Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa

  Geraldine stomped downstairs to the basement and came back up with an almost empty garbage bag. She threw it at him.

  “Where’s the rest of it?”

  Geraldine pulled Dawn and Jimmy out of the doorway of Dawn’s room. They stood side by side in the hall, Geraldine’s hands on their shoulders. She started softly. “Where is it? Where is it? Your kids are wearing it. It’s in their closets. It’s in the medicine cabinet. It’s in the goddamn fucking fridge. That’s where the rest of it is.” By the time she got to “the goddamn fucking fridge,” she was screaming.

  There was more screaming and door slamming, until Dean went back to the club, yelling over his shoulder, “It wasn’t my money, Geraldine! It wasn’t my money!” Jimmy couldn’t find Professor Pollo, and Dawn couldn’t find the Finding Stick. Jimmy’s eyes were wide and blank, and Dawn knew he wouldn’t sleep without the Professor, so she made a new stick out of a ruler and two pencil crayons, but it didn’t work. “He’ll turn up,” she said. “He always does.” Jimmy was sitting cross-legged on the bed, rocking a little. He had stopped crying, but his face was wet and his nose was running.

  “You know what I wish?” he said.

  “You could find Professor Pollo?”

  He shook his head. “I wish we could go back to Grandma and Grandpa’s.”

  Dawn went cold. His voice had throbbed when he said it. She didn’t know if she could counter the effects of that kind of wishing. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to.

  Sometime shortly after that, Amy was born. At the hospital, Geraldine showed them how to hold the baby, who was wrinkled and red but otherwise perfect, and they took turns, sitting next to Geraldine on the bed. When Dawn laid her finger on Amy’s palm, Amy made a tight little fist around her finger and hung on for dear life. She knows who I am, Dawn thought. “Hi, baby sister,” she whispered, and kissed Amy’s cheeks. She loved her completely already.

  Dean had a diaper bag full of balloons, pop, cupcakes, plastic cups and a bottle of champagne. They pulled the curtains around Geraldine’s bed and everyone climbed on. Geraldine was giggling. “The lifeboat,” she said. “Dean, move your big fat feet.” Dawn blew up the balloons and Jimmy handed out the cupcakes and glasses. Dean took out the champagne and then held up his hand for silence.

  “Now, here’s the situation, kids. You know they don’t allow champagne and cupcakes in the hospital, right?”

  Dawn and Jimmy nodded.

  “You know why?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Because only the very worst-tasting things are available in the hospital, right, Geraldine? Oatmeal, tapioca, etcetera. If something tastes good, it isn’t allowed. That’s why we’ve got the curtains pulled. But here’s the problem.” He lowered his voice even more, and they all had to lean close to listen. “When I open this bottle, it’s going to make a big pop. Then the nurses will come and we’ll all be booted out of here on our backsides. All of us except Amy. So when I give you the signal, you three have to make a sound. Like a big cough or something—”

  Jimmy said, “I know! I know! A big sneeze!”

  “Even better. A big sneeze. Are you ready?”

  They had to wait for Geraldine to stop laughing. “Okay, ready? One, two, three—”

  They all fake-sneezed and the champagne cork shot up to the ceiling. Dean poured fast, but champagne still ran down the sides of the bottle and soaked into the sheets. He gave Dawn and Jimmy a dollop each in their glasses. They were all giggling and shushing each other.

  Dean raised his glass. “A toast,” he said quietly.

  Dawn raised her glass. Dean said, “Welcome to the family, Amy.” A tear ran down Dawn’s face and plopped into her champagne, and she was sure she could taste it, a tiny bubble of saltiness swimming happily in a million bubbles of sweet.

  The house felt weirdly empty after Geraldine and Amy came home. Geraldine and Amy spent most of their time sleeping. Jimmy didn’t want to play anything because Professor Pollo was still missing. And Dean was hardly there because of Opening Night. The quiet got on Dawn’s nerves.

  A band from Toronto was coming for Opening Night, and Dean was going crazy with the arrangements. The printer had screwed up the posters, the bartender he had hired as a favour to Del Cherniak didn’t know a highball from the highway, and Antoine’s mural was coming off the wall in bits and pieces. Dean even looked like he was going crazy: his eyes were bloodshot and his hair was standing up. He had slept at the club the last two nights to supervise while the electricians redid the goddamn wiring. He’d come home to take a shower, and he hadn’t been in the door five minutes before the phone started to ring. He lit one cigarette, put it down, turned around and lit another. “No,” he barked into the phone. “No. I don’t care if they have to run the wires out the window and down the street! No!” As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again. “Yes, I told them to reprint. Why? Because it’s Yellow Brick Road. Not Bricks! For fuck sakes!” He left the phone off the hook when he went to take a shower.

  Geraldine knocked on the bathroom door and asked him if he had a minute. He opened the door and said, “Geraldine, I do not have a minute. I do not have a second. Do you not understand how much I have riding on this?” He stormed past Geraldine. Dawn stood in her room, peering out through the crack in the door.

  Geraldine said something Dawn couldn’t hear, but she heard Dean’s response as he pounded back down the stairs. “Because if I don’t clear eight grand, I’m fucked, thanks to you.”

  Dawn went through the house, putting out the cigarettes.

  Dean was taking them to Opening Night. Not at night, because it was a bar, but the day of, so they could watch the band rehearse, which would be like their own private concert. The Yellow Brick Road was full of people. The mural was fixed now, and a red velvet rope kept people from leaning against it. Dawn sat at the bar while Dean took Jimmy to the bathroom. She was studying the bottles when she saw a familiar brown foot. Behind the cash register, on an upside-down ice bucket, sat Professor Pollo. She climbed up on her stool and reached for him, but the bartender grabbed her hand. “Hey, hey, little girl. That’s not yours.”

  Dawn stared at him. Was he crazy? “It’s my brother’s.” She was so angry, she had trouble speaking clearly. “We left it here by mistake.”

  “I don’t think so,” the bartender said.

  “It is so my brother’s! Ask my dad!” Dawn slid off the stool. “Never mind. I’ll ask him myself.” Didn’t this guy know her dad owned the place?

  She found Jimmy eating brownies in Dean’s office. “Want one?” he asked.

  “No. Where’s Dad?” she said. “I have to tell him something.”

  “He went across the river with Antoine to buy some kind of light you can’t get here.” He bit into another brownie.

  Dawn stood, chewing a hangnail. If Jimmy saw Professor Pollo behind the bar and the bartender didn’t hand him over, he’d go crazy. On the other hand, maybe Jimmy going crazy was just what that jackass out there deserved. Just then, a guy stuck his head in the door. “The band is going to rehearse.” He saw them. “Where’s Dean?” He didn’t wait for them to answer.

  Everyone stopped working to hear the band. Dawn didn’t know why; they were so loud, you could hear them no matter where you were, even in the bathroom downstairs, under I Love Lucy, with your fingers stuffed into your ears. Dawn kept imagining how angry Dean would be when he came back and she told him about Professor Pollo. He would fire the bartender on the spot. “Do you think my daughter doesn’t know her own brother’s toys?” he would say. “Do you think my daughter would lie?” Dawn went back upstairs and circled the bar, glaring at the bartender. Just you wait, she thought.

  The band rehearsed for at least an hour, and they still didn’t sound any better. Dean still hadn’t come back, and Professor Pollo was still behind the bar. Jimmy appeared beside her and grabbed her arm. His eyes were filled with tears. “It’s okay,” she said, “I’m going to get him back.” She had to turn
her head so he could yell in her ear. “I don’t feel good, Dawn,” he said. She made him sit down at a table and told him she’d bring him a drink. “A drink and something else that will make you feel a whole lot better,” she said. When the bartender went to the other side of the bar, she climbed up on a stool and snatched Professor Pollo from the upside-down ice bucket. But when she got back, Jimmy was gone. It took her a moment to realize he was under the table. He had thrown up all down his shirt. His eyes were open but mostly the white part was showing. The band finished their cacophony and Dawn realized she was screaming.

  The bartender drove them to the hospital and carried Jimmy in. He told Dawn he was going back to find Dean. Dawn was weeping. A nurse came out and wanted to know what Jimmy had had to eat or drink that day. Dawn tried to swallow her sobs. “He had Alphabits for breakfast.” She could hardly speak. “A hot dog for lunch. And brownies. He’s allergic to strawberries.”

  A different nurse came out. “Who brought that boy in?” she said.

  “I did. He’s my brother.”

  The nurse frowned at Dawn from over her half-moon glasses. “Where are your parents?”

  Dawn stared back at her. “My dad went over the river to get some lights.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “My mother?” Dawn was confused by the question. She thought it was a test, to see if she would lie.

  The nurse shook her head. “All right, come with me.” She left Dawn in a small room with a desk and two chairs. “Someone will be here shortly,” she said.

  Shortly seemed to take forever.

  “Is my brother all right?” Dawn asked when the nurse came back.

  “He’s having his stomach pumped. He’ll be okay. This lady would like to have a few words with you.”

  The woman behind the nurse wore a grey pantsuit, black-framed glasses and a black velvet hairband in her straight, chin-length grey hair. She carried a square black briefcase instead of a purse and sat in the chair beside Dawn. “What’s your name, dear?”

  “Dawn Turner.”

  “Dawn, I’m a social worker. My name is Mrs. Kraus. I need to ask you some questions about what happened.”

  Looking back, she could see why it was hard to pinpoint the exact beginning of the end. So many things had seemed new, even the bad things: talking to a social worker, seeing Jimmy in a hospital bed sipping ice water from a plastic cup, going home and finding the driveway blocked with police cars and police officers coming in and out of the house and garage. Everything was like the start of something, if not something good, then at least something different, and yet when it was all over, Dawn and Jimmy ended up right back at Vera and Frank’s, where they’d begun.

  GIRLS LAND, BOYS LAND

  The baby bleated, and the birds of terror fluttered awake. Even through layers of sleep, Laura could feel their scratchy wings against the inside of her skull. Please, please stay quiet, she begged the baby silently. Burying her face in the hot pillow, she searched her memory for something to fall into, something still and dark, like an inky lake at nightfall, and finally found the Pointe.

  The Pointe was a protective arm of land with two cottages set in its crook. To get there, you had to drive through Sunnyside, a wide beach with a marina and tennis club and dozens of dark, glossy cottages clumped together like Licorice Allsorts. At the Pointe, there was only the summer place Laura’s parents rented and the bungalow belonging to the Shells, who lived there year-round—Mr. Shell, a writer, Mrs. Shell, who worked in a surveyor’s office, and their daughter, Sue Ellen. Behind the two houses was a wilderness threaded with trails and beaded with mysteries: a shrub with a sandy floor inside, a ring of oak trees around a table-like stump and, in the middle of nowhere, connected to nothing, three mossy concrete steps—a portal into another dimension, according to Sue Ellen.

  Sue Ellen could shimmy up trees, jump hurdles over chairs and swim across the bay. She had once rescued a stranded baby deer and fed it with a bottle until the Humane Society came and took it to the zoo. She had a real bow and arrow (with which she once shot a squirrel by mistake), and a way of describing something so that it came true. When she discovered that she and Laura were reincarnated Egyptian princesses, Laura felt her insides thrum with ancient syllables. When she said boys were spying on them, the hedges rippled with shadows and whispers. When she pointed out the border between Girls Land and Boys Land, Laura could see it as clearly as if there were a fence with watchtowers.

  That last summer, Laura and her mother went to the cottage alone. A few months before, Laura’s father had stopped going to work. He sat at home in his chair, and if Laura or her mother asked him anything (“Dad, do you want some soup?”

  “Richard, just how long do you intend to sit there?”), he would tell them the whole thing all over again from the beginning: it was all the fault of a man by the name of Marcus Findley, who had insinuated and laid traps, who pretended to be one thing and then revealed himself to be in cahoots with others. The bathroom was mentioned, and a key, but they couldn’t figure out what had actually happened. It chilled Laura, but her mother muttered, “Oh, for god’s sake, Richard. Be a man!”

  Laura’s mother said they wouldn’t be going to the cottage if her father didn’t get off his backside and get another job. Anyway, Laura’s mother was tired of the cottage—you had to drive to Sunnyside for any kind of company, unless the Shells were your cup of tea, and they were not hers. For one thing, Mrs. Shell went around in baggy shirts and rundown shoes, and she had a big, seesawing laugh that Laura’s mother called unseemly. (Laura’s mother had a low, rippling laugh, and she was always smartly turned out; even at the cottage, her lipstick matched her sundress and the scarf in her hair.) And Laura’s mother was sorry, but she just didn’t believe in mothers going off to work. The war had been over for ten years! Sure, some mothers still did it, but that didn’t make it right. If you were a wife and mother, that was your work. And what kind of writer was Mr. Shell anyway? Laura’s mother had never heard of him; he couldn’t be a very successful writer, which was probably why Mrs. Shell had to work in the first place.

  Laura prayed that her father would get up and get a job. Instead, he started to cry in the mornings (without sound, just tears slipping down his face and into his now grimy shirt collar), and Laura’s mother said, “I’m at the end of my rope. I really am.” She called and reserved the cottage for two weeks. When Laura asked how they would pay for it, she said, “That is your father’s responsibility.”

  They arrived at the cottage before lunch. Laura’s mother gave her two cupcakes and said, “If they ask over there, just say your father stayed in town to work.”

  Laura raced across the lawn, calling for Sue Ellen. Sue Ellen dropped down in front of her from a pine tree, wearing a headdress made of willow wands over her short, sun-streaked curls. “What weapons hast thou brought this annum, Mighty Huntress?”

  “I have brought my keen eyes and ears,” Laura said. She extended her hand. “And supplies.”

  “Excellent,” Sue Ellen said, taking the cupcake. “But we cannot talk here.” She tilted her head at the hedge between the cottage and her house and whispered, “We have a situation.”

  They stopped in to say hi to Mr. Shell, who was smoking cigarettes and reading a magazine at the kitchen table. When he saw Laura, Mr. Shell stood up, bowed, shook both her hands, kissed her cheeks and twirled her around in a little do-si-do. “Greetings, City Girl,” he said. “How are things in the bright metropolis?”

  Sue Ellen said, “Dad, I have to debrief Laura on a situation.”

  Mr. Shell bowed again. “Of course,” he said solemnly. “I will not detain you.”

  The situation was serious: the whole Pointe was a war zone between Girls Land and Boys Land. At Girls Land Headquarters in the bramble bush, Sue Ellen explained how they had to patrol the borders twice a day and check for traps and secret messages. The Boys were ruthless, relentless; they could not let their guard down, not even for a minute.
r />   For the first few days, Laura’s mother sat in front of the cottage with a stack of magazines, refusing Mrs. Shell’s invitation to dinner and Mr. Shell’s plea for distraction from the terrors of the blank page. Then, one afternoon, she was sitting on the Shells’ patio, drinking gin and tonic with Mr. Shell, a magazine open on the table between them. “I had no idea you wrote for them,” Laura heard her saying. She waved her unlit cigarette in a gesture of wonderment. “I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection earlier.” Mr. Shell leaned forward with a lighter. He proclaimed himself a mere hack, which made her laugh, and Laura was relieved: her mother wouldn’t have to drive to Sunnyside for company, after all.

  Mr. Shell was the perfect gentleman, Laura’s mother declared later that night as they cold-creamed their faces in the cottage’s tiny bathroom. “And it’s completely wasted on Mrs. Shell, I’m sure,” she said.

  “Dad’s a perfect gentleman too, isn’t he?” Laura said, and felt a pang in her throat for her father, sitting at home in his chair. He might have sprouted a fine layer of dust now, like the ornaments on the mantel.

  “Of course,” her mother said, and Laura’s throat hurt even more.

  Each day, Sue Ellen and Laura got closer and closer to victory over the Boys of Boys Land. It was Sue Ellen’s best game yet. But when Laura related their latest feat to her mother, her mother didn’t get the point. “Why don’t you invite some other kids to play?” she said, frowning at the white plastic flower on the strap of the new swimsuit she had just bought in Sunnyside. “I mean, wouldn’t it be better with real boys?”

  She meant the Sunnyside boys who played basketball at the marina and tore up and down the road, hooting and hollering on their bikes. Boys Land Boys never hollered: it would give away their position. They were silent, narrow-eyed, stone-hearted soldiers who would risk their lives to defend their territory and carry information back to their Leader, Michael Pierce. They were a different breed of boy altogether.