The Good Goodbye

  She’s studying a framed poster on the wall, one of those lame Matisse pictures you find in beach rentals. She’s wearing Levi’s, but not vintage, and a shirred, red tube top that shows off her tanned shoulders. Her dark hair is loose and flowing. No earrings, which is a mistake. Big silver hoops would be perfect. I should take mine off and hand them to her. “That’s just where I was teaching last. Before that, I was in Phoenix, and before that Nashville. But I grew up in Portland.”

  “Nashville must have been dope.” All those country stars. I pick up a glazed ceramic ashtray that looks like some kid made it, all lumpy and uneven. Is this supposed to be art?

  “It was fun. You ever been?”

  “I’ve never lived anywhere but D.C.” I’ve never even been out of the country. Except for junior year, when I went to Puerto Rico with Mackenzie and her family for spring break, but all I saw was the hotel room. I spent the whole time puking in the bathroom.

  “You make it sound like torture. A lot of people would love to live in D.C.”

  “Not their whole lives.” Who wants to live anywhere their whole life? Boston would have been a change. Boston would have been a start. I’d loved Boston the minute I stepped onto its crazy sidewalks going everywhere and saw all the ivy creeping up the sides of the buildings. This no-name town in Maryland doesn’t count as anything. It’s just like all the other no-name towns near the ocean that my family’s vacationed at here and there, like a pebble skipping across the water.

  “I’m surprised, actually. I thought you were one of those girls.”

  I lower my glass. “One of what girls?”

  “Relax. I meant it as a compliment.” She reaches down to switch on a table lamp, springing the room into light and shadow. “I thought you were the kind of girl who takes ski trips to the Alps, spends the summer in Milan. The lucky girl.”

  I look like that kind of girl. I’ve spent my whole life trying to look like that kind of girl. “I wish.” I hold out my glass. She smiles and lifts the bottle. The wine gurgles into first my glass, then hers. “I’d love to go to Europe. I have family there. My mother’s French.” Later, my mother would say when I would ask about my grandparents and if I had any cousins. Another day. Arden and I snooped around when we were kids, looking for old family albums or clues to my mom’s life before she came to America, but there was nothing. Not even a passport. My dad’s never met them and Aunt Nat said she wasn’t sure my mom really had a family overseas, but I think I have grandparents somewhere and that they’re wondering about me, too. Maybe they didn’t want your mom to marry your dad, Arden would say. Arden the romantic. I hate to think what the real reason might be.

  “And you’ve never been.”

  “My dad’s always too busy to take time off and my mother…” My mother doesn’t like traveling. My father had had to beg her to go away for their anniversary last year and even then they’d come home a day early. I’d almost died when I saw their car pull up out front, and I’d barely gotten everyone out in time and cleared the countertop of all the liquor bottles before the front door swept open. I shrug and glance at Chelsea.

  She’s studying me. “Hungry?”

  We sit in the dining room, a creepy space painted dark brown and filled with heavy mahogany furniture. The paintings are hideous landscapes in ornate gold frames, nothing like the modern stuff in the living room. “This place has a split personality.” I pull out my chair. The thin rug catches beneath the legs.

  “I know. I’m kind of obsessed with trying to figure it out. My guess is they inherited some of these things and picked up other pieces when they lived in other cities. Or maybe this is a second marriage for both of them and they combined their households. Or maybe they just have really terrible taste.”

  I look around the room, trying to picture the people it belongs to. It would be horrible to inherit stuff you hated. I’d give it away, I decide. “Where’s your stuff?”

  “I have no stuff. I don’t want anything weighing me down.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing that can’t be packed in a few boxes. Clothes, a few books. These wineglasses. You know, the important things.” She watches me take a tentative bite.

  “Good, right?”

  I chew. It’s not anywhere as good as my dad’s. “It’s okay. Maybe cooked a minute too long.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the minute I took to answer the door.”

  I smile.

  When she undoes the bakery box, I see a slice has been cut out. She looks at me. “I guess Arden got to it first.” At least it doesn’t have candles and balloons frosted all over it. The cake is delicious. We each eat two pieces and sag back in our chairs. “I’m definitely going on a diet tomorrow.” She stands to clear the dishes. “Coffee? Cognac?”

  I’m supposed to meet Hunter at a party. I’m already late. Dinner’s taken way longer than I’d expected. We’ve been through a bottle of wine and talked about our favorite movies. I love horror flicks with a dead guy chasing people with a chain saw, but she’s all about weird indie films that make no sense. Give me a good tangled subplot anytime, she’d said. Turns out she’s a reality-TV junkie like me. I’m a sucker for those cooking shows, she’d told me. I didn’t tell her my whole life’s been a cooking show.

  Clattering noises come from the kitchen. Chelsea’s loading the dishwasher. “Have you decided?” she calls to me. A distant rumble of thunder. It’s going to rain, soon.

  This is a huge house for just one person. She must go crazy, being here all alone. “Cognac sounds good,” I call. Before she comes back into the room, I slide the pottery ashtray into my bag and snap it shut.

  We’re in the living room, sitting side by side on the couch. I’m not a fan of cognac, but this stuff is okay. One sip heats me through and through. I’ve got a nice buzz that insulates me. I don’t care that my jeans are too tight or that I’m stuck at some crappy college where the biggest thing to do is go to football games and get loaded at my professor’s house. I don’t care that I might get into a second-rate law school as a result and never amount to anything. Most of all, I don’t care that my mom looks at me with disapproval and my dad barely looks at me at all. Chelsea’s got her legs curled beneath her and her glass cupped in one palm. She reaches into the bookshelf behind us, red and blue and smooth tanned skin, and hands me the book I’d pulled out earlier, the one with a picture of a praying Buddhist on the cover. “What does this say again?”

  Her face is so close to mine. I could reach out and touch it.

  Natalie

  THERE’S BEEN AN ACCIDENT on the highway. It takes Theo four hours instead of two and a half to get back. I pace outside Arden’s room and then he rounds the corner. His face is lined with fatigue. He carries his briefcase heavy in one hand.

  We sit on the couch in the family lounge and Detective Gallagher takes his usual chair. I don’t want to talk to this man. I don’t even want to see his long face, his dark hair waving back from a high forehead, but I have to know what he’s thinking, what people are telling him about Arden.

  He explains that the lab’s matched the brand of paint thinner to the same one used by EMU’s studio art department, which buys its supplies in bulk. A student working alone in the printmaking studio Friday evening saw Arden leaving with a five-gallon jug of paint thinner.

  “Arden’s taking a painting class,” Theo says. “She must have needed it for an assignment. Didn’t she say something to you about that, Nat?”

  “They were doing self-portraits. Arden wasn’t happy with hers. It’s a large part of her grade, so she was planning to work on it over the weekend.” See? I’m saying. A completely innocent explanation.

  “Her professor didn’t seem to know anything about that,” Detective Gallagher says. “He says he’s strict about keeping supplies in the studio.”

  “So she broke the rules,” I say. “Students must help themselves to art supplies all the time.”

  He gives me a look. “Let’s talk about her relatio
nship with Hunter.”

  It’s a quick change of subject. “Yes, okay,” I say, uneasy, not meaning it. “But she didn’t really talk about him. They were friends, that’s all.” Answering questions he’s not even asking—it just makes me sound guilty. It makes Arden sound guilty.

  “What did she tell you about him?”

  I don’t look at Theo. “Nothing, really. She liked him. They were taking a class together.”

  “Is that all she said?”

  “I know how it looks. I know how it sounds, but that doesn’t mean she was hiding something. It just means that she didn’t think there was anything to tell us.”

  “We’ve told you,” Theo says. “Boys have never been an issue.”

  “Are you sure?” Detective Gallagher says.

  Meaning what? I frown, rub my hands together.

  “We don’t monitor her every move,” Theo says. “We don’t interrogate her. We respect her need for privacy. I work with teenagers. I see it all the time. The parents who are the most controlling end up pushing their kids the furthest away. Those are the kids who will do anything to assert their independence.”

  “Arden talked to us,” I say. “We have a healthy relationship. We know the important things.”

  “Did you know she was having sex with Hunter?”

  He says it so baldly. Trying to startle me into an unguarded response? I hadn’t known. I’d had no idea. But I’m not going to admit this. I’m not going to help him blame my daughter for anything, so I don’t reply. I just sit there. My hands are tightly twisted together and I unclench them.

  “Sex doesn’t mean the same thing it did when we were teenagers.” Theo’s using his headmaster’s voice: formal, with a slight choked quality. It tells me he’s hating this. “It means, in fact, almost nothing. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true.”

  But I know it would have meant something to Arden.

  “How did Rory feel about it?” Detective Gallagher asks, and I suddenly understand why Arden and Rory had been fighting.

  “I don’t know,” I say in a perfectly neutral voice. I can’t even remember the last time I talked to Rory. Would she have confided in me? She would talk to me in her Rory way of dropping a single clue and letting me ask the question that would lead to the next clue. Together we would assemble the whole. She is my niece by marriage only but I had always felt a kinship with her. I had always felt I understood her. I’d gone from Arden’s hospital room to Rory’s, to read to her the way I’d just read to Arden, as I had when they were little—both of them together, separated by a thin wall.

  “What about Arden? Did she mention anything about how she and Rory were getting along?”

  Theo folds his arms. “What are you getting at?”

  “Look. You’re a father. You work in a high school. Are you telling me you didn’t pick up on any signs that something was going on between the girls?”

  “Is this some sort of indictment over our parenting style?”

  “It’s just my experience that parents always know more than they’re willing to reveal. They mistakenly believe they’re protecting their kids when all they’re doing is making things worse.”

  “I don’t know what kind of parents you’ve been dealing with, but that’s not the case here. We want you to find out who did this.”

  “Even if it proves to be your own daughter?”

  “Yes.” Theo says it unhesitatingly, with conviction.

  Detective Gallagher studies him, then glances to me. “Another thing.” How can there be anything more? “Did you know Arden was being brought before the committee for student misconduct?”

  This can’t be true. The school would have informed us. Then I think, No, they wouldn’t. Arden’s eighteen. In their eyes, she’s an adult.

  Theo covers my hand with his. “How is this relevant?”

  “It goes toward state of mind.”

  “You don’t know our daughter’s state of mind,” I say. “You don’t know her at all.”

  “Look, Detective Gallagher,” Theo says, ever reasonable, ever calm. “Maybe Arden did have a romantic relationship with this boy. Maybe she and Rory argued about it. I can buy that. But girls don’t set fires just because they’re jealous.”

  “Unfortunately, Mr. Falcone, that’s exactly what they do.”

  —

  I swish the curtain closed behind me, metal rings rattling. Theo’s somewhere nearby. Down the corridor, outside the hospital building, I don’t know. He’s on the phone with the university, trying to track down a dean so we can find out exactly what misconduct Arden is being accused of. It’s early evening and he probably won’t reach anyone until tomorrow, but we can’t just sit here and do nothing.

  But that’s exactly what I’m doing, sitting here doing nothing. Arden wouldn’t set a fire to frighten or hurt Rory. She just wouldn’t.

  I can’t see Arden’s face. I can’t read her features. Wake up. Wake up, Arden. Tell us what really happened. I can’t help you unless I know.

  Arden wanted to be a mermaid when she was little. The sight of blood makes her queasy but she’d stared entranced at the X-ray of her broken wrist. In ninth grade, she came home from school every day smelling of darkroom chemicals, and in tenth grade, the knuckle of her right index finger was permanently stained black with India ink. She gets cold easily and has a slight overbite that three years of braces couldn’t quite correct. She props a book in front of her cereal bowl, and curls one foot around the other as she reads. She ducks when Theo kisses her soundly on the top of her head, making her giggle. I do know this girl. I’m not going to listen to what people are saying about her.

  A nurse comes in to check the monitors. She doesn’t cheerfully say hello when I greet her, which alarms me. “Is Arden okay?” I ask, and she nods tightly. “No change.” But she doesn’t linger by Arden’s bed the way she had the afternoon before. Maybe she’s had a fight with her husband, maybe her back is hurting her, but I can’t help but wonder if somehow she’s heard the suspicions circling my daughter.

  I pull my phone from my bag and press the buttons. The phone rings, but my mother doesn’t answer. She must be driving the boys somewhere. Or maybe they’re at the park. My mother’s a big one for fresh air. Maybe she thinks this will stave off the chicken pox. I had Skyped with them that morning, before school. The boys had been all motion, eager to show me their homework, a scrape on Henry’s knee, a cardinal perched on the bird feeder they had given Theo for Father’s Day. But they’re not there now. I leave a message. “Hi, Mom. Just wanted to know if you’ve heard how Christine’s operation went.” Two little girls with dark curly hair, attached chest to chest, their arms wrapped around each other. A complicated surgery, Christine said, but not as complicated as some. I wonder how the girls will feel when they’re no longer connected. “Call when you have a chance.”

  The door slides open. It’s Theo. “Any luck?” I whisper, and he shakes his head. “My mom’s on the line.” He comes into the room. “She wants to say hello. That okay?”

  I hesitate. Sugar can be overbearing. But Theo’s already extending the phone and I slide my own phone into my pocket and speak into his.

  “Hi, Sugar.” I let myself out of Arden’s room.

  “Now, listen. I’m going to tell you what I told Theo. You kids need a good lawyer.”

  Her voice is strong, purposeful. She’s used to getting her way, being heard and listened to. George may be the successful businessman but Sugar’s the one really in charge. Vince had been the one to introduce me to his parents. Sugar had held both my hands in hers and studied my face before hugging me hello. I’ve always wondered what she’d been thinking.

  “I know. We’re on it.” I walk down the hallway to the family lounge. Someone’s been in here, leaving behind a paper cup on the table and a crumpled blanket tossed across the back of the couch.

  “No, not someone through the Bishop School. You don’t want everyone knowing your business. You need to be able to speak your mi
nd.”

  We need to be able to afford it. “Speak our mind about what?”

  “You don’t know what a police investigation could turn up.”

  “Arden didn’t do it, Sugar.”

  “Well, of course she didn’t!” she exclaims, sounding surprised. I’m relieved at this support from an unexpected source. “But you don’t want everything bared for public consumption. She called us, you know.”

  I stop walking. “Arden? When?”

  “Oh, just before we left on our trip. She wanted to thank us for her birthday present. It was all right to send the girls money this year, wasn’t it? That’s all they asked for.”

  An oblique reference to the fact that we had so little of it. “It’s fine. Of course it’s fine. Thank you.”

  “George and I will send them more for Christmas, too. They’re in college now; they have expenses.”

  Will Arden be home for Christmas? I’ll have to come up with a vegetarian substitute for turkey, something special that she’ll love. I rest my forehead against the cold glass, look down onto the rain-soaked parking lot below. People hasten to and from their cars, umbrellas whipped by wind, folded newspapers gripped between two hands to form a waterproof shelf. They seem so far away. Arden had fallen even farther. “What did she say?”

  “What did who say?”

  “Arden. What did she tell you? How did she sound?” Sugar’s a talker. She probably didn’t let Arden get in a word edgewise. Still, I need to know. Had Arden sounded happy? Had she sounded okay? I need to know I hadn’t overlooked something that would explain how this happened.

  “Let me see. I asked her how classes were going and she said fine. I asked if there were any boys on the horizon and she told me no one special. I hope you’re not worried about that, Natalie. Some girls are just late bloomers.”