The Last Time We Say Goodbye (13 page)

I toss the bottle in the recycling bin and put my back to the window. From here I have a view of the top of the stairwell. The empty frame of Dad's graduation photo gleams at me, like it's trying to get my attention.

Oh, that's right, I think. The mystery.

How would Sherlock Holmes go about solving this case?

Well, I reason, first it might be a good idea to check to see if there are any other photos missing from where they ought to be. Or if the hunting picture and Dad's graduation picture are the only two. That'd be a start.

I do a quick mental rundown of where there are pictures. Then I check the mantel over the fireplace in the living room, but nothing's out of order there. I try Dad's office, where there's still a silver framed photo of him and Mom on their fifteenth wedding
anniversary. Dad didn't take it when he left. Mom's never taken it down. It's still there, a dusty example of the kind of parental units I used to have. I try the guest bathroom, where years ago Mom framed several photos of Ty and me taking baths together as toddlers, all the private places covered with bubbles but humiliating nonetheless. All those pictures are still in place. Outside of the mother lode in the stairwell, I can't think of anywhere there are framed photos.

Nothing else is missing. Back to square one.

Clearly I'm no Sherlock Holmes.

But who says they have to be framed photos? it occurs to me suddenly. That sends me to a particular shelf on the bookcase in the basement den, where there's a row of photo albums. Mom and Dad's wedding. Their honeymoon. Family vacations. And then our baby books, mine and Ty's both.

Mine is full and well maintained. Mom carefully filled out the family tree and all the details about my birth, like that I was born at 9:46 at night after eleven hours of labor, and I had excellent Apgar scores, and the first three months of my life I spent approximately three and a half hours a day crying for no good reason at all, which is just under the clinical definition of colic. She has the dates and times of all my first accomplishments: my first bath, my first smile, my first steps and words (
Da-da
, then
dog-gy
, then
Ma-ma
, which totally offended my mother), my first teeth, my first haircut, my first friend, where it says
Sadie McIntyre
in Mom's perfect cursive. As if I really want to know that stuff.

Ty's baby book is slimmer. By the time Ty came along, Mom
had her hands full with me and no time to spend lovingly documenting every moment of his life. The second kid always gets shafted in the picture department. He's lucky, I suppose, that he has any photos in his book at all.

It's hard to thumb through it, but I do.

Ty as a fat and purple sleeping lump.

Ty as an adorable chubby toddler.

Ty on a camping trip, wearing Dad's Jeep baseball hat, drinking a can of grape Fanta with a straw.

Ty petting Sunny.

Ty in bed, on Elmo sheets, with his dimpled hands clasped and his eyes closed, saying his prayers.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I skip over the pictures of Ty and me, because something in my chest twists when I look at them, all this carefully archived evidence of what we've lost.

His first word was
Ma-ma
, incidentally. Kiss-up.

It doesn't take long for me to realize that there are photos missing in this book, too, not just places Mom was too busy to fill in, but empty spaces with the residue of double-sided tape still marking the page. But unlike the framed photos that are MIA, his baby book photos aren't something I have memorized. I don't know what's gone. All I can do at this point is make an educated guess here and there and count the spots where I conclude that a photo has been removed.

Eight photos, in all. Which brings us to a grand total of ten missing photos.

I'm still no closer to understanding what's going on here. Or why.

I hear footsteps on the floor above me. Part of me freezes for about three seconds, until I recognize the sound of Mom's jingling keys. She has a rhythm when she gets home: open the coat closet by the door, hang up her coat. Walk to the kitchen and set down the mail in the tray on the kitchen counter. Open one of the cabinets and stick in her purse and her keys. Make herself a cup of instant coffee—or, more recently, a wine cooler or glass of wine.

I'm starting to fear for her liver.

I glance at the clock on the cable box near the basement TV. 6:07.

Mom shouldn't be home yet.

I take the stairs two at a time. Mom yelps when I pop up at the top.

“Hey,” I say. “Get off early?”

“How was your day?” she asks me, sliding by my question.

Oh, you know, Mom, I think. Fan-freaking-tastic.

“The Lemon died,” I report. “I don't know if she's coming back this time. She's still in the parking lot at Dave's.”

“Oh no,” Mom exclaims. “How did you get home?”

“I had to get a ride with Steven.”

“Oh.” This has got to be the most loaded “oh” a person has ever uttered.

“Yeah,” I affirm. Awkward city.

Her expression softens. Mom understands breakups. She gives
a stilted laugh. “That car of yours definitely has the right name, doesn't it?”

I nod.

“If only we had some—” she starts to say, and then stops herself.

If only we had some money. To buy a new car.

I try not to scrutinize our family's financial situation, because if I do, it becomes abundantly clear how my parents' divorce was the key contributor to all our current cash-flow troubles, and there's nothing I can do with that information but be mad about it. But I pay attention to numbers. I know that Ty's death cost $10,995: the casket alone was $2,300, plus all the funeral home fees (embalming, body storage, a cost to rent the mortuary space for the wake, etc., which added up to around $3,895), plus what they charged for the body retrieval and cleanup ($400), plus the flowers ($200), plus the grave space at Wyuka ($1,300) and the cost to dig the grave ($1,000), and finally the headstone, which was an even $2,000.

Mom is a registered nurse, but she's been on the job for less than a year, so she makes $20.25 an hour. She had a life insurance policy on both Ty and me, but because Ty's death was a suicide, the insurance company declared that his policy was void. Dad pitched in for half the cost, of course, but he's not rolling in cash, either. See divorce lawyers and court fees and the money he had to fork over for Mom's nursing school after he left.

In other words, we're broke.

See Lexie drive a clunker.

“I don't really need a car,” I tell Mom now. “When I'm at MIT
next year I'll take the subway. Cambridge has excellent public transportation, which is safer, statistically speaking, than driving a car.”

She smiles sadly and pats my hair. I don't know if she believes that I'll get into MIT, but she'll act like she does. She'll indulge me. “Good. Then it will be one less thing to worry about,” she says. “Now let's go figure out what we're going to do with the Lemon. Then we can get dinner.”

Ironically, the Lemon starts right up for me when we go back for it. Without a hitch or a sputter or anything. She just purrs to life.

“Wouldn't start, huh?” Mom says from her vantage point in the next parking space over. “Are you sure that's what happened?” She gives me a look like maybe this whole charade with Steven giving me a ride home may have been a ruse on my part. To spend time with Steven. Because of course I still must like Steven. Because he's such an upstanding young man.

Maybe Mom doesn't understand breakups.

“I swear. The car likes to mess with me,” I say. “She's temperamental.”

Mom nods knowingly and then moves on to the dinner plan.

“How about the Imperial Palace?” she suggests. “You love that place.”

“Meh.” I shrug. “It's only marginally good.”

She accepts what I say at face value. “All right. We can do better than marginally good, I think.”

“How about the Spaghetti Works? We haven't been there in
forever.” Because it's too expensive. Not ridiculously expensive, but too expensive for us. “I heard they have a six-dollar spaghetti special. All you can eat.”

“Spaghetti sounds wonderful,” she says. “I could use a glass of red wine about now.”

TIME PASSES. THAT'S THE RULE
. No matter what happens, no matter how much it might feel like everything in your life has frozen around one particular moment, time marches on. After my brother died, time passed slowly, with me trudging through all the obligatory activities that I was still expected to do: class, eating, sleeping, brushing my teeth, drying my hair, pretending like I gave a crap. Either that or time disappeared: I found myself on the other side of Christmas without remembering more than an ambiguous pine-scented blur. A calculus final, gone. Whole conversations that I don't have any memory of.

Now, suddenly, I find that it's March 3. A big day. A day I was waiting for: the first possible day that I could have expected to hear anything from MIT. After school I go to the mailbox, and there, tucked in the shadows, big and beautiful, is a fat envelope.

I've been trying not to think about MIT too much, to refrain
from obsessing like some people do or get my hopes unrealistically high—there are other schools, after all, other perfectly decent institutions of higher learning. But MIT is
the
institution. And somewhere deep inside me, I expected this. I hoped for it, anyway. I dreamed.

I don't bother going inside. I tear the letter open and read it standing next to the mailbox.

I swallow down the hard lump in my throat and scan past the details: I have until May 2 to let them know whether I accept their offer, they invite me to attend something called Campus Preview Weekend in April to get a sense of what life on campus would be like, an MIT student will be calling me in the coming weeks, and they urge me to look over the details of my financial aid package. I flip forward and my breath catches—more than forty-three thousand dollars in scholarships.

I read on:

This is happening.

This is what I've wanted from the time I knew what college was about: to get out of Nebraska, to study math with the country's best instructors, to bounce my ideas off the sharpest minds. To become someone of consequence. I don't want to be rich or famous, but I want to contribute something significant to the history of human thought.

The Riggs theorem.

That's my immortality, my idea of heaven. Something people will remember me for after I die.

As I walk back to the house I'm surprised by how, with this letter finally in my hands, I'm not that excited. Not the kind of excited I thought I'd be.

I'm going to MIT. Okay. Yes. This is what I wanted. Yes. This is, without a doubt, the most awesome thing ever to happen to me. Yes. Yes.

But that will mean leaving Mom all alone in this house.

I sit down on the living room couch and read the letter again. I force myself to imagine it: me standing at a blackboard at MIT, going all Will Hunting on some problem, me curled up on a twin bed in a tiny-but-mine dorm room, reading about quantum mechanics, me strolling along some tree-lined sidewalk, chatting with the other students, a stack of heavy books under my arm.

It's nice, thinking about the future as something that won't entirely suck.

But things are different now than they were when I filled out my college applications.

March 5. I haven't told my parents. Not Dave, when we had our session yesterday. Not my friends. I don't know how to slip it into the conversation at school. I guess it should be as simple as
Guess what? I got into MIT. Hooray-hooray!
But whenever that pause happens, when I could make the announcement, I choke.

If I tell people, they're all going to watch me for my super-elated reaction. And I'm not Beaker; I'm no great actress. I'm happy I got into MIT, I am. But I don't know if I can do happy at this stage in my life. Not in public. Not at the level they're all going to expect.

Still, I bring the acceptance letter with me, tucked in with the Ashley letter in the front pocket of my five-subject notebook, and every now and then I open the notebook and stare at the envelope and think of all the promises collected in this one place, all the hope.

Maybe that's it, what's holding me back from telling people—the hope.

I'm not used to hope anymore.

It's hardest to hold the MIT news inside me during calculus. We're learning how to find volumes of rotations using integrations, and Steven is up at the board writing out these gorgeous equations, his handwriting so much neater than mine and so much more careful, which is why Miss Mahoney called him up there, so he could show us the answer the way a painter might create a still-life that looks like:

“So,” Miss Mahoney says when he's nearly finished. “Let's say Steven is a glassblower, crafting a vase. He could use this method to understand the different shapes he's making and the amount of water the vase would hold.”

“Yeah, Steven,” El snickers. “You're a glassblower.”

He grins and shrugs one shoulder. “It's a job.”

“What kind of vase are we talking about, here?” pipes up Beaker. “What color of glass? I've always been fond of blue glass. Can you do a blue glass vase for us, Steven?”

“All righty,” he says, and turns back to the board. “Blue glass coming up.”

The class laughs, and we understand it's a tad lame, but I've always appreciated the way Miss Mahoney tries to give us real-world applications for the things we learn, so it's not just math in a box. She wants us to see the beauty in the equations, how absolutely cool it all is, but she also wants it to be real for us. It never fails to amaze me, in these moments, that the numbers explain something tangible and true about life. The numbers make sense of things. They make order of a disordered world.

I want to say thank you to Miss Mahoney. For giving me that. For trying to make it fun and not just “neat,” unnecessary knowledge.

I want to say,
Hey, Miss Mahoney, I got into MIT.

Then I want to tell Beaker. And El. After all the daydreaming we did. MIT is a real place, and I am going there. I'm going there.

I want to tell Steven.

But I can't find the words.

Words were never really my forte.