Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between

“Carrier pigeons?”


“Oh, sure,” she says. “Pigeons are totally fine.”

“Well, at least there’s something,” he says with a grin.

“Aidan,” she says, grabbing the front of his shirt and giving it a little tug. Somewhere inside her, an army of tears is on the move, the pressure building behind her eyes and in her throat. Soon, it will be too much. Whatever dams might exist—whatever walls she’s managed to throw up—will surely break, and all the many hollows of her heart will be flooded. It takes all her strength to fight against it, because there are still things to be said, and she can’t bear for them to be muddled.

But even this seems beyond her at the moment.

“I don’t…” she begins, but quickly falters.

Aidan only nods. “Me neither.”

“I wish…”

“I know,” he says. “Me too.”

She gives up then, stepping into his arms and resting her head against his chest, but then she hears the soft thud of his heart, and she knows there’s only one thing left that matters. “I love you,” she says, the words clear and steady and true, and she can hear the smile in his voice as he says it back: “And I dove you.”

“Shut up,” she says, but they’re both laughing a little bit now. When she tilts her head back, he kisses her for the last time, and all she can think is that this is another kind of first, something she hadn’t counted when she made her list: their first goodbye.

“Have a good trip,” he says as they pull apart again, and this—finally—is what tips her over the edge. She can’t help it: She begins to cry, swiping uselessly at the tears, but unable to stop, because it’s such an ordinary thing to say in a moment that feels so fantastically unreal.

But when it’s her turn, she can do no better. “I’ll miss you,” she tells him, holding on for a second more, though the car is puffing out clouds of exhaust, and the rain is coming down harder all around them, and the end of all this—the end of them—is finally here after all this time, rushing up to meet them like a freight train, noisy and unstoppable, the sound of it loud in her ears.

Aidan kisses her once more on the top of her head, and she clings to his hand for another few seconds before letting go. When she finally does, she can’t bear to look, or she’s certain she might never actually leave, and so instead, she squares her shoulders and breathes in and out, walking straight over to the car and climbing inside with her heart skidding around in her chest and the tears all mixed up with the rain on her face.

“You okay?” her mom asks, once she’s shut the door, but Clare has no idea how to answer that, because she is and she isn’t, because she’s stuck somewhere between the end and the beginning, and the only way to get unstuck, it seems, is to keep moving.

So she nods. “Let’s go,” she says as Bingo clambers onto her lap, his tail fanning the air. Her dad throws the car into gear, and they back out of the driveway with the dog looking out the rain-streaked window as they pass Aidan, because Clare can’t seem to bring herself to do it. But once they’re on the street, she changes her mind, struck by an urgent need to see him one more time, so she twists around in her seat, peering between the boxes piled in back.

He’s still there, of course, standing in the rain as he watches them go. It almost feels to Clare like she left a piece of her heart back there with him, the two halves being stretched between them like taffy. She lifts a hand, and he does the same, and they remain like that for what feels like a very long time, fixed in a slow-motion version of goodbye.