Before Goodbye

by Mimi Cross

  “Bryn,” Cate says. “Cal wasn’t my boyfriend. And I don’t want his heart, I just want—”

  He wasn’t her boyfriend. Is that what she said? It’s ridiculous that I care. The guy’s dead. But—

  All of sudden, it’s like a show has started. Like we’re all at a play, or in one. Our comments, thoughts, hang in midair, as a gray Honda pulls up in front of one of the two garage doors and parks. A man wearing a gray suit gets out. Goes inside.

  The very air is still. But what just happened? Act I began. Ended. What now?

  “Okay, Crazy Cate. Show’s over.” Bryn turns the flask upside down. “All gone.”

  “Fine. I’ll—come back tomorrow.”

  “And do what?”

  It sinks in now, really sinks in. This man is an organ recipient. Is Cate really thinking about knocking on his door? I blow out a breath.

  “Maybe she’s right, Cate. This can’t be the greatest thing for you to be thinking about—”

  “Look, you guys. I just—need some time. You don’t have to be here.”

  “I want to be here,” I say, leaning forward.

  “I don’t,” my sister says.

  “Okay, well, I’m just going to see if, I don’t know, maybe there’s a good time for me to talk to him.”

  “Cate. Your timing is not going to make ringing his doorbell and asking him to hang out any less insane,” Bryn objects. “I mean, what exactly are you going to tell him? You know what? I’ll tell him. Tell him you’re certifiable, but he doesn’t need to worry.” Bryn opens her door, gets out, then comes around and leans in Cate’s open window. “Because you’re not a stalker or anything. Like me.”

  Bryn shoots Cate a terrible smile, then strides toward the house.

  “Bryn!” Cate says, clambering out of the car. “Wait. Let’s talk about this.”

  I follow.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore,” Bryn says. “I want to show you that you need help. And the way I’m going to do that is to knock on this guy’s door and tell him what’s up. Then he’ll call the men in the white coats, since your parents are too lame to do it and restraining people isn’t my specialty.”

  “Bryn, wait,” Cate begs.

  “For what? For you to get it through your head that there’s no way to stay connected to this guy Cal?”

  “Cate,” I begin, putting my arm around her.

  She shrugs it off. “Bryn,” she says in a low voice. “You’re going to attract his attention.”

  “I want his attention. You do, too, obviously. You want someone’s attention. The K, this crazy shit about Cal haunting you—you’re screaming for help, Cate.”

  Bryn’s almost at the front door.

  “Bryn, stop,” I insist.

  But Cate’s already grabbing her arm, dragging her into a row of bushes alongside the house, saying, “You can’t just barge in there!”

  Feeling ridiculous, I crouch down near the girls.

  “I’m not. I’m going to say hello first. Then I’ll barge in. And tell him that you want to go on a date with him so you can chat about his heart or whatever. Then he’s going to tell you how crazy you are, and maybe you’ll listen to him, since you won’t listen to me, or Laurel.”

  “Laurel?” Cate stiffens. “You talked to Laurel? About me?”

  “Jesus, Cate. You’re best friends. Or are you so obsessed that you’ve forgotten that?”

  Bryn rises up out of the bushes. At the same time, another car pulls into the driveway.

  “Bryn,” I warn, yanking her down as one of the garage doors clatters up.

  We hear the car pull in. The door closes again with a rattle.

  “Guess your friend doesn’t live alone,” Bryn says.

  “You think?” Cate retorts.

  Bryn mutters something. She’s taller than Cate and closer to the windows. Now she gets up on her knees. From there she has a view that we don’t: she can see inside.

  “Oh man,” she says softly.

  “What?” Cate and I say together.

  “Looks like your friend’s heart went to a good cause.”

  Slowly I move over, kneel next to Bryn.

  In what looks like a living room, the man in the gray suit is kissing a woman, probably his wife, because on either side of him, pulling on each of his hands, are two little girls, twins, about five years old, who resemble them both.

  “Company,” Bryn sings out softly, no longer looking through the window but toward the street. Yet another car is pulling up in front of the house. Now a beautiful Asian woman gets out.

  Cate’s breath catches.

  “Who is it?” Bryn asks.

  “Cal’s mother. But I guess . . . that makes sense?”

  “It does,” I say. I understand everything now. Really understand. If I could talk to someone with Jack’s heart . . .

  Planting one foot on the ground, I motion for Cate to move in my direction. Then I kind of pull her up on my knee so she can see.

  The man still has a daughter hanging on each arm, as his wife, frowning a little like she’s confused, ushers Cate’s friend’s mother into the living room. The Asian woman makes a vague circle in the air with her hand, possibly indicating that she’d been in the neighborhood. She’s saying something—an apology? Clearly, there’s been a misunderstanding.

  “I don’t think they knew—” Cate starts.

  “That your friend Cal’s mother was coming,” I finish.

  I wonder about the little girls. Do they know their daddy has a new heart, one that belonged to someone closer to their age than their father’s?

  The man gestures to the couches. His wife sits down, saying something to the girls, who disentangle their fingers from their father’s and go sit obediently next to her.

  After a slight hesitation, Cal’s mother approaches the man in the gray suit, whose smile holds steady.

  Tears pool in his wife’s eyes as she watches Cal’s mother—who is not so steady, who is visibly trembling—embrace her husband.

  The two stand with their arms around each other for what seems like a very long time.

  And then, with one arm still around the man who has her son’s heart, Cal’s mother leans in a little so that the side of her face rests against his chest.

  She closes her eyes and smiles.

  Cate sags against me.

  I rest my chin on her head. Gently kiss her hair. I don’t know if she feels it or not. It is a stolen kiss.

  A ghost kiss.

  PROOF

  CATE

  “Hi, Cate.”

  “Hey, Cate.”

  These greetings come from Laurel and Bryn, who stand together at my front door on this frozen Saturday afternoon.

  I’ve just woken up from a nightmare. In the nightmare, I never see Cal again.

  And I haven’t seen him. Not lately. Although I hear songs in my head all the time now, and I swear he’s put them there. I’d prefer he put them directly into my notebook. I try to write them down but . . . most of them slither off the page like the snakes of fog that writhe over Ocean Avenue in the spring. I’ve only caught a couple.

  “What time is it?” I ask quickly, suddenly scrambling for something normal to say.

  Laurel and Bryn exchange a look. Too late, I realize I should have invited them in.

  “We brought you something.”

  “We have something for you.”

  Their nearly identical words run across each other. My stomach lurches.

  Laurel hands me a book. Hallucinations by somebody named Oliver Sacks. Its turquoise cover is illustrated with a detailed sketch of an eye. From the brow, yellow-and-blue lines radiate upward. The wide-open eye and the lines projecting like rays make the drawing look . . . mystical.

  “Cate?” Laurel sounds like she’s afraid I might break if she talks too loud.

  Outside, Dee sits behind the wheel of her shiny Mercedes, looking like a getaway driver.

  I blow out a breath. “You two join the Jehovah’s Witness
es or something?”

  Then I slam the door.

  Then I realize: I’m out of K.

  And the truth is, the door slam was only in my head, in the form of a brief wish.

  “What’s this?” I say too brightly, holding up the book.

  “Just something, we, um . . .” Laurel mumbles. “Take a quick look.”

  “Take a good look,” Bryn says.

  It’s a new book, the cover unmarred. But several pages have been dog-eared.

  I glance at Laurel. Since we were tiny, we’ve been turning down corners, marking favorite pages in picture books, favorite places in stories. These days, we often dog-ear pages of novels before exchanging them, indicating that the page contains a beloved passage, or lines of dialogue uttered by a character we wish we’d come up with ourselves, words that perfectly mirror our thoughts. I’m particularly guilty of this, sometimes even underlining phrases with pencil, thrilled to have found the right words to match my feelings.

  But now I wonder. If I were to go back and read them over, would the words I’d marked so carefully reveal additional information, maybe even entirely different information?

  So much meaning swims beneath the surface of a word. I get that now. I get that some words are so deep, so wide—they’re like glacial lakes, or oceans covering a landmass of implications. And I get that sometimes I’m down there, too, swimming in the depths of the wordwater, muddying the clarity or filtering the mud.

  For a second, my vision clouds—and I actually see water. See myself and Laurel, both of us down near the silty bottom of the cedar pond, red wordwater holding us under, instead of aloft.

  But Laurel won’t swim with me now. She won’t even meet my eyes, which, with an involuntary flutter of lids and lashes, clear abruptly.

  I skim the first dog-eared page—Chapter 13: “The Haunted Mind”—and let out a small sound of disbelief.

  “. . . the hallucinations we must now consider, which are, essentially, compulsive . . .”

  The sense of betrayal strikes as hard as a fist, making my face heat, but I read on.

  “The emotions here can be of various kinds: grief or longing for a loved person . . . horror, anguish, or dread following deeply traumatic, ego-threatening or life-threatening events . . . the conscience cannot tolerate. Hallucinations of ghosts . . . are especially associated with violent death or guilt.”

  “I’m thinking about apologizing to you,” Bryn says. “Thinking about it.”

  My eyes waver over the next few pages: “Bereavement causes a sudden hole in one’s life, a hole which—somehow—must be filled . . . Bereavement Hallucinations . . .”

  I shut my eyes, wishing that everything—Laurel, Bryn, the book—would just go away.

  Laurel says, “Think this might fit?”

  Like she’s talking about a dress or something.

  “It’s . . . your brain’s solution,” she continues. “The hallucination can be hearing a voice, seeing an image, or both—” She breaks off as my eyes snap open.

  Angrily, I turn to the back of the book, scanning the index: paranormal or supernatural . . . religious feeling. Then find myself flipping to another dog-eared page, this one talking about sensed presence.

  Bryn and Laurel exchange another look. But suddenly, I don’t care anymore, about the two of them conspiring.

  I’ve found something that interests me.

  Chapter 6: “Altered States.”

  “To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and—”

  Outside, the sunlight bounces off Dee’s windshield.

  Escape will do nicely, thank you very much.

  “Cate? Cate, are you here?”

  Not really.

  But my mother’s timing is perfect for once.

  “Hey, can you guys go say hi to my mom? She’s been seriously on me lately.”

  “Sure,” Laurel says. She heads toward the kitchen, looking relieved.

  “Yeah, okay,” Bryn says, about to follow. “But you owe me. By the way, David says hi. Now you owe me double.”

  DRAGON

  CATE

  Dee watches warily as I approach the car.

  “Hey, Dee.”

  “Hey.”

  “So, you know that stuff you gave Laurel?”

  Dee frowns. But I guess she figures there’s no point pretending. “Yeah?”

  “Think I can get a little more?”

  “It’s gone? Everything she gave you?”

  “It wasn’t that much,” I say defensively.

  “More than she wanted you to have. It was just to help you through—you know.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m through ‘you know.’ And I like the high it gives me.”

  “Fine with me. But I’m not holding. And—” She gives me her sugar-laced-with-strychnine smile. “You’ll have to pay. You know Chinatown?”

  “Enough.”

  She rifles through her purse, pulling out a scrap of paper and a pen. She jots something down and hands the paper to me. It’s an address.

  “How does Laurel feel about you wanting more?”

  “How does Laurel feel about you dealing?”

  “Technically, I’m not.” She nods at the paper.

  “Then I guess I don’t have to say thanks.”

  She gives me a spiky look. I return it.

  “How many?” I ask. “How many of Laurel’s friends do you have coming to you?”

  “They don’t come to me.”

  “You know what I mean. First one’s free, right? That’s a little cliché, don’t you think?”

  “Worked with you.”

  “How many?” I ask again, eyeing the gleaming Mercedes.

  “Enough,” she says, mimicking me from earlier. “Enough that I don’t have to drive my daddy’s old station wagon.”

  That rubs, because although my family has money, Dad’s cheap. When you make it on your own, you tend to watch your pennies. So I don’t have as many shiny things as a lot of the other kids in Middleburn. Plus, the way Dad wears his sneakers till they have holes in them bugs me, and I do wish I had a car as nice as Dee’s, so it infuriates me that she’s even noticed our old car. Or maybe Laurel told her that my dad is tight. The thought makes me even angrier.

  “You know, I don’t need this shit.” I toss the paper on the ground.

  “But you want it, don’t you?” she says as I start to turn away. “You feel strangely compelled to keep taking it. And you feel like that’s okay, because you’re not addicted. You’re in control. That’s the beauty of K. The when, the where . . . how much, who with. It’s up to you, and you like that. You like having control over such a snaky substance, because you’re out of control in so many other ways.” She leans through the open window, fingers curled like claws, then she snaps her hands out at me. “Boo! Do I sound like your imaginary boyfriend?”

  VINYL

  DAVID

  Restrained vocals, atmospheric keyboard pads. Drum loops drowned in reverb placed way back in the mix. The song cranking in Listen Up! has a hypnotic quality. The music fills every bit of empty space inside me. That’s what a good band can do.

  After flipping through half the vinyl collection, I check out the used CDs. Then I wander upstairs, grab a few songbooks. Dylan, Springsteen—their lyrics read like novels. In their stories, I find parts of myself I didn’t know existed.

  Taking a seat on a stool behind a glass case that holds collapsible music stands, ancient-looking sheet music, what appears to be a pile of clarinet parts, I read through the lyrics—not just Springsteen and Dylan, but Eddie Vedder, Eminem, Johnny Cash. Poets, all.

  Stacks of CDs crowd the surface of the case. I’m supposed to be putting them away, but . . . it’s like being surrounded by these tangible objects, something intangible, invisible, is opening inside me. Something I thought I’d let go, or thrown away when I’d been forced to make myself in my brother’s image but that maybe I’d
only put away.

  It’s like an unresolved chord vibrating inside me, a song with no final cadence. No finish. No end. It’s like . . . this thing—this thing that’s breaking open, or maybe it’s waking, this thing that the music sheds light on, that lyrics illuminate—it’s in my blood. It’s me.

  I’ve always loved music, always used it, almost the same way I’ve used girls. I can say that now, because nice as I’ve always been to the girls I dated, I finally get it. It was still using.

  But maybe that’s what people do. Maybe we all use each other. I don’t know. Porn—that’s using. But people? Yeah, I don’t know.

  I plunge back into the lyrics. Lose myself. Until someone says, “Hey.”

  Cate Reese stands in front of me, gray eyes scanning the shelves behind me, fingers tap, tap, tapping against her lips. She is lacking her characteristic stillness. This unsettles me. Or maybe it’s just her. What she does to me.

  Before I have a chance to say hi, she points suddenly at the air. “What is this?”

  “‘Low Roses.’ How are you doing?”

  “Fine. Are they from around here?”

  I want to ask why she’s here. Want to ask what she’s thinking now, now that she’s seen where her friend’s heart is. I want to ask if the position of her own heart has changed.

  I would have asked her all this after we left the bushes outside the gray-suited man’s house, but the silence that fell over the three of us seemed like a weight too heavy to lift. Boyfriend or not, she obviously loved her friend Cal.

  “Ah—no, the song is ‘Low Roses,’” I reply. “The band is Sex Changes at Gunpoint.”

  She raises an eyebrow, and I nod in agreement with her speechless commentary. The band’s name seems to be in direct opposition to the sound of their music.

  A smile pulls at her lips.

  She looks . . . different. Even from the other day. She’s definitely not high. Her eyes are clear. Maybe it’s something she’s done with her hair. It looks good, but it’s kind of hanging in her face. Like she wants to hide behind it.

  And then there are those moving fingers, drumming on the glass now. They’re a jarring juxtaposition to the stillness that’s always emanated from Cate.