Before Goodbye

by Mimi Cross

  Her sponsor suggests she go to a meeting every day, and Cate tells me that sometimes she protests. “It’s a proven fact. Ketamine isn’t addictive.”

  But then her sponsor asks if she knows the name of the longest river in Egypt and reminds Cate that lots of things are addictive.

  I tell Cate her sponsor is right.

  It’s this same sponsor, the girlfriend of an old family friend, apparently, who warns Cate away from me. Who keeps reminding her she shouldn’t date for ninety days.

  Damn.

  Luckily, no one counts a band rehearsal as a date.

  MUSIC

  CATE

  Ruby, the thin guitarist from Deep Dark Love, steps on a pedal—

  Her electric guitar spins out a line of dark satin . . . filling the rehearsal space.

  I’ve got the black Tak strapped across my body. Now I begin to play.

  Ruby weaves in and out of my chord sequence. I start to get that feeling, of lift.

  Behind me, Trevor lays down a primal groove on his new toy, a cocktail drum. I turn to look at him, standing behind his strange kit, and when our eyes meet, he switches up the rhythm until it settles somewhere in my pelvis.

  Goosebumps rise on my skin. I am in a big car, being driven. Yet I am the driver.

  Dale Waters is standing to my right, a step or two behind me, his white sword of a smile sheathed, his hands not moving yet, just a premonition on the upright.

  When he sees me looking at him, he flashes me that ravening grin, and then, holding back till the last possible part of the beat—he slides into the groove just in time to catch me as I swoon into the song. At this musical moment, we are made for each other.

  Then his evening voice leans into mine. Our chemistry sizzles. No wonder I’d been confused.

  The volume grows. The chorus comes—

  Dale’s voice is the resistance I press against. And just like that night, he won’t let me go too far, this time holding me down with the midnight sound of his gleaming bass. Grounding me as I push into the dark places, although he’s there, too.

  I’ve written these songs, but it doesn’t seem like it now. Deep Dark Love—minus the horns and keyboards—are as much a part of this as I am. Yes, they’re following my map, but they’re following so closely we’re like lovers spooning.

  Then we’re making out, and it’s love or lust or whatever you want to call it. I may not have had sex yet, but I have this. May not have made love, but I make music.

  Finally I find David, sitting still and stunned in the back of the room. He smiles and I almost get lost in the spill of honey.

  So I swim away, back into the music pooling around me, before I lose my place.

  My place . . . this is it. Not just in the music, but in the words, too. As I sing, they expand— sometimes literally. Multiple notes for a single syllable—I’ve always known words are huge, are more than meets the eye, but now, they’re like skyscrapers. Mountains. Volcanoes.

  But when the band begins to improvise—

  My fingers stumble.

  “Give it up, Angel,” Dale says, his lips close to my ear. I shut my eyes, but it’s hard. I’m just so used to all those little black notes strung out across the page like a bridge.

  Now I have no page, no bridge. Just a set list taped to the side of my guitar—twelve tunes born over a handful of weeks, over my entire life—and these strangers who are not strangers because they know everything about me. They must, or they wouldn’t be able to talk, talk, talk to me like this without words.

  But that’s not enough, not yet. Not to let go completely. It took this long to get here, but I can’t go any further.

  “It’s down south,” Dale says. “Come on, Katydid.”

  “What the hell?” David mouths at me. He’s wearing a terrific scowl.

  Dale flashes a lightning grin at him, and David flips him off. He laughs and turns his back to David, making a gliding motion nobody but me can see. “In the hips.”

  My breath catches, but I get it. I let go, still not with my guitar, but with my voice.

  And this time, when I stop playing, the band fills in the blanks. Their sound swells around me. Waves carrying me atop a sea, their instruments making up for the fact that mine is missing.

  After a while, I slowly make my way back into the groove with my guitar. Now I see the whole picture. Next time I’ll be ready.

  Playing with a band is like having a parachute of gossamer and steel. It’s having people who have your back, who know your secrets, who know you.

  Singing with a band is trampolining with your breath. A sound you make, that makes you, too.

  Being in a band is instant trust, because you have to. You’re using everybody’s blood. And if there’s someone who doesn’t feel that, it doesn’t matter. Musicians have huge egos—or fragile egos—and everybody wants to be a big cat. No one wants to blow it.

  At the end of the rehearsal, Dale and I talk about this very thing. I tell him my worst fear. I tell him about Weill Hall.

  He just looks at me with those sky eyes, with that unchanging blue. He’s unimpressed that I’ve played such an amazing venue and unconcerned that I screwed up.

  “No biggie, Angel. It doesn’t mean shit.”

  I fold my arms. “Easy for you to say—you weren’t the one up there blowing it.”

  “I’ve blown it before. Everybody sucks sometimes.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to suck.”

  “Want to be perfect, yeah? Fuck that. Perfect wrecks it, the whole creativity thing. I’ll tell you what,” he continues, “we’ll play that gig of yours, and we’ll kill it. But do us all a favor, leave perfect out of this.”

  Now David calls out something about the last song, about the tempo. Dale glances at him, then nods in agreement. David says something else. Dale nods again.

  He waves David over, says approvingly, “What you said was dead-on. So what do you play?”

  “Sports,” David says. Then he looks straight at me. “But I’m a really good listener.”

  CANADA

  DAVID

  Friday night I call Cate to confirm our date for the following evening—our First Date, Cate calls it—and then, we just keep talking. And when we stop, the silence stretches between us, becoming a place of its own. A room where we’re together just hanging out, like we did last summer.

  When I tell Cate about the room idea, I can hear her smile, then the silence isn’t so silent anymore.

  “I can hear you thinking,” I tell her.

  “That’s . . . pretty cool.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking . . .” She hums a little under her breath, probably jotting down a song idea. She does that a lot lately. We may not be dating, but she’s at my house a lot, almost as much as she used to be, taking care of Kimmy.

  “I’m thinking,” she repeats, “I don’t want to wait.”

  “Ah. And what is it you don’t want to wait for?”

  “Our First Date. Can you come over?”

  “You mean, like now?” It’s nearly midnight.

  “Like now.”

  When I arrive at Cate’s, I’m suddenly struck by the fact that I’ve never been inside her home. But apparently, that’s not going to change tonight. She meets me on the porch and we go behind the house to a big old barn.

  Inside, it’s color. Enormous, breathtaking canvases are everywhere.

  I want to know everything about this place. The studio, Cate calls it. I want to know about her father and what drives him to create such wild beauty. I want to know—

  “Come on.” She gestures to a ladder that doesn’t look like it can hold either of us. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  I must look confused, because Cate laughs and gives me a little push.

  We climb up to a hayloft. It’s filled with paintings and, also, hay. Piles of old, dusty hay, bales of new hay. Moonlight slices in through a crack in the wall and spills over the new hay, turni
ng it to gold.

  “The old hayloft door,” Cate explains, watching me follow the line of light with my eyes. She crouches down, so I do, too.

  In a nest of hay is a litter of kittens. She picks one up.

  “This is the one I’m giving to Kimmy. What do you think?”

  The ink-black ball of fur is the size of my fist. “I think it’s great, but my mother . . . isn’t around right now so . . .”

  “Exactly,” Cate says. Her eyes are full of sympathy. I try to smile but can’t.

  Cate’s smile, though, is another slim line of light in the dark loft as she returns the kitten to its mother’s side. Now she moves away from the fluffy huddle and sits back against one of the hay bales. I sit next to her.

  “Bryn told me your mom left,” she says. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not yet,” I say.

  She nods. Then she looks around the loft. “My dad wants to get animals, turn the studio into a real barn.”

  “What about his paintings?”

  “He’ll sell them and start a new series. He says the new paintings will be small. Microcosms—that’s how he envisions them.”

  “And what do you envision?” I ask, walking fingers down her arm, entwining them with hers. “Why did you want to see me tonight?”

  “Because tomorrow night is our First Date, and because we’ve waited so long, there are a lot of first-date things I want to do.”

  “Three months is a long time to wait for a date.”

  “I was thinking more like three years.”

  “Are you saying . . .”

  “I’m saying, since we—or at least I—have waited for this date for years, there may be, besides the first-date things I want to do—that we want to do, I hope—some second-date things.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “You’re afraid that we’re going to run out of time.”

  “I’m not afraid of anything.” Chin lifted, Cate’s eyes dare me to say differently.

  “I’m sure you’re not. So then, what is it you’d like to do tonight, on this predate of ours?”

  “I’d like to get some of the talking out of the way.”

  “Oh really.”

  “Stop looking at me that way!”

  But she keeps looking at me the exact same way—until she doesn’t.

  “David, I want to know about Canada.”

  The sliver of light coming in at the edge of the hay door vanishes as the moon moves on and we’re left in nearly total darkness.

  “I know you almost died,” Cate says quietly. “I want to know what happened. You said you understood why I asked. Well, nothing’s changed.”

  She takes my other hand, entwining her fingers with mine the same way I did with hers. My palms are pulsing. I want to touch more than just her hands. It would make this so much easier. I imagine kissing her neck, like I nearly did in the pool last summer. That day was a lifetime ago, but it’s still vivid in my mind.

  Canada is vivid, too, the memories sharp as shards of glass.

  And I know if I don’t tell her, if I don’t share the thing that changed everything, then everything won’t really be changed. I won’t be changed. And the glass will continue to cut me.

  “It was my fault.”

  I say this first, because it’s the worst thing about me, and if she can get past it, maybe we have a chance.

  “I hadn’t looked at the trip guide, not that day. I knew some waterfalls were coming up—we all knew—but I didn’t know how big they’d be. Not that we were supposed to have anything to do with them—we’d finished the portage and were supposed to cross the lake above the falls. But one of the canoes—someone hadn’t tied it tightly enough. When I came off the trail, it was in the center of the lake.

  “I went into the water. Dan, one of the trip leaders, went in after me. The current was strong. It took us both.”

  “David.” Cate’s squeezing my hands tightly, or maybe it’s me gripping her.

  “The falls at the top fed into a pool. It was rough. There were rapids. I was knocked unconscious. But somehow . . . I survived. The other counselor found me, on the shore.

  “Dan wasn’t so lucky. He . . . went over the second set of falls. The drop from there . . . He didn’t make it.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Cate whispers.

  I shake my head. “I still can’t believe it.”

  “I understand.”

  I know she does.

  KISSES

  DAVID

  Before she has time to say anything else, I ask, “Cate, did you ever really look at me—really see me—before I came back from Canada?”

  “I think . . . I’ve always looked at you. Just didn’t let myself admit it. Then, right before you left, there was that day, with the dresses. You told me I was pretty.”

  I’m dumbfounded. And so, so disappointed.

  I laugh an ugly bark of a laugh, so loud in the quiet night that Cate cringes.

  “Wow,” I practically shout. “You’re easy! That’s it, huh? That’s all this is?” Anger burns through me. How could I have been so wrong about her? “Here I was, thinking that something was happening between us, something real—”

  Cate leans in and kisses me. Just gently presses her lips to mine.

  I go completely still.

  And in that stillness, I no longer see the ugly things about myself I saw last summer. I’m not that guy anymore, who uses girls like a drug. The self-blame for Dan’s death remains, but Cate’s kissed me after all. So maybe even that can be forgiven.

  When I finally open my eyes, Cate’s wide-eyed, like she’s afraid of what she’s just done, that I might freak over it.

  But then she’s the one who’s freaking, words spilling out of her, fast and breathy.

  “It is something real,” she says. “And I think, maybe it’s always been here, between us. Waiting to be . . . discovered. I just, I thought you could never want me, you were so . . . everything.

  “When you called me pretty, I heard something else. I heard possible. And when I saw you, that night in your room toward the end of the summer, you were still everything, but you were also . . . you. And that was so much better. And it made me want you even more.”

  I can’t help it now. I wrap my arms around her. Bury my face in her neck. She shivers and hugs me to her.

  “I don’t want to waste any more time,” I whisper against her skin. “Don’t want to waste one more second.” I lift my face and kiss her mouth, but lightly. “Not this one . . .” I bring my lips to her cheek. “Or this one.” I kiss her other cheek, repeat the words, punctuating each phrase with a kiss: on her forehead, her eyelids, her collarbone. Then I pull back. “Why didn’t we know?” My voice is a cross between a sob and a laugh. Something is shifting in me.

  “We did,” she says. “We do. We know.”

  We can’t stop smiling now. We just stare into each other’s eyes and grin.

  Soon, in silent agreement, we climb down the ladder, and even though the spring air is cool and damp, we walk back behind the barn, into the woods. No words, just her hand in mine. Relief floods me—along with adrenaline—as I step into the invisible field of electricity that’s been living between us for so long.

  Deep in the woods, everything is black-and-white and moonlight. We crouch, picking pebbles out of the still-winter-cold creek. When we stand, I reach for her hips, slip a pebble into her pocket. She slips one in mine. The fronts of our bodies are nearly touching, the inch of air between us wildly alive. I laugh softly.

  Then I turn back to the stream, choose a larger stone. It’s round and white as the moon. Smooth as her lips. I place it in the palm of her hand, where it fits perfectly.

  Then I tell her all the reasons I love her—going back to last summer.

  “You sound like a poet,” she says with a smile.

  “I’m not anything,” I say. “Not anybody, just—me. And compared to all this?” I spread my arms wide, not sure if I mean t
he woods or the world or the entire universe—or maybe what’s between us. “Compared to this, I’m nothing. Or maybe, I’m part of it all. Maybe we are. Cate, do you think there’s a plan?”

  But even as I ask the question, she radiates the Yes of it.

  She inclines her head then, the simple movement appearing almost formal, like an abbreviated bow, and makes a sweeping gesture with one arm, as if inviting me to go before her on the overgrown path.

  I do, and soon I’ve led her so far into the woods that we come out the other side, where the trees give way to moonlit fields spreading out before us like a silvery sea.

  Cate sweeps her arm out once more now, her open palm upturned.

  “Welcome, to the Hotel Vast Horizon,” she says.

  “I like that.”

  “It’s a song. Come back with me to my house. Come inside. I’ll play it for you.”

  SPLIT

  DAVID

  My father chooses the night of Cate’s show to corner me.

  “You received a letter today from South State. I thought, at first, it was a plea for funds.”

  Opening shots: The college of your choice has no money. And I read your mail.

  Of course, I know the letter had nothing to do with fundraising. The application to South State was the only one I sent. I assume I was accepted, but . . .

  Strategy: Move into defensive position. Door? Ten steps away. Keys? Check.

  “Oh yeah?” I say. “What did the letter say?”

  “‘Yeah.’ Is that how they talk at South?”

  It’s a ridiculous comment. Everyone says “yeah.” But I want to get out the door, so I don’t reply.

  “I imagine many of the students at South hail from the Pine Barrens. I suppose there may be a more backward place on the East Coast, but if there is, I don’t know it.”

  Apparently, I got in.

  “Dad, I’d love to celebrate with you, but I’ve got to go.” In my happiness, I’m careless.

  “Dad? Dad? You sound like a Southie already! I’ll thank you to continue addressing me as Father, as you always have. If you want to go to some downwardly mobile college, that’s up to you—for now.” He mutters something about my mother being behind my low-level choice, and I wonder how he can blame her for anything, now that she’s left him. “But you will continue to adhere to the high standards we keep in this house.”