Every Time We Say Goodbye (28 page)

Laura said, “Oh! He has settled down. I mean—” She didn’t know what she meant. She didn’t want Vera to think that she had failed to make him turn over a new leaf.

Vera said, “Well, you can always stay here. Until you get back on your feet.”

Dean would hate it, but Laura didn’t see that they had much of a choice. Mr. Angelini said he would change the locks if they weren’t out by the end of the week. And maybe if they were here, Dean wouldn’t feel so free to disappear for long stretches, or yell when she asked him where he was going, or push over the kitchen chairs because he couldn’t find his car keys. His parents would help her set him straight. And it was just for a while, until she could sort out the car loan and the other bills.

Plus, she was pregnant again.

She took a second job as a typist two days a week at the
Sault Star
, working alongside Deb McKenna, who claimed to have forgiven Laura for jilting her cousin, because hey, these things happen, right?, but who showed far too much interest in the state of Laura’s marriage, never failing to mention that she had seen Dean on his way somewhere at some odd hour, jeez that guy is always on the go, isn’t he, Laura? Laura put up with it, though, because she had no choice, the same way she put up with Will Wharton, who made deliveries of paper and ink to the
Star
and always made a point to come in and say hello to the wife of his good buddy Dean. Once, pretending to nearly drop his stack of invoices, he brushed his hand along her backside and then pretended nothing had happened. Surely, then, Dean could put up with living at his parents’, and if he hated it so much, he might come to his senses and return the car and start saving money so that they could move out and be in their own place before the new baby was born.

Frank and Vera rearranged the whole house for them, moving their own bedroom to the sunroom downstairs and leaving them with the second and third floors. They moved Dean and Laura’s couch and TV into the attic room, which felt cold and hollow no matter how many throw rugs and doilies Vera brought up. “At least we’ll have our privacy,” Laura said, coming to sit next
to Dean on the couch and taking his hand, but he pulled away and looked at her with ugly eyes, flat and dull like old pennies.

She missed their old apartment with the little balcony overlooking the fruit trees and tomato plants, and Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love” soaring up from downstairs, but she had money now to pay some of the bills that had piled up. She ate with Frank and Vera most evenings, and it was easier, not having to cook after she had been running around at work all day, and at least when Dean did not come home for dinner, she didn’t have to eat alone. Vera didn’t like the way Laura let Dawn suck her thumb, or how Laura let her fill up on milk and spoil her dinner, or how on the weekends Laura disrupted the routine Vera had worked to get Dawn into during the week. But Vera meant well, and it was only temporary, and what choice did she have, anyway?

Then a black fog started to overtake her, and she wanted to sleep all the time. When Dawn cried, her heart started to race. The doctor said it was nothing. Pregnant women got tired. She should eat properly and get a good night’s sleep.

The night before Jimmy was born, Dean came in early and found her crying on the sofa in the attic room. He took her hands away from her face and wiped her eyes very gently. “Hey, hey,” he said. “Look at me. Laura. Look at me.”

She looked at him and hiccupped. “I feel so bad,” she said.

“I know. I know. I’m sorry.” He put his arms around her and rocked her. He said everything would be different from now on. He would be a better husband and a better father. He was turning over a new leaf.

“You always say that,” she hiccupped.

“I know,” he said, “but it’s different this time. I promise. I promise. You’ll see.”

Jimmy was an angelic baby, white and pink and gold, with fine hair and round eyes. Dean looked stricken when he held
him for the first time, and Laura thought,
Of course. He wanted a son. All fathers want a son
. This time, he remembered to pick them up at the hospital. He had a bag of toys—trucks and a baseball glove and a little beanbag monkey with a straw hat and a pipe. He’d bought things for Dawn, too, and told her how lucky the baby was to have such a good, smart, strong big sister. He carried Dawn on his shoulders and the baby in his arms. Dawn tugged at his ear and said, “Giddyup, Daddy,” and Dean neighed and pretended to bite her leg while Dawn shrieked and held on.

It was good. Dean came home at night. He took Dawn out so that Laura could have some peace and quiet. They came tumbling back in, waving balloons, fencing with pussy willows, sticky with grape juice. On Saturday mornings, he practically destroyed Vera’s kitchen making pancakes. He fell asleep on the sofa with Jimmy on his chest.

When it was good, it was very, very good.

Everything happens for a reason
, Laura thought, watching Dean show Dawn how to hold the baby. “Thatta girl,” he said. “See how he’s looking at you? He knows you’re his big sister. He knows you’re always going to look out for him.” The unhappiness had hollowed her out so that she could hold more joy. Things had finally turned around.

W
ithin three months, things had turned back. Dean was coming home late again. He said sales were slow; he wasn’t making enough on commission, but he would be damned if he would go back to the plant. It meant they had to keep staying at Vera and Frank’s. It meant Laura had to go back to work at the
Star
. (The bank had let her
go
. “Take time off. Put your feet up. Stay home and look after your kids,” Mr. McCleary said, pretending he was doing her a favour.) The black fog crept back. When the baby cried, she was terrified, and she couldn’t say why. Shocking thoughts came to her, and she lacked the strength to keep them out.
I hate my life. I hope I fall down the stairs and die
. In the mirror, her eyes looked sticky and her lips pulpy.
Hideous
. She put her hands on her stomach, gripping the apron of excess skin that hung over it.
Fat
. She felt feverish, and strange pains ran up her back and into her chest.
Sick
.

She kept trying to pinpoint the exact place she had gone wrong. Should she not have married him? But that’s what people in love did. Should she not have fallen in love? But how could that be helped?

That night in the Algonquin Hotel, he had said he loved her. He had said he was crazy about her. She was the only one for him. He’d lost her, but then he’d found her, and he was never going to let her go. He wanted to spend the rest of his life, etcetera, etcetera.

So why wasn’t he happy?

He said,
Tra la la, tra la laa
. He said,
Doo wop ditty, da doo run run
. Or he might as well have, because what he actually said made no sense. He protested and promised. He talked in circles. He loved her, of course he loved her, he was happy, she was happy, the children were happy, they were all happy, yes, for fuck’s sake, he loved her, why did she keep
asking
him that?

She kept asking because she’d overheard two women in line at the grocery store. “What, is he still running around on her?” (Still?) “With that little bit of a blond thing?” And then they had seen Laura and had a desperate need, both of them, to paw through their purses. Because a woman had called and asked for him, pretending to be a clerk from Davis Men’s Wear at 10:30 at night. And because Laura herself had seen him one evening, talking to some people at the entrance of McSweeny’s, his arm slung around a woman’s neck. She didn’t know the woman, but she wasn’t a little bit of a blond thing at all, so maybe he was running around on the woman he was running around with, and maybe that meant these women meant nothing to him, they were a phase, and he would pass through them and come out on the other side. It had to mean that or something close to that, because it made no sense otherwise.

She didn’t want to have made an unfixable mistake, and in fact, the mistake was easy to fix. All he had to do was stop seeing
that other woman, or women. All he had to do was go to work in the morning and come home at night. Come home and stay home. Stay home and be her husband. It wasn’t too late. As long as they loved each other, the story could be saved, because nothing was more powerful than love.

She overheard Deb McKenna in the employee lounge (“Well, she wanted him, she got him”) and stumbled outside to stand in her shirt sleeves in the raw wind, too numb to feel the frost in the air. Will Wharton drove up in his truck and saw her standing there. “Jeez, Laura, aren’t you cold?” He offered her a cigarette, and she took it from him. He was talking to her, and she talked back without understanding anything either of them said. Will didn’t seem to notice. “You’re a great girl, Laura,” he said. “I always liked you. You know that?” He stroked her arm and then, when she didn’t pull away, he pulled her close and pressed his mouth against hers. She let him kiss her, and then she went back inside. From her desk, she could see Will outside, finishing his cigarette. She didn’t care that he had kissed her, or that anyone might have seen it, because it didn’t make any difference. Nothing she did could make a difference. Only Dean could change things.

Vera was irritated with her because she was helping less and less in the house. “But I’m sick,” she protested, and Vera snapped, “Then see a doctor.” She made an appointment, and the doctor seemed to know exactly what she was talking about. He nodded as she ran through the list of symptoms, and handed her a prescription.
So I
am
sick
, she thought. The pills filled her head with a different kind of fog. She watched thoughts appear out of it (
I should get up and see why the baby is crying
) and fade back into it.

She wanted to be a good mother. She wanted to pick up the baby, oh her sweet, fair boy, with his plump little hands, his face nestled against her shoulder. But the sweet moment never lasted;
there were bottles to be washed and clothes to be folded and now the baby was crying and wouldn’t be soothed, and her daughter wanted Jell-O “Right now, Mommy, right now,” and why was this all her fault and her responsibility? The only relief came from putting her face into the pillow and forcing herself down into the well of sleep.

A door opened and a voice said, “Shh, shh,” and the baby’s cries faltered and stopped.
He prefers her
, Laura thought. He smiled and kicked his legs when he saw Vera, whereas he fussed and squirmed when Laura picked him up. Even Dawn said, “I want Grandma to cut my pancakes. You don’t do it right.”

She wondered how many more pieces she could separate into, and whether it was the sickness or the medicine that was dissolving the shell that held her together. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. She used to read that to Dawn. Now her father-in-law read to her daughter while her mother-in-law rocked her son to sleep. An egg fell off the wall, then curds and whey got spilled, but that might have been a different story. The pills mixed up her thoughts. But if she didn’t take the pills, she wouldn’t sleep, and the birds of terror would be flapping and shrieking all night long. She lifted her hand off her face. It was four o’clock. It was always four o’clock. She would not go down for dinner. She was sick. The name of the ailment was uncertain. Headache. Stomach ache. Separation of self into parts. Tomorrow morning, she would have to get up, wash and dress herself, wash and dress the children, bring them downstairs for breakfast, find her purse and keys, and be out the door by eight o’clock. She would be drained and dead-eyed before she even left the house. But if she stayed home, there would be no money. If there was no money, the bills would not be paid. If the bills were not paid, the calls would start again. The people who called were polite, toneless. Mrs. Turner, we require. Mrs. Turner, we must have.

They didn’t even bother asking for Dean anymore.

She didn’t know how much was still owed. It was better not to add it up. They didn’t know, downstairs. They thought things were under control, that money to buy a house was flowing into a savings account. She couldn’t tell them that a river of debt was sucking them under. If she told them, something would have to be done, and she didn’t know what could be done. They would say, “We don’t blame you,” but they would. She couldn’t keep her husband home. She couldn’t manage the accounts. She couldn’t look after her children.

They would blame her, or worse: they would tell Dean to shape up or ship out, and Dean would choose the latter. Frank had already hinted at this. “You can always stay here,” he’d said one evening when Dean had failed to come home for dinner and Vera had gone upstairs to put the kids to bed and it was just the two of them, sitting over remnants of chicken pot pie at the dining table. “You and the kids. If things don’t work out with him, I mean. We can tell him to go.”

Laura had leapt up from her chair, rattling the plates on the table. “I’d better start clearing up,” she said, grabbing the gravy boat and some glasses. In the kitchen, she ran the water and tried to breathe through the pain in her lungs. It was the cruellest thing she had ever heard.
We can tell him to go
. It was like offering to cut off someone’s head because they had a headache, she thought, and a gasp like a laugh escaped her.

If things didn’t work out with Dean, they didn’t work out. Without him, it was all wrack and ruin.

She went to work in the morning, and she came home sick and went to bed. The name of the ailment could not be said with any certainty, but she knew something was wrong, at the very core of her.

“What, sleeping again?” Vera said. Laura showed her the pills. Vera read the label and said, “Nerves. I told you it was all in your head.”

All in my head
, Laura thought.
Just like my father
.

Vera said she had to fight it off. Pull herself together. Snap out of it. “I had it too,” she said. “After my operation. The doctor gave me medicine.”

“What operation?” Laura asked, although she had already guessed.