What Happens to Goodbye (13 page)

Read What Happens to Goodbye Online

Authors: Sarah Dessen

Beep.
“Mclean? Um, hi. This is Opal, from the restaurant? I’m here with your dad. . . . He’s had a little accident.” A pause, at the worst possible time. I heard an intercom, some buzzing. “He’s okay, but we’re at the hospital, and he says his insurance card is at the house, and you’d know where it was. Can you call me back at this number when you get this?”
Beep.
“Hi, honey, me again. I’m back from the grocery, saw you didn’t call yet, so when you do, just try the home—”
I fumbled with the phone, hitting the END button once, twice, trying to clear the screen so I could call out. My heart was suddenly racing, those words filling my head:
accident
,
hospital
. And behind them, harder to see:
okay. Okay. Okay
.
My phone took forever to dial, each beep seeming like an eternity as I looked around the full courtyard in front of me, seeing nothing. Finally, an answer.
“Hello? ”
“Opal,” I said. “It’s Mclean. I just got your message, is my dad okay? What happened? When did he—”
“Whoa, whoa,” she said. “Take a breath. Mclean? It’s all right. He’s just fine. Here.”
Now I could hear that I was breathing hard, almost panting. The sound, primal, filled the phone for the next few seconds and then, like a dream, my dad was suddenly there.
“I told her not to call you,” he said. He sounded bored, like he was waiting in line at the post office. “I knew you’d totally freak.”
“I am not freaking,” I told him, although we both knew I was. I took a breath as instructed, then said, “What happened?”
“Just a little knife slip.”
“Really?” I was surprised.
“Not mine,” he said, sounding offended. “It was one of the prep guys. I was teaching a little fillet class . . . things got out of hand.”
My heart was finally starting to beat normally again as I said, “How out of hand?”
“Just a few stitches,” he replied. “And a puncture of sorts.”
“I’m surprised you even went to the hospital,” I said, which was the truth. My dad’s hands were covered with scars from various accidents and burns, and usually, unless he’d hit a vein or something, he’d wait until after work to deal with it, if he did anything at all.
“It was not my idea,” he grumbled. “Trust m a bront>
“You have to go to the hospital when you cut open your hand!” I heard Opal say in the background. “It is company policy. Not to mention common sense.”
“Anyway,” my dad said, ignoring this, “the upshot is that I need my insurance card. Which I think is at the house . . .”
“It is,” I said. “I’ll get it.”
“But you’re in school. I’ll just send Leo.”
I thought of Leo, big and gangly, banging around in the file box where I kept our important papers. “No,” I said. “I’d better do it. Look, I’ll be there soon.”
“Wait,” he said just as I was about to hang up. “Don’t you need a ride?”
That, I hadn’t thought about. I was about to tell him this when I happened to look across the courtyard to a single bench by the entrance to the gym. There a girl sat, a green floral purse beside her, wearing a green raincoat with matching green earmuffs, sipping a Diet Coke through a straw.
“I think I’m covered,” I told him, getting to my feet and picking up my bag. “I’ll be there soon.”
“This one time,” Deb said as she edged her small, tidy car into the right-turn lane, “my mother spilled an entire cup of boiling water on her stomach. You know, like the kind you get at a coffee shop, to make tea with, superhot? We had to take her to the emergency room.”
I nodded, forcing a smile. “Really.”
“But she was fine!” she added quickly, glancing at me. “Totally fine. Didn’t even scar, although we were both sure she would.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I know!” She shook her head, slowly accelerating as signs for the hospital began to appear. “Modern medicine. It’s amazing.”
I peered ahead, taking in the big red EMERGENCY with an arrow beneath as it appeared. Despite my dad’s assurances, I was strangely nervous, my stomach tight ever since we’d hung up. Maybe Deb had picked up on this, and it was why she’d pretty much talked nonstop since I’d approached her and asked for a ride. I’d barely had time to explain the situation before she had launched into a dozen stories to illustrate the point that Things Happened, But People Were Okay in the End.
“It’s just a knife cut,” I said for about the tenth time. I wasn’t sure if this reassurance was for me or her. “He gets them all the time. It’s part of the job.”
“I can’t believe your dad is a chef!” she said, easing into the turn lane. “That is so exciting. I hear Luna Blu is amazing.”
“You’ve never been there?”
She shook her head. “We don’t eat out much.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Well, I’ll have to take you sometime. To thank you for the ride.”
“Really?” She seemed so surprised I had a twinge of pity, although I wasn’t sure why. “God, that would be so great. But you totally don’t have to. I’m just happy I coud help out.”
As we headed up the road to the emergency room entrance, I saw a couple of doctors pass by, both in scrubs. Off to the left, a man in a wheelchair with an oxygen mask was sitting in the sunshine. None of this helped my nervousness, so I distracted myself by saying, “Yeah, but it must get kind of old, right? Being a student ambassador, and everyone always asking for something.”
Deb leaned farther over the steering wheel, peering at the parking options. She was so precise and responsible, in her perfect green headband, her neat car with a memo pad stuck to the dash, a pen clipped to its side. She seemed older than she was, older than she should be. “Not really,” she said, turning into a nearby lot.
“No? ”
She shook her head. “You’re actually the first person who’s asked me for anything.”
“I am?” I didn’t mean to sound so surprised, and could tell immediately by her reaction—a slight flush, a nervous swallow—that it didn’t do much for her confidence. Quickly, I added, “I mean, I’m glad. Makes me memorable, I guess.”
Deb cut the engine, then turned to look at me. Her expression was clearly grateful, happy. What must it be like to be so genuine, so fragile, your entire world of thoughts so easy to read on your face? I couldn’t even imagine. “Well, that’s nice to hear! I hadn’t even thought about it that way!”
There was a sudden blast of siren from behind us, and an ambulance came racing up to the emergency room entrance.
He’s fine,
I told myself, but even so my heart jumped.
“Come on,” Deb said, pushing open her door and reaching into the backseat for her purse. “You’ll feel better once you see him.”
As we walked across the lot, she reached into her bag, taking out a pack of gum and offering it to me. I shook my head, and she put it back, not taking a piece herself. I wondered if she even chewed gum, or just carried it as a courtesy. I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
Earlier, when we’d stopped by my house, it was no surprise that she’d been polite and complimentary. “What a lovely place,” she said, standing in our sparsely furnished living room. “That quilt is gorgeous.”
I looked over at the sofa. Tossed over one arm was one of my mom’s quilts, made way back when she’d first taken up the hobby. The truth was, she was really good at it, and could do all kinds of intricate patterns. At our old house, we’d had tons of them, both as décor and to use when it was chilly. When we left I’d boxed most of them up with the rest of our stuff in storage, only to have my mom give me a new one as I stood in Peter’s driveway saying goodbye.
“I’ve been working on it nonstop,” she said as she pressed it into my hands. Her eyes were red: she’d been crying all morning.
I took it, looking down at the neatly stitched squares. The fabric was pink and yellow and blue and varied: denim, corduroy, cotton. “This is really nice.”
“It’s baby clothes,” she told me. “So you have something to remember me by.”
I’d taken it, and thanked her. Then I’d put it in a box in the U-Haul, where it had basically stayed until I brought some stuff back to her house during one summ ofeak and left it in my closet. I knew I should have kept it, but like so much else with my mom it just felt so loaded. Like under it, I’d suffocate.
“Thanks,” I’d said to Deb, back at the house. “We just moved in, so things are still kind of all over the place.”
“I’d love to live here,” she said. “This is such a great neighborhood.”
“Is it?” I asked, digging around in the file box for my dad’s insurance card.
“Oh, sure. It’s in the historical district.” She walked over to the doorway, examining the molding. “My mom and I looked at a house for sale on this street a couple of weeks ago.”
“Really? Are you thinking about moving?”
“Oh, no,” she said. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “We just . . . Sometimes for fun, on the weekends, we go to open houses and pretend we’re buying. We decide where we’d put everything, and what we’d do to the yard. . . .” She trailed off, looking embarrassed. “I know it sounds silly.”
“Not really.” I found the card inside a book of stamps, and slid it into my pocket. “I do stuff like that, too, sometimes.”
“You do? Like what?”
Now I was stuck. I swallowed, then said, “You know. Like, when I start a new school I always kind of change myself a little bit. Pretend I’m someone different than I was in the last place.”
She just looked at me, and I wondered what on earth it was about her that made me be so honest. Like she was sick with truth, and really contagious. “Really,” she said finally. “I bet that’s hard, though.”
“Hard?” I said, walking back to the door and pushing it open for her.
She walked out, adjusting her purse over her shoulder as I locked the door. “I mean, just having to change each time. It’s like starting over. I’d kind of, I don’t know. . . .”
I glanced over at Dave Wade’s, thinking of Riley and her asking about him. There were no cars in the driveway, no signs of life. Wherever he was, he wasn’t at home.
“... miss who I was before,” Deb finished. “Or something
.”
Then I’d said nothing: I didn’t know how to respond to this. Instead, I just followed her to the car, and we’d come here. Now, though, as we walked up to the emergency room sliding doors, I glanced at her again, envying her confidence, even in the face of what I knew others thought about her. Maybe it was easier for some than others, though, changing. I hardly knew her at all, but I already couldn’t imagine her being any other Deb than this one.
Inside the hospital, we were hit with that immediate hospital mix of disinfectant and uneasiness. I gave my dad’s name to a squat man behind a glass window, who typed a few things on his computer before sliding a piece of paper across to me that read A1196. The four digits made me think back to that morning, searching for my locker, when my biggest concern had been getting my mom off the phone and out of my hair.
“I think it’s this way,” Deb said, her voice calmer than I felt as she led us down a hall, taking a right. Somehow, she just seemed to
know
when I needse er to take the lead, like my fear was that palpable.
There were not rooms but cubicles with curtains, some open, some closed. As we passed by, I tried not to look but still caught glimpses: a man lying in a bed in his undershirt, hand over his eyes, a woman in a hospital gown, mouth open, asleep.
“A1194,” Deb was saying. “A1195 . . . Here! This is it.”
The curtain was closed, and for a moment we stood there as I wondered how you were supposed to knock or even know you had the right place. Then, though, I heard something.
“Seriously. You have got to let the roll thing go. It’s done.”
There was a loud sigh. “Okay, I understand the pickles have been well accepted, but that doesn’t mean . . .”
I eased the curtain open, and there they were: my dad, seated on the bed, his hand and wrist wrapped in bandages and gauze, and Opal in a nearby chair, legs crossed, looking irritated.

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