Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa

  But as the snow rose in dirty hills and bluffs along the roadsides and Geraldine’s stomach got rounder, her voice got higher and sometimes she even hit them. She was turning into someone else, and Dawn tried all the magic she knew to turn her back, but nothing made any visible difference. Sometimes, she wished she could vanish her.

  Dean didn’t need help in that direction. He could vanish all on his own, especially after Uncle Del (who wasn’t their uncle, only Dean’s friend) convinced him to quit his job at the radio station and work for him, and now he was always going over the river to the American Sault, even on weekends.

  “What exactly are you doing for that guy?” Geraldine wanted to know.

  “This and that. Keeping an eye on a few projects, scouting for business opportunities,” Dean said.

  “Business opportunities, my ass,” Geraldine muttered.

  Dean said, “He’s a man who makes things happen.”

  “Oh yeah?” Geraldine said. “Can he make a paycheque happen?”

  “If I just wanted a paycheque,” Dean said, “I’d sign on at the plant. You gotta see the big picture, Ger.”

  Geraldine marched over to the fridge and grabbed a handful of envelopes. “Electricity bill. Phone bill. Returned cheque.” She tossed the envelopes one at a time at Dean, who let them fall to the floor. “There’s your big picture, mister.” Dawn’s mouth fell open: Geraldine sounded exactly like Vera.

  When Vera and Frank stopped by after school or early on a Saturday morning, they always asked, “Where’s your father?” and Dawn and Jimmy were supposed to say, “He’s away on business.” They weren’t supposed to say “for Del Cherniak” because Vera couldn’t stand that Del Cherniak and Frank wouldn’t trust him as far as he could throw him. Vera and Frank came to bring them the socks or vitamins they had picked up on special. They stood in the doorway in their boots and coats, the bright, cold air swirling in past them. They were always on their way somewhere, the cemetery or the grocery store, so no, they couldn’t stay. Finally, Geraldine stopped asking them to come in.

  After they left, Dawn stood in the kitchen door to see what they had seen. Dishes in a sink full of cold, greasy water, a cream cake scraped clean of its icing, crushed Mountain Dew cans on the floor. That was Geraldine and Jimmy playing Dew Shot. At least from the kitchen door they couldn’t see the unmade beds and the pile of garbage swept behind the TV.

  One Sunday afternoon in January, Geraldine invited them in again. She asked three times, hovering and circling, clearing her throat, but still they wouldn’t stay.

  “Oh god, oh god, what am I going to do?” Geraldine cried when they left. She put her hands to her face and squeezed the sides of her head. Dawn would have laughed if she had been out of arm’s reach. Dean had been away on business for two weeks, and Geraldine had taken the phone off the hook because it was always someone looking for him. Vera and Frank had brought old issues of National Geographic and Oreos reduced to half-price because the box was a little crushed. “What good are these?” Geraldine cried, knocking the magazines onto the floor. She had only enough money for her bus fare tomorrow, and there was no dinner for the kids. And they weren’t even her kids. “Youse aren’t even my kids,” she wailed. “Oh god, what am I going to do?” She plumbed the sofa lining for change and then sent them to the store with $1.71 for milk and bread. “Close enough,” she said. “Just pretend you lost some on the way.” But they stopped to play with Vincent down the road, the three of them flying over his backyard snow hill on his saucer sled, and when they got to the store, they didn’t have to pretend. Dawn’s pockets were empty. They went back and dug frantic holes in the snow until their hands cramped. “We need the Finding Stick,” Jimmy said, and it might have worked if Geraldine hadn’t caught them in the upstairs hallway.

  She said nothing when they told her; instead, she turned and punched the wall so hard her fist went through the plaster. After that, she went to her room and the door closed with the quietest click. Jimmy couldn’t find Professor Pollo and went temporarily crazy, shuddering and crying, until Dawn found the Professor behind the kitchen door. She got Jimmy to lean over and sip water from the opposite side of the cup to take away his hiccups. Then they ate a row of Oreos each and put themselves to bed.

  When Dean had come last summer to tell them he had good news, Dawn knew immediately that all her wish work had paid off. “Kids,” he yelled. “Vera, where are the kids?” They heard his voice and forgot not to pound down the stairs, making enough racket, according to Vera, to be heard all over the Two Soos. “Kids, I have some great news. You know Geraldine, right?” Of course they knew her. Dean had been going out with her for a year. “Well, how would you feel about Geraldine being your new mother?”

  Dawn and Jimmy began to jump up and down. “When is the wedding?” Dawn wanted to know. “Can I be the flower girl?” But Dean said he and Geraldine had already got married that morning at the courthouse.

  Jimmy asked if they should call her Mom.

  Dean scratched his chin. “Why don’t you just keep calling her Geraldine for now? That’s what you’re used to, right?”

  As soon as he could find a place, they would all move in together. Dawn immediately began to lobby for the right kind of house, and Dean clicked a make-believe pen to take notes on his hand.

  Dawn thought she would float away. At last, at last: father and mother and kids living together in a normal house, instead of father living in a two-room apartment that smelled of cat pee over the Sunset Café on Queen Street and kids living with their grandparents in a weird old house with claw-footed furniture and a cellar full of pickled beets. They would go to Parents’ Night with their parents, they would go on vacations during summer vacation, they would go to the movies and then to A&W and it wouldn’t be for the birds and a damn foolish waste of money.

  “I think I’ve got it,” Dean said, pretending to read his notes. “Million-dollar single-storey mansion with indoor-outdoor pool …”

  Dawn and Jimmy began to jump up and down again and hoot and holler and Dean jumped and hollered with them until Vera went upstairs with her nerves.

  They waited until Dean found the house, then they waited until it was fixed up for them, then they waited for Dean and Geraldine to come and get them before lunch on the last day of August. The beginning began, and it was good at first, or at least there were moments of good, considering it was still the beginning and some things didn’t count. But by the time the snow began to melt, Dawn knew it was coming to an end. With beds unmade and clothes unwashed in smelly piles around the broken washing machine, a garbage bag of money squashed flat under the spare room bed and a stolen car in the garage, it couldn’t possibly last much longer.

  THE BLISS

  When the sickness woke her early in the morning, just after the birds began to sing, Grace pulled the sheets over her head and thought about her mother. She had to start with the day she didn’t want to remember, because, before that, the pieces were too small to make anything out of. That day, her mother dropped her rag and sank into the brown armchair under the lamp while Grace stood beside her, perplexed. The floor was not half-finished. “Grace,” her mother said, “come and have a little rest with me.” Grace hesitated, then laid her rag down and climbed onto her mother’s lap. The room smelled of oranges from the wax.

  “Will you tell me a story?” Grace asked.

  Her mother said, “First I must sit, Grace.”

  “I must sit too,” Grace said, and laid her head upon her mother’s shoulder. Her mother tucked her arms around Grace’s middle, and they listened to the drip and fall of rain outside. Her mother said her ears were too tired to listen to the radio. The sheets they had pulled in this morning before the rain started were still in the basket, and they hadn’t done a thing about dinner, but they stayed in the chair, not shelling peas or knitting, just sitting, until Frank got back from school. Frank was big. He was twelve. He came clanging in, bringing the smell of wet earth, banging his books down. Whe
n he saw them, he went quiet. He shifted from foot to foot, shedding worry. “What’s wrong, Ma?”

  Grace answered for her. “She is tired. She must sit.”

  When their father came home from work, their mother got up to make dinner. “I’m feeling better,” she told Grace. Grace leaned against her mother and breathed in her smell of white soap.

  The next time, her mother stopped in the middle of the washing. “I must sit, just for a moment,” her mother said. “Shall I finish the wash, Ma?” Grace asked, but her mother smiled and said no, Grace was too small to work the wringer. In the front room, they sat on the sofa and watched the light grow bright and then dim on the polished floor. “I must get up,” her mother said, but she did not move.

  When Frank came home, he squeezed the laundry through the wringer and emptied the machine. “Ma is not well,” he told Grace. “You have to help with dinner.”

  Grace said, “I have to sit with Ma.”

  So Frank peeled the potatoes and fried onions and bacon and set the table, and Grace and her mother sat in the front room under the lamp until it was time to eat. Sometimes Grace opened her mother’s button box, a little red tin trunk with yellow trim, and they looked together. Grace’s favourite was the bride button, a pink pearl set in a silver curlicue. The large navy button with the gold satin centre was the groom. After buttons, they played hands: Grace’s fingers were the animals or the birds, hopping over the hills of her mother’s palms, looking for a warm, soft place to sleep. Grace had clever hands, her mother said. They were good at threading needles and lacing boots and fitting the coffee pot back together after her mother had washed all the pieces.

  Her mother’s hands were not working properly. They broke a teacup, a plate, a jar. Sometimes they could not hold the scrub brush to clean the pots or the wooden spoon to beat eggs. She had to sit earlier and earlier in the day, and her legs ached and twitched. She didn’t want to read or listen to the radio or sing “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” She just wanted to sit. In the garden, weeds were choking the tomatoes and the berries rotted on their vines.

  One Saturday morning, her mother did not get up. In the front room, Grace traced pictures in the dust on the claw-footed table while the doctor talked to her mother upstairs. She drew a mother bird and a baby bird in their nest. The wind lifted the nest from its bough and drifted it down to the cool, green creek, where the water carried it swiftly away. Inside the nest, the mother bird put her wing over the baby bird, and they watched the waves and waved at the fish. When they got hungry, they paddled the nest to shore and ate berries and drank water from leaf cups. Then they got back into their nest and floated downstream again.

  The doctor came down and talked to Grace’s father in the kitchen with the door closed, and when the doctor left, her father called for Frank. Later, Frank called for Grace. “You know that Ma is sick, Grace. That’s why you didn’t start school this year. We all have to help. I’ll make breakfast in the morning and you wash the dishes. You’re six now, you’re old enough to do that.”

  But after Frank had left for school, her mother said, “Leave the dishes for now, Grace. Come and do my hair.” They sat in front of the oak dresser that held an oval mirror between its two curved arms, and Grace brushed her mother’s hair, lifting the dark waves to her face. Her mother’s hair smelled different from her skin—it smelled like lemon tea.

  The doctor brought oranges. No one was to have them except her mother. After they woke from their afternoon sleep, Grace peeled an orange and broke it into segments on the plate. Her mother said, “I can’t eat it all, Grace. You take half.” In the afternoons, they ate orange pieces and rested until Frank came home.

  In the mornings, Frank muttered and moped in the doorway of the bedroom. In the evenings, he called out, “Ma? I’m home now,” and pushed Grace aside on the bed. “He’s mussing the covers,” Grace complained, but her mother said, “Shh, Grace, let him sit.” She put her arms around them and called them her Two Peas because they looked so much alike, with thick reddish-brown hair springing from broad foreheads and the same sharp little chins. Grace was always glad when the other pea left the pod to do his homework.

  On Wednesday afternoons, Mrs. Davies brought loaves of bread and a rhubarb pie. Her mother said, “Grace, go downstairs and play. I want to talk to Mrs. Davies.”

  Grace pounded down the stairs, then crept silently back up to sit outside the bedroom door. She liked the pie, but why couldn’t Mrs. Davies leave it in the kitchen and go home straight away? There was no need to come upstairs and disturb her mother, who needed to rest.

  “You see how my legs are now,” her mother was saying.

  Mrs. Davies said, “Oh, Florence. But you know, they say people can live years with it.”

  When Mrs. Davies left, Grace said, “Ma, do you want a glass of water? Some bread and butter?”

  Her mother shook her head. She only wanted Grace to sit with her. Her mother’s arms were heavy now, even though they had grown thin, and she could not lift them to hug Grace, so Grace put her arms around her mother and laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and said, “Shall I tell you where the mother bird and the baby bird went in their nest today?” Her mother nodded and closed her eyes.

  Frank scolded her. “What do you do all day? Why don’t you help?”

  Grace said, “I do help.”

  Frank said, “Pa’s at work, I’m at school. I can’t do everything around here.”

  But he did. He made breakfast and supper. He washed the dishes and weeded the garden. He washed the clothes and tried to make Grace hang them to dry. She said she would and then slipped upstairs to sit beside her mother, who was asleep.

  Frank said, “Pa, Grace won’t listen to me. She’s big enough to help a little bit, isn’t she?”

  In the kitchen, her father answered quietly. Grace could not hear the words, but he must have said, Frank, let her be, because after that, Frank let her be.

  It was the Creeping Paralysis, Frank told her. Some people could live years with it. Her mother lived two. Violet, a fat young woman with a face like pudding, came during the day to wash Grace’s mother and change the sheets and feed her spoonfuls of custard and soft-boiled egg. Violet told Grace to get out from underfoot. She closed the bedroom door when Grace’s mother was sleeping so that Grace wouldn’t wake her. She cut Grace’s mother’s hair into an ugly bob, and then she cut the bob into something worse. “It’ll be easier this way,” Violet said, dumping the dustpan of dark feathers and curls into the compost pile.

  In the end, her mother could not lift her head or speak. She had been turned to stone. But her eyes were not stone. They followed Grace everywhere and talked to her. Her eyes said all the things her voice had once said, before her throat had turned to stone: Grace, how I love you. You are the dearest girl in the world to me. I wanted a daughter so badly after three boys. After Eddie and Joey went up to Heaven, they sent you down to me.

  Her eyes said, Grace, tell me that story of the mother bird and her baby. Have they got all the way to the sea? Grace curled up at her mother’s side. The mother bird and baby bird were not yet at the sea. They had stopped on the riverbank, and some kindly beavers gave them tea and filled their nest cupboard with chokecherries and nuts.

  Violet threw out the chokecherries and little black seeds. “Don’t bring a mess in here,” she said. She threw out the daisies Grace had picked. “They were dead,” Violet said when Grace scowled and sulked. Grace asked her mother, “Does everything die?” and her mother’s eyes said, Yes. All things: birds and bugs and plants and people. “Why does everything die?” Grace asked. Her mother’s eyes said, I don’t know, and filled with tears.

  One morning a terrible sound woke her. Her father was standing outside, in the cucumber bed, choking, she thought, and then she realized: crying.

  On Sundays, she went with Frank to the graveyard to see the stone with her mother’s name: Florence Alice Turner, 1890–1930. Joey and Eddie’s stone was there too: Jose
ph William Turner, 1911–1918; Edward Albert Turner, 1912–1918. They had died of the flu. Frank told Grace, “Now Eddie and Joey have Ma to look after them. They’re all in Heaven together.”

  “Why don’t we all go to Heaven?” Grace asked, but Frank said, “Hush! Don’t talk like that, Gracie.”

  To get to the graveyard, they had to walk up their lane, past the Cherniak farm with its fields of mournful black and white cows, to the wide road and down to the church. Frank said, “If you aren’t good, Grace, I won’t take you,” because Grace had been acting up. Throwing tantrums, refusing to eat and worse: she had taken the scissors and cut the leaves off all the plants in the front room. She had cut off her own hair in jagged strips. And worse than worse: she had taken the photograph down from the wall and cut out her mother’s face so she could have it with her all the time. “Leave her,” their father said when Frank said she must be punished. Their father went downstairs to the cellar, where he sat in the dark. Frank said, “Grace, I won’t take you on Sunday.”

  Grace cried, and after that she became sick. Her head hurt and she threw up. A rash bloomed along her face and neck. Her teeth chattered, she could not breathe, and her hair was wet with sweat. The doctor said she was hysterical. They were to ignore her. She would snap out of it.

  When the doctor left, Grace ran upstairs to her mother’s room, with its bed neatly made. She ran downstairs to the front room, where the floor no longer gleamed with polish. Her shoes hammered up the stairs and pounded down the hall, and the horrible noise filled her ears. Frank said, “Stop it, Grace!” but she could not stop. There was a motor and she was caught inside it; the teeth of the gears were chewing through her arms and legs.