The Good Goodbye

by Carla Buckley

  “Why?” Theo asks. “What does this have to do with anything?”

  “Did she tell you about the fire in her room three weeks ago?”

  I sit back. I have the sensation of something slipping away.

  Theo glances to me, then to Detective Gallagher. “There was a fire in her room? And the college didn’t notify us?”

  “Apparently, they didn’t know.” Detective Gallagher studies us over the tops of his glasses. “Witnesses say it was Arden who set it. Does your daughter have a history of setting fires?” His voice is mild, but his expressionless eyes stay focused on mine.

  “No! Of course not.”

  “What witnesses?” Theo asks.

  “It’s an ongoing investigation. I’m afraid I can’t say.”

  “Bullshit,” Theo snarls, and I grip his hand reflexively, astonished by this angry version of the even-tempered man I thought I knew.

  “Arden wouldn’t do something like that,” I tell Detective Gallagher. Can’t he see the truth plain on my face, hear it in my voice? I am completely open, stripped bare. “She’s a good kid. She has no issues, no problems that we’re hiding. She’s never once given us cause to worry.” It’s a feeble explanation that doesn’t quite ring true, but I feel the need to defend her actions until she wakes up and can explain them for herself.

  “One other thing.” He hasn’t heard a word I’ve said. “The lab tests have come back. We’ve identified the accelerant used in the fire as paint thinner.”

  He knows. He’s accessed Arden’s school records and seen that she’s taking Painting 101. He’s lobbed a grenade. “That doesn’t mean anything, Detective Gallagher. Paint thinner’s not a controlled substance. Anyone could buy it. Anyone could have it on hand.”

  “Look,” Detective Gallagher says. “I’m a cop in a college town. I see it all the time. Kids away from home for the first time, no one watching their every move. You said it yourself, Mr. Falcone. Kids got to figure things out and sometimes they don’t do so well. They make mistakes. They panic. Sometimes they end up hurting other people.”

  “You don’t know our daughter,” Theo says. “And this conversation is over.”

  You have to be careful, I’d warned Arden. But she hadn’t been careful enough.

  —

  I hurry down the hall. I barely register the fact that the curtains are drawn inside Rory’s room. I’m intent on the next door, the one that leads to Arden. I slide it open and step inside. She’s right there, peacefully sleeping, all the machines working quietly around her. Theo’s gone off to make phone calls and figure out if we need an attorney—with all the lawyers who have children at Bishop, surely one of them will step forward to help us.

  Arden’s shadow and stillness, a blur of white gauze and looping rubber tubes. It’s been forty-four hours. Two days is nothing, Christine’s assured me. But she’s going to call Dr. Morris and talk doctor to doctor, to see if there’s anything Dr. Morris hasn’t confided. I’ll call you right away if I learn anything, she’s promised me. No matter what time it is.

  Someone screams down the hall. Pain? Fear? I can’t tell. Arden doesn’t twitch. Her mouth is slack. The screaming goes on. Why doesn’t someone help that man?

  Why doesn’t anybody love me? Arden had wept, when no one asked her to junior prom. I had rocked her in my arms. They will, I promised her. Love is such a slippery thing. It comes and goes; it leads and misleads.

  “What did you want to tell me, honey?” I whisper. “Why didn’t you call?”

  Silence.

  I sit in the chair beside my daughter’s bed, reach through the railing, and find that small patch of warm, bare skin between the rigid blood-pressure cuff and the medical tape holding the IV needle in place. A narrow space all my own holding a little green-and-purple butterfly with wings stretched open, searching. There is a lesson here, I know, and as long as I can feel my child’s heartbeat, I will have hope. As long as she lies here, unable to talk and defend herself, I will do the defending for her. I had left her in that dorm room. I had left her to her own devices. I feel the pump of blood beneath her skin and release the breath I’ve been holding. I open one of the books Theo has brought from home. “ ‘Is your mama a llama?’ ” I begin.

  Arden

  MCREIDY’S ART SUPPLIES is in a crappy little mall in Bailey’s Crossroads. You have to know it’s there or you’d never turn off Route 7, steer carefully around the potholes, pull up against the dented trashcan overflowing with garbage, and get out of the car. Because you might think that all that’s there is the dusty-windowed Pho restaurant, the dark hardware store that’s never open, the sketchy-looking tanning parlor with the green neon palm tree. But keep on walking.

  McReidy’s doesn’t look like much from the outside, either. It’s just a door between other doors, until you find the right one and step into a blaze of color—tubes of every kind of paint, soft and squishy and smelling like promise when you uncap them and pierce their foil lids; red sable watercolor brushes of every imaginable thickness; Rapidograph pens with their sturdy rectangular bottles of black ink; bright white canvases so big they could fill the wall of a museum and so tiny you could balance one on your palm. Creamy pastels, kneaded erasers in smoke gray, firm tablets of colored and white papers. Buckets of colored tiles. Fountain pens and sharp-pointed colored pencils. Everything you could ever want. More.

  But when I pull open the door, there’s Ignacio, standing quietly beside the shopping carts. I miss him. Liz is nice, but not as nice as Ignacio. He doesn’t say anything. He’s waiting for me to say it and I do. I’m sorry. The smile on his broad face widens. I should have told my mom the truth, but I didn’t. I let fear stop me.

  Ignacio has two little kids. He keeps their pictures in his wallet and jokes with me in Spanish. He nods approval when I slice radishes into perfect ovals or melt the butter to the exact temperature. Maybe I will draw him a picture. I look for the stick of charcoal and a fresh sheet of paper. When I look back up, Ignacio is gone.

  —

  Early evening, the air purple and gray, the leaves maroon and burnt orange and ocher, all the dark and shadowy shades that close around a person and make them feel small. In California, it would be bright blue sky and blinding yellow sun, sharp and clean. Breathable.

  The cafeteria is a blast of heat and voices. Kids everywhere, laughing and talking. A few glance at me and I look away, cheeks pink. I don’t know any of them. Will I ever feel like I belong? I get in line and help myself to a slice of pie, hold a crumbly-rimmed plastic glass beneath the spigot of milk and fill it up frothy white. I find an empty booth by the window at the far side of the room.

  Rory’s at dinner with D.D. and other kids from our floor. I know how it’ll be if I go over there, so I’m here, anonymous. Rory always thought it was such a little deal. She never understood how hard I had to work, or at least she didn’t want to. She just took the papers I wrote and smiled. Our little secret.

  I didn’t always catch my mistakes, but my teachers did. Arden, this sounds a little familiar, or, You need to go deeper. You need more sources. You need to flesh out your argument better. Youneedyouneedyouneed.

  I slide into the booth. Voices rise and fall around me.

  “I hate Snapchat. Every morning there are a million waiting from the night before.”

  “Their red eyes glowing.”

  Laughter.

  “This morning I got one of vomit. The caption read He missed.”

  More laughter.

  I look down at my plate, the triangle of pie oozing purple-blue syrup. My mom always makes me a blueberry pie for Thanksgiving with a big scrolling A formed out of pastry dough on top. I drag the tines of my fork through the juice, watch the flecks of grease coalesce in runnels.

  On my way out, I scrape the uneaten pie into the trash. How can I say no to Rory?

  —

  We almost never get snow in D.C. The TV weatherman can’t stop grinning. Better bundle up, he cautions us, rubbing his hands
together.

  The storm rages toward us, dumping snow and ice, bringing everything to a standstill. I huddle inside and watch the lake turn white and gray and then crack with a sudden sharp bellow. A reprieve, right? But wouldn’t you know it, the three D.C. snowplows do their thing and the roads are clear by late Friday night.

  Rory texts me at midnight. See u at 6, and I know I’m screwed.

  I finish my take-home history test, write an essay for Spanish, and around five-thirty, while my mom and dad and little brothers sleep, go into the hall bathroom, turn on the light, and quietly close the door. I lean forward to the mirror and carefully draw a line of black along my upper eyelids and pull back my hair into a ponytail. It takes me several tries. Rory and I both have blond hair the same exact streaked honey color and thickness. The only difference is Rory’s is a few inches longer, which doesn’t explain why, when she pulls her hair back, it slides smoothly. When I do, my hair fights back, throwing up ridges and bumps.

  At six, I let myself out the front door, bundled in my puffy blue down coat, and slide into the passenger seat. Rory looks me over. She tugs the silver hoops from her earlobes and hands them to me, nods with satisfaction when I hook them through. “Perfect,” she says. I check myself in the rearview mirror. I see a pair of unhappy eyes looking back.

  We’ve lived in D.C. our whole lives but have never left the safe northwest part. We’re nervous driving south into the ghetto where the high school stands with bars on its windows and snow lies in dirty chunks along the chain-link fence. No one we know would ever come here, which is exactly why we signed me up to take the SATs here. Rory waits while I twist open an orange capsule, sprinkle a line of powder onto my small hand mirror, and snort it. “Good luck,” she says, and pulls away from the curb, but not before I see the car door locks slide down.

  The guy checking IDs at the door barely glances at me when I hand him Rory’s driver’s license. Still, I keep my head lowered until I’m all the way inside the gym. I’ve never seen graffiti on school walls or naked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling in metal cages. But once I sit down and pick up my #2 pencil, the strangeness falls away and I could be anywhere.

  Rory gets me at noon, a fluffy white scarf bundled around her neck, her cheeks perfectly pink, and her lips shiny with gloss. The other kids stare at her as they troop past, and she pretends not to notice but I see her lift her chin a little, preening. “How’d it go?”

  “Fine.” I yank the elastic out of my hair and rub my eyes with a tissue. I’d let a few right answers go past. Rory got me to take the test for her, but she can’t make me do my best. Which is what I should have figured out long ago.

  Rory shoves the car into gear and we drive off, bumping across rough terrain.

  —

  The sun’s warm across my shoulders as I sit in The Bowl, books spread around me on the grass. “Gross.” Rory wrinkles her nose at the photograph of the ancient stone fertility goddess with her jutting breasts and rolls of belly fat.

  “She’s not so bad,” Hunter says, and she rolls her eyes.

  “Pig.”

  He laughs.

  I love the sound. I bend over my notebook.

  “She needs a bra,” Rory says.

  “You’re missing the point,” I say. What is it with Rory and her obsession with this statue? It must offend her in some way. It must threaten her to think skinny isn’t always perfect. “People starved back then. They didn’t have Pizza Huts and 7-Elevens. They had to work to produce their food. They were at the mercy of everything. So that”—I wave my hand at the opened book—“was the ideal. It meant you were successful. It meant you could bear progeny and keep humankind alive. That was being a goddess to them.”

  “Thank you, Professor,” Rory sneers.

  Hunter reaches across me to flip the page. His arm brushes mine, his skin warm, and then it’s gone. “So don’t do that one,” he says. “How about these Roman soldiers?”

  “Now you’re talking,” Rory says, and once again, Hunter laughs. Amazing how she can turn it on, leave a trail of laughter in her wake. Boys are easy, she told me. Make them think you don’t care and they’re yours.

  Hunter’s hers, even if he doesn’t know it yet. He’s always showing up, like now. All the thousands of EMU students and he just happens to wander past while we’re out here? Rory’s been going out with him at night, texting me not to come back to the room. I stay at the library until it closes at midnight, trudge back to the dorm, and sit on the floor outside my room until the door finally creaks open. Hey, Hunter would say, seeing me, but not really seeing me.

  “You going to the Delta Delta Psi party?” Hunter asks, and Rory rolls onto her side to look at him.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You sure? Free beer. Plus they’re getting in live music.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Typical Rory, not committing until the last second, letting the guy dangle, twisting and turning. She’s not planning to join a sorority. Harvard isn’t big into Greek life, she told Hunter as the two of them lolled around on her bed. I’d been at my desk reading and wishing they’d go someplace else. It doesn’t make any sense to join for just one year, she’d said, her arm lifted as she drew circles in the air with her finger. That’s not the real reason, though. She can’t afford the dues.

  “How ’bout you, Arden?” Hunter asks.

  I’m surprised he’s asking. “Probably not. I’ve got a test Monday.” Turns out frat parties aren’t for me. I ran into that guy I’d made out with and he’d looked right through me. Either he’d been too drunk to remember or I’m just not that memorable.

  “Just my luck,” he says. “To be hanging with the only two sober chicks on campus.”

  My face warms, even though I know he’s not really hanging with me. It’s the transitive property of hanging.

  “I didn’t say anything about being sober,” Rory says.

  My first drink was peppermint schnapps that Rory stole from the bar when Ignacio wasn’t looking. We hid in the office while my mom and Uncle Vince worked the Christmas rush. Happy noises filtered in, along with the smell of garlic and onions and roasted meat, as Rory and I traded the bottle back and forth. It was the worst Christmas ever. I couldn’t get out of bed the next day, lying there as the room spun around and around, and pretending I had the flu. Now I don’t drink stuff that pretends to be something else. I like strong bitter drinks that warn you straight up.

  “You hear the drama this morning?” Rory asks. “D.D. found out Whitney hooked up with Zach.”

  D.D. and Whitney live next door and play music so loud it booms through the wall between us. D.D. has Barbie pink hair and a pierced tongue, and the first time she was over, told us she was bi. What do you say to something like that—Good for you? Rory and I talked about it later. Can people really be bi? I’d wondered. The room was dark, just the light from the corridor shining under our door and the moon casting shadows of leaves on the curtains. Rory’s disembodied voice answered. Maybe being bi is what you are when you haven’t decided.

  “Heartbreaking,” I say.

  Rory makes a face. “It’s the principle, Arden. D.D.’s right. You don’t date your friend’s ex.”

  D.D.’s nothing like the girls Rory hung out with at Bishop, the popular ones who stared right through you, who rolled up the waists of their skirts and spent hours straightening their hair into shining sheets. D.D’s the opposite of those girls. I want to like D.D., but I’m not sure she wants to like me. “Zach’s barely an ex. How long had they been going together, three days?”

  “I’d kill a friend who went out with my ex.”

  Hunter’s texting, his head bent over his phone. That’s the other thing he doesn’t know: he has an expiration date. The longest Rory ever dated anyone was Blake and his Axe vapor trail, and that was only because of his family’s beach place. I rotate my pencil between my fingers and draw a few quick lines. The intentness on his face emerges, the way his lips curve.

  He
glances over and whistles. “Hey. That’s amazing.”

  I flush warm.

  “Arden can draw anything,” Rory says. Like she’s in charge. Like she owns me or something.

  “Let me try.” Hunter reaches for Rory’s pencil, which she gives up with a sly smile. He leans over and scribbles something on her notebook. She tilts her head to look at it, then giggles. Rory never giggles. My face burns.

  She flips her blond hair over one shoulder, exposing the long line of her throat. “You dirty, dirty little boy.”

  —

  I stand by the window, looking down through the leafy branches to The Bowl.

  You want it? Rory had asked, holding out the green-and-white-striped top. It still had the tags attached. My mom would hike an eyebrow at the price before steering me to the back of the store to the clearance racks. I finger the soft cotton knit, then take out the backless black dress Rory wore to that frat party. Her perfume still clings to it. The string of bugle beads along the neckline’s loose. Rory will throw the dress away if she notices.

  I tug down my jeans and pull off my T-shirt. I step into the dress and work it up over my hips. It’s snug and I have to suck in my tummy. I stand on my tiptoes and eye myself in the mirror. Rory wears tall silver rhinestone heels with it, but I don’t dare crouch in case I split a seam. I pile my hair into a knot on top of my head and fasten it with a clip. I try on a pair of long, dangling earrings and turn this way and that. From a distance, I look enough like Rory. But come up close and you’ll see the differences: my greener eyes a fraction farther apart, my lower lip fuller, and my chin not as strong. I’m not Rory. I can never be Rory.

  I stole a bottle of wine from Double’s shelves. I’d just grabbed the first thing I saw and slid it into my backpack. When Rory read the label later, her eyes widened and she grabbed my elbow. “Shit, Arden. You know how much this is worth?”