Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa

  He found he could forget the box. Not forget, exactly. But he could live with it. The unanswered question, the questionable answer. He didn’t have to figure it out in order to go to school in the morning, or watch Gunsmoke on Saturday night, or eat hot, gooey butter tarts straight out of the oven, or taste the oily, bitter homemade wine that Dave smuggled out of his father’s garage in a jam jar. He didn’t have to figure it out to ask Rita Vachon to the dance, or to neck with her after. He could walk over it, talk over it. He could skate on top of it. The truth, whatever it was, was lying deep in cold, dark water, with a layer of opaque ice over it. He was up here. Skate, skate, skate. What did he care what was down there?

  The only glitch was that ideas still went off in his head like flares or opened like sudden secret doorways, difficult (impossible) to ignore. He could have just paid Wharton, for example, but in the middle of math class he had an idea so irresistible that he skipped lunch to go to the bank. Back at school, he made a few bets on whether he could infuriate Wharton simply by paying his debt, and then, surrounded by a crowd of whispering, grinning onlookers, he fed ten dollars in nickels through the grille of Wharton’s locker. He found Wharton in the cafeteria. “Hey, Wharton. I left the ten bucks in your locker.”

  Wharton sneered. “How’d you leave it in a locked locker?”

  “Slipped it through the air vent at the top.” He smiled as Wharton lurched to his feet. “Don’t worry,” he called out. “It’s all there. Every last nickel.”

  People said after you could hear Wharton’s roar all through the school.

  That led to another idea, and he spent the next two months getting people to bet on Wharton. He bet he could make Wharton challenge him to a fight and then back down. He bet he could get Wharton accused of stringing a cheesecloth bag full of pennies above the principal’s office and rigging it so the coins dribbled out every time someone went in or out. He worked through George Gerard and Dave Stanghetta, providing the script, coaching them on the exact ratio of audacity to nonchalance. By the end of it, Wharton was looking at Dean with a wary respect, or something close to it, Dean had won back his ten dollars, and Rita Vachon had agreed to go steady with him. All in all, he thought Operation New Leaf was going extremely well.

  Then, just after he turned fifteen, as the creek thawed and black water soaked through the ice, and the snow dissolved, revealing bare yards and mud slicks, he had a series of setbacks. First, he was invited to leave Barb Fox’s house and never return after Mrs. Fox walked in on them on the sun porch while his hands were inside Barb’s shirt. Dean hadn’t known that Mrs. Fox and Mrs. Vachon were sisters, which made Rita and Barb cousins, and although Rita said their kinship had nothing to do with why she never wanted to see him again, he was sure it hadn’t helped. In his misery, he forgot about a history test and Father Croce literally tripped over himself in glee to hand back his failing paper. Father Harrison called his parents to complain that he was creating a disturbance in math class (if you could call throwing your voice a disturbance), and in the course of the conversation, his father found out that Dean hadn’t actually been on the hockey team. His science project, now overdue, was still a bag of rocks.

  He sat in his room, trying to balance a piece of slag on a piece of coal. Downstairs, the good china was piled neatly on the dining table, and the house smelled of almond cake and floor polish. It was Institute Night, which meant he was banished to his room for the evening while the Institute ladies drank tea and yakked downstairs.

  “You’re to go upstairs and stay there,” his mother said crossly before he’d barely taken off his coat.

  “I know,” he said. “Jeez.”

  “I mean it,” she said. Her voice was cold and hard. “None of your acting up.”

  His face grew hot at the memory of it. Before, he had been able to shrug it off, but now he was worn right through. He talked too loudly; he had a one-track mind; he couldn’t settle down; he didn’t apply himself. Everything he did was some class of acting up. Creating a trick that would amaze and amuse? Wearing his hat at an angle? Acting up. Even laughing was acting up! The things he loved best were weeds to be uprooted, or fires to be stamped out. Not only did they not understand him, they didn’t even like him.

  Downstairs, the Institute ladies began to arrive. They’d been coming to the house twice a year for as long as he could remember, making a terrible racket, all talking at once and cackling, and then suddenly hushing: someone had heard so-and-so’s (indistinct) was (inaudible), and someone else had been found with (indecipherable, followed by shocked silence).

  Sometimes he got more of the story when they came upstairs in pairs to use the bathroom. (Mary Beth’s husband was running around on her, Dr. McCabe’s daughter was caught drinking rum at the bootlegger’s). He usually threw open his door to greet them, calling them “Ladies” and bowing gravely. They always fluttered and cooed, and after he had gone back into his room, they’d say to each other, “Gosh, Vera’s boy is getting big. And handsome. A real charmer.” Tonight, he kept his door closed (bowing to the Institute women = acting up), but he could still hear them in the hallway.

  “You should talk to Vera,” one of them said. “She had one.”

  “When did she have hers?”

  “I can tell you the exact date. January 7, 1944. The day she went into the hospital, that was the day we heard my brother lost his leg in France.”

  In his room, Dean tossed the iron ore and slag back into their bag. Once they started in on who lost what limb in which war, there was no chance of hearing anything even faintly interesting.

  “But what should I say?” the first woman was saying as they passed his room. “I can’t just go over and say, ‘Oh, Vera, I hear you had a hysterectomy.’ ”

  “Well, not like that. But—”

  Dean waited until they were all the way downstairs before he pulled the dictionary off the shelf. He knew what it meant. He just wanted to make sure.

  Hysterectomy: surgical removal of the uterus.

  January 7, 1944. Months before he was born.

  Adopted. Even the word was ugly: cutting and gaping. Shame ran through its syllables and dripped out the end. He was that thing. That word meant him.

  This was why he worried them and baffled them and caused them to go about with lined foreheads and pursed lips.

  In his room, he paced. If he thought hard enough, he might remember. The oldest picture in his head: he was on the floor in the living room holding Brownie, the dog in the shoe. He was what, two? Three? Before that, nothing, but no one remembered anything before that. He opened his door and listened—teaspoons clinked against the good china downstairs and a woman said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bess, you’re on my skirt again”—and then he went to the cabinet in the hallway where she kept the photo album. Back in his room, he opened it at random and lifted the tissue paper from the stiff black page. There he was, sitting on the floor, toy trucks lined up around him. He slipped the picture out of its mounting corners and turned it over. Dean, 3 years, 6 months. Turning the pages, he saw Dean, 2 years, standing in diapers beside the armchair, Dean, 20 months, tottering with a bottle, Dean, 12 months, sitting on his father’s knee. That was the start of the album. He closed the cover, irritated. The pictures told him nothing.

  Except that you weren’t here for the first year of your life, a voice in his head said, and Dean bolted up, chilled. It wasn’t the voice that announced the Cities of Origin, or the Smart-Ass Voice that so enraged his teachers. It was an older, colder, careless voice.

  He understood what it was saying. He imagined some old stone building with draughty hallways full of unwanted kids. Orphans and runaways and bastards. The adults came and looked at them through a window and pointed to the one they wanted. The babies wouldn’t know anything, but the older kids probably combed their hair and stood up straight and tried to look like they came from the City of No Trouble. That was the problem right there: you couldn’t actually tell where they were from. You didn’t kn
ow what you were getting.

  His mother used to say what a good baby he had been. Never cried, never fretted to be picked up. She could put him down and he would stay there. She thought she was getting a good, quiet child like the Walinski boy. By the time he started to show his true colours, it was too late. No returns.

  He pushed his hair back from his forehead to see his whole face in the mirror. Years ago, he had asked his mother, “Do I look more like you or dad?” He remembered this. Jesus! And she’d said, “More like your dad. You have the same cowlick.”

  A cowlick that was not his father’s. A mother who was not his mother. “What am I going to do?” he whispered.

  Find out, the voice said. The sound of his own bad blood speaking.

  At a loss, he started at the library, standing in front of a row of encyclopedias. Where to even begin? A for adoption, O for orphan, C for children, P for parents? It would take all day. He glanced over at the librarian gluing something into a book behind a wide, polished desk. She looked old and cranky and nosy. He approached with caution. “I have to do a project on adoption,” he told her. “Do you have any books on it?”

  “Adoption!” she exclaimed. He saw that she was actually young. But still cranky. “What kind of project?” And nosy.

  “Just a project for school.”

  “What kind of topic is that for a project?” she said. “What school do you go to?”

  “Central Tech,” he lied.

  “What kind of information do you need, exactly?”

  “Anything on adoption agencies.”

  She gave him an odd look, but he held her gaze. “Well, the Children’s Aid Society usually handles adoptions. I don’t know if we have anything, but I’ll have a look,” she said. She walked over to another desk, and he turned and walked out.

  In the phone booth outside, he asked the operator for the number of the Children’s Aid Society and dialled.

  “Children’s Aid. Good afternoon.”

  “Do you have children for adoption?” he asked.

  “I beg your pardon? Do we—?” the woman asked.

  “Have children for adoption. Do you put children up for adoption?”

  The woman said, “This is the Children’s Aid Society. To whom would you like to speak?”

  Dean hung up and waited ten minutes. He called again and in a deep, ponderous voice, he said, “May I please speak to the adoption department please?”

  “Young man,” the woman said, “we have work to do here.”

  “My name’s Clark. My wife and I want to adopt a child.”

  The woman hung up.

  At school, he decided to talk to George Gerard, whose habit of reading things unnecessarily had given him a head full of facts and an irritating but interesting way of poking holes in what people thought. He’d say, “See, that’s where you’re wrong,” and suddenly you would see. They were sitting under the football bleachers, sharing the last of George’s cigarettes. Dean blew a sloppy smoke ring and said, “Hey, you ever meet anyone who was adopted?”

  George nodded. “Cousin in Sudbury.”

  “Does he know?”

  “That he’s adopted? Don’t know. Only met him once. We had to share a bed one Christmas when we went up there.”

  “He must feel terrible. If he knows.”

  George considered this. “Why? It’s not like it’s his fault.”

  “True,” Dean said. He hadn’t thought of that. He lit a match and watched it burn down. “Only he doesn’t actually know who he is, your cousin. What if his mother was a whore or something, and his father was a gangster?”

  “Look!” George had produced a perfect smoke ring. “Top that, Turner.”

  “He’d inherit that bad blood,” Dean persisted.

  George shook his head. “That’s an old wives’ tale. There’s nothing in blood. It’s just blood. That’s how they can do transfusions.”

  Dean took the cigarette from him and inhaled. George was right. There was nothing in blood. Good old George. He exhaled a misshapen smoky oval and rubbed out the butt in the grass. “You wouldn’t feel weird if you found out his real dad was serving time for murder? Come on. You’d think twice about sharing a room with him again.”

  George laughed. “I’d think twice, anyway, because the little bastard pissed the bed.” He passed Dean the last cigarette.

  “But it goes against nature,” Dean said. He was dragging up everything now for George’s cross-examination. “I mean, look at animals, right? It’s instinct. No animal just walks away from its young, unless there’s something wrong with the kid.”

  “Our cat did that once when its kitten was deformed,” George said. “With people, I think it’s more like something’s wrong with the parents and the government takes the kid away. For its own good, like.”

  Dean watched the smoke twist up from the cigarette and curl around his fingers. Something wrong not with the kid but with the parents. Another idea he hadn’t thought of. “Yeah, but if there’s something wrong with the parents, there’s probably going to be something wrong with the kid, eh?” Dean passed the cigarette to George and waited for him to say, “See, that’s where you’re wrong.”

  George thought a moment and said, “You mean they’re going to pass it on, like hair colour. Yeah, I see what you mean.”

  “So it is bad blood, then,” Dean said coldly.

  George shrugged. “I guess.” He handed the end of the cigarette to Dean. Dean knocked it away. “For fuck sakes, Gerard, I don’t want the butt.”

  “All right. Don’t take my head off.”

  Dean spat and stood up suddenly. “Where’d you get these cigarettes, anyway? They taste like the bottom of an old lady’s handbag.” He kicked at the cigarette pack, just missing George’s hand.

  George stared at him. “Jesus, Turner. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” he said. Everything.

  Finally he went to see his English teacher. Brother Nick looked over his silver half-glasses and told Dean to take a seat. Dean still owed him a descriptive essay on one of the seasons. “What can I help you with, son?”

  Dean said, “Well, I’ve got this cousin, see, who has this dilemma about his parents.” He looked up to see how Brother Nick was taking this. Brother Nick was frowning ever so slightly. “He’s actually my second cousin,” Dean added, for that extra whiff of veracity. “He thinks he might be adopted.”

  Brother Nick raised a furry grey eyebrow. “What makes him think he’s adopted?”

  It came to him so fast, it was scary. “Both his parents have blue eyes, see. And my cousin has brown eyes. And he just learned in science that’s impossible.”

  Brother Nick leaned back and considered this. “Has he spoken to his parents?”

  “Well, that’s what I said. Why don’t you ask your parents, and he said, oh, I could never do that, and I said, well, is there any other way to find out, and he said—”

  Brother Nick broke in. “All right, Dean, let’s stop right there. It sounds like your cousin needs to speak to his parents immediately. Or his priest. This is quite serious. If he doesn’t speak to his parents, you have to tell your parents.”

  Dean nodded vigorously. “Exactly! That’s what I was thinking I should do. But he said he’s going to call some office, the Children’s Society or something—”

  “The Children’s Aid Society? Here in town?”

  Dean nodded.

  Brother Nick shook his jowly head. “Oh no, no, no. That’s not … they can’t … they wouldn’t be able to tell him.”

  “Maybe he meant another office, like a headquarters?”

  “The main office is in North Bay, but that’s not the point. Even the North Bay office wouldn’t tell him anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “They aren’t allowed to. It’s the law.”

  “Oh.”

  Brother Nick shifted his bulk in his seat. “I’ve heard of cases like this before. This has to be nipped in the bud.”

&
nbsp; Dean wanted to snort. Now he was a case. “I’ll talk to my parents as soon as I get home,” he said. “Anyway, my cousin’s probably going to just forget the whole thing.”

  “That’s not the point,” Brother Nick said, and he laid out the point, the problem and the solution: the point was God’s guidance, the problem was that we thought we knew better than God, and the solution was prayer, because no matter who our parents are, we have One Father, the Lord our God, and one Mother, Mary, and we have to trust in their divine love, and if we did, then all would be well.

  It took Dean another ten minutes to extricate himself. He kept his forehead furrowed to convey seriousness while his brain whirled and whistled. So they wouldn’t tell him anything. They weren’t allowed to by law.

  The law, huh?

  It came to him in one backlit image, what he would do, how he would do it. He wouldn’t need much. A car, of course. That was the hard part. Everything else was simple: a crowbar, a hammer and a flashlight for reading papers in the dark.

  DISAPPEARING ACTS

  Even the car turned out to be easy. He’d put it in his black book under “Disappearing Acts.” Instructions: Say good night to your parents at the usual time. Lie in bed, fully clothed, until they go to sleep. Wait. Wait some more. Then down the stairs (avoid the creaky step). Pick up the key from the basket on top of the fridge. Fetch the bag you hid earlier in the basement. Open the door, slip out into the darkness. So long “Mom.” So long “Dad.”

  He put the car in neutral and pushed it out of the garage. The crickets were making an awful racket. Upstairs, the windows were completely dark, but just to be sure, he pushed the car all the way to the end of the driveway. At the end of the road, he turned right. The streets were empty, the houses dark. The steel plant blazed like a house on fire, but everything else was silent and still. When he got to the highway, he braced his arms against the wheel and gunned her.