Things We Didn't Say

Chapter 42

Casey



She glares at me, all trace of girlfriend kindness from last night gone like frost in the sun.

“Are you going to tell him, or should I?”

“Tell him what?”

“About your secret past. About your boyfriend, Tony.”

At this she produces my phone. I make to snatch it out of her hand, but she thrusts it into her back pocket. I can’t tackle her for it now, not with Jewel bouncing on the couch next to us.

“Hey, J. Don’t bounce on the couch with candy in your mouth.”

“Oh, leave her alone,” Mallory says, waving at Jewel.

“Where did you get that?”

“It rang in the pocket of your coat when you got back from your smoke break.”

“You have no right.”

She smirks at me. “I don’t care if I do or not.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Does Mike know about him?”

I don’t answer, which is answer enough for her.

She folds her arms and smiles at me like a predator, all teeth. “It won’t matter then, who he is. Michael, if you haven’t noticed, is a bit of a prude about things. I tried to remove the stick from his ass for seventeen years and couldn’t do it. So, good luck with explaining to him why you kept this innocent friendship a secret.”

And I’m back to Thursday morning again, the hope of a life with Michael and his kids whirling down the drain. I look down at my ring. It catches the bright light bouncing off the snow outside the window.

She’s right. Michael grants no mercy. There is right and wrong and lying is wrong and hiding the truth is just as bad.

My heart swells up, and my eyes dart around the room of this house, which now that I’m about to lose it again is not so much drafty and old but inviting and homey, with its archways and moldings, and the kids’ things scattered around like leaves on an autumn lawn.

A hard thud in the living room draws my attention, and I see Jewel on the floor.

She’s flopping like a fish, eyes bulging and mouth in a large O, but she makes not a sound.

I grab Jewel from behind around her waist, hold my fist at the base of her rib cage, and start thrusting. I’m dimly aware of feet pounding down the steps, frantic shouting.

Jewel is thrashing in my arms, panicky.

“Honey, I’ve got you,” I say. “Hang on.”

I thrust again, again.

The candy shoots out, bulletlike, and skitters across the floor. Jewel makes a huge gasp, then coughs, and gasps some more between terrified sobs.

Jewel turns in to me and throws her arms around my neck.

I close my eyes and hold her, letting her tears soak my shirt, and I cry on her hair, and we cling together in a wet embrace. The door flings open and there’s shouting and hysteria between Mallory and Michael, but I’m not listening. I’m holding Jewel and crying for what was almost lost to everyone, and is still lost to me.

Michael takes her from my arms, and I let him. She belongs to him, after all. Not me. His coat is still cold from his walk outside. He shrugs out of it awkwardly, trying to hold Jewel at the same time, while Mallory frets, uselessly smoothing Jewel’s hair, straightening her glasses.

I notice Angel and Dylan standing under the living room archway. Dylan’s face is grim and hard, and he’s got one arm around Angel’s shoulders; they are nearly the same height. They’ve grown so much in just the two years I’ve known them. In two more years, when I’m barely a memory, a blip in some snapshots, they’ll be practically adults.

Michael has lowered down onto the couch, where Jewel cuddles up on his lap. Mallory kneels at Michael’s feet to get a look into her daughter’s tear-streaked face. Red sticky goo from the jawbreaker had leaked out of her mouth and caked on her chin. I go into the kitchen to fetch a wet towel.

I start to wipe Jewel’s chin, but Mallory snatches the towel from me to do it herself.

“What happened?” Michael finally says.

“She was jumping on the couch with a candy in her mouth,” I tell him evenly. “She must have fallen, and it got caught in her throat.”

“Why did you let her do that?” he says. He’s actually asking me that question. Me. The one who did the Heimlich and saved her life.

“I didn’t.” I weigh what to say next. I could swallow my words and say nothing. I could stay neutral, I could even tacitly accept responsibility. But no. I’ve been doing that all along. Much good as that’s done me. “Your ex-wife thought it was a great idea, though.”

“How dare you!” she shouts, leaping to her feet. “I told her to stop doing it just before she fell.”

My first instinct is to look at Jewel for confirmation of my story, but I glance away: she’s a child and should not be put on the witness stand.

And it doesn’t matter. I can see from Michael’s face he’s made up his mind about me.

“N-not true.”

We all turn in surprise to Dylan.

“I saw it. M-M-Mom told Jewel it didn’t matter, she could keep jumping.”

Jewel nods her head in the circle of Michael’s arms. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she croaks out. “I didn’t know it would happen.”

Dylan screws up his face, concentrating on his next words. “Casey was awesome. A hero.”

“Oh, some hero!” shouts Mallory. “Some hero getting plastered when her stepson is missing, talking to her boyfriend on the phone, too.”

I should point out that I was not plastered while Dylan was missing, but late at night, after he was found, when everyone was asleep. I should point out that Tony is not my boyfriend.

I should point out I’ve just saved his daughter’s life, and the man I thought I’d marry has yet to thank me.

“She was awesome,” Dylan repeats, and I see his fists tighten. “You just stood there and s-s-stared.”

“I was afraid!”

“Y-y-you . . .” He stops, scrunches his eyes, and sucks in a breath. When he opens his eyes, he says with clarity and volume, “You were useless.”

“My own son turns on me, now. I get it. What about you, Angel, huh? You think Casey’s so much better than me?”

Angel folds her arms and tosses her hair, an echo of her mother. “She does have a boyfriend. I read it in her diary.”

Michael startles at this, visibly.

“Casey?”

He’s wounded again. He strokes Jewel’s hair, and in that moment it doesn’t look like he’s comforting her so much as soothing himself. Jewel looks at me sideways, her glasses crooked again.

They all stare at me, waiting. A fresh wave of nausea rolls through me, reminding me of my bender last night, of my history, of what I used to be that Angel and Mallory have opened up now.

I stare past them all outside, at the people clearing their driveways, tossing aside the snow.

I walk up the stairs slowly, feeling dreamlike and oddly serene. It’s an easy thing to retrieve my duffle bag, which was already packed. My computer is already inside, too. I’ve probably got angry clients trying to e-mail me, so I should go find some free WiFi soon.

My books and things I will let go. My clothes that I didn’t put in the bag can be replaced by one trip to Target.

It’s noisy downstairs, but I don’t really hear it. It sounds like a loud movie, muffled by the floor.

I pick up the picture from the top of the dresser, consider whether to take it. I place it facedown, instead. My ring slips off easily now, and I leave it on top of the overturned frame.

My vision is blurred as if through a scrim. I only recognize Michael by his size and shape as he blocks my path on the landing in the curve of the staircase. I nudge him aside, forcefully, when he won’t move at first.

I drift down the steps. The kids in my peripheral vision look like angels to me, out of focus and distant.

I should get my phone back, but I won’t. I’ll get a new one.

Change my e-mail, change my number, change my address. Maybe I’ll be Eddie again. I liked that nickname, better than Edna at least.

I stroke Jewel’s hair once before I go, cup her cheek for a moment, which still feels soft like baby skin, but that might be a trick of my senses, still clinging to the hope I’d had for a baby in this house.

There are voices, but they are babble to me.

I close the door and walk down the porch with a heavy step. The whole world seems muffled by the wet snow as I walk away, up the hill, turning east, then north again, then I stop paying attention because what difference does it make?

I’m not wearing my boots, so before long my feet are cold, my toes numb like the rest of me.

I walk, and smoke, past the Wealthy Street Bakery, full of happy weekend couples, past the Literary Life Bookstore, these landmarks I’d started to feel belonged to me, in my new life.

I have no phone, and no one knows where I am. Out of my numb haze comes a blast of giddiness. No one knows where I am!

Minutes, maybe an hour, pass as I coast on my anonymity. Up ahead I see a huge rectangle of glass with a neon Miller sign hanging in the middle, a cavelike interior beyond. Without a thought I swing open the door and step into the comforting dark of a neighborhood dive. Not my neighborhood, and the patrons can tell, but they merely look up, note my presence, and look back to their tables and drinks and video Keno.

I seek out a corner table. The middle-aged waitress recognizes my silence as a fortress. She bothers me as little as possible, no doubt well versed in the body language of those who’d like to get quietly drunk. As it’s afternoon, I go with my standard afternoon drink and order a beer on tap. There’s a college football game on a small TV in the corner. I don’t know who’s playing, and I don’t care.

The beer glass is cold in my hand. The bubbles pop against my nose. It’s more bitter than I remember, and for a moment my stomach heaves, No, not again, but soon settles down to the inevitability of it, the familiarity of it. Wake up, liver. Back to work.

I lose myself in the football game. I used to watch with Billy all the time, and he’d explain offsides and downs. I pick a team to root for based on the color of uniform, to keep myself interested, so I don’t think too much.

But the game ends, and my cash runs out. It’s getting dark already.

I should call Tony. I could borrow a phone, and it’s a local call. But I feel myself falling away from him, too, because he would be disappointed in me. Drinking twice in two days, and this time I’ve got no one to blame.

So I walk some more, not knowing how long, struck that it doesn’t matter now. Kid bedtimes, homework routines, band practices, all of it has winked out of my life at once. It’s only me again, and no one cares when I do anything.

Pondering this, I unfasten my watch and drop it in the snow.

I investigate the details of my surroundings as if I’ve never seen them before, as if I haven’t cycled past these places a hundred times. But everything looks different when you’re walking. Closer. Real.

I start to consider where to spend the night. I figure there’s room on my credit card for a hotel room, if I don’t go anywhere fancy. But that would require talking to people. I don’t want people now. I wonder about overpasses and cardboard boxes. I remember learning in Girl Scouts when I was a kid how if caught in the elements you could dig a trench in the snow and be actually quite warm.

The beer has made me sleepy, and the cold has been so constant now I don’t feel it anymore.

From the corner of my eye, I notice a car trailing me. I’m down a side street, I realize. I don’t know which street. I haven’t been paying attention.

The car pulls almost even with me, and my heart seizes up. The rest of me is unplugged, like someone’s cut a cord between my animal self, which wants to preserve my safety, and my higher brain, which is only mildly interested.

I hear the crunch of a door swing open and my feet take over, forcing me to a sloppy, numb, tipsy run.

“Casey!”

I turn before I think better of it, and it’s Michael. It’s his car, with the door open.

He holds out a hand, beseeching. I just stare at him.

“Please, it’s at least warm in the car.”

I shrug and allow my feet to carry me back to the car, though the rest of my soul feels banished and locked away, somewhere far from here.