Say Goodbye for Now

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  Pete’s tears began to run freely again, but nothing else changed. They both just sat there, watching the horses graze.

  “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, Pete. Not one damn thing. There’s something wrong with him. I don’t know him, so I can’t tell you exactly what his problem is, but I think he’s one of those people who can’t stand to be surpassed.” Then, before he could even ask, she added, “That means bested. I think he was able to be a better dad for you when you were just a little guy, and he was the big, strong one. Sometimes I think he just couldn’t handle your growing up into a young man with your own opinions and a better sense of honor than his. And a big, powerful young man at that. And if I’m right about that theory, there was nowhere that situation could possibly go except wrong. Then other times I’m just glad I don’t know the workings of that man’s brain. But the problem is him, Pete. The problem was never you.”

  She patted him on the knee and let herself out. Left him to sort things through.

  Alone with his thoughts, Pete was surprised to find that he tended to believe her. Yes, there was still a small place in his chest that would always feel empty. That would always tell him he was never enough. But that day he began to believe that emptiness a little less and believe Dr. Lucy a little more.

  When he came downstairs for dinner she was sitting at the typewriter. Pete could hear the familiar clacking of the keys.

  “Writing a letter to Mr. Bell?”

  “Yes,” she said, still clacking.

  “Telling him about what happened with my dad?”

  She stopped typing. Turned to look at him over her shoulder.

  “I was. But maybe I should have asked you if that was okay.”

  Pete let that situation turn in his brain a couple of times.

  “Yeah. It’s okay. If it was anybody else it wouldn’t be. But it’s Mr. Bell. So it’s okay.”

  MARCH 1966

  SIX YEARS AND SEVEN MONTHS AFTER THE BELLS MOVED AWAY

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Dr. Lucy

  Dr. Lucy sat at the breakfast table, drinking coffee and catching up on a week’s backlog of morning papers. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say she was flipping through the papers. Looking for an article of interest but not finding it. Yet.

  Then her eyes landed on just what she was looking for. But after reading the first paragraph, her brow furrowed with disappointment.

  She stopped reading. Sighed. Looked up.

  Pete was staring into her face. He had actually paused in the process of shoveling scrambled eggs into his mouth, which evidenced a surprising amount of concern.

  “Thought you never read the paper,” he said.

  She wondered if it was possible that he really hadn’t noticed her change of habit in that department in the last couple of years, since she and Calvin had started following the case together.

  She wasn’t answering, so he added, “I thought you just read the funny papers and the weather and then used it to line Archimedes’s cage.”

  The skin on his face looked red and a little raw from his recent shave, and his long, slightly shaggy hair had been slicked back, wet looking, to appear presentable at his latest full-time job. It was a Saturday, but he still worked a morning shift.

  “I didn’t use to,” she said. “But Calvin and I are following a legal case together. Loving versus Virginia. Have you heard anything about it?”

  “No, ma’am. Not as I know of. But I know it must be worth following if you and Mr. Bell find it so interesting. So tell me about it, so I know.”

  “Okay. Well. Let me see how I can compress this. There’s a couple. A married couple. The husband is white and the wife is Negro and Indian. They’re from Virginia, but they left the state and traveled to the District of Columbia to get married, because it’s illegal in Virginia. Just like it is here in Texas. Then they went home and promptly got arrested. This was something like 1958, I think. They’ve been forced to live outside the state all these years. But they want to go home. They have family there. So they’ve gotten the American Civil Liberties Union to take up their case. That’s a group that defends people’s rights. Calvin and I have been a bit hopeful about it. Well. Guardedly hopeful, I suppose. Sometimes I feel like I’m just setting myself up for a fall, and that nothing will ever really change. This morning, for example. This morning is one of those times.”

  She gestured toward the article.

  “What does it say?” Pete asked, his brow imitating her own.

  She dropped her eyes to the article again and scanned quickly.

  “It’s disappointing, but it’s not all bad. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the state’s antimiscegenation laws. That’s the bad part. The good news is that the court also set aside the original conviction. Of the couple, I mean. It said a sentence requiring the defendants to leave the state is ‘unreasonable.’”

  “But you were hoping they would make it legal.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we don’t live in Virginia.”

  “I know. But sometimes case law is like dominoes. One law falls in one state and other people in other states can cite that decision to challenge the remaining laws. I’m not saying it’ll happen anytime soon, or even that it will happen at all. Just that Calvin and I have been following it.”

  Letting ourselves hope, she almost added. She recalled a time when not letting herself hope had been something of a specialty of hers. But that seemed so long ago now.

  “Know what I like best about that case?” Pete asked, sounding upbeat again. Or at least as though he was trying to be. “The name. Loving versus Virginia. Usually those cases have these legal names that don’t really mean anything and you can’t even remember them. But this one . . . this one is so . . . honest. Like they’re just flat-out admitting that it’s loving that Virginia is trying to fight against.”

  Dr. Lucy smiled. To herself, and a little sadly.

  “Actually, that’s the couple’s name. Mildred and Richard Loving.”

  “Really? So it’s just a coincidence?”

  “Yes, but I agree with you. The name of the case is one of the best parts of the whole thing, coincidence or not.”

  “Is it all over now? And they lost?”

  “Probably not. It’ll probably go all the way to the Supreme Court. Which doesn’t mean they’ll hear it. Or decide it well. But anyway, Pete. It’s after eight. You’d better get going.”

  His eyes flickered to the clock, and he quickly slurped the last of his coffee.

  “Oops,” he said, and darted away from the table.

  Dr. Lucy returned her gaze to the paper and began to read the article word by word from the beginning. Maybe there was some other scrap of positive news she had missed.

  “Dr. Lucy?”

  She looked up to see Pete’s groomed-for-work head peering at her around the kitchen doorway.

  “Yes, Pete?”

  “If they do decide that case right, and the laws change, would you and Mr. Bell get married?”

  She sighed. She wondered, as she gathered herself to answer, if her face looked red to him. It felt a little flushed to her.

  “I don’t know, Pete. I don’t know if that’s what he still wants. It’s been so long. Things can change. People can change. He might have met somebody new by now.”

  “Wouldn’t he have told you?”

  “That’s a hard thing to tell somebody.”

  “Couldn’t you just ask him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I could.”

  All the times she’d almost asked him slipped through her mind, an unintentional loop of memories. The letters she had typed—carbon copies and all—then balled up and thrown in the trash. The sentences begun on the phone and never finished.

  “Problem is,” she added, “then I’d find out.”

  Once Pete was safely out the door to work, she took down the shoeboxes of Calvin’s letters, and found the very first one. It wasn’t hard, because she had contin
ued to keep them in order. She knew the letter had to do with faith in the world—that ever-tenuous subject—and so allowed herself to believe it would help her that morning.

  She sat in the wing chair, brushing aside the jungle of tendrils of the overgrown “Calvin Plant,” and removed the letter from its envelope. The paper had yellowed with age and the creases had grown fragile from folding and unfolding.

  August 4th, 1959

  Dear Lucy,

  It was such a delight to speak with you on the phone today, even if it was only a quick call to let you know we’d gotten in safely. I wish I were a rich man. I’d call and talk for hours. If I can find work and when Justin and I are no longer staying with family, maybe a short call is a luxury I’ll be able to afford once a week or so. I hope I’m right about that.

  I thought about you a lot on the bus. I was watching people. Watching the world. I made a set of observations that kept bringing me back to you. I wasn’t doing it on purpose, but I couldn’t help watching the masses of humanity in public bus stations, and on the buses themselves, and noticing how people automatically divide themselves up. Or maybe it’s not automatic, I don’t know. Maybe it’s something we learn at a young age without even realizing it. And I don’t only mean dividing into black and white, though certainly that’s a big part of it. But it seems even more basic at its core. Public accommodations divide people into money and no money. And unfortunately black and white follow a fairly predictable pattern within.

  I try to take the world as it comes, Lucy. I wonder if you’ve noticed that about me. But I have to say it’s a face I put to the world that, while certainly not phony or false, is not without its cracks.

  I began to get discouraged on the bus. I began to lose faith in what kind of world we live in. I wanted it to be a place where I could stay in Texas with you, harm no one, and live my life. But it’s not. It’s a world in which my son was beaten for doing nothing more heinous than being a friend. But then I thought, it’s also a world where a pretty woman doctor sewed him back up and tended to him lovingly and didn’t even want money in return.

  That’s a lot to do for someone, Lucy. You rescued my faith in the world.

  I guess the world will always be like this. I suppose we’re built with complete free will, and as much as we’re capable of depravity, to the same degree we are wired for greatness. Everyone gets to choose, I think. And my challenge is to decide where I’ll place the bulk of my attention. What I’ll most believe in.

  I mostly believe in the lovely lady doctor who saved my faith in people.

  Please write soon.

  Love,

  Calvin

  She refolded the letter and put it away, noting that it hadn’t helped much. It had only filled her with still more doubts as to whether the emotion they’d shared could survive so many years of crushing distance.

  She arrived home from the market at two thirty that afternoon.

  Pete came trotting down the stairs when he heard her come through the door.

  “Mr. Bell called,” he said.

  She found her insides torn between disappointment at missing the call and fear that something was wrong. He didn’t call often, because it was hard to afford it. For both of them.

  “Did he say why?”

  “Yeah. He said his father died. He just wanted to talk to you.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll call him right now.”

  She dialed the number by heart and listened to nine rings, each echoing in an empty pit of her belly—a soft spot that hurt right along with Calvin.

  No one answered.

  No matter how many times she tried the number again over the weekend, it always turned out the same.

  She thought several times of getting in the car and driving to Philadelphia, though it would have taken a solid two days at the least. But she felt unable to make such a move without first knowing for sure she was wanted there. Her thoughts on the matter kept taking her around in a circle and leaving her nowhere.

  Another part of her life that always turned out the same.

  His letter arrived several days later.

  March 12th, 1966

  Dear Lucy,

  This has been a heartbreaking week for our family. I’m sure Pete gave you the message. I’m sorry if I missed your return call, but there were so many arrangements to be made.

  It was very sudden. He had a heart attack when no one even knew he was having trouble with his heart. If he’d been feeling poorly he never said.

  Justin is deeply grieved. He looked up to his grandpa. Just about everybody who knew him well did. He wasn’t a perfect man. He was a little rigid sometimes in his thinking and didn’t always express affection easily. But he was a deeply principled man with a great sense of integrity. I know you would have loved him, because I modeled myself after him in many ways. You would have seen a lot of me in him and the other way around.

  That leads me to my deepest regret in all of this: You will never meet him.

  Sometimes when justice is not close at hand, people are quick to tell you that you will simply have to wait—that until the people standing on your neck feel more comfortable standing elsewhere, you have no choice but to be patient. They talk of this like it shouldn’t be all that much of an inconvenience for you. But how do you hand a person back the time that was taken from him?

  Very real losses are happening while people wait.

  Sorry to end on a down note, but it’s hard to sound cheerful in the wake of your father’s death.

  I love you, and that’s a bright point in all of this.

  Calvin

  She held the letter in her hands for several minutes.

  He loves me, she thought.

  Not that he didn’t say so often. Not that she hadn’t known. It was more that she had begun to lose track of how he loved her. Of course they had been through a lot together. And of course there was love. But they no longer talked about making a space for that love, or whether the love had a future in a world that continued to begrudge them the space.

  She would call him several more times in the two days that followed, and eventually reach him. But when real losses are happening, and there’s nothing you can do to restore them, it’s hard to know what to say.

  DECEMBER 1966

  SEVEN YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE BELLS MOVED AWAY

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Pete

  It was a Sunday morning, early, and colder than most for this part of the world. Even for December. Pete was preparing to give the horses their morning feeding. If nothing had distracted him, he soon would have moved on to letting the dogs out for a good run.

  But something did distract him.

  The door of the shed was open again. Not wide open, but distinctly ajar. It was the fourth morning in a row he had found it that way. The last three times he had assumed the fault was his own—that he had failed to properly latch it closed the night before. This time he knew he had been careful.

  He walked over warily, hearing the dogs whining and hitting the wire fencing behind him. He pushed the door wide and looked in. Just like the previous three mornings, there was nothing out of the ordinary inside the shed.

  He quickly fed the horses and opened all the run gates to let the dogs out. Then he stuck his head into the kitchen to see if Dr. Lucy was awake. She was, and she looked up from an empty skillet she had just set on the stove. Smiled at him.

  “Dr. Lucy? Have you been going into that shed for any reason?”

  “No, I let that be your territory these days. Why do you ask?”

  “Because every night I make sure it’s closed. And every morning I find it open. For the last four days this’s been happening.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “That seems strange.”

  It struck Pete that she sounded a little like Justin in the way she said it, and that she might have picked up the expression from him.

  She followed Pete out into the yard. The dogs milled around them, and jumped up, hoping to involve
the humans in their play.

  “I do think I might have left it open the first night,” he said. “But after that I was real careful.”

  “That latch hasn’t been very good for as long as I can remember. It’s not lined up quite right anymore. I think a good push would be all it takes, no matter how carefully you think you closed it.”

  They both stuck their heads inside the shed. There was one small, high window that let in a slant of early morning light. Pete could see their breaths blow out as clouds of moisture in that beam of sun.

  Dr. Lucy walked inside and over to a stack of folded drop cloths on the concrete floor. She ran her hand over the top of the stack, then looked closely at her palm in the slanted light.

  “Some kind of animal fur,” she said. “Something’s been sleeping in here.”

  “Something wild, you think?”

  “I don’t know. Could be. Stray dog, maybe? You said it’s been happening for the last four days. And that’s when this cold snap started.”

  “Wouldn’t the dogs bark, though? If some strange animal came around? They can see the shed from their runs.”

  “Hmm,” she said. She pulled to her feet and dusted off her hand against her apron. “That does make it a bit of a mystery.”

  But she didn’t stay around to help him solve it. She walked back into the kitchen to resume the making of breakfast. Pete was hungry, as usual, so he didn’t argue or complain.

  “I could put a hook and eye on that door,” he said. Then he shoveled another oversized bite of pancakes into his mouth while he waited to hear her thoughts.

  “I hate to see you do that. Seems like we’re here to help animals, not keep them out in the cold.”

  “I was thinking that, too,” he said, his mouth still mostly full. It was a habit he tried to avoid in her presence, but some things needed saying right away. “Depends on what it is, though. If it’s a wild animal . . . you know, one that was dangerous to the horses, I’d want it out of here. Especially with Smokey being so old and now lame. Just what he doesn’t need is a coyote or something that thinks it lives here.”