Every Time We Say Goodbye Read Online Free Page B

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 timethe 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.
    In the fall, Grace started school. The first day, she was afraid, so Frank let her carry the pink pearl bride and her navy groom in her pocket. In the beginning, she liked going. Words were made of letters and letters were lines and lines were pencil marks that could be rubbed into pieces of grit and blown away. She liked numbers, too, because they were just one and one added, and if you took one and one away, you went back to nothing. But she had no interest in the equations of triangles or the wars of kings, and the teachers had to speak to her again and again. If they spoke too sharply, they would bring on one of her headaches, and she would weep until she vomited and they would have to send her home. Sometimes, she could not breathe and had to be sent home anyway. Finally, they let her sit at the back of the class and read. The bliss did not come at school; there were too many sounds—chanting and tapping and sniffling—and too many smells—wet wool and mould and chalk. But she was happy enough to read, because she could stay very still and no one bothered her with talk or questions, and sometimes she caught the bliss in between the words.
    Their father came home from work one evening and did not go back. There was no work to go back to. He went quiet, speaking only to say yes or no or “Frank, fix some dinner for your sister.” Frank said it wasn’t just their father. Across the whole country, factories had been laying off and people were going hungry, and their father had been luckier than most,hanging on at the steel plant for almost four years. Frank was going to work at the tar plant. He would have to quit school, but at least he would be bringing something home. And Grace did not have to go to school anymore either, Frank said. It was pointless if she wasn’t going to apply herself. She was twelve now, old enough to keep house for them. He left her a list of things to do, and sometimes, she finished the list, but other