by Jamie Pope
He stepped out of his truck, but instead of moving forward he just stood there. Stood there and stared at Cora, who hadn’t aged much in the past ten years since he had seen her. Her skin was still smooth and the color of milk chocolate, her clothes still so feminine and pretty. Her hair was white now, but that only added to that air of regality that she always carried around with her. He knew that Cassandra had inherited some of that from her mother. But he also knew that there was more to Cassandra than that. There was a side of her that only he ever got to see.
“Are you going to stand there all day, Wylie James, or are you going to come here and hug an old lady?”
“Ma’am.” Her words spurred him into action and his feet ate up the ground between them until he had the woman off her feet and in his arms. He missed her. Almost as much as he missed Cass. Terrance’s mother never liked him, only tolerated him. His own mother had disappeared from his life when he was a kid. But he always had Miss Cora, who never seemed to think any less of him. Miss Cora who mothered him when he needed it. “You’re not an old lady,” he said softly after a few moments. “You still look the same.”
“You are a liar, but a good one, so I will forgive you.” She let go of him and stood back to study him. “My goodness, you’ve grown into a big man. And handsome too. Did the Marines do that to you?”
“I’ve finally learned to eat my vegetables, ma’am.”
She smiled softly at him and touched his cheek. “How have you been, Wylie? Tell me your life has been good.”
“It’s been just fine,” he lied. It had been a lot of things, but it had never been fine.
Tears formed in her eyes. “I’m sorry, you know. I have wanted to apologize to you for so many years.”
He shook his head. Shaking off her apology. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Miss Cora.”
“I did. I should have spoken up, but I kept silent.”
He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to go back to that time in his life when he was pissed at the world and so lost that he never thought he was going to find his way out. “How is she?”
The sadness came over her instantly, like it was eating her up. Wylie knew it must have been bad. He knew for Cora to call him back it must have been something she couldn’t handle. “Come in.”
She opened the door and preceded him inside. The formal living room was the first room in the house. Tastefully decorated, understated, no signs of Cass’s touch. His eyes unwillingly zeroed in on a wedding photo. It sat in a place of honor on top of the fireplace. He studied Cass in her pretty white dress, a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes plastered on her face. Terrance stood beside her, beaming. Triumphant. He should have been. He had won that day.
Terrance had asked Wylie to be there, wrote to him while he was stationed in Korea to ask him to be his best man. Wylie never answered. The request was a punch in the gut. The final nail in the coffin of their friendship, of their brotherhood. He had been so mad at Terrance for years but when he found out Terrance had been killed, he cried. He hurt. He missed the man he thought he had never wanted to see again.
“She looked for you that day,” Cora said, causing his mind to turn from those thoughts. “She would never admit it, but she looked for you that day. I think Terrance did too. I wasn’t sure what either of them would have done if you had showed up.”
Wylie just stared, his mouth unable to work in that moment.
“I’ve never seen a bride so uninterested in her wedding plans. It took me some time to figure out why that was.”
A funny little feeling formed in his chest, or maybe it was an easing of the tightness he had carried there all those years. He wanted to blame Cass for what happened. He wanted to blame her father, Terrance, his family and the whole damn world, but in the end he couldn’t, because he was the one who had left. He left her and his friendship and the people who raised him and he never looked back.
“What’s been going on?”
She said nothing, only took him up the stairs to the back of the house. On the way he saw photos of them. Of vacations and family functions. He saw their achievements. Terrance’s diploma from Brown. His Ph.D. in psychology. His certificate in counseling.
“Terrance was a licensed counselor in marriage and family therapy too. He had an office in the house,” she said by way of explaining the shrine to him. “He could have made more money working someplace else, but he took that job at Farnsworth to be closer to Cassandra. He didn’t like to be away from her.” She looked back at him. “Sometimes I wonder if she felt stifled by it. But then I remember that it had always been the three of you. I rarely saw my daughter without one of you boys behind her. I knew it was going to be bad after it happened.” She stopped at the last door at the end of the long hallway. “But I never thought it was going to be like this.”
She opened the door, but he could barely see into the room. It was broad daylight, just past one P.M., but the windows were covered and the lamps were off. The only light came from the television.
“She hasn’t gotten out of bed in weeks.”
“Start from the beginning. Tell me everything.” He was away when it happened, but even when he got to a television, he couldn’t make sense of it. There was so much debate about gun violence, about school safety, but all he wanted to know about was his friends, about what happened after the violence.
Cora let out a heavy sigh. “Sometimes I don’t even know. She was newly pregnant. Not many people know that. She was finally pregnant after trying for three years. And he shot her in the stomach with a double-barrel shotgun.” She paused for a moment, her voice choked. “She should have died that day. There was so much blood, so much damage. She went into a coma three days after it happened. The doctors couldn’t explain why, but she just went to sleep and she didn’t wake up for months. I was told that it was her body’s way of healing itself. But I wasn’t so sure she was ever going to wake up. And then one day she did. Sometimes I think it was a mistake bringing her back here. She can’t leave her house without seeing one of those ‘God Bless Farnsworth’ signs. She can’t go to the store without people coming up to her to thank her or to pay their respects. She can’t even walk out of her bedroom without constant reminders of Terrance. People say time heals all wounds, but Cass’s wounds seem to grow deeper with each passing day. She blames herself for his death. I know she does. She was the one who called Child Protective Services. She was the one the gunman was coming for. She still doesn’t think she should live, and that scares me.”
Cora went silent as she looked to her daughter, who was barely visible under the covers. “She’s a hero. She got those kids out of that building. She went out into the hallway to face that man to give them time to get to safety. She’s done so much good, but she’s wasting away. If I don’t do something, I’m going to lose her. She’s my only child. I can’t lose her.”
The sadness had gone from her face. He only saw fear now. He had lost Terrance. He had lost Cass, too, when he walked away ten years ago, but he couldn’t stomach the thought of a world without her in it.
“Can I go in?”
“Of course. That’s why I asked you to come. I think you’re the only one who can get through to her.”
He didn’t know if that was true, but he walked in and ripped the coverings from the windows. Bright sunlight invaded the room; as he turned to face Cass, he saw her shrink from it. Shield her eyes with a pillow.
Seeing that made him pause. The girl who used to love being outside. Who spent hours walking with him, and riding bikes, and playing in the woods, was hiding from the light. It was almost too much for him to take.
He made himself move forward. He got on her bed and pulled the pillow from her face. He touched her. He cupped her face in his hands and forced her to look up at him, into his eyes. He wanted to see into her eyes. He wanted to see if there was any sign left of the girl he once knew.
Her face was pale. Gone was the gorgeous smooth brown skin. In its place was
something yellow and sickly and blotchy. Her eyes were dull, not the soft brown that he used to get lost in. Even her hair seemed to have lost its will to live. Those riotous, tightly coiled curls, which she could never tame, lay flatly against her head. They looked sad. She looked sad. He never thought he would see her this way.
“Cass.” He heard the catch in his throat, felt the fire burn in the back of it and the tears well up in his eyes.
“Wylie?” She came alive as the realization of him hit her. “Wylie James, is that you?” Her eyes traveled over his face as she reached up to touch his cheek. And then she did something shocking. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close. The last time he held her, Cass was lush curviness, at twenty-two, just coming into her womanhood, but now the body he held was thin, fading, wasting away in this bed.
“He would have liked to have seen you before he died. He missed you.” She squeezed him tightly. “I missed you. I wanted to see you before I go,” she said softly.
He didn’t need any more clarification to know what she was talking about. Cora was right. Cass didn’t want to live anymore.
“Pack her clothes.” He couldn’t let that happen. “I’m taking her with me.”
Chapter 3
She hadn’t met him yet. That new boy. That stranger who moved in with Terrance’s family. She had been away at camp, away from Terrance for a month. They had spent every summer together since his family moved from New York five years ago. It was weird not seeing him for so long. It was even weirder seeing him play with someone else.
She sat in the bay window in her living room, just staring at them. Terrance and this boy. She could only see him from behind, but now she understood why everyone in her town was whispering about him.
He was different.
The opposite of her best friend.
He was wide. Not fat, but big, while Terrance was thin and long. The boy had brown hair, which was just a little too long, and looked kind of golden in the sunlight. His clothes were messy, worn, not quite right for the town they lived in. Terrance had short, black hair and neat clothes and those glasses she had never seen him without.
This boy was white.
And Terrance was black.
It didn’t matter to Cassandra what color he was, Cassandra decided that she wasn’t going to like him.
“Why are you just sitting there, girl?” Her mother nudged her shoulder. “You just got back from camp. Go see Terrance. I know you missed him.”
“No, I didn’t!” she said, which wasn’t true. She had missed Terrance. She had been home for nearly twenty-four hours and he hadn’t come over to see her. He hadn’t even called to say hello. They ate dinner at each other’s houses and rode the same bus to school and had gym class together. He was her best friend, but he was too busy playing with some stranger to say hello.
“Honey, I learned long ago that you can never wait for men to come around. Sometimes you just have to go out and get them.” Her mother smiled knowingly and gave her a gentle push. “Go say hello to your boy before your behind fuses to that chair and I have to call somebody to remove it.”
She did as her mother said, heading outside to the Millers’ yard. She didn’t know why she felt so self-conscious walking over to greet Terrance. She had been to his house a million times. This time shouldn’t have been any different. Except it was.
She tugged on her shirt, suddenly realizing that her clothes didn’t fit her like they used to. Suddenly caring about how she looked, even though she never cared about her appearance with Terrance before.
He saw her approach just as the ball came toward him in a perfect spiral. He caught it easily and tucked it under his arm. “Hey,” he said in greeting, and ran to close the distance between them.
“Hey,” she said back, and that’s when the boy turned around to look at her.
There was nothing about him that should have stood out to her. He had brown hair and a big chin and square jawline. Maybe he looked a little older, a little rougher, than the boys she went to school with.
But there was something about his eyes. Light brown, big, kind of sad-looking. And he was staring at her like she had never been stared at before. Her hands wanted to fly up and fix her hair and tug on her shorts and cover her body, which she had begun to feel so foreign in.
“Cassandra, this is Wylie James. He lives with us now.”
Wylie James moved closer, extending his hand. She took it, surprised by the feeling of his firm handshake. It was unexpected. No boy had ever shaken her hand. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said. “You can call me Wylie if you’d like.”
She took her eyes off their connected hands and looked up to his face. His voice was slow. Southern. He didn’t sound like any boy she had known.
And then, just like that, she decided she was going to like him.
* * *
Cassandra turned over, away from the sun, away from the light that was burning her eyes. But she didn’t feel her soft bed, her safe place for the past few months, beneath her. She felt nothing but a car seat belt slide up and touch her throat. For a moment she thought she was dreaming. A dream within a dream, but she opened her eyes to see Wylie there. She dreamed about Wylie a lot. She had tried not to think about him over the years. It seemed unfair to Terrance, but sometimes he slipped into her thoughts, into her dreams.
She blinked, rubbed her eyes and stared at him, wondering how long it would take before he disappeared. But he was still there, watching the road ahead of him as he drove to some unknown destination. Then it came back to her. Her mother wiping her face with a wet cloth, telling her something about healing, telling her that she was going away for a little while. She remembered strong arms lifting her, placing her into the front seat of a large black pickup truck. But she also remembered feeling exhausted, feeling that heavy pull of sleep that never left her.
He didn’t look the same anymore, she thought as she studied him. Those faint traces of boy that were still with him when she had last seen him had vanished. His body was even thicker, his jaw squarer, his face harder. Her Wylie James was a man now.
He must have felt her eyes on him, because he glanced over at her. His eyes were the same—big and light brown—and he still looked at her in that odd way that nobody else did. But this time, unlike all the other times, she saw worry there. She didn’t like it and that surprised her, because she hadn’t felt anything other than numbness in such a long time.
He reached over and touched her face, sliding his thumb across her cheek.
“How’s my Cass?” he asked her softly, placing his eyes back on the road.
“Cass. My Cass.” she silently repeated.
He was the only one to ever call her that. The only one to shorten her name. She remembered liking it. Liking the way it sounded when it rolled off his tongue, liking the person she used to be when she was with him.
Her head started to ache. Her rarely used mind started to spin with thoughts she never wanted to think again. Thoughts of Terrance and Wylie together as boys. Images of them beaming at each other during their high-school graduation. Images of Terrance looking around the church for Wylie on their wedding day. Memories of her waiting for him to come back.
She shut her eyes. Tried to shut them out, hoping her friend, sleep, would take over her again. But it didn’t.
“Cass?” Wylie pulled off the road. He took her face in his hands, and as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t keep her eyes closed any longer. He kissed her forehead like he was kissing her mind, willing it to soothe. And somehow it did. Somehow she stopped thinking about the past and a ruined friendship. She stopped thinking altogether, because all she could do was feel. His hands were large and rough; his lips were warm and smooth. She felt safe, shielded, protected. She felt, just a little, when she hadn’t felt anything in so long.
“Drink this.” He handed her a bottle of cold cranberry juice, which he pulled from a cooler in the back.
It was her favorite. He remembered. Ten years
later and he still remembered. The cold, sweet juice slid down her throat as she sipped. She tasted it, actually tasted it. She couldn’t remember the last time she noticed the taste of anything.
“More,” he ordered, pushing the bottle toward her mouth. She obeyed, suddenly feeling thirsty again.
When all the juice was gone, he took the bottle away from her. He took her face in his hands once again, but this time he set his forehead against hers. “I should have come to get you sooner,” he whispered.
Yes, a little voice whispered inside her. You should have come to get me ten years ago.
She couldn’t believe that bitter thought formed in her mind. She had missed Terrance. She loved him. She pulled away from Wylie, looking up into his still-worried eyes.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Home.” He shook his head. “To my home. You’re going to live with me.”
* * *
All she did was sleep. That’s what Miss Cora told him, that was what he saw during most of their journey to his home. He was almost mad at Cora for letting it get this bad, for not making her go to a doctor, for allowing her to stay in a town that held nothing but memories of her husband and how he died.
He was mad at himself too. For writing instead of calling, for waiting instead of going to see her. But the truth was he didn’t know how he would be received in Harmony Falls. He had left because he wasn’t good enough. He was told he wasn’t good enough by the people whom he thought of as family, by the man he loved as a brother. He had only ever been a charity case to them. The one no one really wanted. He looked over to her, needing a distraction from his thoughts. Her eyes were open. For a moment he thought she was looking in his direction, but it was clear that she wasn’t seeing him. There was nothing in her eyes. Not hurt, not sadness, not fear. He could have taken seeing her in pain, but this near lifelessness was too much to bear.
“We’re almost there.” It had been a long day, and he could feel the exhaustion tugging at his eyes. He had left his quiet town of Aquinnah, Martha’s Vineyard, for Connecticut before sunrise. He hadn’t planned to leave so early in the morning. He had planned to take his time, to settle things at work before he left, but he couldn’t sleep that night after Miss Cora called. He could only think about seeing Cass again. “I think you’ll like it here,” he continued, feeling at a loss for what to say to her. “Aquinnah is on the quiet side of the island. There’s not many tourists here, now that summer is ending. Most of the island kids have gone back to school, even though it’s still August.”