One Last Call Before Goodbye novel · Chapter 1 of 16
Chapter 1: The Ticket in the Cat
Sent home to die, Colleen finds a summoning ticket in Clifford's old gift and calls him, but a woman answers and he hangs up; then a text arrives accusing her of taking his mother's money.
Five years after I left Clifford Wexley, a doctor sat on my hospital bed and told me there was nothing left to try.
She said it kindly.
She said I should go home and be comfortable.
I was twenty-seven.
On the evening they discharged me, I packed my things into a tote bag while my sister went down to the pharmacy.
The last thing on the windowsill was a little white ceramic cat.
Clifford gave it to me for my twentieth birthday.
I had carried it to every apartment, every hospital, every waiting room for seven years.
I reached for it with the bag on my arm.
The strap caught it.
It hit the floor and broke into four pieces.
I got down on my knees, slowly, because everything hurt now.
The cat was hollow.
Inside the biggest piece was a slip of paper, folded small and tight.
I unfolded it.
The handwriting was his.
I would have known it anywhere, those tall slanted letters he used on every note he ever slid into my locker.
"Summoning Ticket. Good for one use. The bearer may call Clifford Wexley once, and wherever he is, he will come to Colleen Duffy."
Underneath, he had drawn a tiny cat.
I sat on the cold hospital floor and read it until the words stopped making sense.
For five years, I had never called him.
I never looked him up.
I never let myself get anywhere near his life.
That was the deal I made.
But I was dying now.
I didn't want anything from him.
I only wanted to hear his voice one more time before I went.
My phone was on the bed.
I dialed the number without looking at the screen.
My thumb still knew it.
It rang three times.
Then a woman picked up.
"Hello?"
Her voice was bright and clear.
I pulled the phone away and checked the number.
It was right.
"Hello? Is someone there?" she said, louder now.
"Hi," I said. My voice came out stiff. "Is Clifford there?"
"Sure, one sec."
I heard her set the phone down.
I heard a television.
Then footsteps, and a voice I had only heard in dreams for five years.
"Hello? Who's this?"
I pressed my hand flat against the floor.
"It's Colleen."
He didn't say anything.
The television kept talking in the background.
"Coll?" he said finally. Then, quieter, "Why are you calling me?"
I looked down at the slip of paper in my lap.
"Are you free anytime soon?"
I heard slippers scuff across a floor.
When he spoke again, he sounded farther from the phone.
"Yeah. I guess."
"I'm in New York," I said. "Where are you?"
"D.C."
Washington.
He had gotten the job, then.
He had gotten everything.
I swallowed hard.
"You gave me a ceramic cat for my twentieth birthday. It broke today. I found the note you put inside it."
"The note," he said.
"Clifford, could you come and"
The woman's voice cut across mine, close to his ear.
"Hurry up, Cliff. The movie's starting."
Cliff.
Nobody ever called him that when he was mine.
"Sorry," Clifford said. His voice had gone polite. "I'm a little tied up right now. Can we talk later?"
The line went dead.
I stared at the black screen.
A gray, hollow face stared back at me from the glass.
I barely recognized it.
The door creaked open.
My sister, Louise, backed into the room with a pharmacy bag the size of a pillow.
"They gave us enough pills to stock a store," she said. "Coll, why are you on the floor?"
She saw the phone in one of my hands and the slip of paper in the other.
Then she saw the broken cat.
She knew that cat.
She had watched me wrap it in a sweater every time we moved.
Louise set the bag down on the bed and crouched beside me.
She put her palm against my cheek.
"You called him."
My eyes burned.
"No," I said.
"Sure you didn't."
She wiped under my eyes with her thumb, the way she used to when I was little and Mom was working nights.
"You two were together from sophomore year all the way through college. Seven years. Nobody gets over seven years."
"I'm over it."
"He stood up to his whole family for you," she said. "He really loved you, Coll. But it's been five years. He's got a new life by now."
I thought about the woman's voice.
The television.
The slippers.
Louise was right.
Back then, he had loved me.
His mother, Cynthia Wexley, had looked at my family and seen nothing worth keeping.
A dead mother, a father who drove a bus, a house with a sagging porch in Astoria.
She fought us for three years straight.
Clifford held my hand through every minute of it.
"Unless I'm dead, Coll," he told me once, on the steps of the old high school, "I'm never leaving you."
So I stayed.
Right up until the day Cynthia made sure he couldn't get hired anywhere.
Top of his class in medical school, and not one clinic in the city would take him.
I still remembered her voice that winter, cool and even across a diner table.
"I raised my son for greater things. Not for some girl with nothing to her name."
My phone buzzed against the floor.
A text, from a number I didn't know.
I opened it.
"This is Sabrina. Clifford's girlfriend. His mother told me what you took from her five years ago. Don't ever call him again."
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