The Last Time We Say Goodbye

by Cynthia Hand

  “Be a gentleman,” Mom said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He smiled and saluted her, and then he was gone. She turned to me with parental nostalgia written all over her face.

  “My babies are growing up,” she sighed.

  I rolled my eyes, and then Steven was knocking at the door, come to whisk me off, to prove that yes, once upon a time, we were young.

  I can’t recall a lot of the dance, but I do remember that when we arrived in the commons, which was set up with silver streamers and blue and white helium balloons and strobe lights, Steven took my hand and twirled me in a circle so that he could take in my dress. I was wearing a sleeveless belted A-line that came to my knee, black lace over green satin, that I’d splurged $79 for at Macy’s.

  “You look like Euler’s equation,” he murmured as he looked me up and down.

  Nerd translation: Euler’s equation is said to be the most perfect formula ever written. Simple but elegant. Beautiful.

  “Thank you,” I said, blushing, and I tried to think of a similar compliment, maybe general relativity or Callan-Symanzik, but instead I went with, “You look hot. Seriously.”

  Steven smiled. He’s a good-looking guy, with brown eyes and golden-brown hair and straight, orthodontically enhanced white teeth, but the people around us don’t usually see that. They see how excited he gets about physics class. They see the calculator in his back pocket. They see his glasses.

  He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. “Come, my lady,” he said, “let us dance.”

  We bobbed awkwardly on the dance floor for a while, and soon Beaker and Eleanor came over with their dates, and we quietly poked fun at the girly girls with their poufy hair in their poufy dresses. Then we hypocritically admired one another’s dresses, and got our pictures taken for the sake of posterity, and danced some more.

  And then there’s this part I remember so clearly. I was dancing with Steven to a slow song, and I let my head drop onto his chest, where I could feel his heart beating. The song was Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years.” We’d laughed at how cheesy it was, how over-the-top sentimental, and made a couple of Twilight jokes, but then we’d fallen right into dancing. It’s a good song for dancing. Steven had his hands at the small of my back, his face in the crook of my shoulder, his breath heating my skin, and I had this moment of sudden euphoria. We’re right together, I thought. We fit.

  It felt like Euler’s equation.

  I lifted my head, and he lifted his. Our eyes met. Our legs brushed as we swayed slowly back and forth.

  “Darling, don’t be afraid, I have loved you for a thousand years,” crooned Christina Perri. “I’ll love you for a thousand more.”

  Wait, I thought. Hold on.

  I had this whole big life ahead of me, college and a career and adulthood, and this was no time to be “falling in love” with anyone. We were too young for that. Hormones, I could understand. Dating and messing around and finding out what it was to kiss and be kissed, all of that made sense. But this—the way I felt in Steven’s arms right then—it felt like more than hormones.

  It felt like so much more.

  I tightened my arms around Steven’s neck and lowered my head again. His heart, when I laid my cheek against his chest, was beating fast.

  So was mine.

  Randomly I glanced over and saw Ty about 10 feet away, dancing with a girl—Ashley, I assumed. I didn’t see her face, just the back of her pale pink gown sweeping the floor and her golden hair tumbling in deliberate waves down her shoulders. But I saw Ty clearly. His eyes were closed, his fingers spread against her hip as he moved with her. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a quiet contentment on his face. A stillness.

  He looked as happy as I’d ever seen him.

  Then, as if he could sense me watching, he opened his eyes, spotted me. Grinned.

  Bitch, he mouthed.

  I grinned back, then pointed to the space between my eyebrows. Are you wearing makeup? I mouthed.

  He subtly gave me the finger.

  I laughed out loud, which made Steven pull back and ask, “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to contain my giggles. “My brother’s a goofball.”

  Steven turned and gave Ty the what’s-up-bro nod, which Ty returned.

  Guys and their codes.

  “I like your brother,” Steven said.

  “He likes you.” I smiled because it was true—Ty thoroughly approved of Steven as my boyfriend. “That guy’s all right,” he told me once. “He gets you.” And back then it was true. Steven did get me.

  The violins swelled to their final crescendo and then faded. We stopped dancing and looked at each other.

  “What now?” Steven asked me.

  “Now we drink the lame punch,” I quipped, and away we went.

  I don’t remember the rest of the dance. It’s lost along with all the other insignificant passing seconds of my life. Me. Steven. Ty. Ticking away. I didn’t know to savor that moment on the dance floor, to understand how beautiful and rare it was, how fragile, how ephemeral, when Ty was happy. When we were all happy, and we were together, and we were safe.

  I didn’t know.

  I didn’t know.

  4.

  DAVE’S OFFICE IS LOCATED in one of those nondescript commercial centers downtown—you know the type of place I mean, where you walk the halls reading the names of lawyers and accountants and realtors on the identical plaques outside their identical doors, until you reach the nameplate that reads DAVID HARRINGTON, MFT, NEW HOPE FAMILY COUNSELING.

  That first time I went, about a month ago, I trudged into Dave’s office expecting the same gray walls and berber carpet from the hall, but then the door opened to this funky waiting area cluttered with fish tanks, an assortment of lava lamps, a coffee table collection of those wiggly dashboard hula dancers, a wall displaying Dave’s impressive collection of vintage Tabasco sauce bottles, and, best of all, the most massive accumulation of comics (like the kind printed in the funnies section of the newspaper) I’ve ever come across. I sat for ten minutes flipping through an old collection of classic Peanuts. Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. Lucy yanking it out from under him. Charlie’s rage. And I laughed at poor Charlie, and it felt weird to laugh, because Ty had been dead for two weeks then.

  That’s when Dave came out of his office. I expected, after the waiting area, for him to be a hippie or some kind of eccentric weirdo, but there he was in his plaid shirt and wrinkle-free khakis, his perfectly groomed beard and graying blond hair cut short and combed carefully into position using a little too much gel. He stuck out his hand to me.

  “Lexie, I assume,” he said. “I’m Dave.”

  I must have looked surprised, because then he said, “Sorry. Do you prefer to be called Alexis? When I met with your mother she called you Lexie.”

  “You talked to my mom? In person?”

  “Yes, briefly,” he answered. “She wanted to fill me in on the situation.”

  I couldn’t imagine my mom in this place, sitting there with her legs crossed next to the hula dancers and the wall of hot sauce, waiting to go in and tell this man about her dead son and her sad daughter.

  “Well,” Dave said, gesturing inside his office where the big plaid couch and the box of tissues waited. “Come on in.”

  I hesitated. “Look, maybe this isn’t such a good—”

  “I’m basically here to listen, Alexis,” he said then. “If you want to talk. Give it a try.”

  Dave’s a nice enough guy. I haven’t figured out yet what he’s really good for, aside from being a misguided way for my mom to feel like she’s doing something for me during this time of need. Like life is not going to absolutely suck right now no matter what. But whatever. My brother’s dead. I’m not talking much, and not hanging out with my friends, and not being the normal chipper Lex they all expect.

  So clearly I should go to therapy.

  This afternoon I sit in Dave’s office for a full thirty mi
nutes before I can think of anything productive to say. So far he’s been okay with that—letting me talk when I’m ready—but today I can tell that there’s something on his mind, some little walnut of my psyche he is eager to crack.

  There’s something on my mind, too, but I don’t tell him.

  I want to. The past few days have been pretty hard-core inside my head. I keep thinking that I must be crazy. Something inside this fragile brain of mine must have snapped under all the emotional strain. I’ve officially lost my grip on reality.

  Because Ty is dead.

  He’s gone. He’s never coming back.

  What I saw the other night had to have been a hallucination or part of a mental breakdown or a waking dream.

  It felt real.

  But it couldn’t have been real.

  Anyway, the smart thing to do would be to tell Dave about it. After all, he’s paid to listen to me. Rationally speaking he’s the perfect person to talk to—impartial, unemotional, practical. This is what therapy is supposed to be good for: to air out your crazy. To get better. To deal.

  But what can I say? Um, yes, I saw the ghost of my dead brother in my basement four nights ago.

  To which Dave will say: Oh, that’s very interesting, Alexis; let’s get you some nice pills.

  So Dave asks me how I am and I say I’m fine. Which I am not. He asks me how my week was and I say it was okay. Which it, very definitely, was not.

  Then it’s quiet while Dave pins me with those kind blue eyes of his and I use the toe of my sneaker to fiddle with the edge of the rug.

  Dave finally says: “I hope you’re not still upset about last week.”

  I stare at him blankly for a few seconds before I remember. Oh. Last week.

  Right. We had a bit of a disagreement last week.

  Because I told him about the hole in my chest. About how I feel like I’m going to die while it’s happening. How I’m terrified that these moments will come more and more often, and they’ll last longer and longer, until all I feel is the hole, and then maybe it will swallow me up for good.

  I thought that was brave of me to confess. I was attempting to open up to him. I was trying to do what you’re supposed to do.

  What I wanted Dave to tell me was that the hole is horrible, yes, absolutely, but that it’s normal, and that it will get better, not worse, and that I’m not going to die, at least not for a long, long time. It will hurt for a while, but I’m going to live.

  And then I would try to believe him.

  But what he said was, “There’s a medication we can get you for that.”

  Then he went on about SSRIs and the wonders of Xanax or maybe starting with Valium, which is nicely non-habit-forming, and I stared at him mutely until he was finished waxing poetically about drugs. Then he said, “What do you think?”

  I said, “You want to put me on antidepressants?”

  He said that antidepressants with traditional therapy made a very effective combination.

  I said, “Do you think I’m depressed?”

  He coughed. “I think you’ve been through something really hard, and medication might make it a little easier.”

  “I see. Have you ever read the book Brave New World?” I asked.

  He blinked a few times. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “It’s about this society in the future where they have a drug called soma that makes everybody feel happy,” I explained. “It’s supposed to fix everything. You’re not content at work? No problem. You take soma, and nothing bothers you. Your mom dies? Take some soma, and everything will feel hunky-dory.”

  “Alexis,” Dave said. “I’m trying to help you. What you’re talking about with this hole sounds like a classic description of a panic attack—”

  “But here’s the thing,” I pushed on. “That futuristic society where everybody is drugged to be happy, all the time, no matter what happens, it’s horrible—monstrous, even—it’s like the end of humanity. Because we are supposed to feel things, Dave. My brother died, and I’m supposed to feel it.”

  I stopped myself, suddenly out of breath. I wanted to say more. I wanted to scream about how Ty had taken antidepressants too, had been taking them for more than two years up until his death, and a fat lot of good it did him. I wanted to tell Dave my ironic little secret: that I know I’m supposed to feel this pain for my brother—sorrow, grief, whatever you want to call it—that I even want to feel it, but I don’t. Outside of those moments with the hole, I don’t feel anything at all.

  I don’t need drugs to numb the pain.

  “I understand,” Dave said.

  “God, when did therapists become pushers?” I said, still worked up.

  Dave smiled, like he thought my insult was humorous, and then went straight to placating me. “All right, Alexis, all right. No drugs.” And that’s when he suggested the diary thing.

  Writing as an alternative to Xanax.

  “I wrote in the journal this week,” I report to him now.

  He looks uncharacteristically surprised. “What did you write about?”

  I shrug. “Stuff.”

  He waits for me to say more, and when I don’t, he just comes out and says, “Okay. This week I’d like to talk about your friends.”

  “I don’t have friends right now” is what slips out.

  He raises his eyebrows. “You don’t have friends?”

  Whoops. “I mean, yes, I have friends, but . . .”

  “Have they stopped being your friends?” he asks. “Sometimes people don’t know how to respond to something like—”

  “No,” I backpedal. “No, they’re great. It’s just that . . . I think I stopped being theirs.”

  Dave makes a thoughtful little noise like this is a therapist’s gold mine. “Why?”

  I take a minute to think about it. Well, in Jill’s case it’s because she was suffocating me with sympathy. When Ty first died, she was there every time I turned around, her eyes worried and bloodshot with crying. “Are you okay?” she’d ask, over and over and over.

  No, moron, I’d think. I am not okay. My brother’s dead.

  But I’d suck it up and say, “Yeah, I’m okay,” which after a few days gave way to a weak nod, and then she’d say something like “Let me know if you need anything” or “I’m here if you want to talk.” Which, after a while, I figured out was what she really wanted me to do. She wanted me to talk about Ty. About his death. About my feelings about his death. And suddenly I got the distinct feeling that she wanted me to cry, so that she could be my shoulder to cry on. She wanted me to break down so that she could build me back up, so she could be my stellar bestie who got me through the worst.

  I know I’m probably being unfair. I love Beaker. I do. I’ve known her since sixth grade, when we were the nerdiest nerds in the gifted and talented class. We’ve had a hundred sleepovers and many a long, serious conversation into the wee hours of the morning about the meaning of life and the likelihood of aliens on other planets and the stupidity of boys. But this thing with Ty isn’t just another serious conversation. It’s my whole wrecked, messed-up life. It’s me.

  She can’t fix me.

  I was getting sick of watching her try. So I just, like, backed away slowly.

  I say all of this to Dave, and he nods. “What about your other friends? Your boyfriend?”

  “We broke up a few weeks ago,” I say. New topic: “I also have this friend Eleanor, but it’s simpler with her, in a way. She’s been avoiding me, while trying to seem like she’s not avoiding me, of course. I don’t think she’s looked me in the eye since it happened. But that’s okay. I get it. Like you said, some people don’t know how to respond.”

  “So you don’t have any friends right now?”

  “Well, I see my old friends at school, eat lunch with them, and we have classes together. But I don’t really feel like doing anything extracurricular, and I need to be home for my mom. So I guess, no. I don’t. Not at the moment.”

  “That’s sad, Lex,
” he says.

  That’s my middle name these days. Alexis Sad Riggs.

  “You don’t have to go through this by yourself,” Dave says. “Try to let people in. That’s the only way they can help you.”

  I can’t be helped, I think. There is no magic spell that will bring Ty back. There’s nothing anybody can do.

  “I’ll work on that,” I say, and go back to fiddling with the rug.

  It’s quiet again. I can literally hear the clock in his office ticking. Four minutes of therapy left to go.

  Three minutes.

  Two.

  “So do you have anything else you want to talk about?” Dave asks.

  Last chance, I think. Tell him about seeing Ty.

  “No,” I say. “I’m good.”

  Which has to be like Lie #17 in this session alone.

  Then I stand up, even though I still have ninety-six seconds left, and walk away from therapy as fast as I can go.

  I have dinner with Dad at Olive Garden. We normally have dinner together on Tuesday nights, after my regular Tuesday session with Dave. Because Megan has yoga on Tuesdays. Dinner with Dad is always a quiet affair because he has even less to say than I do. He doesn’t have the most exciting job in the world—he’s an accountant—and he knows I don’t want to hear about Megan or the house he lives in with her or how they pass their time, so there’s not much left to discuss. It was easier when Ty was with us (although Ty hated the Dad dinners and was always finding last-minute excuses not to show), because at least then we could talk about sports.

  Now we’re down to one safe topic of conversation.

  “How’s school?” Dad asks.

  “I got a seventy-one on my calculus midterm,” I blurt out.

  I don’t know why I tell him. It’s embarrassing, especially with my dad, who’s obviously a bit of a numbers guy himself. I can’t look at him when I say it. I’m sure my face is bright red, but I keep picking at the salad like everything is fine.

  Dad puts down his breadstick. “That sounds serious.”