Before Goodbye

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Mimi Cross

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Skyscape, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503949720

  ISBN-10: 1503949729

  Book design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  To Brian

  (Because I said I would.)

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PART I: SUMMER

  MOTIF

  WILDERNESS

  CEDAR

  MORPHINE

  QUARTET

  STITCHES

  BLOOM

  DEAD END

  VASCULAR

  SPACE

  BRICKS

  HEAT

  DUET

  WISH

  WATER

  GLITTER

  GOLD

  NYLON

  ICE

  SUGAR

  UNDERTOW

  GUITARS

  STARS

  GLASS

  PART II: FALL

  NIGHT

  ANTISEPTIC

  OAK

  DRAFT

  PINE

  KETAMINE

  CHARM

  SWEAT

  LICHEN

  BOULDER

  REACH

  ALCOHOL

  CONNECTION

  SILVER

  BLUE

  REFLECTION

  WORK

  GUEST LIST

  AFTER PARTY

  EMBER

  HOME

  STATIC

  FRUIT

  RIDE

  ENAMEL

  RAIN

  SILK

  IMAGINATION

  SCAR TISSUE

  STONE

  SNOW

  SPLINTERS

  WEB

  PART III: WINTER

  BLOOD

  LIE

  LINOLEUM

  AIR

  CRACKS

  HOLE

  DISSONANCE

  LAUGH

  NAUSEA

  BREATH

  HEART

  RUNDOWN

  FAMILY

  PROOF

  DRAGON

  VINYL

  SEX

  DRUGS

  ROCK & ROLL

  WAVES

  CITY

  LYCHEE

  SOLO

  LOFT

  TOUCH

  OBLIVION

  SHADOWS

  CONCRETE

  HORSES

  GHOSTS

  SKY

  HEARTBREAK

  PART IV: SPRING

  COFFEE

  STRINGS

  STEPS

  MUSIC

  CANADA

  KISSES

  SPLIT

  CONVERTIBLE

  STAGE

  HOTEL VAST HORIZON

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “I’ll meet you there when

  the evening writhes

  I will know the location

  by the look in your eyes

  The void and the vista

  the fugitives gone

  I’ll see you there

  at the Hotel Vast Horizon . . .”

  —Chris Whitley, “Hotel Vast Horizon”

  PART I: SUMMER

  MOTIF

  CATE

  Toe taps and tongue clicks.

  “Tika tika tika tika.”

  Nods. And hand gestures.

  “Tika-ti. Tika-ti.”

  I watch, transfixed, as classical guitarist Gabriel Tomas Garcia has Cal play the same twelve measures again, and again. Each time, the music is the same. Each time, it is different.

  Over and over the master teacher articulates the running sixteenth notes, their incessant motion broken only by the occasional eighth note, until finally, at the end of the section, Cal hits the final note, a whole note with a fermata hovering above it like a watchful eye.

  The fermata tells the player to hold the note beyond its standard value, relying on his discretion as to duration. In other words, you hold the note as long as you want.

  This is a surprisingly subjective idea for composed music.

  Cal holds the note— and the rest of us hold, too, the dozen or so students who sit on the folding chairs that ring the classroom, all willing victims to the music’s power. We hold our bodies still, and we each hold our breath, as if the music has encircled our very throats like an impossibly beautiful noose.

  The main theme of a Bach fugue—that’s what Cal’s working so hard on. The subject. The seed. Garcia is attempting to show Cal that if he doesn’t catch this germ, doesn’t suffer the sickness—as well as find the cure—he will fail in his musical endeavor.

  So says the master in so many words.

  Only in this case, so many words means no words at all.

  “He didn’t say anything,” I point out to Cal now. “Not for the last thirty minutes.”

  Our class has just ended and we’re up in Cal’s dorm room, sitting on the unclaimed twin bed across from his. It’s the second day of the Manhattan School of Music’s Summer Guitar Intensive and Cal’s assigned roommate hasn’t shown up yet. Cal’s guess is car trouble, my money’s on stage fright. Programs like this, although they’re open to high school students like us, like Cal’s no-show roommate, are geared toward professional players. They’re basically pressure cookers.

  It’s cooking in here, too, the steamy New York City summer seeping somehow into the supposedly air-conditioned dorm. But despite the heat, as we continue to dissect Garcia’s pedagogical methods, I shiver. “Seriously, he didn’t say one word in the entire last half hour of the master class.”

  “He didn’t need to.”

  “I know. That’s what’s so amazing. It’s . . . supernatural, really, when you think about it.”

  “You’re saying Garcia’s supernatural—because he didn’t say anything?”

  I laugh. “Not Garcia. Music. It’s . . . ghostly. All that work learning a piece, woodshedding with guys like Garcia—it doesn’t change the fact that we pull it from the ether. We play the music, then it’s gone. Gone until the next time we summon it, call it up from nothing but a piece of paper covered with little black circles of ink.”

  “Like raising the dead.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Or adding water to sea monkeys and watching them squirm to life.”

  I punch Cal in the arm. I can do this because he’s one of my best friends. I can also ignore his response to the blow, his mock indignation—which I do, and continue.

  “Music’s haunting, you know? Just think about the way a melody gets stuck in your head.”

  “An earworm.”

  “That’s a really gross image. Besides, I was thinking more like, maybe we can’t let a melody go, because we need it. It’s a primitive need, I think, because music itself is primitive. It’s . . . instinctual. We respond to music on some animal level.”

  “Maybe you do.” Cal laughs. “For me it’s more like a really hard math problem.”

  This whole time Cal’s arms have been wrapped around his guitar, and now he plunges into the piece he’s played so many times today, drops into the racing waves of sixteenth notes like he’s an Olympic swimmer, and maybe his attention’s been on the wa
ter all along.

  Instantly captivated, I listen, and this time it’s the music that makes me shiver, goosebumps rising on my skin.

  A muffled ringtone comes from Cal’s backpack, and although he ignores the call, the sound has obviously interrupted his train of thought, because he stops playing.

  I start to protest, when I notice he’s staring at my bare arms.

  “What?” I say.

  He reaches out and brushes an index finger across the fine hairs standing at attention along one of my forearms. I think I may feel them stand a little straighter now.

  The moment hangs, making me think of that gorgeous final note, of the way Cal used the fermata to make it sing. At the end of class, we’d applauded both teacher and student and they bowed their heads, Cal’s shining black hair swinging forward. The afternoon sun had blinded me for a moment, so I couldn’t see. Then he’d straightened, blocking the bright light once more, but not completely. It still shone on the gleaming wood of his guitar, transforming it to gold.

  I’d daydreamed in that instant that the gold was real. That it was payment for playing the entire piece for us at the start of the master class—for taking us on a journey, then delivering us back to the starting point, possibly forever changed.

  I feel like this could change me, too, whatever’s happening now, between us.

  But . . . what exactly is happening? Cal smiles at me, then laughs a little. The bed jiggles slightly. And just like earlier, when, after holding that note beneath the bull’s-eye for exactly the right amount of time, he’d released it simply by lifting his fingers soundlessly from the nylon strings, he somehow releases me, in this moment, or his laugh does, and I begin to breathe again.

  But what was that? It’s confusing, the way we were bound together for a heartbeat just now.

  It was only his finger, only my arm. It was nothing.

  Suddenly, his fingers are flying over the strings again, playing that motif for the millionth time, and I think once more that it’s true: Words are like second-class citizens here. We’re learning the language of music, a language where silence counts as much as sound. The spaces between the notes—we talk about them, too. The places to breathe, and to rest, to just . . . exist.

  We are, of course, already quite fluent in this language. You have to be, just to get into this program, and to stay in for ten days. You’ve got to work your ass off. Or at least I do.

  For another minute or so, I watch the way Cal gets lost in the music, his dark hair swaying around his shoulders as he plays. Then I stand up.

  He stops playing. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got to go practice,” I say. “Some of us need to, you know.” Teasing him further, I tell him I’ll be holed up in my room for the next ten days and that he should send food and water. “But don’t worry, I’ll live. I live to practice. That’s what I’m here for.”

  I turn to leave and, to my surprise, I feel Cal’s fingertips on the back of my hand—the same light touch as before.

  “Not me,” he says softly.

  “Oh yeah?” I look down at him, musing. “And what are you here for?”

  Outside a cloud passes before the sun. Or maybe it’s later than I think and the sun has disappeared for the day behind one of the soaring skyscrapers I used to love so much when my family lived in Manhattan. Either way, I’m momentarily distracted as the room darkens.

  Cal’s fingers loop my wrist.

  “I’m here for you, Cate. Always.”

  A beat later it begins to rain, and Cal starts playing again, an improvised melody, a counterpoint to the raindrops that hit harder now, sharply striking the dorm room windows as real weather moves in.

  And so the moment to speak passes—or maybe I’m more like Gabriel Tomas Garcia than I thought.

  By the time I go, Cal’s playing sounds like it’s part of the storm.

  WILDERNESS

  DAVID

  Lifting the canoe off my shoulders, I use a rolling motion to bring it down the side of my body and onto the tops of my thighs. From there, I ease the boat into the muddy shallows at the edge of the opaque green lake.

  Almost immediately, a thin trickle of water seeps into the bottom. This is not good.

  There are still two days left till the end of the trip. Two days until we reach base camp, a laughable description for the cluster of flimsy wooden lean-tos poised precariously on the granite ledge of a pine-shadowed island in the middle of nowhere. Still, the island’s where the floatplane picks us up. Then we van it to the airport. But with one less canoe . . .

  Rubbing a hand over the back of my neck, I watch as water pools in the boat’s silvery bottom. Someone’s been careless on the other end of the portage, probably putting the aluminum canoe down on a rock. At least one of the rivets along the seam has popped.

  Besides lining up the canoe alongside five others and tying the excuse of a bowline to a low limb on a nearby pine, there’s nothing I can do right now. I pull off my flannel. The T-shirt underneath is soaked with sweat. It stinks. Week four, and we’ve been pushing across the chain of lakes for five days straight. But tomorrow’s a rest day. Washing some clothes might be a good idea. If I don’t fall for the siren song of my sleeping bag, which may or may not have a girl in it.

  Six guys. Six girls. Two guides who treat the term lightly. Add a complete lack of civilization, and even with the daunting distance we’ve trekked, there’s been plenty of time to—

  The water winks. I do a double take. Under the ubiquitous spotlight of the late July sun, another canoe spins slowly at the center of the lake. An escapee. The silver shimmer of the empty belly of the boat flashes again now, a slightly curved grin, taunting me.

  It’s as if the vessel knows I can’t resist playing hero. Never have been able to.

  Really, the lake isn’t so wide. Anyone in the group could swim to the other side in twenty minutes, which means I can do it in less. It feeds the falls, but that doesn’t matter. If we lose the boat, we’re screwed. I peel off the T-shirt, yank off my hiking boots, slosh into the water.

  A second later, my feet lift off the bottom. Deeper than I’d thought. No worries. A few strokes and the canoe’s an arm’s length away. I grab the raveled bit of rope dangling off the bow and turn back, surprised to feel the current tugging around my legs.

  A movement just beyond the shoreline at the barely visible trailhead catches my eye. Dan, Dan, the Portage Man—one of our fearless leaders—is emerging from the woods. He stops when he sees me. Goes still. Then he folds his arms, an unreadable expression on his face.

  My foot strikes a rock. It’s big enough to balance on, which I do, grinning at Dan, though I’m pretty sure he won’t even crack a smile. He doesn’t like me. Whatever. This trip’s not going to change me or how I act. I just need to get through it. More proof for Dad that I can be like Jack.

  Jack. My brother. He came here, too. Hiked these same trails. Maybe swam in this lake.

  An image forms before I can stop it: Jack, in the water. Not here on the surface with me, but beneath.

  Some bug—a greenfly or mosquito—dives toward my eyes. I swat at it. The picture disintegrates.

  Lifting the bowline to show I’ve got the canoe, I begin pulling the boat toward shore.

  It pulls back.

  My feet slip on the muck-covered rock. I yank the thin line—

  The rope snaps.

  The canoe turns in slow motion, heading for the falls. For the first time, I hear the rush of them. Still, I dive after the boat, catching Dan’s words just before I go under, his voice echoing over the water, louder for a moment than the roar of the falls, than the cocky voice of my ego.

  “David! Don’t be an asshole!”

  The water grabs me—

  Pulls me under.

  Then somehow the sky sucks me up—

  Drops me—

  Over

  The falls.

  The roar of the water fills my ears as I manage to lift my head out of the chu
rning white froth and snatch a breath that’s nothing but

  Water—

  Takes me down.

  Thud. My shoulder. On a rock or—the bottom. I can’t breathe.

  Reaching out I grasp—

  Nothing.

  My face slams stone. A thunderstorm rages inside my head. Water rages around my body.

  Lightning shoots through me as

  Sharp scrapes my stomach, gouges the skin along the side of my pelvis—

  A knife?

  Pain—

  CEDAR

  CATE

  The water holds me . . . and I float. Eyes closed, face up. Summer-warmed. Water-cooled.

  Laurel and I both float. Drifting, on the still surface of our secret cedar pond.

  A mountain of white clouds passes over the Pine Barrens. The russet waters of the pond darken to carnelian. A merganser’s buzzy call sounds from the nearby Winding River.

  “What is this,” she asks, “our fourth summer?”

  “Mm-hmm.” But I know she’s not really counting. She’s thinking. Thinking it’s the first time we’ve ever been here without her older sister. The first time that Laurel has driven us.

  “You have your license,” I say.

  “Yep.” I can hear her grin. “I’m going to drive us around the world. This is it.”

  “The start of everything,” I respond.

  “The start of everything,” she agrees.

  With a slow roll, I turn my face into the tannin-rich water and dive under.

  I’m an otter, a seal. A mermaid . . .

  Coming up for air at the far edge of the pond, I examine the sprawling roots of a huge cedar hanging over the water. The tree must have been felled by a recent storm, a bad one, apparently, if it took this giant down. I reach up— run a finger along one of the slick, dark roots that have been ripped from the earth. My finger comes away muddy.

  Laurel continues floating on her back, eyes closed, smile wide, her long white-blonde hair fanning around her face, painted pale orange by the cedar water.

  My lips stretch into a smile just from watching hers. “Lovecats?” I ask.

  “Lovecats,” she answers, smile growing to grin, grin bursting into laugh.

  This is another one of my favorite things about Laurel, how easy it is to make her laugh. I laugh too now. Lovecats is a kind of code for us, used to cement an agreement or solidify a plan, so named because of “The Love Cats,” a song by the Cure that we used to dance around to when we were tiny, and my mom had grand—or, probably more like weird—plans for us. Laurel and I can still sing the song at what we figure is record-smashing speed, though thankfully, we forgot the dance steps years ago, or so we both claim.