Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa

  “But why were you in detention in the first place?” she’d cried. (Spitballs, but he wasn’t going to tell her that now.) “Why do you always have to act up?”

  The truth was, the ideas just came to him, he didn’t know from where, in flashes, all joy and bedazzlement, burning away that queasy, uneasy feeling he had so much of the time. Working on a piece made him feel sharp and bright, like when you brush against the radio and the thin film of static you hadn’t even noticed disappears. “I guess it’s in my blood,” he told her, which made her mad as hornets.

  Some of his pieces still needed practice, but the light bulb trick was perfect. Last year he’d made five dollars at the church social. How it worked: you stood at an open second- or third-storey window looking reflective, and then you said, like it had just come to you, “You know, I’ll bet I can drop a light bulb out of this window in such a way that it will hit the pavement and not break.”

  “Sure, if you wrapped it in a pillow,” someone would say. “And it landed on a mattress.”

  “No, I mean a naked bulb. There’s a way of holding it so that when you drop it, when it hits the pavement, it doesn’t break.”

  After the jeers and snorts, you narrowed your eyes and said, “Uh … anyone care to bet?”

  That afternoon, Wharton had stepped forward right away, bet ten and unscrewed the bulb from the cloakroom himself. Everyone else went silent, and Dean felt their faith waver. He should have known right then and there that something was up. No one would bet ten bucks straight away like that.

  Dean held the end of the bulb with his thumb and forefinger. “This is the trick,” he told the crowd. “It’s all in the grip. This way, the wind currents act as a buffer.” He licked a finger and held it up, frowning as he calculated. This was the part he loved: when the tide began to turn, waves of disbelief curling helplessly against the incoming current of desire. Their doubt was drowning in their hope, their longing for a story they could take away with them: guess what Dean Turner did today.

  He shook his head and asked for something to practise with, a pencil, a comb. They watched the comb fall and bounce, and that was the signal for Dave Stanghetta downstairs, pressed against the wall with his baseball glove, to get ready to catch the bulb, hold it half an inch from the pavement and let it drop with the smallest clatter.

  But Wharton must have heard about it from someone. He sent his goons to waylay Dave, and upstairs, they all listened to the bulb explode on the frozen concrete below.

  It wasn’t the money that got to him; it was the wave of disappointment that went through his crowd. They had believed, and nothing had come of it. Dean Turner had collected their hopes and tossed them out a window.

  And now he was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling like an idiot while his pounding ticked ever closer. He leapt up. Options: attic or the parental bedroom. Nothing in the attic except old furniture and the Christmas decorations, plus it was always freezing up there. Their room was his best bet; he was certain they had money socked away. They would miss it, of course—Dean would bet ten bucks that every single penny in this house was accounted for, including the eighty-two cents he had just scrounged up—but he’d worry about that later. He fetched his flashlight from his bedside table.

  He’d been through their room countless times before, not always looking for money, just looking, and he knew the smells by heart. The wooden trunk at the foot of the bed exhaled a cheerful whiff of forest, followed by the stench of mothballs. Nothing in there except the good linens and knitted baby hats and boots threaded with green ribbon. His mother must have put them away for the next baby, but no baby had ever materialized. Once he’d asked for a brother for Christmas—an older brother; he thought you ordered them from the catalogue—and his mother got something caught in her throat and left the table, and his father told him angrily to hush with that kind of talk. They were embarrassed, he thought, at the possibility of having to explain the facts of life to him—or the impossibility, given their use of directions to refer to body parts (down there, backside). He replaced the baby things and started in on the closet (more mothballs, laced with lavender).

  Behind his mother’s Sunday dresses and his father’s one good suit, against the back wall, were the hat boxes and shoeboxes containing receipts and sewing patterns. He ran the beam of light over the shelves, wondering what he could turn a pounding into that people would be talking about years from now.

  Nothing came to him, but he saw, for the first time, that the wall under the last shelf was a different shade of plywood. His heart sped up. He knocked against it. Hello? He yanked the plywood away and aimed his flashlight into the dark. Metal glinted back. Hello!

  It was an ordinary tool box, except it was locked, which was a good sign—actually, it was great, because a lock could only mean money. Not only that, but it was a puny little lock, easily snapped off. And not only that, but having just searched the house, he knew where there was another lock just like it. He flew down to the kitchen and then back up with a pair of pliers and the lock’s twin brother. You want your ten bucks, Wharton, you’ll get your ten bucks.

  Smiling at how easily the lock yielded, he threw open the lid. Spit filled his mouth. Nothing! A bunch of papers. He pawed through them angrily. Not a dollar, not a single goddamn dime. What the hell was so important that it had to be locked up? Bank statements, his parents’ wedding certificate. The deed to the house. Maybe he could pay Wharton with that. Here you go, Wharton. Keep the change.

  A faded photograph of his mother, younger and thinner, with her hair in a bun, and some other woman with short hair, in front of the rose bushes out front, holding a baby between them. He turned it over, but the back was blank. A yellow envelope with a card inside from the Province of Ontario. Certificate of Birth. Required Surname: Turner. Registered Given Name: Daniel. Mother: Grace Turner. Who was Grace Turner? Some relative he’d never heard of. Father: Not Given. He knew what that meant. Poor kid was a bastard. No wonder he was locked up.

  From the bottom of the box, he lifted out a brown folder. Inside was a long, cream-coloured paper with heavy black print. He saw the title at the top of the page, with its ornate, curling A, and his name typed in plain letters at the bottom. He tried to read the document, every hereby and wherefore and on this day, but it made no sense. His ankles gave out under him and he sat down hard on the wooden floor.

  Downstairs, the back door opened. His mother. He threw the papers back into the box and snapped the lock into place. He had barely made it to his room when she called up the stairs. “What are you doing up there, Dean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, you should be doing your homework. I’m going to start dinner.”

  “Okay.”

  He actually took out his science textbook and stared at the blur of black lines. His chest was an iron-banded barrel. He couldn’t count how many times he’d been through that closet. How many times he’d been within a foot of that metal box. So that was what I was looking for all along.

  The plan was to wait until after dinner, until they were sitting in the front room, his father reading the paper, his mother knitting. Either after dinner or never, he told himself, but he couldn’t eat. He sat watching them butter their bread and pass the potatoes and chew their food. His mother’s light brown hair, freshly set in pincurls, gleamed in the yellow light. She was telling his father that Mrs. May’s sister-in-law was actually related to them, because she was a Butler and the Butlers and the Turners were related.

  Dean’s father helped himself to another pork chop. “What are you waiting for, Dean? Your dinner is getting cold.”

  Dean squeezed his hands into fists in his lap.

  His father said, “Are you sick?”

  His mother said, “Are you in trouble?”

  Dean said, “Am I adopted?”

  For a moment, all he could hear was a storm of blood, whirling and rushing in his ears. Then a clatter of cutlery. “What on earth!” his father exclaimed, and his
mother cried out, “What kind of talk is that?”

  He kept his eyes on his plate and took shallow breaths through his mouth. The blue clock above the sink tapped out the seconds. The refrigerator hummed. He would wait all night if he had to.

  When he looked up, he realized: they were waiting for his answer.

  What kind of talk is that.

  Oh, he could tell them: it was the talk of the metal box at the back of the closet, the talk of a flashlight in the dark and a twisted-off lock. It was the typed and signed certificate talk: hereby, wherefore. He could tell them, but he would not. The whole thing had gotten turned around: he should be the one with his arms folded and his mouth set in a straight line and sparks shooting out of his eyes; they should be the ones with sore throats and cold, wet hands, their limbs weighed down by thick, dark dread.

  He gave them another chance. “Am I?”

  “Of course not,” his mother said. “What put that idea into your head?”

  Whereby, on this day, I saw my name filled in.

  If he said it, he could never take it back. But if he didn’t say it, it could still be untrue, and everything could be sorted out. He swallowed hard. “The teacher was talking about it at school today. A kid in my class was adopted.”

  They looked so relieved, he wanted to cry.

  “Well, you most certainly are not,” his mother said.

  His father picked up his knife and fork.

  “Eat your dinner, Dean,” his mother said.

  “Do as your mother says,” his father said.

  Your dinner. Your mother. Everything looked the same—the red and white tablecloth, the blue-faced clock against the yellow wall, his mother and his father in their places—and yet he was seeing it all for the first time. He was sitting at the table, but he was also watching himself from somewhere else, crouched in dark, tangled underbrush, the wind howling all around him.

  Dean picked up his fork and began to shovel potatoes into his mouth. “I need ten dollars by next Friday,” he said. He did not look at either of them. “I made the hockey team, and I have to buy all the equipment.”

  HALLUCINATIONS

  He had to wait until they went to church without him on Sunday morning. He had to say he was sick on Saturday night. Not that it was difficult to convince them. He had hardly touched his food all week. He could see them looking at each other. They were still wondering. Who at school did you say was adopted, Dean?

  New kid. Name of Macowski. You don’t know him.

  They were going to take him to Dr. McCabe if he wasn’t back to himself by Monday morning.

  Back to himself. Now, what self would that be?

  He heard the sound of the car engine fade, but he didn’t move for twenty minutes. It was hard to drag himself out of bed. He banged his knee on the edge of the oak dresser, then just stood there, staring at himself in the oval mirror. It couldn’t be true. He looked like his father. They had the same dark hair, the same cowlick. When he smiled, he had a dimple, one of his mother’s two. And anyway, something like that could not have been kept from him for fourteen years. There would have been signs, clues. He would have known.

  He’d made a mistake, he’d read it wrong, he wasn’t thinking straight.

  He just needed to go back into the closet and open the box and see those papers again to make sure.

  Inside the closet, he pushed his way through the clothes and knelt on the floor, pulling aside the plywood panel and aiming his flashlight into the darkness. The beam cut straight through to the cement wall.

  The box was gone.

  He sat on his heels.

  Now what?

  He didn’t know what. His brain was frozen. The spaces between things seemed distorted, like in a nightmare. A daymare. Maybe he had hallucinated the whole thing. Maybe he had been so worked up over the light bulb fiasco that his brain had cooked up this story, a little mental abracadabra, to distract him. Poor guy, his brain thought. He doesn’t realize there are worse things in the world. Being blown to smithereens by the A-bomb, say. Getting rabies. Being adopted.

  And it had worked beautifully too, thank you very much, brain of Dean Turner. He didn’t give a goddamn straw about Wharton now.

  He felt a small surge of hope. It was one possibility.

  The other possibility: they had moved the box.

  “Bastards,” he whispered fiercely.

  The box was gone, and he knew it was gone, but he couldn’t stop looking for it. He passed his hand through the empty space; he knocked on walls and banged on shelves. Coats fell off their hangers; a shoebox fell, spilling receipts. Bastards, bastards. They would be home soon and would find him here among the coat hangers. The criminal always returns to the scene of his crime. His father had told him that. Except he might not be my father. Dean shivered. What if his real father was a bank robber who cracked safes for a living, and that’s why Dean found it so easy to break into locked boxes? What if what he got from his father was not a cowlick but bad blood?

  He stuffed handfuls of receipts back into the shoebox and yanked the coats back onto their hangers. Everything was crooked. He didn’t care. A black fury had risen in him. He choked on tears and spit and unzipped his fly and pissed into the back of the closet.

  Back in his bed, he fell asleep and had strange dreams: feverish dreams in which ball bearings rolled through his head and his limbs turned to grey rock with lichen growing on them. He surfaced from one dream into another, aware of the watery afternoon light through his eyelids. He must be sick: his mother never allowed him to sleep during the day. He twisted in the sheets and his body turned into a long creek, curling through the fields and murmuring to itself. Fish flickered deep in his veins.

  He woke when his mother called him for dinner. “You look better, Dean,” she said when he came downstairs. He expected it to be dark outside, but it was still afternoon; they ate early on Sunday. The whole house smelled of roasted chicken. “Do you feel better?” She laid a cool hand on his forehead. He felt hollowed out. He ate two servings of buttery chicken and mashed potatoes in pools of golden gravy. It was Sunday dessert as usual, apple pie and praises to the Walinski boy: parents lacked the proverbial pot but boy studied every night in a broom closet, put himself through law school, and look where he was today.

  “A lawyer,” his father said, “with a big house in the east end.”

  The familiarity was almost comforting.

  After dinner, he announced he was going for a walk. His mother protested, but his father said the fresh air would do him good. Outside, night was summoning itself under the branches of the apple trees. He headed to the creek, inching down the snowy bank to the ice. This had been his domain since he’d caught his first fish, at age six, standing on this same flat rock, with a rod he’d made himself. Now he had a proper rod, and since his birthday last year, a Mitchell reel (he had almost cried to see the glossy red box sitting on his breakfast plate, the exact model he had asked for instead of the flimsy approximation he had expected); he was down here every day in the summer, and even under snow, he knew every turn in the creek, every secret stone and hollow.

  He stepped out onto the ice. It creaked, protesting his weight, but he knew it would hold. Above him, the lights of the house blazed against the darkening sky. He trudged down the frozen, snow-covered creek, listening to the rhythm of his boots and his breath, past the first bend, the fallen log, the wide turn, the narrows. By the time he got to the white pine that leaned out over his favourite fishing hole, an old, waxy moon was rising. It threw down enough light for him to keep going, but back at the house, he knew, they would be starting to worry.

  Would they be so worried if he were not their kid? Would his father buy expensive Mitchell reels for someone else’s kid? Would his mother make butter tarts just because they were his favourite if she didn’t have to?

  The thing was, he had no actual proof, beyond what he had seen by flashlight, in a closet, in a hurry, and what he had seen was like a dream fragment now
: it shifted out of sight whenever he tried to look directly at it. And people did hallucinate, staggering around the desert or on the battlefield. He had done it himself: once, a bat hanging from the beam in his room had resolved itself into a sock; another time, rehearsing pennies from heaven in the attic, he thought he saw a ghost. Now he could add the time he thought he was adopted.

  It made sense. Or it made more sense than being adopted and then lied to for fourteen years. Because it wouldn’t just be the am-I-adopted, no-you-are-not lie. It would also be the how-we-named-you lie (his father wanted to call him James, but his mother had her heart set on Dean), and the you-have-your-father’s-cowlick lie. Every day would have been a lie, and they just weren’t the kind of people who could pull that off. Plus, he had seen his birth certificate. Dean Turner. Born April 1944 in the city of Sault Ste. Marie. You couldn’t make a birth certificate lie.

  There had been other papers in that box, and he hadn’t looked at them properly. He had been stunned, cold with shock, stupid with fear—there was no word for what he had been. But those papers probably explained the whole thing. He had a cousin somewhere who was adopted. Big deal.

  Standing under a fringe of white pine, he rubbed his gloved hands and stamped his feet and huffed, waiting for the clouds to open and release the moon. This was his own fault. Had he not been showing off with the light bulb trick, he never would have found the box in the first place. His parents were right: he needed to settle down, stop acting up, be more like the Walinski boy.

  It was either that or go home and tell them he had opened the box.

  He turned back and trudged home through the darkness. It was time to turn over a new leaf.

  OPERATION NEW LEAF

  He got off to a good start, waking before his mother called him, and in the hour before breakfast, he actually studied for a history test. This earned him a 94 and a trip to the principal’s office, courtesy of Father Croce, on charges of cheating, but Father Dougherty merely asked him a few questions on Roman history and released him, satisfied. It was insulting but also kind of amusing to watch Croce twist himself into a muttering fury (“Studied, my ass!”), trying to figure out how Dean had done it. That evening he cleaned his room and took out the garbage without being told, and asked his father to bring home some iron ore from the plant so he could start his science project (“The Making of Steel”), even though it wasn’t due until April.