Before Goodbye

by Mimi Cross

  Now my gaze travels down to the place where the bark has been ripped away from the trunk of the tree, and there, written on the smooth inner layer of the wood, are more words.

  “Luv U 4-Ever. Don’t leave us. Leah.”

  I keep waiting to wake up from this nightmare, but it’s not happening.

  “You are gone from this place but never from my heart. Christina.”

  There’s more, but I have to stop. Have to stop reading. Stop thinking.

  A black backpack hangs from the branches of the tree, one of those cloth ones that shops give away at grand openings. It makes me think of a bat, or a black ghost, the way it’s stretched out between branches, and I ponder its significance. Up high near the backpack, a package of guitar strings is attached to the tree with a screw. Below that is an 8x10 of Cal.

  The picture is in one of those glass frames without any kind of edge or border. It is pristine. The early autumn winds and rain have not touched it. In the photo, Cal is wearing a white button-down and a tie. It’s a school picture—recent—Cal’s last school picture ever. I gaze into Cal’s nearly black, but somehow bright, eyes. He looks like he’s about to laugh or say something.

  “Tell me,” I whisper.

  But I was the one who should have told him something, who should have said, “The stars are in your eyes—I love you.”

  Would he have pulled over? Would I have touched him, run my fingers through his hair? What if we’d stopped and spent a minute looking in each other’s eyes? Would that have been the same minute that tore Cal from this world?

  Next to the pots of flowers that rest among the twisted tree roots is a plastic container. The faded words on the lid read: “You have suffered a great loss. Please feel free to take some of these. We hope it will help you.”

  Already, hope fills me as I crouch down—

  But as I’m about to pull the lid off the bucket, I realize it’s full of literature from a religious organization. Words from the fence flash through my brain—

  “Rest in Paradise.” Does anyone really believe that’s where Cal is?

  Sinking back on my heels, I picture my dad, scowling and grousing about the Catholic Church, how they’re all about money, how they take away people’s freedom, their choices.

  But there’d been that moment of hope, when I’d read the words on top of the container, and I want that hope, I cling to the feeling now, even as it fades.

  And then, just like that, the hope is gone. Cal is gone, and I wish, wish, wish that when he’d put his hand on my knee I’d said, “Pull over. Pull over and kiss me.”

  A dangling cross spins slowly on a brass chain, glinting in the golden light. Next to it, someone has tied a bundle of Magic Markers. But I don’t reach for the markers, or the cross.

  Tear after tear rolls down my face, and I feel like I might never come out of this crouch, might never get back up. I want to curl into a ball, stay under this tree. Dissolve into the dirt.

  I don’t know how to get through something like this, but the answer isn’t in a plastic bucket. It’s not at the tip of a marker.

  I feel my face contorting, sobs jerking through me. I want to go home.

  But—I am home. My house is just down the road. So what is this feeling?

  I just . . . I thought we had time. How can this be real?

  “Help me,” I mouth to no one.

  DRAFT

  DAVID

  From: David Bennet

  To: Cate Reese

  Date: Oct 1, 2013, at 7:14 PM

  Subject:

  Hey Cate, I heard you were in a car accident. I also heard that you’re okay, but it must have been

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  From: David Bennet

  To: Cate Reese

  Date: Oct 2, 2013, at 11:43 PM

  Subject: Hope you’re feeling all right.

  Hi Cate,

  Haven’t seen you around school since you were in that accident. Not even in the cafeteria. Guess our schedules are totally opposite. Or maybe you’re a vampire and don’t eat.

  Maybe you’re taking some time off, I don’t know, but I haven’t seen you in a few days and apparently you haven’t returned my mother’s calls, so, just wanted to make sure you’re okay. Don’t know when you’re coming over to babysit. Maybe you’re not up for that, but Kimmy misses you. I miss you.

  Call, will you? Or answer this. Or text. Send a howler. Something. Anything. xx, DB

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  PINE

  CATE

  “The second thing to remember is that our relationship with our dead Christian loved ones isn’t dissolved by death—we pray for our dead in case they are in purgatory for a time, and ask them to pray for us.”

  “‘In case they’re in purgatory for a time’? What the hell?” Laurel whispers. “Is that supposed to make anyone feel better?”

  We’re sitting so close I can smell her perfume. Closing my eyes, I breathe it in, trying to block out the sickeningly sweet scent of lilies that fills the church. Resisting the urge to bury my face in her shoulder, I hold her hand so tightly the ring on my middle finger presses painfully into my skin.

  “And the first thing?” Her angry whisper hisses in my ears. “Were we supposed to catch that?”

  I find her ferocity strangely soothing. My parents, my friends in the city—the one or two I’ve told—their feather-soft sympathy only makes me feel worse.

  “No idea,” I say, stealing a glance around the church. I’ve never been to a Catholic Mass. Everyone is sitting impossibly still. But stillness is gone from me forever. I cross my legs. Uncross them. Recross them. It feels like my blood itches. Smoke rises from a swinging censer. Everyone seems to know when to sit and when to stand. All I know is I want to run.

  Afterward, at Cal’s uncle’s, a plate of food I can’t possibly eat is pressed into my hands by someone I don’t know, and I’m backed into a corner. I try not to stare at Cal’s mother, whom—unbelievably—I’ve never met, and who, I’m pretty sure, was not at the church. She wears no makeup and her feet are bare. Her long black hair is loose and the same shiny black as Cal’s. I just know that, if I were to touch it, it would feel like silk. Feel like his. She’s beautiful.

  Cal’s mother has the precise movements of a classically trained musician, which she is, and which is why Cal lives—

  Lived.

  Which is why Cal lived with his uncle. Cal’s father left when he was small, and that, Cal had told me, was the reason for his mother’s relentless touring. She never got over it.

  As she circulates through the room, Mrs. Woods does not cry, and although I don’t catch everything she’s saying, I hear a few words here and there. Her slight Chinese accent makes me think of birdsong. Just watching her makes me feel better.

  But I am in a corner. Murmuring voices, the sound of clinking forks and knives, people passing glasses—I need to get outside.

  Cal usually came to my house whenever we managed to get together, so I’m not that familiar with his uncle’s place, but then I remember the den. Making my way through the throngs, I slip into the empty room and jerk open the French doors— but there are dogs everywhere it seems, on the patio, in the yard. I don’t know who they belong to, but they bar my way with snarls and thin dog lips pulled back over sharp-looking dog teeth.

  Someone grabs my sleeve, yanks me back inside, slams the doors shut.

  “Watch it, Cate Cat, those things ain’t show dogs.” Laurel crouches down, pushes her nose against the glass. She bares her teeth in imitation of the b
easts and they bark. One dog begins to howl. Laurel howls back.

  This strikes me as weirdly hilarious.

  “Come on!” Laurel growls at the dogs. “Tell me how you really feel.”

  The dogs go crazy, jumping at the glass. I know she’s being cruel, but the chorus of dogs is just so funny that I finally let out a little howl of my own. “‘Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.’”

  Laurel stands up. “Finished that drink I gave you earlier, huh?”

  “Yeppers. What was in it?”

  “You don’t want to know. But you feel better, right? You must if you’re quoting your dad.”

  “Not my dad. Allen Ginsberg. ‘Howl.’”

  “Yeah, well, I knew it had something to do with your dad. It’s one of those whack recordings he listens to while he paints, right? How about you, make any masterpieces lately?”

  She’s referring to the time we sampled a dozen bottles from my parents’ liquor cabinet, then went into the barn and helped ourselves to Dad’s paints and blank canvases. We swore we were making great art. It was the only time in my life Dad got really mad at me, less about the booze, I think, and more about the art, or rather, lack thereof.

  Hoping he wouldn’t realize just how many canvases we’d ruined, Laurel had gotten Grace to drive over, and we’d loaded up the back of the Ridgeways’ SUV, then driven to the 7-Eleven on the outskirts of Red Bank. There we dumped our artistic efforts and Grace made us drink massive amounts of coffee.

  Thinking about it now makes me laugh. I try to stifle the sound, but it hiccups out.

  “Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.” Laurel gives me a conspiratorial look, and suddenly it’s just the two of us. I can tell her now. I swallow my laughter.

  “Laurel, I need to tell you something.”

  “Anything,” she says, her smile fading.

  “I think . . . I was in love with him. I mean, I know I told you, texted you that night, but . . .” I pause as the priest’s words whisper in my head: For he created all things that they might be.

  With difficulty, I continue. “I know it now. In a different way. I was—I am in love with him.”

  “Aw, Cate.” Laurel slings her arm around my shoulders, and I sag against her.

  Even though she’s my age, I’ve always seen Laurel as the older sister I never had. But right now I feel older. Ancient.

  Holding on to each other, we take a few shuffling steps over to a small velvet love seat and plop down. Her face is so full of sympathy—I start crying again.

  “I was going to tell him to slow down,” I say tearfully. “You know me, ‘safety first.’”

  “Yeah, that is you,” she admits quietly. “But it wasn’t your fault—”

  “It is! I should have said something. I knew we were going too fast, but I didn’t want him to think I was—I don’t know. Boring. He was so amazing, just the way he thought, about music. Laurel, I’ve known him since I was four years old, what am I going to do? How can I—” I take a shuddering breath. “The intensive, that’s when everything started to change. Oh, Laurel.”

  Laurel nods slowly, pursing her lips like she’s trying to make sense of something. “You guys really did click. You obviously liked him a lot . . . you were friends for a long time.”

  “My whole life!” Fresh sobs rack my body, and I have a horrible weightless feeling, like I’m a kite and someone’s cut the line and I’m sickeningly free in a too-big sky. Like the time Laurel and I took kayaks into the ocean and I got dizzy because we were out so far and the water went on forever and there was nothing but deep blue beneath me—I wasn’t attached to anything.

  Also, I feel drunk. Drunk, yet different than drunk, from whatever Laurel put in my drink. But that blurry feeling works—it’s the spinning off into a too-big space feeling I can’t deal with. So I stuff it down now, bury it with everything else I can’t handle, with that night, in the car.

  Laurel strokes my hair. Time ticks by, I don’t know how much—I hate time now. Time is a horrible, misleading thing. You don’t know when it will come apart, when it will be up.

  Finally she says, “Everything’s going to be okay, Cate, and . . . I think you should feel better just knowing . . . Cal loved you.”

  “But why? He was so talented, so brilliant! And I’m just—”

  “You’re not just anything,” Laurel says fiercely. “Not just anyone. God, Cate, why is it so hard for you to believe that people are into you? You’re you. And that’s why Cal liked you. Because of who you are. I know you guys had the music thing, but he was into you.”

  But I can’t help feeling she’s wrong. The wrongness jostles for a place inside me next to the pain—pain that simultaneously makes me feel like I’m hungry, and like I can’t eat.

  All those years—he made me want to play. I’d never be as good as him, we both knew it, but I tried, and he encouraged me, because we were friends, but mostly, because of the music.

  “I’m canceling it,” I say now to Laurel. “Canceling the gig.”

  “Your concert in the city? The Strings with Wings thing?”

  “No, I—I have to play that show.” Do I, though? How can I? Right now I can’t even imagine picking up a guitar. But I don’t say those things. I just tell Laurel about the gig Cal booked in Brooklyn. “But there’s no way—”

  “Cate,” Laurel interrupts. “You don’t have to think about that right now.”

  But I do need to think about it, and I need to cancel, because I’m not going to play that date. Because why? All these years, I was trying to keep up with Cal. Yes, I played because I wanted to; I played for me. But even more, maybe, I played for him. He—was my muse.

  KETAMINE

  CATE

  Sitting on the bed, I stare down at the little packet in my palm. One bump. I don’t even need to take it all, just mix some into a glass of juice, like Laurel did at Cal’s uncle’s house.

  Thanks, Laurel. You’re a Lovecat.

  Something moves outside the window. A tree branch. It’s so dark out tonight.

  Dark inside, too. Inside my head.

  I run a finger over the packet. The way the paper is folded makes it look like a miniature envelope. Laurel gave me a whole pile of them.

  Where’d you get it? I’d asked.

  Does it matter? Feel better, Cate Cat.

  I picture now, inside the envelope, instead of white powder, there’s a tiny letter, embossed with minuscule script. “You’re invited,” I imagine it says in a formal font, “to get the hell out of your life. RSVP—”

  But there’d be no phone number, no date. Instead¸ it would simply say, “before you lose it.”

  Fine. I’ll RSVP. Yanking open the bedside table drawer—where a dozen other tiny envelopes smile up at me—I grab a pen, and with a hard little laugh, write my name on the envelope in the fanciest writing I can manage.

  Cate Reese

  And for my date? My plus one?

  Carefully now, I add:

  No one.

  CHARM

  DAVID

  I’ve been sitting in the cafeteria for less than a minute. Already, I’m surrounded.

  Trish and Tammy strut by—separately—on their way out, glaring at each other, scowling at two freshman girls who’ve sat down on either side of me. Next to the girls are more girls, friends of the two who are bookending me I think, but I don’t know. I don’t know too many freshman girls. They all seem to know me.

  The guys at the table are no mystery. Former teammates of mine, they’re probably on the fence about whether they should be hanging out with me at this point.

  Two of the guys look at the girls on either side of me, exchange knowing glances. They nod approvingly, as if they agree with something I’ve done, or am going to do.

  I’m about to leave when the girl on my right, who is very pretty, puts a hand on my arm. Thinking she’s about to ask me something, I remain seated.

  B
ut she doesn’t ask a question, doesn’t say anything at all. Just presses her thigh against mine under the table, while the girl on my left talks to her about an upcoming party.

  Girls. Girls are the one thing that I do better than Jack. Than Jack did.

  That’s what Rod Whitaker calls it. “Doing girls.”

  “Hey, Bennet, wanna do girls today?”

  The thing is, I’ve never needed Rod for this game, never even saw it as a game, really. I take girls very seriously. I’m indebted to them. They are the only things that remind me:

  I’m not Jack.

  Girls are the only things that make me, me. Or they were. I thought they were.

  I just referred to girls as “things,” twice. That is fucked up.

  I’m fucked up. But that doesn’t make me unique.

  Jack was fucked up, too. Obviously. Or he wouldn’t have killed himself.

  Jack was everything, then suddenly nothing. Nowhere. Or somewhere. Depending on whom you ask. What you believe.

  As far as Jack and girls, though, maybe it comes down to this: Jack was not . . . sensitive. Simply translated this means: he was not fluent in the language of girls. And I am. Or I can be. Apparently. Thus: girls.

  My father, at least, painted Jack this way. “A strong, unbending boy,” he’d say. For many years things went on this way, my father telling and retelling the legends of Jack.

  But the diaries say something different.

  I was thirteen when I found the stack . . . a veritable treasure trove of Jack.

  I’d gone down to the basement, looking for a part, for the water rower, I think. Things had been moved around that day, as if someone else was searching, too.

  The diaries were full of lyrics, none by Jack, but carefully copied. A collection of sorts, I guess—his favorites, all the songs he liked.

  The lyrics alternated with other entries, pages written in Jack’s neat hand. There were detailed accounts of track meets. Tennis matches. Even marching band. There were mathematical equations written down as well, movie reviews, and camping tips.