The Last Time We Say Goodbye Part 27

"Still." He refuses to let me take the wind out of his sails. "That's impressive. That's amazing. That's-"

"Can you stop?" I say.

He looks baffled. "Stop what?"

"Stop celebrating."

"Why? This is it, Lex. What we've dreamed about for you, all this time. The life we've wanted for you."

I can't hold it in. "Is it? This is the life you've always wanted for me?" I gesture around us, at all the happy people eating their happy steaks, celebrating anniversaries or birthdays or paychecks. "This?"

The waitress shows up with my salad and looks uncomfortable, because we're obviously having an argument.

"Hey, don't worry about it," I tell her. "Take it back. I'm not hungry anymore."

She sets the salad on the table anyway, then speed-walks away. I grab the MIT materials and return them to the envelope, then stuff it into my bag and start to gather up my coat.

"Peanut," Dad says.

"Don't call me that," I bark. "I am not your Peanut. You don't get to call me that anymore."

His expression hardens. "What is wrong with you? You're acting like a child."

"I am your child, technically speaking," I retort. "Or did you forget?"

He rears back like I slapped him. "Why are you so angry?"

Oh, let me count the ways: Because this is not what I wanted my life to be. This is not the situation I pictured in my head when I told my dad I was going to MIT. We should be gathered around the kitchen table, Mom, Dad, Ty, and me. I would pa.s.s the letter around to them, and everyone would be smiling, and Ty would tease me about being an egghead, and I would fake-punch him, and we would laugh and celebrate my escape from Nebraska, but it wouldn't feel like an escape from anything bad. I shouldn't be telling Mom in order to get her through a crying jag and Dad at some c.r.a.ppy chain restaurant and Ty in the cold ground.

But that's my life.

And can I say any of this to him? Can I say, You screwed up everything; it's all your fault, the way I said it so easily to Steven last month? Can I tell him what I really think, call him a cheater? A liar? All the pieces of broken gla.s.s that night in the park with Ty after Dad left us?

Of course I can't. If I told him those things, I would lose him more than I already have. I would lose him for good.

I can't lose anyone else.

But I can't tell him about the photo, either. About Ty wanting that s.p.a.ce in the collage for him. I can't.

He doesn't deserve that.

"I have to go," I say to Dad, my voice catching. "Enjoy your steak."

He stares after me as I storm out. I sit in the car for a few minutes, fogging up the winds.h.i.+eld with my ragged breaths, trying to get myself together enough to drive.

"Please, Lemon," I plead, stroking the steering wheel. "You can do this."

I turn the key. She starts up with an unhealthy little sputter, but she starts.

"Thank you," I breathe, and then I put her in gear, and I refuse to look at Dad's face in the window as I make my getaway.

Sadie McIntyre is waiting on the front porch when I get back to the house, sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette. I don't know why I'm surprised.

"Don't you park in the garage?" she asks as I come up the sidewalk, then figures it out and answers her own question. "Oh, right. Of course you don't."

"Did you want something?" I'm ready to take Mom's approach and go to bed early so that this "tremendous" day will be over. Stick a fork in me; I'm done.

"I wanted to check up on you," she says. "I haven't, like, talked to you for a while. Not since . . ."

"Patrick," I fill in. I lumber down onto the steps beside her. "I didn't see you at the funeral."

"I had to work," she says with a sideways glance: yep, guilt. "But those things are hard for me. It takes me back to when . . ."

"Me too."

We sit for a minute, her smoking, me trying not to breathe it in.

"You know what I remember most, from my dad's?" she says after a while. "People kept saying, 'It's going to be all right.' That's what they told me, over and over and over, like Don't you worry, little girl, it will all be okay, because there's got to be some bulls.h.i.+t overall rule of the universe that no matter what happens, no matter how bad it gets, everything will be all right in the end."

"Yeah," I murmur.

"And you know what I kept thinking? I kept thinking, That is a f.u.c.king lie. It is not going to be all right. It will never be all right, ever, ever again. So stop f.u.c.king lying to me."

"You thought that? How old were you, fifteen, that you thought 'stop f.u.c.king lying'?"

Her blue eyes crinkle up in amus.e.m.e.nt. "I had an advanced vocabulary for my age."

"So I gather."

She laughs and smokes.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there for you," I say after a minute. "You came to Ty's funeral, but I didn't go to your dad's."

She shrugs. "I wasn't there for you when your dad checked out, either. Plus I wouldn't have been able to appreciate you being there at the time, anyway."

"And knowing me, I probably would have said something stupid like 'It's going to be all right.'"

We both smirk.

"Well, you don't know until you know," she says. Then she's ready to change the subject. "So how's it going with the spirit situation? Have you seen him again?" she asks. "Since you gave the letter to Ashley? I want details."

I can't help but tense up. "I've seen him."

"A lot?"

"Yes. A lot." Like halfway through the state of Missouri in the backseat of the car a lot. "Anyway, there's something else now."

"Something else?" Sadie tries to sound like it's no big deal, but I can tell she's interested. She's able to see this Ty ghost thing as a simple mystery to be solved. Because it's not her house. Not her life.

"You remember the collage Ty made, for his own funeral? He put all of these pictures in a special frame?"

She looks appropriately somber. "Yes."

"And there was a blank s.p.a.ce in the collage."

She nods.

I sigh. "That s.p.a.ce was supposed to be for a picture of my dad. And I found the picture. And I feel like Ty wants . . . he would want me to give it to my dad."

"Oh. Okay. That sounds complicated."

"You're telling me." I lean my head back and wish there were stars to gaze up at, but the sky is muted by clouds, a dark, oppressive gray. It's March, but I can smell snow in the air. It feels like this winter is hanging on, that it's never going to end. I sigh. "I do not want to deal with my dad."

"I get that. Your dad's a douche," Sadie says.

I sit up. "What'd you say?"

"Your mom, she was-I mean, she is so great." Sadie puts her chin in her hand, her eyes lost in thought. "I always wished my mom could be more like your mom. My mom is so uptight about everything. Your mom was so laid-back and funny. She used to make pancakes shaped like teddy bears, with the chocolate chip eyes and the strawberry mouth, and she sewed you all these great costumes for Halloween, and you always got the best birthday cakes. My mom . . ." She shakes her head.

"Your mom was busy. She had a lot of kids to take care of," I say.

"I wish-" She stops herself.

It's not that hard to figure out what she was going to say. She wishes her dad were here.

Because her dad was the kind of dad all the kids wanted their dads to be. He was a fourth-grade teacher, but one of the cool ones, one of those who wore dress s.h.i.+rts rolled up at the sleeves, who could play Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay on his guitar, who didn't look dumb in sungla.s.ses. He had this big booming voice that made you sit up and listen, but he was always in a good mood.

Sadie flicks ashes off her cigarette. "So. You think Ty wants you to make up with your dad."

I remember the way I kept finding the empty frame on the floor in the hallway. The light on in the playhouse. The cologne. I could explain all those things away, but they seem to add up to something. They seem to add up to Ty.

"I don't know," I say. "I wish there were some way I could figure it out definitively, one way or the other-I'm crazy or I'm haunted-I don't care. I just want to know."

"I get that," Sadie says. "I went to a medium once. Did I tell you?"

I s.h.i.+ft on the step and stare at her. "No you didn't tell me. When was this?"

"Madam Penny." She takes a long drag, contorts her mouth to blow the smoke away from me. "About two years ago."

I reach over and take her cigarette out of her hand, chuck it in the s...o...b..nk.

"Hey. What the h.e.l.l?"

"I'm doing your lungs a favor. Anyway, Madam Penny," I push on before she has time to get truly mad at me. "What was that like? I want details."

She snorts. "It cost me a hundred bucks for a half hour. I was so sure I was going to be able to talk to my dad. I had this gold watch that he used to wear all the time, because her website said she worked better if you brought in an item that you a.s.sociated with the person you wanted to speak with."

I remember that watch. When Sadie's dad rolled up his sleeves to teach long division, we'd see it gleaming on his wrist. Sometimes during cla.s.s he'd pick one of the students to hold his watch and keep track of time when he read out loud to us-because he'd get lost in a story, he used to say.

"So what happened?" I ask.

"I got in there, and she immediately said she could feel someone on the other side reaching out to me, an older male figure, she said. A wise man."

"Yeah? Your dad?"

"Nope." She picks at a hole in the knee of her jeans. "Gregory, she said his name was. He was a monk who died in the twelfth century."

I stare at her, completely baffled. "What?"

Sadie laughs at my expression. "Madam Penny said he was my spirit guide. He was there to direct me on my soul path. We each have an invisible helper in this life, she said, someone to lead us and help us along our way."

"If that's the case, then my spirit guide is fired," I say.

"I know, right?"

"So . . . did you get to talk to your dad?" I ask, but I can already see the answer coming.

She looks off down the street for a few seconds before she answers. "No. She went on about this Gregory person for twenty minutes, and then I tried to get her to look at the watch and she started telling me about my grandfather, who died when I was two so I wouldn't have known him from Adam, and then she babbled on about a great lover I had in a past life, a guy in a bomber jacket who fought in the Second World War, who loved me like the moon and stars, I remember she said. He wanted to send me a message of love and forgiveness, she kept saying. Love and forgiveness. Forgiveness and loooooove. And then my time was up."

It's quiet. Then Sadie finally says, "So it was a huge waste of money."

I try to keep it positive. "Hey, but it was entertaining."

"Right. It was a real barrel of laughs."

"I'm sorry. That sucks."

She shakes her head. "I was naive. G.o.d. A hundred dollars. It kills me to think about all the stuff I could have bought with a hundred dollars back then."

"It was an experiment," I say. "You went in with an open mind."

"I really thought my dad would talk to me," she says. "I thought I would get all the answers."

She sniffles, and that's when I realize she's crying. It's been two years and she's still so disappointed that she didn't get to speak to her dad that the thought brings her to tears.

I envy her for that.

I reach into my backpack to find a pack of tissues, which I carry around on the off chance that one of these days my tear ducts will start working again and then I'll cry a fricking river. I hand her one. "But you still watch Long Island Medium," I point out as she takes it and dabs at her eyes. "You're still a believer, right?"

"Yeah, well, I prefer to think that Madam Penny was flawed."

"Seriously, seriously flawed," I agree.

"I was so p.i.s.sed. I egged her house later," Sadie confesses.

My mouth falls open. Then we both start snickering. Then outright laughing.

"You really are a delinquent," I observe when our laughter fades. "Wow. What did she look like? Was she all dark and mysterious and gypsy-like?"