The Good Goodbye (21 page)

“I wouldn’t have pegged you as a lawyer.”

Meaning what, that I’m not smart enough? “Why not?”

“You know how many papers you have to write in law school?”

I don’t need this. She can’t buy me with a cup of coffee. I push back my chair and she reaches out, puts her long slim fingers on mine for a brief moment. A flash of knowing, and then her hand’s gone, back to circle her cup. I can’t move. “Tell me, Rory. Seriously. I want to know. Why law school? Of all the things you could pursue, why that?”

No one’s ever asked me that. My saying it’s my plan is usually enough to stop them.

“Is it because you want to be a champion for the downtrodden, a righter of wrongs? Or maybe you just want to rack up billable hours and put in an eternity pool?”

Snarky bitch.
Law school’s just two words that add up to three years on top of college. Seven years of my life planned and programmed. Seven years where I don’t have to ask the hard questions, and if I try to look too far into the future, everything blurs. I wake up every morning with a panicky feeling that makes me throw back the covers and sit straight up. Then I think,
Why?
The plan isn’t the problem, I know. The problem’s me. “What’s wrong with being a lawyer?”

“Nothing. Someone has to be one. Why not you?”

She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know anything about me. “Like someone has to teach art history?”

“Exactly. And someone has to pick up the garbage, deliver the mail.”

“I’d rather go to law school.”

She smiles. “Just wait until you’re halfway through your first year. Then we’ll talk.”

It feels good, making her smile. Powerful. I feel the scales lift and rock back into balance. “So how come you’re teaching 101? I thought it was supposed to be someone named Llewellyn.” Her name hadn’t been the one listed in the catalog. Her profile isn’t even on the college website.

“He had to take an unexpected leave of absence. I was hired at the last minute. Lucky for me. I’d been looking for months.” She’d been teaching in Chicago, but a relationship turned bad and one of them had to split town. “I lost the coin toss.” She shrugs. I can’t tell if she’s sad or not, but I can’t believe she’s talking to me like this. I can’t tell how old she is. Not as old as my mom, but older than Liz, the prep cook at Double. So maybe thirty. But I bet the guy she’d been dating was older. Someone smart, funny, not necessarily good-looking. Someone who tucked in his shirt and wore bow ties and made her fondly sigh and shake her head. I wonder what had happened to make them break up. Maybe she’d gotten tired of the bow ties. Maybe he’d decided to go back to his wife.

“Guys suck,” I say. They only want one thing.

“Hmm.” She rotates her cup between her hands. She wears a silver ring on her thumb; her nails are all plain. “Maybe you just haven’t found the right one.”

“Maybe.” I glance at my phone, see the time. “I have to run. Thanks for the coffee.”

She nods. “See you later, Rory.”

“See you later, Chelsea.”

This time, she doesn’t correct me.

—

Hunter’s sitting on the low brick wall, talking with some guys on the team. I’m not sure how I feel, seeing him. Good, of course, but also a little worried. Isn’t there anything else he wants to do but hang around waiting for me? He waves when he sees me, and the big smile on his face twists me up a little inside. I can’t explain the spasm of guilt. “Sorry,” I say when I get to him. “Chelsea wanted to talk after class.”

“Hey, Rory,” one of the guys says. “Hey,” I say back. I’ve been nice to all of them, pretending to be interested in hearing about their games and the other teams and their statistics, but really, it’s so tedious. We have nothing in common, but they still try; guys always do around me.

“See you,” Hunter tells them, pushing himself off the wall and jumping down beside me. Today’s his rare afternoon off from practice and I’d wasted part of it at a coffee shop, sipping a drink I didn’t want, talking to someone I didn’t know. He takes my hand. “Chelsea, huh?”

I like holding hands with Hunter, the comforting warmth of his palm against mine, the way his fingers slide around my fingers, swallowing them up. It makes me feel anchored, but in a good way. I think about that, not about how he’s looking at me, even while we’re walking. “That’s how I roll.”

“So what did Chelsea want to talk to you about?”

The other me would have rolled her eyes and told Hunter all about how pitiful it was that a professor was trying to make friends with a freshman. “She wanted to lend me a book on Giotto,” I lie.

Arden’s at her painting class. She knows not to come back too early. I unlock my dorm room door and push it open. Hunter stops in the doorway. “Whoa. What happened in here?”

“We decided to redecorate.”

He sniffs. “You burn something?”

“Arden did. It’s no big deal.”

“Okay. Just, you might want to open the window.”

“So open it.” I walk over to my dresser to plug in my cell. He’s right. That awful smoky stink is still here, lingering behind the scarves. I feel his arms wrap around me from behind and his breath warm on the nape of my neck.

“In a minute,” he says. “I’m busy right now.”

Hunter’s a total catch. He’s so hot he scorches the grass when he walks on it. There are a million girls who would jump him the minute I turn my back. I let him push me onto my bed and run his hand up my stomach to my breast. I kiss him back. He’s a good kisser, his lips soft and warm.

He rolls me over on top of him. I look down at him, his beautiful blue eyes so serious. The late-afternoon sun paints shadows across his face, his bare shoulders and chest. “I’m transferring to Harvard next year,” I tell him.

“Uh-huh.” He slides his hand beneath my shirt and dances his fingertips along my lower back, tingling my skin.

I hold his face between my hands. “And then I’m going to law school.”

“You’re going to make a kick-ass lawyer.”

I will. I’m going to be a champion for the downtrodden, a righter of wrongs. It’s been the plan for as long as I can remember. I feel completely confused.

Natalie

DR. MORRIS SQUIRTS
soap into her palm and pedals a splash of water into her cupped hands. She talks to us while she does this. “How are you? Have you been outside today? Did you see the game last night?” It’s clear her mind isn’t really on our responses and neither are ours. She yanks latex gloves from the cardboard box, picks up the flashlight from the bedside table, and goes over to check the machines, then Arden’s pupils.

“How is she?” I ask, and Theo’s hand tightens on my shoulder. Dr. Morris doesn’t answer. She’s intent on what she’s doing. I want her to say,
Don’t worry. Just a false alarm.
Or,
Here’s a nice surprise.
But what she does say when at last she turns and strips the gloves from her hands is “Let’s talk in the hallway.”

She tells us that the medication has brought the fluid buildup inside Arden’s skull back down within normal parameters, but just barely. I watch her lips form these words. Her brown hair is parted neatly down the middle and tucked back over each ear. She wears small pearls in her earlobes and I wonder if she’s taken the time to do this, or perhaps she inserted them weeks before and hasn’t yet gotten around to removing them. She tells us that she would like to see a greater drop and she’s a little concerned that it’s been four days with no real improvement. Four days. It seems like forty, the water rising and our little boat rocking dangerously to try to stay afloat. Arden’s not getting better. If anything, she’s starting to slide in the other direction.
Stop it,
I tell myself.
Stop it.

“You said it might take a while,” Theo reminds her.

“Well, that’s still true. She’s young and healthy. She could surprise us, but I really was hoping to see more of an improvement by now.”

“But she’s within normal range,” I say.

“Yes, she is.”

I should acknowledge this small victory with a bottle of expensive wine poured with great ceremony into a round glass. Instead, I am eyeing the choices in the vending machine and talking on the phone with my mother while Theo naps at the hotel.

“Nothing yet,” my mom tells me. She has scanned every inch of the boys for signs of itchy red spots, despite their squirming insistence that they are fine. Henry put up a struggle, which she had quelled by telling him it was the only way he was going to be able to visit his sister. But it will be ten more days before they’re officially cleared. Where will we be then?

“Potato chips or chocolate?” I ask my mom, and she says without hesitation, “Chocolate,” so I slot the coins into the vending machine and push the button. Mom knows about Hunter, having seen it on the news, and we’ve talked about the vigil that’s been planned.
If you’re planning to attend,
she said,
I could drive up with the boys and meet you there. They don’t have to know what it’s about. They’ll just be happy to see you,
but I had known that Oliver would understand exactly what all the candles were for and all the weeping people. Whenever I was driving and he was in the backseat, I had to avoid passing cemeteries. He’s a tombstone magnet, lurching forward in his booster seat and pointing out the window.
Can we stop, Mommy?
Please?
If I could, if traffic was light and I had the fifteen minutes to spare, I’d pull over to let him wander through the rows of stone tablets, past the cement angels and stiff bundles of unnaturally bright plastic flowers while Henry found something to climb onto and leap off of. But Oliver’s the one who asked the questions I didn’t have the answers to.
Why do people die? Will Percy go to Heaven, too?
And here I am, still avoiding having to come up with the answers. What is it about me that makes me so afraid to talk about death? I haven’t always been such a coward. It’s motherhood. It tears you open; it exposes you. It tells you just how vulnerable you are.

“Mom,” I say. “Theo’s planning to go to work tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell the boys.”

“I’m not sure he’ll have time to swing by the house. Mom, I want him to stay here.”

“Oh. Well, of course you’d be worried about him on the highway, as tired as he must be.”

“It’s not that. It’s…” I’m afraid. I’m feeling my walls of resolve start to crumble.
I can’t lose faith. I can’t. Where will Arden be if I do?

“Natalie?” my mother asks, and I say, “Nothing, Mom. May I talk with the boys?”

They chorus over the phone, their voices echoing and scrambling over each other, hard to disentangle because my mother has turned on the speaker. It doesn’t matter what they’re saying so much as hearing them say it. They chatter about how Caleb wouldn’t share T-ball at recess so THEY TOLD THE MONITOR who is fat but really PREGNANT, how Janey won’t be in school for ONE WHOLE WEEK because she is CONTAGIOUS, they did all their HOMEWORK even the STUPID READING so can they please watch TV now? They remind me that tomorrow’s their field trip to the zoo. “Don’t worry,” Henry tells me. “I’ll keep an eye on Oliver.” But it’s not Oliver who has an absolute gift for sneaking away when his teacher’s attention is momentarily diverted. The permission slip had come home and I had glanced at the date and thought that surely after all these long months of struggling to turn Double around every single day I could take off one morning, so I had signed up to chaperone. The three of us had been looking forward to this, our first field trip together. They don’t say anything about their disappointment that I won’t be going after all, and I realize with sadness that my little boys are growing up.

“Goodbye,” I tell them, and they chorus, “ ’Bye, MOMMY.”

I’m walking past the family lounge when I see Gabrielle and Vince inside. He’s pacing and she’s talking in a low voice. I’m about to continue on, to leave them to their private conversation, when Vince turns and sees me. “Natalie,” he says. “Got a minute?”

His voice is clipped. He’s upset about something. “Sure.”

“Close the door, will you?”

Puzzled, I shut the door behind me and come into the room. It’s dark outside, the window black, distant lights peppering the horizon. “What’s going on? Is it Rory?”

Vince slides his hands into his pants pockets. Gabrielle moves to stand behind him and together they look at me, unsmiling. “Detective Gallagher just left,” Vince says. “He told us the lab report came back. Paint thinner, Nat?”

“I know, but—”

“Hold on. He also told us about the other fire, the one in the girls’ room a few weeks ago. He’d told you, too. You and Theo, but neither of you said a word to us.”

“What were we supposed to say, that the police think Arden’s guilty? I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t.”

“It just makes me wonder if there’s something else you’re keeping from us.”

I hesitate. Do they really need to know the girls had been fighting? No, I decide. I won’t say a word. “I don’t know anything more.” I feel my cheeks warm. I’m a terrible liar. “I don’t know what was going on with our girls.”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Gabrielle says. “You didn’t know what was going on. Maybe if you’d paid more attention, visited your daughter just once at college, you would have seen. You might have prevented this from happening.”

“Like this is all
my
fault? How? What could I have seen?” I look to Vince.

He sighs. “It’s not like you and I have been talking, Nat. I wasn’t going to bring it up.”

Now I feel a little frantic. “Bring up
what
?”

“She was doing drugs,” Gabrielle says. “I found marijuana in her dresser. There were liquor bottles under her bed.”

“You went through Arden’s things? You had no right!”

“I was concerned. I knew you weren’t checking up on her.”

“Of course I wasn’t checking up on her. She’s eighteen!”
Don’t come for Parents’ Weekend, Mom. No one does.
And,
I’m going to spend Fall Break on campus. Is that all right?

“She’s still a child.
Your
child.”