Before Goodbye Read online

  It’s ridiculous, because before we actually lived here, I’d always thought the barn was cool. When Mom and Dad first started leaving me alone, it was out here, not in our Manhattan apartment. I remember exploring the barn by myself, daydreaming all kinds of stories.

  That was around the same time I started babysitting Kimmy Bennet, so I must have been twelve. Funny how, at twelve, the barn had seemed mysterious, exciting, but at sixteen . . .

  The wheels of my bike leave the ground for an instant as the road dips down. The temperature drops slightly now. The smell here in the hollow is different, more complicated: green things growing atop previous autumns, a whiff of horses from a nearby farm, although “farm” isn’t the right word for the massive estates set back in the woods or beyond the fields.

  None of the estates are visible from here, but like everyone in Middleburn, I know they’re there. Their owners are rock stars, politicians, and wealthy New York techsters: Northeast royalty, old money and new.

  The woods, though . . . they are royalty of another sort. Mighty maples. Ancient oaks. In many places along Chapel Hill Road nothing borders the backs of these towering trees but more woods. Even at my house on Lenape, just off Chapel, out behind the red barn, it’s like there’s no rest of the world beyond their stretching sovereignty.

  When I get to the Bennets’ I remember: David is home, and he’s been home, for over a month. I just haven’t seen him. That’s because he’s basically been living in his bedroom. Not that we ever hang out, but I usually see him a lot when I’m at the Bennets’. By the pool, in the kitchen, watching TV. He’s always coming or going, with friends, or without. There’s always a phone in his hand.

  “He’s bummed about his leg,” Kimmy told me a couple of weeks ago. “I signed my name on his cast with hearts and flowers, but it didn’t cheer him up.”

  David had been hurt on a canoe trip, but it still didn’t make sense. A broken leg, crutches—it didn’t seem like enough to stop David I-Can-Do-Anything Bennet.

  “Or anyone,” Laurel snickered when I told her about David’s self-imposed exile from society. After that, I hadn’t thought too much about it. About him.

  The rest of the Bennets are at their beach house in Montauk. They always spend the last two weeks of August out there, and it seems weird that David didn’t go, but I guess it makes sense. How do you have fun at the beach when your leg’s in a cast?

  Kimmy’s cat Midnight strolls into the kitchen. I feed her, then organize the mail. After that I check the garden. The bluestone-bordered squares are lush with blowsy roses and fat tomatoes. I pick the ones about to burst.

  There’s no question in my mind why David isn’t taking care of these things. Not only is he laid up, but these jobs are mine. Mrs. Bennet has paid me to do them for the last three summers, as well as on random weekends when the family’s away.

  About to leave, I picture David up in his room. He’s let three calls go to voicemail since I’ve been here, and suddenly the idea of him spending the last days of summer alone makes me feel bad.

  So instead of heading out, I go upstairs, where a long hallway runs the length of the house. At the end of the hall, I climb a short flight of steps and knock on his bedroom door.

  He doesn’t answer, but I hear music.

  Slowly, I push the door open—

  Then stop short, staring at the boy on the bed.

  The sense of entitlement that previously issued from David Bennet like a fragrance is gone. On his face—a face so good-looking you have to remind yourself that staring isn’t polite—is an expression of uncertainty. His mouth works, his smile a flickering flame that won’t catch.

  “Go away,” he says flatly, turning his face to one side.

  Quickly, I shut the door. My hand freezes on the knob, heart beating hard.

  Kimmy’s older brother has turned from gold to shadow.

  Briefly, I consider calling Montauk. Has David been like this ever since he got back from his trip? What happened to him?

  I don’t call his parents, but the next day, I knock on his door again.

  When he doesn’t answer, I ask—through the door—if he needs anything.

  “No,” he says. “Nothing.”

  After feeding Midnight, I leave. The following day, though, I can’t help myself. He seems so different, his transformation so total. He can’t be okay.

  This time when I ask if he needs anything—again through the door—he assures me in a clipped voice that he is fine. But then he says, “Wait.”

  I wait.

  He says, “Yes. I need . . . something. Company. Come in. Please.”

  I open the door.

  “I’m sick of TV, sick of computer games. Sick,” he says under his breath, “of myself.”

  Then his smile slips into place, and although he’s thinner and pale, he looks more like the boy I’ve always known. Although I am beginning to suspect I don’t know him at all. That, perhaps, no one does.

  Even on crutches David stands tall, with the erect posture of an athlete. In combination with his slightly patrician features, this bearing makes him look strangely formal.

  The cast and crutches barely slow him on the stairs, and once he’s settled on the couch in the den, I perch on a nearby chair and wonder, as we talk about music and movies—me, haltingly; him, fluidly—if David Bennet even knows himself. Because as we speak, I become convinced that this well-mannered hospitable boy is not who he pretends to be.

  I’m not sure what, exactly, convinces me of this. It may be that sliding smile. The way it disappears, then reappears, a quick series of sunsets and sunrises, when before it held at midday.

  Or maybe it’s the way he’s sitting so still now. He’s usually a whirl of motion.

  I’m surprised when he asks me to come back the next day, but I do, laden with movies. It’s rainy and gray, perfect weather for watching. I’ve brought a bag of salty-sweet kettle corn.

  “You said this one’s your favorite?” He holds up Waking Life, an older Linklater film.

  I nod, but all at once feel uncomfortable; my choice suddenly seems way too weird. And also because—David Bennet? Why am I even here?

  “Why do you like it so much?” he asks.

  “Um . . .” I can’t seem to think.

  “Okay,” he says slowly.

  My cheeks heat.

  He asks me to pop in the disc.

  After the movie we watch another. Say Anything from the late 1980s.

  As the credits roll, David and I both agree. Diane would have gone to the window.

  “The movie could have ended there,” David says. “With him blasting the Peter Gabriel song. Those lyrics . . .”

  I picture John Cusack holding the boom box but can’t really remember the words.

  “You look like her,” David says suddenly. “Like that actress, the one who plays Diane. Her eyes look like yours, and that—tremulous thing. You’ve both got that going on.”

  There’s no way I’m going to ask him to define “that tremulous thing.” And then I don’t have to, anyway, because now he continues, saying, “It’s not like you’re nervous. It’s more like . . . underneath—” He breaks off, shaking his head. “Forget it. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “Um. Okay.” And now I am nervous, for no real reason, and everything feels kind of awkward. So I just say, “If she’d gone to the window, you’re right. The movie could’ve ended there.”

  But David shakes his head again now. “Actually, no. Not everything is . . . resolved.” Then he looks away and mumbles something. I think he says, “The dad.”

  The next day things have shifted for him. When I get there he’s low. The shadow boy’s back, and I feel the pinch of his sadness. He’s prone on the couch with a magazine. He says hi but won’t meet my gaze.

  So I go out to the garden and pick a flower, an insanely perfumey rose. It’s blown out and bright red, the biggest one of the bunch. Inside, I hold it under his nose.

  He raises an e
yebrow but swings his way to the porch, where he looks over the wall to the garden. He makes a small sound that becomes a true laugh. He turns and looks at me then.

  His smile is back, and it’s . . . beautiful.

  “Thank you,” he says quietly.

  But oddly, the more we hang out, the more stilted our conversations become.

  It’s not surprising that I have trouble talking. Finding the right words is like a quest for me. But that he has so little to say is different. Very.

  Over the years, I’ve seen David a million times at the Bennets’. Usually on his way to some game, or a party—or a date. I’ve seen him with at least a dozen girls, and he’s never been at a loss for words. I’ve seen him whisper in their ears before vanishing upstairs with them.

  Once he got his license, he’d drive off with those same girls—or different ones. It was almost as if it didn’t matter who they were, as if all the girls were . . . interchangeable.

  I scowl at the memory. No, finding the right words is my problem, not his.

  And yet, even though I struggle to find the right things to say, after a few afternoons of sitting on that porch, or hanging in the den, each of us with a book, or listening to music, I discover that just being around David makes me feel good. Happy. As if I haven’t been before.

  Or maybe it’s just the music. We listen to so much of it. New bands I’ve never heard of, some older bands as well—and songwriters, lots of songwriters.

  One day David puts on a song by a singer-songwriter named Suzanne Vega. The guitar part isn’t classical, but there’s precision to it—a steady, pulsing repetitiveness that instantly takes me to the same still place practicing does. Only this isn’t a series of scales or a challenging étude, or like any piece I might play. It’s a woman singing about being like a marble, or an eye, a woman singing about scattering like light.

  “What’s this song called?”

  “Small Blue Thing.”

  “Can we hear it again?”

  We listen to the song six times in a row. It’s delicate without being fragile. The guitar is a steel string and it sounds like an ominous fairy tale. David thinks it sounds like “silver clockwork.” We both agree that the singer’s voice is preternaturally calm.

  I’m fascinated by the way she sings the word fingers, by the rhythm of it, by the way the word seems to begin in one place and end someplace totally different. It’s like a single-word haiku. The music moves in a somewhat circular manner, and then, the word leaves her lips— a subtle meteorite that doesn’t speed across the heavens but, rather, glides across a dark expanse of sky until it lands somewhere else—another spread of stars, maybe another universe.

  And yet there’s not even a breath between that word and the next. How does she do it?

  David is mesmerized as well, but at some point I realize he’s watching me intently.

  Yet I can’t care, this song is like a . . . portal. It’s leading me into another way of listening. Yes, I’ve listened to guitar pieces in this way, but never to a song, never to words.

  Glancing again at David, I get the distinct impression that he has listened to lyrics in this way. The thought gives me chills.

  “I didn’t realize a song could be so full. Full of something other than what the lyrics mean. So full of—”

  “Invisible things?”

  I’m so surprised I don’t reply, but suddenly I feel certain. This is the real David Bennet.

  DEAD END

  CATE

  Almost two weeks of afternoons slip away like this, where it’s just the two of us.

  Some days go by so fast I stay for the evening, staying later and later each time.

  Finally, as the last days of summer sidle by, David seems to settle somehow, becoming someone between the busy, popular guy I’ve watched coming and going for years and the shadow boy I caught a glimpse of that day when I’d knocked on his bedroom door.

  But I think about that shadowy boy, and it makes me want to ask David what happened in Canada. Then I catch him studying my face or watching me walk into the den with whatever CD he’s asked me to get from his room, and . . . I don’t know. I just want to stay like this, immersed in music with him, in the lyrics he listens to so intently. The music I consider to be his.

  Then suddenly, it seems, his family is back and I have no reason to go over.

  At first, I think it’s no biggie. That the only reason I even want to go over to the Bennets’ is to see Kimmy, get back to babysitting so I can support my own music habit. I’m still practicing nearly every day, but I’ve fallen behind in listening. I need to keep up on the latest classical recordings, need to listen to the way a performer like David Russell births a melodic line into existence note by note, as if he’s carefully pulling a fine gold chain from the magician’s hat of his guitar, link by smoothly forged link.

  The night before school starts, Laurel asks where I’ve been.

  When I tell her, she immediately accuses me of crushing on David.

  “You’ve got a thang for him, Cate, simple as that. Bye-bye, Guitar Guy.”

  But it doesn’t feel simple. And she must be wrong. Because having a thing for David Bennet would be a total dead end.

  Besides . . . I’m in love with Cal.

  VASCULAR

  DAVID

  I imagine my father’s blood, coming to a rolling boil. Hot as this end-of-summer weather.

  “How will you be ready for the fall season?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Excuse me?” A vein stands out along my father’s temple. He grips the steering wheel of the Porsche, one of several luxury cars he owns.

  Like many of his possessions—and most family members—my father treats the cars as extensions of himself. Now we careen dangerously around the corner of White Oak Ridge Road.

  We’re on the way home from seeing my orthopedist. The fact that my father found the time to take me to the appointment shows just how concerned he is, although not necessarily about me personally. More like about me as an investment. He’d drilled the doctor about recovery time, physical therapy. Drugs.

  “We’ve got to get him on the football field,” my father said, his tone intense. “There must be something you can do. Practice is starting, and if my son’s not ready . . .”

  Dr. Grant addressed my father’s concerns but in a way that was, let’s say, open to interpretation. Then he smiled broadly at me as we were leaving, practically winked. We didn’t need to exchange a word—we both knew what he was doing. Taking the ball out of my father’s hands. Putting it in mine. Even though I’m certain he intuited that I was going to drop it.

  Dr. Grant is a cool old guy. I appreciate how he has enabled me to do what I need to do.

  My father, however, does not.

  As we get closer to home I can practically hear his pulse pounding. His face reddens as he voices his vehement disagreement with the good doctor’s open-ended diagnosis.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I interrupt as we pull into the driveway.

  “What could you possibly mean by that combination of words?”

  Slam! The driver’s side door.

  “I mean, it doesn’t matter if I’m ready or not. I’m not playing this year.”

  Micromanaging each movement now, each breath, willing myself to remain calm, I shut the passenger door as quietly as possible.

  “What the hell do you mean, you’re not playing ‘this year’?” he explodes. “This year is it! The culmination of everything we’ve worked for! The college we’ve chosen . . .”

  But I’ve stopped listening. “The college you’ve chosen,” I want to shout. “Your alma mater.”

  All they want is a carbon copy of Jack Bennet. A golden goose to lay a winning game, which is exactly how I’ve been sold, as someone who can take a collegiate institution to the top of the sports publicity pinnacle.

  As I stumble back into what becomes a one-sided conversation (“I’ll study—I just won’t study the playing field”), it pi
sses me off that my offerings, though they’re admittedly drenched in anger, are not accepted. My father would rather be furious, would rather fight.

  He’d rather declare later that Scotch-soaked evening, as he aims his bleached smile at me like a loaded gun: “Employment, then, if you’re not going to be a part of the athletic program for your senior year.”

  “What, school isn’t enough of a—”

  “It is not. You will work. You will replace every hour that you would have been on the playing field, the ice rink—the goddamn away-game buses—with an hour of gainful employment.”

  He drains his glass. But he’s only finished with his drink, not with me.

  “Now,” he says softly, and the hair rises on the back of my neck. The change in volume is not an indication that he’s less upset, but that he is more so. “How about student council? And what about”—his voice drops to a whisper, “the debate club?”

  “I’ll—I’ll keep doing those.”

  “Well. That’s a relief.”

  “I’m sure it is,” I’m tempted to say. “The ability to talk people in and out of things is what you prize most. Manipulation, coercion, persuasion—your ‘work,’ work that takes you away from home constantly, depends on those skills. And the physical feats that gave you your ‘leg up in life’? You insisted I master those, too. Thanks. The coaches have been great stand-in dads.”

  But I’m not a complete idiot. Those words remain unspoken.

  “So, then, do you have a job lined up?”

  “How could I?”

  “You will by the time school starts.”

  “Fine.”

  “No, it’s not fine.” He runs a hand back through his hair, straightens the knot of his tie even though it doesn’t need it. “But it will have to do.”

  Translation: “You will have to do, because your brother Jack is gone.”

  He allows a small smile to twist his lips when he sees that I’ve understood this. Then he spins on his heel and strides away. As he passes the row of mirrors lining the front hall, he checks his reflection. He has a few pounds on me, but anyone can see: we look just alike.