The Last Time We Say Goodbye

by Cynthia Hand

  She doesn’t look at me again as she walks to the locker room door.

  12.

  ON THE BUS RIDE HOME, Sadie slides into the seat next to me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her ride the bus before, but here she is, in ratty black jeans and green Converse sneakers, her shoulder brushing mine as the bus bumps along the street.

  “Do you want to have dinner at my house?” she asks.

  My mouth waters just thinking about dinner at the McIntyre house. Sadie’s mom is a culinary genius—pot roasts and lasagnas and fried chicken with mashed potatoes, all the various meals I’ve eaten at the McIntyre home cycle through my mind, bite after wonderful bite.

  I get out my phone to text my mom and tell her that I’m going to be home late. Out with a friend, I type. She should be happy with that.

  See Lexie socialize.

  But when we get to Sadie’s place, the house is strangely quiet. I remember it always being a bustle of activity and noise before—Sadie’s brothers talking and joking and jostling, music blaring, her mom screaming for them to keep it down—but now there’s nobody home, by the sound of it. Sadie leads me down the stairs to the family room in the basement. It looks the same as I remember, same couch, same paint colors, except the TV is bigger now. It still smells faintly of popcorn, from when Sadie’s parents bought an old popcorn maker from a theater in Lincoln when it went out of business, but the machine is gone, a patch of slightly lighter carpet outlining where it stood along the wall. We used to love to watch it heat and pop, the burst kernels spilling out like a delicious volcano of buttery goodness. We spent hours down here, hours upon hours. A decent percentage of my life.

  “Have a seat,” Sadie says, and plops herself down on the couch.

  “Where is everyone?” I ask.

  She frowns like she doesn’t understand the question.

  “Your brothers?”

  “Oh. They all have their own places now, except Seth. Josh is married. Austin’s in law school. Matt’s studying child psychology at UNL, though he changes majors every few months. They’re around, though. They come for Sunday dinners and show up if they need to do laundry.” She puts her feet on the trunk that serves as a coffee table and sighs contentedly. “It’s nice having the TV to myself.”

  Everything changes, I think. That’s the only constant. We all grow up.

  Almost all of us.

  “I remember watching Jaws here,” I say, sliding down on the cushions next to her. “What were we, eight? My mom would have killed me if she’d known.”

  Sadie shudders. “It took me years to get over that movie. I couldn’t even swim at the lake without imagining a shark in the water under me, waiting to rise up and bite me in half.”

  She turns the TV on and brings up the DVR, where I see, predictably, a bunch of episodes of Long Island Medium. But there’s also Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State and My Haunting and pretty much every other ghost-related show on television. Which for some reason I didn’t expect. I wouldn’t have pegged Sadie as someone who would obsess over the occult.

  “Do you have a preference?” she asks. “We don’t have to watch ghost stuff. We can watch anything. We can just veg, if you want.”

  “Why do you like those shows?” I ask, because I don’t get it. I don’t understand how any rational person who isn’t wrestling with the idea of her dead brother possibly being a ghost watches those shows.

  Sadie shrugs. “I’m morbid, I guess. I like the idea that we don’t stop, after we die.”

  “You believe in heaven and all that?”

  Her eyes meet mine, startled. “Well, yeah. I do.”

  “But if heaven exists, what’s this ghost thing about?” I gesture at the TV. “So everyone Theresa hears on her show is a person who didn’t go to heaven, who’s just sticking around earth hoping to chat with whatever medium comes along?”

  “No,” Sadie informs me matter-of-factly, like this is scientifically proven. “Theresa deals with spirits, not ghosts.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Spirits are people who’ve passed on to the other side. It’s like another dimension, and they can visit us and watch over us and pass along messages, but they’re at peace. Ghosts, on the other hand—” It occurs to her then that I might not want to hear this, and she falters.

  “What about ghosts?” I ask, sitting up. “Tell me.”

  “Ghosts haven’t crossed over. They have unfinished business in this world, so they linger.”

  I want to laugh it off and say it’s all a bunch of crap, but I can’t. Not after everything. “So you think what I’ve been . . . experiencing . . . is a ghost,” I surmise. “Not a spirit.”

  “Well, you saw his figure, but he didn’t speak,” Sadie explains, “which is more consistent with ghosts. Spirits are talkative. And he’s a suicide.”

  “But why does that matter?” I find myself asking, my voice sharper than I mean it to be. “I mean, with suicide, they want to leave this earth. They want to cross over, right?”

  She bites her lip, and I wonder if she’s not telling me that she believes suicides go to hell or being a ghost is a kind of purgatory. A punishment. I wonder if she’s judging him like everyone else.

  “I think with suicides a lot of times they’re hanging on to something,” she answers finally. “Some anger or some pain or something they’ve got to work out.”

  “So you think my brother is trapped in my house because he has something he has to work out,” I say. “Unfinished business.”

  It’s a ridiculous notion. Stupid. Crazy. Dumb.

  Sadie doesn’t answer.

  I take the letter out of my backpack and sit for a minute holding it.

  Ty’s unfinished business.

  “I don’t know that he meant to give this to her,” I say flatly. “What unfinished business could he possibly have with Ashley? I mean, they broke up. He’s dead. That’s finished business, I’d say.”

  “You haven’t read it, have you?” Sadie asks in her raspy voice.

  I’ve wanted to. I have so wanted to. “It’s sealed. He wouldn’t have sealed it if he wanted anybody else to read it.”

  She stares at the envelope thoughtfully. “Well, you have more self-control than I do. I don’t know if I could not read it, if I had a letter like that.”

  “It’s sealed,” I say again, as if that settles it.

  “You should read it. Then you’ll know what Ty wants you to do with it.”

  “Sadie,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s not real. Ty’s not a ghost. He doesn’t want anything. He’s dead.”

  Her eyes flash up to my face. “You don’t think he’s real? But what about—”

  “I saw him for maybe a total of five seconds. I don’t even know what I actually saw. The first time, I might have fallen asleep watching television and dreamed it, and the second time . . .” I think about the way Ty’s face loomed up at me in his bedroom mirror. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I saw. Maybe it’s me that’s the problem. Maybe I’m . . .”

  She folds her arms across her chest. “Crazy? You think you’re crazy?”

  I smooth down a corner of the letter. My nails are short, jagged, bitten. I don’t even remember biting them; it’s a bad habit I’ve never had before. That all by itself is like proof that there’s something wrong with me.

  Sadie shakes her head. “You’re not crazy.”

  I glance up. “How do you know?”

  “Because crazy people never wonder if they’re crazy. Come on, Lex. If you’re insane, then the rest of us are in big trouble, is all I’m saying.”

  I don’t find this very reassuring.

  “Even if you are crazy, which you’re not, and even if the ghost isn’t real,” she points out, “the letter’s still real, and it’s definitely intended for Ashley. So you should give it to her.”

  I should give it to her, she says. This girl who broke my brother’s heart. This cheerleader.

  I shake my head. “No,” I murmur.
<
br />   “Don’t you think you should respect his wishes?” Sadie asks.

  My shoulders are instantly tight. My lungs start to close up. It feels like it’s all coming down on me at once—bad dreams, bad memories, bad choices. It’s too much. “What wishes did Ty respect?” I throw back at Sadie. “Why doesn’t anyone ever ask that, I wonder. Where’s the respect there?”

  “Lex, hey, it’s okay . . . ,” Sadie begins. “I know—”

  “You don’t know.” I cut her off. “I didn’t ask for this. I’m not Ty’s messenger boy. If he wanted this girl to have the letter, he could have mailed it. He could have left it where someone else would find it. Not me. Why does it have to be me?”

  “Maybe he wanted you to r—”

  “No. I don’t believe in this stuff. I won’t. I don’t want—”

  I can’t finish the sentence. The hole ratchets itself wide open in my chest. I’m out of air.

  “You don’t want him to be in your house,” Sadie murmurs.

  It’s the most horrible irony, Ty hating his life so much that he chose to end it, only to wind up right back in our house, back in his room, stuck, as helpless to change his situation as ever.

  It’s the worst thing I can think of.

  I won’t believe it.

  I sit for a minute not-breathing. Sadie lays her hand on my shoulder and squeezes. She doesn’t say anything but pulls me into a hug, and I let her. When we were younger she smelled like cheap laundry detergent and Ivory soap and kid sweat, from all her running. Now the aroma coming off her is a fruity perfume, some kind of melon, mixed with a whiff of cigarettes.

  After I regain the ability to take air into my lungs, Sadie pulls back. “Do you need to punch something?” she asks. “I find that punching something is therapeutic.”

  I shake my head, embarrassed, wheezing. Nobody has had such a front row seat for the hole in my chest before. “I’m sorry. I’ve been kind of a spaz lately.”

  She flaps a hand at me, like whatever. “Don’t be sorry. It is what it is. When my dad died I thought I was going mental for a long time. I had all this pain and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just puked it out on people. My mom and Seth got the worst of it.”

  I stare at her.

  Her dad died. I knew that, somewhere in the back recesses of my brain. It happened three years ago, the summer we were fifteen. Her dad had been playing catch with her brothers in the backyard, and then he just sat down on the grass and said he was out of breath. And then he died.

  I was at math camp in Vermont that summer. My mom called to tell me. I didn’t go to the funeral. Sadie and I, we’d grown apart by then.

  God, I think. What kind of selfish, horrible friend am I?

  I forgot her dad died.

  That’s why her mom’s not home. Her mom had to get a job. That’s why the house is so empty.

  “It’s okay,” Sadie murmurs.

  It is not okay. It is not okay.

  I don’t know what to say. I suck.

  Right then, the door behind us opens, and Seth wanders out. He’s wearing camo pajama bottoms and nothing else, his short blond hair tousled. He rubs his face and gives us a sleepy grin.

  “Hey. What’s going on?” His gaze moves over to me. “Hey, Lexie.”

  “Hey, Seth.”

  He’s different than I remember, too. He’s taller, obviously. Filled out from the lanky teen he used to be, with muscles and tattoos splashed across both biceps, a black dragon stretching down his ribs. He raises a pierced eyebrow at me.

  “Long time no see,” he says.

  I nod. “Are you just getting up?”

  Sadie snorts. “He sleeps all day. Slacker.”

  “I am not a slacker,” Seth argues, unfolding his half-naked frame unceremoniously on the couch next to me. Where Sadie has just a hint of nicotine on her, Seth has a cloud of stale cigarette smell floating over him. “I work nights.”

  “He’s a desk clerk at the Residence Inn off the Cornhusker Highway,” Sadie informs me, like this is the most slacker job ever. “He basically sits on a stool all night and brings people extra towels.”

  The side of Seth’s mouth quirks up. He turns his attention to the television. “Don’t tell me you’re watching the ghost stuff again. That stuff’s bullshit, you know. Do they ever get a real ghost on tape? No. They get strange orbs, weird floating lights, mysterious creepy sounds. No real evidence of a ghost. It’s a fucking scam.”

  I’m inclined to agree. Plus I’m jealous at the way the swear words can simply flow off his tongue, like it’s no effort to produce them.

  “Hey, Lex, I think I’ve found something for you to punch,” Sadie replies fondly.

  “I could tell you a ghost story better than anything you’d see on TV,” Seth boasts.

  Sadie scoffs. “Okay, smart guy. Go ahead. Tell us a ghost story.”

  “Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  “Oh, we’re sure.”

  He looks at me. I nod. “Okay.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and puts on a serious expression. “A few years ago I worked at Circuit City on O Street.”

  I almost laugh. Somehow when I heard the words ghost story my mind didn’t jump straight to Circuit City on O Street.

  “It’s closed down now, but I worked there for like a year. It was a pretty normal job. A slacker job.” He smirks at Sadie. “Mostly I hung out in the DVD section and tried to keep the punks from shoplifting movies. They always stole weird stuff, too, like The Notebook and Mary Poppins and shit.”

  “Ooh, terrifying,” Sadie mocks.

  He ignores her. “So one night after we’d closed up, I went into the back office to get some receipt paper to restock my register, and I got this weird feeling.”

  “A weird feeling?” Sadie’s skeptical. “Like maybe the feeling that you should get a real job?”

  He looks at me again. His eyes are the same cool blue I remember. “A feeling like there was someone watching me. At first I thought maybe someone was in the room with me, like a customer or a burglar or somebody. I said, ‘Who’s there?’ and I picked up the baseball bat that my boss kept in the corner of the office. I went into the back room, and I turned on the lights and checked all the corners and stuff, but there was nobody. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling.”

  I wait for Sadie to make another snarky comment, but she doesn’t. She’s leaning forward, waiting to hear the end of the story. So am I.

  “So I put the bat away and turned to go back out on the floor, and that’s when I noticed it.” He leans back, clearly enjoying the fact that we’re so interested. “The shadow.”

  I can’t help it; a chill goes down my spine. I shiver.

  “Shadow?” Sadie repeats hoarsely.

  “On the wall, there was a shadow of a man. And then I like whipped around to see what was casting the shadow, and I saw this dude standing there, just looking at me. He was an Indian. He was wearing the buckskins and moccasins and the feather in his hair and the whole Native American ensemble, which was weird enough, but what was weirder was that I could sort of see through him, to that sign on the wall that counted how many days since the last accident.”

  It’s quiet for several seconds. Sadie and I are holding our breaths.

  “So, go on,” Sadie prompts. “What did you do?”

  “I took a couple quick steps back,” Seth says.

  “And what did he do?” I want to know.

  “He nodded, all solemn, and then he lifted his hand up like this.” Seth raises his palm. “And then he said, ‘How.’”

  “‘How’?” I repeat. “‘How’ what?”

  “Like, ‘How, white man. I come in peace.’ And after that we were totally friends, me and Tonto, and every night after work we’d knock back a beer.”

  He starts laughing.

  Sadie smacks him on the shoulder. “You doofus!” she cries. “God, can’t you be serious for two seconds?”

  He keeps laughing. I sink back into the cushions, part relie
ved, part disappointed, while Sadie chews him out.

  Doofus, she called him. I swallow.

  “But seriously, though,” he says, catching Sadie’s wrists when she tries to pummel him. “That Circuit City was built on an old Indian burial ground. Look it up on the internet if you don’t believe me. And sometimes, for real, we’d hear footsteps or things would be moved in different places when we left the room. Seriously.”

  “Come on, Lex,” Sadie says, disgusted, jumping up. “Let’s get away from this loser.”

  “Love you too, baby sis,” he calls after us, grinning wickedly. “You should have seen your faces. Priceless.”

  She takes my hand and tows me toward the stairs. When we get to the kitchen she gets out two paper plates, unwraps two frozen burritos out of the freezer, microwaves them for two minutes, and then scoops one up with a spatula and sets it in front of me.

  Plop.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she says. “Dinner is served.”

  Mom’s still up when I come in a few hours later.

  “How’s Jill?” She’s sitting at the kitchen counter flipping through a Better Homes and Gardens magazine and sipping a glass of white wine. “Did you have a nice time?” she asks.

  “Actually, I was hanging out with Sadie McIntyre,” I confess.

  A mix of surprise and disapproval crosses her face—Sadie’s not what she would think of as a “good influence”—but she covers it up quickly. “What brought that about?” she asks, keeping her voice light. “I didn’t think you and Sadie had much in common anymore.”

  “We have more in common lately.”

  Comprehension dawns in her eyes. My mom has no trouble remembering that Sadie’s dad died. Mom’s a decent human being.

  “Well, I think that’s nice, you and Sadie,” she says after a moment. “You two used to be like peas in a pod.”

  I nod, remembering Sadie’s face when she talked about her dad, the tension in her mouth like she was trying to keep her lip from quivering, even after all this time. She believes that her father is in a better place now, but that doesn’t stop her from obsessing about ghosts and spirits and what happens after we die.

  I think about what she said about the letter for Ashley, that it doesn’t matter if the ghost is real or not, that Ty intended for Ashley to have it. That I should respect his wishes.