Every Time We Say Goodbye (15 page)

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.

H
e 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.

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.