who at school did you say was adopted, Dean?

New kid. Name of Macowski. You don’t know him
.

They were going to take him to Dr. McCabe if he wasn’t back to himself by Monday morning.

Back to himself. Now, what self would that be?

He heard the sound of the car engine fade, but he didn’t move for twenty minutes. It was hard to drag himself out of bed. He banged his knee on the edge of the oak dresser, then just stood there, staring at himself in the oval mirror. It couldn’t be true. He
looked
like his father. They had the same dark hair, the same cowlick. When he smiled, he had a dimple, one of his mother’s
two. And anyway, something like that could not have been kept from him for fourteen years. There would have been signs, clues. He would have known.

He’d made a mistake, he’d read it wrong, he wasn’t thinking straight.

He just needed to go back into the closet and open the box and see those papers again to make sure.

Inside the closet, he pushed his way through the clothes and knelt on the floor, pulling aside the plywood panel and aiming his flashlight into the darkness. The beam cut straight through to the cement wall.

The box was gone.

He sat on his heels.

Now what?

He didn’t know what. His brain was frozen. The spaces between things seemed distorted, like in a nightmare. A daymare. Maybe he had hallucinated the whole thing. Maybe he had been so worked up over the light bulb fiasco that his brain had cooked up this story, a little mental abracadabra, to distract him.
Poor guy
, his brain thought.
He doesn’t realize there are worse things in the world. Being blown to smithereens by the A-bomb, say. Getting rabies. Being adopted
.

And it had worked beautifully too, thank you very much, brain of Dean Turner. He didn’t give a goddamn straw about Wharton now.