The Last Time We Say Goodbye
Page 44

“There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven,” intones Robert Plant.
The smell of Ty’s cologne is so heavy it makes me want to cough.
“Mom, what’s going on?” I ask.
She wipes at her face. Then she reaches and turns down the music.
“I called in sick.” She goes to the box and removes another poster—The Hangover Part II—and goes about realigning it in its former place on the wall. “Could you help me?”
I unfreeze my feet and hold the paper up for her as she carefully guides the tacks back into their original holes.
“Redecorating?” I venture.
“Gayle was here. She brought that.” Mom indicates the box. “She thought . . . it was time . . . for me to pack up . . .” She bends her head, gasps for air as the tears drop into the carpet. “Tyler’s things. She said it would help me . . . move on.”
I bite my lip to keep from bursting out with furious words for Gayle. How dare she, I think. How dare she come here and decide what’s best for everyone?
“Gayle wants me to sell the house,” Mom continues. “She wants me to move to Lincoln, closer to the hospital so it’s not so much trouble to drive in to work. She says I should get a smaller place, since Tyler’s gone and you’re going off to school and it will only be me. She also wants me to take a new job that’s come up in the neonatal intensive-care unit—work with the babies instead of having to deal with all the people who keep dying on me in the surgical wing.”
“Sounds like Gayle has it all figured out.” I sit on the edge of Ty’s bed.
Mom reaches into her pocket for a crumpled-up tissue. She blows her nose and goes back to the box, where she takes out an old catcher’s mitt, from when Ty was in Little League.
“Where did this go?” she whispers. Her eyes dart around the room. “I can’t remember.”
“Top right corner of the bookshelf,” I answer automatically.
She nods. “That’s right. Of course. You always had such a perfect memory. A photographic memory.”
She makes no move to return the glove to its place. She stands there holding it, rubbing her fingers along its smooth leather surface.
“I volunteered to coach T-ball that one year, do you remember?”
I remember.
“I got this book called Coaching Tee Ball: The Baffled Parent’s Guide. I didn’t know anything about baseball.”
“You learned.”
“Tyler was mortified to see me standing up there in front of everybody with that book.”
“He got over it.”
She stares at the mitt. “I tried,” she says after a minute.
“I know.”
“No, I mean, I tried to do what Gayle said. I tried to take it all down, put it away. I even thought about calling his friends and asking them if they would want some of it. But . . .” She takes a shuddering breath. “I can’t. I can’t let go.”
She starts crying for real now, in big, gasping sobs. I jump up to hold her.
“I can’t,” she cries against my shoulder. “I can’t.”
The hole opens up in my chest and I cling to her, and it’s as if the pain passes back and forth between us, until she goes limp in my arms.
I guide her to sit down on the bed.
“I have big news,” I say softly. “Good news.” Because we could both use some good news right now.
She looks up at me, bewildered, tear-streaked. “What?”
“I got into MIT.”
Her face opens up like a flower in the sun. She pulls away and stares at me for several moments, not talking, just looking at me with an expression that says maybe there is a God after all. Who has answered her prayers.
“I’m glad,” she whispers when she regains her powers of speech. “I’m so glad, Lexie.”
I try to smile. “Me too.”
“Now you can go,” she says fiercely.
“I can go?” I don’t understand.
She takes me by the shoulders and gives me a gentle shake. “You can build a new life for yourself. That’s what I want, for you to get away from this place. I want you to go to Massachusetts and never look back.”
She says it like we’re the last people in line for a lifeboat on a sinking ship, telling me to leave her. Telling me to let her drown.
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” I croak. “You can build a new life for yourself, too.”
She lets go of me and turns away. “No. My life is over.”
I’m shocked to hear her say it that way. She was always an optimist, before. Even when Dad left, after she got over the initial shock, she kept saying, “He’ll come to his senses. He’ll come back. We’ll go along the best we can until then. This isn’t the end of the world.” Even though it clearly was. The end of our world, anyway.
And now she’s saying her life is over.
“Mom . . .” I don’t even know where to start.
She’s not looking at me anymore; she’s staring at the mirror with the Post-it and the words below empty.
“You’re not dead,” I say, my voice sharper than I mean it to be. “You’re alive. It’s hard now but . . . you’ll heal. You can still be happy, someday.”
She goes to the bookshelf and returns the catcher’s mitt to its proper place. “No, sweetie,” she says in her official parenting voice, like I’m ten all over again and she’s telling me the facts of life. “I’ll never be happy. How could I, when he’s not here? When I have failed him this way? No. No. I will not heal from this. My life is over,” she says. “If you weren’t here I’d . . .” She trails off.