Every Time We Say Goodbye (25 page)

It wasn’t the something she had meant. But then, what else could it have been? Dean Turner was not going to walk through the door singing “You Belong to Me.”
This
was what came next. At least it would mean her own house, away from her mother, who still told her to straighten up, smarten up, stop moping and daydreaming, and away from her father, who sometimes went somewhere in his head and someday might not come back.

They set the date for July 14 and booked the hall, and her friends at work threw her a shower, and she argued with her
mother about the dress and the invitations and the flowers. Her mother said they couldn’t afford the kind of wedding Laura seemed to want, but Laura found a flaw with everything, expensive or not, and couldn’t decide on anything, and it was making her mother crazy. “You’re going to end up with no wedding at all,” her mother said, and Laura burst into tears and slammed her bedroom door.

In May, Warren called and said he had some very exciting news for her, something that would make her very happy, and could she be ready in fifteen minutes? At the Cherry Pie Diner, Warren told her he had been offered a promotion. “Manager,” he said gravely, but he couldn’t completely suppress his smile. The youngest manager in the bank! It was a small branch, but still, it was a tremendous opportunity, and Laura wouldn’t have to worry about a transfer because Warren didn’t expect her to work after they got married. As manager, his salary would be more than adequate.

“That’s wonderful,” Laura said.

“And I have a cousin up there, so we would have some family already,” Warren said. Laura didn’t know where “up there” was; she had missed that part. The position would start in August, Warren said, right after the honeymoon. He had negotiated that himself. They were sending him up at the beginning of June to meet the staff, and he would look for an apartment or house to rent. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Not many start their married lives in such a good position,” he said. “And Sault Ste. Marie is a nice place to raise a family.”

A bolt went through her. “Sault Ste. Marie?”

Warren looked irritated. “Laura. Haven’t you been listening?”

Everything inside her lifted and tilted precariously, and she had to clutch the bottom of her chair to keep herself from sliding off.
Don’t be foolish, Laura
, she told herself in her coldest, hardest mother-voice, but her heart had already galloped off.

Later that night, she called Warren. “I want to go with you when you go up.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well. That probably … They won’t—”

“If we’re going to live there,” Laura said, “I want to see it. I want to know what I’m getting myself into.”

“But it’s so close to the wedding,” Warren said. “You’ll have so much to do.”

“Everything’s mostly done,” Laura said. “And don’t you want me with you when you look for a place?”

So it was settled. Laura would have to pay for her own ticket, of course, and she would stay at a hotel while Warren stayed with his cousin. Her mother said it was a useless extravagance at a time when they should be saving money, but Laura barely heard her. She could barely think at all.

A
door opened and a voice said, “Mommy? Are you waked up now?” Laura heard herself groan.
Get up, Laura
, another voice said sternly, but it was only in her head. That voice said all kinds of things:
Get up; don’t move. You’re not to blame; this is all your fault. You’re on the right path; you took a wrong turn; you would have ended up here, no matter what. Everything is all wrong, but somehow it will work out for the best in the end
.

The voice could not be trusted. She pulled the sheet over her head. At the bottom of the dark pool, the voice could not even be heard.

Sault Ste. Marie had made her eyes hurt. The ache began when they landed at the tiny, windy airport and deepened on the long ride into town, where she and Warren used her room to freshen up. At the bank, where Warren introduced her as
his fiancée, her eyes kept darting off, left and right, and by the end of the day, she felt like she was separated from her body by a thick, transparent sheet of pain. Back at the hotel, Warren said, “Jeez, Laura, you look
terrible,”
and she said, “I know. Do you mind if I don’t come to your cousin’s? I have the most terrible headache.” Warren said he would explain to his cousin, kissed her forehead and told her to get a good night’s sleep. She watched from the window as he climbed into the taxi and disappeared.

There was no phone in her room, so she went down to the lobby. He might not even live here anymore. He might not remember her. He might be married. Even if he still lived here and remembered her and wasn’t married, he might merely say, “Well, have a good visit and thanks for calling.” Anyway, she was engaged. The wedding was two months away. The hall was paid for, and the gilt-edged invitations that she had fought for so ferociously had been sent out, and the dress was hanging in a plastic shroud in her closet.

She just wanted to make sure. Plus, if she was going to be living here, she didn’t want to run into him by chance and have to bumble through introductions and explanations.

The operator had only one listing, for Turner, Francis. She called, and a man answered on the first ring. “Wharton, for crying out loud, I said I’d be there.”

“Hello?” Laura said.

“Hello,” he said after a pause. “Who’s this?”

“Is this Dean Turner?” She knew it was him.

Another pause. “Well, now, that would depend on who’s asking,” he said. His voice had gone dark and silky.

“It’s Laura.”

“Hello, Laura,” he said warmly, but she could tell he didn’t know who she was.

“You probably don’t remember me,” she said, and her words slopped against each other, as if she were a little drunk. “We met a couple of years back. In Toronto.”

He didn’t say anything, so she took a breath and charged on. “We met in the cafeteria at Eaton’s, remember? We … we went shopping and then we had dinner—”

“Where are you calling me from, Laura?” She couldn’t read the tone of his voice.

“I’m in town. I’m with my—I work for the bank and I’m in town for a few days and I thought I would—”

“Where are you staying?”

“At the Algonquin Hotel. I just wanted to, you know, say hi. I remembered that you were from here, and I …” She couldn’t think how to finish. Why wasn’t he saying anything?

“Listen, Laura, I have to make a call, because some guys are expecting me, but—”

Her hand was trembling. “Yes, of course. I mean, I have to go now too because my—I just wanted to say hello. It was nice talking to you.”

She hung up and made it to the stairwell before the tears seeped out of her eyes. Oh god, she was a fool. What had she been hoping for? That he would say, “Laura! At last! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” No, not that, but that he remembered her, at least. That a part of him was always wishing for her, the way a part of her was always hoping for him.

She knew what her mother would say to that.
Why do you imagine these things? God, Laura, you remind me of your father before the hospital
.

Her mother would have also said,
What is wrong with you? You’re engaged to be married! Why are you calling men you don’t know?

She slumped into a chair in her room, hands dangling between her knees, too perplexed now for tears. She had
everything a girl could want, and she didn’t want any of it. Something
was
wrong with her. She
was
like her father before the hospital: telling the same story over and over, crying over nothing, unable to let go. Constitutionally flawed. But from now on, no more. Enough was enough. She would marry Warren and settle down and be happy and stop going around with tears in her eyes and her head in the clouds.

She washed her face, brushed her teeth and went back downstairs to call Warren at his cousin’s.

Warren’s cousin lived in a shabby apartment on the third floor of a house. A secretary at the
Sault Star
, Deb McKenna was what Laura’s mother would have called homely: she had a broad face and big hands and dark, wiry hair straining against the wave it had been set into. They sat on Deb’s worn sofa and drank canned orange juice with a splash of rum and listened as Deb recounted her bad dates with reporters. “You’re lucky,” Deb said to Laura. “You’re lucky to have my cousin, that’s all I can say.” Laura linked her arm through Warren’s and agreed.

Deb’s roommate wandered in wearing a vivid yellow silk shirt over a pair of man’s pyjama bottoms, and waved at them on her way to the kitchen. Deb said Geraldine was waitressing at the Gold Room while she looked for a better job. Laura called out, “Do you have any clerical experience, Geraldine? Because Warren is going to be the manager at the Royal Bank.” Warren shot her a warning frown, but Geraldine said she was waiting for a call back from the steel plant. Warren said that a plant secretary probably made more than a bank teller, anyway. Geraldine came out of the kitchen, eating peas straight out of a can. “I might have to start off as a secretary,” she said, “but I’m going to end up
in
the plant.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Laura said. “I’m sure you won’t end up in the plant.” But perhaps she had misunderstood, because Geraldine
laughed and shovelled another spoonful of peas into her mouth. Laura looked at the mismatched chairs, the faded
HAPPY NEW YEAR 1963
streamer still taped above a closet door, the egg-stained plate on the windowsill, and she thought, “This could be me. If it weren’t for Warren, I’d end up rooming with a homely girl and a weird girl who eats peas out of cans, hoping to be noticed by someone like Warren so that I could start the rest of my life. I
am
lucky.”

The next evening, Laura wore her flapper-style dress, the pale gold fringed sheath, to dinner with Deb and Warren and Warren’s new colleagues and then to the Cinnamon Lounge, where Warren discussed housing prices and neighbourhoods, and Deb told Laura about a guy she was seeing last fall who’d popped the question and then called her up the
next day
and said he’d changed his mind. Laura shook her head in disbelief. Warren said, “That’s a ridiculous price. Listen to this, Laura.” People at the next table got up to leave in a flurry of chairs, and on the other side of the room, Dean Turner put his arm around a girl whose red hair was falling out of its beehive. He was talking, and everyone at his table was laughing. Laura stood up suddenly, knocking over Warren’s drink, and excused herself.

In the bathroom, she dabbed at the Coke stain on her dress, her breath coming in spasms. She was trying to remember if that table had been empty when they came in, but her thoughts kept colliding with each other. The headache threatened to start up again, an ominous pulse above her left temple. She reapplied her lipstick, but it looked garish against her pale skin, so she wiped it off.
I don’t know what to do
, she thought. But there was nothing
to
do, except go back out and sit down with Warren.

Out in the corridor, she almost walked straight into him. He smiled at her and made a little bow. Her ears filled up with a thrashing noise, and her throat felt suddenly coated with ice. He didn’t recognize her.

And then he did. “Hey!” he said happily. “Laura! I called you at the hotel last night, but they said you’d gone out.” He leaned back and appraised her. “Wow. You look even more beautiful than I remembered.”

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.