The Last Time We Say Goodbye (2 page)

MOM IS CRYING AGAIN THIS MORNING.
She does this thing lately where it's like a faucet gets turned on inside her at random times. We'll be grocery shopping or driving or watching TV, and I'll glance over and she'll be silently weeping, like she's not even aware she's doing it—no sobbing or wailing or sniffling, just a river of tears flowing down her face.

So. This morning. Mom cooks breakfast, just like she's done nearly every single morning of my life. She scrapes the scrambled eggs onto my plate, butters the toast, pours me a glass of orange juice, and sets it all on the kitchen table.

Crying the entire time.

When she does the waterworks thing, I try to act like nothing is out of the ordinary, like it's perfectly normal for your mother to be weeping over your breakfast. Like it doesn't get to me. So I say something chipper like, “This looks great, Mom. I'm starved,” and
start pushing the burned food around my plate in a way that I hope will convince her I'm eating.

If this was before, if Ty were here, he'd make her laugh. He'd blow bubbles in his chocolate milk. He'd make a face out of his bacon and eggs, and pretend to talk with it, and scream like he was in the middle of a slasher film as he slowly ate one of the eyes.

Ty knew how to fix things. I don't.

Mom sits down across from me, tears dripping off her chin, and folds her hands in her lap. I stop fake-eating and bow my head, because even though I quit believing in God awhile ago, I don't want to complicate things by confessing my budding atheism to my mother. Not now. She has enough to deal with.

But instead of praying she wipes her wet face with her napkin and looks up at me with shining eyes, her eyelashes stuck damply together. She takes a deep breath, the kind of breath you take when you're about to say something important. And she smiles.

I can't remember the last time I saw her smile.

“Mom?” I say. “Are you okay?”

And that's when she says it. The crazy thing. The thing I don't know how to handle.

She says:

“I think your brother is still in the house.”

She goes on to explain that last night she woke from a dead sleep for no reason. She got up for a glass of wine and a Valium. To help her get back to sleep, she says. She was standing at the kitchen sink when, out of the blue, she smelled my brother's cologne. All around her, she says.

Like he was standing next to her, she says.

It's distinctive, that cologne. Ty purchased it for himself two Christmases ago in like a half-gallon bottle from Walmart, this giant radioactive-sludge-green container of Brut—“the essence of man,” the box had bragged. Whenever my brother wore that stuff, which was pretty often, that smell would fill the room. It was like a cloud floating six feet ahead of him as he walked down the hall at school. And it's not that it smelled bad, exactly, but it forced you into this weird takeover of the senses.
SMELL ME,
it demanded.
Don't I smell manly? HERE I COME.

I swallow a bite of eggs and try to think of something helpful to say.

“I'm pretty sure that bottle gives off some kind of spontaneous emissions,” I tell her finally. “And the house is drafty.”

There you go, Mom. Perfectly logical explanation.

“No, Lexie,” she says, shaking her head, the remains of the strange smile still lingering at the corners of her mouth. “He's here. I can feel it.”

The thing is, she doesn't look crazy. She looks hopeful. Like the past seven weeks have all been a bad dream. Like she hasn't lost him. Like he isn't dead.

This is going to be a problem, I think.

I RIDE THE BUS TO SCHOOL.
I know it's a bold statement to make as a senior, especially one who owns a car, but in the age-old paradox of choosing between time and money, I'll choose money every time. I live in the sleepy little town of Raymond, Nebraska (population 179), but I attend school in the sprawling metropolis of Lincoln (population 258,379). The high school is 12.4 miles away from my house. That's 24.8 miles round trip. My crappy old Kia Rio (which I not-so-affectionately refer to as “the Lemon”) gets approximately 29 miles to the gallon, and gas in this neck of Nebraska costs an average of $3.59 per gallon. So driving to school would cost me $3.07 a day. There are 179 days of school this year, which adds up to a whopping $549.53, all so I can have an extra 58 minutes of my day.

It's a no-brainer. I have college to pay for next year. I have serious savings, a plan. Part of that plan involves taking the school bus.

I actually liked the bus. Before, I mean. When I used to be
able to put in my earbuds and crank up the Bach and watch the sun come up over the white, empty cornfields and the clichéd sun-beaten farmhouses tucked back from the road. The windmills outside turning. Cows huddling together for warmth. Birds—gray-slated junco and chickadees and the occasional bright flashes of cardinals—slipping effortlessly through the winter air. It was quiet and cozy and nice.

But since Ty died, I feel like everybody on the bus is watching me, some people out of sympathy, sure, ready to rush over with a tissue at a moment's notice, but others like I've become something dangerous. Like I have the bad gene in my blood, like my sad life is something that could be transmitted through casual contact. Like a disease.

Yeah, well, screw them.

Of course, being angry is pointless. Unproductive. They don't understand yet. That they are all waiting for that one phone call that will change everything. That every one of them will feel like me eventually. Because someone they love will die. It's one of life's cruel certainties.

So with that in mind I try to ignore them, turn up my music, and read. And I don't look up until we've gone the twelve miles to school.

This week I'm rereading
A Beautiful Mind
, which is a biography of the mathematician John Nash. There was a movie, which had entirely too little math, in my opinion, but was otherwise okay. The book is great stuff. I like thinking about how Nash saw our behavior as mathematical. That was his genius, even if he did go
crazy and start to see imaginary people: he understood the connections between numbers and the physical world, between our actions and the invisible equations that govern them.

Take my mother, for instance, and her announcement that my brother is still with us. She's trying to restructure our universe so that Ty doesn't disappear. Like the way a fish will thrash its body on the sand when it's beached, an involuntary reaction, a survival mechanism, in hopes that it might rock its way back into the water.

Mom is trying to find her way back to the water. It makes sense, if I look at it from that angle.

Not that it's healthy. Not that I know what to do about it.

I don't for a second believe that Ty is still in our house. He's gone. The minute the life left him, the minute the neurons in his brain quit firing, he stopped being my brother. He became a collection of dead cells. And is now, thanks to the miracles of the modern embalming process, well on his way to becoming a coffin full of green goo.

I will never see him again.

The thought brings back the hole in my chest. This keeps happening, every few days since the funeral. It feels like a giant gaping cavity opens up between my third and fourth ribs on the left side, an empty space that reveals the vinyl bus seat behind my shoulder blades. It hurts, and my whole body tightens with the pain, my jaw locking and my fists clenching and my breath freezing in my lungs. I always feel like I could die, when it happens. Like I
am
dying. Then, as suddenly as it comes on, the hole fills in again. I can breathe. I try to swallow, but my mouth has gone bone dry.

The hole is Ty, I think.

The hole is something like grief.

School is largely uneventful. I float through on autopilot, lost in thoughts of John Nash and beached fish and the logistics of how currents of air could have carried the scent of my brother's cologne from where it sits all dusty by the sink in the basement bathroom through the den, up the stairs, to the kitchen to utterly confuse my mother.

Then I hit what used to be the best class of the day: sixth period, Honors Calculus Lab. I like to call it Nerd Central, the highest concentration of the smartest people in the school you'll ever be likely to find in a given place.

My home sweet home.

The point of this class is to give the students time to study and do their calculus homework. But because we are nerds, we all finish our homework in the first ten minutes of class. Then we spend the rest of the hour playing cards: poker, war, hearts, rummy, whatever strikes our fancy.

Our teacher, the brilliant and mathtastic Miss Mahoney, sits at her desk at the front of the room and pretends that we're doing serious scholarly work. Because it's kind of her free period, too, since the school budget cutbacks eliminated her prep hour.

She has a thing for cat videos on YouTube.

We've all got our weaknesses.

So there we are, playing a rousing game of five-card draw.
I'm killing it. I have three aces. Which is a lovely math problem all on its own—the probability of getting three aces in one hand is 94/54,145 or (if you want to talk odds) 575 to 1, which is pretty freaking unlikely, when you think about it.

Jill is sitting on my left, twirling a lock of her bright red hair around her finger. I think she means the hair twirling to look like some kind of tell, as if she has an amazing hand, but it probably means just the opposite. Eleanor is sitting on my right, and she has a lousy hand, which I know because she just comes out and says, “I have a lousy hand,” and folds. That's El—she says what she thinks, no filter.

Which brings us to Steven, who is sitting across from me with a very good hand. How do I know? He's trying to be all stone-faced, which he fails at in every way. It's one of the things I used to like so much about Steven—his inability to hide his feelings. You can reliably see what's going on in his head through those big brown eyes of his. Which at the moment are definitely happy about the cards he's been dealt.

So yeah, he has a good hand, but three aces good? Probably not.

“I'll see your bet, and raise you fifty Skittles.” I count and push the candy into the center of the table.

The players suck in a collective breath—that's a lot of candy.

Steven looks at me dubiously.

“Well?” I say, a challenge, and I think,
Just because we broke up doesn't mean I have to go easy on you. Just because something bad happened doesn't mean you have to go easy on me.

But before he can respond, Miss Mahoney calls my name.

“Alexis, can I talk to you for a minute?”

Singling me out. That can't be good.

I put my cards facedown on the table and make my reluctant way over to her desk. She's chewing on her bottom lip, another ominous sign.

“What's up?” I chirp.

“I wanted to talk to you about this.”

She pushes a piece of paper across her desk toward me.

Last week's midterm.

Worth 25 percent of my total grade.

Upon which, next to my name, is scrawled a big red
71%
.

I push my glasses up on my nose and scan the innocuous piece of paper, aghast. Apparently I got the answers to three whole problems outright wrong, and she gave me only partial credit on a fourth problem. Out of ten.

71 percent.

Practically a D.

I swallow. I don't know what to say.

“I know this stuff,” I say hoarsely after a few excruciating seconds, looking it over yet again, seeing my own glaring errors so plainly it feels like some kind of cruel practical joke.

There goes my 4.0, I think. Boom.

“I'm sorry,” Miss Mahoney says quietly, as if everybody in the room isn't already straining to hear this conversation. “I can let you retake it on Friday, if you think that would help.”

It takes me a few seconds to understand. What she is sorry for.
Why she's offering me a do-over when she never gives do-overs. Your grade is a fact, she always says. You must learn to deal with the facts.

I straighten.

“No. I'll take it.” I grab the edge of the paper and pull it toward me, pick it up, fold it in half to hide the grade. “I'll do better on the final.”

She nods. “I'm so sorry, Lex,” she says again.

My chin lifts. “For what?” I ask, like I don't know. “You didn't bomb the test. I did.”

“I know things have been hard since Tyler . . .”

And she pauses.

God, I hate that pause, while the person speaking searches for the most watered-down way to say
died
, like calling it by another name is going to make it any less awful: terms like
laid to rest
, like death's some kind of nap;
passed
or
departed
, like it's a vacation;
expired
, which is supposed to be more technical but really sounds like the deceased is a carton of milk, a date stamped on them, after which they become—well, sour milk.

“Killed himself,” I fill in for Miss Mahoney.

At least I'm determined to be straight about it. My brother killed himself. In our garage. With a hunting rifle. This makes it sound like the most morbid game of Clue ever, but there it is.

The facts.

We must learn to deal with the facts.

“I'm fine,” I tell her. Then, again: “I'll do better on the final.”

She stares up at me, her eyes full of that terrible pity.

“Is there anything else?” I ask.

“No, that's—that's all, Alexis,” she says. “Thank you.”

I go back to the poker table. I can feel the stares of the other students on me, my friends, my classmates, most of whom I've known since at least sixth grade and have done Math Club or the Science Olympiad Team or Physics Bowl with over the past four years. All now thinking I must be so cold and clinical, to say it like that. Like I don't care. Like I clearly didn't love my brother if I can just rattle off the fact that he's dead so easily.

I sit down, slip the offending test into my backpack, and try to face my friends. Which is turning out to be kind of impossible.

Jill's eyes are shining with tears. I can't look at her, or I know she'll start full-out sobbing. Which could set off every girl in the room, except possibly El. Because hysterical girly crying, unlike suicide, is definitely contagious.

I could go, I think. I could simply walk out, down the hall, out of the school, into the frigid 21-degree afternoon and a twelve-mile walk home. Freezing to death might be preferable to this. Miss Mahoney would let me go. I wouldn't get in trouble.

But it's because I wouldn't get in trouble that I can't leave.

I can't have special treatment, not for this.

So I pick up my cards and try and totally fail to smile and say, as casually as I can manage, “Now, let's see, where were we?”

Ah, yes. Three aces.

“Lex . . . ,” says El. “What grade did you—”

I point at Steven. “I believe you were going to call.”

He shakes his head. “I fold.” This time what's written all over
his face is that he has more that he wants to say. A lot more. But he doesn't know if that's his job anymore, to try to comfort me. He doesn't know how to comfort me. So he folds.

I glance at El. She doesn't meet my eyes, but shrugs one shoulder and stares at her fingernails like she's bored. “I had the crap hand, remember?”

“Beaker?” I prompt.

Jill nods and takes a shaky breath and pushes most of her remaining Skittles to the center of the table. “I'm in,” she says.

She has nothing. A pair of queens.

I put my cards down, aces up. So hooray, I win all the candy. But it feels like I've lost something so much more important.