The Good Goodbye by Carla Buckley Read Free Book Online Page A

pressing buttons. The smell is nauseating. It fights with the astringent odors of cleaning solutions.

    I wonder where I can buy a pack of cigarettes—surely they don’t sell them in the gift shop—when the metal doors behind me swish open to admit two nurses pushing a gurney. I run over. “Arden Falcone?”
    The male nurse nods. “We’ll get her settled and then you can visit.”
    I can visit? I clutch the railing of the stretcher and look down, but this girl has her head wrapped around with white gauze. Only her right eye, swollen shut, is visible, the small tip of her nose, a bump of chin. Her mouth gapes open to admit a long plastic tube fixed in place by pieces of white medical tape. It makes her look dull, vacant. Arden has never been an openmouthed sleeper. A stubborn tuft of blond hair sticks out from amid the bandages. I walk alongside and reach to pat it into place, then catch myself from correcting this small rebellious act, this defiance that says Here I am. I am here.
    “Arden,” I say, despite myself. “Hello, my darling.” She doesn’t blink the one eye I can see. She doesn’t part her lips and speak. I want to cry.
    The head of the bed is elevated to let gravity help drain the fluid seeping into Arden’s skull and dangerously pressing her brain against the bone. A tube protrudes through the mask of gauze above her temple and more tubes loop across her body, forming a heavy web of plastic. Both arms are bandaged. Very gingerly, I reach for her right hand and turn it fractionally toward me. A glimpse of a few inches of pale forearm stained with orange Betadine, and beneath it, a little purple-and-green butterfly, its hand-drawn imperfect outline, its not-quite-symmetrical wings looking bruised.

    Then we’re in her room, the nurses guiding the bed against the wall. I step back to allow them to move around Arden, hooking things up, plugging things in with the aid of small flashlights, eerie beams of light dashing around in focused concentration. So many machines clustered around the bed, more than there are in Rory’s room. That’s okay, isn’t it? They are all different, tall, squat, rectangular, and square. Their screens vary. Yellow, pale blue striped with dark blue, a jagged trio of lines moving across a black screen. This last machine hangs from the wall in the corner, silent and foreboding, staring down. Another box hangs over the foot of her bed, and the nurse sees me looking. “She’s got on compression boots,” he explains, and lifts the sheet to allow me a quick glance, flashing the beam of his flashlight so I can see how Arden’s legs are encased knee to ankle in thick white pads with Velcro straps. As I watch, they swell to double their size and then release, shrinking back down with a sigh.
    “They’ll help circulate her blood. We don’t want a clot.” He goes around the end of the bed and I follow to watch him shine his flashlight on the plastic bag of urine attached to the bottom of her bed tucked up and out of sight. It looks full, but I don’t know what the normal rate is supposed to be. I don’t know how long it’s taken for her body to produce this. “Is that okay?” I whisper, and he says, “Looks fine.” He speaks in a normal voice.
    A tall metal rack stands sentinel, an array of hooks holding up dangling bags of fluid, plastic loops braiding and twisting and reaching across the top of Arden’s bed to her. The sheet slides down her shoulders, her hospital gown untied and lying across her body. Here’s another precious piece of real estate, a few inches of clavicle, the smooth skin stretched across her chest beneath thick pads of gauze covering her throat, from which an ugly worm of a tube pokes. The nurse shines the flashlight across my daughter’s body to show me. “That’s a drain. Don’t worry. She can’t feel it.” Arrayed on each side are discs taped in place to sense the rise and fall of her heart, working away silently.

    He pats my arm. “I’ll