Before Goodbye

by Mimi Cross

  All of a sudden I’m so tired, I just want to lie down. Instead I kneel, staring at the stone.

  When I was little, I used to love to come here and see the “statues.” Dad, artist that he is, used to bring me on the weekends. Silently, we’d walk the well-tended paths.

  These outings infuriated my mother. “She’ll have enough loss in her life, for god’s sake—” She’d always cut herself off at that point, shake her head, leave the room. It was as if she didn’t want to let the rest of the words out.

  She still does that. Leaves the room, leaves the house, when she’s angry. It’s like she knows once your words escape, they go out into the world and wreak havoc. She stifles words nearly as well as I do. Maybe that’s why she’s such an advocate for visual artists, people who express themselves with something other than words.

  I find a few choice words though, kneeling here in the dark, or maybe they find me.

  “Fuck you,” I whisper to the stone. But it’s not nearly enough, and I turn my face toward the sky, attacking the true target. “Fuck you, God! Fuck you and all your—”

  “Cate?”

  My head whips around and I’m about to leap to my feet.

  David Bennet kneels down next to me. “Hey. Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  I’m shaking so hard, all I can do is look at him.

  It takes a moment for David to read the words on the marker. “Cate—”

  “There’s nothing to say,” I mumble. “He’s gone.”

  David nods slowly.

  But he doesn’t get up.

  “He’s . . . really gone,” I repeat.

  “You sound like you’re trying to convince someone.”

  David is soaked. He must have been here for a while. Now he pushes his wet hair back from his face. More prepared than me, he holds a black umbrella in his hand. I’m about to ask him why he doesn’t put it up when I notice it’s all angles, metal rods skewering ripped cloth.

  “What happened to your umbrella?” I ask. “And what are you doing here?” It’s much easier to ask questions than to think about what he’s just said. If I’m trying to convince someone, it’s probably me, which means I still don’t believe Cal’s gone. Which makes me certifiable.

  “My brother.” He gestures vaguely with the busted umbrella, to a point someplace behind him.

  I’d heard about David’s brother. Heard the silences, was more like it. The conversations that snapped shut when I walked in the room.

  “He died when I was Kimmy’s age.” David’s expression hardens slightly. It’s a look that dares me to pity him. I’ve never seen it on his face before, and I have certainly seen his face. I have watched that face—I can’t deny it anymore—for years.

  All the times I lay by the pool, sat on the couch with Kimmy watching movies . . . for years I hadn’t really noticed David, but I had. I knew everything about him, knew he’d been a star athlete, knew he’d been someone’s boyfriend—knew he’d been a jerk. I knew his smile. Knew he was changing. And, yes, along with all the other details I’d memorized over the years, I discover now, that I’d known he’d been hurting. Been missing something, though he had everything. Only it wasn’t a something, it was a someone. How had I not known that?

  For a minute I struggle to find the right words, to acknowledge the void in his life, maybe even compare it to mine.

  But all I can think of to say is “I’m sorry,” so I decide to say nothing at all.

  If his brother died when David was nine, it’s way too late to say sorry.

  SNOW

  DAVID

  Snow doesn’t produce a sound. Rather, it emits stillness.

  Cate’s stillness is not so different, and like the snow, that still aspect of her, I’m starting to understand, has to do with something frozen.

  Now I speak carefully into the non-sound, the snow silence.

  “Cate, it might help you to know, I chased the ghost of my brother for years.”

  It’s snow quiet again.

  The flakes have become slightly smaller, drier, the crystals more precisely shaped, icy stars beginning to stick as the temperature drops.

  “Not at first. I was too young. But starting at about fourteen, I explored a lot of ideas. I was big on Buddhism. Thinking, you know, maybe in another life . . . I wanted to believe in something . . . anything. Anything other than the truth, which was that Jack was gone. That was it.”

  Cate’s eyes say, No.

  “That’s too simple,” she murmurs. “Do you really believe that? Believe that there’s nothing? That we die and it’s over?” Sounding slightly desperate she asks, “What did that look like? The chase, I mean. Chasing his . . . ghost.”

  “Besides my Buddhist phase?” I feel my lips twist. “I met with a priest. Contacted a—this sounds stupid—a medium. I’m pretty sure I tried yelling at God, too. Repeatedly.”

  “So you’re saying it won’t work? The yelling-at-God approach?” Cate says this lightly, as if she, too, is ready to give up. But her gray eyes are serious.

  I shake my head. “Yelling at God, at the sky. Talking to these fucking stones—sorry. Don’t listen to me. Everybody handles loss—”

  “Differently, sure. But what about finding? Did you ever—have you ever heard his voice or, or . . .”

  A sigh slips from my lips before I can stop it, though I think maybe she hasn’t heard it, because in the same moment the wind picks up, sweeps away the snow quiet.

  Then I tell her the truth, though it’s not what she wants to hear, and push to my feet.

  But the wind’s kept my words from her as well. “What did you say?” she asks.

  “I never heard anything,” I repeat, raising my voice over the wind. “Never saw anything.” I offer her a hand. Pull her to her feet. “I don’t believe in ghosts, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  The wind kicks up a notch suddenly, tearing through the cemetery, sending wet snow into our faces, down the collar of my shirt. Cate shouts now so I can hear her over the gusting, says something like, “Then why are you here?”

  “What?” I shout back.

  Shivering hard, she pushes the words through chattering teeth. “Why do you come to see your brother here if you don’t believe in ghosts, don’t believe his spirit . . . resides somewhere?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t believe in his spirit. When he died—when anyone dies—I think they become a part of . . . everything. Everything in nature. A person’s soul, essence—whatever you want to call it—I think it joins the energy that surrounds us. The sky. The . . . stars.” I glance around at the trees bordering the cemetery, their black-shadow branches swaying wildly now in the wind. “The air, maybe.”

  It’s ridiculous that we’re trying to talk out here, in what’s obviously becoming some kind of freakishly early winter storm, but it’s like she can’t let this go. It’s as if, because my brother is dead, I must know something.

  “You didn’t really answer,” she shouts. “If a person’s soul, or whatever, becomes part of everything, why do you come here?”

  Cate’s lips are slightly parted as she continues to look up at me with what is, I see now, an imploring expression. This expression makes her look younger than she is. Like a kid, the kind of kid who comes to the cemetery on Halloween, not with a six-pack and a bunch of friends, but as a seeker: someone looking for a sign, a message, some words that can never be spoken because the speaker is dead.

  I don’t want to hurt this part of Cate, this hopeful kid. But I also know that the other Cate, the Cate who pulled me out of myself this summer, the grown-up part of her that’s taken care of Kimmy for the last four years after my parents deemed Bryn and me too busy, or possibly too irresponsible—she can handle this, needs to handle it. She needs to get over this guy, Cal.

  Then again, what the hell do I know? I’ve come here for years, I don’t even know why. Not anymore. So that’s what I tell her as the snow turns to sleet.

  “I don’t know, Cate, why I come h
ere. But if there’s a reason . . . it changes.”

  She nods and watches as the wind nearly tears the umbrella from my hands. For half a minute I wrestle with it, trying to get the spokes in order. Then I give up, putting an arm around her, pulling her against me as if, somehow, I can keep her dry. As if I can protect her.

  SPLINTERS

  CATE

  David might not be keeping the weather off me, but he’s keeping something off.

  “Did you drive?” His lips brush my ear as he leans in to make himself heard, his breath warm on my cheek. I gesture toward the east side of the cemetery. He says, “I’ll walk you.”

  As we angle into the wind, I glance down at the useless umbrella in his hand, suddenly understanding that he’d hit it against something. That’s how it got broken. My intuition flares, and I picture David Bennet, smashing the umbrella against a headstone.

  So he is still trying.

  It’s a visceral image: David, a granite marker, the broken black bat of an umbrella. All at once the gesture strikes me as utterly brilliant, necessary even. I need to get home.

  Quickly, I say goodbye and get in the car, leaving David at the edge of the cemetery looking slightly stunned. Just before I shut the door, I think he calls my name, but I’m not sure.

  Then I’m driving. Sleet splattering the windshield. As I pass The Killing Tree, my thoughts scatter like rain. Cal’s dead.

  Why can’t I let him go?

  Humming fills the garage, and the door closes with a clatter. But I don’t move. I just sit there, in the car, in the garage, all the urgency I’d felt, the inspiration, drained away now.

  The light snaps off, leaving me in darkness. Gradually, my eyes grow used to the lack of light. A row of trash cans, a couple of old bikes, and shadows . . . shadows . . .

  My friend’s brother did it in the garage, the night of her senior prom. Selfish bastard. Then again, they say that all suicides are selfish.

  I let my head fall back against the seat. Suicide. There are probably plenty of people out there who want to die . . .

  Cal’s dad left when Cal was a kid, and his mom was never around. Cal hadn’t had it easy, but he would never have taken his own life—why did it have to be him?

  Suicide . . . it’s a horrible thing.

  It is also . . . a possibility.

  Like many people, I have given this possibility a lot of thought, although not for myself. For me there is only one interesting aspect of suicide, and it is not the piece that leaves you dead.

  Suicide is not contagious—it can’t be spread, and that is what I find reassuring. While most people who consider suicide are comforted by the idea that they can always bow out, in the middle of the night, say, or the middle of life, I appreciate only the fact that it can’t be passed to another person, like a germ.

  That it isn’t in your blood.

  Suicide. I don’t get how anyone can do it. Can’t understand why anyone would want to do it. Why anyone would want to die in a garage, want to die at all. I could never, ever kill myself. I’d need a hit man. Need to hire someone to murder me.

  I run my hands over my face. Cal. Why did it have to be him?

  In my mind’s eye I see the Sutton Prep girls circling The Killing Tree like birds or ballerinas, necks arching, faces dipping— looking, and looking, hoping to find something, some . . . remnant of Cal, that would somehow stop the loss of him from being so total, so complete.

  Who would look for me if I disappeared in an instant the way Cal did?

  Had my mother asked herself that question? Had she thought of me at all?

  I remember going to visit her after . . . but I don’t remember much. Just that big green lawn at the place she went to “recover,” an endless lawn that stretched forever. A wide beautiful barrier I had to cross that day, to where she sat under a tree like some Buddha.

  Beautiful gardens bordered the edges of that long lawn . . . gardens filled with tall purple irises, their petals sloping away from their wide-open centers . . . dark centers, that made me think of the color of the sky just before night falls.

  I remember a stooped gardener, in a broad-brimmed hat . . .

  Mothers . . . they’re gardeners of a different sort. So what right do they have to walk away from their barely budding flowers?

  I stayed with my gram for a while, then my cousins . . .

  But it was my aunt who told me the truth. Told me the fighting between my parents had been so bad my dad temporarily lost sight in one eye. That made sense. He’s a visual artist.

  But my mom, she didn’t wait for something to stop working. She decided she wanted to stop living. Pills. That’s what my aunt said. A handful.

  Not too long ago, I confronted my mother. Asked her to write it all down—probably because I didn’t want to talk about it, but I wanted to know. Wanted the details from her, not from my aunt, not from my memory, which is thankfully free of the details. Because how can I know what really happened unless she tells me? She was alone when she took the pills.

  God. I’d never want to die alone.

  She never did write about it for me. Just a letter was all I wanted, so I could understand. So I could dissect her words. Try to find proof. A guarantee. Something that would tell me it was her, only her. That it wasn’t my fault somehow, that I didn’t drive her to it. And that I wouldn’t, couldn’t inherit what she had, that kind of crazy. Because she had to be crazy, right? When she tried it?

  I wobble. How close is that to crazy?

  On the upside: she did tell me she hadn’t really wanted to die.

  “I just wanted to get out,” she said.

  Um, thanks?

  She’d waved a hand, as if my understanding of that part wasn’t important. “It wasn’t you; it was your father.” But that still showed me that he had more effect on her than I did. Still meant, in essence, that I didn’t matter. Whether she meant to kill herself or scare my dad, or both, or neither, she still left me. I was three.

  She left for three weeks, or six weeks, or three months . . . I forget what she said. See? That’s why I wanted her to write it down. How am I supposed to remember the story when I’m still trying to understand it? I wanted her to write it down so I could look at it, later. Study and memorize and analyze the literary DNA she’d leave in a letter. Compare her genes with mine.

  I have memories of Mom dangling me over her knees as she crouched down on the kitchen floor, kissing my neck, the two of us laughing. Memories of her telling me she loved me.

  But, at some point, maybe when I couldn’t take the ups and downs any longer, her alternating presence and absence, I shut down. It must have seemed . . . safer. Even Laurel—who can be a cold bitch sometimes—used to tell me my soul was frozen. I told her she was just trying to get me to go with her.

  Even as a musician I’ve excelled in technique, not expression. Most of my emotions have remained locked away, in a cage of music theory.

  Then last summer . . . the emotions that slept in me the way fish sleep in winter water, began to wake . . .

  But now, again, they’re somnolent.

  And, maybe, it’s like this for everyone. Once you experience a loss or a betrayal. A death . . .

  A trivial misunderstanding that simmers over the course of a day, then bursts into a fiery argument, like Laurel and Dee’s.

  A suicide.

  An accident.

  There are so many ways to lose love; is it even worth finding?

  Love means ten thousand different things to ten thousand different people—there is no harder word to define.

  My mother’s love . . . is a ghost of what it was. My parents’ love for each other, the same.

  Maybe all loves die . . .

  Turn to ghosts.

  The thought propels me out of the car.

  In the house, I trot upstairs and grab my guitar, then slip-slide out to the barn. I flash back to being onstage at Weill Hall.

  This is one ghost I need to exorcise.

  Once
I’m inside the barn, I take the Martin out of its case.

  It’s killing me already, how it bounces off the old wood of the ladder as I climb, but this guitar is going to have a lot more than a ding or two in it before I’m done. I’m out for blood.

  Up in the hayloft I pause, considering. But in the end there’s nothing rock star about it.

  There’s not even the drama of David’s umbrella.

  I simply hold it over the edge—

  And let it drop.

  WEB

  DAVID

  The drop into the cyber abyss is effortless. I start out with a homework assignment but rabbit-hole quickly.

  Man, where do they find these girls?

  I am eyes.

  The speed of sound—that was my question. What’s the speed of sound?

  Cartoon sex, that’s pretty much what this is. Going to quit in a minute, just want to see . . .

  I am fingers.

  Wikipedia, NASA, Wired—any of these sites will tell me the speed of sound.

  Some of these things—you can’t unsee.

  I am letters, numbers, shortcuts, codes.

  Seven hundred and sixty mph, seven hundred seventy—it doesn’t really seem that fast.

  How fast did Cate Reese run away from me tonight? Cate . . . I’m going to stop. I just . . . want to check out this one site . . .

  I am a keyboard, a credit card, an expiration date.

  Wings at the Speed of Sound is an album by Paul McCartney. “Speed of Sound” is a Coldplay song.

  I’m done now, as soon as I follow this last link . . .

  I am . . . desire.

  The speed of light is faster than the speed of sound.

  So is the speed of a bullet.

  Just need to click . . .

  I am identifiable. But . . .

  I am unknown.

  PART III: WINTER

  BLOOD

  DAVID

  “In a pool of his own blood.”

  “That’s bullshit. You don’t know that’s how it went down.”