When Danny had died, she’d gone blessedly numb, and the numbness
had held the pain at bay. This time, there was no numbness. When Rob
MacKenzie amputated himself from her life, she felt every slice of the
scalpel. For fifteen years, the one constant in her life had been Rob. He’d
shared her moments of triumph and supported her through her moments of
anguish. Danny Fiore had been her love, her heart, her obsession, but Rob had
been everything else: friend, mentor, pillar of strength. Sounding board,
collaborator, keeper of secrets. And, ultimately, lover. The emptiness he
left behind was too vast to be filled. Casey would have welcomed some of that
soothing numbness, for she felt as though she’d been scoured with sandpaper and
then rolled in salt. It was difficult to remember what her life had been like
before Rob. It was impossible to imagine her future without him.
Sleeping was impossible; when at last sleep did come, she would
inevitably awaken with her body clenched tight around a hard core of yearning
deep in her belly. She tormented herself by reliving every moment of their
lovemaking. A part of her had died with Danny, and after two years of a
sterile, barren existence, Rob had brought her back to life. He’d unleashed a
tide of raging hormones that had lain dormant through two years of sexual
starvation, and she hungered after him with a yearning so carnal it astonished
her.
He had resumed his tour. One dreary November day as she
listlessly thumbed through the newest issue of
Variety
, she found an ad
listing the dates and the cities. Now she had a new method of torturing
herself. She knew that he was in Denver on November twenty-seventh, and in
Dallas on the thirtieth. He’d picked up twelve extra cities this time around,
and a part of her hated him for continuing on with his life, as if the time
they’d spent as lovers had never happened.
She spent Thanksgiving with Bill and Trish because she had to eat
somewhere or risk undergoing the Spanish Inquisition. That night, Casey went
to bed early and lay alone in the darkness, thinking about the man who’d always
been her Gibraltar, who’d always known the right words to say and had seemed to
carry the solutions to all her problems in the palm of his hand. How could he
have been so wrong? Had he really expected her to erase the years she’d spent
as Danny’s wife, to just wipe the slate clean and pretend those years had never
happened? She’d loved Danny passionately. He would always retain his rightful
place in her heart. Rob should have understood that. He should have
understood that her love for Danny in no way negated her love for him. She’d
loved Rob since the beginning of time. That love had simply ripened into
something neither of them had expected, something tender and lusty and
beautiful.
On Christmas morning, she exchanged gifts with her father and
Millie. That afternoon, she called Travis in Boston and talked to him for a
half-hour. Leslie was pregnant with their second child, and they’d just bought
a ranch house in Chestnut Hill. It was on a dead-end street in an
upper-middle-class neighborhood, and there was a big back yard for the kids to
play in. The schools were wonderful. And Casey couldn’t help smiling just a bit
at the irony of her rebellious brother’s defection to the suburban bourgeoisie.
It was the first Christmas in fifteen years that she hadn’t talked
to Rob, and the significance wasn’t lost on her. She thought about tracking
him down, but what would she say once she had him on the phone? They’d both
said things that couldn’t be taken back.
I don’t love you. I don’t want
you.
Lies. Every word a lie. They’d deliberately hurt each other, and
she wasn’t sure they could ever recover from that. It would be best for both
of them if she held onto the shredded remains of her pride and left him alone.
***
It was always the same. Night after night, town after town, until
it all blended together into a single, continuous nightmare. He played until
his fingers were raw, gave them what they’d come for, but his heart was no
longer in it. Onstage, it was possible to maintain a certain detachment, to
hide behind his instrument and the physical separation from the audience.
Offstage, where life was a perpetual party, it was more difficult. In real
life, he was expected to interact with people. So he complied indifferently
with their expectations, and if anybody noticed the change in him, nobody had
the nerve to say anything.
Then, in Denver, Kitty Callahan fell off the stage during
rehearsal and broke her ankle. Rob paid her hospital bill and had her flown
home, and then he had to do some serious scrambling to locate a replacement
backup singer on such short notice. One of the roadies knew a local girl, a
leggy blonde named Kimberly, who had a beautiful voice and didn’t mind giving
up her day job to play twelve cities in twenty days. She spent most of her
off-duty time making cow eyes at him. After a few days of that, he decided one
night in Memphis to exercise his
droit du seigneur
and take her up on
her implicit offer. It might not cure what was wrong with him, but it couldn’t
hurt. Through the smoky haze of an overcrowded hotel room, he made eye contact
with her. He lifted a shoulder and tilted his head toward the door, and she
nodded. He almost laughed at how easy it was. He might be thirty-five years
old, but he hadn’t lost his touch yet.
On his way out the door he grabbed a bottle of coffee brandy
before guiding Kimberly down the shabby hallway to his room. He set the brandy
down on the vanity and got two Dixie cups from the bathroom. He poured a cup
of brandy for her, then filled his own, wondering how many he’d have to drink
before he could convince himself that this stunning blonde was really a green-eyed
brunette.
She had the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, and right now they were
looking at him as though he were the big, bad wolf. For the first time, he
wondered if she were underage. She looked about sixteen. “How old are you?”
he asked, the first words he’d spoken to her, probably ever.
“Twenty,” she said.
He drained his cup of brandy. “You’ll do.”
She came to him willingly, and he relaxed. He might not be much
good at polite conversation these days, but getting laid he could handle. It
didn’t require polite conversation. It didn’t require any conversation at
all. He crumpled his empty cup and dropped it on the floor, drew her into his
arms and kissed her.
Easy
, he thought, as that sumptuous body became
pliant in his arms. He’d done this a hundred times before, with a hundred
different women. This time wouldn’t be any different.
They fell across the bed, and he peeled her shirt up and off over
her head. Her breasts were firm and round and unfettered, and he sampled them,
forcing his attentions on first one breast and then the other, wondering as he
did so why her ample mammary glands had failed to arouse him. Where was the
excitement, the anticipation, the pleasure? If he was going to the trouble of
getting laid, he ought to at least enjoy it. He drew back his head and looked
at her, and she opened those incredible blue eyes in puzzlement. “Rob?” she
said.
And he realized, with utter astonishment, that he didn’t want her.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said, rolling away from her to lie
staring at the ceiling.
“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t do it.”
“I don’t understand.”
He looked at her. “I don’t even know your last name,” he said.
“Is it something I did? Something I said?”
“Look at me,” he said. “I’m thirty-five years old. I’m old
enough to be your goddamn father.” Those bare breasts staring him in the face
embarrassed him. They looked so vulnerable. He bent and picked her shirt up
off the floor and tossed it to her. “Put this back on,” he said.
She plunged her arms into the shirt and yanked it down over her
head. “What did I do wrong?” she asked in bewilderment.
He would have liked to offer consolation to this young girl who
thought she’d been rejected, but he realized with tired resignation that he,
who had always been so adept at giving, had nothing left to offer her.
Somewhere between Jackson Falls and Memphis, the well had gone dry. “Nothing,”
he said. “Just leave. Please.”
When she was gone, the bedside clock ticked in the silence. Rob
got up and walked to the vanity where he’d left the bottle of brandy. He
stared at his reflection in the mirror, and then he picked up the bottle and
uncapped it.
“Well, kiddo,” he said, “looks like it’s just you and me.”
***
The call came from Drew Lawrence at the end of January. “We found
something the other day,” he said, “sitting on a back shelf, covered with
dust. Masters of some tracks that Danny laid down about three years ago. Do
you know anything about them?”
“No,” Casey said, surprised. “Danny never said anything to me
about unreleased material.”
“It was an album he’d been working on while you were separated.
When the two of you got back together, he shelved the project.” Drew paused.
“Casey, we’d like to release it.”
“As an album? Posthumously?”
“It’s not unheard of—”
“No.”
He continued as though he hadn’t heard her. “Danny wasn’t under
contract to us at the time these recordings were made. Legally, they belong to
you. We want to buy them from you.”
“They’re not for sale.”
“Why not?”
“The man is dead, Drew. But you’re still trying to drain blood
from him. What’s wrong? Is your supply of Armani suits running low?”
“That’s unfair. This stuff is dynamite. We owe it to his fans to
make it public.”
“Come on, Drew. We both know that for ten years, Danny Fiore was
your meal ticket.”
“Casey,” he said, “if we don’t release this material, it’ll die
with him. Is that what you want?”
She hesitated. He had her, and he knew it. “No,” she said at
last, “I suppose it’s not. Let me hear it. Then we’ll see.”
“Great! I’ll have a copy made and in your hands by tomorrow
morning. Call me as soon as you’ve heard it, and we’ll talk.”
The package arrived by Fed Ex around ten the next morning, an
anonymous-looking CD in a paper wrapper with
Fiore Master, Copy 2
printed on it in pencil. She popped the disc into the CD player, then went to
the kitchen to pour herself a shot of bourbon. For this, she was going to need
fortification. Shot glass in hand, she returned to the living room and sat in
the Boston rocker to listen.
His voice still tore her to pieces. It always had, and it always
would. Nobody else could do with a song what Danny Fiore could. That voice
was liquid velvet, wrapping itself around the notes, seeping into all the
crevices, evoking memory and emotion, light and darkness, heaven and hell and
everything in between. For a moment, she was back in that dark cellar in
Boston, hearing him sing for the very first time, and her response was the same
now as it had been then, the same as it had been every time she’d heard him
sing. He’d had the gift of magic, and it broke her heart to know that
extraordinary voice had been silenced forever.
Most of the songs she’d written herself, with Rob, and that was a
whole different heartache. Memories came back to her in bits and pieces,
scraps of conversation, rough spots where they’d had to go back and rewrite,
jubilant moments when it had come so quickly they couldn’t write fast enough to
get it all down. Some of the material was new to her, but it was impossible to
mistake a Rob MacKenzie composition. Like a fine wine or a Monet, Rob’s music
bore a signature all its own. She would have recognized his work if she’d
encountered it on a mountaintop in Tibet.
She poured another bourbon and ran the whole thing through a
second time. This time, she froze her emotions and listened with a
professional ear. Drew had been right. This was the best work Danny had ever
done. She sat in the rocker with the shot glass, thinking about the words he’d
said to her so many years ago:
I want them to kiss my ass. I want to prove
I’m more than just some bastard wop kid from Boston’s Little Italy
. She’d
always known he was more, much more than that. But had he ever really believed
it himself?
A half-hour later, she called Drew. “Casey!” he said, sounding
jovial and paternal. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“Really? I have fifty bucks that says you’re eating a pastrami
sandwich at your desk because you were afraid you’d miss my call if you went
out to lunch.”
At the other end of the line, he chuckled. “You win the bet,” he
said. “Only it’s liverwurst.”
“I’m ready to deal,” she said.
“I knew you’d see it my way. We’re prepared to make a generous
offer—”
“I’ve already decided on my price.”
When she named it, there was silence at his end, a silence that
stretched out between them. He cleared his throat. The joviality was gone.
“You can’t possibly be serious,” he said.