The Last Time We Say Goodbye

by Cynthia Hand

  I grab his arms. I hold on.

  Ty looks into my eyes. He smiles, and it’s a sad smile, because he knows how this is going to end. We both do.

  He says, “Don’t watch. Stay up here, where it’s safe. It will be over soon.”

  “Ty, no.” I clutch his arms tighter. “Don’t.”

  The bear is too strong. I can’t hold him. He’s yanked away. He falls. In the blackness of the forest, I hear him scream.

  This is a dream, I tell myself. This is only a dream. He can’t die again.

  But he does. I hear the bear kill him. There are roars, Ty’s yells of pain and terror, the ripping of fabric and the cracking of bones. I press my face into the rough bark of the oak tree, and I squeeze my eyes closed, and I listen to him die. Even then, in my dreams, I can’t cry for him. I can’t stop it. I can’t help.

  I am completely useless, I think. I can’t save him.

  Then, when it’s over, when the woods fall silent again, I wake up. In my own room. In the dark. Alone again.

  I’ve been having these dreams for weeks now. They’re always the same, me and Ty, doing something we used to do, talking the way we used to talk, and then, after a while, something goes wrong and Ty dies. So far he’s died in a plane crash and gotten shot by a gang member and been struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. In one he fell down a set of stairs and broke his neck. In another he got hit by a car while we were riding our bikes to school. It’s like my own personal version of Kenny from South Park, except that Ty never dies the way he actually died. And every time he dies, every time I watch him, it feels real.

  My stomach churns like I might vomit. I take a few deep, steadying breaths, like when Dad was in his Pilates phase and made us all learn to breathe from our core, and I sit up. I push my tangled hair out of my face. And then my heart lodges itself in my throat like a chunk of ice.

  In the dim light from my bedroom window, I see a figure standing there. A silhouette. A person.

  “Ty?” I croak.

  The figure shifts slightly, as if he’s been looking out at the street but now he’s turning around. He doesn’t speak. I fumble for my glasses on the nightstand. I’m bat blind without my glasses. When I was a kid I used to freak myself out in the middle of the night, thinking that if a monster came out of my closet to get me, I wouldn’t see it until it was too late.

  My fingers close around the frames. I unfold them carefully, bring them to my face, and look again at the window.

  He’s not there. There’s just the shadow from the weeping willow tree outside.

  I fall back on my pillow.

  A shadow. A stupid shadow. From the stupid tree.

  Ty’s not ever going to be here when I open my eyes, I tell myself sternly. Not for real. No matter what I dream about.

  I turn onto my side, my face to the wall. I will myself to go back to sleep. I go with the tried and true method: numbers. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, each number the sum of the two numbers before it. The Fibonacci sequence, it’s called, after an Italian mathematician who wrote about it in 1202. Fibonacci numbers are everywhere, in nature, even, in the pattern of leaves on a stem or the way the circles present themselves on the skin of a pineapple or the arrangement of seeds in a pinecone. Math. Safe, reliable math.

  There is nothing more real than numbers.

  My heartbeat starts to slow. My shoulders relax. I let myself breathe.

  34. 55. 89. 144.

  I remember that I’m wearing my glasses, and I take them off, fold them, and reach behind me to set them on the nightstand. The room goes dark and blurry, like an impressionist painting, colors but no distinct lines. Like a Van Gogh painting, I used to tell myself. Starry Freaking Night. I pull the covers up to my chin.

  233. 377. 610. 987. 1,597. 2,584.

  And it’s right then, as my eyelids begin to get heavy, as I start to drift off to the gray space where Ty isn’t dead, that I smell it.

  A mix of sandalwood and basil and a hint of lemon.

  Brut.

  I smell my brother’s cologne.

  10.

  SOMEONE’S KNOCKING ON THE FRONT DOOR.

  I ignore it. I’ve got my hands full, literally. My sleeves are rolled up, and I’m wearing the rubber gloves and apron and everything, up to my elbows in hot, soapy water, in the middle of the mountain of dishes that’s been piling up on our kitchen counter all week, since neither Mom nor I have the energy for dishes.

  I haven’t been sleeping well.

  Now, I’ve decided, is not a good time for a visit from the sympathy parade.

  Whoever-it-is pounds on the door again.

  I’m annoyed. Mom’s still asleep. Yes, it’s after three o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday, but she’s been out cold all day. She didn’t even get up for church, which is a bad sign. Until now she’s always managed to get up for God.

  The knock comes again.

  Hey, that’s okay, I think, still ignoring it, putting a dish in the dishwasher. Mom doesn’t have to go to church. We’re allowed to be antisocial. We’re permitted to sleep as much as we want to. We get a pass. It’s the only real perk that comes with the whole lose-your-brother gig: an indeterminate amount of time to make excuses. I don’t have to open the door.

  But this knock. It’s loud. Persistent. A knock that isn’t going away anytime soon.

  Then it occurs to me that whoever-it-is could be bringing us dinner. That’s how American culture teaches people to deal with a death: They bring a casserole. A pie. A fruit salad. This ritual provides the person giving it the feeling that they’ve done something useful for us. They’ve fed us. That’s how they show us they care.

  The first week people cared a lot. We had so much food that most of it went bad before we could eat it. Mom and I weren’t even remotely hungry at that point; we just kind of sat in various positions on various pieces of furniture, and people would orbit around us, bringing us tissues, water, every few hours asking us if we thought we might eat something. I always waved the food away, but Mom tried. She wanted to be polite. I’d watch her sit at the table, forcing herself to go through the motions of eating, chewing each bite carefully, swallowing, trying to smile and reaffirm how good she thought it was, how very thoughtful.

  The second week the people were mostly gone, and we picked at the best stuff they’d left us: the chocolate cream pies, the roast chickens, the sweet rolls. I tossed the rest. By the third or fourth week I started to get a bit of my appetite back, but right about then was when the food stopped coming.

  People move on with their lives.

  Even if we can’t.

  Which is too bad, since I can’t cook to save my life, and Mom’s becoming less and less reliable in that department.

  I’m suddenly hopeful as I go to answer the door. A casserole sounds amazing. I’m starved.

  I open the door, and there’s Sadie McIntyre, our neighbor from three doors down. Voilà. But something’s off. She doesn’t follow the regular visitor protocol when she sees me, doesn’t smile, doesn’t ask how I am. She’s not holding a plate of cookies or a pan of enchiladas or any kind of offering whatsoever. She’s just standing there, one leg crossed over the other, staring at me with bright blue eyes, her expression neutral.

  “Hi?” I say, a question.

  “I’m going to Jamba Juice,” she says in her cigarette-husky voice. “Do you want to go?”

  This request makes no sense for a number of reasons:

  1. It’s February. In Nebraska. Today’s a particularly chilly one; my cracked phone reports that it’s hovering at around four degrees right now. Fahrenheit. When Sadie asks me, the question comes in a puff of steam.

  Do you want to go to Jamba Juice?

  Presumably to get a frozen drink.

  2. Sadie and I haven’t spent any real time together since elementary school.

  When we were kids, when we were really little, I mean, we practically lived at each other’s houses. I had my own secret path from my back door, across Mr
. Croft’s porch, along the big stone wall that stretches across Mrs. Widdison’s backyard, through a gap in the lilac bushes that edges the McIntyres’ property, and across their lawn to Sadie’s bedroom window. I could have walked that route in my sleep.

  Sadie was my first friend. I can’t even remember a time before I knew her, although our parents liked to tell a story about how Sadie ran away from home when she was two and ended up in our backyard sandbox, which is how we met. A firecracker was what my parents called Sadie. She was my best friend for years. If the other kids called me Four Eyes or Coke Bottles or Squinty (the glasses were a big liability back then), I could always rely on Sadie to come to my defense. She had four older brothers, and if anybody picked on either one of us, Sadie would set her brothers on the bully the way you sic a pack of dogs. I survived elementary school, in large part, on account of Sadie and the McIntyre boys.

  I can still picture Sadie from those days: scrawny and tan, her curly, float-away hair bleached almost white by the summer sun, wearing a clean but faded T-shirt handed down by one of her brothers, which was always so long on her it would flap at her knees as she ran. Sadie loved to run. She never walked anywhere if she could get away with running there. And because I liked her so much, and because she was my friend, I always ran after her.

  Until one day, when Sadie stopped running. She got a bike, and picked up a paper route from her older brother, so she could buy her own clothes when she started sixth grade. She started wearing makeup, and smiling in a different way. She made herself over into a whole new Sadie.

  To be fair, I changed too, that year. I started hanging out with Jill and Eleanor and Steven. Sadie and I grew apart. It happens. As a sophomore Sadie had an unfortunate incident with shoplifting, which the entire neighborhood knows about but doesn’t speak of. She hangs out with the stoner crowd. I’m in the geek brigade. We’re still friendly, but our social circles don’t often overlap.

  Now she’s standing on my doorstep in a worn red plaid jacket and jeans with deliberate holes in the legs, her blond curls tucked under a black knit hat. She’s wearing gloves and too much eyeliner. I wonder why the stoners always feel the need to wear eyeliner.

  “Lex?” she prompts, because I still haven’t answered her question.

  Oh, right. Jamba Juice.

  I can’t fathom what she wants from me, what she could be up to, but I also can’t think of a good excuse, and honestly, the idea of getting out of the house for a while appeals to me. So I nod and remove the rubber gloves.

  “Sure,” I say. “Just let me get my coat.”

  Jamba Juice is deserted when we arrive. Big surprise. The guy behind the counter acts startled to see us, like we must have wandered in by mistake.

  “Whew,” Sadie breathes with a playful smile as she saunters up to the counter. “It’s a scorcher out there. I am parched.”

  She’s joking, but it doesn’t compute with Counter Guy, who puts down his phone mid-text and stares at us like this has to be some kind of punking situation, like any second now he’s going to spot a camera crew filming this.

  “I’ll have the Matcha Green Tea Blast,” Sadie says without even consulting the menu, like she’s here every day. “With the antioxidant boost.” She turns to me. “You get one, too, Lex. My treat. Got to combat those free renegades.”

  Free radicals, I think, but I don’t correct her. I order the same.

  “Can we sit anywhere?” Sadie asks Counter Guy after she pays. “Or do we need to wait for a table to become available?”

  He waves a hand across the empty shop and goes back to his phone, annoyed like we’re interrupting his free time. Sadie picks a table in the far corner, slings her sizable leather purse over the back of her chair, plops herself down, and goes right to her drink, which is, I should mention, about the same color and texture as fresh guacamole.

  This should be interesting.

  “Some people,” she says, “have no sense of humor.”

  I take a tenuous sip of the smoothie. It’s surprisingly good.

  “So,” Sadie says after our smoothies are about a quarter of the way depleted. “I want to talk to you about something.”

  Here it comes. The “I’m so sorry” speech. The sympathetic squeeze of the hand. The “how can I help?” offer that I will actually feel guilty about when I refuse. The part where I will become Sadie’s new pet project.

  “I saw you the other night,” she says. “Running.”

  Oh. That. I blink up at her. I try to imagine what I must have looked like, out there without my coat on, tearing through our neighborhood like I was being chased by wild dogs.

  An insane person, that’s what I looked like. A stark raving lunatic.

  “Are you taking up running?” Sadie asks.

  The idea is so preposterous that I almost laugh out loud. Even in those days when I used to run around after Sadie, I always hated it. I despised every aspect of running: the sweating, the huffing and puffing, the weird taste I’d get in my mouth, the way my shins ached afterward. I make it a rule to avoid physical exertion if at all possible.

  But what can I tell her, I was running away from the ghost of my dead brother?

  “Something like that,” I mumble.

  Sadie nods like she’s confirming a rumor she’s heard about me. “That’s great,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about running again myself. I got this app on my phone that’s supposed to take you from the couch to running five K in like a month. You start out alternating running and walking and then end up running the whole time, by the end. It burns like five hundred calories per hour.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” I say.

  “So maybe we could run together,” she suggests casually, and fixes me with this strange stare, like she’s throwing out some kind of challenge.

  Uh-oh. Danger, Will Robinson. Red alert.

  “Uh, sure,” I manage to get out. “We should totally do that. I mean, I’m kind of busy right now, but maybe in a few weeks. And I don’t know if it’s a great idea to run in the cold, bad for your lungs or something. Maybe in the spring. But then I have Physics Bowl, and I have to take a bunch of AP tests, and my schedule gets pretty hairy. Maybe in the summer . . .”

  Sadie’s eyes narrow.

  “Oh, Lex,” she says then. “Whatever.”

  When we were in fifth grade, we went through a phase where we played this game called Whatever, which is where you’re basically trying to get rid of all your cards by lying about what you have, but if someone says whatever and catches you in the lie, you have to take the whole pile. Sadie was a master of that game, I remember. She could always pick out my fibs.

  She’s calling me a liar.

  “Sadie . . . ,” I begin.

  “Something’s going on with you,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “You were scared, that night on the road. I want to know what you were running from.”

  I stare at her helplessly. “I wasn’t running from anything—”

  “Whatever, Lex,” she says. “What-ever. You’re in some kind of trouble. I can feel it.”

  Silence builds between us. I think, Of course I’m in trouble. Haven’t you been paying attention for the past two months? And: What do you care if I’m in trouble? We haven’t been close for years. It’s none of your business. But then the urge to tell somebody—the urge to get the past week off my chest—crashes over me like a tidal wave. Sadie’s still my friend. And she’s not like my other friends; she’s not super rational and scientific, and maybe she won’t jump to conclusions about my dubious mental health. She could be open-minded.

  She could listen.

  I do a quick survey of the shop. Counter Guy is nowhere to be seen, probably in a back room somewhere. The Jamba Juice is empty.

  “I was running, because . . .” I take a deep breath. “Because I thought I saw Ty. And so I had to get out of my house, for a while.”

  Sadie leans forward. Her eyes are absolutely serious.

  “Okay,”
she says after what I swear are the longest sixty seconds of my life. “Tell me everything.”

  An hour later we’re holed up in my bedroom watching Long Island Medium. After I finished giving Sadie the basic details of the Ty-could-be-a-ghost story, she insisted that I bring her home and take her down into the basement to show her the mark on the wall from where I threw the phone at Ty, like she wanted to see the evidence herself, even though there’s no real evidence. She peppered me with a barrage of questions: At what time of day, precisely, did I see my brother? Did I feel hot or cold in his presence? Was he wearing white or black? Did he look normal or was he altered in any way?

  I tried to answer the best that I could.

  Then she stood in the middle of his bedroom gazing into the mirror like she expected him to appear at any moment. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed when he didn’t show.

  “Is this the note?” she asked, her eyes lingering on the Post-it in the center of the glass.

  Sorry Mom but I was below empty.

  I nodded.

  She stared at it for a few more seconds, and her voice was low when she asked, “Did he talk to you?”

  “No,” I answered, and I thought, This is crazy. How is it possible that we’re having a conversation about this like it really happened? “He was only there for one or two seconds, both times. It was like a flash.”

  “Well,” she said gravely, “he’ll definitely try to find some way to express what he wants. He’s here for a reason, and you have to figure out what that reason is.”

  Right.

  “How do you know so much about ghosts, anyway?” I asked.

  And that’s how we ended up watching Long Island Medium on my laptop upstairs. I’ve never seen the show before, but apparently Sadie’s caught almost every episode.

  “Theresa’s hilarious,” she says now, stretched across the foot of my bed on her stomach with her feet dangling in the air. “It’s almost like she can’t help herself. She has to talk to the spirits wherever she finds them.”