“Mr. Fiore?”
His heart slammed into his throat. “Yes,” he said.
The name tag on the swarthy young man’s lab coat read
A.
Rodriguez
. “Your wife is a strong woman,” A. Rodriguez said. “She’s going
to be fine.”
“Oh, Christ.” Danny buried his face in his hands again, not
bothering to try to stem the tears that squeezed past his closed eyelids.
“We performed a routine D&C,” Rodriguez said, “and a
cauterization to stop the bleeding.” He frowned. “Mrs. Fiore lost a great
deal of blood. I’m keeping her overnight, just to be safe. As long as there
are no complications, she can go home in the morning.”
Now that the terrible moment of fear was past, Danny’s body began
to tremble. “I have to see her,” he said.
“She’s been sedated,” Rodriguez warned. “She’ll be groggy.”
It didn’t matter. He had to see her, had to touch her, had to
verify that rich, red blood was still coursing through her veins. Had to make
her know how much he loved her. “I’ve made a damn fool of myself,” he told
Rodriguez. “I have to try to set it right.”
She was lying with her face turned to the wall. He sat in the
chair beside the bed, picked up her hand and held it to his lips. “I’m sorry,”
he whispered. “I’m so goddamn sorry.”
She was silent for so long that he thought she was asleep. “I
guess,” she said at last, “that’s supposed to make it all better.”
He leaned over the bed. “Tell me what you want. Anything. Just
say it and I’ll do it.”
“Oh, Danny. I’m not sure this is something that can be fixed.”
“We have to try. Christ, Casey, we can’t split up over something
like this.”
She finally looked at him, and her eyes were puffy and bloodshot.
“Can you think of a better reason?”
“I can’t think of any reason. I love you.”
“You’re the one,” she reminded him bitterly, “who asked for a
divorce.”
“I was talking through my ass. You know better than to listen to
me when I do that.”
She wrapped slender fingers around the bed rail, and he watched as
her knuckles, already white, went even whiter. “I think it would be better,”
she told him, “if you weren’t there when I got home.”
The silence grew heavy between them. “I see,” he said at last.
“I need time,” she said. “I have to figure out what to do.”
This can’t be happening to us
, he thought. Like an automobile accident, it was
supposed to happen to somebody else. He cleared his throat. “Will you be all
right?”
“I’ll survive.” She hesitated. “What about you?”
Fighting panic, he said, “I can stay at Tony’s. There’s a cot in
the store room behind the bar. Don’t worry about me.”
“Then I guess,” she said, “there’s nothing left to say.”
“I love you,” he burst out. “There’s that.”
“Don’t do this to me, Danny,” she said. “Just leave. I don’t
want to hear it.”
***
Harsh artificial light from the street lamp outside the window
filtered through the venetian blinds and fell in narrow strips across the foot
of the hospital bed. Casey lay on crisp white sheets and listened to the lusty
squalling of an infant in the nursery down the hall.
Dr. Rodriguez had been kind. He’d patted her hand and said,
“Sometimes these things happen, especially with a first pregnancy, and we don’t
know why. But you’re young and strong and there’s no reason to believe it
should ever happen again.” Because she’d lost so much blood, Rodriguez had
insisted she stay the night. He’d instructed the nurse to give her a sedative,
then left her to face her purgatory alone.
She dozed. When she awoke, Rob MacKenzie was sitting in the chair
beside her bed. The door to her room was closed, muffling the sounds that
echoed up and down the corridor. She extended a hand. “Hey,” she said softly.
In the darkness, he took her hand. “Hey,” he said.
“Visiting hours are over. How did you get in?”
“It’s amazing,” he said, “how far boyish charm will take you.”
The silence between them was comfortable, the silence of two
people who knew each other well enough to negate the necessity of words. After
a time, he said, “You can’t blame yourself.”
She blinked back tears. “What makes you think I’m blaming
myself?”
With the pad of his thumb, he rubbed her knuckles. “I know you,”
he said.
“Not very pretty, is it? My whole life, collapsing around me like
this.”
Rob squeezed her hand. “I know you may have trouble believing it
right now, but Danny absolutely adores you.”
“Then how could he do this to me? How could he even touch another
woman?”
“He’s human,” Rob said, “just like you and me. Human beings make
mistakes.”
“I’m trying to understand, but I can’t. Since I met Danny, I’ve
never even looked at another man.” She closed her eyes, but the picture in her
head wouldn’t go away, the picture of Danny with another woman. “I want to kill
him,” she said. “I want to kill both of them. I want to rip her heart out.”
The sense of unreality was still strong when she returned home the
next day. Danny’s clothes were gone, and his guitar. His door key lay in the
middle of the kitchen table, a blatant reminder of everything she’d lost.
Casey locked herself in the bedroom, buried her head in a pillow that smelled
of Danny, and let the deluge come.
It was dusk when Rob knocked on her door. “I brought home a
pizza,” he said. “Come out and have some.”
“Leave me alone,” she said dully.
“I can’t,” he said. “You need to eat.”
She swiped the heavy dampness of her hair away from her cheek. “I
already ate.”
“Bullshit. Get dressed and get out here, or I’m coming in after
you. And don’t think the lock will stop me, because I’ll break the goddamn
door down if I have to.”
She resented his bullying, but it worked. The pizza smelled like
heaven with pepperoni on it. Rob poured a glass of Boone’s Farm Strawberry
Hill and held it out to her. “You look like shit,” he said. “Have a drink.”
She took the glass from him. “You certainly know how to
sweet-talk a woman, MacKenzie.”
He tore off a slice of pizza, gooey with elastic threads of
mozzarella, and put it in her hand. “Eat,” he said.
She ate. And to her astonishment, felt infinitely better.
“Thanks,” she said, reaching for a second piece. “I guess I needed that.”
He tilted the half-empty bottle of Boone’s, and a thin stream of
red liquid poured into his cup. He set the bottle on his thigh and fumbled
with the cap. “I promised myself I’d stay out of this,” he said, “but I just
can’t. You’re miserable, he’s miserable—hell, I’m miserable, and it’s not even
my marriage we’re talking about.”
She held out her glass and he obligingly refilled it. “In some
ways,” he began, “I’m an old-fashioned guy. I want the house and the kids and
the wife.” His voice grew wistful. “And I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m
actively searching for that special woman.”
“Why, Rob. All this time, I thought you were a free spirit.”
“Ah, yes, my sweet, but underneath there beats the heart of an
Irishman who grew up in a family of nine kids.”
“So what’s your point?”
“I’m getting to it. When I find that special woman, she’s going
to be a lot like you.”
She blinked in surprise. “Like me?”
“Oh, she might not look like you or dress like you. She doesn’t
even have to cook like you.” He toyed with his glass. “But I have one
absolute prerequisite. She has to love me as much as you love Danny.”
She silently contemplated his words. “I’m afraid,” she said,
“there aren’t many women like that around.”
“Exactly.”
Either her head was befuddled from the wine, or he was speaking in
riddles, because she still wasn’t getting the point. “And?”
“And. I’ve always held up your marriage as a shining example, a
yardstick upon which to measure all other marriages, past, present, and
future. If the two of you split up, you’ll be destroying my belief in the
sanctity of matrimony.”
“Oh, please. Don’t make me throw up.”
“Shut up. I’m not finished. I know he did a dirty, rotten thing
to you.”
She sipped her wine. “What he did,” she said, “was despicable.”
“And you want to see that he’s justly punished for it.”
“Exactly.”
“But you’re punishing yourself right along with him.”
She considered his words. “Maybe,” she said grudgingly.
“Look,” he said, “I won’t argue that you’re the injured party
here. You know it, I know it, Danny knows it. But has it occurred to you that
you’re not the only one who’s hurting? Sure, you were in the right, so at least
you have your self-righteousness. Danny’s the one who got stuck with the
guilt.”
“Good! I hope it’s eating him up!”
“Shut up and listen to me. His whole goddamn life has blown up
around him, and he knows it’s all his fault. So don’t tell me you’re the only
one hurting, because he’s bleeding inside just as bad as you are.”
“Then why did he do it?”
He leaned back against the couch. “Sex,” he said, fiddling with
the lace to his sneaker, “isn’t the same for a man as it is for a woman.”
Dryly, she said, “Would you care to clarify that?”
“Women have trouble separating sex and love. Men don’t.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you condoning what he did?”
“I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying the difference
exists.”
Three days after the disintegration of her life, Casey was back at
work. The hotel’s part-time employees didn’t enjoy luxuries like sick leave,
and without Danny’s income, she wasn’t sure she and Rob could stay afloat. She
refused to dwell on Danny’s welfare or wonder how he was surviving. As her
mother used to say, he’d made his bed, and now he was going to have to lie in
it.
It was September, the pleasantest time of year in New York, and as
business picked up at the Montpelier, Casey took on as many extra hours as she
could get. She worked double shifts and came home at midnight, feet throbbing
so bad she couldn’t sleep until she’d soaked them in Epsom Salts and warm
water. Working so hard had its benefits, though; when she fell into bed at
night, she was too worn out to think about Danny, or about the baby she’d lost.
Money was scarce. As the weeks passed, she dipped more than once
into her emergency fund to buy groceries. In the evenings, when Rob was out,
she sat in the dark to save on the electric bill. The soles of her shoes were nearly
worn through when lady luck smiled upon them, and Rob got a break.
Rick Slater and his band were well-known around the Big Apple, and
when his lead guitarist left to form his own band, the drummer, who’d done some
studio work with Rob, recommended him as a replacement. Rob auditioned, Slater
liked what he saw, and the rest, as they say, was history.
In
October, Rob talked her into a trip to Atlantic City with some musician friends
of his, Steve Stern and Chico Rodriguez. Along with Chico’s girlfriend,
Marietta, they drove down in Steve’s red ‘68 Malibu convertible. It was a
golden Indian summer day with a touch of breeze off the Atlantic, and after a
twenty-dollar win at the slot machines (beginner’s luck, Chico said), Casey
left the others in the casino and strolled the boardwalk alone.
She
was watching two gulls fight over a discarded French fry when she saw a tall,
tawny-haired man in a suede jacket, walking arm-in-arm with a redheaded girl.
Casey’s heart slammed into her rib cage, and the man turned to say something to
the girl, and his face was nothing like Danny’s. But the damage was already
done. How could she possibly long for Danny with this kind of intensity when
she was so repulsed by the knowledge that he’d touched another woman? Had she
become so desperate that she wanted Danny no matter what the cost to herself?
If
so, this was a side to her personality that she didn’t much like. She didn’t
want to be the kind of woman who couldn’t live without a man. Hadn’t she
proven that to be untrue? It had been six weeks since she’d last seen
Danny—six weeks, three days, and seventeen hours, to be precise—and she was
doing just fine. She was getting up each day and going to work. She watered
her plants regularly. There was nothing growing in her refrigerator, and Con
Ed hadn’t yet cut off her electricity. Didn’t that prove she was a fully
functioning, contributing member of society? Didn’t that prove she didn’t need
a man to survive?
So
what if she hadn’t told her family about the separation? So what if she’d
found his old gray B.U. sweatshirt in the hamper, and now she slept in it every
night? It didn’t matter that every morning when she awoke, she still
automatically reached out to find him. Or that she still wore her wedding
ring, and refused to even consider taking any step that might legally cement
the separation. None of this meant a thing, because Casey was a survivor, and
not even Danny Fiore could take that away from her.