Every Time We Say Goodbye (16 page)

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 know 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.”

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.

E
ven 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.

He’d left no note. Eventually, it would leak out.
Did you hear?
he imagined people saying,
Dean Turner is gone. Really? Where? No one knows. He just disappeared in the night. Stole his parents’ car. Right out of the garage
. They’d all be jawing over it for weeks, trying to figure it all out, cooking up one wrong story after another.

He didn’t care what they came up with, because he wasn’t ever coming back.

Now you see him, now you don’t. Common magic had its uses, after all.

Half the town must have known he was adopted. You couldn’t just come home with a kid one day and say it was yours. It was old news to everyone except him. He had always thought people looked at him differently, too closely, at church, walking down Queen Street, at the doctor’s office. All this time, he’d thought they were saying,
That’s Dean Turner, who climbed out a window at school after the teacher locked him in the detention room. And when the teacher turned around, there he was, sitting right back in his seat
. Now he knew. All this time, they had been turning to each other, telegraphing their knowledge with raised eyebrows (
Did you know? Oh yeah, I knew
), while he blathered and boasted and carried on, oblivious.

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING
S
AULT
S
TE
. M
ARIE
, a sign said.

“Good riddance,” Dean replied.

Easiest thing he ever did, until the first complication: the car ran out of gas, a few minutes outside of Sudbury. The sun was just coming up, a pink stain on the horizon. He let the car sigh to a stop on the side of the road and made a mental note to add to his instructions: Before you leave, check the gas.

He fetched his bag and an empty jerry can from the trunk and headed to town, rehearsing the lines in his head. “My dad and I ran out of gas. Just down the road a bit. He said I should go on account of I’m young and my joints aren’t acting up yet.”

A delicate layer of frost covered the brown fields and the still-bare branches of trees along the road. He walked faster. From somewhere, a rooster crowed. The jerry can smacked his leg, and the hammer and chisel in his bag bit into his hip. The gas station was dark and silent. He kept going. In town, outside the Empire Hotel, he stopped at a row of cars and began pressing his face against windows, peering into the dark interiors. He saw nothing of interest until he came to a dark blue Packard: the owner had left a pair of leather gloves on the dashboard and a tweed cap on the passenger seat. Not his style, but useful additions to the currently empty disguise compartment of his bag of tricks. Dean slid in and fitted the cap onto his head. “Not bad, old chap,” he said to the rear-view mirror. If only he had a pipe. He was wriggling his fingers into the leather gloves when he noticed the keys in the ignition. He shook his head. “Oh, that’s very kind of you, but really, I couldn’t.” The key turned easily and the engine cleared its throat and began to murmur softly. “Well, if you insist,” he said, shifting the car into gear. By now the sun had hoisted itself above the barren hills and was glaring at him through the windshield. Dean pulled down the sun visor, and an unopened packet of cigarettes fell into his lap. He smiled. “Don’t mind if I do.”

It was mid-morning when he reached North Bay, the early spring sun appearing as polish along the tops of everything. He parked the Packard outside Delilah’s Grill and checked his face in the rear-view mirror: he was pale, with dark wells under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks. He smoothed back his hair and got out. Inside Delilah’s, he ordered bacon and eggs, toast and chocolate milk. The waitress had fluffy blond hair pulled back from her face with a blue hairband. Her name tag said
ROSE
. She called him honey and said he looked tired. He said he had been driving all night and waited to see how she reacted. She
didn’t look surprised or say, “What? Aren’t you kind of young to be driving all night by yourself?” She just nodded and asked if he wanted coffee as well. When she brought it, he told her he was on his way to meet his real mother for the first time. “She gave me up when I was a baby because she was too sick to look after me,” he said. “But she’s better now.”