The Last Time We Say Goodbye

  We watched the news for a while on television, where a map of the area kept showing the tornado hovering above us, a swirling cartoon cyclone slowly moving in our direction.

  Then Dad suggested a game of chess.

  He’d been through his chess obsession a couple years before and hadn’t played since. But there in the basement den was the beautiful mahogany board he’d purchased back then, and the marble pieces, and what else was there to do while we waited?

  I played first. I lost. Spectacularly, if I remember correctly. In spite of my math affinity I’m not much good at chess. I’m shortsighted; I can’t predict that far ahead, to the other player’s choices and moves. I only see the pieces in front of me and react.

  I wasn’t surprised when I lost. I’d never won against Dad. He’s not the type to let his kids win just so they’ll feel good about themselves. In his chess phase I must have lost a hundred games to him, and every time he’d take my king, he’d say, “Well played, Lexie. You’re getting better. One of these days you’re going to beat me.”

  But I never did.

  So on June 24, when I was 14 and stuck in the basement with my family and a chessboard, I played, and I lost. I stuck out my tongue at Dad, and he chuckled at me, and then he said, “Tyler. You’re up.”

  Ty took his place on his side of the board with the look of an excited puppy.

  Oh boy, I remember thinking. This is going to be quick.

  But almost right away he made a move that surprised Dad.

  “Where’d you learn that?” Dad asked, squinting down at the board.

  Ty shrugged. “Is it a bad move?”

  “No,” Dad said distractedly. “No, that was an excellent move. There’s a name for it, even, if I can just remember it.”

  Before long Ty made another excellent move. And another. And another.

  Before long he was clearly winning the game.

  Then we had to stop for a bit when the sky went black. The lights flicked out. We all went into the bathroom with candles, where the pipes would provide some extra protection if the wind ripped the top of the house away. Ty and I got into the empty bathtub with the emergency radio. Dad sat on the counter with his arm around Mom.

  “The Caro-Kann Defense,” he said after a minute. “That’s it.”

  Yep, we were possibly about to die, and Dad was still marveling at Ty’s chess moves.

  I looked at Ty. He had a secret smile.

  We didn’t have to stay in the bathroom long.

  The tornado skimmed by Raymond and carried on to the east, where it took out a whole string of farms before it dissipated, and we could come out of the bathroom.

  Ty and Dad went right back to their game. Mom and I sat on either side of them, holding up candles to light the board, and watched it all go down, a rapt audience as Ty moved around the board like a pro. The whole time Dad looked so confused. I mean, Ty was 12 years old. When Dad had gone through his chess phase before, Ty had been like 10. He hadn’t even really grasped the rules of chess.

  “How are you doing this?” Dad asked finally when Ty took his queen.

  “I’ve been playing a little on the computer,” Ty confessed. He sat back. “Checkmate.”

  Mom and I crowed. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” Mom said, and I think she got a little too much satisfaction out of Ty winning, because she also had lost a hundred games to Dad.

  “I have to get a picture,” she said. So that’s when the photo happened.

  In the picture, Ty has just won the game and he’s practically glowing, he’s so happy. Dad is looking down, beaten, but he is smiling, too.

  He was proud.

  “Well done, son,” he said. He clapped his hand on Ty’s shoulder and squeezed. “Want to go again?”

  Ty shook his head. “I better quit while I’m ahead.”

  The power came back on. We all blinked in the sudden brightness of the room. Ty grinned over at Dad. “I have this new game on the Wii. Tennis. Do you want to try to beat me there? Loser buys McDonald’s?”

  “Sure,” Dad said. “You bet.”

  Sucker.

  It was a good day. A good memory.

  I don’t want to be the kind of person who hates my dad.

  29.

  THAT MORNING I WATCH THE SUN RISE, and then I get in my car and drive. I know the way to Megan’s house like I’ve driven there a hundred times—straight down 27th Street to the south part of town, where the houses are old but expensive and well maintained. Wrought-iron fences and such.

  Her house is a small tan-and-green one near the zoo. It has a red door. Christmas lights are still strung along the edge of the roof. A black-and-white cat stares at me from the window.

  Dad’s a dog person, by the way.

  I tuck Ty’s collage frame under my arm and make my way carefully up the uneven sidewalk. I climb the steps onto the porch, take a deep breath, and ring the bell.

  It’s warmer today, I realize. Water drips off the roof. The snow is melting.

  Megan answers the door. She is blond and bobbed and dressed in a little navy blue suit dress. When she recognizes me her face becomes the quintessential picture of surprise, her burgundy-lipsticked mouth in a perfect O shape.

  Behind her I see Dad, dressed for work, wearing a similar expression.

  “Hi,” I say, moving past Megan and into the house. “Do you have a minute? We need to talk.”

  22 March

  The lie I told Dad:

  The frame was behind the door.

  There’s an empty space in the frame, a picture missing.

  By complete coincidence I discovered this photo of Dad and Ty (not in a frame) on the floor behind the door.

  Therefore: it must have fallen out of its frame somehow.

  Therefore: Ty meant to put that photo of Dad in the collage.

  Therefore: Ty didn’t leave Dad’s picture out on purpose in order to hurt Dad.

  Therefore: It’s possible that Ty forgives Dad.

  I don’t know if he actually believed me, but it’s a fiction I think we both can live with.

  30.

  “THAT,” DAVE SAYS, “is what we in the business call a ‘breakthrough.’ Good job.”

  “It was no big deal.” I fiddle with the edge of the rug. “I was only there for ten minutes.”

  “It’s a very big deal, Lex.” Dave smiles. “How long has your father been gone?”

  “Three years.”

  “And in all that time, you’ve never gone to his house?”

  “Megan’s house,” I correct him. “No. I’ve never been there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .” I don’t know how to explain my reasons so that they seem rational. Perhaps they aren’t rational.

  “Why yesterday, I mean,” Dave says. “Why go to Megan’s house now?”

  I shrug. “I finally had something I wanted to say to him.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I wanted him to know that his picture belonged in Ty’s frame. That’s all.”

  “How did he react when you told him?”

  He cried. I’d never seen Dad cry before, not even at Ty’s funeral, so it shocked me. He didn’t make a big show of it; he put his hand to his eyes for a few minutes while his chest heaved and his shoulders shook, and then finally he dropped his hand.

  Then he said, “I’m so sorry, Lexie. I know what I did hurt you and your brother, and I am sorry for that.”

  I wanted to hold on to my anger when he said that. I could have answered that his sorry wasn’t good enough. His sorry can’t bring Ty back. Which is true.

  But my anger was a slippery thing, like a fish I was trying to keep hold of, and it wiggled out of my grasp.

  I looked at Dad, and he looked at me with his hazel eyes, Ty’s and my eyes, and he said, “I would have stayed. If it could have stopped Tyler from doing this. I would have come back.”

  I shook my head. It’s too confusing, too hard to think about the what-ifs. I have my own pe
rsonal list of what-ifs, without having to deal with Dad’s.

  He whispered again that he was sorry, and cried some more, so I laid my hand over his on Megan’s kitchen table. He put his other hand over mine and squeezed, and we stayed that way for a few minutes, until I slid my hand away and told him I had to get going to school.

  “Thank you for coming,” he told me as he walked me down the driveway. “For telling me about the picture. It means a lot.”

  It didn’t matter that almost everything I’d told him about the photo and the collage was a total fabrication on my part.

  “You’re welcome.” I got into the car.

  Dad knocked on my window and leaned down to say, “Maybe . . . maybe you could come to dinner here next week. We could talk about MIT.”

  “Maybe,” I said, because MIT was still feeling pretty far away, and I didn’t know—I still don’t know—if I was ready to make Megan’s house a regular thing. “I have to go.” I put the Lemon in gear. “Take care, Dad.”

  “Take care, Lexie,” he said.

  I could see him in the rearview mirror, standing on the sidewalk in his suit and tie, his hand lifted in a wave as I drove away.

  “Alexis, are you still with me?” Dave prompts, because I’m just sitting there, not answering. “Are you all right? Would you like some water?”

  I cough. “Sure.”

  He opens the minifridge under his desk and gets me a Dasani. I drink.

  “He said he was sorry,” I say when I’m ready to talk again. “For the divorce. For the way it hurt Ty and me.”

  Dave nods.

  “Aren’t you going to write that down?” I ask him. “It seems important. A breakthrough, like you said.”

  He doesn’t write it down. “Do you accept his apology?” he asks.

  “Sort of. Maybe. Probably not.”

  “Do you feel like you’ve started to forgive him?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think he should get off that easy. But it was nice to hear him say he’s sorry. I didn’t think I’d ever hear him say that.”

  Dave strokes his beard, which is what he does when he’s about to say something terribly profound. “Forgiveness is tricky, Alexis, because in the end it’s more about you than it is about the person who’s being forgiven.”

  “Like that old saying about how holding a grudge is like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die.”

  “Exactly.” Dave sits back, puts his feet up on the coffee table. “I’m proud of you. To go to that house, to face him, to give him that small kindness with the picture, that took courage. It was a step in the right direction.”

  “The direction to what, though?” I ask. “Where am I headed?”

  “Acceptance. Which is the path to healing. Growth. Contentment.”

  I mull this over. “I will never be happy again,” Mom said. She said it like it’s her duty now, her motherly obligation, to consider her life ruined because she lost Ty. I don’t view things the way Mom does, but it’s difficult to imagine being truly happy again.

  I don’t know what my duty is.

  “How did you feel when you were done talking to your father?” Dave asks.

  “I felt . . . slightly better,” I tell Dave.

  This he feels compelled to write down in his yellow legal pad. He underlines the words.

  “Slightly better is good,” he says.

  I agree. Slightly better is good. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.

  “Lex?” Dave says. “Are you okay?”

  “Sometimes I think I see Ty.” I don’t know where this comes from, this sudden confession, but suddenly it’s out there. I glance at Dave quickly. “Sometimes I feel like he’s there. In the house. And I feel like he wants something from me.”

  I brace myself to be sent off to the funny farm.

  Dave nods. “That’s very common, actually.”

  I stare at him. “Common?”

  “It’s common for people to continue to see loved ones who have passed. When he was alive, your brother took up a certain space in your life, a physical space and an emotional one. Now that he’s gone, the brain naturally tries to fill in that empty space.”

  “So it doesn’t mean I’m going crazy,” I venture.

  Dave lets out a bark of laughter. “No, Lex. You’re certainly not crazy.”

  And it doesn’t mean that Ty is a ghost, either. For some reason this revelation brings on the ache in my chest.

  It turns out there’s a logical explanation, after all.

  So why don’t I want to believe it?

  31.

  SADIE’S RUNNING OUTFIT IS HOT PINK. It’s impossible to miss her at the end of my driveway, hopping from foot to foot, warming up. She says the pink makes her feel like an atom bomb: like a nuclear explosion is her exact phrasing, pronouncing it “nuke-cue-ler,” the way George W. Bush used to say it even though he knew it was wrong, just to piss people off.

  How Sadie and I are friends, I still don’t know.

  “Come on,” she hollers at me. “Let’s get moving already.”

  We run. Spring seems to have finally arrived, so we’ve been running. Today is our second attempt this week in the couch-to-5K plan. I’m wearing yoga pants and a MATHLETE T-shirt, and I do not feel anything like a nuclear explosion. I hate running as much as ever. It’s a horrible thing to do to yourself. Waterboarding, really, would be kinder.

  There’s an upside, though. I do like the quiet of the early morning jogs around our neighborhood, the only sound our footfalls on the asphalt and our labored breathing in the spring air. I like the stillness in the air just before the sun rises. I like the colors that gather in the sky. The way everything, for just those few moments, seems fresh and unsullied.

  Sadie’s watch beeps. “Okay, walk,” she says.

  We slow to a brisk walk. This is the early part of the jog—before I feel like I am going to die—so I am able to answer Sadie when she asks me if I’ve seen the ghost.

  “I haven’t seen him. Not since I told the big whopper to my dad about the collage. How about you?” For some reason I can’t bring myself to tell her about what Dave said, that seeing Ty is a common occurrence, my brain filling in the spaces my brother used to occupy.

  “Me?” She looks over at me quizzically.

  “How’s Gregory, the spirit guide?”

  I grin. She grins back.

  “Oh, right. Gregory is fabulous. He’s got my life all planned out.”

  Her watch beeps. “Run!” she orders, and off we go.

  “Actually,” she says when we’re at the next walking interval, “I’m thinking about going to college. Not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or anything,” she says with proper dramatic flair, “but I’ve looked into a few community colleges, and then if I liked that I could transfer to UNL.”

  “Good for you!” I beam at her, as much as I am capable of beaming in this jogging situation. “I told you. You’re smart. You should do something with that.”

  “I’m thinking psychology or counseling. Get paid the big bucks for people to tell me all of their problems.”

  We pass by one of our neighbors, old Mrs. Wilson, who is watering her flowers. She looks at us suspiciously. Sadie waves. Mrs. Wilson scowls and goes back in the house.

  “What about MIT?” Sadie asks me. “What’s going on with that?”

  “Not much. I’m supposed to be getting a call from one of the students this week, and next month I’m going to visit the campus.”

  “You don’t sound very excited.”

  “I am, though.”

  “You’re scared,” Sadie teases.

  “No. I’m just anticipating this huge change. And I’ve never been great with change.”

  I’ve been thinking about MIT a lot. Just six months away. I know better than anyone how much can change in six months.

  Sadie’s watch beeps. “Run!” she yells, and we run, and I stop thinking for a while and focus on survival. r />
  Walk.

  Run.

  Walk.

  Run.

  I’m out of breath. I have a stitch in my side. I’m pretty sure I hate Sadie. For each step of the routine, the run parts seem longer and the walk parts seem shorter. After six of these, I feel like I’m going to die.

  “Walk,” she says finally. “Last leg.”

  Thank God. If I believed in God.

  “How’s your mom?” Sadie asks between pants as we cool down. “I saw her at the grocery store yesterday, and she looked—”

  “Slightly better,” I fill in.

  “Yeah. She looked better.”

  “She’s doing okay. She laid off the wine and the pills, and she’s going to church again, which seems to give her some energy, so yes. She’s doing better.”

  Mom and I haven’t talked about my little speech in the car on the way home from Graceland, but I feel like she heard me. That’s something.

  “It’s such a cliché, the whole ‘time heals all wounds’ thing, but it’s true. Clichés are clichés for a reason, I guess,” Sadie says as we drag ourselves into her front yard. “Hey, do you want a ride to school later?”

  I check my watch. “You mean in like fifteen minutes later? Sure.”

  It would rock to not ride the bus.

  “Okay, so shower, do something with that hair—I’m just saying—or whatever you need to do, and meet me back here in fifteen minutes.”

  Fourteen minutes later I’m back at the McIntyre house. Sadie comes out, hair still wet but eyeliner perfectly in place, and unlocks the doors to her old Jeep Grand Cherokee with its peeling red paint.

  I’m still thinking about MIT.

  “Are you okay?” she asks me.

  “Fine. I’m just jealous that you have a car that actually works.” I glance at the dashboard. “You’re almost out of gas, by the way.”

  She shrugs. “Gas is expensive.”

  “The light is on. Do you even have enough for us to make it to school?”

  She rolls her eyes, annoyed that I have to be so darned practical, and turns the car off. Then she unbuckles her seat belt. “Wait here.”