Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa

  She said, “I’m here with my fiancé.” The cold in her throat was spreading.

  “Fiancé? Where?” He leaned in, and she could smell alcohol and aftershave. She shivered. He placed his hand over his heart. “Tell me it’s not so.”

  Lies! she wanted to shout. She wanted to slap him. Instead, she said, “Excuse me, I have to go.” The cold had reached all the way to her feet, turning them into chunks of ice in her gold kitten-heel shoes.

  “Wait, wait,” he said, catching her arm and steering her into an alcove at the end of the hallway. “Listen. I was really glad to hear from you last night.”

  She shook him off.

  “Can’t we talk?”

  “Why didn’t you write me if you wanted to talk? After that night.”

  “Write you?” He looked bewildered. “I didn’t even know your last name.”

  “It was on your arm,” she hissed, but he still didn’t get it. She pushed past him and then whirled around. “You wrote my address on your arm! You said you would call me the next day!”

  Back at the table, Warren was shaking hands with everyone. “Ready to go?” he asked her. She was.

  Forty minutes later, something pinged against her hotel window, once, twice; then something harder clanked against it, but when she looked out, she saw nothing. Then Dean stepped out from behind a tree on the lawn below, and her heart somersaulted in her chest. She slid the window open and pressed her face against the screen. He whispered something that was lost in the night air.

  “I can’t hear you,” she said, struggling to raise the screen.

  He whispered it again, this time with gestures.

  “What?” She couldn’t hear a word. Finally she managed to lift the screen and stick her head out. “What? What do you want?” she called down.

  He squeezed his head in his hands theatrically and said loudly, “I’d like to announce my intention of sneaking up the back stairs of this hotel to see the girl named Laura who is hanging out a second-floor window. Unfortunately, the front desk clerk refused me entry, and even more unfortunately, the girl herself appears to have gone deaf, so my nefarious plan to have her sneak down and open the back door to let me in will, in all likelihood, never come to fruition.”

  She was frozen in place.

  “I’ve already woken up two other guests,” he said. He touched his hand to his heart. “Please, Laura. Let me come in.”

  She raced downstairs and opened the back door at the end of the hallway. He slipped in. “Go up first,” he said quietly. “Wait, what’s the room number?”

  A few minutes later, he stepped into her room and closed the door behind him. He said, “I always wondered if I’d see you again.”

  He was not even touching her and her skin was fizzing and sparking.

  “I do remember,” he said. “I remember the restaurant. I remember when we kissed outside that bar.” His eyes were burning into her. “I still have the pen. At home in my room. It’s white. It says YOUR BUSINESS IS OUR BUSINESS.” For a minute, she tried to remember if the pen had said anything (had it even been white?), but then he leaned over and kissed her, and it was exactly the same, the feeling of stars and oceans and flowers moving through her.

  “I called the hotel the next day,” she told him. “You were gone.”

  “I made the mistake of calling home,” he said, “and they talked me into coming back. By the time I got here, the address had rubbed off.”

  She took his hand and led him to the bed. He sat down and reached for her, but she stepped back and reached behind to unzip her dress. He smiled and leaned back on his elbows. She pulled down the satin straps and stepped out of her dress and pulled off her nylons and dropped everything on the floor at her feet. She raised her hands over her head. “Take me,” she said. The words came from nowhere. She didn’t even recognize her own voice.

  In the morning, he said, “Come with me,” and for the second time, she did. It was a chaotic, breathless rush. She took too long writing the letter to Warren (her hands were shaking, and she wrote “Warrent” and “wring”), and then Dean wouldn’t let her pack her clothes. “No time!” he said, waving her purse at her. “You said he was picking you up at eight o’clock, and he looks like the kind of guy who’s twelve and a half minutes early for everything.”

  “I don’t know what to wear!” she protested. She was standing in her bra and nylons.

  Dean picked up her fringed dress from the floor and shook it out. “Wear this,” he said. “This is the world’s best dress.”

  “But it’s a party dress,” she said, stepping into it.

  “We’ll buy new clothes,” Dean said, zipping her up.

  “But my clothes are new,” she protested, thinking of how painstakingly she had sewn the forest green suit, the sky blue skirt and quilted jacket. She was chewing a hangnail, laughing and crying. “I’m only going to be ripping them off you,” Dean said, wriggling his eyebrows and snapping his teeth. She let him wrest the empty suitcase from her. They flew down the back stairs and out to where his car was parked in an alley, right under a NO PARKING sign. He started the engine, checked his rear-view mirror and said, “Ready, Freddy?” Out of breath, she nodded. But instead of driving, he climbed out of the car, checking over each shoulder. “Just wait here,” he told her. She slid lower in the seat, imagining Warren appearing at the end of the alley. Moments later, Dean was back. He gunned the engine as he pulled out of the alley. “Our disguises,” he said, handing her a paper bag. Inside were two pairs of sunglasses.

  At the top of a hill, he pulled over to the curb so that he could show her where he worked. The steel plant sprawled beneath them, a tangle of wire and smoke between black towers and girders and rusted cylinders. “Every time I go in there,” he said, “I walk under something that could crush me and crisp me and grind me to dust. You’d think I’d feel some sort of fear, right? But it’s all just clanking and wheezing and the goddamn whistle. Boredom is what finishes you off in the end.”

  “You don’t belong in there,” she said, laying a hand on his cheek.

  He kissed her. She parted her lips and let his tongue fill her mouth. He pulled her hair back and kissed her neck. A car behind them honked and he released her to drive, but a few minutes later, he reached over and slipped his hand under her dress and stroked her through her white cotton panties. Wetness had already bloomed through. She shifted and opened her legs so he could get his fingers under the elastic, then threw her head back. “Stop the car,” she said.

  He kissed her and slid his fingers in and out of her until she came with a shudder. When she opened her eyes, he smiled into them. “God, you’re fantastic,” he said.

  He drove with one hand on the wheel, one arm around her shoulder. The wind blew soft and warm. They crossed the bridge and were welcomed to the United States of America by a large sign and detained by a customs agent who knew Dean from some kind of all-night poker match. “Remember dead-eyed Jack?” he kept saying to Dean, who shook his head and said, “Poor old Jack.”

  “Who’s dead-eyed Jack?” Laura asked when they finally got away.

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  They stopped for breakfast at a place Dean knew—“The best hash browns you’ll ever eat,” he said—and then they bought a giant box of fudge and sat on a bench at the river’s edge. He put his head in her lap and fell asleep, and she stroked his hair and watched the sky fill with clouds. When he woke, he said it was too late to go anywhere. “Anyway, we need to pick up a few things.”

  In a department store, they bought a small suitcase, a yellow sundress and a sweater for Laura, and a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of dark trousers for Dean. Across the street in the drugstore, he filled their basket with toothpaste, a razor, perfume and aftershave, a comb, Cracker Jack, Coca-Cola and a small box of cigars.

  Back in the car, he removed the gold rings from two cigars and took Laura’s hand. “For the motel,” he said, sliding one ring onto her finger. “Sometimes they ask.” Lau
ra remembered the ring she had left in the envelope in the hotel room. Warren would have called her mother by now. Her mother would be sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and making a list of people to call and things to cancel. Her father would sigh and shake his head and say just enough to show he knew what was going on and agreed with the consensus. She would never be able to go home, even after she had a real ring on her finger and was Mrs. Dean Turner.

  Dean let go of her hand. “Or we could just go back. It’s not too late.”

  “Of course it’s too late,” she said. It came out more sharply than she intended. She slid over and tucked herself into his arms. “Do you think I want to lose you again?”

  Between them, they had enough money to get all the way to New York, Dean said, where they would both find jobs within five minutes of their arrival, but in fact, they ran out of cash almost right away because they spent the next night in Saginaw so that Dean could look up a guy he knew who would be able to set him up with another guy who had connections in New York, only “look up” meant take the guy and the other guy out for drinks and dinner and more drinks and pay the tab, which came to thirty dollars, which was all Laura had in her wallet. Dean said it was worth it, though, for the names of New York high flyers and nightclub owners who wouldn’t look at you unless you came with a recommendation. “I promise you, Laura,” Dean said, “you will never say to me, ‘Gee, that dinner in Saginaw was a waste of money.’ ” Meanwhile, though, how would they get to New York?

  Dean said, “Don’t you have money at home?”

  “You mean in Toronto?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, but I can’t go home, Dean.”

  “No, I know you can’t go home. But you could go to the bank, right?”

  She gasped. “Warren works at that bank!”

  “So?”

  She teared up. “Dean!”

  He put his arms around her and told her he understood: he never wanted to see Warren again, and he’d only ever laid eyes on the guy from across the room. It would be easier if they had more cash, but they could get jobs right here.

  Only it seemed there were no jobs in Saginaw, and after two days of walking the main street and one night sleeping in the car, Laura said she would go to Toronto. They drove back over the border at Detroit, and in the late afternoon, she walked into the bank in her dark glasses and withdrew all her money. Charlene accepted her bank book and withdrawal slip and counted out her money without looking at her. Everyone else behind the counter stared at her. The entire transaction seemed to take hours. Warren’s desk at the back was empty.

  “Thank you, baby,” Dean said when she slid back into the car.

  She nodded. A tear slipped out from under her glasses. She said, “Can we go now?” She was afraid someone would come running out after her, call her a tramp, a slut. She was afraid it would (somehow) be her mother.

  The plan was New York, New York, but somewhere along the way, in a pretty little town with a white courthouse and cobblestone streets, they would get married. They would know the place when they saw it, and Dean would pick Laura’s bouquet himself. They would arrive, husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Dean Turner, to begin their real lives in the world’s truest city. But the towns they passed through had ugly, modern courthouses, or they smelled of sulphur or sewage. In the meantime, Dean bought a box of rubbers at a drugstore because they couldn’t have a baby until they were well settled in their new lives.

  Then there was a new plan, which was to have no plan. You couldn’t plan for life, anyway; you had to be open to whatever came along. If they had wanted a planned life, Laura would be married to Warren right now and Dean would still be working at the plant. The new plan was to hit the road and see where it took them. It might take them to New York or California or Timbuktu, for all they knew.

  Laura hated the new plan. In the eight weeks since they had fled Sault Ste. Marie, the road had taken them to Scranton and then Bridgeport, and their money was running low again. Then it ran out, and they both got jobs at a motel in Atlantic City, where Laura developed a rash from the cleaning fluid and Dean developed a broken nose in a fist fight with the man who ran the gas bar. Things improved in Ocean City, where they rented a cabana on the beach and Laura got a job typing up invoices at a car dealership and Dean went out every day to look for work. At night, she lay in his arms and listened to the surf roll in. The cabanas around them were empty; it was too rainy for tourists. “Much better this way,” Dean said. “No one can hear us make love.”

  She wanted to talk about what came next. Dean said, “Next what?”

  “We can’t live here after Labour Day,” she said. “We need a plan.”

  “Okay, Planner McSpanner,” Dean said. “Here’s the plan: At the first sign of frost, we get back on the road and drive clean across the country to lovely, luscious, sunny California.”

  But she woke the next morning nauseated, and the morning after that, she threw up. “It was that pizza,” Dean said from bed. “Remember I said there was something wrong with it?”

  Laura opened the bathroom door. The nausea had already begun to rise again. She said, “It wasn’t the pizza.”

  Everything turned out in the end. It turned out differently from what they had planned and not planned, but they were together, which was why they had run away in the first place and what was supposed to happen all along. They went back to Sault Ste. Marie and got married at City Hall. Dean talked himself back into his job at the steel plant, and Laura got a job at another bank. She called her parents, but her mother refused to come to the phone. “Are you happy, sweetheart?” her father asked, and Laura wept. “I am, Daddy. I really am.”

  Frank and Vera said they would help. They were lovely people, Frank and Vera, although Vera was a little stern. More than a little, actually. “Don’t let Vera scare you,” Dean said. “No matter what you do, you’re going to disappoint her. The thing to do is not even try.” But Laura wanted to try. Both Vera and Frank said they hoped she would have a good influence on Dean, that he would settle down now and turn over a new leaf. They wanted Dean and Laura to stay with them, rent-free, until they had saved enough money to buy a place of their own. And in truth, Laura didn’t mind this idea; the house on Sylvan Avenue was big enough, a mansion compared to the little bungalow she had grown up in, and she liked the gables and dormer windows and the rose-laded trellises. Plus, it would give her a chance to get to know her in-laws, now that her own parents were so far away (and one was refusing to speak to her, in any case).

  But Dean was adamant: they were not living under Frank and Vera’s roof, thumb or prison rules, no way, no how. He promised to find Laura the perfect apartment, but every place they looked at had something wrong with it—it was too small or too close to a schoolyard, or the downstairs neighbours were Nosy Parkers. In the end, the one they took had the flaws of all the other places combined. Dean said, “It’ll give us time to find something better,” but Laura liked the apartment, with its cupboards tucked cleverly into the wainscoting and little leaded windows overlooking the backyard where the Angelinis grew tomatoes. The first morning, while Dean slept, she changed into a blue skirt and white blouse and went to get groceries at Philomena’s down the street so that she could cook a big breakfast for Dean. But when she got back, he was gone on a mission necessary for the future well-being and happiness of Mrs. Turner, according to the note. She made the bed and picked up his clothes, and then sat in her kitchen, sipping coffee from one of the cups Vera had given her. My home, she thought. Our home. The home of Mr. and Mrs. Dean Turner. She didn’t care that they weren’t in New York or California; she didn’t care that the apartment had thick vinyl folding doors for the bedroom and bathroom and all the closets. She had told him that last night, when he fell into a melancholy mood after sex and said he was a terrible husband for not being able to give her the kind of home she wanted. “You are all I ever wanted,” she said. “From the first time we met.” She kissed and smoothed his forehead until
he stopped scowling and put his arms back around her. And now he was out getting a surprise, for her.

  She got up and washed and dried the cup. Then she opened all the windows, reorganized the contents of the cupboards and drawers, scrubbed the floors and washed the curtains. Mrs. Angelini brought up an armful of gladiolas from the garden, and Laura put them in the crystal vase that had been a wedding present from Mrs. May, a neighbour of Frank and Vera’s. When the pot roast was in the oven and the potatoes were boiling on the stove, she looked around and hugged herself. She was a woman of leisure until her husband got home from wherever he was. Where was he, anyway? It was getting dark outside.

  EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON

  She had slept for too long, and when she woke up, Dean was gone. She tried to call him, but her fingers kept misdialling. They were supposed to meet at four o’clock, but she had gone to the wrong station and now he would leave without her. Dean, Dean, she sobbed. Wait for me, I’m just getting a jacket. She opened the closet door and plunged her hands into the coats, a navy raincoat, a fur-collared camel hair. These were her old coats, in her childhood home in Toronto. In the kitchen, her mother was sifting flour into a bowl. “Help me with these cookies before your father gets home from the hospital,” she said, pushing the blue mixing bowl towards Laura. Laura looked down and gasped: the bowl was full of dirt and the dried husks of wasps.

  She woke, this time for real. Across the room, her own face looked back from the oval mirror, shadowed in the winter twilight. She had slept all day. Her mouth was full of ash. She could hear the rough murmur of adult voices downstairs, then the high, bright voice of her daughter, like a sudden yellow streamer glimpsed through grey branches. She would go down and help with dinner. She would say, “Much better, thanks,” when her father-in-law asked how she was, and it would be true. There was nothing the matter with her.