Every Time We Say Goodbye (29 page)

Vera said, “A tumour. In my uterus. That’s why I couldn’t—why we adopted Dean.”

“Did the medicine help?” Laura asked.

“I didn’t take it,” Vera said. “I just put my foot down. I said, ‘I’m not going to feel like this anymore.’ And that was the end of it.”

“I’m trying,” Laura said, her eyes hot with tears that could not be shed.

“Well, you need to try harder,” Vera said. “That’s all there is to it.”

The name of the ailment was failure and shame. There was no cure.

She called home. Her mother answered. They had started speaking again after Dawn was born, and for the last three years, Laura had been telling her how wonderful it all was, her handsome, dashing husband, her beautiful little girl, her kind, loving in-laws, her angelic little boy. Now Laura told her mother she was thinking about coming home with the kids.

“Oh, at last!” her mother exclaimed. “Dean will drive, I suppose?”

Laura said she was coming alone. With the kids. To stay for a while.

Her mother said, “What do you mean?”

What Laura meant was, she was leaving Dean. She would take the kids and go home, and then he would realize. He would come to his senses. She said, “I need to come home, Mom. Just for a bit.” Then she was crying, and in the sweet relief of it, she told her mother everything.

Her mother’s voice was gentle. “Laura, honey, I wish you’d told me sooner.”

“I know, Mommy. But I thought it would get better.”

“It will get better, honey. It will. You just have to work at it. You’ll see.”

Laura blew her nose. “I
am
working on it, and it’s not working. I need to leave him.”

“Laura.” The gentleness was gone. “Listen to me. You cannot leave your husband. You have two kids. How on earth would you manage? Believe me, I know. It was hard enough for me with one—”

“Mom, if I stay here, I don’t know what will happen to me. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Her mother said, “Laura, you sound just like your father.” Then she said, “Your father is better now, and I won’t have you upsetting him. Can you imagine—if you show up with Dawn and Jimmy? What would people say? After the stunt you pulled the first time?”

Her mother said no, absolutely not. She said Laura’s place was with her husband and her children. She said Laura would have to work at it. That’s what marriage was. Did she think it was all flowers and candles and a stroll in the park? It was no picnic, but you didn’t jump ship when things got difficult. Laura’s mother hadn’t left Laura’s father, had she? No, she had stuck by him, through thick and thin.

“I don’t want to leave Dean!” Laura cried. “I want him to come back to me.”

“Honestly, Laura,” her mother snapped. “I can’t talk to you when you don’t make sense.” She hung up.

Dean came in just as the sun was coming up. “Where were you?” Laura asked quietly from the chair she had been sitting in all night.

“At Wharton’s.

“Don’t lie to me.”

He yawned. “I’m going to bed.”

“What about work?”

“I’ll call in sick.”

“They’re going to fire you.”

He shrugged and dropped his shirt on the ground. “I don’t care if they do.”

“You don’t care if they do.” She leapt up. “I’ve been breaking my back working and you—you’re out until all hours with god knows who. You have a wife and two kids living with your parents. You can’t even—”

The lamp came flying across the room and broke against the wall.

She staggered backwards with a cry. “Oh, calm down,” he said, climbing into bed. “I didn’t throw it at you.”

“But you threw it,” she whispered. A deep, wrenching sob shook her.
When it was bad, it was horrid
. “Why do you behave like this? What is wrong with you?”

He lifted his head off the pillow to look at her. “I don’t want to do this,” he said.

“Then why don’t you call to say where you are? Why can’t you—”

“No!
This!
I never wanted any of this.” He gestured wildly at the room.

“If you hadn’t quit the plant, we wouldn’t have to live here.”

“Will you
listen?
I never wanted to get married and live in this shit town and punch a clock.
You
wanted this. This was your idea.” He turned his back to her and pulled the blankets up to his neck.

Laura stood in the middle of the room, her arms hanging uselessly by her sides. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Are you saying you don’t love me?”

“No, okay? No. I do not love you.”

There it was, the truth, shaped into words and launched into the air at last. And even though she had known, it still came at her like a punch in the head; she saw flickering lights and felt an implosion of blood in her temples. “Are you leaving me?” she asked him. “What are you saying?”

He made a snorting sound. “I’m not saying anything. Now let me sleep.”

Laura went into the next room, where Dawn and Jimmy were curled up in their cot and crib. Something dense and enormous had crash-landed in the middle of her head, and it was impossible to think around it. Half her thoughts were on one side of the blockage, half on the other; the beginning and ending of sentences didn’t match up.

He hadn’t wanted to marry her. But he had loved her. He hadn’t wanted a wife and kids. But he had married her.

He didn’t want to be married. But he was married.

He wasn’t leaving. But he wanted to leave.

He never wanted this. But she hadn’t wanted this either—living with her in-laws, paying bills that were never paid off, waiting for her husband to come home and stay home. The black fog, the birds of terror. She hadn’t wanted any of it, but she was going to be stuck with it.

She could hear the kettle being filled in the kitchen. In a few minutes, the kids would be awake, and she would have to take
them downstairs for breakfast. She stood up and began to dress for work, pulling on nylons, a black shirt and a white blouse. It took her a long time; her hands seemed to be very far away from the rest of her.

Downstairs, as she was shoving her feet into her boots, Vera said they were running out of cereal for Dawn. “I’ll bring some home tonight,” Laura said. Her voice came bouncing back off the kitchen tiles and echoed in her head, but Vera didn’t seem to notice. “Not that expensive kind. Get puffed rice,” she said, setting down a plastic bowl in front of Dawn.

Dawn chanted, “Get puffed rice! Get puffed rice.” Laura pulled on her coat. Dawn waved her spoon gleefully. “Bye, Mommy!”

At 3:30, she was sitting motionless at her desk when Will Wharton came by with a load of paper and ink and told her she looked awfully pale. A tear burned a track down her cheek. Will said, “Jeez, Laura. Let me drive you home.” She shook her head, but he insisted. “Go on, get your coat,” he said.

She walked across the room on shaky legs. No one said anything, but she saw them watching her as she pulled on her beige woollen coat and boots. “Going home early?” Deb McKenna asked. Laura didn’t answer. Will Wharton held open the door, and she walked out into the stinging cold.

He helped her into the truck and then got in and turned on the heater. She was crying silently, just tears and snot. Will handed her a crumpled tissue. “It’s clean,” he said. She held it limply and continued to cry as Will told her that Dean was a son of a bitch who didn’t know how lucky he was to have a woman like her, and if she had been his wife, he would have made damn sure she wasn’t sitting in a parking lot crying her eyes out like this. When he put his arms around her, she made no effort to push him away, and when he started to kiss her, she let him. He
rubbed himself against her, jamming his hands under her coat, squeezing her breasts, groaning in her ear, “Laura, Laura.” Finally, he shuddered and sat back and said, “Jesus … You wanna get a room or something?”

Laura pulled herself upright and buttoned her coat. “Can you take me to the bus terminal?”

“The bus terminal? Why? You wanna go somewhere?”

“Toronto.”

He was silent for a while, and then reached for the gearshift. “You know what? I’ll drive you. What the hell. It’s Friday. I wouldn’t mind getting out of town for the weekend.”

W
ill Wharton dropped her off on Saturday night, after spending Friday night in a motel room in Sudbury trying to convince her to come away with him. They would drive to Buffalo and keep going, get as far as they could with the company truck before it was called in missing on Monday morning; they could get a place, get jobs, start new lives. She said no. She had heard this story before. Will sulked. He was still sulking when they reached the driveway of her parents’ home in Toronto. “You could at least invite me in,” he said. She shook her head. He said, “Well, I’m gonna keep going. I’m—”

“Goodbye,” Laura said and climbed out of the truck.

For the next three days, she did nothing but sleep, waking only to stagger to the bathroom or sit up and drink the cool, milky tea her father brought her. When she finally got up, he talked about the smallest of things: the book he was reading about birds of Ontario, the strange badger-like creature he had
seen in a field at Don Mills. He said he was going to paint the kitchen a very light green. He asked her if she wanted a slice of toast.

He didn’t ask her why she had left, or tell her that she had to go back. She leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes. The fog was gone, and the strange pains in her limbs. Her insides had been completely hollowed out. She was almost weightless. She had come through something terrible, but she was too weak to look back and see what it was.

After her mother left for work in the morning, her father asked if she wanted to go for a walk. She had to wear her old camel hair coat and a pair of her mother’s boots from the front hall closet. Her father held her arm and guided her down the street to the corner. The air was sharp and clean, and her breath formed wet circles on her wool scarf. “Shore lark,” her father said, pointing to a small bird on a fence. “They like the snow.” They stopped to watch the small bird with its little cap and scarf of dark feathers. Laura pulled her fingers out of the ends of her gloves and balled them up against her palms for warmth. Her wedding ring was loose on her finger. When she pulled off the glove, it dropped into the snow. “Did you lose something?” her father asked. She shook her head.

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.”