The Good Goodbye (9 page)

“They’re worried about paying workers’ comp.”

“Who gives a shit?”

“I do,” Arden says. “You should, too.”

What I care about, what I really care about, is the way things used to be: my dad high-fiving Aunt Nat over some soft-shell crabs he’d scored for cheap, my aunt turning from the huge kettle and holding out a spoon for him to taste the seafood stock. How they used to stand so close together, their heads almost touching, as they worked on the menu. All the stories they’d tell about their customers, opening them like presents, their voices bubbling over each other while we laughed and laughed; Thanksgiving at Arden’s house, the long dining room table shining, Christmas at mine, my mom stringing pretty white lights and fir garlands all through the banisters and filling the house with the smell of the woods. Easter egg hunts and birthday parties, rainy days and sunny ones, always our two families braided together, sturdy.

But now my dad doesn’t sing the
Superman
theme when he slides into his chef’s jacket and Aunt Nat circles the dining room greeting customers without so much as looking my dad’s way. Uncle Theo doesn’t smile at my mom, holding up the bottle to offer her a refill. My mom doesn’t lay her hands flat against his chest as she stands tall to kiss his cheek
bonjour.
My dad and uncle don’t lean back against the sofa and argue over defense, then leap to their feet to cheer the Redskins on. They’ve all gotten pretty stellar at not seeing one another, and it scares me. It tells me nothing’s unbreakable.

“Not my problem.” I pick up my steel-wool pad because any second Aunt Nat’s going to turn around and see. It’s not like we make any money working at Double. They won’t let us waitress, where the real money is, but Arden and I are expected to pitch in and help. It feels like punishment. I’ve complained to Arden that I should have talked Mr. Zorba into hiring me for the summer and she made a face.
His name isn’t Zorba,
she’d said.
Yes, it is,
I’d insisted, but she’d shaken her head.
That’s just the name of his restaurant. His name is Ed.

“They’re the ones who screwed things up,” I say.

“What do you mean ‘they’?”

Aunt Nat elbows the door shut, her arms filled with packages of meat wrapped in butcher paper, and we fall silent. She smiles at us a little curiously but doesn’t say anything as she walks past. We wait until she’s in the walk-in before I hiss, “Stop acting like your mom’s the victim. She’s as much to blame as my dad is.”

“How can you say that?” Arden’s eyes fill with tears and it infuriates me. She’s always so quick to cry or blush or laugh too hard. It makes her seem desperate. I’ve warned her over and over again:
Stop being such a baby. You have to toughen up.
She only says,
I can’t help it.

“Aunt Nat should have seen this coming. She should have taken his name off the title.”

“Why, because she’s psychic?”

I give the table a vicious swipe. “Because your mom knows my dad better than anyone.”

—

“Can’t I just ride with Arden and her family?” I ask over breakfast, and my father looks thoughtful, but my mother shakes her head. “There won’t be room for all your things,” she decides, and there’s no getting around that. So I sit sandwiched between pillows and comforters, staring between my parents’ heads at the bumper of Uncle Theo’s dusty Volvo as sprawling fields of corn and soybean and whatever the hell else they grow out there stake their claim on both sides of me and real life grows smaller and smaller until it disappears behind me into a bobbing speck. A hundred and seventeen miles stretch between my house and East Maryland U and as each one passes, I know. This is a mistake. I shouldn’t have agreed to it. I need to speak up and tell my parents before it’s too late. My dad will be upset and my mom pissed at my sudden change of mind, but won’t she be relieved, too? “Hey, guys,” I say, just as my father changes lanes and my mom yells at him to slow down. “What is your big hurry?” she demands, and all of a sudden I can’t wait to get there.

—

A sneaker’s jammed under the door to prop it open as all the Dorks from Dorkville stream inside, carrying armloads of crap. I stand on the steps, suitcase leaning against my leg, arms crossed, while my dad and Uncle Theo creep the streets looking for places to park and my mom and Aunt Nat try to keep them from running over each other.

Arden appears in the hallway, her little brothers trailing behind her, their blond heads bobbing. It always makes me smile to see the twins. Oliver runs right over and takes my hand. His palm is warm and damp, but I don’t mind. “Elevator’s broken,” Arden tells me.

“Seriously?”

“There’s no air-conditioning, either. I mean, like, they don’t even have units.”

That
hadn’t been in the college description. “Freaking fantastic,” I mutter, and pick up my suitcase.

When our parents arrive, we all cram into the empty room and look around, my parents being careful not to look at her parents. Beige cinder-block walls with chipped paint, twin beds with thin mattresses that bow up at the ends, two scarred oak desks with chairs, one narrow window with battered aluminum blinds. The floor’s covered in a sketchy yellow linoleum, and the mirror above the dresser is cloudy. Two closets with sliding doors with holes cut into the wood instead of doorknobs. No one says anything for a minute, and then Henry, crouched on the floor and peering beneath the bed, pipes up: “Is this going to be your new room, Arden?” When she says, “Yes,” he claps his hands. “I
like
it!”

—

We take down the blinds and string up the curtains my mom and I found at an insane price in Georgetown. We shove planks of wood under the mattresses to keep them from sagging our butts to the floor and line the drawers with lavender-scented paper. We hang up clothes and tack posters to the walls, spread out the oval braided rug to cover the worst of the floor. We pile towels onto shelves, sort toiletries into rubber bath caddies. Aunt Nat rolls a long plastic bin packed with first-aid stuff and packages of soup and hot-chocolate mix under Arden’s bed, and my mom loads the small refrigerator with coffee drinks and vitamin water. Uncle Theo hooks up the TV and my dad levers the printer onto my desk beside my laptop.

We work pretty much in silence. We keep the door open to let the air circulate, but sweat trickles down my spine. I yank my hair up into a ponytail and tug my thin cotton tank top away from my skin, but it doesn’t help. Families walk past, laughing and calling out to one another. Music plays from down the hall. The girls in the room next door stop by to introduce themselves as D.D. and Whitney, and Oliver and Henry run up and down the hall, playing some sort of game they’d invented.
Just like you and Arden always did,
Aunt Nat would say. I could hear people stop to talk to them. My little cousins are so cute, the way they look up so earnestly through the blond hair that flops over their eyes. I used to hope for a little brother until I found my mom’s birth control pills hidden inside a box of tampons, and then I stopped asking.

When my mom sets the big zippered bag with my bedbug-proof mattress cover on the bed beneath the window, Aunt Nat straightens. “Hold on a minute, Gabrielle,” she says, and turns to us. “Girls, how do you want to figure who sleeps where?”

Arden and I play rock-paper-scissors. Two rocks, then two scissors. I stare at Arden.
Read my mind, read my mind, read my mind.
Third time, I do paper and she does scissors. I smile so only Arden can see. She gives me a slight nod. “I’ll take the window,” she says.

My mother frowns. “Then you should switch second semester. That is only fair.”

“Sure,” Arden agrees, but she and I both know that won’t happen. She knows I have to sleep next to the exit. She knows I dream about fire.

A guy knocks on the door, buzz cut, sleeves cut off leaving ragged armholes. That look is so yesterday, but he’s okay-looking in a friendly sort of way. “Hey, welcome to D House. I’m Steven, the RA on this floor.” He extends his hand, and though my dad and Uncle Theo and Aunt Nat all go over to shake it, my mother crosses her arms and stands back.
We are sending our daughter to an average school, filled with average kids doing average things,
she’d hissed to my father.
We can only expect her to meet an average boy.

Like you did?
my father said, and I’d been filled with shame.

“We’re having a dorm meeting tonight to go over house rules,” Steven tells Arden and me. “There’ll be orientation activities all week. Don’t worry,” he says to our parents. “I’ll keep an eye on your daughters.”

I look at Arden and roll my eyes.

After greasy Chinese takeout no one eats—not even Oliver, who eats everything—and a round of hugs, my parents making sure not to accidentally bump into my aunt or uncle or even look in their general direction, our families leave and the room feels deflated. I look around at the stuff we still have to put away—the clothes and school supplies and kitchen crap my mom insisted I have so I wouldn’t be infected by other people’s germs—and wonder when it will start to feel like home.

Arden’s kneeling on her bed, trying to pry open the jaws of the small fan so she can clip it to her headboard, and I go over to help her. “Thanks,” she says, as the fan purrs to life and lifts my hair away from my face. I lean close and speak into the whirring blades so my voice comes out funny. “You’rrre welcommme.”

She laughs. “We should go to that dorm meeting.”

“You can if you want.” I sink down onto her bed. “But I already know what they’re going to say. No loud parties after midnight. Don’t let strangers into the dorm. Don’t leave your flatiron plugged in, and no smoking in bed. Blah, blah, blah.” I’ve spent my life strung between rules. I’m in no hurry to be trapped by them again. I turn to the window, hoping for a stray breeze.

After a moment, Arden plops down beside me.

People’s voices flit up from outside, and we look out the window through the trees to the path below, but all we can see is darkness and splashes of bright green where the spotlight hits the leaves. This could be Anyplace, USA.

I’ve waited for this day my entire life. It’s dangled in front of me ever since I can remember, a big, fat, glossy emerald. I knew that when it finally came I’d suck in my very first real breath ever. So today comes and I’m holding the emerald tight in my hand.

Don’t forget,
my mother warned me before she and my dad left.
You need to check in every day by six, okay?

I open my palm to look at the emerald and see the dull sheen. It’s not real. It’s the cheap plastic of toy rings you get out of bubblegum machines. This day started out like any other, and that’s the way it ends, too.

Natalie

I GLARE AT
the coffeemaker.
Doesn’t anything in this place work?
I’d done everything right: pour in the water, fit in the filter, push start. The green light had flashed; steam hissed. The aroma of brewed coffee rose into the air, tantalizing. I stood there, foam cup in hand, when coffee shot out in a scalding spray. I yank handfuls of paper towels from the dispenser to mop up the mess. I’ll have to get my fix from the cafeteria. I used to cut myself off from caffeine around noon.

“I thought I’d take the boys for haircuts,” my mom says. “There’s a new place in my neighborhood we could try. They have cute little spaceships for chairs.”

Another chore I’d been meaning to take care of. Just the other day, I’d contemplated taking nail scissors to their bangs. “Don’t worry about it, Mom.” Holding my cell phone to my ear, I press my shoulder against the family lounge door to push it open. I’m saving my energy for what matters. I glance to the window and see the sky’s a uniform gray. It’s Sunday morning. This weather front has lingered for two days. I can’t see beyond it. “You’ve got enough going on.”

I’m not certain how the boys would react to spaceship chairs. Three months before, they’d have clambered happily up, but first grade—more specifically, exposure to other first-graders—had begun to pressure them into rejecting anything that smacked of babyhood. Henry was having no problem adapting. Lately, he’d been refusing to sit in his car booster seat despite his small size and I’d taken to bribing and outright threatening him. It was Oliver who was hanging back, watchful. He still liked me to sing him a nighttime lullaby, while Henry lay stiff as a board, pressing a pillow against his ears.

We’ve had a miracle. Arden’s condition hasn’t improved, but sometime in the murky overnight hours, Rory’s blood pressure finally stabilized and her heart rate thudded back into the normal range. We should all be weak with relief, but now something else has emerged: Rory has acute respiratory distress syndrome, ARDS for short. Her lungs have shut down. She has to rely on the ventilator to pump oxygen through her blood. She’s at risk of complete organ failure, brain damage. She sleeps unaware, balanced on the impossibly slim knife’s blade separating life from death.

People with ARDS can completely recover,
I’ve reassured Gabrielle. I’ve talked to my sister and she’s told me it’s not a death sentence. But I’d heard the hesitation in her voice. I don’t tell Gabrielle that. Gabrielle had closed her eyes and nodded.
Thank you.

“Don’t you worry about me,” my mother says.

“I do worry about you. You’re not getting any sleep, either. Maybe I should call a babysitter so you can go home and get some rest. I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

But Arden has shown no change. The hours have trudged past. Dr. Morris increased the medication and it’s done nothing. I have stared at my daughter’s face—the swollen eyelid, the rounded tip of her nose, her determined chin—trying to find her among the shadows. I can’t place my palm to her forehead; I can’t stroke her cheek or brush back her hair to soothe her. All I can touch are these few inches of warm skin on the inside of her right forearm and her socked feet protruding from the compression boots wrapped around her calves, which I cradle in my hands, gently tracing my thumb along one instep. She never even squirms, and Arden is so ticklish. I have leaned close and told her,
You can do it, sweetheart. You are stronger than you think.