The Good Goodbye (6 page)

I pat my pockets, reach into the bag hooked over my shoulder. Of course there’s nothing there. I hide my pack in my desk at Double where Theo would never find it. I’d quit when I was pregnant with Arden. He doesn’t know I’ve started up again.

Theo’s in admissions, signing papers. Vince and Gabrielle are in with Rory, and I haven’t seen any other family members. Nurses have been going in and out of the sliding glass doors leading in to patients’ rooms. They talk quietly in the hall. One of them nibbles cheese crackers from a plastic bag as she stands beside a wheeled computer, pressing buttons. The smell is nauseating. It fights with the astringent odors of cleaning solutions.

I wonder where I can buy a pack of cigarettes—surely they don’t sell them in the gift shop—when the metal doors behind me swish open to admit two nurses pushing a gurney. I run over. “Arden Falcone?”

The male nurse nods. “We’ll get her settled and then you can visit.”

I can visit?
I clutch the railing of the stretcher and look down, but this girl has her head wrapped around with white gauze. Only her right eye, swollen shut, is visible, the small tip of her nose, a bump of chin. Her mouth gapes open to admit a long plastic tube fixed in place by pieces of white medical tape. It makes her look dull, vacant. Arden has never been an openmouthed sleeper. A stubborn tuft of blond hair sticks out from amid the bandages. I walk alongside and reach to pat it into place, then catch myself from correcting this small rebellious act, this defiance that says
Here I am. I am here.

“Arden,” I say, despite myself. “Hello, my darling.” She doesn’t blink the one eye I can see. She doesn’t part her lips and speak. I want to cry.

The head of the bed is elevated to let gravity help drain the fluid seeping into Arden’s skull and dangerously pressing her brain against the bone. A tube protrudes through the mask of gauze above her temple and more tubes loop across her body, forming a heavy web of plastic. Both arms are bandaged. Very gingerly, I reach for her right hand and turn it fractionally toward me. A glimpse of a few inches of pale forearm stained with orange Betadine, and beneath it, a little purple-and-green butterfly, its hand-drawn imperfect outline, its not-quite-symmetrical wings looking bruised.

Then we’re in her room, the nurses guiding the bed against the wall. I step back to allow them to move around Arden, hooking things up, plugging things in with the aid of small flashlights, eerie beams of light dashing around in focused concentration. So many machines clustered around the bed, more than there are in Rory’s room. That’s okay, isn’t it? They are all different, tall, squat, rectangular, and square. Their screens vary. Yellow, pale blue striped with dark blue, a jagged trio of lines moving across a black screen. This last machine hangs from the wall in the corner, silent and foreboding, staring down. Another box hangs over the foot of her bed, and the nurse sees me looking. “She’s got on compression boots,” he explains, and lifts the sheet to allow me a quick glance, flashing the beam of his flashlight so I can see how Arden’s legs are encased knee to ankle in thick white pads with Velcro straps. As I watch, they swell to double their size and then release, shrinking back down with a sigh.

“They’ll help circulate her blood. We don’t want a clot.” He goes around the end of the bed and I follow to watch him shine his flashlight on the plastic bag of urine attached to the bottom of her bed tucked up and out of sight. It looks full, but I don’t know what the normal rate is supposed to be. I don’t know how long it’s taken for her body to produce this. “Is that okay?” I whisper, and he says, “Looks fine.” He speaks in a normal voice.

A tall metal rack stands sentinel, an array of hooks holding up dangling bags of fluid, plastic loops braiding and twisting and reaching across the top of Arden’s bed to her. The sheet slides down her shoulders, her hospital gown untied and lying across her body. Here’s another precious piece of real estate, a few inches of clavicle, the smooth skin stretched across her chest beneath thick pads of gauze covering her throat, from which an ugly worm of a tube pokes. The nurse shines the flashlight across my daughter’s body to show me. “That’s a drain. Don’t worry. She can’t feel it.” Arrayed on each side are discs taped in place to sense the rise and fall of her heart, working away silently.

He pats my arm. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes. Let me know if you need anything.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

He reaches up to slide the curtain across the glass wall and Arden and I are alone. All I can see of my daughter is the ghostly rounded shape of her bandaged head and the sheet covering her. I wait for the shadows to sort themselves out and carefully reach again for the skin on the inside of her arm, just enough for the tips of my four fingers to line up, the fine hairs I know are palest blond, the soft rise of a narrow vein, the reassuring warmth of her skin. The small purple-and-green butterfly, wings open, seeking freedom. Fighting for it.

I should be worrying about the fire. I should be demanding to know how it happened, demanding to know how all the safeguards failed, leaving my daughter barely clinging to life, but all I can think of is
She’s here.
She’s in this room with me right this moment. I can see and touch her, and that’s all that matters.

Rustling behind me. It’s Theo, letting himself quietly into the room. “How is she?” he whispers.

“Talk to her.” I’m so glad to see him. He brings warmth into the room, solidity. “She needs to know you’re here.”

“Hey, sweetheart. Hey, Arden Garden.” His voice is forced and unnatural, and tears sting my eyes. “Daddy’s here,” I say to compensate, in a chirpy voice I instantly regret. We are all going to have to practice speaking normally. I inhale and try again. “Guess what today is. Our anniversary. Can you believe it?”

I tell her about the homecoming kids and how the server had to break up a mashed-potato food fight. I pretend this is a regular conversation and that we are at home, in our kitchen, just the two of us. I tell her about the twins, and how Oliver took his ant farm to school and, miracle of all miracles, not one ant escaped. I tell her Rory’s sleeping in the room next door, and that she’ll be okay, too. What I don’t tell her is that this might not be true, and that the doctors are all wearing grim expressions. I don’t tell her I’m sick with fear.

Later, in the cafeteria, while the nurses are changing Arden’s bandages and the Foley bag, I cry against Theo’s shirt. “How did this happen?” I’m blubbering. I’m barely making sense. There had been fire alarms and smoke detectors, rules about appliances. No candles. Cooking in the kitchens. “How did this happen?” My hands are fists, gathering up the material of his shirt. Over and over, I see my daughter cartwheeling through the air, arms and legs outspread. The ground had been hard. It had been unforgiving as it rushed to meet her. “Why Arden? Why Rory?”
Why us?

Theo rubs his hands up and down my back. “I don’t know,” he murmurs, and it only makes the images in my head spin faster. Arden on the ledge. Arden in the air. Arden on the ground. I have to know that bad things don’t just randomly happen. “I have to know,” I insist, and the next day, I do.

—

“How is she?” my mother asks on the phone.

I’m in the ICU family lounge. The window offers a rain-smeared view of slanted utilitarian rooftops and concrete. The windowsill is wide and stacked with cardboard boxes of jigsaw puzzles in faded colors. A ruffled paperback of sudoku puzzles sits on the round table, a pen lying across its magenta cover.
I’ll be right back,
the owner seems to have said, but it’s been there for hours—overnight? A bulletin board offers celestial help, a suicide hotline, coupons for a local dry cleaner, and a missing poster for a dark-eyed girl staring unhappily at the camera.

“The same,” I tell my mother. We’ve talked twice already during the course of the night—or has it been three times? I have nothing new to share. We’re in a holding pattern; all we can do is wait to see if the extra fluid in Arden’s skull starts to drain. She could make a complete recovery. I have made Dr. Morris admit this.
It’s possible,
the doctor had said.
Anything is possible.

Arden’s surrounded by love. She’s floating in it.

All night, I watched the machines in my daughter’s room pump and drip and measure and squeeze; I stared at the shadows of the rise and fall of her body, and finally when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I dragged my chair closer, lowered the molded plastic railing, and laid my forehead on the mattress beside her. This is as close as I can get to actually holding her.

Liz had called first thing this morning.
I’m so sorry. I know you’re busy, but do you want me to open the restaurant tonight?
I’d had to stop and think.
What day is it?
Saturday, our biggest night. But beyond scraping up this basic fact, my mind wouldn’t work. I couldn’t think.
I don’t know,
I’d told her
. If you think you can handle it, go ahead.
Her answering hesitation had thrummed over the line.

“I think you should move her to D.C.,” my mom says. “The hospitals here are excellent.”

“I talked to Christine.” The prevalence of twins in our family led my sister to focus on what happens when twins don’t separate in utero. When I found out I was pregnant with twins, Christine insisted I get an ultrasound. We all held our breath until she’d read it and confirmed the boys were okay. “She says it’s too risky to move Arden right now.” Christine had gotten on the phone with Dr. Morris and reported back that she was fucking awesome, and Arden and Rory were in excellent hands. If Arden’s burns had been more extensive, had covered thirty percent of her body, Christine said she might have suggested otherwise. What’s thirty percent? An arm and a leg? A torso? “She says to keep Arden here.”

“All right. If Christine says so. When is she getting here?”

“She has that operation, remember?” I told Christine that there was no point in her coming now, and she made me promise to keep her in the loop. I told her I’d keep her so much in the loop she’d feel strangled, and she’d let out her breath. “I told her to wait until it was over. It’s not like being here would change anything.”

“She could give you moral support.”

“She is. Plus I have you and Theo.”

Mom sighs. “How’s Rory? Is she any better?”

“She’s about to go into surgery. They’re fixing her leg.”

“What about Vince and Gabrielle? How are they doing?” She stumbles over Gabrielle’s name. Mom’s never mastered the French pronunciation.
Such a pretty girl,
she’d murmured, meeting Gabrielle at my wedding all those years ago. Mom had gotten tipsy, and her eyes were moist. She’d patted my cheek, whispered,
You picked the right brother.
As if there had been calculation on my part. Mom hadn’t been certain I was doing the right thing marrying Theo. She’d worried I was only acting on rebound.

It’s not as if Vince and I had broken up. We’d never even dated. But the night before he’d left for France twenty years ago, Vince had murmured in my ear, surprising me.
Come with me
.
We’ll get married, master puff pastry together.
I’d leaned away and stared at him.
Just think about it,
he’d urged.

But he didn’t repeat the offer when he sobered up. So I stayed home, and two weeks later, his older brother, Theo, walked into the restaurant where I was sous chef. After the initial shock of familiarity—Theo and Vince looked so much alike; their voices had the same timbre and resonance; they squared their shoulders the same way and tilted their heads to the right when they were thinking something through—I began to tease out the deeper and more meaningful differences between them.

Vince was restless, always looking for the next adrenaline rush. Theo was calm and purposeful. He looked at me; he listened. He made me laugh. With Vince I felt that I was always auditioning for his admiration, but with Theo I could just be the real, flawed me: impulsive, impatient, sometimes irritable. He carved out this warm, lovely space where I felt safe, where I felt found, where I felt treasured. And the first time Theo put his hand around my wrist to lead me across a crowded room, my entire body tingled with recognition. All I could think of at that moment was how much I wanted his hands to touch the rest of me.

“They’re hanging in there,” I evade, though Vince and I haven’t spoken. Not really. While the doctors were talking to us the night before in the hallway outside our daughters’ rooms, I had felt Vince watching me. But I couldn’t look back. Even now, I can’t jump the canyon between us. I can’t pretend we’re okay.

I hear the wind blow past the phone, muted shouts in the background. My mother’s calling from the soccer field. “How’s the game going?” I need to hear about the boys, and how their lives are staying on happy tracks.

Last night’s storm breezed through D.C. but stalled along the Maryland shore, directly overhead. Earlier, I’d heard thunder booming. I hate rain—I always have—but I’m glad it’s my mother and my boys getting a brief spate of sunshine now before the storm rolls back in. After the game, my mother will take them to lunch and then to Janey’s birthday party, which I’d forgotten but was the first thing Henry reminded my mother about when he woke up. They will come home, happy and tired, to walk Percy and then sprawl on the floor of the family room playing with LEGO while my mom assembles dinner. A good day, and I’d been looking forward to it, but now I can’t remember the woman I’d been just twenty-six hours before, scooping dog food into a bowl and eyeing the weather report on TV, worrying about a few inches of rain and pending soccer plans.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “It’s kind of hard to tell when someone’s made a goal. And they talked me into ice cream for breakfast. I hope you don’t mind. They were so upset about Arden. But I drew the line at sprinkles.”

“That’s right, Mom. You’re the boss.” Framed prints in hideous pastel colors hang on the hospital walls. Once Arden gets out of here we will bring her paintings over and hang them on all the walls. It will be a way of thanking the doctors and nurses for saving our child. It will be a way of supporting the other families who find themselves in the cheerless place where we are now.