Every Time We Say Goodbye Part 10

"You didn't steal the Packard from outside a hotel in Sudbury?"

"No, sir."

Blink. "Then how'd you get here?"

"I hitchhiked."

"And the thief who stole the Packard just happened to leave it outside the office you broke into?"

Dean shrugged. "Weird, huh?"

Cooper gestured to the tools. "You steal these?"

"No."

Blink. "You just happened to find them under a smashed window?"

"I brought them from home."

"For the purpose of breaking and entering."

For the purpose of sticking them up your a.s.s, Dean thought. A wall of fatigue rose up, and he crossed his arms and settled down behind it. This conversation was over.

Cooper left the room and Dean slid down in the chair. "Don't show weakness," he told himself, but he was tired in a way he'd never been before. He was tired of all his thoughts, and they were tired of themselves. They just lay there in his head, limp and flat and disconnected from everything. If Cooper came back and said Dean was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, he'd shrug and shuffle off to his cell.

He must have fallen asleep, or into that grey in-between place, because when Cooper came back, he could see by the splashes of light on the floor that it was much later. Cooper stood there waiting for Dean to look up. Dean could feel him blinking.

"Your parents just got here."

"They're not my parents," Dean said.

"Really? Who are they, then?"

They're liars, Dean thought. He didn't answer.

"Well, they sure drove a long way for someone else's kid."

Dean said, "I was adopted."

"I gathered that," Cooper said, and sat down at the desk.

"Why?" Dean straightened in the chair, alert again. "Did they say something?"

"No," Cooper said. "But why else would you be going through files at the Children's Aid?" He opened a drawer, fiddled around with something, closed the drawer. "I was adopted myself," he said.

Dean smirked. "Sure."

Cooper said, "It's true. My cousin told me. We were arguing over something. I was eleven. I said I was going to tell my dad, and she said, *That's not your dad, anyway. You were adopted.' "

Dean studied Cooper's face. "Did you believe her?"

"No. But I went in and asked them. My mother said no and my father said yes. So I knew it was true."

Wow, Dean thought. That was as bad as What kind of talk is that? "Did you ever find your real parents?"

"I did."

Dean leaned forward. All his thoughts had come awake, and hope was flickering and humming just off to the side. "How? Where?"

Cooper was playing with a paper clip. He straightened it out and then bent it into a V. "Where did I find them? I'll tell you where I found them."

The hope flickered out.

"I found my mother in the kitchen, making my lunch for school. I found my father in the backyard, fixing my bike. I found them every day when I came in the door. Every time I sat down at the table to eat the food they had bought and cooked for me."

Dean slid back down in the chair.

"Look at me, son," Cooper said, and Dean looked up, his face aflame.

"I may be adopted, but I sure as h.e.l.l am not your son." Although as soon as he said it, he realized Cooper could very well be his father. Just about any male past the age of thirty on the whole G.o.dd.a.m.n planet could be his father.

Cooper straightened the paper clip again and it snapped in two. He placed the pieces carefully on the blotter. "I know you're thinking about the woman who gave birth to you and the man who made her pregnant, and you're wondering who they are and why they didn't keep you."

Wrong, Dean thought. I'm thinking that you are the biggest a.s.s I've ever encountered in my long and varied history of encountering a.s.ses.

"But the truth is, those people out there in the waiting room, they're the ones who wanted you. They're the ones who are bringing you up. They're the ones who didn't sleep a wink after they found out you were gone."

Dean turned to look. He saw only their backs, but he recognized them immediately. His mother's wide back, his father's thin one. His mother's dark brown hat. His father's battered grey fedora. A feeling of tenderness and longing opened in him, and his throat and nose itched furiously. He averted his face. He didn't want to bawl in front of Cooper so that Cooper could later claim it as victory. Yep, finally got through to the kid. Had him in tears by the end of it. The wetness in his eyes had nothing to do with Cooper.

"Think of what you're putting them through," Cooper said.

A surge of anger drowned the longing. Think of what they put me through, Dean wanted to shout.

"The thing is," Cooper went on, "those other folks, they aren't anything to you. They gave you up because they had to, and that's the whole story. It wasn't personal."

Dean stared at him. It wasn't personal? The people who were supposed to want you for the most indispensable, irreducible, unquestionable reason of all-because you were their own flesh and blood-didn't want you and they gave you away to people who, when they saw your true colours, didn't much want you either, and it wasn't personal? Dean swallowed hard. "Yes, sir," he said. "I understand now."

Cooper missed the sarcasm completely. He nodded and stood up. "You think you want to know, but trust me, you don't. They keep those records closed for good reason."

"Oh, very good, sir. You're very wise, sir."

Cooper glared at him. "There's no need to get snarky with me, young man."

As he was closing the door, Dean called out, "It's not personal."

He watched Cooper talk with his parents in the hallway. Cooper had probably been the kind of kid his parents wanted. A homework-doing, Mouseketeer-cheering, old-lady-helping kid who didn't have to always be showing off or playing the fool. A colourless kid who would stand between them at church and think good thoughts instead of wondering how hard it was to get into the sacristy and whether the wine in there would be worth the effort. Then they were walking towards him, Cooper in the middle, and Dean remembered the photograph of Vera and another woman and a baby between them. There'd been another birth certificate. Mother's name: Grace Turner. A relative he'd never heard of, a woman hidden in a closet for having a baby before she got married.

His mother.

UNDERCOVER.

He wouldn't put it in his book, because he hadn't developed it himself, but he knew how to make another person disappear. Remove photos of said person from all alb.u.ms (don't forget to check cardboard box of miscellaneous pictures). Go through the house and collect personal effects: clothes, shoes, monogrammed gloves, alphabet key rings. Check books for the person's name written in fading ink on the flyleaf. Shake out books just in case the person left something pressed between the pages: a letter, an address written on a slip of paper. Never, under any circ.u.mstances, mention the person. That wouldn't be hard once all physical traces had been removed. And even removing the physical evidence was probably not so hard after you got rid of the actual person.

He had no idea how they'd accomplished that part. He could only say that there was nothing of Grace Turner in the house.

Their only oversight had been leaving the photo and the birth certificate in the box in the closet. And they'd corrected that.

He kept his investigations to himself. It wasn't difficult. When adults wanted you to be something badly enough, they'd take anything as a confirmation that you were becoming it. They wanted you to be a doctor, you got 87 on a biology quiz, and bing, bang, boom, you were on your way to medical school. Never mind that Mrs. Agnew had been using the same biology tests for five hundred years and anyone could get a copy with the answers for a quarter and, in fact, you yourself were selling the copies this year. Or they wanted you to have settled down, and weeks pa.s.sed where nothing happened except you came home and did your homework, and on Sat.u.r.day you raked Mrs. May's lawn and she sent you over to her sister Mrs. Murphy's house to do some yardwork, and lo! you had settled down. Never mind that you were undercover the whole time, taking notes and cracking codes. They wanted you to put this adoption business behind you; you said you would, and be-bop-a-loo-bop, you had put it all behind you.

He had slept in the back seat all the way home from North Bay, waking to the crunch of Vera closing the pa.s.senger door. For a few moments, it was just him and Frank listening to the engine click and sigh. Frank took off his gla.s.ses and began cleaning one lens with a handkerchief. "It's hard for her to talk about," he said.

Hard for her to talk about? Dean thought. Think of what you're putting them through. How could you do this to us?

Frank looked at him in the rear-view mirror. "We didn't tell you because we thought it would be better for you not to know. We couldn't have children of our own. We tried, but she had to have an operation, and-"

Dean didn't care about any of that. "Where did I come from?" he asked. "Who are my real parents? Where are they now?"

Frank breathed on the other lens and began to polish it. Dean wanted to grab the gla.s.ses and throw them out the window. He was reaching for the door handle when Frank spoke up. "The woman couldn't keep you. She was young and not married. That's all I can tell you."

"That's all you know or that's all you can tell me?"

"That's all we know."

Dean's face tightened into a mask. They should know better than to lie to an expert.

Frank said, "The best thing is to just put it out of your mind. Don't let it be a monkey on your back."

"Fine," Dean said. He knew how to play that game. He got out of the car. "I'm going in."

Vera was in the kitchen, breaking eggs into a mixing bowl. He opened the refrigerator and stood peering in. From the corner of his eye, he could see that she had put down her wooden spoon and was looking at him. Even though it was too late, because he was on his own now and there was almost nothing she could say to change that, he waited. The clock ticked; on the stove, the coffee pot began to burble.

"Don't stand with the fridge open," she said. "And wash your hands."

It was Mrs. May who told him. "Grace Turner? Why, that's your aunt. Your father's sister. She went to work down south." Her sister Mrs. Murphy told him even more. Sometimes, he was sure he was two steps away from unravelling the whole thing. Other times, what seemed like a brain-swelling, throat-choking revelation shrank into some sc.r.a.p of common information by the time he got to the next clue. The hardest part about being undercover was that he had to pretend he knew nothing and wanted to know even less. It took him almost two years to put it all together. But Cooper might have been right about one thing: You think you want to know. But you don't.

He had started his detective work by knocking on Mrs. May's door and asking if she had any yardwork he could do. She had babysat him when he was a kid, on the rare occasions Frank and Vera went out. Her children were all grown up and her husband had died years ago. She would be lonely, he thought. She would welcome the chance to talk. And she had to know something; she'd lived at the end of the road, in the small white house with blue shutters, for years. But she turned out to be discreet; she'd stop mid-sentence and say that she had already told him too much, after spending twenty minutes telling him nothing at all.

He had much better luck with Mrs. Murphy, who lived in a much bigger house with a bigger yard across town. The sisters had nothing in common except that they were both fat, and not even that was the same. Mrs. May was the soft kind of fat and called him "Dean, dear" and always sounded breathless. Mrs. Murphy was the hard kind of fat, addressed him as "Boy" and had a voice like a can of nails. Her house had a complicated system of eaves and gutters and mouldy waterspouts, and there was no one to help her with the upkeep. Her children were ingrates, her neighbours were criminals, and her husband was dead-poisoned, Dean was fairly sure, by Mrs. Murphy herself, although a cast-iron frying pan over the head was not out of the question.

"You just do your work there and don't listen to her," Frank had advised the first morning Dean set out on his bike. But it was impossible not to listen: she talked constantly, and swore more inventively than he did.

It was easy to get her to talk. All he had to do was mention a person and she went off like a firecracker. Father Croce. Father Croce was a drunk, and Dean couldn't tell her he hadn't smelled the G.o.dd.a.m.n drink on him. Father Dougherty. The princ.i.p.al of Dean's school had his finger up his a.r.s.e. (He agreed with her on that point, even though he wasn't sure what it meant.) Dr. McCabe. Dr. McCabe had been s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his secretary all these years, and Mrs. McCabe knew it, but that didn't stop her from flouncing around in her silk this and her fur that.

Vera. Well, Vera certainly did well for herself, considering what she came from. Vera's father had been a drunk, hawked everything he owned for the drink and even sold the pots and pans when there was nothing else left. Vera's sister had married a man just like him, only he was well off, so she kept her pots, but Vera got lucky. What was Dean doing with the leaves over there? He was going to walk through them and scatter them all over h.e.l.l's half-acre. Frank. Now there was a sad story. Frank's mother had died of creeping paralysis, and Frank's father had died of septic shock. And Frank had to bring up his younger sister, Grace- "My dad has a sister? Really?" Dean said. "He never talks about her."

"Well, I'm not surprised."

Dean stopped raking. "What do you mean?"

"She got knocked up and had to go down south. Why are you holding the rake like that?"

Dean bent down and pretended to free something from the end of the rake. If she got onto the subject of his c.r.a.ppy workmans.h.i.+p, he might never be able to steer her back.

"Where down south?"

"Oh, I can't remember. It was a long time ago. Peterborough or Kingston."

"And then what happened to her?"

"How should I know? I had enough worries of my own with that lout I was married to."

"She, Grace, wasn't married?"

"Why do you think she went down south?"

"Who was it ... the father, I mean?"

"What do I look like, the FBI? Watch what you're doing there. If I wanted the leaves smeared around, I'd let the wind do it for free."

When he'd tried pressing Mrs. May for more information, she said, "Oh, I'm not one to gossip, Dean, dear. You'd have to ask your mother and father about Grace. She was a sweet girl. She used to pick flowers over in the field where Donaldson's store is now. I hardly remember her."

But Mrs. Murphy said, "I remember her, all right. She was soft in the head."

He almost dropped the rake. "What do you mean?"

"What do you think I mean? Are you soft in the head yourself?"

Dean scowled at the ground. "I mean, was she crazy? Stupid?" He didn't know what he would do if Grace turned out to be r.e.t.a.r.ded or something. Those records are sealed for a reason.

"No, no." Mrs. Murphy waved him back to work impatiently. "She was just off."

He held on to the "just." Just off. Like milk. You could still drink it. It had just been left out too long. He started to ask about the baby, but Mrs. Murphy said she'd seen enough of his leaf-arranging, thank you very much; the p.r.o.nger boy two streets over did a much better job.

At home, he searched for her again and again in the bookcases and the cupboards, in between cookbooks and among the spice jars. She had been here. She had grown up here with Frank, who was not his father but his mother's brother. She had touched these walls and sat under these lights and walked through these doors. But they'd erased every trace of her, or else she'd taken everything with her. She had left nothing of herself behind. Except him.

He waited several weeks after Mrs. Murphy dismissed him before he brought up her name to Frank. They were in the bas.e.m.e.nt, painting two wooden benches Frank had built for the front lawn. Dean said, "Mrs. Murphy says I have an aunt named Grace." He watched Frank carefully.

Frank smoothed another band of dark green paint onto the pale wood. "My sister," he said.

"Where does she live?"

"Down south. She went down there to work during the war. She got a job in a big clock factory. Watch what you're doing there, Dean. You're dripping everywhere."

"How come she never visits us?"

"She has her life down there, I guess."

"But she's your sister."