The Goodbye Time (3 page)

Chapter Seven

I didn’t get a chance to ask Katy what had gone on in Dr. Pinsher’s office because by the time she got out, we were in science class studying photosynthesis again. It looked like she’d been crying. But of course, everybody who comes out of Dr. Pinsher’s office looks like they’ve been crying. It’s like Dr. Pinsher
wants
you to cry. Her whole office is filled with Kleenex boxes. I noticed that the day I brought the note to her.

Anyway, as soon as school ended and I got Katy alone, I asked her what was going on.

She was really quiet when she spoke. I could hardly hear her, with buses and cars driving by on Broadway. “She asked me if I understood how it was with Sam. His ‘condition.’ She called it his ‘condition.’ ”

“Of course you do. You’ve been living with him your entire life!”

“That’s what I told her. But then she asked if I understood how ‘grave’ it was and how Sam would never get any better. If I realized that he was
severely
retarded and would be growing into a big, grown-up retard that was still in diapers that my mom couldn’t handle.”

“She didn’t call him a retard!”

“But that’s what she meant. Believe me. Then she said that after last night—with my mom getting stitches and Sam breaking his wrist—we had to think of putting Sam in some kind of place. Like some kind of institution where other mental people live.”

Katy swallowed so hard I could see a lump bulge in her throat. “It would be for the good of everyone, Dr. Pinsher said. Because Sam’s ‘condition’ is ‘taking a toll’ on all of us and it’s getting worse and actually turning dangerous, and Bug Eye and me and my mom can’t go on the way we’ve been.”

“Is that true?” I asked. I didn’t really know what to think. I mean, I know it’s awful when Sam is wild or doing certain disgusting things, but he can also be really sweet. Sometimes he’ll cuddle up on the sofa with his teddy bear and he’ll look just like a baby—a huge, hairy baby, but sweet all the same.

“Well, last night was bad. And sometimes he gets a little wild. But nothing like that ever happened before. It was just, you know, an
accident.
”

“What does your mom say?” I asked her next.

“That’s the weirdest part. My mom never told me anything. The first I heard about the idea was from Dr. Pinsher. Why didn’t my mom just talk to me?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. But what I guessed was that Mrs. Paoli didn’t know how to explain it to her, so she got Dr. Pinsher to do it instead. Not that it mattered all that much; it was awful no matter who told who.

“Bloody hell,” Katy said, suddenly in her Johnny voice. “I’m not letting them send me nephew off. He doesn’t belong in no boarding school.” I looked straight ahead down Eightieth Street to the border of trees in Riverside Park. Some of the trees had pink flowers all over them, and they looked so bright on the green of the other trees and grass. I don’t know why, but the petals and trees looking so pretty the way they did made everything seem even sadder.

“I can take care of ’im,” Johnny said. “I’ll spend more time at home.”

“Your dad’d be proud of you, lad,” I said. And while I was saying that about Johnny’s dead dad, I was suddenly thinking of Michael’s dad, and for the first time ever, playing felt sort of weird. I mean, sad things that we used to pretend were happening had started to happen in our actual life, and it gave me a scary feeling, like a big hole was opening underneath us and Katy and I—and Bug Eye and Sam and Michael and maybe even everyone—were falling into it.

That night was the first time Katy’s mom agreed to come in for a drink. She looked even worse than usual; the huge pink bandage above her eye stretched across her whole forehead. She and my parents went into the living room and stayed there for a long time. Katy and I didn’t even try to eavesdrop on them.

“I know what they’re saying,” Katy said. I figured I knew what Katy’s mom was probably saying, but I wasn’t so sure about what
my
parents were saying. I got this awful thought about my brother. Like, what if Tom got into some terrible accident or something and got brain-damaged and turned into a person like Sam who was sweet sometimes but also wild and out of control? What if he knocked my mom down and she had to get stitches, and he broke his own wrist doing it? And what if he was never going to get better? Would my parents keep him at home with us? Or would they think it was “taking a toll” on me and put him away in some mental institution, like Katy’s mom wanted to do with Sam?

I really wondered about this. It was different with my parents, of course, because there are two of them, and maybe with two people, especially if one’s a dad, it would be easier to keep a brain-damaged kid at home. It was awful to think about something like that. Long after Katy and her mom had left, I lay there in bed, clutching my old stuffed elephant, wondering what my parents would do. And not just about Tom. What if something that terrible happened to
me
?

Chapter Eight

The night after Mrs. Paoli had a glass of wine with my parents, I was reading in bed and my mom came into my room to talk. You can always tell when parents have something serious to say. They sort of move differently—slower, more carefully, like they’re walking on tiptoe.

My mom sat on the edge of my bed. That’s another sure sign it’s serious.

“So,” she said, “how is everything at school? I hear that Michael Trefaro’s back.”

“Yeah,” I said. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Michael she wanted to talk about, even though she likes him a lot and thinks it’s a big tragedy that he lost his dad.

“Sweetie,” she said, the most major sign that something bad was coming, “do you know about Katy’s brother? Do you know, I mean, that he hurt their mom the other night?”

“Yes,” I said, “though I’m sure he didn’t mean to. Sometimes he can’t help himself. He gets out of control and—”

“Of course he didn’t mean to. Sam is very ill.”

“Everybody knows that, Mom.”

“Anna, what’s wrong with Sam won’t get any better. In fact, it may get worse. That’s because his body will keep growing while his brain will remain the same. He’ll grow into a man, but his brain will stay a baby’s brain. Already his mother has to shave his face.” That was weird to think of. I pictured Sam with a long black beard, curled up in bed with his teddy bear.

“Darla—Katy’s mom—has had to make a very hard decision. To put Sam in a hospital.”

“She’s doing it, then?”

“She has to. It’s dangerous to keep him home.”

“But nothing ever happened before.”

“Maybe not,” my mother said. “But the doctors at the hospital said it probably will again. What would happen if he really hurt his mother? I mean seriously injured her. Who would take care of Katy and Gem?” Gem? Who on earth was Gem? Then I remembered: Bug Eye. Bug Eye had a real name, and of all things, it was
Gem.
Like a diamond or a ruby or something.

“Katy doesn’t want her to. Katy wants to keep him home, and it isn’t right that Mrs. Paoli didn’t even talk to her about it. Her mom is mean.”

“Anna, sweetie, don’t you see? Katy is
why
she’s doing it. For Katy and Gem, not for herself. She’s terrified that one day Sam will hurt the girls.”

“Katy says he won’t.”

“Her mother can’t take a chance like that. How would you feel,” my mom went on, “if Katy was badly hurt by Sam?” I didn’t think she really expected an answer to that, so I didn’t say anything. I’d feel bad, I knew. It had been hard enough seeing her that morning with her hair all a wreck and her face not washed.

“But it isn’t fair. It’s not Sam’s fault!” I felt myself almost starting to cry. It made me think of a girl at school whose parents made her get rid of her dog because it had bitten her little brother, who was poking it with a stick. And the dog was old and had been a good dog for twelve whole years.

“It’s true,” said my mom, “it isn’t fair. A lot of things in life aren’t fair. Just look at the television news. You see children starving or living with war. The children didn’t cause the war, and yet they have to live with it. Or look around our neighborhood; you see people in wheelchairs, people who are blind or deaf. These are just terrible facts of life.”

“But why do they have to happen?”

“I wish I knew the answer to that. Maybe it’s God’s way of making others more like Himself—more compassionate and aware and more creative about finding ways to help the ones who are suffering.”

She paused for a moment, then looked at me in a serious way. “Here’s where you can play a part.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean here’s your chance to really stand with Katy and show what kind of friend you are. One good thing that happens when terrible tragedies occur is that people realize how lucky they are to have good friends.” She sounded so grim and serious, it was making me sort of scared. I really didn’t know what else I could do to show Katy I was her friend. We had the kind of friendship where we didn’t have to say a whole lot of stuff about loving each other. We both just understood that we did.

“Katy needs you, Anna. It’s going to be hard for her. She’ll need you when she’s ready—to listen and just be there. To let her vent and show her sadness any way she needs to.” She looked into my eyes and held them. “Do you think you can do that?”

“Yeah. I guess.” I said the words, but I wasn’t really sure. I mean about what she meant.

The next time my mom spoke, she had switched to her cheerful, optimistic voice. “It’s the best decision for everyone. It’s been hard, you know, for Katy and Gem. Their mom feels bad that she hasn’t had time to give them much attention. Katy’s strong—thanks in part to having a best friend like you—but Gem’s been having problems.” She probably had no friends, I thought, on account of her being so weird and mean. But I didn’t mention that to my mom.

“Plus it’s not like they’ll never see Sam again. They can visit him whenever they want. And people with special training will be there to take care of him—twenty-four hours, night and day.”

“So when are they going to take him away?”

“Oh, Anna. No one’s going to take him away. They’ll take him to the hospital just as if they’re going to the doctor—”

“And then they’ll just leave him, the way they left Laura’s dog!”

“What?”

“Never mind. It just seems so mean to bring him there and let him think that everything is normal, when the truth of it is he’s never coming home again!”

It was awful then what happened. My mom’s eyes started to fill with tears. I
hate
when she cries, and I wished I hadn’t said what I had. I mean, there she was, trying her best to comfort me, and I ended up making
her
sad. She blinked a few times to make the tears go back where they came from. Then she dropped her hand onto my leg and started to stroke my knee.

She said in a really quiet voice, “Katy’s lucky to have a sensitive friend like you.” I shrugged. Right then I didn’t think Katy was very lucky about anything. My mom went on stroking my knee for a while. Then, after what seemed like a pretty long time, she said, “Are we on for Friday afternoon? Dress shopping, Katy and you? We’ll go out to dinner afterward. Anywhere you want.”

“Okay,” I said, but my voice was flat. To tell you the truth, it didn’t excite me all that much. I was too sad and scared for everybody. I mean for
all
of us.

Chapter Nine

On Friday afternoon my mom came breezing into the schoolyard to pick us up. I know it will sound like I’m saying this just because she’s my mom, but she looked good. Compared, that is, to the other moms in their jeans and sweatshirts and running pants. She was wearing a navy blue pantsuit and swinging a big black pocketbook, and her blond hair was catching the sun and floating a little in the breeze as she swung over to us and sang out, “Let’s shop till we drop!” I was hoping Kendra saw her and heard her say that. And I hoped Michael saw her too and knew what a cool, pretty mom I had.

The first store we hit was Macy’s on Thirty-fourth Street. That’s the world’s biggest department store, and it was loaded with dresses, let me tell you. Katy and I were secretly playing. I was Aunt Mimi taking Clarissa to shop for her high school prom dress. My mom didn’t have a clue, because we said the same stuff we would have said if we were ourselves looking at dresses, such as “Hey, this one’s nice” or “Wow, talk about ugly!” She thought we were using English accents just to goof around and make the other shoppers think we were visiting from London. She even started to talk in an English accent too.

“Here’s a charming frock,” she said, holding up a dress that looked like it belonged to Little Bo Peep. We knew she was kidding about the dress. But there were a lot of nice dresses there too. I almost bought one that was white with tiny pink flowers all over it, but they didn’t have it in my size. Katy liked one too, but then she looked at the price tag and suddenly didn’t seem to want it anymore. After that she started looking at the price tag before she even looked at the dress.

Suddenly my mom said, “This place is overwhelming. Let’s zip across the street to Daffy’s and see if they have anything. We can always come back here later.”

“Righto,” said Katy really fast.

So that’s what we did. We zipped over to Daffy’s, which is on the seventh floor, which you go up to in a glass elevator. It’s known for its slogan, “Clothing Bargains for Millionaires.” Unfortunately, they didn’t have much for millionaires our age. Not in dresses, anyway, though we did buy some really cool T-shirts with a map of the world on them for $8.99. We decided to pay for them and put them on right away. Then my mom, seeming to forget all about going back to Macy’s, suggested we start walking downtown toward Loehmann’s and T.J. Maxx and Filene’s Basement.

It was warm outside, so we didn’t need our jackets. It was fun walking along in our cool map-of-the-world T-shirts, just looking in store windows and talking in our English accents. My mom took us to a cafe she goes to sometimes with people who write children’s books. It’s a neat place with pink tablecloths and real English-looking teacups, and it has a whole long tea menu with teas from places all over the world, like Dakar and Cameroon and Malaysia. You’d think we’d want to keep playing in a tea place like this, but for some reason we stopped for a while. We sat there drinking our sophisticated tea and eating real scones like they eat in England, talking about dresses and fashion, as if we were in high school or something.

“I’d look great in that green one we saw,” Katy said, laughing. “Like a walking, talking kiwi.”

“And how about the one with the feathers,” I said, plopping some raspberry jam on my plate. “I’d look like a parakeet from Pluto.”

My mom was laughing too. “How about the one with the black tulle and the leather bows? I kept thinking of Anka. Poor dear Anka.” Up till then I’d never thought about Anka as a “poor dear” anything. And it wasn’t what my mom had said but what Katy said next that actually made me feel bad for her.

“What’s Anka going to do when Tom goes away to Harvard?” And both of us—my mom and me—just kind of froze. My mom looked at Katy for a second over the rim of her teacup before setting it down, not taking a sip.

“That’s so thoughtful of you,” she said to Katy softly. “I haven’t really thought of that. I’ve been so focused on myself. On how
I’ll
feel when Tom goes off.”

“Me either,” I confessed. Katy looked a little pleased that my mom had called her thoughtful, but I don’t think it went to her head. She was used to being thoughtful, I think. A lot more than I was, that’s for sure.

“You know,” said my mom, “Anka and Tom probably think things won’t change that much. But the truth is, they will. Tom’s starting a whole new life.”

“But he’ll come home to visit,” I said.

“Of course,” said my mom.

“And Anka, I guess, can visit him,” Katy suggested hopefully. “And stay in a hotel, I mean.”

“There’s lots of holidays,” I said. I was starting to feel a little depressed. And to tell the truth, it wasn’t for Anka.

“Life means change,” my mom said in the tone she uses with adults. “Change is hard, but that’s how we grow.”

“But why,” said Katy, “do so many changes have to happen at once?”

“I think it’s because change causes change,” my mom replied. That didn’t make any sense to me, but looking across at Katy, I could tell she knew what my mom meant. Sometimes Katy’s a hundred times more mature than me.

After our tea we started walking around again. We were heading west on Twenty-fifth Street when we passed a curious-looking store. In the window a mannequin in a long velvet bathrobe was leaning against a fake fireplace. On the mantel of the fireplace were all sorts of statues and odd things—vases and clocks and colored bottles with fancy Arabian-style tops. There was other weird stuff in the window too. Like a leopard-skin chair and a table with legs that looked like some kind of animal horns.

“Let’s go in,” suggested my mom. Katy and I glanced at each other doubtfully but followed her inside. Once in the store, my mom seemed to move by radar, passing right by the racks of winter coats and big old-lady jackets to a section where lots of dresses hung—dresses for people like Katy and me.

At first it seemed weird and I didn’t want to look at them. They were
used,
you know—maybe the girls who wore them were
dead
and their mothers had brought their clothes to Goodwill. That’s what it was, in case you haven’t already guessed: a Goodwill store. Anyway, we were rummaging through the dresses when all of a sudden Katy caught a glimpse of red material. She pulled on it—and yanked out the most beautiful dress! We stared at it, all three of us. It was really a special dress—cherry-colored, with bows for straps and the widest skirt I’ve ever seen. The kind of skirt that wasn’t all bunchy and gathered in, but more like a great full circle that would swirl straight out if you spun around.

“That’s gorgeous, Katy!” my mother exclaimed, and she peeked down the dress to see the label sewn inside. “Neiman Marcus,” she announced. “What size are you?”

And Katy said, “Whatever size this dress is.” My mom held it up in front of her.

“I think you may be right. It’s darling. Let’s try it on.”

And it really was—both darling and Katy’s size. When she came out of the dressing room, which was just a tiny cubicle with a curtain hung in front of it, my mom and I both caught our breath.

“It’s beautiful!” The words just popped right out of my mouth. It was twenty times nicer than anything we’d seen all day—nicer than any dress I’d
ever
seen!

“Really?” said Katy.

“Look for yourself.” We turned her around to face the mirror on the wall. For a second she seemed shocked.

“Wow,” she finally murmured. “Who’s the fairest of them all?”

“You, by far,” I answered. My mom came up behind her.

“Look at the stitching. Even the little buttons. You simply have to have this dress.”

“Yeah,” said Katy dreamily. As she twirled around, the skirt swung out exactly as I’d known it would. Then she stopped.

“There’s just one thing.”

“What is it?” asked my mom.

Katy looked down. “Well, it comes from . . .
here.
”

“From here?”

“From a secondhand store. What if, like, Kendra—”

“Kendra? Why would you care what Kendra thinks?” My mom’s really nice, but sometimes even she doesn’t get things. She tells us stuff—like not to care what people think, or to be ourselves and not follow the crowd. Not that that isn’t good advice; it’s just not as easy as she thinks.

Now she said in a very firm voice, “Katy, you cannot
not
buy this dress because you’re worried about Kendra or anyone else. On the way home we’ll drop it at the cleaner’s. No one will ever know.”

Katy smiled and fluffed the skirt. “Thanks,” she said. “I love it.”

While Katy was changing, my mom took me back to the dress racks. She began to search in a very determined, serious way. And suddenly I realized: she was looking for a secondhand Goodwill dress for
me
! I stood a ways back and watched her. She seemed so fierce and businesslike, pushing the hangers along the rack, feeling the skirts, noting how the fabric hung. At some point she turned around. I thought she was going to speak to me, but she didn’t. She just narrowed her eyes and looked at me, and I felt my face get hot and red. I got the point. I guess it would have been mean of me to at least not
try
to find a dress, though I’d kind of been counting on something new.

By the time Katy joined us, the cherry red dress over her arm, I was flipping through the clothes rack too. And you know what? We did find a dress. It wasn’t as great as Katy’s, but it was really nice, much nicer than the boring stuff at Macy’s. It was navy blue with bright white trim around it, and my mom said her pearls—her real ones—would look “superb” with it.

On the way home after dinner, we dropped off our dresses at the dry cleaner’s. Mrs. Yu, who owns the store, exclaimed how beautiful they were. “Like a dress for a princess!” she said to us.

Katy was spending the night with me. It was Friday, so
Wild Star
was on TV. My parents knew it was our favorite show, so they fixed up the couch in the living room. We stretched ourselves out on the piles of comfy pillows and my mom served us ice cream while we watched. It was a repeat, but we didn’t care. We could have watched the same episode forty times and it wouldn’t have bothered us.

We were pretty tired by the time we got to bed that night. Katy was curled up on the blow-up mattress next to my bed, and I was dozing off on a pile of soft stuffed animals.

“Aunt Mimi?” she whispered suddenly.

“Johnny?” I thought she had fallen asleep.

“Do you know about me little cousin Jeremy?”

“What about ’im?”

“Did y’know he’s going away?”

“Jeremy?”

“Yeah. It’s been decided. He’s going away to a special school in London.”

For a second I didn’t answer. Then I said, “That’s better for ’im, Johnny.”

“You fancy?”

“Yeah. He’ll be with other kids like him.”

“Yeah, I s’pose.”

“And his mum won’t be so knackered.”

“True enough.” Her voice had gotten very soft. “It’s just that he might miss us.”

“But there’ll always be someone there with him.” I was trying to remember all the things my mom had said the other night. I don’t know why it was so hard.

“But they won’t be
us.
They’ll all be strangers he doesn’t know. And they won’t know how to help him—how sometimes he wants a certain toy. Or sometimes you have to rub his head. I just hate to think of him waking up in the middle of the night and calling for me or Bug Eye, and we won’t be there to hear him, so he’ll just keep calling louder, but no matter how loud he calls for us, he’ll wait and wait and we’ll never come.” She was crying now. I could hear the bubbles in her voice.

“Oh, Katy, they’ll come!” I got out of bed and plopped onto the blow-up mattress next to her. “My mom said there’d be special people always awake to go to him. It’s their job to stay awake all night.”

“But they aren’t us! And Sam’s such a baby, even though he’s really big.” I didn’t know what to say to her. I couldn’t remember the other good things my mom had listed. I wished she was there to tell Katy all the things she had told me. I didn’t know what else to do, so I reached for my oldest teddy bear and pushed him into Katy’s arms. She took him and held him really tight.

Then she said, “We’re taking him on Thursday. We’ll just drop him off. He has no idea.”

“My mom says he won’t understand. That it’s harder for you than it is for him.”

“I know my mom feels really bad. But she says it has to happen. She’s really afraid for me and Gem.”

“You called her Gem.”

“What?”

“Your sister. That’s the first time you ever called her Gem.”

“Bug Eye, I meant. She’s moving into Sam’s old room with all her stupid fairy stuff. We told our mom—both of us did—that we wanted her to take the room so she won’t have to keep sleeping on the couch. But she said she didn’t want to. She said she likes the stupid couch and wants Bug Eye to have a room. She wants us both to have a room.”

“Wow,” I said. “She’s really nice. Not many moms would do that, I bet.”

“Yeah, I know. She doesn’t always seem so nice, but that’s because she’s stressed and stuff.”

“And now just think, she won’t have to always feel so stressed.”

“Yeah,” said Katy softly. “And we won’t have to worry that Sam might end up hurting her.”

“You can visit Sam too,” I told her. “It’ll really be a treat for him.”

“I can go every day if I want to.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not like we’ll never see him again.”

“Heck, no,” I said. “And you can bring him Cheerios. And those cookies he likes. And that stringy cheese.”

“And his favorite,” said Katy. “Gummy worms.” She settled back down with my teddy bear and I kind of tucked them in. I climbed up to my own bed.

“I’m glad you’re my friend,” she whispered.

“And I’m glad you’re mine.”

“Good night, Anna.”

“Night, Katy.”

In a couple of minutes she was asleep. I lay there for a while listening to her even breaths, thinking about Sam. I hoped it was true what my mom had said, that he would be okay. Then I started to think of Tom. He’d be leaving too in a couple of months. I knew it wasn’t the same as Sam, but I also knew that in a way he would never come back. Oh sure, he’d be here for Thanksgiving and Christmas and maybe even the summer months. But he’d never really live here again the way you do when you’re a kid. I knew I was right about all this. If it wasn’t the way I thought it was, why would my mom be feeling so bad, missing him the way she did before he was even gone? Which I knew she did, even though she tried to pretend she was feeling fine. It seemed to me that college was a tunnel. Tom would go in and disappear and when he came out the other side, he wouldn’t be a kid at all. I didn’t want to think about any of it. The tunnel and Tom. And poor big Sam, waking in the night alone.