“Lie exactly on top of me. Press me down.” Then, “This. This is it.”

They stay this way for a while, pancakes on a plate; then Cate pushes herself up, away from Dana, looks down on her. “I know this is important to you. I get that. And that nothing stays the same. But doing it this way makes me feel bad about myself. The higher I feel when I’m with you—stoned in paradise, you know, like the song—the lower I sink in my own esteem. I have to stop.”

“Yes. I know,” Dana says as she reaches down around the backs of Cate’s knees and pulls them apart, slowly.

Cate’s phone makes the coin-drop sound. Maureen.

how’s the party going? send a pic.

Cate rolls off Dana, then sits cross-legged on the bed, stumped.

A pause, then the phone rings—Maureen deciding she needs to communicate more directly. Cate and Dana watch as the phone keeps ringing, which is to say, as it keeps playing “Danny Boy,” the special ringtone Maureen put on so Cate will know it’s her.

“I can’t answer,” Cate says. “There’s supposed to be a party in the background. I hate this new personal-surveillance state. More and more, I’m starting to think like Graham.”

“You have to go to the last line of defense. Say your phone ran out of juice. That’ll give us until tomorrow, then call her back.”

“I know I have to do something about this. Maureen was part of my Plan C and I seem to have tossed that plan over the side. And I don’t think there’s a Plan D. I have to let her know all this. Just not while I’m sitting naked next to you in your aunt’s bed.”

Then they watch silently as the phone winds its way through the ring’s last notes—and down the mountainside.

symphony

They—Cate and Neale and Joe—are at the symphony. It’s intermission. Neale has gotten tickets to the premiere of an avant-garde cello concerto featuring extraneous sounds piped in along with the music made by the orchestra. Maybe, Neale is hoping, these sounds will qualify as noise.

They are in the top balcony, but the front row of it. So, pretty good cheap seats. Joe sits between Neale and Cate. As soon as the intermission began, he pulled out his phone to watch an obscure French movie. Since what happened to his mother, he cloaks himself in silence; it’s a hoodie cloak, with earbuds. He’s not available for comment. His people will talk to your people. Later.