Say Goodbye for Now

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  “Wish I could see the horses from my bed,” he said after a time.

  “Want to trade?”

  “No, that’s okay. You can have them. Say. Pete. Do you think it’s just me? Or just us? Or is this really scary?”

  “You mean having some guys after you?”

  “No. Not just that. All of it.”

  “Not sure I follow,” Pete said. “All of what?”

  “I guess I can’t say it right.”

  “Well, try. I’m interested.”

  “Just . . . I don’t know. Being a person, I guess. Is it just me, or is it really scary?”

  “That’s a good question,” Pete said. “I’ll have to think about that.”

  But once again, he didn’t exactly think. More left simple openings for thoughts or feelings to volunteer.

  Pete figured if someone had asked him just a few days ago he’d have said no. That being a person was not particularly scary. But now he was afraid to go home. And it was the same damned home.

  “Think it’s possible to be scared and not know it?” he asked Justin.

  “Not sure. I usually know it.”

  “I’m scared a lot of the time.”

  “Maybe it’s just being a kid. Maybe it’s okay to be a grown-up but it’s scary to be a kid.”

  Pete thought about Dr. Lucy making her face into a high wall to keep everybody away from her except the animals.

  He thought about the look on Mr. Bell’s face the first time Pete had ever seen him. The sheer terror in his eyes because his son had been hurt, and he didn’t yet know how or how badly but he knew he was about to find out. And the way Pete watched that terror melt away as they held each other.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s better for grown-ups. I think you were right the first time. Being a person is just hard.”

  “Why doesn’t anybody say so, then?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  Justin asked a lot of good questions, Pete thought. It was too bad Pete didn’t feel smart enough to answer any of them.

  Chapter Thirteen: Dr. Lucy

  It was long after midnight, and she couldn’t sleep. And she didn’t know why. Except for the parts of her that did.

  She had developed a trace of indigestion, and she decided she had to fix that situation because it was keeping her awake. Even though she knew on some level that the indigestion probably wasn’t the heart of the issue.

  Still, she felt as though she had to do something. Move in some direction. So she pulled on her summer robe and wandered downstairs in search of some sort of antacid.

  She was standing in the kitchen in the dark, because the moon had gone down and she didn’t want to wake Pete by flooding his couch bed with light.

  She was looking at her life.

  It was the same array of property and belongings she looked at every day. Except you don’t look at your life every day. You don’t stand a step or two outside it and say to yourself, This is my life. You just walk through it the way she assumed a fish swims through water, never registering it as water. It’s just what is.

  Now she looked out the window at her backyard, and its horse pasture, and its dog kennels, and its shed, and its trees. And she looked around at her kitchen, and the teapots and knickknacks she kept there.

  And she thought, This is my life. This is the totality of it.

  The strange part of the feeling lay in the fact that just a few days ago it had felt like enough. Just the animals and the otherwise empty house. But she knew when it reverted to that status quo, when the company was gone, it would never be enough again.

  All had been revealed. The jig was up.

  “Don’t let me startle you,” a voice said.

  It was not Pete. It was Calvin.

  But before she could register that it was Calvin, it startled her deeply. It knocked the breath out of her for a moment, and left her standing with one hand on her heart. As if to restart it.

  “Oh,” she said. “Calvin. You frightened me.”

  “Exactly what I was trying not to do.”

  He was sitting up on the couch, a thin blanket pulled up to his waist. She could see just well enough to make out that much. Now that her eyes had adjusted.

  She quickly, thoughtlessly ran her hands through her hair to tame it. Then it struck her after the fact that it was probably too dark to bother.

  She walked into the living room and flopped onto the couch beside him.

  “What are you doing down here?” she asked. “Where’s Pete?”

  “I asked him to sleep in one of the twin beds upstairs.”

  “Why?”

  “Just seemed righter that way. I’m not sure that’s a word. Righter. But just then, in that sentence, it felt like the one that wanted to fit.”

  They sat in the dark in perfect silence for a time. Maybe a minute.

  “My reaction to having this company,” she said, “is not at all what I was expecting.” She regretted the confession immediately, because she knew she would have to elaborate. But he didn’t directly ask her to. He just waited. “I guess I thought I liked being alone,” she said at last.

  “And now you find you don’t?”

  “Maybe I just didn’t have much to compare it to.”

  “Nothing wrong with learning new things about yourself,” he said.

  “I wish I could agree. But it makes me feel like a phony.”

  “Oh, I doubt that. Phony and you are two things that don’t go together in my head at all. But go ahead and tell me what you mean.”

  She didn’t, at first. She was wondering whether she could. Or even should. She had to keep reminding herself that she didn’t know this man well. That her feeling of easy familiarity in his presence was not supported by any facts.

  When she opened her mouth, the easy familiarity won the day.

  “I guess I feel like I’ve been putting up this big front to the world like I don’t need anybody or anything. Like I’m happier by myself. I don’t like being alone any better than anybody else does. I just got confused because it was better than being with most of the people I’ve known.”

  “There’s a difference between confused and being a phony.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Self-deception is the difference.”

  Another long silence followed. It grew problematically long. It wasn’t a comfortable silence. In fact, it began to make her edgy. Especially when their eyes met. Her vision had adjusted to the dim light from the kitchen. She assumed his had, too. And their gaze snagged, and stuck there a moment, and it felt like an admission of something they had been tiptoeing around for a long time. Which was impossible, since they hadn’t known each other a long time. But that’s how it felt.

  The silence broke, and it was Calvin who broke it.

  “Maybe I’m mistaken about the undercurrent here.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But probably not.”

  “In that case, I feel I have to say it . . .”

  “That you don’t feel the same.”

  “No,” he said.

  Just in that moment, in the reverberation of that one word, she heard him saying, “No, I don’t feel the same.” He may not have meant that, but she heard it. All her gates slammed shut, and she felt herself surrounded by a sturdy shell. Something to stand guard over her retreat. Something that would pretend to keep her safe. Pretending was the best that could be done with the situation, as was so often the case in her life, and she knew it.

  “No, that’s not the problem at all,” he continued. “Our problem is not that you feel one way and I feel another. Our problem is coming to us from outside this house.”

  She tried to digest his words for a moment. To reverse her brief misperception. But the gates that had slammed shut resisted slamming open again. So she just sat, feeling numb and more than a little bit stunned. It reminded her of the time a few weeks earlier when she’d accidentally reached into the socket of a plugged-in lamp while changing the bulb. Or, more accurate
ly, the aftermath of that moment. The adjustment back to something like normal.

  “You’re not saying anything,” he added. “But I know you know what I mean.”

  “Why does anyone have to know our business?”

  “I wish I knew,” he said. “I don’t know why people feel they have to know each other’s business. I just know they do. This is a town of only a few thousand. People take stock of each other. They know their neighbors’ comings and goings. You think nobody’s made note of us driving around together?”

  “No. I don’t think that. I know they have.”

  Her shock was melting away now. Morphing into a sense of utter defeat. Limp, enervating defeat.

  He reached over and placed his left hand on her right. His hand was warm, and surprisingly uncalloused. And determined. As if it had one opportunity only, and would not be cowed.

  “When an eleven-year-old boy can be beaten within an inch of his life for walking down the street with the wrong friend . . . ,” he said, “. . . well, I just don’t see what chance we have, Lucy. We’ll get somebody killed.”

  She couldn’t help noticing he said “we’ll.” “We will.” Not “we would.” She wanted to think it meant something, that it was a signal of his intentions. But that didn’t match with his words.

  “Maybe I don’t care,” she said.

  “Maybe you can say you don’t care whether something happens to you. But how will you feel if something happens to me? And vice versa. What if I say they can all go to hell, I don’t care, and then it’s you who gets hurt? Then how will we feel? And I have a son. A vulnerable son. I’m sorry.”

  He gave her hand a gentle squeeze and then took his own away. The warm area where it had rested reverted to cold. Quickly and completely cold. Maybe even colder than it had been in the first place.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

  And with that she rose and moved off toward the stairs.

  “What did you come down here to get?” he asked her.

  “I don’t even remember.”

  Then she climbed the staircase and went back to bed. And did not sleep.

  He joined her at the breakfast table in the morning before the boys were awake. She was sitting with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands. She had not brushed her hair or her teeth, or put on makeup, and she regretted that now.

  He put a hand on her shoulder, but only briefly.

  “May I pour myself a cup of coffee?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  He sat down close to her side a moment later. She left her face in her hands and did not look at him. And did not allow him to look at the wreck that was her face after such a sleepless night.

  “I hope nothing I said last night came out sounding hurtful.” His voice sounded deep and calm. And so familiar. As though he’d been at this breakfast table for a hundred morning coffees instead of two.

  “No. It’s not you, Calvin. It wasn’t your fault. I was being stupid. Everything you said was absolutely right. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I don’t suppose we got into trouble by thinking. I’d say this is more of a feeling proposition.”

  “No wonder I hate it,” she said.

  “Nothing wrong with feeling.”

  “On a morning like this I find it hard to agree.”

  “Look. There’s nothing unusual about what we’re going through. All over the world people are meeting and getting to know each other and discovering that there’s a little spark between them.”

  “Answer me this, then. Why are they all excited and happy and optimistic about the future while I’m sitting here with my head in my hands?”

  She heard him take a long drink, but she still didn’t look.

  “They’re not all,” he said. “Some might have feelings for someone who doesn’t return them. Others might already be committed to someone else. Or about to be separated by physical distance. Some are too young for their parents to approve.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I haven’t cornered the market on problems.”

  She took her hands away from her face. It was hard to do. She knew she looked a wreck. But if you can’t trust a man to look at your real face and not run screaming, what good is it to have him around in the first place?

  He looked into her eyes and smiled. He was freshly shaven and looked as though he’d just stepped out of the shower. But his eyes seemed tired, as though he’d aged over the weekend.

  “Maybe . . . ,” she said, and then weighed whether to go on. “Maybe for just one day . . . one lovely, harmless Sunday . . . we could live out one day of our lives pretending there was no world out there. What could it possibly hurt?”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and took another long gulp of the hot coffee.

  He did not immediately reply.

  “Something tells me you can think of what it would hurt,” she said.

  Another brief silence.

  “My mother told me a story when I was little,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a true story. I think it’s more of a fable. It was about a boy who takes in these orphaned baby birds. But he doesn’t have a cage or a box to keep them in. So he keeps them in a bottle. A big, round bottle with a wide base and a narrow neck. And he feeds them well, and gives them plenty of water. And they grow. Comes a day they still fit in the bottom of the bottle but they’ve grown too big to fit through the neck. Sooner or later they’ll outgrow their living space in the bottom. Then the challenge is how you get the birds out of the bottle without harming the birds and without harming the bottle.”

  Silence while she digested that scenario.

  She lit a cigarette even though she worried that he would mind. She was simply too despondent to scrape through the moment without one.

  “I suppose you couldn’t,” she said. “Something would have to give.”

  “Right.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t feed something in a situation where it would be a big disaster for it to grow.”

  “Exactly.”

  She pulled a long draft of smoke and exhaled it toward the ceiling. Then, at the end of the stream, she blew three perfect rings.

  “But how much can something grow in one day?” she asked.

  A movement caught her eye and she looked over to see that Pete and Justin had walked into the kitchen. Calvin sat back in his chair, moving his upper body farther away from hers.

  “You okay, ma’am?” Pete asked. “You don’t look very happy.”

  “I just didn’t get a lot of sleep,” she said.

  “Us neither. I sure am hungry. Is there anything for breakfast?”

  “I think I’m going to have to make a run to the market,” she said.

  She already had two cartons of eggs in her cart and was trying to decide on a brand of bacon when she first noticed it. Or, at least, noticed the first instance of it.

  She glanced up to see two young housewives, their hair looking nearly beauty-parlor fancy and fresh, one with rhinestones in the frames of her eyeglasses. They had their heads together, whispering. And they were looking directly at her.

  The moment she returned their attention they broke off their stares and hurried in opposite directions.

  She chose the bacon that happened to be in her hand without knowing much about it, then moved on to the produce section in search of a few nice-looking grapefruit.

  The produce man looked up as she approached and did not look away again.

  A moment later he grabbed his cart and moved it around to the other side of the potato and onion island.

  That last one could have been my imagination, she thought.

  But then, as she felt her way through the grapefruit, he kept stealing glances.

  She found herself trying to remember if it had always been this way. Granted, she’d always been something of an enigma in this area, being a woman living alone, and so far away from everyone else. There seemed to prevail an attitude that she must be up to some
thing.

  But it couldn’t have been as bad as all this, she decided, or she wouldn’t be so suddenly aware of it.

  She wheeled her cart up to the checkout and placed her purchases in front of the checker, a young man who could not have been more than twenty years old. He looked up at her briefly as he punched in the prices of her groceries. He smiled, but the smile did not look natural at all. It looked like something you’d serve straight from a can.

  “Oh,” he said, and paused in his ringing things up. “I have to ask you a question.”

  She felt a burning along the tops of her ears.

  “No,” she said.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  “No, you may not ask me anything. There is no part of my life that is even remotely any of you people’s business. So you can just get that through your head right now.”

  Silence.

  The checker’s mouth hung open. The bag boy’s eyes grew wide.

  A woman had moved her cart into the line behind Dr. Lucy. That woman’s mouth fell open as well.

  “I was just going to ask you if this was the bacon in the special section with the ‘Sale’ sign over it.”

  “Oh,” she said. And looked away. “Right, of course. I’m sorry. Um. I didn’t notice. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, we’ll just go ahead and give you the discount on that all the same,” he said.

  She gave him a five-dollar bill and did not wait for her considerable change. She hurried out of the store without looking back.

  Calvin was in the kitchen when she got home, standing at the sink doing the dishes from the previous night’s dinner. His gaze was fixed out the window into the backyard, and he wore something like a faint smile at one corner of his mouth.

  All the tension and humiliation of her brief foray into the world fell away. She could literally feel it go, like water pouring off her when she stepped out of the Gulf of Mexico and walked to her towel on the sand.

  She thought, Right. Of course. None of that exists. Today and today only, there’s no world out there. I’d just for a moment forgotten.

  He turned his head and looked into her eyes, and smiled at her. Their eyes froze that way. Locked into a gaze. She was immensely relieved to see that he couldn’t prevent such moments, either. It would have been tragically disappointing if he could find it within himself to be rational and wise.