Read What Happens to Goodbye Online

Authors: Sarah Dessen

What Happens to Goodbye (45 page)

I spent a lot of that week at the beach thinking about the last two years, picking through my yearbooks and pictures. I also hung out a lot with my mom, and as I did so, I realized I’d been wrong about assuming that she, too, had fully reinvented herself when she left Katie Sweet behind for Katherine Hamilton. Sure, she had the new family and look, as well as a huge beach house and the entire different world of being a coach’s wife. But I still caught glimpses here and there of the person I’d known before.
There was the comforting familiarity I felt, this strange sense of déjà vu, when I watched her with Connor and Madison, sitting on the floor building block towers or reading
Goodnight Moon
, both of them snuggled into her lap. Or how, when I found her iPod on the fancy portable stereo, I’d turn it on to find some of the same music that was on my dad’s: Steve Earle and Led Zeppelin mixed in with the Elmo and lullabies.
Then there was the fact that every night, when the twins were asleep, the first thing she’d do was take a glass of wine out to the deck, where I’d find her looking up at the stars. And despite the high-tech kitchen created to make gourmet meals, I was surprised and pleased to see that she stuck to her old basics, fixing dinner casseroles and chicken dishes that began, always, with a single can of Cream Of soup. The biggest proof, though, was the quilt.
I’d brought it to my room with the rest of the stuff in the bins when we came back from the Poseidon. A couple of nights later, when the temperature suddenly dropped, I pulled it out and used it, wrapping it around me. The next morning, I was brushing my teeth when I stuck my head out of the bathroom to see my mom standing by my bed, where I’d folded it over the foot, holding one corner in her hand.
“I thought this was packed away downstairs,” she said when she saw me.
“It was,” I said. “But I found it when I found the pictures and yearbooks.”
“Oh.” She smoothed her hand over one square. “Well, I’m glad it’s getting some use.”
“It is,” I replied. “It was a godsend last night. The twins clearly had lots of warm clothes when they were babies.”
She looked at me. “The twins?”
“The squares are made of their baby clothes. Right?”
“No,” she said. “I ... I thought you knew. They’re yours.”
“Mine?”
She nodded, holding up the corner that was between her thumb and forefinger. “This cotton bit here? It was from the blanket you came home from the hospital in. And this embroidered piece, the red one, was a part of your first Christmas dress.”
I moved closer, looking at the quilt closely. “I had no idea.”
She lifted up another square, running her fingers over it. “Oh, I loved this little denim piece! It was from the cutest overalls. You took your first steps when you were wearing them.”
“I can’t believe you saved all that stuff for so long,” I said.
“Oh, I couldn’t let it go.” She smiled, sighing. “But then
you
were going, and it seemed like a way to send some of me along with you.”
I thought of her sitting with all those squares, carefully quilting them together. The time it must have taken, especially with twin babies. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said.
She looked up at me, surprised. “Sorry? For what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just ... not thanking you for it, I guess.”
“Oh goodness, Mclean,” she replied, shaking her head. “I’m sure that you did. I was a total emotional wreck that day left. I barely remember anything about it, other than you were leaving and I didn’t want you to.”
“Can you tell me about the rest?” I asked, picking up my own corner, where there was a pink cotton square.
“Really?” she said. I nodded. “Oh, well. Let’s see. That one there was from the leotard you wore for your first dance recital. I think you were five? You had fairy wings, and ...”
We stood there for a long time, with her moving from square to square, explaining the significance of each. All these little pieces of who I’d been once, with her to remember for me, stitched together into something real I could hold in my hands. There was a reason I’d found it, too, that night I’d run away. It was waiting for me. Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.
Now, in Lakeview, I looked back at the model, where Deb was busy adjusting a couple of buildings on the far corner, and realized that, like my mother with the quilt, I could see a history within it that someone else would miss. The sectors just left of center, a bit sloppy and uneven, that Jason, Tracey, Dave, and I had started on the day the councilwoman arrived all those weeks ago. The thickly settled neighborhoods I’d labored over endlessly, sticking one tiny house on at a time. Tracy’s old bank, next to the grocery store she’d been banned from, and that empty building, unmarked and unremarkable to anyone but me. And then, all around, the dragons, the parts not mapped, yet to be discovered.
If the quilt was my past, this model was my present. And looking at it, I saw not just myself in bits and pieces, but everyone and everything I’d come to know in the last few months. Mostly, though, I saw Dave.
He was in the rows of houses, so meticulous, in much straighter lines than the ones I’d done. In the buildings downtown he knew by heart, naming them easily without even having to look at the map. All over the complicated intersections he’d taken charge of, maintaining that only he, as a former maker of models, could handle such responsibility. He was on every piece he or I had added during our long afternoons together up here, talking and not talking, as we carefully assembled the world around us.
“So,” I said now to Deb, who’d moved over to the table, where she was sorting plastic bags of landscaping pieces, “the new deadline’s the second week of April. That’s, what? Four weeks or so?”
“Twenty-six days,” she replied. “Twenty-five and a half, if you count it to the minute.”
“But look how much you have done,” I said. “It’s almost finished.”
“I wish!” She sighed. “I mean, yes, most of the buildings are done, and we just have a couple of final sectors to do. But then there’s all the environmental and civic detail. Not to mention repair. Heather took out an entire apartment complex the other day with one of her boots.” She snapped her fingers. “It went down just like
that
.”
“So she really worked on this over break?” I said.
“Well, working is a broad term,” Deb replied. She thought for a second, then said, “Actually, I take that back. She’s very good with detail. She put in that entire forest line over there on the upper right-hand corner. It’s the bigger stuff she tends to mess up. Or, um, destroy.”
“I can late,” I said, more to myself than to her. Still, though, I felt her glance over, so I added, “Sorry. It’s been kind of a long week.”
“I know.” She picked up a bag of tiny plastic pieces, walking over to me. “Look, Mclean. About that whole
Ume.com
thing ...”
“Forget it,” I told her.
“I can’t,” she said softly. She looked up at me. “I just ... I want you to know I understand. I mean, why you might have done that. All the moves ... It couldn’t have been easy.”
“There were better ways I could have dealt with it,” I replied. “I get that now.”
She nodded, then tore open the bag. Looking closer, I saw that it was filled with tiny figures of people: walking, standing, running, sitting. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all jumbled up together. “So what’s the deal with those? Are we going to just put them anywhere, or is there a set system of arrangement?”
“Well, actually,” she said, taking out a handful and spreading them in her palm, “that’s been a big topic of discussion.”
“Really.”
“Yeah,” she said. “See, the manual doesn’t specify, I guess because the people are optional, really. Some towns chose to leave them off entirely and just have the buildings. Less cluttery.”
I looked back at the model. “I can see that. It would seem kind of empty, though.”
“Agreed. A town needs a population,” she said. “So I thought we should devise a sector system, like we did with the buildings, with a certain number of figures per area, and make sure they are diverse in their activities so there’s not repetition.”
“Activities? ”
“Well, you wouldn’t want all the bicyclists to be on one side, and all the people walking dogs on the other,” she told me. “I mean, that would be wrong.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
“Other people, however,” she continued, clearing her throat, “feel that by organizing the people, we are removing the life force from the entire endeavor. Instead, they think that we should just arrange the figures in a more random way, as that mirrors the way the world actually is, which is what the model is supposed to be all about.”
I raised my eyebrows. “So this is Riley saying this?”
“What?” she asked. “Oh, no. Riley was totally down with the people-sector thing. It’s Dave. He’s, like, adamant.”
“Really.”
“Oh, God, yes,” she replied. “To be honest, it’s been a bit of a conflict between us. But I have to respect his opinion, because this is a collaborative effort. So we’re working on a compromise.”
I bent down by the model, studying a cul-de-sac, until I felt her move away, turning her attention to something else.
Compromise,
I thought, remembering the one Dave had been working on with his parents, and mine with my mom. It was that give-and-take he’d talked about, the rules that were always changing. But what happened when you followed all the rules and still couldn’t get what you wante? It didn’t seem right.
“So,” Deb said now, bending down by the far left edge of the model, “about the restaurant closing. Does that mean ... you’re moving to Australia? That’s the rumor, according to the grapevine. That your dad got a job there.”
Typical restaurant gossip, distorted as always. “It’s Hawaii,” I told her. “And I’m not going with him.”
“Are you staying here?”
“No,” I said. “I can’t.”
She turned, padding back over to the other end, by the tree line Heather had done. She bit her lip as she bent down over it, adjusting a couple of trunks. Finally she said, “Well, honestly ... I think that sucks.”
“Whoa,” I said. For Deb, these were strong words. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I!” She looked up, her face flushed. “I mean, it’s bad enough that you’re going to go. But you didn’t even tell us it was in the works! Were you just going to take off and disappear, just like that?”
“No,” I said, although I wasn’t sure this was entirely true. “I just ... I didn’t know where I was going, and when. And then the whole
Ume.com
thing ...”
“I understand, it was crazy.” She took a step closer to me. “But seriously, Mclean. You have to promise me you won’t just leave. I’m not like you, okay? I don’t have a lot of friends. So you need to say goodbye, and you need to stay in touch, wherever you go. Okay?”
I nodded. She was so emotional, on the verge of tears. This was what I’d wanted to prevent with all those quick disappearances, the tangledness of farewells and all the baggage they brought with them. But now, looking at Deb, I realized what else I’d given up: knowing for sure that someone was going to miss me.
What happened to goodbye,
Michael in Westcott had written on my
Ume.com
page. I was pretty sure I knew, now. It had been packed away in a box of its own, trying to be forgotten, until I really needed it. Until now.
“Okay then,” Deb said, her voice tight. She drew in a breath, then let it out, letting her hands drop to her sides. “Now, if you don’t mind, I really think we should tackle these last two sectors before we go tonight.”
“Absolutely,” I replied, relieved to have something concrete to do. I followed her over to the other table, where the last group of assembled houses and other buildings were lined up, labeled and ready to be put on. Deb collected one set, I took the other, and we walked over to the far right top corner, the very end of the pinwheel. As I bent down, taking the adhesive off the bottom of a gas station, I said, “I’m glad there was something left to do. I was worried all this would be finished by the time I got back here.”
“Well, actually, it would have been,” she said, pushing a house onto her sector. “But I saved these for you.”
I stopped what I was doing. “You did?”
“Yeah.” She put a house on, pressing it until it clicked, then looked at me. “I mean, you were here at the very beginning, when this all started, before I even was. It’s only right that you get to be a part of the ending, as well.”
“You’re welcome,” she replied. And then, side by side, and without saying another word, we finished the job together.

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