33. The Last Goodbye
33
The Last Goodbye
“AND NOW, ELVISTOO take it away,” I said, voice cracking, and handed the microphone back to the man dressed in white.
As soon as Bruno introduced himself again and starting to sing “Love Me Tender,” Alice and Carver and Mom embraced me, threading our arms together in a hug. I loved them so much, I started crying—or maybe I was already crying? I couldn’t remember when I started, and I couldn’t remember when they started crying, either, but we hugged each other as tightly as we could. Because there was a secret about all the Days—we cried whenever we saw someone else crying. So if one Day cried? All the others followed, and at that moment I wasn’t sure if I’d started it, or Carver, or Mom (definitely not Alice, never Alice), but it didn’t matter.
“You’re t-terrible at speeches,” Alice said after a while, wiping the tears out of her eyes. Her eyeliner smeared, and I cleaned it up with my thumb.
“I know,” I replied.
Carver took a breath. “I think I’m going to propose. To Nicki.”
Mom gasped, “Oh, darling! I’m so happy!”
“Here?” Alice asked, flabbergasted.
“No—course not! But soon.”
“Good, because I could imagine Alice doing it here, but not you,” I remarked, earning a pinch from Alice. “Ow! Hey! That was a
compliment
!”
Alice stuck out her tongue. “I don’t even
have
a partner.”
“Doesn’t mean you won’t forever,” Mom said sagely, dabbing her running mascara. “Love comes when you least expect it. Why, when your father and I first met . . .”
I glanced over to Ben, on the far side of the funeral, with the good mayor happily keeping him company, as Mom recounted when she first met Dad at a conference that was one-third furry con, one-third ballroom-dancing championships, and one-third mortuary seminar. It was a good story, but we’d heard it a thousand times.
We could hear it a thousand times more.
I couldn’t tell those kinds of stories about Ben. Half of the people wouldn’t believe me, and the other half would think it was a tragedy. Maybe it was. Dad said I wouldn’t keep ghosts as companions my whole life—but what if there was one I wanted to keep?
What if one was different?
Ben must have felt me staring, because he turned his dark eyes to me, and mouthed, “You did great.”
And I couldn’t help but smile.
“Oh, she sees her ghost boyfriend again,” Alice mock whispered to Carver.
My shoulders squared. “He’s
not
my boyfriend!”
“Mm-hmm,” Carver replied skeptically. “Oh, come on, you were basically over the moon for whoever helped you cheat last night.”
“I wish I could see him,” Mom mused.
“I still wish it’d been Dad—no offense to your ghost guy,” Alice
added with a half-hearted shrug. “But I realized you probably wouldn’t have kept that a secret.”
“Yeah, no. I haven’t seen him,” I confirmed a little sadly. My siblings exchanged the same look—before I took them by their hands and squeezed them tightly. “He knew we’d have each other. He didn’t need to stick around.”
Alice tugged her hand out of mine. “Ugh, this is getting too mushy for me. Go get your ghost boyfriend or whatever.”
“He’s not my . . .” But just as I began to argue, my siblings split for opposite ends of the funeral to talk with other people, and Mom wiggled her eyebrows before she joined the small group of people moving back and forth to Elvistoo’s rousing rendition of “Build Me Up Buttercup.”
Ben stood and tilted his head toward the far side of the cemetery, where we sat a few nights ago, and as I thanked the people for coming and accepted their condolences, he patiently waited under the oak tree.
“The flowers are beautiful,” I told Heather, who agreed in that
I told you so
way of hers, and I found that I really didn’t care. She came through for me when I needed it most, and that counted for something. Not everything—I could forgive her, but I wasn’t going to forget how she made me feel in high school.
But she wasn’t worth any more of my time, either.
I didn’t manage to make my way over to the bench until Elvistoo was on his second glass of champagne and had devolved into singing anything the crowd shouted, so he was currently howling through “Welcome to the Black Parade
.
”
“I can honestly say I’ve never been to a funeral this fun,” Ben said when I finally sat down beside him. “People are
literally
dancing on graves.”
“Well,
around
graves. It’d be disrespectful to dance
on
them,” I
corrected, and noticed that his hands were white-knuckled fists on his knees. “Are you still hearing them? The voices?”
He nodded. “They’re louder. And it’s—getting harder. To stay here.”
A chill crept over my skin. “But I haven’t worked at all on the book! You shouldn’t be
going
anywhere,” I replied in alarm.
To which he swallowed thickly. Pursed his lips. And admitted, “I don’t think it’s about the manuscript, darling.”
“It
has
to be. That’s the only reason you would be here, haunting me, and—”
“It’s not,” he interrupted resolutely, and winced in pain.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why? What haven’t you told me?”
He shook his head. He hadn’t been able to meet my gaze since I came over to the bench. Why was I just noticing this? He couldn’t meet my gaze because he knew I’d see the truth if he did. “I . . .”
“Ben.”
He clenched his jaw.
“Benji.”
“It’s a long story,” he began, staring down at a patch of dying grass by his left loafer, “but I think I need to tell you. I think I
should
have told you from the beginning.”
I clenched my fists. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. If he wasn’t here because of the manuscript, then . . . what else could there be? “Okay. What is it?”
“Ann Nichols was my grandmother.”
I forced a laugh.
Really?
“
Ben!
C’mon, I know you love her. She was like the matron saint of romance to all of us—”
“I don’t mean like that.” Slowly, he drew his eyes to mine. They were glassy and wet. The world slowed. Oh no. “She was
my grandmother
.”
There was a lot of information in that sentence that could have
surprised me. The fact that he hadn’t told me the myriad of times we talked about his grandmother. The slant of his nose that perhaps looked a bit like hers. The sharpness of his jawline. How much he
knew
about Ann Nichols. How he always called her Annie.
No, it wasn’t any of that. What surprised me was one simple word: “
Was?
”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “She passed away five and a half years ago.”
Five . . . and a half
years
? Just about the time when I met her, when she sat down across from me and offered me a job. I was shaking my head vehemently. “That—that can’t be right. No, we met at that coffeehouse . . .”
“She couldn’t have,” Ben replied gently. “She had been bedridden for at least a year prior while she was writing her last book—
The Forever House.
We had a quiet funeral. She wanted it that way, because she had an idea. There were four books left in her contract, and she wanted them written, but she didn’t want the cloud of her passing to define them. So she laid out a plan to find a ghostwriter and finish those books. She also told me not to notify her publisher.”
“And her
agent
?” I could just imagine the flames spitting from Molly’s mouth when she found out—
“Molly knew.”
I wasn’t sure if that made things better or worse, actually. I tried to keep myself calm, but I was anything but. My head was spinning. “And—you—the estate—just
let
me? Without knowing she was
dead
?”
“No.” He finally opened his eyes, and faced me. “I had been on the hunt for a ghostwriter for a few months at that point, but none of the writers fit. Then you asked, and I thought perhaps Annie had reached out to you before she died and just never told me.” He shrugged a little half-heartedly.
“But she didn’t. She asked me herself.
After
she died,” I realized, and sighed. “I took a job from a ghost. Never had
that
on my bingo card . . .”
Ben let out a soft laugh, leaning close to me. His hand was so near mine, I could almost reach out and take it if he were alive. “Annie did used to say the universe sends you the things you need exactly when you need them, and I want to think it sent you. I don’t know about afterlifes or what happens after—after
this
but . . . finding your book was divine. Giving you Annie’s legacy and watching it flourish under your pen was a blessing. And this?” He looked into my eyes, and suddenly this no longer felt like a conversation. It felt like a goodbye. “These last few days have been . . . beautiful. It’s a good ending, darling. As your editor, I have no notes.”
My throat constricted. “Ben . . .”
“I’m sorry, but I—I think I know why I’m here. With you. It isn’t because of Annie’s book. It’s because of
yours
. To thank you.” And he smiled. It reached his eyes, but in the way smiles did when you were trying to swallow down a sob. “The last year of Annie’s life was hard—I was her only family left, and she was mine. I can’t begin to express how much your book helped me. That entire year was bleak, but I could open it and get lost in your words, and in those moments it felt like everything would be okay. I don’t know why it was that book, exactly, but it was. So, thank you for giving me words when I didn’t think there were any left. I hope you never stop giving the world your words.”
I couldn’t count how often I wanted to hear those exact words from someone—anyone—and here was this man telling me he
loved
them. Cherished them.
My mouth grew dry, and I didn’t know what to say. If I said,
You’re welcome
, would he disappear in a sparkle of dust? Would the wind carry him away into the afternoon?
“I’m sorry I have to go,” he said softly, guiltily, “but I promise that not all of your companions will be ghosts, darling.”
I’d heard that before. “Not even the ones I want to stay,” I replied. My heart was breaking.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, and gave me a sad sort of pleading look. It twisted my gut. “I want to be with you—but not like
this
. I want to grow old with you. I want to wake up every morning and see you on the pillow beside me. I want to cherish every moment of our lives and—”
“We can’t,” I interrupted. “I know.”
Something inside of me gave then. Not hope, exactly, but the small thread of happiness I had this past week, because it couldn’t support me. I was balancing precariously on a string that snapped, thinking it was made of sturdier stuff.
“Florence—” he began, and winced again. He clutched his chest. “I—I want to stay but I . . .”
He couldn’t. He was begging me to let him go.
I took a deep breath. The good goodbyes were what you made of them. Elvistoo crooning The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” in the background, Mom laughing through her tears as Seaburn spun her through the grass.
I turned back to Ben, and I smiled the only kind of smile I could muster. It was sad and broken, but it was mine. “Thank you, Benji Andor, for letting me live in your grandmother’s world for a few years. And thank you for wanting to live in mine.”
All I wanted to do was take his face in my hands and kiss him, but as I reached out to try, his eyes widened. He sucked in a short breath.
As if he saw something past me. Something I couldn’t see. Something I never would.
And then he was gone.
Forever this time.