Skyscape
January 1, 2016
399 pages
Genres: Contemporary, Young Adult
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Music means more than anything to high school student Cate Reese; it’s also what unites her with Cal Woods. Devoted classical guitar players, Cate and Cal are childhood friends newly smitten by love—until a devastating car accident rips Cal out of Cate’s life forever. Blaming herself for the horrific tragedy and struggling to surface from her despair, Cate spirals downhill in a desperate attempt to ease her pain.
Fellow student David Bennet might look like the school’s golden boy, but underneath the surface the popular athlete battles demons of his own. Racked with survivor’s guilt after his brother’s suicide, things get worse when tragedy darkens his world again—but connecting with Cate, his sister’s longtime babysitter, starts bringing the light back in.
As Cate and David grow closer, the two shattered teenagers learn to examine the pieces of their lives…and, together, find a way to be whole again.
Mimi Cross was born in Toronto, Canada. She received a master's degree from New York University and a bachelor's degree in music from Ithaca College. She has been a performer, a music educator, and a yoga instructor. During the course of her musical career, she's shared the bill with artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, and Sting. She resides in New Jersey.
website
Excerpt:
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, sit-
ting
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 water 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.
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