Beside her, Travis loosened his tie. “I never realized,” he said,
dazed. “Not really. Until now.”
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her brother so
unnerved. “Thank you,” she said softly, and turned to Rob. His eyes were
closed, his head pressed back against the plush leather seat, his face pale and
stony. She took his hand in hers and squeezed it hard. He opened his eyes,
and they were damp and feral. “I’m stronger than you think,” she said.
Hoarsely, he said, “Are you?”
“Once,” she said, “a very wise man told me I didn’t always have to
be the strong one. That it was okay to accept help once in a while.”
He squared his jaw and turned away. “And your point is?”
“It’s a two-way street,” she said. “We get through this
together.”
A December burial was unusual in Maine, but since the ground
wasn’t yet fully frozen, it was what she’d requested. While security guards
held the curiosity-seekers at bay, the family and a few friends huddled in a
tight little band, high on a hill, shoulders hunched against the wind that shot
like darts through their clothing and rattled the bare branches of the elm tree
that towered above them. Eyes hidden behind dark glasses, she listened emotionlessly
to words that were intended to soothe, as they lay Danny to rest in the family
burial plot.
There was no wake. That, too, had been her request. Only stiff
hugs at the cemetery, then the brief trip home in the limousine, followed at a
discreet distance by the security guards Rob had hired. For days, while her
physical scars healed and her black eye made its slow evolution through the
color spectrum, the guards worked rotating shifts, one posted in the house, one
in his car at the end of the driveway. A precaution, Rob told her. Nothing
more than preventive medicine, protection against any potential threat.
Normally, Casey would have balked at the lack of privacy.
Instead, she felt only indifference. The security guards knew the short list
of people who were allowed in. Everybody else was turned away. One more
thing she didn’t care a fig about. They could all stay away as far as she was
concerned. The only person she cared to see wasn’t coming back, and nothing
else mattered any more. After six days with only one minor incident involving
a fan with a telephoto lens, Rob dismissed the security people and took over
the responsibility of keeping the world at bay.
Casey walked through life cocooned in numbness. Friends and family
stopped by frequently, offering help and moral support. She thanked each of
them politely, served them coffee and pie, and sent them on their way.
Only Rob was allowed to stay. He reminded her daily to change her
clothes and comb her hair. He washed her dishes and vacuumed her rugs, he
bought the groceries and cooked the meals and badgered her into eating. He
kept her functioning with endless games of Monopoly and blackjack. It was Rob
who sat up with her at three in the morning when she had to bake pies or go
crazy, Rob who ate the pies after she made them. It was Rob who listened
during those all-night sessions when she talked incessantly about Danny, Rob
who drove her into Farmington and helped her pick out a new car.
Eventually, inevitably, the day came when she knew it was time to
send him away. “You’ve done enough,” she told him. “You’ve gone so far beyond
the boundaries of friendship that I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”
“We already talked about boundaries,” he said. “And I’m not
looking for payment. You know better.”
“Rob,” she said, “you have a life. You should be living it.”
He protested, as she’d known he would, but she thought she
detected a thread of relief running through the fabric of his protests. And
who could blame him? These days, she could barely stand her own company. She
certainly wouldn’t wish it on anybody else.
“Come to Boston with me,” he said, “for Christmas. Mom and Dad
would love to have you.”
“And ruin Christmas for everyone? I think not. But thanks for
the offer.”
“I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone.”
She braced her palms against the lip of the kitchen sink and
watched a chickadee pecking at the tiny black seeds that were scattered across
the hard crust of snow beneath the bird feeder. “I have to do this myself,”
she said.
He squared that stubborn jaw. “Why?” he said.
“Because,” she said, “you won’t always be here. Because sooner or
later, I have to face life on my own. Because it isn’t right for me to depend
on you for everything.”
“You’re not ready.”
“And if you stay,” she said gently, “I never will be.”
So he went, and she was left the monumental task of reassembling
the pieces of her ravaged life. Christmas came and went, and the family
respected her wishes. They didn’t try to force her into celebrating.
Christmas afternoon, Rob called from Boston and they shared a brief, stilted
conversation. He badgered her to visit him in California after the new year.
Because it was easier than arguing, and because argument wasn’t her strong suit
these days, she agreed.
Most nights, she went without sleep. Nights were the worst,
because at night there was nothing to fill her mind with, to make her forget.
Danny was there, in every corner of that creaky old house, and in the wee hours
of darkness, he whispered to her, seduced her with memories of warm, sleek
flesh and softly whispered words of passion. As the weeks passed, pain began
to eat away at the edges of her numbness. When the longing became too
unbearable, she would go to the closet and open the door and bury her face in a
great armload of his shirts. His odor clung to his clothing, to the bed linens
she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to change. On the rare occasions
when she actually slept, inevitably she dreamed about him. The dreams were all
different, all the same: he was still alive, smiling, arms stretched out to
her, but always just beyond her reach. She would awaken and automatically turn
to him, and then she would remember, and the pain was like a rock-hard fist in
her abdomen.
She wasn’t sure exactly when she became aware that the music had
died. She only knew that it was gone. Inside her, around her. She locked Danny’s
piano and put away the key. Meticulously avoided the den where the stereo sat,
gathering dust. Never once turned on the radio in the new Mitsubishi sports
car she felt such indifference towards. The music had been Danny, and Danny
had been the music, the two so interwoven she couldn’t separate the strands.
Without Danny, there was no music, and the silence was deafening.
Every week, without fail, Rob mailed her what she came to think of
as care packages. These innocuous little bonanzas were her only ray of
sunshine in an otherwise bleak existence. She never knew quite what would be
inside. He always sent a letter, sometimes lengthy, sometimes brief, depending
on how busy he’d been that week. He cut out newspaper articles he knew she’d
find interesting, and cartoons to make her laugh. He told her all the new
dirty jokes he’d heard. Sometimes he would include a cassette of his latest
music; a couple of times he tucked in a half-finished song in the hope of
enticing her, but she refused to take the bait. He sent a batch of Gary
Larsen’s
Far Side
paperbacks, and on one occasion, he sent her one of
Igor’s discarded whiskers scotch-taped to an index card.
Once he sent an old photo of her at nineteen or twenty, mugging
for the camera in faded jeans and Danny’s old gray B.U. sweatshirt. She had no
idea when or where it had been taken, and she studied it at length, stunned by
how young she had looked. And how happy.
Sometimes, she wrote back. Sometimes, she actually mailed the
letters she wrote. Other times, they were so maudlin that instead of mailing
them, she tore them up and burned them.
He called a few days after the photo arrived. “Did you like the
picture?” he said.
“I was never that young,” she said. “Where on earth did you get
it?”
“I’ve had it forever. Bet you don’t remember the occasion.”
“Not a thing.”
“Boston Common,” he said. “A Sunday afternoon in October.
Remember the Sunday afternoon football game?”
A bittersweet, piercing pain shot through her chest. “I haven’t
thought of that in years,” she said.
“Every Sunday about half-past one, we’d come by and drag you and
the Italian stallion out of bed. You two were always in bed.”
“Danny was working two jobs,” she said softly, remembering.
“Sunday was the only day anything ever happened in bed, and then you bozos had
to come by and interrupt. We always tried to ignore you, but you and Trav just
kept banging on the door until one of us got up to let you in before the
neighbors decided to call the cops.”
“We couldn’t play without you,” he said. “It was Danny’s football
we used.”
“And afterwards,” she said, “we’d troop back to the apartment, all
muddy and sweaty and grass-stained, and we’d sit around on the floor, eating
pizza and drinking beer.”
“Glory days,” he said softly.
The tightness in her chest had grown nearly unbearable. “He
certainly had a way of drawing people to him, didn’t he?”
“Oh, Danny had charisma,” he said. “But it wasn’t Danny who kept
us coming back, week after week. It was you.”
“Me?” she said, incredulous. “Be serious.”
“I am. You were like this earth mother person. You made us feel
welcome, kept us warm and fed, made us feel good about ourselves. You have
this rare talent, babe. It’s the way you relate to people. When somebody
talks, you listen. I mean you
really
listen, like that somebody is the
most important person on the planet. I’ve never known anybody else who could
do that.”
***
The last Saturday in January, it happened again. Rob picked up
the phone to call Danny. He got as far as dialing the number before he
remembered, and felt that squeezing pain in his chest as he slowly hung up the
phone. Danny had been the linchpin around which his life had revolved for
nearly two decades, and even though he’d witnessed death with his own eyes, it
was still difficult to believe. It wouldn’t sink in for a while. And until it
did, he was doomed to flounder, lost in a world of which Danny Fiore was no
longer a part.
He called Kitty Callahan instead, and they had dinner at a quiet,
out-of-the-way place he knew, in a neighborhood where the rich and the chic
never wandered unless they took a wrong turn somewhere. While Gloria Estefan
bubbled from the overhead speakers, they had a few drinks and talked about old
times. Afterward, he went home with her. They’d been friends for years, casual
lovers on occasion, and he knew that whenever he sought comfort, he could find
it with Kitty. But tonight, the comfort he’d always found so satisfying failed
him. Not that there was anything wrong with the sex. Sex was sex, and Kitty
was good at it. But it failed to fill that yawning hole inside him. This
time, after they made love, he did something he’d never done before: he
climbed out of bed, put his clothes on, and went home.
The Hotel California was too silent, too empty. He changed into
his sweats and went running. On silent streets, through the velvet California
night, past block after block of single-family bungalows tucked beneath
sprawling eucalyptus trees, he ran with a steady rhythm, letting his thoughts
run with him. Danny Fiore had always been so certain of precisely where he was
headed. For Rob, he’d been a touchstone, a talisman. Without him, Rob wasn’t
sure where his own life was going. His career was established. He had more
money than he would ever know what to do with. But there was an emptiness
inside him that threatened to swallow his soul.
He was thirty-three years old, too old to be sleeping in beds all
over town. What he needed was some kind of normalcy to his life. Something
permanent. Somebody waiting for him when he came home from the road. Danny’s
death had forced him to face the truth. His life was going down the toilet,
and if he didn’t make some changes soon, he was in danger of turning into one
of those wild-eyed, grizzled hermits who lived among piles of moldering
newspapers and spoke to nobody but the cat.
And that was precisely who was waiting for him upon his return.
Igor, fresh from a long nap and primed for nocturnal adventure. He let the cat
out, stripped off his clothes, and showered. Alone. Toweled off and climbed
into his bed, still alone. Turned on the stereo and lay there pondering the
mysteries of the universe while Bob Seger crooned a haunting refrain about
loneliness, about lost loves and missed chances down on Main Street.
He picked up the telephone. It was 2:30 in the morning on the
East Coast, but Casey answered on the first ring. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey, yourself.”
He shifted the telephone receiver, positioned himself more
comfortably in the bed. “You weren’t sleeping,” he said.
“Bad night. You?”
“Bad night.”
“No hot date?” she said.
He thought fleetingly of Kitty Callahan. Not even close. Not
tonight. He cleared his throat. “No hot date,” he said. “How are you?
Really?”