chapter Fifty
Casey woke up with a start. It took several seconds for her to remember where she was, and why there was another person under the covers with her. It was her house. Her bedroom. Hers and Reuben’s.
But not anymore.
She looked over at Eric, who lay on his back, eyes twitching, as if he were dreaming. Casey wondered what he was dreaming about. Home? Near death? Revenge? Tortured young women? Prison? Or perhaps something more pleasant, like what had just happened in this bed? His light hair flopped over his forehead, one thatch of it close to his eye, and she fought the impulse to move it.
His coloring was the opposite of what she used to see there, Reuben’s dark, Mexican heritage having been burned into her soul, into these sheets, these pillows. But he breathed evenly, like her husband, his face relaxed, except for the moving eyelids. One arm was flung above his head, the other reaching out, as if to touch her.
Casey closed her own eyes and tried to go back to sleep, hopefully the dreamless kind. She didn’t need any more images crowding into her mind. She thought of Ricky, in his old bed at their mother’s house, free at last from his undeserved jail cell. Of Betsy and Wayne, finally freed from their waiting, only to have to deal with the knowledge of what they could have had, but had lost. Of Zeke and Dan Pinkerton, forced to face the deeds of their brother. How long would it take any of them to move on? To live life as they had? But perhaps that wasn’t the point. Perhaps the point was that they had to take what had happened and learn to live their life in its light.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, it was no use. There was no way she was going back to sleep. Moving slowly, with the same focus she had used in Texas, only this time for gentleness, she slid from the bed, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt—Reuben’s old one that she kept in her bag, which still lay almost entirely packed—and made her way downstairs.
The moon was nearly full and cast shadows on the back steps, where she chose to sit. The yard looked foreign in that eerie light, as if Casey had landed in some other time, at some other place. She gripped the cement of the stairs, so solid underneath her. So unchanged in the past years.
She closed her eyes and breathed in the night. The air smelled the same, tasted the same. Its composition had not changed since she had last experienced it. But at the same time…
She got up and walked across the yard. When she reached the end, she turned to look up at the house. Reuben. Omar. Eric. A building that once held a family, that now saw what could be referred to as a beginning. Or was it an ending?
A train whistle floated over the breeze, and Casey’s nerves tingled. Where was the train coming from? Where was it going? Casey tried to tamp down a nagging feeling that something wasn’t as it should be. That her priorities had shifted too far. Reuben. Omar. They’d shared a life there, in that house. They were supposed to still be there, with her. That had been the plan. They weren’t supposed to die in a flaming wreck, only for her to replace them with other things, with other people.
God, what was happening? What was her problem? What was she thinking?
Something rustled in the pine trees, but Casey didn’t have to look to see what had caused it. She stood silently in the moonlight. Waiting.
For Death.