Six Goodbyes We Never Said by Candace Ganger

Author:Candace Ganger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

NUMBERS AND DEATH

Salmon-colored poppies inconsistently situated on a pair of leggings Nell changed into after news of Ray’s death. Forty-seven on the front, bits of jade foliage positioned in between. Naima wondered, Why not forty-eight or fifty? Nell broke her thought into segments with a muffled whimper, and as she looked up, Naima accidentally stumbled into her gaze. It was there that she saw it: heartache mixed with disbelief. She quieted, directed Naima to the two men—a marine and a chaplain—standing guard near the driveway with Christian and his friends. With a silent nod, Nell pointed, and the movement of her shaking finger cut the air between them; this is when Naima remembered what she said to herself about Ray the day before she attempted to take her own life. I’ll always be a ghost to him.

Ray would tell her thereafter that people can change at the slightest crinkle in their world—just as he had after Josephine passed. But maybe he hadn’t changed for the better, if leaving was all he’d ever be capable of. Ghosts are all Naima believes she has left. She’ll wonder, if she’d caught the balloons when Nell struggled that day, or if she did what she did every year, or counted the hexagons again, or if she hadn’t been born at all, things would be different now. But she’ll never know what else to do, to fix a thing. That, to her, is worse than death. So she counts. And counts five more times.

Because when Ray died, he was on his sixth tour.

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