“Lots of family nearby. And me. I’ll stay as long as she needs
me.”
“Good. If she wants to talk, listen. If she doesn’t want to,
don’t push it. If she wants to be alone, respect her wishes, within reason.
Try to keep life as normal as possible. But don’t expect too much from her at
first. She’s been through a terrible ordeal. She took quite a bump to the
head, then she kicked out a window and went through it, slicing herself up
quite prettily in the process. She was in shock when they brought her in.”
Rob closed his eyes. “Jesus,” he said.
“She’ll need time to recover, physically and emotionally.” The
priest laid a hand on his shoulder. “What about you?” he said. “How’s your
support system?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“It’s my job to worry about you. The doctors here take care of
the sick and the dying. I take care of the people who love them.”
“Thanks, Father, but I’ll deal with it my own way, in my own
time.” His throat clogged up, and he closed his eyes against the sting of
tears. “I’m sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “I thought I got all my crying out
of the way on the trip from Boston.”
“It’s all right, son. Take a few minutes to pull yourself
together.”
He drew a long, shuddering breath. “I have to get her out of here
before the media gets wind of this.”
Father Letourneau nodded somberly. “The hospital hasn’t released
the name of the deceased yet, but most of the staff knows, and in a small town
like this, news spreads like wildfire.”
“Has anybody called her father? I don’t want her family hearing
about it on the radio.”
“No. I had enough trouble prying your name out of her. Is there
someone you’d like me to call? Mr. Fiore’s family, perhaps?”
“Casey and I are the only family Danny has. Had.” He hesitated,
more rattled than he’d realized. “I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his temple.
“I’m not thinking straight.”
“It’s all right. Take your time.”
“I guess I can call her folks from the road.” He closed his
eyes. “Shit,” he whispered. “I can’t believe this.”
He followed the priest down a maze of corridors, stopping at the
door of a small sitting room. Casey was curled in a fetal position on the
couch, feet tucked under her, Danny’s suede jacket wrapped around her, twelve
sizes too big. She was staring blankly at the television, where Lucy and Ethel
were up to their usual shenanigans. On the table beside her there was an
untouched cup of coffee. In her hand, a wrinkled manila envelope. “Hey,” he
said softly.
She looked up. There was a bandage over her left eyebrow, and her
cheek was peppered with tiny red welts where they’d pulled microscopic glass
fragments from tender flesh. There was blood in her hair and all over her
clothes, and she had a black eye. She looked like something from
Night of
the Living Dead
, and he tried to keep the shock from his face as he entered
the room and knelt on the floor in front of her. He wanted desperately to
touch her, but didn’t dare. Instead, he touched the manila envelope, gingerly,
with a single fingertip. “What’s in here, sweetheart?”
She let him take it from her, and he opened the flap. Inside were
Danny’s wallet, his wedding ring, his Rolex. Rob swallowed hard and closed the
envelope and gave it back to her, dreadfully sorry he’d asked. He looked to
the priest for help, but at some point, Father Letourneau had discreetly left
the room. He was on his own.
He cleared his throat. “Did they give you any medication?”
She reached into the pocket of Danny’s bloodstained jacket and
pulled out a vial of pills and two prescription slips. Valium and Tylenol with
codeine. He tucked them back into her pocket. “Are you in a lot of pain?” he
asked.
She looked at him, but she wasn’t seeing him. “I can’t feel
anything,” she said. “Why can’t I feel anything?”
“It’s a temporary condition,” he said. “Come on, sweetheart,
let’s go home.”
The priest stood in the vestibule and watched them, all the way to
the car. The storm was over, the roads cleared, the sun breaking through.
Casey burrowed into the seat cushion and Rob drove like a little old lady so he
wouldn’t frighten her. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched her open the
envelope. She took out Danny’s Rolex and slipped it on her arm, shoving it all
the way to her elbow before it stayed put. And they rode in silence.
He drove about twenty miles before pulling into the parking lot of
a rural diner. Casey looked at him blankly. “Breakfast,” he said, releasing
his seat belt. “If my blood sugar gets any lower, I’ll be comatose.”
The table was sticky, the menus greasy. The waitress looked at
Casey oddly but didn’t comment on her appearance. He ordered bacon and eggs,
home fries and toast. Casey stared helplessly at the menu. “She’ll have the
same thing I’m having,” he said, and took the menu from her hands and closed
it.
The coffee tasted like mud. He loaded it with sugar and drank it
to lessen his shakiness. When the food arrived, he dug in, ravenous, but Casey
just looked at her plate. “I can’t do this,” she said woodenly.
“Yes, you can.”
“No.” She shook her head and looked at him with absolute
certainty. “I can’t.”
He set down his fork and took her hand. “You’re strong, babe.
You’re the strongest person I know. You can do this. You’ll get through
this.”
She looked up at him. “How?”
“You pick up your fork and take a bite. You chew it and swallow
it. Then you do it again.”
That blank gaze never wavered. “I wasn’t talking about eating,”
she said.
“Neither was I. You have to take life in little bites. If thirty
seconds at a time is all you can handle right now, that’s how you live life.
Thirty seconds at a time, until you’re ready to handle more. Then you take it
ten minutes at a time, and then a half hour. Nobody’s going to ask you to make
decisions. Nobody’s going to ask you to think. Nobody’s going to ask you to
do anything you don’t feel ready to do. I’ll be there to see that they don’t.”
She set down her fork. “I need to use the bathroom.”
“Go ahead,” he said, then remembered the pills in her pocket.
“But leave the jacket here.”
He didn’t like the idea of her going alone, but there were some
places even he couldn’t follow her. While she was in the rest room, he used
the pay phone to call her folks and tell them in as few words as possible what
had happened. When he returned to the table she was still gone, and he stewed until
the door to the bathroom opened and she emerged. He didn’t think she was
suicidal, but he wasn’t about to leave her alone long enough to find out.
When she sat back down, he got his first look at the gash on her
arm. “Holy mother of God,” he said, and caught her wrist and turned it so he
could count the stitches.
Eighteen.
He closed his eyes and dropped her
arm, suddenly nauseated. “My turn for the bathroom,” he said. “Will you be
all right for a few minutes?”
“I’m not an invalid,” she said, and took a bite of toast.
The men’s room was pretty bad. Not the worst he’d seen, but
definitely somewhere in the top ten. He used the facilities, then stared at
his face in the mirror and decided he looked worse than she did. He splashed
cold water on his face. There were no paper towels, so he dried himself with
the tail of his shirt. “MacKenzie,” he told his reflection, “you are one class
act.”
The drive to Jackson Falls took a hundred years. The sand trucks
had been out, but the roads still weren’t great, and his speedometer never once
passed forty-five. It was afternoon when they finally reached her house, and
then he discovered that her keys were locked in the house and Danny’s were
still in the ignition of the wrecked BMW, and he had to break a window so they
could get in.
The house was eerily silent. He stood over her and picked a shiny
sliver of glass from her hair. “I think you’d feel better,” he said, “if you
had a hot bath and a shampoo. Will you try? For me?”
She shrugged.
He’d never felt so helpless in his life. She needed somebody to
undress her and bathe her and put her to bed. There was only so much he could
do. What she needed was another woman. In desperation, he called Trish
Bradley.
It was the right thing to do. Trish fussed and clucked and cooed
over Casey like she was a small child, and he felt a tremendous relief as the
weight of responsibility was temporarily lifted from his shoulders. While
Trish was taking care of Casey, he drove back into town and got her prescriptions
filled. When he returned, she was sitting at the kitchen table in a flannel
nightgown, smelling of soap and eating a bowl of beef stew. He found a roll of
plastic in the shed and some masking tape in the kitchen drawer, and he patched
up the broken window until he could get the pane replaced.
Then he went upstairs and called his parents. He knew they’d be
waiting to hear from him. He filled them in, reassured them that he had
everything under control, promised to get the car back to them as soon as possible.
Then, while the family took turns fretting over Casey, Rob kept himself busy
fielding phone calls. They all called:
People Weekly
, the
Star
,
Rolling Stone
.
Entertainment Tonight
. MTV, CNN, and all three
of the major networks.
The New York Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
,
the
Los Angeles Sun
. AP and UPI and the various wire services. The
goddamn
National Enquirer
. For each caller he had the same brief,
canned response. Yes, the reports of Danny Fiore’s death were true. No, Mrs.
Fiore was not available for comment. While he swallowed gallons of Trish
Bradley’s potent coffee, the phone rang off the hook, until his voice gave out
and he was forced to turn off the ringer and unplug the answering machine.
He folded his arms on the kitchen table and lay his head down and
closed his eyes. He’d been up for thirty-six hours, and Trish tried to badger
him into resting, but after all that coffee, he was too wired to sleep.
Instead, he put on the gray sweats he’d left in the guest room closet the last
time he visited, and he went running. It was eight miles from Casey’s house to
the town line and back, and while he was running, he didn’t have to think,
didn’t have to feel, didn’t have to do anything except breathe in and out and
will his muscles to keep moving.
When he got back, most of the company had left, but Trish and Bill
were still there, drinking coffee at the kitchen table. The way Trish made
coffee, none of them would sleep for a month. “Where’s Casey?” he said.
“Upstairs, resting,” Trish said. “Hey, don’t wake her up!”
He squared his jaw. “She’s not sleeping,” he said.
He knocked softly on her bedroom door and opened it a crack.
“It’s me,” he whispered. “You awake?”
She raised her head. Her shiner was already turning alternating
shades of green and yellow. She patted the bed and he sat down on the edge.
“You’ve been running,” she said.
“How’d you know?”
“The way you smell.”
“Great. I’ll go back down and shower.”
“No,” she said. “I like it. It’s the way you always smell when
you’ve been running.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, “we have to talk about the funeral.”
She closed her eyes. “I can’t make it go away. I keep trying,
but it won’t go away.”
He swallowed. “I’ll do it all, if that’s what you want.”
She took his hand in hers and stroked the palm with her thumb.
“This isn’t easy for you, is it?”
“It’s easier if I keep busy.”
“I trust you, Flash. Absolutely.”
“I know. I just didn’t want to overstep my boundaries.”
“I think we’re beyond boundaries,” she said. “We have been for a
long time.” She sat up groggily, got up from the bed and moved stiffly, like
an old lady, to the desk. “Will you do something for me?” she said.
“Anything. Anything at all.”
She pulled two cards from the Rolodex, moved slowly back to the
bed, and handed them to him. “Will you call these people?”
The names meant nothing to him. Anna Montoya and Eddie
Carpenter. “Sure,” he said. “Who are they?”
She sat down on the edge. “Danny’s parents,” she said.
“Danny’s parents? But I thought—” He stopped abruptly, wondering
just how well he’d really known Danny Fiore.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “Maybe someday I’ll tell it to
you.”
He spent the rest of that day on the telephone. When he finished
with the mortician, he made all the necessary calls to reschedule his life,
both personal and professional, for the foreseeable future. And then, long
into the night, hours after he should have been in bed asleep, he called
everybody he could think of who’d known Danny Fiore. He couldn’t let Danny go
without a proper sendoff.
He finished the last call at two in the morning. Hung up the
phone, poured himself a shot of Danny’s good bourbon, and sat alone in the
dark, brooding. Thinking about his life. His screwed-up past. His uncertain
future.