Goodbye for Now: A Novel Read online

  Julia walked into the kitchen, fished the flyers out of the recycling bin, and smoothed them on the counter.

  Meredith raised her eyebrows at her mother. “I thought making ceramic gnomes was undignified and small?”

  “Right, small. So I was thinking elves.” Julia managed a little smile to accompany her little joke.

  “You’re keeping flyers for sentimental value?” Meredith wondered.

  “Nagging from the great beyond,” said Julia. “Best kind.”

  On Thursday, everyone needed a break. Uncle Jeff and Aunt Maddie took Kyle and Julia for a fancy lunch at their fancy hotel. Dash and Meredith—secretly, guiltily thrilled—went through Livvie’s jewelry.

  “Grandma would say toss it all,” declared Meredith giddily from the center of the bed surrounded by piles of pearls, gold chains, pewter charms, fake and real diamond necklaces, jade bracelets, and giant rings. Some of it was valuable. Most of it was not. Some of it was gorgeous. Most of it was not. She was wearing three strands of pearls (white, pink, and mother-of), two gold necklaces (one with a locket that wouldn’t open, one with a poodle charm from when Livvie’d owned a dog—before Meredith’s time), a newly paired pair of earrings (one dangly silver hoop, one blue stud), and four rings which ranged from Livvie’s wedding band to a red-and-purple plastic one Meredith had won for her at a fair in sixth grade. Dash had on one very fake diamond tiara, a macaroni necklace he had made himself, rings on every single finger (few of them even as elegant as the red-and-purple plastic one), and, over his heart, competing ivory brooches.

  “Give me one of those,” said Meredith.

  “They’re a matched set,” Dash protested.

  “One’s a dragon and one’s a tiger.”

  “Exactly. They’re going to duke it out. We have to see who wins.”

  He looped a charm bracelet around his ankle. It dangled four gold pendants with silhouettes of Jeff, Julia, Dash, and Meredith as babies.

  “You’re taking all the good stuff,” Meredith whined.

  “Girl, I am rocking this family anklet. You could not pull this off.”

  “At least give me the tiara.”

  “Okay look, four piles,” said Dash. “One for your mom, one for you, one for me, and one for OLSA.”

  “OLSA?”

  “Old Ladies’ Salvation Army.”

  “Even they wouldn’t want some of this.”

  “Grandma would want me to have these,” said Dash, holding up clip-on coral sun and moon earrings.

  “Grandma would have said those earrings are hideous,” said Meredith.

  “They’re hers.”

  “And I’m sure they were very stylish when she bought them in 1947, but they are not now.”

  “I will rock these earrings,” said Dash, clipping them on.

  “Do her proud,” said Meredith.

  On Friday, they were down to what was left. It was a lot, and it wasn’t much. Her telephone, her knitting supplies, her junk drawer full of what everyone’s junk drawer is full of—Scotch tape and extra scissors and delivery menus and expired coupons and rubber bands and paper clips and empty key chains. They found M&M’s she’d hidden for Meredith and Dash one afternoon when they were five and bored (they had found most of them but not all, apparently) and VCR tapes that had fallen behind the TV and unused coloring books either forgotten from when she had small grandchildren or maybe just in case any little kids stopped by. And all her furniture. They’d called the actual Salvation Army and were waiting for them to come by, and Uncle Jeff was on the phone with a real estate agent—it got that far—before Meredith said:

  “I’m moving in.”

  “Where?” said her mother absently.

  “Here. Grandma’s house. I want to move in.”

  “It’s an old-lady apartment,” said Uncle Jeff.

  “Grandma lived here when she was a newlywed,” said Meredith. “She had little kids here. She had teenagers here.”

  “Lot of history,” said Dash. “Lot of memories.”

  “That’s a bad thing?”

  “Might be hard. Might be too heavy.”

  “Grandma would want me to live here,” said Meredith.

  “Lot of ugly furniture,” added Dash. It was true. Some of the furniture was ugly enough to resist even nostalgia.

  “I’d get rid of my place and pay you guys rent,” Meredith said to her mother and uncle.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Uncle Jeff. “You’re family. It’s yours as much as anyone’s. It’s not about the money.”

  “Grandma would want you to live here,” her mother acknowledged, “if that’s what you want. But not if it’s going to make you sad and depressed and mopey. Not if it’s just because you can’t let go.”

  “I can’t let go,” said Meredith. “But that’s not why I want to stay.”

  Later that night, Jeff and Maddie went back to their hotel, and Kyle and Julia went back to Meredith’s, and Dash stayed at Sam’s, while Sam himself began unwrapping all of the carefully wrapped plates and cups and glasses and bowls and putting them back on the shelves where he found them. Meredith’s feeling was that her postcollege, mismatched, thrift-store china had nothing on her grandmother’s. Meredith’s feeling was that they belonged in these cabinets. Meredith’s feeling was, “That’s what my grandmother would say I should do.”

  “You always know what your grandmother would say,” said Sam.

  “I’ve known her all my life.”

  “But what about what you want?”

  “I want what she wants. Wanted. She wants what’s best for me, and that’s what I want as well.”

  “Me too,” said Sam. “How about I finish unpacking plates and stuff here, and you go home and pack up your stuff.”

  “I can start that tomorrow.”

  “Last night with Dash and your folks? Your aunt and uncle? Maybe you’d like to spend tonight with your family.”

  “I think you are my family,” Meredith said. And then she said, “You need to go home and pack too.”

  “Why?”

  “Move in here with me.”

  “What?”

  “Move in here with me.”

  “Oh, Merde, it’s way too soon.”

  “You wanted to move in before you left for London.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “You were not.”

  “I was … delirious with happiness.”

  “Emphasis on the happiness.”

  “Emphasis on the delirious.”

  “Your place is too small. My place is too … mine. This place is just right,” Meredith said. “Besides, my grandmother would say that you should stay.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Would she have liked me?”

  “Are you kidding? She would have loved you.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “You’re smart. You’re funny. You’re a baseball fan. You make good popcorn. But mostly, you’re awfully kind to her granddaughter.”

  “I’m unemployed. Grandmothers hate the unemployed.”

  “Nice to her granddaughter would trump that. Trust me,” said Meredith.

  “I wish I knew her,” said Sam. “She seems like an amazing person.”

  “I can’t believe you never met her. I can’t believe you’ll never meet her.”

  “I’ll get to know her anyway.”

  “How?”

  “By living in her house,” said Sam. “By loving her granddaughter.”

  They finished packing and moving their own stuff into Livvie’s over the course of a couple weeks. But that first night after her family left, Meredith went home and untied all of her model airplanes. When Sam got back to their new apartment, he found clean sheets on the bed, two dogs in the kitchen, and hundreds of model airplanes hanging from the rafters. Then he and Meredith went into the bedroom to properly christen it as their own.

  Afterward, Sam watched the airplanes tracing swinging shadows over both their b
odies, airplane shadows over his chest and stomach and feet, like strange tattoos over her face, her breasts, circling her navel like an air base.

  “How many are there?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know actually. I lost count at some point.” She raised one naked leg and pointed with her toes to a World War II Hellcat in the corner painted a sloppy mess of pinks and purples. “That one’s the first one. My dad built it. But I painted it.”

  “I guessed.”

  “I was a pacifist, but we lived on an island. It was hard to find model kits that weren’t warplanes. I’d build them then paint over their insignias in pastel hearts and flowers. I’d put little plastic puppies in the cockpits. I’d replace their machine guns with pretzel sticks.”

  “Why’d you start making them in the first place?”

  She shrugged. “Probably there was no reason why. Probably the reason was if they didn’t give me something focused to do, I tore around the studio and broke things. If you’re going to make pottery for a living, you have to find a way to corral your toddler.”

  “You longed to fly maybe? Escape?”

  “I think it was about achievement instead. You know, like, ‘Look what we can do—fly!’ And look what a kid can do too—take a big pile of wood and a bottle of glue and some paint and mess with it all afternoon until it makes an airplane. Maybe that’s what my parents wanted to give me—a sense that I could do anything.”

  “I wish I’d known you then,” said Sam.

  “Why?”

  “You must have been the smartest, sweetest, funniest little girl.”

  “Yeah, but it would have been creepy if you’d thought that when I was six.”

  “Not if I were six too. I could have helped you build planes.”

  “You still could.”

  “Where would we put them?” Sam asked.

  “That’s why I started hanging them from the ceiling. I ran out of room on the shelf. But on the ceiling is where they belonged all along. They’re airplanes—they should fly. And then at night I’d have flying dreams.”

  “Everyone has flying dreams,” said Sam.

  “Not like mine,” said Meredith.

  ABSENT IS ABSENT

  What happened next happened because Sam couldn’t stand to see Meredith so unhappy. It happened because he was desperate to help. It happened because he was still in the trying-to-prove-his-love-and-win-her-heart phase. It happened because he was unemployed and had the time, and summer waned into fall, and the weather got wetter and colder and more discouraging. Mostly, it happened because he was just cocky enough to believe that it could. That and he had no idea where it would lead. None at all. How could he possibly?

  It happened too because Sam was stunned to find himself jealous, envious, of Meredith’s grandmother’s death. Not her dying—Sam didn’t want that, obviously—and not the loss of a loved one, of course; what Sam coveted were the memories. This took him a while to figure out. First he thought he just felt bad for Meredith. Then he thought he just felt sad because she was sad. For a bit, he thought it was that he never had the chance to meet Livvie. For a bit, he thought he was being a selfish asshole who just wanted his girlfriend to get over it already—old people die!—so that she could get back to being the nondepressed, nonmorose, nondejected woman he vaguely remembered. But no, it was none of that. Sam was missing his mom. And that was hard.

  That was hard because it’s hard to miss someone you’ve barely met. It’s hard to miss someone you can’t remember. Missing is remembering. They are the same act. They are part and parcel. But Sam didn’t have a single actual memory of his mother, so it was hard to, odd to, miss her. It was more like the other kind of missing—missing a bus rather than missing a loved one. He was aware that something huge had passed him by, but without memories to dwell on and pore over, it was hard to hang on to what it was.

  She died in a car accident when he was thirteen months old. His dad said Sam was already saying, “Mama,” his first word, that he adored her and wailed when she left the room even for a moment, that they couldn’t leave him with a babysitter because his mother couldn’t pry Sam out of her arms, so ferocious was his grip. Sam believed these stories, not because he thought his dad would never lie to him—to give him back even a small piece of his mother, to fabricate even the tiniest scrap of memory, Sam suspected his dad would lie happily—but because all of that sounded exactly like any thirteen-month-old. Sam’s dad offered these details as proof of extraordinary love, but in fact, Sam knew, it was the most ordinary kind of love there was.

  The photographic evidence suggested ordinary too. There he was—red and wrinkled and wailing at first then wrapped in a blanket like a burrito then posed with the dog, with a snowman, with a very drippy ice-cream cone, covered in flour, surrounded by Tupperware on the kitchen floor, grinning naked and filthy in their front garden, on top of a slide in a too-big hat, and being nibbled variously by geese, calves, sheep, goats, and in one even a yak. There were pictures of Sam and his mom in ridiculously wide-legged pants and hideous shirts with walleyed collars and voluminous curly hair (his mom’s; she didn’t live long enough to see Sam grow much hair). Two pictures in particular stood out, at least to him. In one, she lies on green pile carpet on her back, her crazy hair spread out above her like when someone gets electrocuted in a cartoon. Sam sits inside this nest of hair, gathering and tossing it in great handfuls like snow. In the second, she’s nursing him, and he has a ringlet of that great mane clenched in a tiny fist and wound all the way down his arm in a move that would be illegal in professional wrestling.

  Sam scoured his memory but could not conjure the sensation of that hair. When he was seven, he found out from his dad what kinds of shampoo and conditioner she’d used and used them himself, hoping to trigger some olfactory memory. When he was ten, influenced by cop shows on TV, he went in search of hair samples, painstakingly looking through the boxes of her stuff bound for charity that his dad had never found the strength to move beyond the basement. He’d managed to untangle from old sweaters and dresses and jackets and the hinge of a pair of sunglasses seven longish strands which he secured with tape inside the back cover of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. These he traced endlessly with angsty preteen fingertips but could never recover memories tactile nor, though he sacrificed one precious strand to Genevieve Trouvier’s Ouija board, even occult. When he started dating, he watched himself for a proclivity toward hirsute girls or, at the least, toward running his hands through their bobs or twisting their braids around his fingers or yanking their ponytails in playful flirtation, but he didn’t find any of that in himself, at least no more than ordinary. Ordinary seemed to be the hallmark of Sam’s brief relationship with his mother. But ordinary as it was, there was no getting it back of course, not even a moment of it. In contrast, it seemed to Sam, Meredith retained so much of Livvie. Comparatively speaking, it was almost like she was still around.

  On the last day of the regular season, Sam and Meredith went to the baseball game. This was a tradition Meredith and Livvie had kept for years. It marked the official end of summer so far as they were concerned, even though the weather had often turned well beforehand and even though Meredith had been back at school for weeks already, because Livvie would always leave for Florida the next day. She’d wait until the Mariners were statistically eliminated from the postseason before she booked flights, just in case, even in seasons—and there were quite a few of them—when it was clear by late April that she could go ahead and buy plane tickets. But final-day-of-the-regular-season tickets, these she bought the day single games went on sale. And thus Sam and Meredith found them, the morning of the game, when they turned over the drawer of the bedside table in a futile but thorough search for the condoms Sam was certain he’d bought more of only the week before.

  Meredith had taken the post-Livvie baseball season off. She couldn’t bear to watch or listen or even look at box scores. Sam had followed the season online, which was fine, but now he thought the
y should go to this game.

  “It’d be a shame to waste the tickets,” he said.

  “I’ll get over it,” said Meredith.

  “Your grandmother would want us to go.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She was a fan. And it was tradition.”

  “It’s pouring. It’s a terrible day for baseball.”

  “There’s a roof. What else are we going to do in this weather?” It had taken Sam a while after he’d moved to Seattle to consider baseball a rainy-day activity, but he was learning.

  “I hate baseball,” said Meredith.

  “You love baseball,” said Sam.

  “I used to. Now I hate it. Now everything reminds me of her.”

  “That’s why we should go. To say goodbye.”

  “I don’t want to say goodbye.”

  “Not goodbye forever,” said Sam. “Goodbye for now. Goodbye for a few months. Goodbye like she’s going to Florida tomorrow.”

  Meredith-skeptical turned into Meredith-slightly-intrigued. They donned layers and went to the game. On the way, they stopped at Uwajimaya for sushi, Vietnamese sandwiches, and the Japanese equivalent of Cool Ranch Doritos. (“My grandmother’s idea of baseball food,” she said.) They smuggled in a thermos of hot cocoa in the inside pocket of Meredith’s too-big jacket. (“My grandmother felt seven dollars was too much for a ballpark latte.”) They traded innings keeping score, Meredith keeping the odd ones and Sam keeping the evens, his argument that it was too cold to take off his mittens trumped by hers:

  “My grandmother felt strongly that you have to keep score.”

  “Why?” Sam’s dad had taught him one season when he was a kid so he’d stop pestering him for snacks every inning and a half, but he rarely bothered anymore. “Do you ever go back and look at it?”

  “No,” said Meredith. “She always said what matters is that it’s there.”