Burn It Up

by Cara McKenna

  Chapter 18

  Lazy winter light woke Casey a few minutes shy of seven. Beside him, Abilene was snoring faintly, a wheezy hum of a noise he knew well now. He sat up slowly, not wanting to rouse her. Soon enough, she’d wake and no doubt be proud to realize that for the first time, Mercy had slept through a full night. Casey was proud himself, come to think of it.

  Neither of them had thought to switch the light off before they’d conked out, and he sat at the edge of the bed for a time, watching Abilene’s face. Her mouth was slack, her expression a mix of angelic and drunk. She didn’t look dignified, but she looked goddamn adorable.

  Last night was different, he thought, remembering it all with a warm flush. Abilene had been different. Fiercer. Needier, in that way that made a man feel a hundred feet tall.

  Knock it off with that shit. Whether he was ready for something serious with her, he couldn’t say anymore. But one thing was set in stone—he had no business even fantasizing about it until he got those test results.

  Saturday morning proved quiet, culminating in a late, drawn-out family breakfast around eleven, once Don and Miah had finished their morning tasks. It was a somber affair, cast in the shadows of the previous night’s drama.

  “One of the hands found two shell casings this morning,” Don said. “Twenty-twos.”

  “No shortage of those in Fortuity,” Casey said.

  Miah nodded. “No sign of a dark truck on the roads last night, but the sheriff’s going to station patrolmen along the highway for the next few evenings.”

  “That’s something,” Abilene offered.

  Christine delivered a plate of toast to the center of the table and took a seat. “We’ve had more than enough excitement for one week. I won’t sleep until they catch this jerk. Oh—speaking of jerks, that rep you told me about e-mailed this morning,” she added to her husband and son. “You weren’t exaggerating when you said it was a hard sell.”

  Casey tuned out as the topic shifted. He was seated next to Abilene, acutely aware of how close their legs were, and acutely aware of that awareness. He tried to blame his edginess on the stress of those looming DNA results, but some of this agitation had a distinctly pleasurable edge to it.

  Ware came by that afternoon to see Abilene and the baby, and it went much like the first time, except they passed the hour in the den, not in privacy. Once he’d left and Casey had made sure Abilene was pleased with how the visit had gone, he shoved a sandwich in his face and headed out.

  The sun disappeared behind the hills beside him as he drove toward the highway. Stop one this evening was the grocery store in the next town, and he hurried through the aisles with the cart. He imagined doing this with Mercy in the little seat someday. Would that be fun, or a total pain in the ass? Parenthood struck him as a muddy mix of both those things. Then he realized he’d better save such theorizing for an hour or two from now, once he knew if he had any business contemplating such a commitment. Too much to wrap his head around. Too much to hope for.

  The sky was black by the time he got back to Fortuity, and he parked in front of his mom’s house and headed up the driveway with a bag of groceries under each arm.

  No sign of Vince’s bike, but he passed Kim’s orange Datsun in the driveway then jogged up the steps to the side door, knocking before he barged in. “It’s just me,” he called. “I brought food.”

  It was Nita who appeared from the den, not Kim. “Casey, this is a nice surprise.”

  “Kim texted me a list this morning.” He set the bags on the counter and started unpacking them. “Christine offered to help Abilene so I could swing by.”

  “And get a break from diaper duty, no doubt.” Nita grabbed the yogurt and cold cuts and took them to the fridge.

  “I don’t mind that stuff.” Sure beat the heck out of straining at every little creak and crack in the old farmhouse, expecting imminent disaster. You’d have thought that crap would’ve ended with Ware now placated. “Where’s Vince?”

  “Garage. Finishing up Abilene’s car, I think. Kim’s with him.”

  “Cool. I need to take a phone call in a few minutes. Mind if I hole up in my old room?”

  “Not at all. It’s still your house, too, you know.”

  Maybe, Casey thought as he closed himself in his tiny childhood bedroom. But also not. It was still his single bed under the one window, still his faded Super Bowl XXXIII poster on the door. The walls were still painted bright blue, but he’d moved on. Kim had a load of her things in here now—random furniture and a bunch of photography equipment—and he welcomed the change. He had an uneasy relationship with his childhood. On the whole, it had been happy enough, he supposed, but he’d left it behind. And maybe it was the leaving it behind that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. His dad had taken off when the stress of family life had become too much for him. Casey had taken off when the reality of his mother’s decline had become too disturbing to bear. And when he thought hard enough about that parallel, the shame burned, and deep.

  He pulled out his phone. Four minutes to six. Four more minutes, and the question that had been haunting him for five years or more would finally be answered. One phone call, and he’d know with more certainty than any vision could offer what his future would look like. Funny how he’d been only too capable of ignoring this shit for all those years, but now that the truth was about to come out, four minutes felt like fucking forever—

  Brrrzzzz. His cell vibrated; then the chime kicked in. It took him three full rings before he brought his shaking thumb down and accepted the call.

  “Hello?”

  “Am I speaking with Casey?” asked a cheerful female voice.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Casey, good evening. This is Carrie Albini, calling from LifeMap. Does this time still work for you?”

  “Yeah. Lay it on me.”

  She laughed politely, and there was typing behind her voice. “Great. So I’m one of the analysts here at LifeMap, and it looks like we’re going to be consulting this evening about three different tests—yours and also Deirdre and Vincent. Is that correct?”

  “That’s right. That’s me, my mom, and my brother.”

  “Great. And I see we’ve got disclosure waivers all signed and ready to go, so let’s dig in. Now, in the mail you’re going to receive very, very detailed reports on all three tests, but when a client requests a personal consultation, it usually means they have some specific concerns they’d like to address. Is this correct, in your case?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Okay, great.” Man, she sure liked the word great. “Where would you like to focus our thirty minutes together, then?”

  “Well,” he said, sitting on the edge of his old bed, “my mom’s, um . . . Her mental health is declining. She’s never been diagnosed by a doctor, though.”

  “Okay, let’s take a look.” More typing and clicking. “I see here in the APOE allele for her test that, yes, she does carry the gene for non-Alzheimer’s dementia.”

  He nodded, no words coming. Luckily, the woman went on.

  “Are you curious to know if you also have this gene?” she prodded gently, voice lilting upward.

  “Yeah. I am.”

  More clicking—easily three hours’ worth of clicking, it felt like.

  “I have good news for you, Casey. You and your mother do not share that gene.”

  He froze, eyes glued to a dark patch on the carpet. “We don’t?”

  “No, you do not.”

  “How sure are you?”

  She laughed. “Ninety-nine-point-many-nines sure. Genetic testing is extremely accurate.”

  “Dude,” he said, and flopped back on his covers. “You have no fucking clue how much of a relief it is to hear that.” Such a relief, he felt tears welling in his eyes, snot building in his sinuses. He sat up and wiped his lashes dry.

  “I can only imagine,” she said.

  “And my brother—is he cool, too?”

  More typing. �
�Yes, your brother also doesn’t share it. Though of course your chances on that one were a bit less nerve-racking, I’m going to bet.”

  Casey frowned, confused. It wasn’t as though she knew about him getting spells and Vince not. “Why do you say that?”

  Silence—a pause deep enough to park a car in.

  “Hello?”

  “Sorry.” Click click click, tap tap tap. “You do know that you and Vincent don’t share a biological mother, correct?”

  He stared at the carpet stain, blank. “’Scuse me?”

  “Deirdre is not Vincent’s mother. Not genetically speaking.”

  “The fuck?”

  Another pause. “I take it this is news to you . . . You have the same father of course,” she went on quickly, like that even fucking mattered.

  Fucking fuck, but Casey had always known the two of them couldn’t be full-blooded brothers. They didn’t look a thing alike. But all this time he’d hoped it was because he must have a different dad, somebody way better than the asshole who’d left them . . .

  “I’ll be goddamned.”

  “Would you like to speak with an emotional counselor?” she offered.

  “What? Fucking no, I just— Sorry. It’s fine. What else can you tell me? Are there any other weird neurological things in my report?” Anything that might explain the visions, if his mother also shared them.

  Apparently not. The woman went through a bunch of results with him, but aside from a predisposition for anxiety and depression, Casey’s brain tested deceptively normal.

  “And of course those are very, very common across the board,” the data chick said. “And depression and anxiety are also strongly influenced by environmental factors.”

  “Sure.”

  A pause. “Are you all right, Casey?”

  “Yeah, I’m cool.”

  “Well, our thirty minutes are just about up. Have I answered all of your questions?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Great.”

  Yeah, fucking great. You just ripped a huge fucking hole through my goddamn family.

  “Now, when your reports arrive in the mail, don’t be surprised if you feel overwhelmed. A lot of it’s very technical, but if you go to our website, we have tools to help you make sense of . . .” She launched into her closing spiel, and Casey tuned out, peering around his room. Staring at the wall he’d shared with Vince, and trying to conceive how it was that they didn’t share the one fucking thing he’d always trusted they had in common. Their mom. The one thing that had bound them together enough to even lure Casey back here in the first place . . .

  He mumbled a half-assed thanks and a good-bye when prompted, and ended the call.

  “Fuck me.”

  Casey wandered out of his room, numb, and dropped onto one of the kitchen chairs. How in the fuck was he supposed to break this to Vince? Tell the guy that he’d spent the past decade watching the heartbreaking mental decline of a woman who wasn’t even his real goddamn mother?

  No matter how Casey tried to word it, all that came echoing back was a big fat tangle of confusion.

  He looked up as Nita entered the kitchen. She’d always been like an aunt to him and Vince—their next-door neighbor and childhood babysitter. She’d also been a way sterner taskmaster than their mom, probably because she’d had the energy to be. Dee Grossier, on the other hand, had seemed forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown after their dad took off. To be fair, Casey and Vince hadn’t exactly been the easiest boys to raise. She’d been on a first-name basis with half the nurses in the Elko ER, for Christ’s sake.

  But Nita Robles was made of sturdier stuff, physically and mentally. She was a deceptively warm, soft, stocky woman, and the glittery blouses she favored belied the thick skin hiding underneath. She’d been left by her husband a few years before Dee had, and they’d bonded over that. In time Casey had come to learn that if he fucked up anything especially bad, it was best to tell Nita first. She’d come down on you hard, but she wouldn’t fall to pieces crying like his mom had. Plus she was way better at relaying the news that you’d, say, burned down the neighbor’s shed, in a way that wouldn’t throw Dee over the edge.

  Casey’s phone was still in his hand, and he couldn’t guess how long he’d been sitting there, shell-shocked. He ought to be over the fucking moon—and he would be, in time. But that shit about his brother . . .

  Half brother. Just like you always thought.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Nita said, uncorking a bottle of red wine at the counter.

  “I just talked to the DNA people. The company I sent that test off to.”

  She froze with a glass in her hand, gaze glued to his face. “Oh?”

  He nodded.

  She filled the glass nearly to the brim and carried it to the table.

  He managed to crack a smile. “You gonna get drunk, Nita?”

  “I was going to enjoy a little taste while I watched the news, but I think maybe you could use a bit more than that.” She slid it over.

  He shook his head and pushed it back. “I got too much to wrap my head around just now.”

  Nita took a sip, swiveling the glass around by the stem. “I take it the news wasn’t good. About you having the dementia gene.”

  Hearing her say it aloud, Casey snapped out of his stupor, sitting up straight. Of course that was what mattered most. His entire perception of his childhood and his family was fucked way up, but it wasn’t the most important news. He wasn’t going to go crazy. He had a motherfucking future.

  “Fuck it,” he muttered, and stood. He grabbed a second glass from the cabinet and filled it for himself, sat back down across from her. “Fucking cheers,” he said, holding it up.

  Looking mystified, she clinked it with hers. “This some kind of gallows humor?”

  He took a deep drink, wincing, and shook his head again. “No. No, it was good news. I don’t have the markers for dementia. Mom does. I don’t. Neither does Vince.”

  Her shoulders dropped in almighty relief. “Jesus, Casey.” She crossed herself, then immediately reached across the table and slapped his arm. “Why didn’t you say so? And why do you look so rattled? Actually, wait—let’s let the good news sink in first.”

  A-fucking-men. He tried to absorb this new state of reality with every cell in his brain. I’m not going crazy. In ten, twenty, thirty years, I’ll be the same person I am now.

  What would he have done different, if he’d known this before? He’d first started getting those disturbing episodes when he’d been living in Vegas, counting cards. He’d assumed the visions must be the first indication that he was going nuts, as his mom had. That had been the first sign of her decline, after all—sudden spacey spells, mumbled nonsense.

  After that, his priorities had shifted. To make money while having fun had always been his life’s main focus, and while card counting had accomplished that on a small scale, there was one thing he found far, far more compelling than gambling, and indeed more compelling than money. And so he’d pursued it, and in the end banked himself more cash than he ever could have in the casinos, working on a team. And fuck that it was felony-level illegal, because if he got caught, he’d suffer, what? Five, ten years of a sentence, maybe, before his brain floated off into the ether. So fuck consequences, fuck the future. Fuck everything outside of doing what fascinated him, and enjoying every cent it brought in.

  Except now . . .

  Maybe he’d known all along, it was time to get out of that scene. Time to accept that the future did matter—a terrifying, exhilarating relief, nearly too much to process. He’d spent so long living his life as though it were about to end, the possibilities that this news had opened were overwhelming. He could make commitments now, sure, but he had fuck-all clue if he was capable of keeping them, of offering them.

  He slowed his racing thoughts, pictured Abilene and the baby. If they were his future, he couldn’t say, but he was free to find out. Free to fall in love and have a fam
ily, if he was ready for it. Big-ass if.

  “Motherfucker.” He couldn’t even believe it. Best news of his life. News that he still had a life.

  “I ought to smack you for the cussing,” Nita said, “but I’m too relieved to care.”

  “Before we get carried away with the celebrating, there was some bad news, along with the good. Unexpected news, at any rate.”

  “So spill—” She paused when Dee’s voice drifted in from the den, needing something or other—the channel changed, a glass of water, the ceiling fan switched on or off. When she wasn’t predicting certain doom, her worries were pretty simple. Nita stood and cast Casey a look, one that told him this conversation wasn’t over, merely paused.

  He found his hand in his pocket, worrying the edges of his lighter. He took out the Zippo, flicked it open and closed. He’d been doing that since he was a kid. It soothed him when he had shit on his mind. The clink of the lid popping up, the snick of the wheel, the metallic snap as he flipped it shut again. Twice he’d had the thing taken to a jeweler to get the hinge replaced. It had seen a lot of worries in the past twenty-plus years.

  Nita returned shortly. “Okay, where were we?” As she picked up her glass, her gaze caught on Casey’s hand. She frowned. “Let me see that lighter.”

  Casey hesitated, and she stuck out her open palm. He felt his face heating but passed it to her anyway.

  “I remember this. This was your dad’s.” She turned it around, studying the old-school Harley-Davidson badge on the front. There was a date etched above it by the manufacturer, the same year Casey had been born. “You miss him, still?”

  He shrugged and took the lighter back. “I barely remember him—he left two days before my fifth birthday.” He’d found that lighter a couple of weeks later, wedged between the cushion and arm of his old man’s recliner. His mom hadn’t even gotten angry when he’d killed one of the only trees in their yard, trying to set it on fire. She’d just looked at that lighter and held his face to her hip, and she’d cried. She’d said, “I’m mad at him, too.” Casey had rediscovered the lighter in the junk drawer not long after, and kept it to himself ever since.