The Good Goodbye

  Arden just stands there, stunned. Then she launches herself at me, fingers spread into claws. I grab her wrists and we wrestle around the room, grunting. Things topple. All I see are her buggy eyes and open mouth. I want to hurt her, slam her into a corner and break something. “I hate you,” I hiss, panting. “I fucking hate you.”

  “What the hell, guys?” It’s D.D., standing in the doorway. “We can hear you all the way down the hall.”

  I jerk myself free and we stand there panting, glaring at each other. “Yeah, Arden. What the hell.” My arms are throbbing and I look down to see angry red gouges from her nails.

  “Sorry,” Arden says. “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  “It’s not nothing.” D.D. comes into the room. “Look at your knee, Rory.” I look down. I’ve banged my knee, blood trickling down my shin. I don’t even feel it. “Seriously, guys. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Ask Arden,” I say.

  “It’s none of your business,” Arden snaps.

  “No, really, Arden,” I say. “Tell her. Tell D.D. how you fucked my boyfriend.”

  D.D. whirls to look at Arden. “What? No way!”

  “He never even looked at you, did he?” Arden shoves past D.D. and out the door.

  On the floor lie the broken pieces of Chelsea’s pottery ashtray.

  —

  I end up at Chelsea’s. It takes her a long time to answer the door, and when she finally does, I fall across the threshold and into her arms. I was on my way to Hunter’s, to have it out with him in person, but halfway there I veered right and kept going. Chelsea’s driveway was empty, all the lights in her house off, but still it felt right to run up the steps of her porch and pound on her door.

  “Oh, baby. What’s the matter? What happened?”

  She pulls me into the safe darkness of her house and closes the door behind me. The firm rasp of the bolt sliding home is a relief. I haven’t cried since I was four years old. I won’t cry now, but my words come in jerky, breathless gasps. We’re sitting close on the couch in her living room, our knees touching and my hands in hers, when she looks down. “You’re hurt. Hold on.”

  She rises, and when she returns she’s holding a bowl and a plastic box with a handle. Sitting back down, she swirls a washcloth in the basin of sudsy water and lifts it, dripping, to be firmly squeezed and pressed gently against first my right arm and then my left. “They look worse than they are,” she tells me. It’s warm and comforting. I relax. “How did you leave things?” She lifts my leg and props my foot in her lap. She’s wearing long pajama bottoms and a tank top. I watch her dab away the dried red streaks of blood, the muscles in her arm flexing and unflexing.

  “We didn’t. She just left, and then I did, too.”

  D.D. had stayed behind while I got dressed, wanting to know the details—what and when and how I’d found out. But D.D. wasn’t the person I wanted to talk to, and then, as it turns out, neither was Hunter. I wince as Chelsea pats my knee dry. I see the cut now, a small slice across the bone. She bends forward to study it, lamplight gleaming on her slippery black hair. “No stitches, I don’t think.”

  “You a doctor?”

  “I’ve had my share of scrapes and bruises.” She glances up and quirks her dark, angled eyebrow. “I went to college on a lacrosse scholarship.”

  “I’m dating a jock.” As soon as the words are out, I want to reel them back in. We’re not dating. I don’t know what we’re doing, but I know that word doesn’t fit. But her expression doesn’t change. She leans forward to set the bowl of water on the table.

  “I tore my rotator cuff and that was that.” She snaps open the plastic box. “How does Arden look? Is she okay?”

  I bristle. Arden’s the one who broke the rules. She’s the liar and the cheat. She’s the one who should be cut and bleeding. “Why don’t I call her and ask?”

  She pats my leg. “Okay, okay. I get it. Just asking.”

  “She only wanted him because he was mine.”

  “She’s not the only one at blame here, Rory.”

  “You mean Hunter?”

  “I mean Hunter.” She folds a piece of gauze into a square and covers my knee. “Here, hold this.”

  I put my fingers against the gauze as she yanks a piece of tape from the roll.

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “No. I’ll kill him if I do.”

  “You know you need to have it out with him. You can’t just hold Arden responsible.”

  What would he say? How could he defend himself—would he even try? Then I have a horrifying thought. What if he and Arden are together right now, talking about me? I curl my hands into fists. I should have gone to Hunter first, cleared the path so there was nothing left standing for Arden.

  “Maybe have it out with yourself, too.”

  “What the hell does that mean? I didn’t tell them to screw around.”

  “These things don’t happen in a vacuum, Rory. You’re close to Arden, right?” She presses lengths of tape around the gauze, sealing it in place.

  Arden’s my best friend, my blood sister. Too many things. I can’t say them because I know she’s none of them anymore. “She’s my cousin.” If I could, I would make that disappear, too.

  “And Hunter must be a nice guy. You wouldn’t date a jerk.”

  Hunter’s not a jerk, but he’s not just a regular guy, either. He’s always there, which is nice but kind of not nice, too. He’s always there. I don’t know how I feel about him. But one thing is for sure: I’m not going to let Arden have him. She needs to know. “I’ve dated plenty of jerks, trust me.”

  She smiles at me. “There you go.” She has her hand wrapped around my ankle, warm and strong. “All better.”

  Chelsea’s a present I keep unwrapping. She’s a mirror I hold up to myself.

  Natalie

  THEY’RE GOING TO CUT out a section of Arden’s skull. Nothing else is working to lower the fluid seeping into her brain—not siphoning it off, not pumping medications into her veins or oxygen into her lungs, not elevating her bed to let gravity have a say. This is a last-ditch effort, but Dr. Morris is confident. “This procedure is well established,” she assures us. “We’ve seen situations turn around completely.” This is more or less the same pep talk she’s been giving us from the beginning, but this time she’s unusually brisk. More alarmingly, she’s not stepping out into the hall to have this conversation out of Arden’s hearing.

  I put my hand on her arm as she’s tapping on her tablet and she raises her head. I see the faint gleam of her eyes in the light from her screen. “Thank you. Thank you for taking care of Arden.”

  A neurosurgeon is on his way to perform the emergency procedure, which is called a decompressive craniectomy. I Google this on my phone, guessing at the spelling, getting it wrong over and over and over. At last I find it and learn that this is a controversial operation that’s been around since prehistoric times and the medical community is divided as to whether it does any good. Dr. Morris says they will try to preserve the section of bone they cut out, to be reattached later. I don’t know where they will keep this piece of my daughter. I don’t know what they will do if they can’t reattach it, and I don’t want to know if there’s a possibility they may never even try. I think of Dr. Morris’s steady brown eyes. We don’t have time for a second opinion.

  I’m phoning Christine while Theo’s talking to my mother. He hangs up and says, “She’s on her way. She’ll pick up the boys from school and be here before it’s over.”

  Brain surgery. It will take hours. My mother and my boys are going to stay in the room Theo and I have booked, and just knowing that they’ll be here soon loosens the knots inside me. I picture them jumping on the beds, squabbling over the television remote, and begging to watch Nickelodeon. They will throw their arms around me when my mother brings them to meet us in the cafeteria downstairs and I will kiss their cheeks and inhale their little-boy smell of soap and strawberry jam and dirt
. For those few brief moments, the center of my world will hold.

  Arden lies in her bed as the nurse works around her. The beam of the flashlight passes over her still face, a glimpse of chin and lower lip. She’s completely removed from the tension swirling around her. Arden has found a peaceful place. I am fighting this battle for her. I am going to win. This is not beyond me. The hospital nurse on the other end of the phone puts me through to Christine, and my sister’s confident voice soothes me. “I’ll find someone to cover my shift. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Christine’s coming,” I tell Theo, and he nods. He’s squinting at the tiny screen on his own phone. He’s been trying to reach his parents, who are out of cell range, but they haven’t been answering his emails. “It was just a stupid cruise,” I say. “We should have told them to come home right away.”

  He doesn’t look at me as his thumbs move over the tiny keypad. “They’ll be here soon. Don’t worry.”

  “Are we doing the right thing?”

  He rubs his forehead tiredly. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  We’ve gotten to this place so quickly. Yesterday had passed in the same exact way as the day before and the day before that. Nurses coming on and going off duty; Dr. Morris appearing first in the morning and last thing in the evening; meals and phone calls and quiet conversations. There’d been no warning we were climbing steep terrain. Maybe the signs had been posted all along the path and I just missed them in my steadfast refusal to see anything but the distant horizon when we could take Arden home.

  The orderly comes and pulls up the railing, releases the brakes, hooks the IV pole onto the bed, and removes and places the monitor on the sheet between her legs, coils of tubing across her chest. The nurse helps him steer it out of the room, and together they push Arden out the door. Bright light slides up her body to her face. She doesn’t flinch; her lips don’t tighten. Her gently curved fingers don’t grasp for purchase. There is nothing about her that resembles a person other than the general shape beneath the gauze. Theo and I walk with her as far as we can, down the hall and into the elevator. We stop outside the surgical suite as the automatic doors whoosh open to admit Arden and leave us behind. “We’ll be right here, honey,” I tell my daughter, because surely, surely, despite what the doctors say, she can still hear me.

  The doors close, and she’s gone from sight.

  “Remember when you had to pick her up from daycare because she wouldn’t eat?” Theo says, softly. “What was she, nine months old?”

  I don’t want to play this game. I turn and begin walking.

  Theo falls into step beside me. “You dropped everything to rush her to the doctor. We thought she was sick, but it turned out she was just sick of baby food.”

  It had happened overnight. Arden was done with mashed-up prunes and peas. She clamped her tiny mouth shut and turned her face when I held up the spoon. She screeched and kicked when I pushed the cart down the baby-food aisle. I found myself pleading with her: Mommy just has to get diapers. Look, here we go. See? We’re all done. She was ready for the good stuff, whatever Theo and I were eating. She’d watch closely as I diced zucchini lasagna, salmon, potatoes au gratin into bits, and when I placed the plastic dish on her high-chair tray, she’d look over to see if it matched the food on our plates before contentedly tucking in.

  “What about when we took her to Williamsburg?” he says. “All she wanted to do was collect acorns. It was like she’d never seen an oak tree before.”

  Our first family vacation and Arden had spent the entire weekend crouched on the ground, filling her pockets with broken pieces of shell. When we got home, she insisted on lining all our windowsills with them. Theo and I had watched wonderingly. Do you think it’s some kind of ancient ritual? he’d asked me.

  Theo slides his arm around my shoulders. “What about that time she won that poster contest? She didn’t even tell us she’d entered the thing. We didn’t even know she could draw.”

  The citywide anti-smoking campaign the D.C. mayor had held. Arden had been the youngest child onstage, and she’d looked so small shaking the mayor’s hand. I think guiltily of the cigarette I’d smoked with Vince. I vow that it was my last.

  “Look how she wore you down about getting a dog.” I hear the smile in his voice.

  I’ll walk it, Arden had promised. I’ll feed it and clean up after it. You won’t even know it’s here. But I’d refused. I knew my limits. Then one afternoon when I went to pick her up from her volunteer job at the local humane society, she’d persuaded me to come inside. There was Percy curled up in his crate, his long tail tucked around his body. As I walked in, he clambered to his feet and looked at me with brown eyes.

  We’ve reached Arden’s room. After a week of darkness, the overhead light is on, casting the space in bleak yellow light. It looks so barren. It looks hopeless. I don’t want to be here. I don’t know what to do, where to go.

  Theo’s right beside me. “What about when she learned to drive and ran over our mailbox?”

  I whirl to face him, hands fisted. He hasn’t shaved; his collar’s rumpled. “Stop it, Theo. I can’t do this.” I won’t be cheered up and encouraged. Words are just words.

  “Arden’s strong. She gets that from you.”

  “You don’t know. You don’t know anything.”

  “I know you never planned to get married, not to me, not to Vince. I know you never wanted kids.”

  I’ve never told him this. I’ve never even whispered it. “I love our kids.” It sounds lame. It sounds pitiful.

  “Of course you do, and they love you. But here we are, Natalie, in another place you never expected to be. You need to figure this out.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got for me—figure it out?” I turn away, and he grabs my arms.

  “You can do this, Natalie.”

  His green eyes so like Arden’s. His face blurs. “I can’t.”

  “You can. I’m right here, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.” He kisses my forehead, my cheeks. “I’m never going anywhere.” He presses his lips against mine. I taste the coffee on his breath, the salt of my tears. I put my arms around his neck and pull him toward me. This man, the father of my children. My best friend, my lover.

  The first time you hold your baby and see she’s all right, you breathe a sigh of relief. You think you’ve crossed the finish line. You don’t realize that the race has just begun.

  —

  My mother phones me from the hotel. I get up from Arden’s bedside and go out into the hall, almost running to answer her before she hangs up. It’s a three-hour trip from D.C. and it’s been more than five since she called to tell me she was about to leave. A million things could have happened en route, but I didn’t dare phone her while she was driving. “We’re here, honey. How’s Arden? Is she out of surgery?”

  “She got out a couple of hours ago.” The intracranial pressure has already decreased, which is a very good thing. Now all we can do is wait and hope that it drops even lower. She’s still heavily sedated. There’s no way to know how she’s doing. There’s no way to predict if she’ll start to move, open her eyes, smile. I have spent the past forty-eight minutes watching the machines pump oxygen and drip IV fluid and a complex cocktail of medication into my daughter. Watching, but not really seeing.

  We’ve heard from Denise the nurse that Rory’s been put on the lung transplant list. Theo is in Rory’s room, talking to Vince and Gabrielle. Everything feels precarious. Fear and loss loom tall in every corner.

  “Could you please tell the girl at the front desk to let us into the room?” my mom asks.

  I hear squealing in the background and guess that Henry’s torturing Oliver or vice versa. I glance at the clock over the door as I talk to the girl. Yes, she has my permission. Yes, please bring in a rollout. You can charge it to our credit card.

  “How was your trip?” I ask my mom when she gets back on the phone, meaning, What took so long? She sighs. “It’s
raining.”

  Still? I glance to the gray window streaked and smeared. Arden loves rainstorms. She huddles outside beneath the porch overhang to watch the thrashing trees and bright bursts of lightning. The boys sit with her, Oliver leaning in to the curve of her arm, while Henry darts forward to capture a handful of water gushing from the downspout. The three of them swimming in the same gene pool and yet each so different.

  “Do you need help settling in?” I ask my mom. There are two nurses in the room. They are watching Arden very closely. Theo could run over to the hotel, or maybe I could. I am craving my sons. Now that they are so near, it feels unbearable.

  “No, no. We’ll be fine. Give us a few minutes and then we’ll be right over.”

  They’re already seated at a far table by the time Theo and I get down to the cafeteria. My mom’s focused on cutting Henry’s sandwich into triangles while Oliver carefully peels the foil from a cup of yogurt. Henry’s hair’s been combed, the cowlick at his crown lying flat. My mother’s doing. Henry will never sit still long enough for me. Oliver’s got on his favorite Pokémon jacket, a size too small. The sleeves ride up his wrists and the zipper barely closes. I’d put it in the donation pile, but Oliver must have persuaded my mom to take it out. They look so ordinary and extraordinary, both. Henry spots us first and shoves back his chair. “Mommy! Daddy!” Oliver looks up and then both of them are running toward me.

  I crouch and they crash into me. I wrap my arms around them and hold on tight. They feel exactly the same, smell exactly the same. I can’t get enough of them. When I stand, I hug my mom. She’s wearing the gardenia perfume Theo and I gave her for Mother’s Day and this gesture touches me. Theo tousles first Henry’s hair, then Oliver’s, and we all sit down. Oliver clambers onto my lap while Henry leans against me, a thrill. He doesn’t like to be confined. Even as an infant, he’d raise his head away from my shoulder to see what was happening around him. He’s always the last to fall asleep, the first to wake up. “I’ve missed you guys so much,” I say, nudging Henry’s plate toward him, handing Oliver a spoon.