Every Time We Say Goodbye Read Online Free Page A

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 hadtaken 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 granulesinto 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,