Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa

“That’s one of the few things she brought from home. It was her mother’s Bible.”

  “All right.”

  “Vera has had a hard life,” Frank said. “Her father drank up everything. They were quite well off, but he just drank it all away. She doesn’t mean to be hard on you, and truth be told, Grace, you should be helping her. You can’t spend your whole life with your head in the clouds. And I don’t like being in the middle. Hand me that board.”

  Grace stood in the middle of the room, where it was dark and cool. Up here, she knew, the bliss would be very strong. She might not have to come back at all. “I like it up here,” she told Frank.

  Frank sighed. “You would.” He stood back to survey the wall. “Well, this’ll be done soon.”

  But the house would never be done, Grace knew, because work begat work, just as fathers begat sons. That was a word she’d learned from the Bible.

  At night, the bliss came briefly and departed. Grace pressed her hands against her stomach. This was how it had been since the sickness started: the bliss gleamed in the darkness and died out, doused by a sudden thirst or twinges in her gut, or else she simply fell asleep and was woken at dawn by the mounting nausea.

  Today, when she awoke, the room was brighter than usual, and she had no time to think of her mother or anything else before she threw back the blankets and raced out. Her stomach was empty, but it still churned up bile. She wiped her face on her sleeve and stepped out of the outhouse, only to come face to face with Vera in her white nightgown, her hair spilling over her shoulders. “Every morning!” Vera cried. “Every morning! Did you think I wouldn’t know? You—you whore!” She slapped Grace, a full, resounding smack. Then her hands flew up to her own cheeks, as if she herself had been struck. Her fingers clutched at her face, pulling it apart like dough; her mouth opened like a tear, and she wailed. The sound scattered the birds out of the apple tree and brought Frank out of the house, his face slack with fear. It was the worst sound Grace had ever heard in her life.

  THE BABY

  Vera called Grace for lunch. The whole morning had come flying apart. Vera had wept, Frank had shouted, Grace had thrown up again. The kettle boiled dry, there was no breakfast, and Frank was late for work. Grace went upstairs to sleep.

  Downstairs, the day seemed to have knit itself back together. The clock above the sink chipped quietly away at time. On the table was a bowl of tomato soup and a plate of bread and cheese. Vera’s hair was coiled into a bun at the back of her head, and her skin was milk clean. She folded tea towels while Grace ate.

  “Grace, you need to tell us who it is.” She cleared her throat. “The father.”

  Grace stared at her soup. Three months ago, she had been stretched out in the long grass beside the creek because the bliss was coming, and when she’d opened her eyes, he was waiting there, and that was the last time she had seen him.

  The first time, it had been early spring, and when he found her by the creek, he frowned. “What are you doing down here?” he wanted to know.

  She said, “I’m just sitting.”

  “Why don’t you sit up in your garden?”

  “I like it here.”

  “Why?”

  She wished he would go away. Soon Vera would start calling for her, and she would have to go up and sweep the walkway. But he seemed to take her silence as an invitation to sit down and keep talking. When she finally stood up to go, he said, “Nice talking with you, Grace,” even though she had said hardly a word.

  After that, he seemed to find her almost every time she went down to the creek, and she didn’t mind his talking because, unlike Vera, he didn’t seem to expect answers; he didn’t tell her to get her head out of the clouds, and sometimes she even found herself listening to what he said. His brother had gone to town to work at the plant, and his sisters had moved away when they married, and even though he did everything he could, his parents were old and the farm was still falling to pieces, and he didn’t know why he bothered. He looked over at her and she found herself saying, “There’s no profit under the sun.” He nodded and said, “No profit whatsoever. Sell the whole thing, I keep telling them. Move to town. I’ll get a job at the plant.” But his parents wouldn’t agree; they had put their lifeblood into the farm.

  The last time she saw him, he looked worried, two small lines between his eyebrows and a pucker in his lip. “You shouldn’t be sleeping out here, Grace,” he said. His dark blue eyes looked sad. “I told you that before.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” she said.

  “Well, resting, then. You should rest at home.”

  She smiled at him. He reached out and put a hand on her knee. It was heavy and warm, and she shivered. The bliss always left her cold. He licked his lips. “Go home now.”

  She said, “I don’t want to go home.”

  “Well, you better go home anyway.”

  Under the hem of her dress, his thumb stroked the bare skin around her knee. “Please, Grace,” he said. “Go home.” He closed his eyes and took his hand back. The veins in his neck were like chords.

  She sat up. His eyes flew open and relief spilled out of them. “That’s—no. No, Gracie, don’t.” She was pulling up the skirt of her dress. “Touch me there,” she said. “Like last time.” Last time, he had covered her with his fingers, stroking her edges slowly and softly until she melted in his hands. “I liked it so much,” she told him. It was different from the cold white castle of bliss. She had gone into ripples and the ripples grew into waves and the waves carried her across a dark, sparkling sea and left her, panting and hot, on the ordinary earth.

  “We shouldn’t,” he said. He looked so miserable, she thought he might cry. “It’s not right.”

  “Who says?”

  “Well, the Bible, for one thing,” he said.

  Grace shook her head. “I looked in the Bible and I couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  “It’s there, all right,” he said glumly.

  “One more time,” she said.

  “Then why don’t we get married?”

  He had asked her that last time: “Marry me. The farm will be mine. I can look after you.” She had seen his mother at church, the hard line of her mouth under a black bonnet, and his father, thin as a wire. She knew the grim house, tarpapered, with slits for windows, and the chicken coop and splintering barn and falling-down sheds and leaning fence and the fields across which the wind whirled in its circuits. She could see all the work that would have to be done; it would run through the days the way rivers ran down to the sea, carrying them all along with it. She shook her head.

  “Well, if you won’t marry me, I’ll sign up,” he said. He had also said that last time. Grace didn’t see what one thing had to do with the other. “Don’t you care that I might be killed?”

  “Please, John. This one time.” She lifted his hand and put it back on her knee. “I’ll never ask you again.”

  And sometime after that, she began to wake up sick before it was light.

  Vera stood up abruptly and began to wipe down the counter-tops. “Now you listen to me, Grace. Get your head out of the clouds and pay attention. This is important. First we have to know who took advantage of you.” She scrubbed at a shadow on the wall. “If someone has hurt you—”

  “No,” Grace said. “It wasn’t like that. I wanted to.”

  At the sink, Vera’s face turned strawberry pink, and her hands were blurry and furious under the stream of water. “Well, it’s all right, then. It’s all right if you have a fellow. Tell us who he is. Frank’ll go and talk to him.”

  Grace set down her spoon. Talk to him and say what?

  “You can get married in the next week or so, and no one will know. Lots of babies come early.”

  “Get married?”

  Vera turned off the tap and stared at her. “Grace, don’t you understand that you’re going to have a baby?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to get married.”

  Vera threw her hands up in the air, aghast. �
�But you can’t have a baby without a husband! You don’t … Grace, you can’t … What will people say?”

  As far as Grace could see, people would say the same senseless things they always said. She didn’t care what people said. But Vera cared. Vera was beside herself. Vera said she would not have Grace under her roof. They had done their best, and this was how Grace repaid them, bringing shame down upon them all. If she was not going to put it right, she would have to pack her bags and go.

  Grace looked up. This was an interesting idea. “Go where?”

  “Exactly!” Vera slapped the table. “Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know,” Grace said, bewildered.

  Vera sent her out of the kitchen. That evening, Grace listened to the rise and fall of voices downstairs. Vera said Frank had to make her tell. He had to make them marry. Grace closed her eyes. John had signed up and shipped out already, but maybe they could make him come back and marry her. They could not, however, make her tell his name—that much she knew.

  Then Frank said she could not stay. He said he had not looked after her properly after their mother had died. They would send her down to the nuns in Toronto or Windsor who had places for girls in trouble. She wouldn’t be the first one to go down and she wouldn’t be the last. The nuns would find a home for the baby, and maybe Grace would end up staying down there. She wasn’t a bad girl. And when he thought about it, maybe the convent was the right place for her.

  Grace turned over onto her side and squeezed her eyes shut to hold down the surging tears. She didn’t want to go live with nuns in Windsor. She didn’t want to have a baby. She tried to think of what she did want, but the only thing she was sure of, she knew she couldn’t have. In this world, you weren’t allowed to sit quietly and think your thoughts all day. You had to get up in the morning and straight away start working, and every piece of work you did just made more work until you were dead and laid to rest in the ground, asleep under the earth. Dust to dust.

  Downstairs, Vera was quiet. Then she said, “Maybe we should let her stay here. We can take care of the baby. Everyone will know anyway. It’s the first thing they say when a girl goes away. And there’s no telling what kind of home they’ll find for the baby, or even if they’ll find one. Sometimes they can’t.”

  Frank said, “That’s true.”

  Grace curled herself around the pillow and fell asleep.

  In the morning, Vera made Grace take a bath and laid out one of her own outfits, a dark green skirt and plain white blouse. “We’re going to town,” she said. Grace’s limbs were heavy and stiff, and town made her more tired than anything, but it was easier to just do what Vera said. The bus let them off in front of Dr. McCabe’s stone house with potted plants on the veranda. Dr. McCabe had iron grey hair and a heavy moustache. He called Grace to come in and said, “Well, young lady, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  What an odd question, Grace thought.

  “You’re in trouble, your sister-in-law tells me.”

  “No,” Grace said. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  “That’s what I said. I hope you realize what your brother and sister-in-law are doing for you. There aren’t many who would do it, believe you me.”

  Vera helped her undress, and Dr. McCabe pressed her stomach and her breasts and listened with his stethoscope. He spoke over her to Vera, asking about Grace’s eating and sleeping habits, telling Vera that Grace seemed healthy enough and the baby would come in March or April. Vera helped her dress, repeating what the doctor had just said. “He says you’re fine. The baby will come in the spring.”

  On the way home, they stopped at Friedman’s for yarn and cloth. There were hats and sweaters and blankets to be knit, Vera said, and diapers and towels and flannel sheets to be cut. As soon as Frank finished the attic room, he would make a cradle for the baby. Grace plodded behind Vera, wishing she could lie down at the side of the road just for a moment. When they got home, Vera surprised her by telling her to sit and rest. “You have to take care of yourself, Grace,” she said.

  Grace sat and rested throughout the autumn and the winter. She thought about pieces of white stone, broken into smaller and smaller pieces; she thought about a tree, adding and subtracting roots and bark and leaves, but never finding when exactly a tree started being a tree; she thought about a spoon being dropped, the clatter, the fading of sound into silence. All these things before would have brought on the bliss, but now they left her unmoved. Sitting in the chair or lying on the bed, she remained solid. The bliss had left her completely.

  Vera gave her small things to do: a shirt to mend, a scarf to unravel for wool. She said Grace did good handiwork when she put her mind to it. Vera did the big things herself, the cooking and cleaning and doing down of beets and apple jelly, and she never complained now to Frank that Grace did not help, and in the evenings, she sewed and knitted for the baby: a white jacket, hat and booties, laced through with green satin ribbon; a stack of flannel diapers. She held them up briefly for Grace to see, and then wrapped them in tissue paper and took them upstairs to her room. When she came back from town, she had things from her sister: bottles and rubber nipples, a cup with a lid, three extremely small spoons. “Doll spoons,” marvelled Grace, but Vera said, “Don’t play with those. They’re for the baby.”

  She also had pamphlets from Mrs. McCabe, which she sometimes read aloud, about the scientific method, with schedules and discipline and toilet training. “Because otherwise, you spoil the baby,” she said, “and I don’t know how many times poor Mrs. McCabe has had to deal with the results. Feebleminded children, juvenile delinquents, you name it.”

  Grace fell asleep in the rocking chair and often woke up to the smell of cinnamon. “You have to eat,” Vera said, bringing in a tray with another piece of raisin pie, and if Grace wasn’t hungry, Vera ate it herself. Then she ate the rest of the pie, one sliver at a time, and the cinnamon rolls as well. Sometimes, they both fell asleep in the afternoon and Frank woke them when he came in. Under Vera’s cinnamon freckles, her face glowed and grew rounder. She sewed a wide smock for Grace and let out her own clothes. “You look like you’re going to have a baby too,” Grace said, when Vera put on her loosened skirt.

  “Don’t be silly,” Vera said. “I’ve just put on a little weight.” But she pressed her hands against her thickened waist.

  In March, there was a little thaw, and Grace’s hands and feet grew puffy. She flailed in bed like a flipped-over bug and finally rigged a belt to the dresser so she could hoist herself up. She woke up one morning with a single sharp pain, and by the end of the day, Dr. McCabe was there. Vera held her hand while Grace writhed. She had no idea how long it lasted. In a way, it was like the bliss: the self dissolved, not into a marble castle, but into a dark place of pain. The pain was thick and solid, with streaks of darker pain. There was no room for thought. Time stopped completely and only started again when Vera sat her up and told her the baby was coming. “Push now, Grace,” she said, and a wave towered over her and came crashing down, and at the end of the wave, she pushed and was torn open.

  Vera said, “It’s a boy! Oh Grace, it’s a beautiful boy!” The doctor spoke, but she couldn’t hear him properly. Her face and hair and nightgown were soaked, and she was freezing. She had to push again, and then it was over. Vera pulled her out of the tangle of sheets and stripped off her wet nightgown. Grace shivered and tried to stop sobbing. “It’s all right now, Grace. It’s finished. The baby’s fine. He’s with the doctor,” Vera said, buttoning Grace into an old flannel shirt. She stripped the bed and remade it. “You sleep now,” she said, and guided Grace back to bed. Grace felt blankets being piled on top of her, and she closed her eyes and fell straight into darkness.

  Hardly any time later, Vera woke her. She put a loaf of bread wrapped in a white towel into Grace’s arms. The bread was still warm from the oven. “He needs to be fed,” Vera said, and Grace looked down, bleary-eyed. It was the baby. It had dark golden hair and a red, furrowed
face, and it moved its head back and forth, mewling. “For heaven’s sake, Grace, you have to—here, like this.” Vera unbuttoned the flannel shirt and pushed Grace’s nipple into the baby’s mouth. Grace gasped when the mouth closed in on her. For such a small thing, it had a fierce hunger. When the baby finished, Vera lifted it out of her arms and told her to go back to sleep.

  The sound of crying pinched her awake some time later. Vera was in the doorway. “Wake up, Grace.” She waited until Grace was sitting up. “Hold his head properly.” Grace moved her arm under its head. Its eyes were closed, but it sucked ferociously for a long time. Vera straightened the sheets and refolded the extra blankets. “Frank and I were talking about a name. We were thinking about Daniel.”

  Grace said, “Look.” When she touched the baby’s palm, it seized her finger.

  “So that’s settled, then,” Vera said. “Daniel.”

  Grace tried to pull her finger out of the baby’s fist but could not. She wondered how it knew to hold on like that.

  The baby slept in the cradle in the front room, and Vera brought it upstairs when it cried. Grace fed the baby, and Vera fed Grace. She carried in trays of oatmeal, poached eggs and toast, milky tea and custard. In between feedings, Grace dozed. “I’m run off my feet,” Vera told Frank happily. “But he’s such a good baby!”

  If Vera did not bring the baby right away, the crying made Grace’s heart race; her hands and legs were jangly, and she squirmed and pulled at the bedsheets until Vera brought it, and Grace got her nightgown unbuttoned, and the baby turned its head and latched itself onto her. As soon as the crying stopped, the pins and needles in her limbs disappeared and she could breathe again. Vera said, “I’ll come back and get him when he’s finished.”

  Grace didn’t mind this part. The baby was warm in her arms, and although her nipples had ached and chafed at first, they didn’t anymore. She put her face close to its head and breathed in deeply. It had its own sweet smell under the smell of white soap. When Vera lifted the baby out of her arms, the place where it had been grew quickly cold.