The Last Time We Say Goodbye (3 page)

IT'S LATER THAT NIGHT WHEN IT HAPPENS.

It's a typical night, post-Ty. I'm in the downstairs den in my pj's, lounging in Dad's abandoned recliner. Mom is upstairs on the living room sofa, still wearing her work scrubs, reading
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
. She's highlighting every few lines, the way she does with these kinds of books that people keep giving us, like every single thing the author says is aimed directly at her. But at least she's not crying. She's not going on about ghosts. She's functional.

So I've left her studying and have spent the better part of the past few hours crunching slightly burned microwaved kettle corn and fast-forwarding through commercials on the DVR, watching
Bones
. I plan to watch reruns of season two until I get too tired to follow the plot, thus too tired to run through today's little calculus debacle over and over in my head.

The evening has pretty much been one gnarly corpse after another.

I'm trying to immunize myself to the sight of the dead. To think of us, of all the living creatures under the sun, as meat. Sour milk. Green goo. Whatever. Something that, inevitably, will rot. I don't know why, but it helps me to see death as inescapable and unavoidable and certain.

Yeah, it's messed up, I realize. But you do what you have to do.

And so it happens that at exactly 10:11, just as I am finishing up episode seventeen, I smell my brother's cologne.

Strong.

SMELL ME,
it says.
HERE I COME.

I don't have time to process this. If I could stop and process it, I would rationalize that the bottle of cologne is much closer to where I'm sitting (in the basement, only approximately fifteen feet from the basement bathroom) than it was to Mom when she smelled it upstairs last night. It would be easy to explain away.

But I don't have time to process. Because right then I glance away from the television for a split second, to check the time on my phone, and when I look up . . .

There he is.

Standing by the door to his room in his favorite jeans and a white T-shirt.

Ty.

I don't think.

I yelp and throw my phone at him.

He vanishes before it reaches him, like a bolt of lightning
flashing across the sky, his image there and then gone. My phone strikes the wall hard with a sickening crunch.

“Lexie?” calls my mother from upstairs, her voice muffled by the layers of wood and carpet between us. “What was that?”

I can't catch my breath.

Ty.

“Lex?” Mom calls again.

“I'm fine,” I call. “Everything's fine. . . .” I make myself get up and go over and collect my phone. My hands are shaking as I try to assess the damage, and not just because I saw Ty. Because I've broken my phone.

Because there's something on my phone I don't ever want to lose. That I can't lose. I can't.

I push the power button and stare at the cracked black screen. My own fractured reflection stares back. I look completely freaked out.

The screen flashes.

It goes on. Reboots.

I close my eyes for a few seconds. Please, I think. Please.

Miraculously, aside from the cracked screen, the phone seems fine. I scroll through the messages, back and back, through the hundreds of concerned texts that have piled up over the past six weeks, the
so sorry to hear
s and
I'm praying for you and your family
s and
let us know if
s, to a text dated December 20.

The night Ty died.

It's still there.

My vision blurs so I can't see the words, but I don't need to see
them anymore. I don't know why, really, the idea of losing this text put me in such a panic. I will never lose this text. It will be stamped in my brain for the rest of my life.

I let myself breathe. It takes me two or three good deep breaths before I can even attempt to get my head around what just happened.

Tyler.

Ty. The word is like a heartbeat.

I stare at the spot where he was standing. “Ty,” I whisper.

But the room is empty.

My brother's not here.

This is pointless.

The last time I saw Ty

No.

It wasn't real.

The last time I saw Ty happy

Okay, so Ty never seemed that unhappy, really, not the kind of unhappy you need to be to

He was getting better

He'd been okay. He'd been—

Sure he was sad sometimes. Aren't we all sad sometimes?

He had his reasons for what he did:

Dad

Megan

that girl Ashley

his stupid shallow jock friends

Mom

me

the way it must have felt like nobody was ever there for him

the general suckiness of life

But then again, life bites for most of us. And we don't all exit this world via a bullet to the chest.

I should get this over with.

The last time I saw Ty happy, really and truly happy, was the night of the homecoming dance. October 11th. He'd asked a girl and she'd said yes. He was picking her up at 8. The first part I remember with him being happy was probably around 7:15, when he appeared behind me in the bathroom mirror just as I was finishing up my makeup.

He said I looked nice.

I made a face at him, because I hate makeup. I hate wearing my contacts. I hate the whole high school dance scene, really, the drama of it all, the uncomfortable dresses and the cheesy pictures and the lame punch everybody stands around sipping so they don't have to talk. I get claustrophobic around large groups of people—it's something about how stuffy the air becomes with so many bodies pressing in around you. I have to have my own space. I need to breathe.

But Steven made the argument that dances are rites of passage, and even though they are kind of torture, they are a necessary evil.

“We go so we'll have proof that we were once young,” he said.

Really I think he just wanted to see me in a dress.

Anyway, Ty said I looked nice.

“Uh-huh. What do you want?” I asked, suspicious.

“I need your help,” he said. “It's important, Lex, and I can't do it without you. Please.”

Our eyes met in the mirror. We had the same eyes (Dad's), hazel with a circle of gold around the pupil. We had the same nose (Mom's), with the same slight bump at the bridge. We had the same brown, curly hair that always looked good on Ty with the help of a lot of product, and wild on me, because I don't care to mess with it. Whenever I looked at my brother, I was struck by how he was like a slightly improved copy of myself, in the looks department, anyway.

His expression was so serious that I instantly caved.

“Okay, sure,” I said. “What is it?”

He held up a pair of Mom's tweezers. “I need you to fix my unibrow.”

I pushed him away. “Yuck! No way! I am not responsible for anything hygiene-related.”

“Please!” he begged.

“Do it yourself!”

“I tried. I can't. I don't know how!”

“They have salons for that kind of thing, don't they?”

“It's too late for that. I have to pick her up in less than an hour. Come on, Lex. I look like Bert from
Sesame Street
. You have to help me.”

Then he turned on the puppy-dog eyes. I ended up heating the little
pot of wax I use to do my own eyebrows—I'd look like Bert, too, if I left it up to nature, and while I might not be super concerned about my appearance most of the time, there was an incident in 9th grade when Jamie Bigelow called me a hairy cavewoman, and thereafter I started to pluck and shave and generally torture myself in the name of femininity.

Ty sat on the bathroom counter while I spread the wax carefully between his eyes. I pressed the cloth down and smoothed it in the direction of the hair growth. Ty gripped the edge of the counter, hard, and took a deep breath.

“I trust you,” I remember he said. “Don't make me look like a freak.”

“You already look like a freak,” I said, but he knew I was joking. “Okay, I'm going to count to three. . . .”

But I didn't count. I just ripped off the strip.

Ty fell backward off the counter, howling, clutching at his face.

“Ow!” he screamed. “You crazy bitch!”

I was shocked. Ty didn't swear. Neither of us did. When we were kids, Mom was always giving us a hard time for the way we instinctively dressed down swear words: heck, crap, dang, a-hole, butt, freaking, and so on. If it means the same thing, Mom used to scold, why say it at all? I guess that lecture affected us, because Ty and I couldn't seem to swear with the proper conviction. Coming from us, bad words sounded stilted and unnatural.

So, wow. Crazy bitch. I'd never been called a bitch before. I found I didn't like it.

“A-hole!” I shot back in a kind of knee-jerk reaction. “Imbecilic butthead!”

“Sadistic harpy shrew!”

“Blubbering manchild!” I retorted.

“Gleeful hair snatcher!”

“Dick!” I yelled awkwardly.

Then we were laughing. Hard. We laughed and laughed, the clutch-your-sides type of laughing where you end up almost crying. We laughed until it hurt. Then we both sighed, and Ty rubbed his face, and we went back to the mirror to inspect my work.

Which didn't look good.

Because the hair was gone—that much was true—but now there was a hot pink stripe of angry skin between Ty's eyebrows. It looked like he'd been attacked by a neon highlighter.

“Uh-oh,” I snickered.

“Lex . . . ,” he said, “what did you do to me?”

I told him it would be better tomorrow.

He gave me a look.

Then he told me how he really liked this girl he was taking to the dance—Ashley, he said her name was—and he wanted to impress her, and I had just basically ruined his life.

“Hold on, don't get your undies in a wad.” I got out a cotton ball to apply the soothing oil that comes with the wax.

The soothing oil, unfortunately, did not live up to its name. We waited 10 minutes post-oil, and his face still looked like someone had branded him between the eyes with a hot iron.

We tried icing it. We tried lotion. We tried hemorrhoid cream, which was one of my more ingenious ideas, but at the end of all that his face was, if anything, pinker.

“Lex,” he said. “I think I have to strangle you now.”

He was only half kidding.

“There's only one thing left to do,” I said gravely.

I held up my bottle of foundation.

He didn't fight it. He stood still while I painted on a layer of Clinique Stay-Matte Oil-Free foundation carefully between his brows. It was a shade too light for his skin, but better than the pink. I also had to cover a large portion of his forehead, so it would blend in.

“Well, now I feel totally emasculated,” he said when I was finished.

“Shut up or I'll get out the lipstick,” I teased, and then he ran away, downstairs to apply his cologne and finish getting ready. A few minutes later Mom came home from work, and before we left she made Ty and me stand together by the front door for a picture.

“Look at my two beautiful children,” I remember she said. Ty slung his arm around me, and I leaned my head into his shoulder, and we smiled. The camera flashed. Mom turned away to dig something out of her purse, and Ty suddenly kissed my cheek, the gross, slobbery razz sort of kiss, which made me pull away and punch him in the shoulder.

“Get out of here, brat,” I said, wiping at my cheek.

Mom handed him her car keys.

“Midnight,” she said.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” he answered.

She squinted up into his face. “Are you wearing . . . makeup?”

He shrugged like he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Well, you look nice,” she said after a minute.

He did. His suit fit him perfectly, and he was dashing in it. Of course I didn't say that, because I was his sister and that would have
been weird. But he looked, I thought then, like he was finally comfortable in his own skin. Relaxed. Ready to be himself.

“Be a gentleman,” Mom said.

“Yes, ma'am.” He smiled and saluted her, and then he was gone. She turned to me with parental nostalgia written all over her face.

“My babies are growing up,” she sighed.

I rolled my eyes, and then Steven was knocking at the door, come to whisk me off, to prove that yes, once upon a time, we were young.

I can't recall a lot of the dance, but I do remember that when we arrived in the commons, which was set up with silver streamers and blue and white helium balloons and strobe lights, Steven took my hand and twirled me in a circle so that he could take in my dress. I was wearing a sleeveless belted A-line that came to my knee, black lace over green satin, that I'd splurged $79 for at Macy's.

“You look like Euler's equation,” he murmured as he looked me up and down.

Nerd translation: Euler's equation is said to be the most perfect formula ever written. Simple but elegant. Beautiful.

“Thank you,” I said, blushing, and I tried to think of a similar compliment, maybe general relativity or Callan-Symanzik, but instead I went with, “You look hot. Seriously.”

Steven smiled. He's a good-looking guy, with brown eyes and golden-brown hair and straight, orthodontically enhanced white teeth, but the people around us don't usually see that. They see how excited he gets about physics class. They see the calculator in his
back pocket. They see his glasses.

He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. “Come, my lady,” he said, “let us dance.”

We bobbed awkwardly on the dance floor for a while, and soon Beaker and Eleanor came over with their dates, and we quietly poked fun at the girly girls with their poufy hair in their poufy dresses. Then we hypocritically admired one another's dresses, and got our pictures taken for the sake of posterity, and danced some more.

And then there's this part I remember so clearly. I was dancing with Steven to a slow song, and I let my head drop onto his chest, where I could feel his heart beating. The song was Christina Perri's “A Thousand Years.” We'd laughed at how cheesy it was, how over-the-top sentimental, and made a couple of
Twilight
jokes, but then we'd fallen right into dancing. It's a good song for dancing. Steven had his hands at the small of my back, his face in the crook of my shoulder, his breath heating my skin, and I had this moment of sudden euphoria. We're right together, I thought. We fit.

It felt like Euler's equation.

I lifted my head, and he lifted his. Our eyes met. Our legs brushed as we swayed slowly back and forth.

“Darling, don't be afraid, I have loved you for a thousand years,” crooned Christina Perri. “I'll love you for a thousand more.”

Wait, I thought. Hold on.

I had this whole big life ahead of me, college and a career and adulthood, and this was no time to be “falling in love” with anyone. We were too young for that. Hormones, I could understand. Dating and messing around and finding out what it was to kiss and be kissed,
all of that made sense. But this—the way I felt in Steven's arms right then—it felt like more than hormones.

It felt like so much more.

I tightened my arms around Steven's neck and lowered my head again. His heart, when I laid my cheek against his chest, was beating fast.

So was mine.

Randomly I glanced over and saw Ty about 10 feet away, dancing with a girl—Ashley, I assumed. I didn't see her face, just the back of her pale pink gown sweeping the floor and her golden hair tumbling in deliberate waves down her shoulders. But I saw Ty clearly. His eyes were closed, his fingers spread against her hip as he moved with her. He wasn't smiling, but there was a quiet contentment on his face. A stillness.

He looked as happy as I'd ever seen him.

Then, as if he could sense me watching, he opened his eyes, spotted me. Grinned.

Bitch, he mouthed.

I grinned back, then pointed to the space between my eyebrows. Are you wearing makeup? I mouthed.

He subtly gave me the finger.

I laughed out loud, which made Steven pull back and ask, “What's so funny?”

“Nothing,” I said, trying to contain my giggles. “My brother's a goofball.”

Steven turned and gave Ty the what's-up-bro nod, which Ty returned.

Guys and their codes.

“I like your brother,” Steven said.

“He likes you.” I smiled because it was true—Ty thoroughly approved of Steven as my boyfriend. “That guy's all right,” he told me once. “He gets you.” And back then it was true. Steven did get me.

The violins swelled to their final crescendo and then faded. We stopped dancing and looked at each other.

“What now?” Steven asked me.

“Now we drink the lame punch,” I quipped, and away we went.

I don't remember the rest of the dance. It's lost along with all the other insignificant passing seconds of my life. Me. Steven. Ty. Ticking away. I didn't know to savor that moment on the dance floor, to understand how beautiful and rare it was, how fragile, how ephemeral, when Ty was happy. When we were all happy, and we were together, and we were safe.

I didn't know.

I didn't know.