Every Time We Say Goodbye (19 page)

Marie nodded sympathetically. “It’s hard when the woman of the house is sick, isn’t it? Everything is topsy-turvy.” She counted out the bills. “Now, how are you going to carry this down to Maniaco’s?”

“Oh, I have my wallet,” Dean said, showing her.

Marie laughed. “Well, won’t you feel like Mr. Rockefeller for two and a half blocks!”

Dean smiled. Maybe she didn’t know. It was possible. The town wasn’t that small.

“You give your parents my best wishes,” Marie said.

“I will,” Dean promised.

When she called him back to the counter, his knees wobbled. Had she compared signatures? But she only wanted to
give him a pen with the bank logo printed in smeary ink:
YOUR BUSINESS IS OUR BUSINESS
. He put it in his pocket with his Rockefeller-thick wallet.

He wore his black winter coat over his school trousers and white shirt, and packed his tie and grey sweater into his rucksack. This time, he took the bus. On the bus, you were just a guy going to visit your Aunt Jean and Uncle Walter, or going down south to look for work like so many people before you. On the bus, you were unremarkable, unidentifiable if anyone asked, just one of several male passengers of average height, all in dark coats.
Now, did he have a hat? Jeez, I can’t remember
. Cars were trouble; they led to cops. A rule for his book. He’d never have anything to do with a stolen car again.

He took the night bus so he wouldn’t have to pay for a room. There was no way to know how long Frank’s paycheque would have to last. Also, the less of it he spent, the more of the original amount he would have when he was ready to pay it back.
Dear Frank and Vera
, he would write.
Here is the money I borrowed. I wouldn’t have had to do it this way if I had my own money, which is in a bank account I don’t even know the number of. Speaking of that, you can keep that money as payment for all you have spent on my room and board all these years. I appreciate everything you have done for me. Yours truly, Dean Turner
. He fell asleep in the darkest part of the night and awoke as the bus was lumbering off the highway into the town of Peterborough at dawn. He’d left the Soo in winter and arrived down here in spring. The snow was gone, and tiny buds glowed on the branches. The main street had a small square with benches and a clock tower, and stores with blue-and-white-striped awnings. They were still shut up, but beside the bus depot, a coffee shop was open. In the men’s room, he rinsed his face and ran his wet hands through his hair.

He ordered coffee, black, and eggs, sunny side up, but he couldn’t eat. The coffee stripped his tongue and turned to acid in his stomach. The waitress told him how to get to the clock factory. If he was looking for work, though, he was probably out of luck; they weren’t hiring. “I’m going to meet somebody,” he said. “Grace Turner. Maybe you know her? She’s been living down here for a while.”

The waitress shook her head. “Never heard of her.”

But that didn’t mean anything. In the Soo, the waitress at the Adanac Diner wouldn’t know every single person who worked at the steel plant. Grace Turner might be a person who didn’t eat in diners. Frank and Vera never did: why pay an arm and a leg for something you could just as easily and far more cheaply make at home? He hoped she wasn’t like Frank and Vera, though. He hoped she was more like him.

Outside, he followed the waitress’s directions: down to the clock tower, walk to the river and follow the road up the hill until he came to the factory. “You’ll know it when you see it,” she said.

At home, the light was still hard and cold; here, it was lemon-coloured and smelled of earth. He liked the look of the place, like a holiday town with those awnings and the benches. There were more people out on the street now, men and women in coats and hats, a police officer (Dean nodded to him politely), a few cars. He kept his head up as he walked, scanning faces. His mother was here somewhere. She lived on one of these streets. She took her paycheque to the red brick bank on the corner, shopped across the street at the department store. Maybe she was walking to work right now. All he had was a faint image of a faded photograph; he couldn’t bring the face to mind. But he believed it was the kind of memory Brother Nick had told them about, where you cannot produce
the answer independently but you can recognize it in a list of options. In a multiple choice test, he would know her when he saw her.

He recognized the factory from the picture in the library book. The librarian who had been suspicious of his adoption project had shown considerably less interest in his essay on industry in Ontario, waving him over to a shelf of cardboard-bound reports with barely a glance. He found Clockworks in Peterborough almost immediately. But Mrs. Murphy had said Peterborough or Kingston, so he called the operator: there was no clock factory in Kingston. And now here he was. Just inside the factory entrance was a wall of clocks. He was startled by one with a pale blue face and delicate black hands: it was the same as the clock hanging above the sink at home.

He found that he was counting the clocks on the wall.

You don’t have to
, he told himself, putting his hand against the metal door.
You can go back. Or go in. It’s up to you
.

He hadn’t thought of what he would say, beyond the initial question. He had been expecting her to know him instantly, and only now did he wonder what he would do if she said, “Yes, I’m Grace Turner,” and then just stood there like she was waiting for him to produce a telegram or a ticket. He needed to give her a clue, something like,
I can see why you might not recognize me, it’s been seventeen years
. Or even
I’m from Sault Ste. Marie
.

That’s all he’d give her. If she didn’t recognize him, he would never forgive her, but at least he wouldn’t be standing in front of her stammering about a locked box in the closet.

Inside, he approached a glass-fronted office. Behind the large window, a woman sat at a desk, surrounded by filing cabinets. He studied her profile: her grey hair was coiled in a braid around her head, and she wore wire-rimmed glasses. She sat straighter than he had ever thought it was possible for a
human being to sit. She hadn’t looked up from her typewriter, and he hadn’t knocked on the glass, but she called out, “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for someone,” Dean said, and felt the words bounce off the glass. The woman kept punching keys. He bent his head so that he could speak directly into the slit at the bottom of the window. “I’m looking for someone. One of your employees. A woman—a lady—her name is—”

“You’re getting fingerprints on my glass,” the woman said.

Did she have eyes in the side of her head? He pulled his hand away from the window.

“Her name is Grace—”

The phone rang and the woman picked it up. “This is Mrs. Thurman,” she said. “No. Yes. That is correct. You are welcome. Goodbye.”

Dean straightened up, cleared his throat. “Uh, ma’am?”

Mrs. Thurman pulled the sheet of paper from her typewriter and held it up. Satisfied, she laid it beside the machine.

“Her name is Grace Turner? The lady I’m looking for? She works here.” The woman was rolling another sheet of paper into her machine and still gave no sign that she could hear him.

He tried to slide the window open all the way, but it was clamped with something. “Hello? I’m looking for Grace Turner. It’s a—an emergency. Her brother is sick.”

“Hands, please,” the woman said.

She
could
see out the side of her head.

“Is she here today?”

“She is not.”

His mouth opened, but no sound emerged. He had found her. She wasn’t here today, but she was
here
.

“Well, can you tell me where she lives?”

“I cannot.”

“But it’s an emergency. Her brother is very sick. I came all the way from Sault Ste. Marie.”

“Then I am sorry for you, young man. But I cannot tell you where she lives.”

Anger, hot and sour, flooded up from his gut, past the hard knot in his throat, and coated his coffee-burnt tongue.
Easy
, he told himself, and tried to breathe normally.

“I’m sorry to trouble you. I can see you’re quite busy, but why can’t you tell me?”

“She doesn’t work here. She hasn’t worked here since the war.”

Dean dropped his head, struggling to clear his throat of the painful blockage. He had lost her again. She’d been here behind the wall of clocks, and as soon as he asked for her, she’d disappeared. Just as she’d been hidden in a box all those years until the moment he had discovered her. The closer he got, the farther away she slipped.

But this woman had known her. This woman had worked with her, had probably seen her every day for years. She was real, Grace Turner, and she had been here. “Do you know where she works now?”

“I do not.”

“But do you know where she lives, then? Does she live in the same place? Could you check your files?”

“We wouldn’t have those files now. It’s been fifteen years since she worked here,” the woman said.

“But I need to find her,” Dean said. The anger was gone, replaced by a dark, shameful urge to weep. “It’s an emergency.”

The woman frowned at her typewriter. Dean lifted his hands and pressed them against the window. They were good and sweaty. He smeared them up and around. Behind the now streaky glass, she got up, fetched a small spray bottle and a square of newspaper and came to the window. She widened the opening and
passed them through. She said, “Ruth Ellis’s boarding house. Wellington Street. That is all I can tell you, because that is all I know. Now I’m going to ask you to please remove your fingerprints from my window, and then we will say good day.”

“Whoa, whoa. Ruth Who? Wellington Street. What’s that?”

“Last known address.”

“But does she live there now?”

“I don’t believe so. Window, please.”

He sprayed the window and wiped it down. She took back the spray bottle and paper and said, “Thank you.”

He got to the door before he realized he didn’t have a street number. “Excuse me, but do you have the address? On Wellington Street?”

She was back at her desk, rolling another sheet of paper into the evil black typewriter. She said, “Knock and the door shall be opened.”

“What?”

“Seek and ye shall find. Good
day
, young man.”

“Good day,” he said, and added under his breath, “old bat.”

He found it right away. It was the first house he went to, a large house of orange brick with freshly painted trim behind a hedge that was all covered in burlap. He opened the mailbox at the gate: two letters addressed to Miss R. Ellis, one to Marcy Cole. On the veranda, he examined the knocker: a snake swallowing itself. The wind lifted, and from the rafters above him came the sound of small bells; he craned his neck and saw a row of wind chimes. He grabbed the knocker and rapped sharply. Just then, he noticed the plaque underneath.
KNOCK AND THE DOOR SHALL BE OPENED
. Maybe this was the town motto. A plump young woman with long brown ringlets answered the door. Ruth Ellis, she said, was in the hospital, but when he said the next name, her face lit up.

“Grace Turner! Oh, she moved to Toronto a long time back.”

He wanted to collapse right there on the porch. Toronto. Again she’d slipped away. Still, this was another person who knew her. “But you knew her? She lived here?”

“Oh, yes. Only I didn’t know her, of course. She was before my time. But Ruth keeps in touch. She keeps in touch with all the women of the house. She’ll have that address in here somewhere. Come in and I’ll try to find it.”

It was the weirdest house he’d ever been in. He was afraid to move for fear of knocking over a pile of books or bumping a picture off the wall, and it wouldn’t be an ordinary picture, either, but a photograph of three people, men, women, who could tell, whirling around in white skirts and tall hats, their heads thrown back, or a painting of a blue-faced man with an extra eye in his forehead, wearing a skirt and playing a flute.

“I’m sorry,” said the woman, looking up from a drawer. “How did you say you knew Grace?”

“I’m her—nephew,” he said. “My father lost touch with her, and I was passing through Peterborough and thought I’d look her up.”

The woman kept talking to him while she rummaged through a cabinet. Her name was Marcy, she was a teacher, like Ruth used to be, and in fact, Ruth used to be her teacher, oh, a long time back, and what a teacher she was, she had opened their eyes to the world, all their eyes to all the strange, precarious, blinding beauty of the world, and now dear Ruth was laid up in hospital and they didn’t know—they didn’t think—here Marcy had to stop looking for the address and begin to look for a handkerchief. When she regained possession of herself, she offered him coffee and strawberry-rhubarb pie, milk and chocolate cookies, a bowl of soup. She couldn’t find the address.

“I know it was Baldwin Street—that much I do remember—because I mailed letters for Ruth, and I remember Baldwin Street, Toronto, clear as day.”

She said she would write it down for him. She did not remember the number, she was sorry.

“It’s okay,” he said, taking the paper. “I’m getting used to that.”

“I’ll ask Ruth. When I go to the hospital this afternoon,” Marcy said. “You call back this evening and I’ll have it for you. If Ruth’s awake. Sometimes she’s not. Sometimes she’s—” Marcy broke off and cried quietly into her handkerchief.

Dean said he would come back later. As he was leaving, he said, “But did Ruth ever say anything to you about Grace? About her being—you know, off?”

“Off to where?”

“No. Off like odd or something? Not very smart?”

“What a strange question. No. Not at all. Grace started her own business, I believe.”

He gave her his most brilliant smile. “Thank you! Thank you so much.” He flew back through the town, over to the bus depot. He had no time to wait for street numbers.
Knock and you shall find
, he said to himself. “One ticket to Toronto,” he said to the clerk.

He fell asleep on the bus and dreamed he was standing outside a house on Baldwin Street. He knocked and a voice from inside called, “Who is it?” “I’m here to see my mother,” he tried to say, but his mouth wasn’t working properly. “Muther,” he said. “Buther.” He knew with inexorable dream logic that he was at the wrong house. At the next house, no one answered his knock, but the handle turned freely in his hand. He went in and he was in his living room at home, the same brown carpet, the same reading lamp, Vera knitting in the armchair, Frank on the sofa reading the paper. From deep in the stillness of the house, a clock ticked. He had gone home by mistake.