The Good Goodbye

by Carla Buckley

  I rock back on my heels, look to her. “Where’s Theo?”

  “Getting something from the car.”

  I kiss the boys one last time, made giddy by their puzzled faces, and straighten. As I go out the door, my mother calls, “The doctors are looking for you, honey.”

  I punch the elevator button, pace. I stand back, look up at the lights over the closed doors, give up, and take the stairs.

  It’s a radiant day after so much rain, sunlight gilding the parked cars. I lift a hand to shield my eyes and see Theo standing fifty feet away by the opened sliding door of our minivan. His hand rests on the roof of the car and his head is bowed.

  I run to him and put my hand on his back. “Theo?”

  He turns to me. I see how terribly this week has aged him. I place my hands on his shoulders. I can’t stop grinning. I want to jump up and down. He listens as I talk and shakes his head. “Honey, this doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know. I know it sounds crazy. But listen. Arden’s eyes aren’t the same green as Rory’s and they slant more.”

  “Natalie—”

  “Theo, her freckle. We never pulled her hair up to see it. We never saw.” I laugh. “Her freckle!”

  “A freckle.”

  “She was always putting concealer on it. She hated it. Theo, it’s Arden. She looked right at me. She knew me.” I slide my hands to his biceps. “Come. Come see for yourself.” I start to pull. “You’ll know her, too. It’s Arden!”

  But he won’t move. “Honey.” His voice is raspy. “The tattoo. We both saw it.”

  “The tattoo.” I laugh again. “Of course, they both got one! Why wouldn’t we know that? They did everything together. Arden would never have gotten a tattoo unless Rory talked her into it. She hates needles.”

  “The hospital wouldn’t make a mistake like this.”

  “Hospitals make mistakes all the time.” And this is the best mistake in the world.

  “But they did blood work for the transplant.”

  I hear the doubt in his voice. “They were just trying to match for the transplant. And we weren’t looking. We weren’t trying to figure out who was who.”

  He’s starting to believe me. I see it on his face.

  I grip his arms. “It explains the nail polish. The silver polish that Arden would never have worn.” My stomach suddenly dips. That girl lying alone in that dark room.

  He’s shaking his head. He still doesn’t believe me. He doesn’t dare to.

  “Oh, Theo, darling, I’m right. I can prove it to you. Let me show you.”

  —

  Theo clings to me, helplessly weeping, this strong, resolute man I love. “I just don’t…I can’t.”

  I press my cheek against the warm cotton of his shirt, my arms tight around him. Our hearts beat together. Our breath. “My darling. My darling.” We will see our daughter grow up. We will watch her stroke a brush across a canvas again; we will hear her laughter as she teases her brothers. Our home will be full, and happy. And someday we will watch her come down the aisle in radiant white. I clutch at him; I press him close.

  Behind me, I hear the curtains swish open. “Oh, honey,” Gabrielle says. “Oh, Natalie. Theo. I’m so sorry.” She squeezes my forearm where it rests on Theo’s arm.

  I pull away from Theo’s embrace. I look at Gabrielle. I feel my joy ebb for the first time. Our miracle is going to kill this woman. I don’t know how to tell her. How could I have forgotten Rory? Rory, lying in the bed beside us? That beautiful, beautiful girl so full of life. Theo and I have been embracing like lovers, delirious with happiness. When had we lost her? Had she heard me reading to her, talking to her in the long hours of the night? Had she longed for her own mother’s voice? Had she been soothed by my love for her, even as I thought she was mine?

  Vince stands behind Gabrielle. Around us in this stuffy room, the monitors blink, wheezing and whirring. The overhead light’s on—revealing Theo’s briefcase slumped on the floor, my sweater half off the back of a chair, the untouched coffee cup, the bed with its crisp sheet spread across the girl lying there. It’s so bright in here. Eight days of darkness and rain and now this.

  Theo clears his throat, rubs his face. “There isn’t any way to say this, Vince. I need to show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  Theo reaches for his brother’s hand. Carefully, he lowers Vince’s fingers to Rory’s forearm—the girl who we’d believed all week was Arden—and onto the image of the butterfly, green and purple, wings outstretched. He runs Vince’s forefinger back and forth. “Feel it?”

  “No, what am I feeling?” Vince flicks a worried glance toward me.

  “Right there,” I say, softly. “Can you feel it?”

  Vince strokes a fingertip back and forth across the tattoo. He looks at Rory’s face. “But…that’s impossible.”

  Gabrielle pushes her way to Rory’s bedside. “What? What’s impossible?”

  Vince takes her hand in his, and as he lowers her fingertips to Rory’s arm, I see it again—the shiny twist of scar tissue beneath the butterfly’s body, hidden by black ink and visible now beneath the slant of light.

  Gabrielle snatches back her hand.

  Vince grabs it back.

  “No,” Gabrielle says. “No.”

  “Honey.” Vince grabs her.

  That long-ago burn, the one that Rory was so self-conscious about. Gabrielle had phoned me, panicked, and I’d rushed over to find her standing at the kitchen sink with five-year-old Rory, holding her daughter’s arm beneath the splashing water as Rory sobbed.

  “No! No!” Gabrielle pushes at him. “No! I would know my own daughter!” She’s screaming, looking to Vince and back to the girl in the bed. “Rory doesn’t have a tattoo!”

  Tears are streaming down Vince’s face. He’s trying to hold her, and Gabrielle is smacking at his arms. “She probably got it and didn’t tell us,” he says. “She probably hid it.”

  “She hid a lot of things,” I say.

  Gabrielle whips around to face me. “You. It’s always you. Every bad part of my life has you in it.”

  “Honey,” Vince says, reaching for her, but she yanks free. Her eyes burn into mine. “This is you. Your little scheme. Everyone listens to you. Even my husband thinks you walk on water. Well, you’re not taking my daughter, too. So just shut up!”

  The curtain opens. A short woman with dark hair steps into the room. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she says, in her soft, gentle voice. She puts her hand on my shoulder, and holds out a clipboard. “There’s just one more spot to sign.”

  The transplant! How could I have lost sight of that? I nod, take the clipboard from the coordinator. My heart is pounding.

  “There’s been a mistake,” Vince tells her.

  Gabrielle snatches the clipboard from my grasp, and I gasp, surprised. She holds the clipboard against her chest. “This is not happening. You can’t have it. You can’t have everything.”

  “Gabrielle, you can’t be serious,” I say.

  “I know this is hard,” Theo says to Vince.

  “Are you kidding me?” Vince says. “How do you expect us to deal with this? You need to back off. You just need to back off.”

  “You poisoned my marriage from the very beginning,” Gabrielle hisses at me. “You think I liked our daughters growing up together? I hated it. I hated every minute, the way Arden followed Rory around, imitating her every move. I hated how you looked down on me. You think you’re so much smarter than me. You think you can have your way.”

  I’m stunned, utterly stunned by this. Panic begins to swirl inside me.

  “I’m sorry,” the coordinator says. “Is there a problem?”

  Gabrielle whirls to face her. “This is my daughter and I don’t want the transplant.”

  “Stop, Gabrielle,” I tell her. “We don’t have time for this. We don’t have time for tantrums.”

  “You think this is a tantrum? You’ve not seen a tantrum.”

  Furio
us, I shake off Theo’s hand. “You would really let my daughter die because of spite? You may not have cared for your daughter when she was alive, but do the right thing now.”

  Gabrielle turns white.

  Vince says quietly in a hard voice, “You both need to leave. Now.” He slides his arm around Gabrielle’s shoulders, pulls her to him.

  As the door closes behind us, Theo says, “Why couldn’t you have given them a little time? Why do you always have to push?”

  “But we don’t have time, Theo!”

  “They gave it to you.”

  “I know, but the transplant…” I search his eyes, wanting him to see, to understand.

  “May not happen now. We may have just lost our daughter.”

  “No!”

  “You heard Gabrielle. You know how she is.”

  He’s right. The venom in Gabrielle’s voice, the things she’d said. I’d had no idea she felt that way. Vince won’t stand up to her. He never has. I turn back to the door and Theo grabs my arm.

  “Don’t you dare go in there. You have to let this go.”

  “I can’t.” It’s a wail.

  “You don’t have a choice, Nat.” He releases my arm and lets himself into Arden’s room.

  Voices echo down the hall. An orderly sweeps a mop across the floor, head down, black earbud cords swimming from his ears and down into the pocket of his navy jumpsuit. A nurse comes out of the room across the hall, sees my face, and steps forward to ask me if I’m okay. I don’t answer. I look past her to the open door, into another patient’s room.

  Someone new has moved into that room. What happened to the previous patient? Had it been a man, a woman? Someone’s child? I can’t remember. All these stories around me. Some of them have to have happy endings—don’t they?

  Arden

  THE WORLD IS ALIEN, the sky a weird navy color, almost green. The trees are stiff and angry. They hold their branches low and crackle them in the wind. Clouds push past the moon, obscuring it. A storm is coming.

  People walk past, talking and laughing, going in the opposite direction. No one looks at me. A low rumble in the distance sounds like a spaceship has crashed into the ground, but it’s just cheering from the stadium. Everyone’s already drunk, for sure.

  I’m awkwardly carrying my painting and a huge tin of paint thinner that I stole from the studio supply cabinet. It sloshes coldly in the curve of my arm and I have to stop and switch it to the other arm every few blocks. The scary emptiness of the art building had crawled around me on insect legs and is chasing me back to my dorm. I see it ahead of me now through the trees, and I realize I’m just going from one empty building to another.

  The wind’s picked up, scuttling leaves across the pavement and whipping my hair across my eyes. I let myself into the building and climb up the stairs, panting when I reach the fourth floor. The tin is so heavy, but what was I going to do, pour it into a plastic cup and carry it half a mile? I’d throw up from the fumes.

  I unlock my door to darkness and reach for the light switch. The overhead bulb flares on, dusting everything pale yellow. The room is empty, the way I knew it would be. Still, I’d hoped. I set my painting on the easel and look at it. Even I can see it doesn’t look like me.

  I need something to decant the paint thinner into. I glance around as the door bangs open. Rory? But no. It’s Aunt Gabrielle. Again. I grit my teeth.

  “Oh,” she says. She’s disappointed to see I’m not Rory. Isn’t everybody? “Do you know where Rory is?” she asks, coming in and closing the door.

  “Probably at Chelsea’s.” I pick up a bottle of hairspray and tug the plastic cap free. It’s the right size. I need it to hold only a few tablespoons of paint thinner, enough to swish my brush around in. “That’s where she’s been spending the night these days.”

  “Who’s Chelsea?” She’s acting strange, picking things up only to put them down again without really looking at them. She doesn’t seem to notice the empty vodka bottle on Rory’s nightstand, the twisted lacy thong lying in plain view.

  I’m brave with treachery. I say it right out loud. “Our art history professor.” I hold the hairspray cap and look at it, hesitating. Does paint thinner dissolve plastic? Better play it safe. I put it down and reach instead for the happy-face glass ashtray D.D. gave Rory as a joke.

  “Why would she spend the night at her professor’s house?”

  “I don’t know.” I unscrew the cap on the paint thinner and set it on my easel. “Ask her.”

  “What has gotten into you girls? You think going to college means you can behave like this?”

  I shouldn’t even be at this stupid school. I should be in California, where no one knows Rory. Emotion rises within me and I blurt out, “Going to college means getting away from you. Rory counted the days.”

  I can’t believe my daring. I stare down at my shaking hands.

  “Look at me,” she says, but I won’t. I don’t have to listen to her. I won’t. I pick up the tin of paint thinner and hold it over the small glass ashtray. If I pretend she’s not there, she’ll go away.

  She comes closer, bumping my elbow. “Look at me,” she says again, and this time I do. Her pupils are black circles floating in amber. Her mouth is precisely shaded with apricot lipstick. “You think you are so special?”

  Her perfume swims around us, sweet and cloying.

  “You’re nothing without Rory. Nothing. The way you follow Rory around like a lost puppy. You know what her friends called you in high school? Oompa-Loompa. They called you other names, too, but I won’t repeat them.”

  “I don’t care.” But I do.

  “Oh, Arden.” She sighs, her mouth crimping. “You keep hoping that someone, someday, will love you. I blame your mother. She made you believe you could be loved. But what does she know about love? That whore.”

  I flinch, shocked. But she doesn’t stop. She pushes her face close to mine. “Always throwing herself at my husband. She doesn’t think I know, but I do. All those late nights, just the two of them. I was glad the restaurant folded. Something had to come between them.”

  This is all a lie. I know it is. But I remember the way Uncle Vince had held my mom the day the grill caught on fire. I clutch the paint thinner to my chest. I try to swallow.

  “Your father didn’t like it, either. But what could he do?”

  “Stop.”

  “I won’t stop. It’s time you know the truth.”

  “I already know the truth.” I’ve known since I was sixteen. Rory and I had leaned forward, staring at the words of the news story marching across the screen of her laptop. Rory has family in France, but she’s afraid to visit them. “You were mean to your little brother. You hurt him.” I would never hit Henry or Oliver. Never.

  She draws back. If she’s surprised, she doesn’t show it. She is so strong. She is so powerful. She’s thinking, hard. “He wouldn’t do his chores. He wouldn’t listen.”

  I don’t believe her. I don’t believe her at all. “Just like Rory wouldn’t listen?”

  Time stretches out, a rubber band. She stands utterly still. It makes my skin prickle, but I have gotten to her. At last, I’ve said something that digs into her and twists.

  “What are you talking about?” she finally says, a warning clear in her voice, but I push on. She thinks she can talk like that about my mom?

  “Rory remembers, you know. She remembers everything.” I’d cried when Rory told me. She’d gotten up and walked away from the swings. “It wasn’t an accident. You told everyone it was, but that was a lie. You pushed her arm over that gas stove. You held it there. You did it on purpose.” I have nowhere to look but right at her. She stands so close, her sleeve touching my arm. The ivory column of her throat, the gold necklace with its tiny cross. I have never known her to go to church.

  “Of course you only heard her side of it. Did she tell you she kept playing with the dials, even after I told her to stop? I was trying to teach her a lesson.”

  “She
was four.” I hold the heavy tin against my chest, armor. My heart is thumping, hard. “I’m going to tell. I’m going to tell everyone.”

  “No one will believe you.”

  “My parents will. And so will Uncle Vince.” Rory will be angry, but Rory is already angry.

  Aunt Gabrielle’s face slides into stillness, and I know I’ve won. But I’m scared. Her face is a mask. She doesn’t even look like herself. She glances around and stops at the painting propped on the easel. “What is that supposed to be? You?” She goes up close. “My goodness.”

  She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything about art.

  She puts her finger on my painted eyebrow and presses hard. The canvas bends beneath her fingertip. “You should have given yourself better eyebrows. You could have at least pretended they were even.” She scrapes her fingernail down my painted nose and halts. I put my hand to my nose, to the small bump there. “Honestly, I don’t think this can be fixed. You can just say it gives you character when people comment. I’m sure they already have.”

  My face is hot.

  She jabs her finger at my painted mouth. The paint crackles. “Those braces never really did the trick, did they? Such a pity. I know how much your parents spent.”

  The orthodontist had tried to fix my overbite. She had spent hours leaning over me in the chair, an intent expression on her face.

  “And your chin. I know you’ve lost some weight recently, but…” She shakes her head and crosses her arms. “You’ll always have a fat little face.”

  Rage bubbles up, hot and spreading. Calm down, my mom warns me. But I see it, the lost look in my eyes, the hopeless droop of my lips. Aunt Gabrielle is right. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic. I swing my arm and hurl a great looping stream of paint thinner at the canvas.

  Aunt Gabrielle gasps and jumps back, brushing at herself. “What the devil are you doing? Stop that!”

  I heave another dripping, stinking stream of liquid. Colors smear. My painted eyes run, my painted mouth turns down. It feels good. It feels excellent.

  “Arden! For God’s sake!”

  I whirl around, faster and faster, holding out the heavy tin, paint thinner spraying everywhere. On the walls, on the floor, all over us. The room is alive with ghosts, all the times Aunt Gabrielle mocked me, Kent Stegnor dumped me, Hunter looked at me with empty eyes. I’m a butterfly. I don’t even see Aunt Gabrielle leave.