The Good Goodbye (7 page)

“Dad called, by the way,” I tell her.
What can I do, Princess?
he’d asked. He hasn’t called me that in years. It makes me suspect everything.

“Are you letting him visit?”

I sigh. I have no energy to manage this, either. “No. And not Mary Beth, either.” Which is really what she wants to know.

The door opens and people come in. Theo, Vince, Gabrielle, and a man I’ve never seen before in a dark suit, a tie folded crisply, round gold-framed glasses. Someone from the university, I decide. Someone with answers? “I have to go, Mom,” I say, and we hang up. “How’s Rory?” I ask Gabrielle, and she answers, “There was a delay. She should be going into surgery soon.”

“This is my wife,” Theo says. “Natalie Falcone. Natalie, this is Detective Gallagher.”

A police officer. I’m instantly wary, though I’ve done nothing wrong. I stand and shake the officer’s hand. “Who’s with Arden?” I ask Theo. This is the first of the rules that I have made with myself. Someone always has to be here with Arden, and preferably in the chair beside her bed, until she comes home.

“She’s okay,” Theo replies, which only means
She’s the same.

“I just have a few questions, ma’am,” Detective Gallagher says. “It won’t take long.”
Questions?
I thought he was here to give us answers. I must look worried, because he adds, “Talking to the family is standard procedure in a fatal fire.”

A fatal fire. That’s what this is, not merely one that blistered my daughter’s skin, smacked her head against the wooden picnic bench beneath her window, broke her bones, and yanked her into a hushed space hovering between life and death. A violence that tightens my throat and makes it hard to breathe. My daughter will be okay—I tell myself this over and over—but Hunter will not. How will I tell her, when she wakes up?

Theo and I sit on the vinyl-covered couch against the wall. Vince and Gabrielle choose the one adjacent. Detective Gallagher picks up a chair and positions it to face us. There is a smooth economy to his movements that warns me to pay attention. Vince is on the other side of Theo, sitting safely back and out of view, but his knees protrude and I see he’s wearing his khaki pants, the ones with the ghostly outline of his wallet worn into the hip pocket and the torn belt loop.
Don’t you dare go out front in those,
I’d chide, and he’d merely grin, go into the office, and reemerge fifteen minutes later, clean-shaven, dressed immaculately in fresh khakis and a crisp chef’s jacket. I’d pat his cheek and wink.

“The fire marshal’s released a preliminary report,” Detective Gallagher begins. “We haven’t released this to the media, and I’d like you to keep it to yourselves for now.”

“Of course.” Theo nods, finding my hand, as Gabrielle says, “What? What does he know?”

“He found traces of accelerant in your daughters’ room. He’s ruling this an arson, pending further investigation.”

“
In
our daughters’ room?” Theo says.

“The fire marshal believes it was the point of origin.”

Point of origin.
It sounds like a horror flick, not this. Not my life. Not Arden’s. “Someone started a fire in their room?”
Were they asleep? How did they let it happen?

“Is he sure it’s arson?” Vince says. “I mean, kids keep all kinds of crap in their rooms. Nail-polish remover, hairspray, cigarette lighters.”

“Rubbing alcohol.” I’d packed the first-aid kit myself and stowed it under Arden’s bunk bed.

“There’s a difference between a flammable liquid,” Detective Gallagher says, “and one that’s used as an accelerant and is intended to spread a fire quickly. We found accelerant everywhere in your daughters’ dorm room, the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The lab’s analyzing samples now. We should know exactly what was used shortly.”

“You’re saying someone wanted to hurt our children?” It’s crazy. It’s impossible. “They’re just
kids.
” Two eighteen-year-olds who spent this past summer watching
One Tree Hill
and eating gummy worms. Gabrielle has her fingertips against her mouth, her eyes blank and stunned. I look to Theo. I want him to agree, to argue that this is all an insane mistake, but his face registers nothing. He’s processing, thinking. “How can we help?” he asks instead.

“Well, arson’s an unusual way to hurt someone. Often, it’s directed at property, but we don’t think that’s the case here. We believe this was a revenge fire, someone settling a grudge.”

“Revenge for what?” Vince sounds bewildered. “These are good girls. What sort of grudge?”

“Did either of them mention any trouble on campus? Maybe some kids the girls have had run-ins with?”

“Rory doesn’t have run-ins,” Vince says. “She gets along with everyone.”

It’s true. Rory’s always been surrounded by a laughing group of kids. They swarm to her. She’s never been afraid to put herself out there and speak her mind. It makes her the unquestioned leader, but it has a price. Back when the girls were in seventh grade, Arden had told me how Rory was being picked on.
Don’t you dare tell Aunt Gabrielle,
my daughter had ordered.
It’ll only make things worse.
And then more recently,
Rory isn’t who you think she is.
Her voice had been freighted with meaning and I’d stopped what I was doing to give her my full attention.
What does that mean?
I’d asked, but she’d just shrugged.

“It’s a big campus,” Detective Gallagher says.

“Rory would have told us if there’d been a problem,” Vince insists.

Detective Gallagher looks to me, light reflecting off the lenses of his glasses.

I shake my head. “Arden never mentioned anything.” But the fact is that Arden has confided so little in me since starting college.
The food here is disgusting. I have to memorize like fifty works of art. The girls in the room next door play Taylor Swift too loud.

“Think. It could be something minor. An argument.”

I look to Theo, who says, “She didn’t say anything to me, either.”

“It’s possible someone from town got into the building,” Detective Gallagher says. “We’re reviewing the student access-card records, but there’s always the chance that someone let a nonstudent into the building. They’re not supposed to, of course, but they still do it.”

“Are you talking about drugs?” Vince asks, and I’m shocked at this, but of course he’d wonder. I should have thought of it, too. He’d just gotten there before me. “You think this is drug-related?”

“Did the girls experiment?”

It’s a softball question lobbed gently. I wait for Vince to volunteer that I’d once caught the dishwasher selling Rory weed, but he remains silent. I rub my temples. I’m searching, scrabbling for meaning. I’m turning over all the rocks. None of this makes any sense.

“No,” Theo says. “Arden didn’t do drugs. Natalie and I would have known.”

Theo’s always saying that his biggest challenge isn’t getting his students into the best schools, but making sure they stayed sober long enough to graduate. Drugs were rampant, despite his best efforts. He watched Arden closely, and I know he worried about Rory. His conviction now is reassuring, but I am remembering the time I phoned Arden and she answered giggling.
Wait, who’s this?
Arden always checks caller ID. She always composes herself before saying
Hello?
I push the pebble back into place: Rory isn’t a drug user and neither is my daughter. Her grades are too important to her and she has her feet firmly on the ground. Arden doesn’t take risks. My daughter’s a careful child.

“What have you heard, Detective?” Vince says. “Do you know if our girls were in any kind of trouble?”

“We’re just starting to track down the kids who lived in the dorm with Arden and Rory. You’d think they’d come forward and volunteer information, but teenagers have a weird code of conduct. They’re at that age where they think the police are the bad guys. And, for some of them, we are.” He taps the tip of his pen on his notebook, looks at me. “Do you know why your daughter wasn’t at the pep rally?”

I didn’t even know there had been a pep rally. I shake my head. “Why does it matter?”

“Homecoming’s a big deal around here, and the pep rally’s almost as big as the game itself. Everyone goes. So far as we can tell, Hunter, Rory, and Arden were the only ones in the dorm last night.”

Out of the hundreds of kids who lived there. It makes the hair on my arms rise. “But we saw kids in the emergency room when we first arrived.”

“They went in to try and save their belongings. They didn’t get far.”

The flames must have been showing in all the windows, the smoke spiraling into the sky. And kids had still gone in, heedless. Only Hunter hadn’t made it out.
Why?

“Mrs. Falcone? Do you know why Rory wasn’t at the rally?”

Gabrielle stirs herself. “I don’t know. She told me she was planning to go. I don’t know why she changed her mind.”

Detective Gallagher jots a note. “Did either girl complain of illness recently? Any possibility they went to bed early? Maybe took some cold medication?”

Theo and Vince are silent. They aren’t the lifelines to the girls. Gabrielle and I are, and because Gabrielle isn’t saying anything, I do. I answer for us all. “Arden seemed fine when she called Wednesday afternoon. She didn’t say anything about feeling sick. You think they were asleep when the fire broke out? But it wasn’t that late.”

“Maybe they’d been drinking,” Vince says, and I look at him. I don’t want to, but I do, because this makes a little sense.

“Do you think that’s what happened?” I ask. “A party that got out of control?”

“Accelerant,” Theo says, and I frown.
Right.

“All right. Well, I appreciate your time.” Detective Gallagher closes his notebook.

“That’s it?” Vince says.

“For now. I’ll let you know if I have any other questions. In the meantime, if you think of anything at all that could be relevant, give me a call. You have my number.”

“Do you think you’re going to find this person, Detective?” Gabrielle asks.

“It’s a priority for all of us. I’m going to be talking with Hunter’s parents, too, when they arrive to pick up their son’s body.”

Not a body. Their
child.
They’d watched him grow up; they’d had dreams for him, hopes. How were they going to make it through this?

“Of course,” he says, “the best thing would be for Arden and Rory to tell us what they remember when they wake up.”

It’s a soaring thought.
When they wake up.
I’m eager to get back to Arden. I’ve been in here too long. A million things could have happened in my absence, and the nurse might not have come to let us know. We’ve been in this hospital less than a day, and every single minute stretches to eternity. Still, I hesitate and look to Detective Gallagher. “Are you certain this wasn’t some kind of prank?”

I’m not naïve. I know terrible things happen every day, but not to me. Not to my daughter. I don’t want this to be a crime. I want this to be an error, an accident with a tragic outcome. “Kids can do the stupidest things.” In culinary school, it had been the price of admission to a party that Vince and I desperately, for some reason, wanted to attend. All over campus, mailboxes had been pried free and dragged away. A federal offense, but none of us could possibly have cared less at the time.

“Kids don’t typically set fires as a prank,” Theo says. Of course he’d know this. He works with teenagers; his degree is in child psychology. He asks Detective Gallagher, “Do we know for certain our daughters jumped?”

I look at my husband with surprise. Where is this coming from?

“We don’t,” Detective Gallagher replies, and I feel surprise give way to horror.

—

“You can’t really believe they were pushed,” I say to Theo in a low voice. We’re hurrying down the hall and we’re alone—Vince and Gabrielle having gone to the cafeteria for a sandwich—but there are still people around.

Theo holds open a door for me. “I don’t want to, believe me, but you have to admit it’s a possibility.”

“It’s horrible. Who would do that? How did they escape?”

“Who says they did?”

He means Hunter. We’ve reached Arden’s room, but I stop and stare at him, shocked. “Jesus, Theo. What are you saying?”

“What do you know about him, anyway?”

“Nothing. He’s just a boy. He was Arden’s friend.”

“You ever meet him?”

“You know I haven’t.” Now I’m angry. I feel helpless, riddled with doubt and regret. Why hadn’t I met Hunter? Why had I waited for Arden to call me instead of calling her myself? But I know the answer. I didn’t want to be one of those moms. I didn’t want to be Gabrielle.

“Why don’t you go lie down, Nat? You didn’t sleep a minute last night. Try the family lounge. I’ll come get you if anything happens.”

I frown. Like any of this can be solved with a nap? “I’m fine.” I grab the door handle to slide open the door to Arden’s room but Theo puts his hand on my arm, stopping me.

“For now,” he says, “but I know you. You’ll push yourself too far. You’re no good to Arden if you don’t take care of yourself.”

I shake free of his grasp. “Stop it, Theo. I know what I’m doing. If I need to sleep, I can sleep just as well in the chair in Arden’s room as on that awful sofa down the hall.” But I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I see Arden falling. I hear her calling for me and I snap awake, stare wildly around me only to remember where I am, and why.

“Fine. Well, I guess you don’t need me.” His annoyance is plain. He looks behind me and I turn to see Vince and Gabrielle headed down the hallway toward us. “I’ll go check on Rory. She should be out of surgery by now.”

I let myself into Arden’s room and slide the door closed behind me. It’s a hushed and gloomy space, the curtains hanging open so the nurses can see in. I don’t know what they can see from the hallway; it’s so dark. I go over and look down at my sleeping daughter. Her mouth is slack. Her eye is closed. I glance to the heart-rate monitor, see the line zigzagging in exactly the same pattern. I look at the pressure monitor. The number holds steady. I look back to my child. “Who did this to you, baby? What happened?”