Every Time We Say Goodbye (3 page)

W
hen the sickness woke her early in the morning, just after the birds began to sing, Grace pulled the sheets over her head and thought about her mother. She had to start with the day she didn’t want to remember, because, before that, the pieces were too small to make anything out of. That day, her mother dropped her rag and sank into the brown armchair under the lamp while Grace stood beside her, perplexed. The floor was not half-finished. “Grace,” her mother said, “come and have a little rest with me.” Grace hesitated, then laid her rag down and climbed onto her mother’s lap. The room smelled of oranges from the wax.

“Will you tell me a story?” Grace asked.

Her mother said, “First I must sit, Grace.”

“I must sit too,” Grace said, and laid her head upon her mother’s shoulder. Her mother tucked her arms around Grace’s middle, and they listened to the drip and fall of rain outside. Her mother said her ears were too tired to listen to the radio. The sheets they
had pulled in this morning before the rain started were still in the basket, and they hadn’t done a thing about dinner, but they stayed in the chair, not shelling peas or knitting, just sitting, until Frank got back from school. Frank was big. He was twelve. He came clanging in, bringing the smell of wet earth, banging his books down. When he saw them, he went quiet. He shifted from foot to foot, shedding worry. “What’s wrong, Ma?”

Grace answered for her. “She is tired. She must sit.”

When their father came home from work, their mother got up to make dinner. “I’m feeling better,” she told Grace. Grace leaned against her mother and breathed in her smell of white soap.

The next time, her mother stopped in the middle of the washing. “I must sit, just for a moment,” her mother said. “Shall I finish the wash, Ma?” Grace asked, but her mother smiled and said no, Grace was too small to work the wringer. In the front room, they sat on the sofa and watched the light grow bright and then dim on the polished floor. “I must get up,” her mother said, but she did not move.

When Frank came home, he squeezed the laundry through the wringer and emptied the machine. “Ma is not well,” he told Grace. “You have to help with dinner.”

Grace said, “I have to sit with Ma.”

So Frank peeled the potatoes and fried onions and bacon and set the table, and Grace and her mother sat in the front room under the lamp until it was time to eat. Sometimes Grace opened her mother’s button box, a little red tin trunk with yellow trim, and they looked together. Grace’s favourite was the bride button, a pink pearl set in a silver curlicue. The large navy button with the gold satin centre was the groom. After buttons, they played hands: Grace’s fingers were the animals or the birds, hopping over the hills of her mother’s palms, looking for a warm, soft place to sleep. Grace had clever hands, her mother said. They were good
at threading needles and lacing boots and fitting the coffee pot back together after her mother had washed all the pieces.

Her mother’s hands were not working properly. They broke a teacup, a plate, a jar. Sometimes they could not hold the scrub brush to clean the pots or the wooden spoon to beat eggs. She had to sit earlier and earlier in the day, and her legs ached and twitched. She didn’t want to read or listen to the radio or sing “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” She just wanted to sit. In the garden, weeds were choking the tomatoes and the berries rotted on their vines.

One Saturday morning, her mother did not get up. In the front room, Grace traced pictures in the dust on the claw-footed table while the doctor talked to her mother upstairs. She drew a mother bird and a baby bird in their nest. The wind lifted the nest from its bough and drifted it down to the cool, green creek, where the water carried it swiftly away. Inside the nest, the mother bird put her wing over the baby bird, and they watched the waves and waved at the fish. When they got hungry, they paddled the nest to shore and ate berries and drank water from leaf cups. Then they got back into their nest and floated downstream again.

The doctor came down and talked to Grace’s father in the kitchen with the door closed, and when the doctor left, her father called for Frank. Later, Frank called for Grace. “You know that Ma is sick, Grace. That’s why you didn’t start school this year. We all have to help. I’ll make breakfast in the morning and you wash the dishes. You’re six now, you’re old enough to do that.”

But after Frank had left for school, her mother said, “Leave the dishes for now, Grace. Come and do my hair.” They sat in front of the oak dresser that held an oval mirror between its two curved arms, and Grace brushed her mother’s hair, lifting the dark waves to her face. Her mother’s hair smelled different from her skin—it smelled like lemon tea.

The doctor brought oranges. No one was to have them except her mother. After they woke from their afternoon sleep, Grace peeled an orange and broke it into segments on the plate. Her mother said, “I can’t eat it all, Grace. You take half.” In the afternoons, they ate orange pieces and rested until Frank came home.

In the mornings, Frank muttered and moped in the doorway of the bedroom. In the evenings, he called out, “Ma? I’m home now,” and pushed Grace aside on the bed. “He’s mussing the covers,” Grace complained, but her mother said, “Shh, Grace, let him sit.” She put her arms around them and called them her Two Peas because they looked so much alike, with thick reddish-brown hair springing from broad foreheads and the same sharp little chins. Grace was always glad when the other pea left the pod to do his homework.

On Wednesday afternoons, Mrs. Davies brought loaves of bread and a rhubarb pie. Her mother said, “Grace, go downstairs and play. I want to talk to Mrs. Davies.”

Grace pounded down the stairs, then crept silently back up to sit outside the bedroom door. She liked the pie, but why couldn’t Mrs. Davies leave it in the kitchen and go home straight away? There was no need to come upstairs and disturb her mother, who needed to rest.

“You see how my legs are now,” her mother was saying.

Mrs. Davies said, “Oh, Florence. But you know, they say people can live years with it.”

When Mrs. Davies left, Grace said, “Ma, do you want a glass of water? Some bread and butter?”

Her mother shook her head. She only wanted Grace to sit with her. Her mother’s arms were heavy now, even though they had grown thin, and she could not lift them to hug Grace, so Grace put her arms around her mother and laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and said, “Shall I tell you where the mother
bird and the baby bird went in their nest today?” Her mother nodded and closed her eyes.

Frank scolded her. “What do you do all day? Why don’t you help?”

Grace said, “I do help.”

Frank said, “Pa’s at work, I’m at school. I can’t do everything around here.”

But he did. He made breakfast and supper. He washed the dishes and weeded the garden. He washed the clothes and tried to make Grace hang them to dry. She said she would and then slipped upstairs to sit beside her mother, who was asleep.

Frank said, “Pa, Grace won’t listen to me. She’s big enough to help a little bit, isn’t she?”

In the kitchen, her father answered quietly. Grace could not hear the words, but he must have said,
Frank, let her be
, because after that, Frank let her be.

It was the Creeping Paralysis, Frank told her. Some people could live years with it. Her mother lived two. Violet, a fat young woman with a face like pudding, came during the day to wash Grace’s mother and change the sheets and feed her spoonfuls of custard and soft-boiled egg. Violet told Grace to get out from underfoot. She closed the bedroom door when Grace’s mother was sleeping so that Grace wouldn’t wake her. She cut Grace’s mother’s hair into an ugly bob, and then she cut the bob into something worse. “It’ll be easier this way,” Violet said, dumping the dustpan of dark feathers and curls into the compost pile.

In the end, her mother could not lift her head or speak. She had been turned to stone. But her eyes were not stone. They followed Grace everywhere and talked to her. Her eyes said all the things her voice had once said, before her throat had turned to stone:
Grace, how I love you. You are the dearest girl in the world
to me. I wanted a daughter so badly after three boys. After Eddie and Joey went up to Heaven, they sent you down to me
.

Her eyes said,
Grace, tell me that story of the mother bird and her baby. Have they got all the way to the sea?
Grace curled up at her mother’s side. The mother bird and baby bird were not yet at the sea. They had stopped on the riverbank, and some kindly beavers gave them tea and filled their nest cupboard with chokecherries and nuts.

Violet threw out the chokecherries and little black seeds. “Don’t bring a mess in here,” she said. She threw out the daisies Grace had picked. “They were dead,” Violet said when Grace scowled and sulked. Grace asked her mother, “Does everything die?” and her mother’s eyes said,
Yes. All things: birds and bugs and plants and people
. “Why does everything die?” Grace asked. Her mother’s eyes said,
I don’t know
, and filled with tears.

One morning a terrible sound woke her. Her father was standing outside, in the cucumber bed, choking, she thought, and then she realized: crying.

On Sundays, she went with Frank to the graveyard to see the stone with her mother’s name: Florence Alice Turner, 1890–1930. Joey and Eddie’s stone was there too: Joseph William Turner, 1911–1918; Edward Albert Turner, 1912–1918. They had died of the flu. Frank told Grace, “Now Eddie and Joey have Ma to look after them. They’re all in Heaven together.”

“Why don’t we all go to Heaven?” Grace asked, but Frank said, “Hush! Don’t talk like that, Gracie.”

To get to the graveyard, they had to walk up their lane, past the Cherniak farm with its fields of mournful black and white cows, to the wide road and down to the church. Frank said, “If you aren’t good, Grace, I won’t take you,” because Grace had been acting up. Throwing tantrums, refusing to eat and worse: she had
taken the scissors and cut the leaves off all the plants in the front room. She had cut off her own hair in jagged strips. And worse than worse: she had taken the photograph down from the wall and cut out her mother’s face so she could have it with her all the time. “Leave her,” their father said when Frank said she must be punished. Their father went downstairs to the cellar, where he sat in the dark. Frank said, “Grace, I won’t take you on Sunday.”

Grace cried, and after that she became sick. Her head hurt and she threw up. A rash bloomed along her face and neck. Her teeth chattered, she could not breathe, and her hair was wet with sweat. The doctor said she was hysterical. They were to ignore her. She would snap out of it.

When the doctor left, Grace ran upstairs to her mother’s room, with its bed neatly made. She ran downstairs to the front room, where the floor no longer gleamed with polish. Her shoes hammered up the stairs and pounded down the hall, and the horrible noise filled her ears. Frank said, “Stop it, Grace!” but she could not stop. There was a motor and she was caught inside it; the teeth of the gears were chewing through her arms and legs.

Frank grabbed her shoulder and yelled, “STOP!” When he turned his back, she opened the closet and threw a can of floor wax at him. It smashed through the glass door of the china cabinet, and when the shattering was finished, Grace sat in the armchair. “I must sit,” she said. The engine inside her was dead.

Frank swept up the glass and brought the dustpan over to her. “Look,” he said. “Look what you’ve done. Ma’s best dishes.”

Grace closed her eyes. “I am tired,” she said. But something about the shards bothered her, and the next day, when Frank was out in the garden, she took the old white and blue creamer down to the creek and broke it into pieces against the big flat rock under the chokecherry tree. With a sharp stone, she pressed the pieces into fragments, the fragments into granules, the granules
into dust. She rubbed her fingers together, and the dust disappeared.
So that is what it was made of
, she thought, amazed.
Tiny little pieces of nothing
.

Against the flat rock, she opened a saucer, a candle, a pea, a beetle, an ant, a seed. Inside, everything was the same. Everything broke into smaller and smaller pieces, until it disappeared entirely.

Some things didn’t break. She asked Frank, “Frank, what is inside this?” It was a screw she had kept from a clock she’d taken apart. She was able to snap the outside plates back into the rim, but had to throw out the metal innards.

He told her how the screw was made. “They take iron ore, you see, and they—”

“But what is inside iron ore?”

“It’s a rock. Like a lump of coal.”

Grace was disappointed. She knew what was inside coal. She asked, “What happens to people after they die?”

Frank sighed. “I told you, they go to Heaven.”

“I mean, what happens to the body?”

Frank told her how God made the first man and woman out of a handful of dirt in the Garden of Eden. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Grace went back out to the flat rock by the creek. Dust to dust. Everything, even people. The mystery was not why everything died, but why anything lived in the first place. What made the tiniest particles cling together to form dust and rocks and seeds? Frank said all the pieces of the world had been drawn together in the beginning by the hand of God. But what kept all the pieces of nothing together
now
, Grace wanted to know. Frank said she had it all wrong. “You can’t get something out of nothing.” But Frank hadn’t opened things, so he didn’t know. Grace thought about this until her head hurt and she had to lie down on the grass beside the rock, and that was the first time
the bliss came. She came unravelled: her head did not hurt, her chest did not ache, and she forgot about her mother dropping things and her father crying in the garden. An empty white chill held her. Inside the bliss, time did not pass. Frank found her and shook her. “Wake up, Grace,” he said, but she hadn’t been asleep. She had been in a different place altogether. She hadn’t wanted to come back.