Every Time We Say Goodbye (23 page)

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.

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.

Something
was
wrong with the game, though, and it took Laura a while to figure it out. The problem was that every gain had to be countered by a small loss. The game advanced, but without conclusion. How long could it go on before it lost its flavour?

When Laura tried to explain, Sue Ellen said, “We’re on the verge of defeating them once and for all. That’s the whole point.”

But when they won, the game would be over, so defeating the Boys for good could not be the point. The point, Laura thought, was not to win but to be caught. At least, that’s how they played it at Laura’s school: when a boy chased you, of course you ran, but if he didn’t catch you, you might as well have not been pursued at all.

Sue Ellen was good at war, but she hadn’t read the books Laura’s mother kept in the top drawer of her night table, bulging paperbacks written by women named Violet and Evangeline,
with titles like
Love Asunder
and
Rogue Heart
. Also, and worse, the Shells didn’t have a television and there was no theatre in Sunnyside, so Sue Ellen had seen almost no movies. Maybe that was why she didn’t know what came next. Hostilities were always followed by contact, danger by rescue, separation by reunion. In a proper story, everything ended with love.

Laura had even worked out the perfect beginning: on a reconnaissance mission, she would be waylaid and taken into Boys Land, where Michael Pierce would hold her hostage. Sue Ellen would try to rescue her, but she, too, would be captured. They would be held in separate cells and have to tap messages through the walls. Some Boys would become their allies. Michael Pierce himself might even fall in love with one of them. (She would not tell Sue Ellen this part just yet.) Hundreds of possibilities would open up; they could play forever.

They were sitting outside Headquarters when she laid it out for Sue Ellen. The sun was hot and sharp on her bare arms, and she could almost feel the rough rope against her wrists. (She did not tell Sue Ellen the details, how she would kick and punch her captors and how Michael Pierce would stare at her, astonished. “You fight like a Boy,” he would say, and she would spit in contempt, which would make him laugh. He had black hair and piercing blue eyes, and wore a buckskin jacket and a knife in his belt.)

Sue Ellen thought about this. “We
could
raid their Headquarters when they’re all out spying. Break in, get information, get out.”

Laura said, “I guess.”

Sue Ellen narrowed her eyes. “I mean, it’s not like you
want
to be captured, right?”

“No,” Laura lied. “No!”

“Well, it sounds like it,” Sue Ellen said. She was clearly annoyed. “I have to go home. I’m supposed to remind my dad about his deadline.”

When Laura caught up with her, she was standing at the hedge between their properties. Mr. Shell and her mother were sitting at the picnic table on the Shells’ veranda, and from the hedge, it looked like they were holding hands, but then she saw they were just playing cards. “Dad!” Sue Ellen yelled. “Deadline!” Her father waved at her, drew another card and slapped his forehead in despair. Laura’s mother’s laugh rippled out towards them.

Sue Ellen scowled. “My father has to work, you know. He can’t work if she’s over there every day.”

Laura said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean his work!” Sue Ellen said loudly. “He has to write!”

But Laura meant it wasn’t her mother’s idea to go over; it was Mr. Shell who invited her. Laura’s mother was just being neighbourly.

That night Laura was woken by low voices and for a moment, she thought the Boys had really come. But it was her mother and Mr. Shell, talking on the other side of the hedge. Laura sat up and pressed her face against the screen, but she couldn’t see anything. She opened her mouth, a technique Sue Ellen had taught her, and then she could hear: “Oh, yes, do that.” “This is
crazy.”
“Shh, shh.” “Oh my god, I love you.” “I love
you
.” “No, don’t, you’ll wake the whole …” “Shhhh.”

After a while, Laura lay back down and pulled the blankets over her head. Her mother and Sue Ellen’s father were … 
in love?
How could it even be true? Laura’s mother always said, “The moment I laid eyes on Richard, I knew he was the one for me.” But assuming it was true, then what? Would her mother and Sue Ellen’s father have to get married? That would mean a divorce, which Laura’s mother said she didn’t believe in (and
that
was in reference to Marilyn Monroe—Laura wasn’t sure if regular people could get divorced). But they would have to divorce in
order to marry; she didn’t know how else it would make sense. It would still be awful, though, even if it made sense, because what would happen to her father? And to Mrs. Shell? (Maybe her father and Mrs. Shell would get married? No. That was probably going too far.)

She was awake most of the night trying to figure it all out. One thing she knew for sure: she could not tell Sue Ellen. But she told her anyway, almost immediately, while they were out on first patrol the next morning. She finished by saying, “But it’s okay, Sue Ellen, because don’t you see? We’ll be sisters.” But Sue Ellen’s eyes turned to stone. She said, “What are you
talking
about” and threw down her bow and arrow. Then she disappeared into the bush.

Laura sat on the mossy concrete steps, wishing she could disappear into another dimension, or at least back into last night (she would cover her ears, she would bury her head, she would not wake up). She sat there until the sun was high overhead and she was light-headed with hunger. When she got home, her mother was packing. “Go say goodbye to your little friend,” she said. Her voice was flinty, but she cleared her throat and it softened. “We have to get back. I’m worried about your father.”

Laura walked along the border of Girls Land, but without Sue Ellen, it was just a thin path through the bush. She cut straight through Boys Land territory and got into the car, and they were back in the city by lunchtime.

At home, Laura’s father had moved from his armchair to the bed. That fall, he moved to the hospital, the first of many extended visits, and Laura’s mother got a job in a doctor’s office. By herself, Laura was free to play the game the way she had wanted to. The Boys came at night, all stealth and speed and strength; they lifted her out of bed and carried her over the border, deep into Boys
Land, into the very chambers of Michael Pierce. He touched her hair and told her she was his now, and nothing could change that. The force of his declaration made her weep with gratitude. This was what she had wanted all along.

But once she was his, the game fizzled out. She tried to imagine what would come next; logically, they would get married and have children, but somehow, this storyline never took her very far. It was a constant mystery, why there was nothing left to play after the declaration, that moment of shattering happiness so perfect it shattered happiness itself.

S
he lifted her head from the pillow and in the gloom saw the empty crib. Her mother-in-law must have taken the baby downstairs. Her little girl was already down there, in a booster seat at the kitchen table, with a pink plastic bowl of animal crackers and her little white juice cup. Her mother-in-law would be shaking her head, her lips pressed thin, thinking,
What kind of mother?
What kind of mother goes to bed right after she wakes up and comes unravelled at the sound of her own baby’s cries? No kind of mother. That’s the kind she was, hiding up here in the dark tower with no prince on the lawn below calling her name to break the spell. She fumbled for the lamp on the bedside table and cried out at the sight of herself in the oval mirror across the room: an old woman stared back, her scalp showing through her thin white hair, her face yellowed and mottled with age. A hundred years had passed.

Well, what did you expect?
her mother-in-law said from the other side of the door.
You said let you sleep, so we let you sleep
.

“Where is the baby?” she called out, but no one answered. The light in the room was dissolving, and she fell back through the depths to where there might be a hatch, a portal that would open onto a different life or carry her backwards through time to the Turning Point so that she could turn and turn away.

She had been eighteen when she wished for Dean Turner. That afternoon, in the cafeteria at Eaton’s, with a storm of tears about to overtake her, she had closed her eyes and prayed, “Please give me a sign.”

She meant a sign that she would not cry today, would not take after her father, was destined for love and happiness and dreams that came true and did not run out abruptly like the end of a movie reel flapping noisily on the projector. “Let something happen,” she pleaded silently.

She opened her eyes: her mother was gone, and Dean was sitting in her place.

Somewhere inside her, the course of time shifted. A turning point.

Light came off him when he talked. Sparks, she wasn’t sure from where: his dark eyes, maybe, or his teeth, which were very white. When he smiled, a dimple formed on one side of his mouth, like he was about to tell her something he shouldn’t. He talked like people in movies, the words spooling out so fast that, in the beginning, she was always a half-sentence behind. He raised his hand and a waitress appeared with a plate of french fries. He leaned back and draped his arms over the back of the booth. He had broad shoulders and long fingers.
Who
are
you?
she thought, and just at that moment, he stuck his hand across the table and introduced himself. “Dean Turner,” he said. He was from the City of Northerly Bore, also known as Sault Ste. Marie. He was staying at the Royal York Hotel. He was adopted.

She couldn’t even imagine telling it: how he appeared out of nowhere, an adopted boy who travelled on his own and shed sparks when he talked. He had come to Toronto to find his mother, he said, and now, after all his travels and travails, he didn’t want to meet her, as crazy, as batty, as loop-de-loop loopy as that sounded.

“Nuts-and-bolts screwy,” Laura agreed, and his eyes glinted.

“Whacky-shack whacky.”

Except she knew what he meant. She always yearned to see her father, right up until they got to the visitors’ room and the door opened, when her yearning suddenly spiked and transformed into its opposite, because the person who came through was not her father. He looked like her father, but he was clearly a stand-in. He was gaunt, and his lips were badly chapped, and even though she held her breath as he leaned in to kiss her cheek, she could smell sour sweat and metal and something unspeakable. Her real father had gone somewhere, and even the stand-in was waiting for him to come back: he kept asking them the time and looking back at the door that led to the ward. Sometimes it was just easier to miss someone.