Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa

  Inside the house, she sat in the dusty-rose armchair by the window and watched the branches wave in the wind. “I should call them,” she told her father, but she didn’t get up. She wanted him to be sick with worry, with fear and shame and regret. She wanted him to wait by the phone, jumping every time it rang, pacing in front of the window, listening for a car in the driveway, footsteps up the walkway. She looked at her father. He patted her hand and asked if she wanted a boiled egg.

  In the afternoons, she watched the branches, and in the evenings, she watched TV. When her mother asked her how long she intended to sit in the armchair, she said, “Until I feel like getting up.” Her father said, “She’s okay, Margaret. Let her be.” Her mother muttered, “Oh, for god’s sake,” and went to bang pots in the kitchen. Laura could hear her but found that she didn’t have to listen. She didn’t care what her mother thought or said or did. She was warm and comfortable in the chair by the window, and when she grew tired of sitting, she walked with her father around the block or to the park, where he pointed out the birds and told her about their migration patterns.

  After two weeks, when her father was out shovelling the driveway and her mother was taking a bath, she went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. Dean answered.

  “It’s me,” she said. “I’m at my parents’ place. In Toronto.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?” Her voice was clipped, flat.

  “Your mother called us when you got there.”

  She waited for him to go on, but he said nothing. Finally, she said, “I’m not coming back.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to do about the kids?”

  The rage that rose in her was hot and ferocious and blinding. For a moment, she thought she was going to pass out. “They’re your kids,” she said. “You look after them.” And she hung up the phone.

  The rage remained, a conflagration burning behind her. She couldn’t think her way back through it. But she was awake now, and she could think forward. She woke every morning and made a list of things to do. By the end of the day, every item was crossed off. In this way, she found a day job in a law office and a weekend job at the Canadian Cancer Society, registered for night classes in management and marketing and finance, moved into a room in a house full of working women, opened her own bank account and bought a second-hand car.

  It was amazing, she thought, how much she could accomplish simply by not caring what other people thought she should do or said she was overlooking or in danger of becoming. She was able to visit with her father by not caring how many sighs her mother heaved or how often she shook her head and claimed not to understand this new world where women swore like men and men grew their hair like women and everyone seemed to be sleeping with everyone else, and now, thanks to Mr. Trudeau, you could get divorced at the drop of a hat and marriage meant nothing to anyone anymore and people could get up from their obligations as if they were pushing back their plates at a restaurant. Laura let the words pool and flow around her. She didn’t have to answer unless she felt like answering, and mostly, she was content to talk to her father about how to build an aviary or the photos of herons he had seen at the library.

  Her mother asked her when she planned to see her children. “You do remember that you have two kids, don’t you?”

  Seeing the children was not on her list. Laura said, “I have no plans to see them. If he wants to send them to see me, he can. He knows how to get in touch with me.”

  Her mother huffed and sputtered and threw up her hands. “It’s not their fault you two couldn’t get along. Why should they be punished?”

  “They’re not being punished,” Laura said. “I’m the one who was punished. I upheld my end of things, all the way up to the end. I did nothing wrong.”

  “Laura, they’re your children.”

  “They’re his children too. He was going to walk out the door and leave me with them, and I guarantee you, no one would have said, ‘Dean, what about your children? How could you have left your children?’ ”

  “You don’t even think about them,” her mother said.

  Laura said, “They’re fine where they are. They don’t need me.” She got up and put on her coat. It was true: she didn’t think about them. She couldn’t. They were on the other side of the fire.

  “You can’t just walk away! You can’t erase the past,” her mother called after her.

  But she could. She could walk, she could erase, she could bulldoze everything and start again. With nothing except her own will, she would build a second life, because the first one was untenable, unbearable, irreparable, a mistake from the very beginning. Every piece of it, every action and reaction and relationship, had grown out of a tragic error. Thinking that it could be fixed or would get better was foolishness, the kind of fantastical thinking that had led her into error in the first place and left her stranded in marriage to a man who didn’t want her and couldn’t provide for her, with two small children she couldn’t look after, with in-laws whose help would have erased her completely, in a story that made no sense. The only chance she had was to step out of the story completely and start again, wanting nothing that she couldn’t give to herself. She wasn’t waiting for the phone to ring or her wish to come true. She was done with waiting and wishing.

  She finished her courses, and the Canadian Cancer Society offered her a full-time job, and then a promotion. She moved into her own apartment. No one at work knew that she’d been married. Whenever someone asked if she had plans for the weekend, meaning a man, she always said she had no time. She studied on weekends and swam lengths at the Y. And in the evenings, she took more courses.

  Three years and two months after Will Wharton had dropped her off at the end of the driveway, her mother called to say a letter had arrived from Sault Ste. Marie. She stopped by after work and opened it in her parents’ kitchen. It was from a lawyer, notifying her that Dean was filing for divorce and would retain custody of the children. She signed everything and mailed it back on the way home. One less thing she would have to do herself.

  Three days after she sent back the papers, she was standing in the kitchen of her apartment, reaching for a bowl, when she remembered Vera telling her to bring home puffed rice and Dawn waving her spoon. No, she told herself sternly, but the image stayed there. Bye, Mommy. After that, she woke up to the fog. She kept working, but she stopped eating. At work, she was given the highest employee performance evaluation possible and another promotion. She was determined to wait it out. It will pass, she told herself every morning.

  Her father took her out for lunch, and the waitress took away her untouched chicken platter while her father stared out the window. “Laura,” he said, “you need to see a doctor.”

  She said no. “It will go away on its own.”

  “Maybe,” her father said. “But it won’t stay away. You need to talk to someone.”

  “Did talking help you?” she asked. She’d said it sarcastically, but her father nodded. “Eventually,” he said.

  “And you’re all better now.”

  “I’ve made my peace with my choices,” he said.

  Laura watched him stir sugar into his coffee. “Do you remember when we used to come and see you? In the hospital on Saturdays? You were always looking at the door or the clock.”

  Her father rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand and nodded. “I felt ashamed. Guilty.”

  “What did you feel guilty about?”

  “Being sick. Being in there. Not being home to look after my family. But it was also the ailment. I felt overwhelming guilt over everything. Ants I killed as a boy. A girl I once called ugly and she heard me. Anguish over something I once said to my father in anger. That’s the nature of depression.”

  So the ailment had another name.

  His hair had gone completely grey, and his jawline had softened and sagged. Laura remembered him lifting her up onto his shoulders so that she could wave her hands through the branches of a
willow tree. That was the father she had lost the summer he had sat in his chair and wept. The summer of Marcus Findley. He had gone away and never really come back. And yet here he was, his eyes saddened by her sarcasm, his forehead lined with worry, his hand reaching for his wallet to pay for the lunch she had not eaten.

  She knew what would happen if she talked to someone. Her whole second life would come apart. And it would come out, eventually, that a second life was not possible unless it grew out of the first life. The person would tell her what she already knew: that you cannot step out of the story and start a new one. It was all one story. Then she’d have to go back. She’d have to do battle in order to make peace, and it would be a hard and joyless peace. She said, “Do you know someone, then?” He said, “I’ll find someone.”

  It took another two years to get back, to find a new job in Sault Ste. Marie, to find an apartment and get set up, hire the lawyer who met with their lawyer to negotiate. Her lawyer, George Gerard, turned out to be a childhood friend of Dean’s. He reminded her that the chips were stacked against her. It wasn’t Dean she had to do battle with. Dean wasn’t even in the picture. After his second marriage had fallen apart, he had slipped out of the frame, leaving behind a dozen variations on a theme: he had been arrested as one of Del Cherniak’s confederates but talked himself out of a conviction, he had been convicted but escaped from jail, he had been jailed but new evidence was discovered and they had to let him go. He had gone to Toronto, or New York. The club was closed up. He was never coming back, or else he was coming back this weekend. The usual Dean Turner stories. The kids were with Vera and Frank, who would, George said, argue against any further disruption to their lives. “What can I get?” Laura asked.

  “Visitation, most likely,” George said. “If you want custody, you’ll have to fight.”

  She could not fight Vera. She could not go to court and hear what a terrible mother she had been. How she’d lain in bed all day. Then one day upped and disappeared. Left her own children, drove off with a man in a delivery truck. It was easier just to take what was offered, and maybe that’s all she deserved. She said, “Visitation, then.”

  George agreed to act as a go-between for the first visit, to pick up the kids and bring them to her apartment. She watched them approach from the window overlooking the parking lot. They were so much bigger than she had expected. Dawn was wearing a brown cord jumper and a white blouse. Her dark hair had been pulled up into a ponytail that Laura could already see was too tight. She held on to her brother’s hand. Jimmy was wearing dark green pants, a white shirt and a bowtie, and was holding a stuffed animal of some sort. The wind lifted his hair and the edge of Dawn’s dress. She couldn’t hear their voices, but she could see that they were beautiful and whole. They were coming to visit. She was going to see them at last. Her daughter and her son.

  SHIPWRECK

  At Frank and Vera’s, Dawn woke in the night and couldn’t remember where she was. “That happens to everyone at night, Tinker,” Frank assured her when she confided in him. But she got confused in the day, too. One minute she was walking past the Pacinis’ lopsided fence on her way home, the next she was in a completely foreign neighbourhood. Not a single house or car or front yard looked familiar, and she couldn’t hear anything over the alarm clanging in her head. Then the houses seemed to undulate and she was in front of the Duchamps’, on Sylvan Avenue, three doors from home. The alarm took a long time to wind down.

  As her former life deteriorated in her head, the way dreams did, leaving only the gist of things, she felt a throbbing compulsion to see their old house across the street from the park. She asked Jimmy if he wanted to come, but he didn’t see the point. Dawn said it was to remember better, but Jimmy didn’t see the point of that, either. That was probably because he never thought people were really gone. For Jimmy, you practically had to be dead to be gone, whereas Dawn saw that there were stages of going, degrees of gone. Take Geraldine and Amy, who now lived in a townhouse on the other side of the city. Dawn and Jimmy still saw them a few times a year, when Geraldine called Vera to schedule a visit, so according to Jimmy, they weren’t gone, but if Dawn wanted to see Geraldine or just hear her voice, she was out of luck. She could call, but that would be weird, because people always wanted to know what you were calling for. Also, Vera would ask who she was talking to. “Don’t be bothering Geraldine,” she’d say. “She has enough on her plate.” So, even though she still saw them sometimes, she had to say that Geraldine and Amy were mostly gone.

  At first the club was just closed (going), then it was closed down (going), then it was Gary’s Pizza (gone). Del Cherniak, who had actually owned the club, was also gone, although his name was still in the news: “Cherniak Charges Piling Up”; “Police Step Up Search for Cherniak.” He had been running a drug lab outside of Wawa and a stolen car racket in the Soo, and the club had been a front to launder the money. In court, Dean swore he hadn’t been part of the criminal operations, which would have been more believable if there hadn’t been a stolen Cadillac in his garage. At least, Dawn thought, there hadn’t also been a garbage bag of money in his spare room. Dean didn’t know where Del Cherniak was, but he didn’t expect him to be caught anytime soon. Del had connections in Detroit. Del Cherniak was long gone.

  Dean himself left in stages. During the trial, he was staying with friends downtown because it was helpful to be close to the courthouse. After he was given a suspended sentence, he was staying with friends in Toronto while he checked out the club situation. He wrote his number on three pieces of paper, one for Dawn, one for Jimmy, one for backup. He would come and get them as soon as he was settled. Jimmy said “away.” Dawn said “gone.” The operator said, “The number you have dialled is not in service.”

  Not everyone was gone. Frank and Vera never went anywhere. They didn’t believe in running hither, thither and yon when there was work to be done, storm windows to be put up, at home. And some people who had been gone had come back: their mother had returned and she wanted to see them. “Over my dead body,” Vera said, and the case had almost gone to court. Now there was a visitation clause in the custody agreement, so Dawn and Jimmy saw her on the first Saturday of every month.

  It was a lot to get used to.

  At least at Frank and Vera’s, once you got used to something, you never had to get used to it again. Even after Dawn started high school, or when Jimmy had to go to H.M. Robbins for grades seven and eight because he and Tommy Palumbo had smashed all the windows at St. Francis, nothing on Sylvan Avenue seemed to change. The old boxy brown armchair was replaced by a new one, slightly less boxy but still brown. The new blue Chrysler was nearly the same shape as the old blue Chrysler. The free insurance calendar changed from flower gardens to puppies in baskets, but the dates remained fixed. Monday, Dawn, piano, Wednesday, Jimmy, ball hockey. First Saturday, Laura’s. Easter Monday and Amy’s birthday, Geraldine’s. On Tuesday, Vera cooked spareribs, Minute Rice and canned peas. On Friday, they had fish. Dinner was at five, and bedtime was at least an hour before anyone else in their class had to go to bed, no matter what was on television. When they got up in the morning, they made their beds before they went downstairs for breakfast, which did not feature Pop-Tarts (too expensive) or notes in the jam jar (foolishness). No one woke them in the night to see a meteor shower, but no one forgot to pick them up after swimming class, either.

  Vera wrote all their appointments in the calendar. She didn’t like unexpected requests or cancellations. She didn’t like it when Dawn and Jimmy came back from somewhere all riled up, either. Usually, this meant from Geraldine’s, where, Vera claimed, they were allowed to run wild, which was more or less the case. At Geraldine’s, kids wandered in and rummaged through cupboards, or rushed in to announce that Alex down the road was building another bomb out of a can of deodorant. It was hard to come back unriled.

  But Vera didn’t like it if they came back too quiet, either, like when they returned from Laura’s, which was the least riled-up place
they had ever been. Everything in Laura’s apartment on Riverview Drive was white, black, heavy, thick and still: white sofa and carpet, black table, heavy drapes, pictures of snowcapped mountains in thick, heavy black and white frames. There was no clutter either: no bundles of coupons or baskets of socks to be mended. Nothing was old or patched or spliced together. It was even quieter in Laura’s bedroom, which was the lightest possible shade of grey before white. The bedspread was silver-grey satin. It was like an apartment in a spaceship.

  At Laura’s, they always started at the kitchen table with apple juice and muffins and the day’s itinerary: lunch, library or a movie, skating, shopping for school clothes. The first time, there had been no itinerary. Dawn and Jimmy had sat side by side on the white sofa, looking at their glasses of grape juice on the polished black tabletop. Laura asked them about school, who their teachers were, what subjects they liked, and leaned forward when they answered, like she was waiting for them to go on, but after “Miss Eliot” or “gym,” they didn’t know what else to say. “You must be wondering why I left,” Laura finally said. “I know you were too young to remember, but you’re old enough to understand now.”

  Dawn’s head was suddenly cold. Just her head. It was the strangest thing. A picture of a snowbank came into her mind. She blinked, but the snowbank didn’t move. The cold moved from her head into her throat.

  Laura said she wanted to explain a few things. It had been very hard on her, she said. She had been very young. She had been overwhelmed. She had had no support. And their father had not kept his side of the marriage contract. He had not upheld his end of things. She had entered in good faith and she was left holding the bag.