The Last Time We Say Goodbye

  I take a much-needed breath.

  We sit there. The turn signal is still on, blinking. Cars are blasting by us at seventy-five miles an hour. Mom looks straight ahead.

  I just said the f word. Twice. To my mother.

  I called her out on her drinking. I told her to get over herself.

  “Mom, I—”

  She holds a hand up.

  “All right,” she says, although I don’t know if she means All right, I’ve had enough, now get out of the car and walk, you ingrate or All right, you’re grounded or All right, I’ll stop saying that my life is over.

  “Mom?”

  She sighs, then pulls the car back onto the highway.

  “Would you look in my purse?” she says after we’ve gone about ten miles. “There’s a book in there.”

  I forage through her purse until I find a small and yellowed paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

  “This?” I hold it up, surprised.

  She nods. “I was supposed to read it in eighth grade. I thought maybe you could read it to me now. To pass the time.”

  “Okay.” It’s odd, but at least she’s not yelling at me. I flip to the first page.

  “‘When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow,’” I begin.

  Mom lets out a slow breath. “Yes. I knew this would be good.”

  So I continue reading. For the next seven-and-a-half hours, stopping for pee breaks and lunch and once because Mom feels the urgent need for a Diet Coke, I read. I read about Scout and Boo Radley and Mayella Violet Ewell. I read until my voice is hoarse.

  When I’m done, Mom says, “I always wanted Atticus Finch to be my father. I used to imagine it, like I was secretly adopted and Gregory Peck was my biological father.”

  “I thought you said you hadn’t read the book.”

  “I saw the movie,” she says. “Have you seen it?”

  “Yeah. In eighth grade, I think. You’re right, Gregory Peck is, like, golden. So all this time I was reading, you knew how the story was going to end.”

  “I wanted to hear the words,” she explains. “I knew how it ended, but I wanted to go slowly and see how it would all work itself out.” She yawns against her hand.

  “How about I drive for this last bit?” I offer.

  She pulls over and we swap places.

  We’ve gone about a mile, just outside Kansas City, when she starts to cry. I don’t even notice at first, but at one point I lean over to adjust the radio and notice the wetness on her face, the trail of gleaming tears from the corner of her eye to the edge of her jaw.

  I smell Ty’s cologne.

  I wonder if Mom smells it. If that’s what’s set off her crying.

  “Are you okay?” I ask her gently. “We can stop.”

  She shakes her head and exhales in a shudder, then opens up her purse and starts to dig around for her pack of tissues. “I’m fine. It’s just . . .”

  SMELL ME, says Ty’s cologne. I DEMAND TO BE SMELLED. SMELL ME NOW.

  I glance in the rearview mirror, and then I see him, I see him clear as day, sitting in the backseat, his head against the window, like he always used to sit, looking out.

  It’s a miracle that I don’t wreck the car.

  Mom says, “It’s just that, I don’t know why we never did that before. Graceland. All these years we’ve been so close, a day’s drive, and we’ve never gone. Why didn’t we?”

  Because Dad hates to travel, I think but do not say. Look up the word homebody in the dictionary, and there will be a picture of Dad.

  “We should have gone,” Mom whispers, wiping at her face.

  “We’ve gone now,” I answer shakily. “Graceland—check.”

  “Yes, but I wish . . . ,” she says, and I know she wants to say we should have gone when Ty was alive.

  But Ty hated Elvis. He didn’t appreciate being subjected to Mom’s obsession with the King. He said so many times.

  My eyes flick back to the mirror.

  Ty is still there. A chill runs through me like a trickle of ice water.

  “Hey, uh, I think the lady in that red car behind us is texting,” I say. “That’s dangerous.”

  Mom turns to look. She gazes right through where Ty is curled in the backseat. She turns back to me. “You should let her pass you. It’s always better to be behind the road hazard.”

  I let the red car pass. Mom gives a disapproving look to the driver, but the lady doesn’t notice.

  I try to keep my hands steady on the wheel.

  Mom gets a tissue out of her purse and blows her nose. The tears keep coming, an endless river of grief. Ty stays with us too. All the way back to Nebraska.

  25.

  I WAIT. Until we’re unpacked. Until we’ve eaten dinner. Until Mom is asleep. Then I slip down into Ty’s room.

  It’s quiet.

  I look at the mirror. The clock radio. The shadow in the corner cast by the closet door.

  He’s not here. But I want him to be.

  “I want to talk to you,” I say. “Ty.”

  Silence.

  “Come on. We can’t run away, right? That’s what you were telling me today? That you’re always going to be there, hanging out in the backseat. Your smell. Your shadow. Your memory. That’s what you were trying to tell me, right? Well, I have things I want to say to you.” I sit at his desk and turn on the desk lamp, which is like a spotlight in the dark. “Come on, Ty. I did what you wanted. I gave the letter to Ashley. Now do what I want, for once.”

  But there’s nothing. No sound. No smell. No Ty.

  Which pisses me off even more. And it’s been a ranting kind of day.

  I stand up. “You’re selfish,” I say into the darkness. “Do you know that? You’re the most selfish person I know. You didn’t even care, did you, about what this would do to Mom? Did you hear her saying her life is over? That’s on you. That’s on you, Ty. You’re no better than Dad is, you know. You just do whatever you feel like doing and to hell with the rest of us, right?”

  My eyes are drawn to the mirror. For a split second I think I see him, a dark shape moving, but then I realize it’s my own reflection.

  I stare at the Post-it.

  Sorry Mom but I was below empty.

  “What, you wanted to make some kind of grand romantic statement? You wanted to demonstrate to the world how much pain you were in?” The hole starts to crack open in my sternum but I push past it. “It’s not romantic. You blew a chunk of your chest out and died in a puddle of your own blood—does that sound romantic to you? The people cleaned it up, yeah, all right, but they left a bunch of soaked bloody paper towels in the garbage outside for Mom to find when she emptied the trash the next week. Romantic, right? What an awesome statement. Oh, and your body loses control of its bowels when you die, and you shit yourself, how fucking romantic is that? And the little girl next door, Emma, you know, she came outside when the ambulance drove up and she was there when they opened the garage door and she saw you like that. She’s six years old. Awesome statement you made there. Right this second you are worm food, and people have forgotten you, they don’t even remember you now, it’s all Patrick Murphy now, but they’ll forget him, too. They’ll move on. That’s what people do. You aren’t Jim Morrison, Ty. You don’t get to be some kind of tragic rock star who died young and everyone builds a shrine to. You get to be a stupid-ass kid. The only people who will remember your ‘statement’ are Mom and me, and that’s just because we hurt too much to forget. Yeah, other people are in pain too, dipshit. Everybody feels pain. You asshole.”

  I tear the Post-it off the glass. The hole is an enormous chasm in my chest now, a swirling black hole, but I fight it. “I do not accept this shitty little note.”

  I crumple the Post-it. I drop it. It falls from my fingers and bounces on the floor and out of sight.

  My vision goes dim around the edges. I can’t breathe. Then I’m on my knees on the floor with my face pressed to the musty carpet fibers,
and I see blue lights behind my eyes. Constellations of pain. But I don’t see Ty.

  “Where are you?” I wheeze into the floor. “Where did you go?”

  The hole passes. I don’t know how long it takes, but suddenly it’s simply gone. I turn my face to the side and cough and lie there in the fetal position until I feel enough strength return to my body to sit up.

  The first thing I do is get on my hands and knees next to the bed and search for the Post-it.

  To smooth it out. To put it back. Because I can’t stay angry at him.

  Instead my fingers close on something hard and sharp. I jerk back, then reach underneath the bed carefully and pull the object out.

  It’s a tooth. A shark-tooth necklace, to be more precise. The necklace part consists of a row of tiny black beads on a rough string, with a single white and jagged tooth gleaming in the center. I sit up on my knees to inspect it, frowning. I bring it into the beam of light from the lamp. You don’t encounter shark teeth every day in our part of Nebraska. Or any part of Nebraska. Landlocked state, if you recall. I don’t remember this necklace. Ty wasn’t the kind of guy who wore necklaces, period.

  “What is this?” I ask to the empty air.

  And then I remember where I’ve seen it before.

  The picture of the three amigos: Ty, Patrick, and Damian making the peace sign.

  I pull Ty’s collage out from behind the door and find the picture in question. It was taken at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. Nebraska may not have too much in the way of snazzy tourist destinations, but we do have one of the best zoos in the country. I have always liked the gorilla exhibit, but Ty’s favorite was the sharks. It’s a huge blue tunnel where hammerheads and blacktips and grays and about ten other species of shark sweep through the water around you like they are performing a slow aquatic ballet.

  Ty would sometimes stand in there watching the sharks for hours. I used to tease him about it. “Who loves sharks?” I’d asked him. “If you got tossed in there, I doubt they’d love you back. Two words: feeding frenzy.”

  “It’s peaceful” was all he said in his defense. “I like it.”

  The three amigos photo was taken just outside the entrance to the shark tunnel. They must have been on a class field trip, because they are each wearing a fluorescent green badge. They are also each wearing a shark-tooth necklace from the gift shop. I stare at their hopeful faces. I close my hand around the shark tooth.

  Ty.

  Patrick.

  Damian.

  Three links in a chain.

  15 March

  The first time I thought there might be something wrong with Ty, the first time it occurred to me that he might be looking at the dying-young scenario a little too fondly, was when Samantha Sullivan, a girl from our church, died of pneumonia. Samantha was a sweet girl, the type who I always remembered smiling. She had braces, but they only seemed to accentuate her smile in a good way. When she got sick, nobody thought she would die. People we know don’t die of pneumonia, not in this day and age, not 14-year-old violin players. She was in the hospital for a few days and scheduled to be discharged on a Monday.

  On Sunday morning she developed a blood clot in her lung. On Sunday afternoon part of the clot broke free and traveled to her brain.

  And then she was dead.

  Samantha hadn’t been super popular. She was quiet. She had a small group of close friends, like me. She didn’t like to call attention to herself. But it seemed like every teenager in the city of Lincoln came to her funeral.

  One of her friends made a playlist of all her favorite songs: Taylor Swift, mostly, with some Carrie Underwood and the Pistol Annies thrown in. Samantha liked country. The playlist looped all through the viewing before the funeral. Samantha’s mom bought several of those collage frames and filled them with photos: Samantha as a baby, Samantha canning tomatoes with her grandmother, Samantha on the beach of Branched Oak Lake with a line of cousins, Samantha eating ice cream with her friends, smiling her sparkly smile.

  At the funeral, the people who got up to speak kept referring to Samantha’s gentle spirit and how she was a light that had gone out too soon, but how she was home now. There was no sickness that could touch her. She was safe. She had run her race. They tried to make it sound like life completely blows, so thank goodness Samantha got out of it when she did, while she was ahead, so to speak.

  No tears in heaven.

  I remember thinking, why? If God’s so good, why take this girl before she’s even had a chance to live?

  It didn’t make sense.

  It still doesn’t.

  Ty took Samantha’s death hard. He spent the rest of the summer playing Taylor Swift songs over and over. He had a picture of Samantha, taken at a church potluck when they were both about 12, sitting on a lawn chair with a paper plate balanced delicately across her knees, about to dig into some potato salad. He tacked the picture up on his wall next to his bed. It’s still there.

  What was weird was that he and Samantha hadn’t been particularly close. Yes, they had known each other since they were kids, and that much was upsetting in itself; nothing can remind you of your own fragile place in the universe so powerfully as someone your own age dying suddenly, here one minute, gone the next. But the level of emotion Ty showed over Samantha’s death didn’t correlate with what he’d felt for her in real life. He hated country music. He wasn’t friends with any of her friends. So why did it settle into him so deeply?

  In life, Samantha had been small and unassuming, a person who gravitated toward the background. But in death she was a shining star. Everyone spoke well of her. Everyone cried for her. They all cared.

  I’ve wondered lately if that was what started Ty’s fascination in his own death. He saw how everyone that one afternoon in the church, in the graveyard, loved Samantha Sullivan.

  It was only a few weeks later that he took the Advil.

  Maybe he didn’t mean to die. I mean, he took the pills practically under Mom’s nose. Who does that unless you want to get caught? To get saved? Maybe he was like everybody else. He just wanted to be loved. But then after he swallowed the pills he went down into his bedroom and went to sleep. Something must have changed in those moments after he took the Advil.

  There were other factors, too. A few days after Samantha’s death a football player at UNL killed himself in the empty locker room after a game, an overdose of some kind of over-the-counter drug. It was all over the news. That same summer a meth head died in what the press called “suicide by police.” He pretended he had a gun, and they shot him.

  There were all kinds of places where the idea might have taken root: that scene in the Twilight series when Edward tries to kill himself when he think he’s lost Bella, because yes, that’s a perfectly reasonable response if you can’t be with the person you love: just die. Or the casual way people roll off the phrase I’m killing myself doing (fill in the blank). Or Dr. Kevorkian, or the death penalty, or the news, which is always spewing out some kind of terrible story about a crazy person with a gun and a death wish. Or Romeo and Juliet in English class or It’s Kind of a Funny Story or a collection of poems by Sylvia Plath on Mom’s bookshelf, from her college days, where she had underlined the lines:

  Dying

  Is an art, like everything else.

  I do it exceptionally well.

  I do it so it feels like hell.

  I do it so it feels real.

  There’s death all around us. Everywhere we look. 1.8 people kill themselves every second.

  We just don’t pay attention. Until we do.

  26.

  GOING BACK TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY IS ROUGH.

  Even the bus ride is unbearable. Everybody wants to stare at the-girl-whose-brother-died, who must be extra fragile now because someone else is dead. It’s how they treated me when I came back after Christmas break—like I’ve got a grief bomb strapped to my chest, liable to go off at any second. They either approach me carefully to attempt to defuse it, or they run for
cover.

  Plus, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, which makes the whole thing super awkward. Nobody’s wearing green, I notice.

  Fun times.

  I look for Damian in the halls before class. I can’t stop thinking about his voice when he was telling me that Patrick was dead. “He was my friend,” he said. Now he’s the only one of the three amigos left standing. But I don’t spot him. Of course, he’s easy to miss when he’s trying not to be seen. Invisibility is his superpower, after all.

  “If I disappeared one day, really disappeared and never came back, they wouldn’t even notice.” That’s what he said to me that day in the gym.

  And I said, “I see you.”

  That’s what I have to do. He needs me to see him.

  I cyberstalked Damian a bit over the weekend, to figure out how I might best do that—be his friend—and this is what I’ve gleaned from his internet activity so far:

  He’s into photography, especially black-and-white candids, photos taken when the subject didn’t know there was a camera. I already knew that.

  He likes to read. I already knew that, too.

  What I didn’t know is that Damian likes to read everything he can get his hands on: science fiction and fantasy and horror, but also books like Marley & Me and The Kite Runner and books about Descartes and Kant and Jung. He’s really into philosophy. He describes himself as a “philosopher poet” on his various online profiles, and I don’t know if this is simply an attempt to pick up girls, but that’s the term he uses.

  Philosopher.

  Poet.

  Which is great and all, except three days ago he posted this poem:

  A white bone picked clean

  by the carrion few