He pulled the trigger.
***
“Danny, wake up!” She shook him with brute force. His side of
the bed was saturated with sweat, and he was still making those godawful choked
sobbing sounds deep in his throat.
He awoke with a jolt, stiffened, dropped back weakly onto the
bed. Covering his eyes with a forearm, he turned away from her and curled into
a fetal position, trembling violently.
She touched his shoulder. When he didn’t resist, she drew him
into her arms and comforted him the only way she knew. His heart was slamming
against his chest with such force that she feared it would explode. “Danny?”
she whispered in terror.
In a ragged voice, he said, “It’ll run its course.”
She held him in silent desperation for what seemed hours, until
his trembling subsided and his heart rate returned to normal. He pulled away
from her then and sat on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands. “So,”
he said, “now you know my dirty little secret.”
She squeezed his shoulder. “How long have you been having these
nightmares?”
Elbows braced on his knees, he ran his fingers through his hair.
“Ever since I came back from Nam. I should have warned you, but I’m gutless.
I didn’t know how you’d react.”
Softly, she said, “It must have been terrible.”
His bark of laughter was brittle. “A real picnic.”
“Have you talked to anyone about this?”
Suspiciously, he asked, “Like who?”
“Like a doctor.”
“Forget it! I don’t need any asshole in a white coat telling me
I’m psychotic!”
“For God’s sake, Danny, you’re not psychotic. You went through
hell over there—”
“Hell,” he said bitterly, “would have been a vacation.”
“Sweetheart, you wouldn’t be normal if it didn’t affect you
somehow.”
He got up from the bed, padded barefoot to the dresser, and lit a
cigarette. “When I first came back,” he said softly, “I’d be walking down the
street and hear a car backfire, and I’d hit the ground. Every time I heard
leaves rustling or a twig snapping, I’d freak. I was a wreck.”
“And now,” she said gently, “you’re all better.”
“I’ve learned to live with it. If you can’t—” He left the
sentence unfinished.
“We’re in this together, remember? For better or for worse.”
“In sickness and in health,” he said dryly, and blew out a cloud
of smoke. “Yeah. I remember.”
“Danny, you’re not sick.”
“It’s not something I’m proud of,” he said. “I don’t know too many
guys who wake up crying and shaking in the middle of the night. I’m also not
proud of what I did there.”
“What you did there was survive.”
“And by what fucked-up cosmic plan did I end up surviving? I
think the lucky ones were the guys who didn’t make it back.”
“Don’t you dare talk like that!” she snapped. “Whatever happened
there, it’s over. You have to let go of it!”
“You don’t understand. You can’t begin to imagine the things I
saw, the things I did. Christ, Casey, I have to live with the monster that’s
inside me.”
“Then talk to me about it. Hold me in your arms and tell me.”
“I can’t. You wouldn’t understand. You’d hate me.”
Furious, she said, “How can you believe it would make one iota of
difference in the way I feel about you?”
“I’m a killer,” he said bitterly, “a goddamn trained killer.
That’s who you’re sleeping beside at night. And the worst thing—” He rubbed
his forehead slowly. “The worst thing,” he said quietly, “is that there was a
part of me that liked it.”
She learned early that musicians have difficulty putting down
their instruments when the gig is over. And Danny had a way of drawing people
to him, so their apartment became a sort of after-hours club, a continuous jam
session that must have given the neighbors apoplexy. As a songwriter, she
found the company intellectually stimulating and the music exciting. As the
lady of the house, it drove her crazy. More than one Saturday morning, she
stumbled out of bed to find someone she’d never laid eyes on before, some
bewhiskered and bedraggled guitar player, asleep on the couch. Or eating a
bowl of Cheerios at her kitchen table. They left behind empty beer bottles and
full ashtrays, water rings on her tabletops and chair arms, discarded pizza
boxes and bare cupboards.
Since Danny seemed to thrive on the chaos, she bit her tongue,
cleaned up the mess, and kept her misgivings to herself. Since she was the one
in charge of the checkbook, he remained blissfully unaware of the havoc this
lifestyle wrought on their finances. It was Rob MacKenzie who brought up the
subject, one Friday evening as she was standing before an empty refrigerator,
balefully surveying its contents. Peering over her shoulder, he said, “Hey,
kiddo, it looks like Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is bare.”
“Yes,” she said grimly. “And don’t spread the word too far, but
Mother Hubbard’s checkbook is looking pretty bare, too.”
“I’m not surprised. Half the time you’re feeding six people on a
budget designed for two.”
“Milk,” she said in disbelief. “You have to love the irony. I
grew up on a dairy farm, and now I don’t have enough money to buy a gallon of
milk.”
He squared his jaw. “Get your jacket,” he said. “We’re going to
the store.”
“Rob,” she said in horror, “I can’t take money from you!”
“Maybe you’d rather starve?”
“We won’t starve. We’ll get by.”
“Oh?” he said. “You have a cow tied up in the back yard?”
“Don’t tease me, MacKenzie.”
“Jesus, Casey, it’s only a few bucks. Don’t make a federal case
out of it. You can pay me back next week.”
Casey looked at him, then back at her empty refrigerator.
Silently counted the days until payday. And wilted. “All right,” she said
reluctantly. “You can loan me a few dollars. On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“That we don’t tell Danny.”
Although she was careful to buy only the barest essentials, they
still filled two grocery bags. She and Rob distributed the contents in her
kitchen cupboards, then gazed ruefully at her pathetic collection of canned
pasta and tuna fish. “My mom has a great recipe for tuna noodle casserole,” he
said.
They shared a grin. “Hey,” she said softly. “Thanks.”
“Hey, yourself. Next time you need something, ask.”
The whole affair left a sour taste in her mouth, even though she
paid him back the minute Danny’s check was cashed on Friday. So she was
horrified when, a couple of weeks later, she found a crisp new twenty-dollar
bill tucked into her jewelry box. She knew Danny hadn’t put it there. The
last time she’d checked, he’d had four dollars to his name. And she’d be
willing to bet the entire twenty that in all the time they’d been married,
Danny had never even lifted the cover of that jewelry box. It was somebody
else who had put it there, and she knew precisely who that somebody was.
That evening, she dragged Rob off to the bathroom, shut and locked
the door, and then leaned against it. She pulled the twenty from her pocket,
unfolded it, and held it up for him to see. “What is this?” she said.
He wrinkled his forehead. “I could be wrong,” he said, “but it
looks to me like a twenty-dollar bill.” And he flashed his most ingenuous
smile, the one that always brought out the recessive mommy gene in even the
hardest of women.
She folded her arms across her chest, determined not to be sucked
in by that boyish charm. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me about it?”
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “it won’t buy as much as it would
five years ago.”
She bit her lip. “Anything you’d like to tell me,” she clarified,
“about how it ended up in my jewelry box.”
He sighed. “Look,” he said, crossing his arms in unconscious
imitation of her. “I’m living at home, paying my mom fifteen bucks a week for
board. I don’t have any other expenses. You guys are having a hard time
making ends meet. You’re paying too much for rent—”
“How do you know that?” she demanded.
“You live on Beacon Hill,” he said. “The whole damn
neighborhood’s overpriced. People raid your refrigerator day and night. Hell,
I eat more meals here than I do at home. I should be paying board to you
instead of my mom.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “Rob,” she said, “I know you
mean well, but you can’t do this.”
He squared that stubborn jaw. “Why?”
“Because! Because it’s—”
They were interrupted by a knock on the bathroom door. “Just a
minute!” she snapped. And whispered, “Because it’s not the way things are
done!”
“Says who?” he whispered back.
“I don’t know!” she said. “Whoever made up the rules.”
“So you plan to spend the rest of your life being a sheep? I’m
really disappointed in you, Fiore. I thought you knew how to think for
yourself.”
His words stung, at least in part because they struck a nerve.
She had always followed the rules. It was what she’d been taught from
infancy. The rules were there to keep life orderly, to prevent chaos and
anarchy. It had never occurred to her to question their validity. But now,
here stood Rob MacKenzie, daring to suggest that maybe, if she bent one of
those rules a bit, the sky wouldn’t tumble down on her head.
“Look,” she told him, “I come from a long line of staid Baptists.
We don’t know how to break the rules. That ability was bred out of us
generations ago.” She smiled ruefully. “Along with our sense of humor.”
“So I should just stand by and watch you starve?”
“It’s not your responsibility to subsidize us.”
“It’s not a subsidy,” he said, “it’s a gift.”
In exasperation, she said, “You are the most impossible man I’ve
ever met.”
He grinned. “I’m Irish,” he said. “So sue me.”
Giving up, she tucked the twenty back into her pocket. “We will
not discuss this issue again. Is that understood?”
He saluted. “Loud and clear.”
And they never did. But after that, whenever starvation loomed,
she would find money tucked into secret places. Sometimes just a few crumpled bills
stuffed into her purse; sometimes a twenty in her bureau drawer, or two fives
in her jewelry box. She never caught him at it, and after a time, she stopped
trying. But she kept a running tally, because somehow, someday, she would pay
back every penny.
As summer moved into fall, she and Rob spent several afternoons a
week writing songs together. As he jokingly told her, “We make beautiful music
together,” and he wasn’t far from the truth. But her woeful ignorance of the
technical aspects of music kept getting in her way. Finally one day, she threw
down her pencil in frustration. “I can hear it in my head,” she said. “Why
can’t I put it on paper?”
“Because you don’t have the skills you need to make the
transition.”
“How can I get them?”
He looked pensive. “I could teach you.”
“I couldn’t ask you to give me that much of your time.”
“We could call it an investment.” He leaned back in his chair and
crossed his bony ankles. “I’ll get my payback when we win our first Grammy.”
Her laughter was rueful. “That’ll be the day.”
But in the end, she recognized that if they were to continue to
work together, she needed to know what she was doing on a more technical
level. She couldn’t continue indefinitely to let Rob carry her.
Rob MacKenzie was a patient teacher with a vast wealth of
knowledge upon which to draw and the willingness to share with her everything
he had ever learned about music. What started as a crash course in music
theory grew into months of intensive tutelage. They studied chord progressions
and intervalic relationships, structure and tempo and style. They stripped
other people’s songs down to the bare bones and then reassembled them to see
what made them work. Over the months, he transfused knowledge to her as if by
an invisible bloodline. Along the way, he taught her a healthy respect for the
great blues musicians of the past and present, from Robert Johnson to Billie
Holiday to B.B. King. He played their music for her, traced for her the
genealogy of the music she heard on the radio every day.
In the process, she learned a great deal about Rob himself. He
had picked up his first guitar at the age of nine. After that, he’d had but
one love in his life. At seventeen, he’d been admitted to Berklee on a full
scholarship, and during his tenure there, he’d soaked up knowledge like a
sponge. At nineteen, he and Berklee had parted amicably when he’d left to
pursue a career as a working musician. He was tired of waiting, eager to jump
in headfirst.
Rob became her mentor, her best friend. It was a euphoric
experience, seeing something she’d worked hard to create come alive in the
hands of a group of talented musicians. The music germinated somewhere deep
inside her, but she tailored it to Danny. She knew his possibilities, knew his
limitations, knew his strengths and weaknesses as a vocalist, and she worked
with Rob to write the songs which would best showcase his talents. Those
afternoons became her lifeline, for during those few hours each week she lived
and breathed music.