The Good Goodbye (17 page)

I find a table and peel the foil from my cup of yogurt. It’s blueberry, Arden’s favorite. When she was seven, she went through a period where she wouldn’t eat anything unless it contained blueberries. Pancakes with blueberry syrup, cereal topped with blueberries, toast smeared with blueberry jelly.
Just like Violet Beauregarde,
I’d told her, wincing as she dropped blueberries into her bowl of minestrone, one by one by one. She’d turned her green eyes to me, wide.
Who?
she’d asked with great interest.

“Mrs. Falcone?” someone asks, and I look up. It’s that pink-haired girl whose dorm room is next to Arden and Rory’s. Whose dorm room
was
next to Arden and Rory’s, I correct myself.

“Hi, D.D.”

Just a few short hours ago, I might have assumed she and Arden were friends. Now I’m wary. Now I’m seeing monsters under the bed.
Just look one more time,
Oliver would plead, and I’ve learned to keep a stuffed animal under there just so I could produce it with a flourish.
It’s only Mr. Teddy,
I’d say, and he’d nod, relieved.

D.D.’s wearing skinny jeans and a cropped top hanging off one shoulder that reveals a few inches of bare midriff. A row of silver hoops dangle along the curve of one ear. Arden had grimaced when one of the servers got her belly button pierced.
Why do people do that?
Arden had muttered to me privately, but now I remember she’d been the one to get a tattoo. “How’s Arden? Is she better?”

Surely this means she and Arden were friends. “She’s not any worse.” This is the most honest answer I’ve given anyone. It’s the bleak fluorescent light overhead shining down on me, laying a firm hand at the base of my neck. It’s this slight girl, barely five feet tall. Without her gang of friends around, she seems even smaller. “I’m sorry, D.D., but the girls still can’t have visitors.”

“That’s okay. I had an appointment here anyway. Now I’m waiting for the bus.”

She’s holding a paper plate with a muffin balanced on it. “Want to join me?” I ask.

She nods, pulls out a chair. “We’re holding a vigil Thursday night. Eight o’clock. Do you think you can come?”

“I’ll try.” So much could happen between now and then.

She glances behind me. “I wish they’d stop playing that.”

I turn to see the television set mounted on the wall. The news is on. The screen shows Arden’s dorm, smeared with soot and gaping black holes where windows once were. I’ve been avoiding the TV, ignoring the newspapers abandoned in the family lounge. Now I can’t look away.

A flutter of yellow caution tape droops around the perimeter; a drift of stuffed animals and candles and flowers are piled, soggy, by the entrance. I had gone through that door, arms filled with Arden’s clothes. I had been focused on hiding my sadness at saying goodbye to my daughter, but she had seen it anyway. She had let me hug her, resting her head against my shoulder.
It’ll be okay, Mom,
she’d told me. I’d tightened my arms around her and kissed her cheek.
The good thing about saying goodbye,
I’d whispered in her ear,
is getting to say hello.

On the screen, Arden’s window, the startling vision of a man leaning out, his face covered with a paper mask. He drops an armload of sharp and broken objects into the open-yawed dumpster below. All the pieces of my daughter’s room, all the things we’d chosen together to make her transition a happy one—the pumpkin-orange comforter and matching pillow sham, the desk lamp with its reaching arm, the pink rubber shower caddy and bright yellow plastic trashcan. Will Arden want to come back to this place? Will she ever feel safe anywhere again?

I turn around, putting my back to the television. I don’t need to see any more.

“They won’t let us back in, not even to get our things.” D.D. picks at her muffin, breaking off pieces of the sugared top and putting them in her mouth. “We’re all doubled and tripled up while they find us someplace else to stay for the rest of the year. Our RA says it’ll probably be one of those motels on Route 4. I guess that’ll be okay. Maid service.” She shrugs, looks at me with red-rimmed eyes. Yes, I decide. She and Arden are friends and this has deeply upset D.D. I feel Arden standing behind me, begging me not to do anything to embarrass her and I stop myself from reaching across the table and clasping D.D.’s small hand, lying just inches away. “Arden talks about you all the time, you know,” she says. “You own a restaurant, right? She says you make the most amazing macaroni and cheese.”

“It’s always been her favorite.” The first grown-up food I’d ever made for Arden. For months, it was the only thing she’d eat, patiently chasing each bit of pasta around the tray of her high chair with her fingers, cheese sauce smearing her cheeks and clinging to her hair. If I tried to intercede and hurry the process along by feeding her with a fork, she’d thump her heels and howl in protest.

“I’ve never eaten homemade anything. Mrs. Stouffer does the cooking at my house.”

I smile. “I can make you mac and cheese sometime.” Sometime—that imaginary point in time when I would make food and bring it to Arden and her friends, stay for a while, tease them as they dig in, encourage them to put some vegetables on their plates, peel back the plastic wrap to reveal the tower of frosted brownies.

“That’d be awesome. The food here blows.” Her gray eyes are thickly lined in bright blue; a tiny nose ring glints against her ivory skin.

“Arden says the same thing.” Theo teased Arden when she complained.
Welcome to the real world,
he’d told her.

“The only vegetarian thing they know how to make is salad. They even scramble the eggs in lard. Arden and I eat a lot of ramen.”

“Arden’s vegetarian?” The girl who loved my roasted chicken, veal cutlets, liver pâté smeared on rosemary crackers? Arden had come home for two whole days and never said a word, not even as I pulled things from the refrigerator and set about basting and roasting and chopping. Talking the entire time to dispel the silence between us while she sat at the island and sipped tea. Disappointment about art school, I’d thought. Homesickness, I’d thought.

“She’s trying it out. She’s not sure she can give up tuna. I told her she could just cut out poultry and beef. That’s where the real industry abuse is, anyway.”

You must treat animals with respect,
my instructor had scolded, looking down at the chicken I was attempting to debone. Everyone had stopped to listen and I had been mortified. After she had moved on, I’d glanced to my right and seen the pristinely sliced portions of chicken shimmering on Vince’s cutting board next to mine, plump and perfect, not a vein of fat or tendon to be seen.

“Rory says there are ways around that. She says there are humane farms, but what’s humane about raising animals for food?”

Sensible Rory, so very much her mother’s daughter. What had Gabrielle seen in D.D. that worried her? I see nothing here but a girl my daughter’s age, making choices, figuring things out.

D.D. pushes away her plate. “Do the police know who did it yet?”

“I don’t think so, but I know they’re talking to a lot of people.”
Witnesses have come forward.
Maybe this girl? “Have they talked to you?”

“They talked to all of us. They had a big dorm meeting and then this dude took us each into separate rooms.” She fiddles with an earring, pushing it in and out. Her features are delicate, gentle swoops, a flutter of eyelashes. Just a child, somebody’s child.

“Detective Gallagher?”

“I guess. He told me his name, but…” She shrugs.

It hadn’t mattered. She had to have been nervous, afraid to say the wrong thing. I know I shouldn’t ask, but I do anyway. “What did you talk about?” I keep my voice conversational, casual. I don’t let her see the anxiety rippling beneath the surface.

“I don’t know. Nothing, really. Just that we’re friends; we hang out together.”

“That’s nice. Arden’s talked a lot about you, too,” I lie.

She drops her hands to her lap, chews her lower lip. She’s thinking.

A clatter behind us, the kitchen crew arriving for setup. I don’t turn around. I’m aware only of this young woman sitting just inches away. A bird, gauging the wind for flight. “Detective Gallagher says there was a fire in the girls’ room a few weeks ago. I had no idea. Arden never said anything.”

She glances up with her smoke-colored eyes. “She didn’t?”

“Do you know how it happened?”

A one-shoulder shrug. “I wasn’t there.”

Which isn’t really answering the question. Who is she trying to protect? “The university didn’t know anything about it, either.”

“No surprise there. Our RA’s pretty obtuse. All Arden and Rory had to do was cover the ceiling with scarves and leave the window open for a few days. But he still would’ve found out at the end of the year. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have gotten back your security deposit.”

I didn’t know anything about scarves on the ceiling. When we Skyped, Arden sat with her back against her headboard. All I saw was yellowed oak, painted cinder block, and Arden’s face. All I’d wanted to see was her face.

“I wasn’t the one who told the police about it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” D.D. says. “I didn’t tell them about that fight Rory and Arden had, either. It must have been Whitney. She doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut.”

“I know they sometimes argued,” I begin, but D.D.’s shaking her head.

“I’m not talking about an argument, Mrs. Falcone. I’m sorry, but I’m not. This was a
fight
. We could hear them yelling all the way down the hall. When we got there, we had to pull Arden off Rory. She was so angry. She really hurt Rory.”

“She did?” I say, stupidly.

“Rory was
bleeding
.”

It’s impossible. Rain patters against the window in a sudden gust. “I don’t understand. Arden’s not a fighter. She’d never hurt Rory.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Mrs. Falcone. I saw it for myself. I wasn’t the only one.”

Arden must have felt terrible. The two of them must have really been miserable about the whole thing. Was this what Arden had called to talk about? I should have seen it in her eyes, set down my car keys, shooed the boys into the other room, and pulled up a chair.

“Look, Mrs. Falcone. I know Rory can be a real bitch sometimes, but still. Arden was wrong. I’m sorry, but she was. Very definitely uncool.”

“You’re right. There’s no excuse for hurting someone.”
Does
Detective Gallagher know about this? Does he think Arden has a violent streak?

She frowns. “I’m not talking about that.”

The conversation has changed direction and I’ve missed the cues. “Of course not,” I say, but it’s too late.

D.D. pushes back her chair. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, no, it’s okay.” But it’s not true. “What were they fighting about? Please tell me.”

She picks up her plate scattered with crumbled pieces of muffin. “I have to go. I don’t want to miss my bus.”

My phone vibrates at my hip. I yank it from my pocket. Theo, with news? But it’s my mother. “I don’t want to alarm you,” she says.

Arden

AM I AWAKE,
or is this a dream? Everything is dark around me.

Images suddenly appear in the distance and swim toward me, flashing past: Hunter’s face and the way his mouth turned up the first time he really saw me. Rory staring down at her phone, the perfect line of her profile and the shining ripple of her hair, her lower lip caught between her bright white teeth.
He’ll call. He won’t call.
Me, sitting in the small crowded shop with my bare arm extended watching the tip of the needle dart in and out. There had been blood, quickly wiped away only to bubble up again. My mom looks horrified when she sees the result.
What did you do, Arden?

I couldn’t help myself.

—

Hunter’s voice rises like smoke in the distance. “Hey, Arden. Hold up.” I spin around and there he is, separating himself from a laughing group of guys shoving one another on the sidewalk across the street. He jogs toward me and I wait, self-conscious in my baggy rolled-up sweatpants, my decrepit nylon swim bag slung over my shoulder, my loose hair frizzy and reeking of chlorine. No makeup, my blond brows almost invisible, my lips the palest of pinks. Rory leaning close to the mirror to say,
I’m getting my eyelashes dyed.

Hunter’s been at baseball practice. He has his own gear bag over his shoulder and his curls are shower-damp, his blue eyes friendly. The scent of soap rises from him. “Headed back to your dorm?” That smile. How does Rory stand it? “Want company?”

He’s only on his way to see Rory, but my voice goes squeaky. “Sure.” Rory’s got a special voice for when she talks to boys, her words flowing rich and sweet and slow like maple syrup. I don’t know where to look, so I focus on the sidewalk squares and let them lead me along as Hunter talks.

He’d played shortstop in high school, but he’d probably have to start out at second base. His mom would be disappointed. His baseball coach was okay, though he was calling a lot of practices. This morning’s pop quiz in art history had been a ringer—what the hell was that lumpy stone thing?

“A doorstopper,” I say, and he looks at me, surprised, then grins. I duck my head, my cheeks burning. The purple sky’s streaked orange, the sun gone with a soft sigh. Yellow lights are popping on everywhere. Charcoal shadows slide across the pale path and disappear into the black grass.

“My dad has a gallery in Baltimore,” Hunter says. “You should check it out.”

Not even a real invitation, so why is my heart pounding so hard? “What kind of art?”

“Outsider, mostly. You should see our house. My mom swears if he brings home one more thing made of barbed wire, she’s making him sleep in the garage. She’d never do it, though.”

“Really?” I wish I could see his house, see him walk around in it, claim his space. I’ve never been in a guy’s bedroom. What would it look like, feel like? Rory says Blake’s room was disgusting, dishes under the bed, clothes lying everywhere. She said it reeked.