Every Time We Say Goodbye Part 14

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. Sh.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.suming 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. Sh.e.l.l? (Maybe her father and Mrs. Sh.e.l.l 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 grat.i.tude. 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.

SIGNS.

She 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 pa.s.sed.

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.

Dean Turner was looking at her so intently she felt she was dissolving into him. He touched the back of her hand, and a long, powerful quaver went through her. This happened to other people, she thought-in books and movies-and now it was happening to her.

"Come with me," he said, and she went, just like that. He took her arm and they strolled through the store, stopping in the luggage department so Dean could tell the clerk they were going to Timbuktu on their honeymoon, and was this material heat- and dust- and camel- resistant? In electronics, they looked for the largest, loudest TV ever made as a hundredth birthday present for their half-blind, half-deaf great-grandmother. At the glove counter, they needed sungla.s.ses because Laura, the daughter of someone who could not be named, was being followed by ("Don't look") that guy in the black coat by the stairwell. In front of the mirror in ladies' wear, Dean lifted a strand of her hair and said her mother was wrong: it wasn't mousy, it was burnished.

Then he checked his watch and announced that he was taking Laura to dinner. "What's the best restaurant in Toronto?"

Laura didn't know. They only ever went to cafeterias and diners. "But wherever it is, we aren't dressed right." He was wearing grey pants, a white shirt, black loafers. She was wearing the pleated navy skirt and blue boat-necked sweater she always wore to the hospital. "We look fine for Eaton's," she said. "But you'd need a jacket. And I'm wearing these," she said, kicking up her foot so he could see her white sneakers. "We won't even get in the door."

"Is that so?" Dean narrowed his eyes and wriggled his eyebrows at the same time.

"Yes, it is," she said, giggling. "Why? What are you going to do?"

In the men's section, he walked straight to a rack and lifted a dark grey jacket off a hanger, just as if it were his. He slipped it on, and they stood side by side in front of the mirror. She lifted the tag on the sleeve and gasped.

"Italian wool," he said, and she rubbed the material between her fingers. "Finest in the world."

The salesman wanted to pack it in a box but Dean said he would wear it. "Next stop, shoes," he told Laura.

She looked down at his feet, but he shook his head. "Not for me," he said.

"I don't have any money," she said.

"I know," he said. He grabbed her hand and they ran back upstairs.

"These," he said, picking up a pair of black patent leather pumps with a thin strap high across the instep.

"You can't buy shoes for me, Dean."

"Why not?"

Laura thought about what her mother would say if she came home in these shoes. If she knew that Laura was running around Eaton's with a guy she'd just met in the cafeteria. She shook her head.

"Okay," Dean said. "We won't get them. But try them on. Just to see how they look." The clerk who had been hovering took the shoe into a back room and came out with a box.

She peeled off her socks and slipped her feet in, rising up on the heel to become a tall and slender Laura. "Do you like them?" he asked.

"I love them."

She walked over to a mirror and twisted her burnished hair into a chignon. Her cheeks were flushed. She looked like someone else.

Dean appeared behind her. "Beautiful," he said, and her face went even pinker. Dean handed her a cardboard box. "For your old shoes," he said.

"You can't buy these for me, Dean."

"I already did," he said. He waved at the clerk behind the sales desk; the clerk waved back.

Laura bit her lip. "Okay, let me buy you something now," she said. "But I only have a dollar."

"Buy me a pen," he said, "so I can write you secret messages." In the stationery department, she bought him a ballpoint pen and he uncapped it and wrote her name and address on the inside of his arm.

They went several blocks, racing, skipping, ducking out of the way of annoyed adults. Everything was funny. A woman told them to act their age, and a police officer asked them if they'd been drinking. They couldn't stop laughing.

"Here," Dean said, stopping. They were outside Barberian's Steak House.

"It looks expensive," Laura said.

"Exactly," said Dean.

Inside the wood-panelled room, the maitre d' looked at them crossly, but as soon as Dean started to speak, the man rearranged the expression on his face and listened intently. Laura thought it was all in the way Dean looked at you. His eyes flashed, like he had just taken a picture of you, like he really saw you. And it was the way he talked, of course. He didn't sound like an adopted boy from Sault Ste. Marie. He sounded like someone famous, someone who lived in California and drove a convertible and had a wallet full of cash. The maitre d' led them to a table at the back. They ate dinner rolls and read the menu while waiters refilled their water goblets. Dean told her about the book he was writing about his life so far. He told her about a trick with a light bulb and a shower of pennies. He told her this was not the first time he had run away. The first time, he had stolen a car. This time, he had stolen a cheque. There. What did she think of him now? She thought he was an unredeemable degenerate, didn't she?

"I don't even know what that means!" she exclaimed, laughing, but he was serious. "It means no good. Everybody knows I have bad blood." He was staring at his empty plate, his face suddenly blank and lightless.

"No," Laura said, her face growing hot with indignation. "You are the most wonderful person I've ever met. I wish the world was filled with people like you." He wouldn't look up at her, so she beamed her thoughts into him. I love you, she told him silently. I just met you, but I love you.

Under the table, he reached for her hand.

The waiter came and lit the candle in the lamp at their table and asked if they were ready to order. Dean waved him away and then called him back and asked for another basket of bread. He said, "I can see the candlelight in your eyes," and that long, trilling thrill ran through her again. They were finishing their third basket of bread when Dean realized loudly that they were going to miss their train. He stood up abruptly, dropping his napkin to the floor, and signalled frantically. Two waiters helped them collect their things, and Dean pressed a folded bill into one's palm as he led Laura out.

Dean took her hand and they ran, laughing, down the street. He pulled her under an awning and kissed her. She was alive in every limb and joint and cell, a conduit for something immense and undeniable. The universe was flowing through her, in all its goodness and sadness and craziness, unimpeded and undiluted, and no matter what happened next, it would be the right thing.

He framed her face in his hands and they kissed again. He loves me too, she thought. It was crazy, but it was true.

His face crumpled and he began to weep. "Dean!" she cried out, and then put her arms around him. He pressed his face into her neck. "Laura," he said, and her entire chest ached at the way his voice wavered. She kissed his ear and his cheek and told him he would find them someday, and even if he never found them, it didn't matter. She knew who her parents were and mostly she wished she didn't. He straightened up and wiped his face. She felt powerful; she had brought him back from the edge of the storm, the same way he had brought her back when he appeared across the table at Eaton's. They walked a bit farther in silence, and then Dean pointed to a crowd of people in front of a windowless brick building. "What's going on in there?" She wanted to keep walking with him, just the two of them, through the dark streets forever, but he led her through the crowd, down a staircase and into a dim, smoky room. It was a nightclub of some sort, jammed with men in turtlenecks and women in tight pants and sweaters. Laura felt like a kid in her gingham skirt, but Dean seemed to recover a little of his sparkle. When the band came on, the room went completely dark, and Dean reached for Laura's hand. A single narrow beam of light cut through the room and fell on the neck of a guitar. Another beam caught a raised drumstick. Another splashed a pool of light under the microphone. The singer, dressed completely in black, stepped forward into the pool. Dean looked transfixed.

Halfway through the song, he turned to her, and she saw that the light had come back to his face. The hurt was still in his eyes, but it had shrunk to a splinter. When the band left the stage, they squeezed themselves through the crowd and out into the night, Dean talking a mile a minute. Had Laura noticed how the lighting made the musicians look like they were floating in the dark? Didn't she love the circular bar? Laura nodded, thinking, Please kiss me again.

He stopped talking and did. Not even in the best Michael Pierce scenarios had she felt so cherished. He wound her hair around his hands, and his voice, silky and soft in her ear, said he was so glad to have found her, and she had to promise, promise, not to leave him or let him go. She promised. Then he sighed and said he should be getting her home now.

They took a taxi, and she wished they could drive through the night, side by side, their arms and hands entwined, her head on Dean's shoulder, but the driver said, "Broadview and Mortimer," and they had to climb out. They stopped between street lights to kiss in the shadows. Dean said he would call her in the morning and blew a kiss from the end of the driveway before turning and jogging into the darkness. Her mother yanked open the door, hissing furiously, but Laura, insulated by the warmth of Dean's invisible arms and the imprint of his mouth on her lips and neck, hardly heard her. Upstairs in her room, she lay in some joyous state between dream and memory for the rest of the night. At last she understood why things had happened the way they did: why her mother's new shoes had pinched on the way home from the hospital, why Dean had stood outside his mother's house and decided not to knock, why Dean had been adopted and why Laura's father was in the hospital in the first place. From the very beginning, their paths had been winding and striving towards each other. This was how happiness worked: it disguised itself as a series of accidents and disappointments, and then you looked up one day and there was the love of your life.

Except he didn't call in the morning, and when she finally dialled the hotel, the clerk said Mr. Turner was no longer their guest. It was just like the day she had come home from school and her mother said, "Your father was taken by ambulance to the mental hospital." They were like dream words that made no sense when you woke up.

Her mother made her take the shoes back.

She waited for him to call from wherever he was, and then she waited for him to write with the pen she had bought, and even though she didn't like this twist in the plotline, she knew this was how the stories generally went. She wasn't meant to understand until they came together again and everything was cleared up in a tumult of kisses and tears. She was supposed to sigh and fret and wander along the path near the Don River, pale and sick at heart, until he stepped out of the shade of the willow tree, as pale and feverish as she was, having risked everything and lost everything to find her again, or at least until he sent her a postcard from the hospital where he had been taken after being conked on the head or run over by a bus.

"It's just like An Affair to Remember," her friend Winnie sighed.

Everything happened for a reason. She just had to have faith.

After six months, her faith began to disintegrate: it seemed they were not meant to meet, fall in love, separate and reunite, get married and all the rest, happily ever after, the end, amen. Maybe there was no reason for the way the whole universe had liquefied itself and poured through her veins that night. It was not an affair to remember but a random encounter, without repeat or resonance.

Winnie said, "I guess it wasn't meant to be, after all," and Laura said, "I guess it wasn't." She could say it, but she couldn't make herself believe it entirely.

Even three years later, when she was working at the bank and seeing a lot of her co-worker, Warren Haddon, she sometimes thought about Dean Turner. When Warren kissed her, he felt like a wooden block in her arms, and when he put his hands into her blouse or between her legs, his touch was faint, as if he were stroking her through a quilt. Her mother said Warren was a perfect gentleman, and he was. He always stopped after a moment or two and removed his hand and straightened up and said he guessed he should be getting her home now. He walked her to the door and kissed her good night under the porch light. Sometimes, terrible thoughts knifed their way into her mind and she imagined saying something shocking to him just at that moment, something cruel and obscene. She didn't know what was wrong with her.

After years of on-and-off attempts and weekend visits, her father was home full-time. He wasn't the father she had mourned as a child, but he wasn't the stand-in either, and in truth, she hardly remembered that other father now, the one before Marcus Findley and the breakdown. They never talked about the hospital, but sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, her father's face would go blank, and Laura would search her mind for something to say to bring him back. After a couple of seconds, he blinked and returned, whether she spoke or not. Still, it was alarming.

Laura asked her mother, "Do you ever notice how Dad disappears sometimes when you're talking to him?"

Her mother said, "Why do you always have to see problems where there aren't any?"

Laura didn't know why. Her father was fine; he was working as a clerk ("a.s.sistant manager," her mother said) at a hardware store. Her mother was fine; she continued to work at the doctor's office because, she said, she had never been one of those women content to sit at home and polish the silverware; she had practically pioneered the way for married women to work. And Laura was fine. She had a steady boyfriend and a job, and her hope chest was filling up with tea towels and embroidered pillowcases. She had learned to sew and was putting together a grown-up woman's wardrobe: a sky blue skirt and quilted jacket, a shimmering pale gold flapper-style party frock, a forest green suit. There was no reason whatsoever for the storm clouds to be gathering just out of the corner of her eye. There was no reason for her to drop her head and pray, Please let something happen, but she did, and that winter, Warren got down on one knee in her living room and opened a little black box and said, "Laura, will you marry me? Will you be my wife?"

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.

EVERYTHING TURNS OUT IN THE END.

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 fiancee, 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 b.u.mble 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."

"h.e.l.lo?" Laura said.

"h.e.l.lo," 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."

"h.e.l.lo, 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-"