The Goodbye Time

by Celeste Conway

  “Righto,” said Katy really fast.

  So that’s what we did. We zipped over to Daffy’s, which is on the seventh floor, which you go up to in a glass elevator. It’s known for its slogan, “Clothing Bargains for Millionaires.” Unfortunately, they didn’t have much for millionaires our age. Not in dresses, anyway, though we did buy some really cool T-shirts with a map of the world on them for $8.99. We decided to pay for them and put them on right away. Then my mom, seeming to forget all about going back to Macy’s, suggested we start walking downtown toward Loehmann’s and T.J. Maxx and Filene’s Basement.

  It was warm outside, so we didn’t need our jackets. It was fun walking along in our cool map-of-the-world T-shirts, just looking in store windows and talking in our English accents. My mom took us to a cafe she goes to sometimes with people who write children’s books. It’s a neat place with pink tablecloths and real English-looking teacups, and it has a whole long tea menu with teas from places all over the world, like Dakar and Cameroon and Malaysia. You’d think we’d want to keep playing in a tea place like this, but for some reason we stopped for a while. We sat there drinking our sophisticated tea and eating real scones like they eat in England, talking about dresses and fashion, as if we were in high school or something.

  “I’d look great in that green one we saw,” Katy said, laughing. “Like a walking, talking kiwi.”

  “And how about the one with the feathers,” I said, plopping some raspberry jam on my plate. “I’d look like a parakeet from Pluto.”

  My mom was laughing too. “How about the one with the black tulle and the leather bows? I kept thinking of Anka. Poor dear Anka.” Up till then I’d never thought about Anka as a “poor dear” anything. And it wasn’t what my mom had said but what Katy said next that actually made me feel bad for her.

  “What’s Anka going to do when Tom goes away to Harvard?” And both of us—my mom and me—just kind of froze. My mom looked at Katy for a second over the rim of her teacup before setting it down, not taking a sip.

  “That’s so thoughtful of you,” she said to Katy softly. “I haven’t really thought of that. I’ve been so focused on myself. On how I’ll feel when Tom goes off.”

  “Me either,” I confessed. Katy looked a little pleased that my mom had called her thoughtful, but I don’t think it went to her head. She was used to being thoughtful, I think. A lot more than I was, that’s for sure.

  “You know,” said my mom, “Anka and Tom probably think things won’t change that much. But the truth is, they will. Tom’s starting a whole new life.”

  “But he’ll come home to visit,” I said.

  “Of course,” said my mom.

  “And Anka, I guess, can visit him,” Katy suggested hopefully. “And stay in a hotel, I mean.”

  “There’s lots of holidays,” I said. I was starting to feel a little depressed. And to tell the truth, it wasn’t for Anka.

  “Life means change,” my mom said in the tone she uses with adults. “Change is hard, but that’s how we grow.”

  “But why,” said Katy, “do so many changes have to happen at once?”

  “I think it’s because change causes change,” my mom replied. That didn’t make any sense to me, but looking across at Katy, I could tell she knew what my mom meant. Sometimes Katy’s a hundred times more mature than me.

  After our tea we started walking around again. We were heading west on Twenty-fifth Street when we passed a curious-looking store. In the window a mannequin in a long velvet bathrobe was leaning against a fake fireplace. On the mantel of the fireplace were all sorts of statues and odd things—vases and clocks and colored bottles with fancy Arabian-style tops. There was other weird stuff in the window too. Like a leopard-skin chair and a table with legs that looked like some kind of animal horns.

  “Let’s go in,” suggested my mom. Katy and I glanced at each other doubtfully but followed her inside. Once in the store, my mom seemed to move by radar, passing right by the racks of winter coats and big old-lady jackets to a section where lots of dresses hung—dresses for people like Katy and me.

  At first it seemed weird and I didn’t want to look at them. They were used, you know—maybe the girls who wore them were dead and their mothers had brought their clothes to Goodwill. That’s what it was, in case you haven’t already guessed: a Goodwill store. Anyway, we were rummaging through the dresses when all of a sudden Katy caught a glimpse of red material. She pulled on it—and yanked out the most beautiful dress! We stared at it, all three of us. It was really a special dress—cherry-colored, with bows for straps and the widest skirt I’ve ever seen. The kind of skirt that wasn’t all bunchy and gathered in, but more like a great full circle that would swirl straight out if you spun around.

  “That’s gorgeous, Katy!” my mother exclaimed, and she peeked down the dress to see the label sewn inside. “Neiman Marcus,” she announced. “What size are you?”

  And Katy said, “Whatever size this dress is.” My mom held it up in front of her.

  “I think you may be right. It’s darling. Let’s try it on.”

  And it really was—both darling and Katy’s size. When she came out of the dressing room, which was just a tiny cubicle with a curtain hung in front of it, my mom and I both caught our breath.

  “It’s beautiful!” The words just popped right out of my mouth. It was twenty times nicer than anything we’d seen all day—nicer than any dress I’d ever seen!

  “Really?” said Katy.

  “Look for yourself.” We turned her around to face the mirror on the wall. For a second she seemed shocked.

  “Wow,” she finally murmured. “Who’s the fairest of them all?”

  “You, by far,” I answered. My mom came up behind her.

  “Look at the stitching. Even the little buttons. You simply have to have this dress.”

  “Yeah,” said Katy dreamily. As she twirled around, the skirt swung out exactly as I’d known it would. Then she stopped.

  “There’s just one thing.”

  “What is it?” asked my mom.

  Katy looked down. “Well, it comes from . . . here.”

  “From here?”

  “From a secondhand store. What if, like, Kendra—”

  “Kendra? Why would you care what Kendra thinks?” My mom’s really nice, but sometimes even she doesn’t get things. She tells us stuff—like not to care what people think, or to be ourselves and not follow the crowd. Not that that isn’t good advice; it’s just not as easy as she thinks.

  Now she said in a very firm voice, “Katy, you cannot not buy this dress because you’re worried about Kendra or anyone else. On the way home we’ll drop it at the cleaner’s. No one will ever know.”

  Katy smiled and fluffed the skirt. “Thanks,” she said. “I love it.”

  While Katy was changing, my mom took me back to the dress racks. She began to search in a very determined, serious way. And suddenly I realized: she was looking for a secondhand Goodwill dress for me! I stood a ways back and watched her. She seemed so fierce and businesslike, pushing the hangers along the rack, feeling the skirts, noting how the fabric hung. At some point she turned around. I thought she was going to speak to me, but she didn’t. She just narrowed her eyes and looked at me, and I felt my face get hot and red. I got the point. I guess it would have been mean of me to at least not try to find a dress, though I’d kind of been counting on something new.

  By the time Katy joined us, the cherry red dress over her arm, I was flipping through the clothes rack too. And you know what? We did find a dress. It wasn’t as great as Katy’s, but it was really nice, much nicer than the boring stuff at Macy’s. It was navy blue with bright white trim around it, and my mom said her pearls—her real ones—would look “superb” with it.

  On the way home after dinner, we dropped off our dresses at the dry cleaner’s. Mrs. Yu, who owns the store, exclaimed how beautiful they were. “Like a dress for a princess!” she said to us.

  Katy was spending the ni
ght with me. It was Friday, so Wild Star was on TV. My parents knew it was our favorite show, so they fixed up the couch in the living room. We stretched ourselves out on the piles of comfy pillows and my mom served us ice cream while we watched. It was a repeat, but we didn’t care. We could have watched the same episode forty times and it wouldn’t have bothered us.

  We were pretty tired by the time we got to bed that night. Katy was curled up on the blow-up mattress next to my bed, and I was dozing off on a pile of soft stuffed animals.

  “Aunt Mimi?” she whispered suddenly.

  “Johnny?” I thought she had fallen asleep.

  “Do you know about me little cousin Jeremy?”

  “What about ’im?”

  “Did y’know he’s going away?”

  “Jeremy?”

  “Yeah. It’s been decided. He’s going away to a special school in London.”

  For a second I didn’t answer. Then I said, “That’s better for ’im, Johnny.”

  “You fancy?”

  “Yeah. He’ll be with other kids like him.”

  “Yeah, I s’pose.”

  “And his mum won’t be so knackered.”

  “True enough.” Her voice had gotten very soft. “It’s just that he might miss us.”

  “But there’ll always be someone there with him.” I was trying to remember all the things my mom had said the other night. I don’t know why it was so hard.

  “But they won’t be us. They’ll all be strangers he doesn’t know. And they won’t know how to help him—how sometimes he wants a certain toy. Or sometimes you have to rub his head. I just hate to think of him waking up in the middle of the night and calling for me or Bug Eye, and we won’t be there to hear him, so he’ll just keep calling louder, but no matter how loud he calls for us, he’ll wait and wait and we’ll never come.” She was crying now. I could hear the bubbles in her voice.

  “Oh, Katy, they’ll come!” I got out of bed and plopped onto the blow-up mattress next to her. “My mom said there’d be special people always awake to go to him. It’s their job to stay awake all night.”

  “But they aren’t us! And Sam’s such a baby, even though he’s really big.” I didn’t know what to say to her. I couldn’t remember the other good things my mom had listed. I wished she was there to tell Katy all the things she had told me. I didn’t know what else to do, so I reached for my oldest teddy bear and pushed him into Katy’s arms. She took him and held him really tight.

  Then she said, “We’re taking him on Thursday. We’ll just drop him off. He has no idea.”

  “My mom says he won’t understand. That it’s harder for you than it is for him.”

  “I know my mom feels really bad. But she says it has to happen. She’s really afraid for me and Gem.”

  “You called her Gem.”

  “What?”

  “Your sister. That’s the first time you ever called her Gem.”

  “Bug Eye, I meant. She’s moving into Sam’s old room with all her stupid fairy stuff. We told our mom—both of us did—that we wanted her to take the room so she won’t have to keep sleeping on the couch. But she said she didn’t want to. She said she likes the stupid couch and wants Bug Eye to have a room. She wants us both to have a room.”

  “Wow,” I said. “She’s really nice. Not many moms would do that, I bet.”

  “Yeah, I know. She doesn’t always seem so nice, but that’s because she’s stressed and stuff.”

  “And now just think, she won’t have to always feel so stressed.”

  “Yeah,” said Katy softly. “And we won’t have to worry that Sam might end up hurting her.”

  “You can visit Sam too,” I told her. “It’ll really be a treat for him.”

  “I can go every day if I want to.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not like we’ll never see him again.”

  “Heck, no,” I said. “And you can bring him Cheerios. And those cookies he likes. And that stringy cheese.”

  “And his favorite,” said Katy. “Gummy worms.” She settled back down with my teddy bear and I kind of tucked them in. I climbed up to my own bed.

  “I’m glad you’re my friend,” she whispered.

  “And I’m glad you’re mine.”

  “Good night, Anna.”

  “Night, Katy.”

  In a couple of minutes she was asleep. I lay there for a while listening to her even breaths, thinking about Sam. I hoped it was true what my mom had said, that he would be okay. Then I started to think of Tom. He’d be leaving too in a couple of months. I knew it wasn’t the same as Sam, but I also knew that in a way he would never come back. Oh sure, he’d be here for Thanksgiving and Christmas and maybe even the summer months. But he’d never really live here again the way you do when you’re a kid. I knew I was right about all this. If it wasn’t the way I thought it was, why would my mom be feeling so bad, missing him the way she did before he was even gone? Which I knew she did, even though she tried to pretend she was feeling fine. It seemed to me that college was a tunnel. Tom would go in and disappear and when he came out the other side, he wouldn’t be a kid at all. I didn’t want to think about any of it. The tunnel and Tom. And poor big Sam, waking in the night alone.

  Chapter Ten

  So Thursday came and Katy, her mom and Bug Eye took Sam to the hospital. It had a pretty name, Fern Brook, and was on Staten Island. To get there they hired a car service and put all Sam’s stuff in the trunk, but on the way back they took the ferry.

  I like to imagine Katy standing on the ferryboat, leaning out over the railing on the deck. Her hair is blowing out behind her and she is looking straight ahead over the blue water. She looks like a girl on the cover of a book. Something bad has happened to the girl, but she is brave, and looking out at the water and sky, all big and blue and shiny, she knows she will be all right. I see this picture again and again. I keep it inside me like grown-ups keep pictures of people in their wallets so they can look at them whenever they want.

  What do you wear to a crepe party? I mean, what’s the right outfit for eating pancakes, aside from pajamas? I had no idea. On Saturday I figured I’d wait till Katy got to my house and she could help me pick something out. Only thing was, Katy never came. Two o’clock passed, then three o’clock. Finally at four I called her apartment. Mrs. Paoli answered.

  “Hi. It’s Anna. Is Katy there?”

  “We’re working on her room.”

  “You mean moving B—” I had almost said “Bug Eye.” Yikes. “You’re moving Gem’s stuff?”

  “Oh, we did that last night. Today we’re going to paint the room.”

  “But what about the—” I stopped for a second. “Do you think I could talk to her?”

  “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Paoli said. After a minute Katy came on.

  “Hi,” she said. Like everything was normal.

  “Hi,” I said. “Why aren’t you here?”

  “What?”

  “You said you were coming over. We were going to Kendra’s party from here.”

  “I guess I forgot.”

  “Forgot?”

  “Yeah, I forgot. Don’t people forget things sometimes?”

  “I guess they do. So when are you coming over?”

  “I’m doing something, Anna.”

  “Yeah, I heard. But we had a plan.”

  “Is that all you can think of—your silly little plans?”

  “Katy!”

  “What? I mean it. There’s bigger things than Kendra’s stupid party.”

  “Like painting your room?”

  “Like changing everything in my house. Like what happened this week. As if you care—”

  “I do care, Katy! You know I do.”

  “Maybe you want to, Anna. But you really can’t understand.”

  “About Sam, you mean?”

  “Sam and a hundred other things. Your life’s so perfect, Anna. Your mom and dad and your great big nice apartment. You don’t understand what it’s lik
e for me. Having no dad. My mom always being tired. My sister being so depressed that she spends her life wishing she had fairy wings. And by the way”—she paused for a breath—“I get it about the dress.”

  “What?”

  “I understand why your mom took us shopping at Goodwill. And my mom says I don’t have to wear that dress. She’s taking me back to Macy’s and buying me the dress I saw that I really liked. She doesn’t care how much it costs. So tell your mom you can keep the dress. You wear the dress if you like it so much!”

  “Katy!” I cried.

  “Goodbye,” she said. “Say hi to Kendra. Enjoy the crepes.” And just like that, she slammed down the phone. I stood there stunned. Like someone had hit me on the head. I couldn’t believe it was Katy saying those things to me!

  “What’s with you?” my brother said, whisking past on his way to the fridge. I stood there speechless, still holding the phone.

  He pulled out a bin of cold cuts, then turned around to look at me.

  “Are you all right? You look like your best friend just died.”

  “It’s like she did!” I blurted out. The telephone started beeping and he took it from my hand.

  “You and Katy had a fight?”

  “I didn’t have a fight with her. She had a fight with me!”

  “Isn’t that kind of hard to do? Takes two to tango, like they say.”

  “I’m telling the truth! I called to find out where she was, and she started yelling all this stuff.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Home. She was supposed to be here at two o’clock.

  We were going to hang out and then go to Kendra’s party.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know! I asked her why she wasn’t here and she said she forgot. Like it didn’t matter to her at all. And then she said I only think about stupid things like Kendra’s stupid party and she wasn’t going to wear the dress from the Goodwill place Mom took us to—”

  “Hey, slow down. You’re losing me.” I took a breath and it caught in my throat as I let it out.

  “She said awful things. Like how I don’t understand her life because my life’s so great and perfect; how I’d never be able to understand, even if I wanted to.”