RUSH (City Lights, #3)(3)

Tears sprang to my eyes. Now I was sure my heart couldn’t hold another drop of happiness. I kissed him back with everything I had. “I love you, too.”

*

One week until opening night. I was hanging out in my dorm room at the residence hall with Melanie Parker. She’d won the Strings’ coveted cello seat, and we’d become best friends before the end of the first rehearsal a month ago. Now, we were talking and laughing as I read dumb jokes off the Internet.

“Okay, wait, here’s a good one,” I said. “What’s the difference between a pianist and God?”

“Seriously, Char…”

“God doesn’t think he’s a pianist.” I wagged my eyebrows at her. “Get it?”

“Yes, I get it. How someone can be as talented as you are and yet such a ginormous dork, is beyond me.”

I shrugged, laughing. “Why should musicians be stuffy and serious all the time?”

“Is this another joke?”

“I guess not all musicians,” I mused. “Mozart used to write letters to his mother, describing particularly satisfying shits he’d taken.”

“Only you would find that admirable.” Melanie glanced at her watch through her cat’s eye glasses. “Damn. We’re late.”

We packed up our stuff and headed out when my cell phone, still on my desk, rang.

At the door, Melanie hoisted her cello case. “Tick-tock.”

“I know, but just let me…” I hurried back to the desk and peered over at the display. “It’s a Bozeman number. Someone calling from home.” Not my parents or Chris, or it would have ID’d them.

“You know how I feel about tardiness,” Melanie said, tapping her foot. Her pragmatism, plus her dark, pageboy haircut never ceased to remind me of Velma, from the old Scooby-Doo reruns Chris and I used to watch as kids on some cartoon network.

I wish I had listened to her. I wish I had left the phone alone and gone to rehearsal. I would have had a few more hours of ignorant bliss before the knife came down, like a guillotine, forever dividing my life into Then and Now. Then had been so full of light and love and music. Now was dark and cold and quiet.

“Hello?”

“Charlotte?” A man’s voice. Watery. Tremulous. A voice choked with tears.

“Uncle Stan?”

“Hi, honey.” A heaved breath laced with a sob. “I have some bad news. You might need to sit down.”

My chest tightened, and my heart skipped a beat and then jogged to catch up. But I didn’t move. I felt frozen. “What is it?”

“It’s Chris, honey. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”

Uncle Stan told me what happened but I remembered it in bits and pieces, and in the end, only one piece mattered. Chris was gone.

He was gone.

Then and Now. Just like that.

*

“You’re going to miss opening night?” Keith’s eyes, which I had always thought were blue like a cloudless summer day, were icy. “Charlotte, we’re a week out.”

I lifted my own shadowed, swollen, blood-shot eyes to meet his incredulously, though I hadn’t the strength to do more than mutter. “The funeral is in four days…”

“No, I know, I know.” He sighed and stood over me, rubbed my shoulder with one hand. “Christ, what a mess. Poor kid.”

I guessed he meant me, though he’d never called me that before.

“I’ll figure something out here,” Keith said, “but your seat on the Strings…I have to fill it, Char. You know that, right?”

I nodded and wiped my nose with the shreds of an old Kleenex I’d been clutching all morning. “I know,” I said, mildly surprised at how little that bothered me. It didn’t really register, actually. Keith’s words came to me from far away, like a distant transmission from space.

He one-arm hugged me, still standing. My cheek brushed against the rough side-pocket of his jeans. “You’re going to be okay, Char. Just go and be with your family. I wish I could be with you.”

I looked up, his words a faint flicker in the darkness. “You do?”

“It’s impossible, of course.”

I slumped. “Oh.”

“I can’t get away now, but you’re going to be fine, kid.” He jostled me affectionately, as if he were a coach and I were a Little Leaguer who dropped the easy out that would’ve won the game. “Yeah, you’ll see. Just fine.”

*

Bozeman, Montana. There wasn’t a more beautiful place on earth, as far as I was concerned. Until that trip home. I flew in at midday, but the Gallatin Valley seemed dark, as if it were hung-over from the longest night.

The flight had been a blur, the ride from the airport with Uncle Stan was a nightmare. He was afraid to speak to me, as if I would shatter at the slightest sound. We rode in his shiny SUV to my home, and I felt like a prisoner walking on death row. Not my death. Chris. Chris is dead.

Chris was dead.

That thought, or variations of it, danced in my brain like the painted skeletons I had seen at a Dios de los Muertos festival one fall. But I couldn’t quite grasp the enormity of it. Not while in New York City, or on the airplane, or in Uncle Stan’s car. But as soon as I got home it would be there. I’d never been so petrified to see my parents in all my life.