The Good Goodbye (36 page)

“Yes, that will be fine. Thank you.” She turns off her phone and slides it into her lime-green bag. Aunt Gabrielle has a million purses, all colors and sizes. My mom has one slouchy black bag that’s worn on the bottom from being dropped to the floor a million times.

“
Bonjour,
Arden. How are you?”

“Fine.” I’m a bird, small and nervous.

She looks around the room. “You girls need to spend some time tidying up in here.” Aunt Gabrielle’s house is so clean I’m afraid to get a glass of water even on the hottest days. She keeps a black plastic tray on the floor by the front door for people to place their shoes. I’m always nervous walking across her gleaming floors in my socks.

“My parents want me to focus on my studies.” A total joke. The last thing I’ve been doing is studying. I can’t even cut it at this place, where partying’s practically a major. I’ve got a Spanish test in the morning, a million math problems due, my self-portrait that still isn’t finished because Rory’s right—it looks just like her—and that freaking art history essay. What about Rory’s paper? I could still do it for her. It might be a way to bring her back. At the mention of my parents, Aunt Gabrielle’s lips tighten. She’s wearing her usual orange-red lipstick. It makes her eyes glow umber. Like a tiger’s, I think.

“Yes, well. Do you know where Rory is? I’ve been calling and calling.”

“We just got out of class. I don’t know where she is now.” I drop my backpack on the floor. “How did you get in here?”

“The girl who lives next door let me in. She saw me waiting in the hall and took pity on me.”

“D.D.? Whitney?”

“The girl with the pink hair. As if that’s at all original.” She’s shaking out a short pleated skirt of Rory’s and re-clipping it to the hanger. “You know, she’s been lying to you.”

Aunt Gabrielle’s been going through Rory’s things. She must have found her stash. Does she know D.D. supplies her? “Who, D.D.?”

“She doesn’t come from money. Her mother’s a nurse at the hospital and she doesn’t even have a father.”

Typical Aunt Gabrielle. She is scary good at finding out stuff about people.

I wonder if Rory knows this about D.D. I want to talk to her, see what she thinks. Will we ever have a conversation again? Will we sit on the swings and talk, or are all those days over? I don’t want Aunt Gabrielle to see me cry. She will only ask why. She won’t give up until I tell her. The only one who can lie to Aunt Gabrielle is Rory. “D.D. doesn’t have a key to our room.”

“Well, apparently, she does.” Aunt Gabrielle stares at me coolly, daring me to decide which one of them is the liar.

—

Are my eyes open?
I blink.
Yes, yes!

A woman’s talking in a muffled voice. “…you get that?”

A curtain covers the wall. Someone’s moving down by my feet. Everything else is shifting shades of gray.

“Got it,” another woman says. She’s closer to me, up by my head. A nurse? Two of them, talking around me like I’m not even there. I want to yell,
Look at me!
Talk to me! Tell me where everyone is.
“Such a pity.”

“A real tragedy. You must get down on your knees every night to thank the good Lord for sparing your girl.”

“When I think that she could have been caught in this…She moved back home, did you know that? Went straight into her old room. I hear her crying every night. The clinic had to give her something so she can sleep. Daphne was a good friend with all three of them.”

Dizzy Doolittle. Daffy Dishes.
Daphne.

“She blames herself. She saw Arden carrying that can of paint thinner down the hall. She said she should have suspected something was wrong.”

There’s no way. D.D.—Daphne—is lying. She was at the pep rally with everyone else. She never saw me carrying anything.

“You tell her it’s not her fault. Who would have ever thought a girl with everything going for her would do something so terrible?”

They think I set this fire. They know I did. Did Rory and Hunter tell them? The nurse is standing close beside me. I see the front of her green top, the bottom of her chin. If I could, I’d reach out and touch her. If she reached down and put her hand to my heart, she would feel it leaping out of my chest.

“It’s this generation. They’re spoiled. They never had to work a day in their lives. Everything gets handed to them. And when things don’t go their way…Too bad they learned their lesson too late. None of them will grow up to see that time heals all.”

“You don’t think so?”

I close my eyes. I lie perfectly still. I feel my chest rise and fall, air pushed in and air sucked out, by the machine beside me. Where is Rory? Why hasn’t she been in here once to see me?

—

I Skype my mom Wednesday. I am going to tell her everything. I am just waiting for the right time. I am going to make her stop and listen. I talk about blue sweaters and then Oliver takes the laptop and we talk about ant farms. I want my mom to take the laptop back so I can tell her,
Mom, I’m so scared.

I call my dad Friday. Things are even worse, and I’m holding my cell against my ear and pacing back and forth. I’ve bitten off all my nails. My jeans hang loose. But my dad doesn’t answer and I don’t leave a message. What could I say? I’ve already done it; I can’t undo it. I hang up. I turn to my self-portrait, propped on the easel by my bed. I run a finger around the oval of my face. I look into my painted eyes.

I am Alice in Wonderland. I have fallen down the hole.

Rory

I SPEND THURSDAY NIGHT
with Chelsea, curled up in her massive bed with its heavy comforters that we push to the floor. She’s working beside me, her laptop on her lap, frowning at the screen. I’m doing math problems, or pretending to. “Have you ever been to France?”

“No, can you believe it? I’ve never been to Italy, either. There should be some sort of law that says people who teach art history have to actually see the stuff in person. It’s ridiculous.”

I think of this, the two of us walking along the streets in Paris, going into shops and talking to the salespeople. I’d have to translate everything for her and she’d be so amazed.
I had no idea,
she would say. We would eat at sidewalk cafés, lingering over bottles of wine or cappuccinos. I’d use sugar, not sweetener, and she would smile at me.

“You know, your essay was due today,” she says.

“Right. I meant to turn that in.” I don’t even try to make it sound like the truth. She should know that I’ve had other things on my mind.

She lifts one of her eyebrows, a swift in flight. “You can’t just not turn in work.”

Like I’m a child? I’m pissed. I rub the eraser hard across the paper. “I know.”

“Is this the way you treat your other professors?”

I look at her and raise my eyebrow. “Oh, so that’s what you are?” She’s got her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail and she’s wearing a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I wonder where she got it from, but I haven’t dared to ask. She sighs and shakes her head. “What?” Are we about to fight? I feel on the edge, tense and jittery. I can’t deal with her heavy sighs and superior way of looking at me.

“Have you ever been diagnosed?”

I frown. She can’t be talking about my trial run with anorexia. “Is this the reading thing again? Are we going to play a fun little game? You know how much I enjoy that.”

“Were you tested in school?”

“Of course not.” I go back to my math problems. She’s looking at me, but I ignore her.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed about, Rory.” Her voice is velvet, smooth and soft. “Lots of people have dyslexia. It’s just the way your brain is wired. There are things you can do. There are tricks you can learn.”

“I don’t have dyslexia.” My brain is fine. My brain is perfect.

“Rory. I care about you.” This makes happiness bloom inside me, a warm circle that pushes the dark shadows all away. She sits up in front of me and cups my face between her hands. “How on earth did you manage all this time without help?”

I did have help. I had Arden.

—

Hunter’s been texting, which is so lame. He should know by now that I’m not going to answer. If I’d run into him, I’d have had it out with him, loud and dramatic and sure to humiliate him in front of everyone. But I haven’t seen him and I guess that’s because he knows exactly how it’d play out. What a coward. I delete our text conversations, all the emoticons and exclamation points gone with the press of a red button.
Buh-bye.

My mom’s been texting, too.
YOU NEED TO CHECK IN.
She uses all caps when she’s really upset. Then she moves on to exclamation points, and finally she just gets in the car. While Chelsea’s in the shower, I think about what to text back. My mom won’t want to hear apologies. I’ve already used the study group excuse. In the end, I don’t answer her, either. Let her get in the car. “You’re going to have to go back to your room sometime,” Chelsea says as she’s toweling off. A flurry of alarm. “You getting sick of me?” I pull on my jeans and she smiles at me. “Of course not. But you do need to work things out with Arden.”

“There’s nothing to work out.”

“You can’t just cut people out of your life like that.”

“My mother did.”

She gives me a look. “That’s the source of all of this, your mother? You know, you’re a grown woman, Rory. You need to stand on your own two feet.”

Is that the way she sees me? “My mother’s the source of nothing, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

She laughs. “Fair enough. Just think about it, okay? I’m going to be working late tonight.” She pushes papers into her worn leather briefcase. It’s not Coach, but it still looks ruggedly cool. “I have to get through these essays.”

“On a Friday?” So she won’t be at the pep rally tonight. I’m disappointed, although I don’t know what I expected. It’s not like we could sit together and hold hands. Not yet, at least.

“On a Friday.” She comes up close. Her arms are bare, the collar of her blouse open to show the tan skin of her neck, the hollow of her throat. We are the same height, eye to eye. She is beautiful, warm and distant at the same time. “Let’s go to Paris,” I say.

“Sounds like a dream.” She kisses me, the lightest pressure against my lips, teasing. I’ve kissed a girl before, but that was high school. That was pretend, just being silly. This is different. This isn’t silly at all. Is this who I really am? I feel my legs quiver, but she moves away. “Talk to Arden. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? We can go to the shore or something. Get out of this town.”

“Your name is like poetry.”

“You can’t really think that’s my name.” She shoos me out the front door, then turns and locks it securely behind us.

Natalie

DR. MORRIS STANDS
beside Arden while a short, stout woman with a cap of brown hair and red oblong glasses fiddles with the dials on the machine. She’s the respiratory therapist. She doesn’t smile as she watches the monitor. She and Dr. Morris are talking to each other briefly and in code. I can’t access any of it. I don’t know what’s going on.

Turning, Dr. Morris spies us in the doorway and comes over. “Arden’s pupils aren’t dilating. I sent her for a CT scan. Unfortunately, it looks like the edema is worsening.”

Unfortunately. Unfortunately.
A mouthful of syllables. I can’t hear them. I can’t assemble them into sense. I look past her to Arden, but too many people stand between us. “I thought the surgery was supposed to fix that,” I hear Theo say.

“We hoped it would. It did alleviate some of the pressure, but not all. Fluid is still building up.”

She’s talking so slowly, in such measured tones. Her brown eyes are clear, her face smooth. She is complete and whole, and I am cracking into pieces. I want to shake her. “Can’t you drain it off?”

“We’re trying to. What you need to understand is that there are some things we are helpless to control.”

“She just came out of surgery. Everything looked fine.” A last-ditch measure and Arden had sailed through. Things had looked stable. I had left my daughter’s bedside and gone down to hold my sons. I had gone shopping with them and smiled at their chattering. I had put food in my mouth and chewed.

“I know. These things can happen very suddenly.”

“What things?” Theo says.

“The scan also showed signs of herniation.”

This is a new word, another assault against which I am defenseless. I glance to Theo and he’s frowning with confusion. “We don’t know what that means.” My voice is high and querulous.

“Arden’s brain stem is expanding outside her skull into her spine.”

There’s a buzzing in my ears. I feel Theo’s arm go around my shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Falcone, Mr. Falcone, but Arden’s prognosis is not good. We’re going to continue sedation and continue draining fluids from the catheter. We’ll give her an increased hypertonic saline through her IV in case…”

“…then what?” Theo’s voice is far away.

I push my way to Arden. She lies propped against the pillow with her eyes closed. A plastic tube is taped between her lips, forcing oxygen into her lungs. I want to unwrap the gauze from around her head. I want to peel the bandages from her arms and torso. I want to crawl onto her bed and pull her into my arms, let my heart do the beating for hers, let my lungs breathe for hers. “Arden?” I whisper.

I had glimpsed reprieve. I had cupped hope in my palms.

—

Arden was five years old when I miscarried my second pregnancy. It happened very quickly. I woke up cramping, saw the blood, and rushed to the hospital. By dinnertime, I was back home again, woozy with grief. I had been far enough along that we had made the announcement to our families and so the announcement had to be unmade. I was careful not to let Arden see me cry. I was careful to be cheerful, but still, one day a few months later, Arden started sobbing in the backseat while we were out running errands.
If Baby can die, doesn’t that mean you can, too? And Daddy?

She was inconsolable. I searched for something for her to hold on to, a conviction, a way of seeing the world that made sense, but I’d never been religious and neither had Theo. We were out of our depth. It was Gabrielle who suggested we take Arden to talk to the pastor at Gabrielle’s church. So one spring afternoon Arden and I wandered through the church gardens with a slim, pleasant-faced woman who told us to call her by her first name. I can’t recall what her name was, not anymore, but I remember her taking Arden’s hand and traipsing along the stone path between pink and yellow flowers as I trailed behind, letting them talk. She explained to Arden that our bodies are like caterpillars. We are tangible and very real, but when we die, we transform into something else, something just as real. We become butterflies.