Every Time We Say Goodbye (31 page)

Dawn’s head was suddenly cold. Just her head. It was the strangest thing. A picture of a snowbank came into her mind. She blinked, but the snowbank didn’t move. The cold moved from her head into her throat.

Laura said she wanted to explain a few things. It had been very hard on her, she said. She had been very young. She had been overwhelmed. She had had no support. And their father had not kept his side of the marriage contract. He had not upheld his end of things. She had entered in good faith and she was left holding the bag.

Dawn was listening and not listening. The snowbank vanished, replaced by a bag, a bulging black sack tied at the top, like a cartoon bag. Something was squirming inside the bag, and it made her feel sick. She didn’t want to see the bag. She tried to think about something else, but the only other thing was a snowbank. Was she going crazy? She was afraid of a bag and there wasn’t even a bag. Now she started to feel faint as well as cold.

Laura said, “But I want you to be part of my life now. And that’s really all I have to say. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

Dawn shook her head frantically.

Jimmy put up his hand. “Can we watch TV?”

Later, Jimmy spilled grape juice on the carpet, and Laura leapt up and opened a bottle of club soda over the stain. When they left, the stain was covered with a thick layer of lavender-tinged salt. After that, Laura served apple juice, and they always had an itinerary.

She told them to call her Laura. “It’s probably easier for you,” she said. Her name was in the paper sometimes for her job. Laura Turner, executive director of the Children in Crisis Foundation. Dawn always cut out the articles, even though she didn’t have
a place for them and they ended up creased under a dictionary or folded into a music book. Seeing her mother’s name in the paper was like seeing her on a day that wasn’t a Saturday: she would catch sight of Laura outside the mall or going into a flower shop, and a jolt would go through her. She would think, “That’s my mother.” No other thoughts followed.

Sometimes, Laura told them about her work, especially if she talked to a millionaire. Jimmy was interested in the millionaires, one of whom had his own helicopter. That was her job, basically: talking to rich people, convincing them to donate money to the foundation. She went to conferences and, in the evenings, gala events. Dawn was interested in the gowns or almost gowns, cream or silver swathes of cloth. Laura had matching shoes, strappy sandals with high heels, and beaded bags, all hanging in protective slots in the closet.

The fridge was another marvel of order and elegance. Inside, everything was small and singular. A miniature jar of mayonnaise, a carton of milk. One apple, one bun. There would be no shipwreck at Laura’s place. Shipwreck was what Vera made to use up leftovers. She layered mashed potatoes, pieces of meat, beans, peas and noodles in a pan and baked it for the afternoon. It was covered over with gravy made from a packet. Jimmy liked shipwreck. Or rather, he liked gravy, and that was all you could really taste. Dawn hated it. She wanted to eat what her mother ate: a chicken breast, a green salad with translucent slices of radish. Food that stayed separate on the plate.

After dinner, Laura gave them each ten dollars for their allowance. Frank and Vera didn’t believe in allowance; if you needed something, you asked for it, and Frank and Vera took you to Kmart after dinner, which meant you always had new underwear and winter boots, but never Pop Rocks or Pet Rocks or the soundtrack to
Saturday Night Fever
. Laura said, “This is for you
to save or to spend on whatever you want.” Luckily, Laura and Vera didn’t talk, except to confirm dates and times, so Dawn and Jimmy were able to prevent the automatic allowance confiscation and redirection into the bank.

Then it was time to go home. Stepping out from the lobby after a few hours inside the apartment, Dawn was always surprised by the clatter and patchiness of the outside world. That’s why she was quiet when she came back from Laura’s. She didn’t know why Jimmy was quiet.

What really riled them up, Dawn thought, was when Dean called. Even Vera got riled up. She would start cleaning the inside of the stove or the floor behind the refrigerator as if her life depended on it. Her face would be flushed and damp, and if you asked her the wrong thing (anything, basically), she would yell at you for asking foolish questions when she didn’t have time for foolishness and then give you a list of jobs as long as your arm.

Dean usually called to say that he was coming to see them: in just a couple of weeks, or months at most, just as soon as he could get away. Better yet, he’d send them tickets and they could come down to Toronto.

It would be better if he sent the tickets, because Vera said she wouldn’t let him darken the door.

“I’m not stopping him from visiting you two kids,” Vera said, scrubbing the baseboards furiously, “but I won’t have him in this house. Not after all the trouble he’s caused us.” She and Frank had paid all his lawyer’s bills, and all the other bills too, after Dean went to Toronto.

When Dean finally came to visit, he saw Amy first, and then Dawn and Jimmy went to see him in his hotel room. They ordered room service and watched TV, and then Dean took them out on a Secret Mission that involved the Clue of the Dented Fire Extinguisher and a lot of running up and down the
emergency stairwells. Dawn didn’t enjoy that part as much; she was thirteen—too old to be playing Secret Mission. But Jimmy said it was the most fun he’d ever had in his life. He said, “Grandma would never let us play that at home. I hope he stays at a hotel every time.” Still, he thought it unfair that Vera wouldn’t let Dean into the house. “Imagine, she hates her own son,” Jimmy marvelled, but Dawn wasn’t so sure. Once, Dean had called and asked Dawn to put her grandmother on the phone. It was such an astonishing request that Dawn hid behind the dining-room door to eavesdrop. There wasn’t much to hear. Vera said, “No. No. No, I won’t. No, I can’t. It’s too late for that. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t help.” Then she hung up. Dawn peeked into the kitchen and her knees turned to jelly. Vera was leaning over, her hands over her face, making a sound that was either crying or choking or throwing up. “Grandma?” Dawn whispered, but Vera didn’t move. Then Jimmy came loping down the stairs, and Vera straightened up, emptied a can of peas into a saucepan and told Jimmy to get his nose out of the fridge. Her voice sounded almost normal.

The next time Dean came up, they still went to the hotel, but they didn’t play Secret Mission. Instead, Dawn and Jimmy sat on the big bed, pillows on their laps, while Dean paced and talked and wrapped them in silky grey ribbons of cigarette smoke. Growing up, he said, he had always known something wasn’t right. The way people looked at him, there was something … Then he found the box with the adoption papers and it all made sense. All he wanted from Frank and Vera was the truth, but they wouldn’t admit the truth. Number one: when he found out, they denied it. “Am I adopted?” he asked, and they said, “No, you are not.” Two, when they couldn’t deny it any longer, they said they didn’t know who his parents were. Three, they said they got him from the Children’s Aid. But he had seen
a birth certificate and a photograph, and he had done his own investigation. His real name was Daniel Turner, and his real mother was Frank’s younger sister, Grace, who had left home and left him behind and never come back. He had gone looking for her, but then he realized she didn’t want to be found; she was married with another child and didn’t want a stranger to show up on her doorstep and disrupt the whole set-up. The thing was, he wasn’t certain. It made sense that she was his mother, but he didn’t know for sure. It was pointless asking Frank and Vera, because of the lies. His whole life with them was a lie. He turned to Dawn and Jimmy. “At least you know who your parents are.”

They leapt up and ran to him. “It’s okay, Dad, it’s okay,” they said, throwing their arms around him. All this time, Dawn thought, she had been feeling sorry for herself because her parents were gone in various degrees, but it was true: at least she knew who they were. Her poor father! Later, they went to pick up Amy, and when they were eating banana splits for dinner and hamburgers for dessert at Dairy Queen, Dawn made up her mind to find out the truth. She would search for clues and keep notes in a little book, and then she would type everything up and send it to her father. She would call it “The Whole Story” and maybe someday it would be published in the newspaper. “Teen Detective Solves Family Mystery. Whole Story on Page Two.” But after Dean had gone back to Toronto, and her search of the house turned up no documents or photographs, her determination began to dissolve. She couldn’t think what to do next. Asking Vera was out of the question. Frank was a possibility, but every time she tried to ask, her tongue twisted inside her mouth, and no matter how she started out, the words always veered off into another question altogether and she’d end up listening to Frank explain the steelmaking process or the difference between direct and alternating current. Even if she could get the question out,
more than likely he would just say, “Now, now. Don’t be bringing that up. It will only upset your grandmother.”

She gave up on the idea of the book, but still, she hoped for something, a clue or a phone call, maybe. Not the kind that made Vera double over and choke, but from someone who could make all the locked-up, rusted-over pieces of the past ease open. Someone who had been there at the beginning. The long-lost, long-gone, gone-for-good Grace Turner, maybe.

Four years later, there came a different kind of phone call, and even things on Sylvan Avenue began to change and go haywire. Things with ugly names, like “tumour,” rose up out of nowhere and ran around smashing into other things—ordinary things like the china cabinet, but also other things with even uglier names, like “addiction.” Schedules were disrupted and beds went unmade and things fell apart where they always did, where they had been falling apart for years.

“J
immy!” Dawn stood at the end of the creek path, hollering into the trees. “Jimmy!” A breeze lifted the pale new leaves, and their undersides shimmered in the damp morning light. A bird called, two long, melancholy notes. “Time for church!” Dawn yelled. She didn’t want to have to edge her way through the buggy thickets and clouds of gnats down to the creek. “I know you’re down there, Jimmy,” she called. Something buzzed near her freshly washed hair, and she slapped at it furiously.
Asshole
. Why did he have to pull this every Sunday?

She found him under the chokecherry tree, sitting at the fort. It wasn’t really a fort, just a big, flat rock at the edge of the creek. Although the creek didn’t technically belong to Frank and Vera, she and Jimmy still thought of it as theirs, especially since the city had fenced off both ends of the path, making their backyard the only way in. When they were younger, they had spent most of their summers here, making maps for buried treasure,
daydreaming at the fort. Now Dawn hardly ever came down here except to find Jimmy.

“Oh, hi, Dawn,” Jimmy said, faking surprise. “I didn’t hear you calling.”

“Then how did you know I was calling?” Dawn stood on the bank, her hands on her hips. “Grandma says get ready for church.”

“I’m not going.”

He said this every Sunday. He said he was an atheist. He even said it to Vera, who said, “I’ll atheist
you
in a minute.”

“What does that even
mean?”
Jimmy muttered to Dawn, but they both knew: it meant he was going to church.

Dawn studied her brother’s face. He had changed so much in the last year that people said he looked older than Dawn; they said he looked seventeen and she looked fourteen. His jaw was long and hard, and his blondish curls had straightened and darkened into long brown feathers that fell into his eyes.

“Just come on, Jimmy,” she said. “Grandma’s freaking out because you aren’t ready.”

“She’s always freaking out,” Jimmy said, but he got up. “Go,” he said, gesturing. As she turned and climbed the bank, she saw him push something farther into a pile of leaves with his toe. She could only see the cap, but she knew it was a bottle.

Up at the house, Vera was waiting for them at the door. “You two make me mad as hornets,” she said. “You know we leave for church at 9:30. You know your grandfather is sick and I have my hands full.”

“We’ll be ready in two minutes,” Dawn said, and they were. It didn’t smooth out the crease between Vera’s eyes, though.

In church, Dawn knelt and prayed. Let Grandpa get better. Let the chemo work and let him go into remission and let him live a long time. Let Grandma stop worrying. Bring my dad back and let Grandma be happy to see him and let him in the house,
and let him find his mother, and let everyone start talking to everyone else again. Also, please don’t let my brother turn into an alcoholic and don’t let him buy any more drugs off Tony Danko.

Jimmy said the problem with prayer was contradictory requests. “Like two teams are praying,
Please let us win,”
he said, “and God just randomly answers one team’s prayers and not the other’s? It makes no sense.”

He had a point, but Dawn couldn’t bring herself to stop praying; now that she had outgrown wishing on stars and candles and dimes in fountains, it was all she had left. And anyway, his point wasn’t applicable in her case, because surely no one was out there praying,
Please let Frank Turner’s tumour get bigger
. There was a very small possibility that Tony Danko was praying,
Please let me sell all this acid and pot and pills
, but she doubted it. She’d met Tony Danko; he wasn’t the praying type.

What would be nice, she thought, would be someone to talk to while waiting for these prayers to be answered, like a guidance counsellor, only not Mrs. Ditmars, whose only concern was whether you were having S-E-X and who recited warnings like a robot even when you said absolutely N-O-T. Someone like the young woman with the crinkly eyes who had handed her a pamphlet in the mall last month for something called Lighthouse. Counselling, philosophy, friendship, the orange and yellow pamphlet said. But Vera must have come across it and thrown it out, because she couldn’t find it now.