Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series)

by Breton, Laurie

  The path before them narrowed, and as though by unspoken signal, Travis and Rob moved in closer as dozens of sticky, anonymous hands pawed and clutched at their clothes, their hair, their bodies. Then, thankfully, the limo was waiting. Massive bodyguards held back the crowd as they stepped inside and the door shut behind them, and Casey closed her eyes and sank into soft leather.

  Beside her, Travis loosened his tie. “I never realized,” he said, dazed. “Not really. Until now.”

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her brother so unnerved. “Thank you,” she said softly, and turned to Rob. His eyes were closed, his head pressed back against the plush leather seat, his face pale and stony. She took his hand in hers and squeezed it hard. He opened his eyes, and they were damp and feral. “I’m stronger than you think,” she said.

  Hoarsely, he said, “Are you?”

  “Once,” she said, “a very wise man told me I didn’t always have to be the strong one. That it was okay to accept help once in a while.”

  He squared his jaw and turned away. “And your point is?”

  “It’s a two-way street,” she said. “We get through this together.”

  A December burial was unusual in Maine, but since the ground wasn’t yet fully frozen, it was what she’d requested. While security guards held the curiosity-seekers at bay, the family and a few friends huddled in a tight little band, high on a hill, shoulders hunched against the wind that shot like darts through their clothing and rattled the bare branches of the elm tree that towered above them. Eyes hidden behind dark glasses, she listened emotionlessly to words that were intended to soothe, as they lay Danny to rest in the family burial plot.

  There was no wake. That, too, had been her request. Only stiff hugs at the cemetery, then the brief trip home in the limousine, followed at a discreet distance by the security guards Rob had hired. For days, while her physical scars healed and her black eye made its slow evolution through the color spectrum, the guards worked rotating shifts, one posted in the house, one in his car at the end of the driveway. A precaution, Rob told her. Nothing more than preventive medicine, protection against any potential threat.

  Normally, Casey would have balked at the lack of privacy. Instead, she felt only indifference. The security guards knew the short list of people who were allowed in. Everybody else was turned away. One more thing she didn’t care a fig about. They could all stay away as far as she was concerned. The only person she cared to see wasn’t coming back, and nothing else mattered any more. After six days with only one minor incident involving a fan with a telephoto lens, Rob dismissed the security people and took over the responsibility of keeping the world at bay.

  Casey walked through life cocooned in numbness. Friends and family stopped by frequently, offering help and moral support. She thanked each of them politely, served them coffee and pie, and sent them on their way.

  Only Rob was allowed to stay. He reminded her daily to change her clothes and comb her hair. He washed her dishes and vacuumed her rugs, he bought the groceries and cooked the meals and badgered her into eating. He kept her functioning with endless games of Monopoly and blackjack. It was Rob who sat up with her at three in the morning when she had to bake pies or go crazy, Rob who ate the pies after she made them. It was Rob who listened during those all-night sessions when she talked incessantly about Danny, Rob who drove her into Farmington and helped her pick out a new car.

  Eventually, inevitably, the day came when she knew it was time to send him away. “You’ve done enough,” she told him. “You’ve gone so far beyond the boundaries of friendship that I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”

  “We already talked about boundaries,” he said. “And I’m not looking for payment. You know better.”

  “Rob,” she said, “you have a life. You should be living it.”

  He protested, as she’d known he would, but she thought she detected a thread of relief running through the fabric of his protests. And who could blame him? These days, she could barely stand her own company. She certainly wouldn’t wish it on anybody else.

  “Come to Boston with me,” he said, “for Christmas. Mom and Dad would love to have you.”

  “And ruin Christmas for everyone? I think not. But thanks for the offer.”

  “I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone.”

  She braced her palms against the lip of the kitchen sink and watched a chickadee pecking at the tiny black seeds that were scattered across the hard crust of snow beneath the bird feeder. “I have to do this myself,” she said.

  He squared that stubborn jaw. “Why?” he said.

  “Because,” she said, “you won’t always be here. Because sooner or later, I have to face life on my own. Because it isn’t right for me to depend on you for everything.”

  “You’re not ready.”

  “And if you stay,” she said gently, “I never will be.”

  So he went, and she was left the monumental task of reassembling the pieces of her ravaged life. Christmas came and went, and the family respected her wishes. They didn’t try to force her into celebrating. Christmas afternoon, Rob called from Boston and they shared a brief, stilted conversation. He badgered her to visit him in California after the new year. Because it was easier than arguing, and because argument wasn’t her strong suit these days, she agreed.

  Most nights, she went without sleep. Nights were the worst, because at night there was nothing to fill her mind with, to make her forget. Danny was there, in every corner of that creaky old house, and in the wee hours of darkness, he whispered to her, seduced her with memories of warm, sleek flesh and softly whispered words of passion. As the weeks passed, pain began to eat away at the edges of her numbness. When the longing became too unbearable, she would go to the closet and open the door and bury her face in a great armload of his shirts. His odor clung to his clothing, to the bed linens she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to change. On the rare occasions when she actually slept, inevitably she dreamed about him. The dreams were all different, all the same: he was still alive, smiling, arms stretched out to her, but always just beyond her reach. She would awaken and automatically turn to him, and then she would remember, and the pain was like a rock-hard fist in her abdomen.

  She wasn’t sure exactly when she became aware that the music had died. She only knew that it was gone. Inside her, around her. She locked Danny’s piano and put away the key. Meticulously avoided the den where the stereo sat, gathering dust. Never once turned on the radio in the new Mitsubishi sports car she felt such indifference towards. The music had been Danny, and Danny had been the music, the two so interwoven she couldn’t separate the strands. Without Danny, there was no music, and the silence was deafening.

  Every week, without fail, Rob mailed her what she came to think of as care packages. These innocuous little bonanzas were her only ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak existence. She never knew quite what would be inside. He always sent a letter, sometimes lengthy, sometimes brief, depending on how busy he’d been that week. He cut out newspaper articles he knew she’d find interesting, and cartoons to make her laugh. He told her all the new dirty jokes he’d heard. Sometimes he would include a cassette of his latest music; a couple of times he tucked in a half-finished song in the hope of enticing her, but she refused to take the bait. He sent a batch of Gary Larsen’s Far Side paperbacks, and on one occasion, he sent her one of Igor’s discarded whiskers scotch-taped to an index card.

  Once he sent an old photo of her at nineteen or twenty, mugging for the camera in faded jeans and Danny’s old gray B.U. sweatshirt. She had no idea when or where it had been taken, and she studied it at length, stunned by how young she had looked. And how happy.

  Sometimes, she wrote back. Sometimes, she actually mailed the letters she wrote. Other times, they were so maudlin that instead of mailing them, she tore them up and burned them.

  He called a few days after the photo arrived. “Did you like the picture?” he said.
r />   “I was never that young,” she said. “Where on earth did you get it?”

  “I’ve had it forever. Bet you don’t remember the occasion.”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Boston Common,” he said. “A Sunday afternoon in October. Remember the Sunday afternoon football game?”

  A bittersweet, piercing pain shot through her chest. “I haven’t thought of that in years,” she said.

  “Every Sunday about half-past one, we’d come by and drag you and the Italian stallion out of bed. You two were always in bed.”

  “Danny was working two jobs,” she said softly, remembering. “Sunday was the only day anything ever happened in bed, and then you bozos had to come by and interrupt. We always tried to ignore you, but you and Trav just kept banging on the door until one of us got up to let you in before the neighbors decided to call the cops.”

  “We couldn’t play without you,” he said. “It was Danny’s football we used.”

  “And afterwards,” she said, “we’d troop back to the apartment, all muddy and sweaty and grass-stained, and we’d sit around on the floor, eating pizza and drinking beer.”

  “Glory days,” he said softly.

  The tightness in her chest had grown nearly unbearable. “He certainly had a way of drawing people to him, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, Danny had charisma,” he said. “But it wasn’t Danny who kept us coming back, week after week. It was you.”

  “Me?” she said, incredulous. “Be serious.”

  “I am. You were like this earth mother person. You made us feel welcome, kept us warm and fed, made us feel good about ourselves. You have this rare talent, babe. It’s the way you relate to people. When somebody talks, you listen. I mean you really listen, like that somebody is the most important person on the planet. I’ve never known anybody else who could do that.”

  ***

  The last Saturday in January, it happened again. Rob picked up the phone to call Danny. He got as far as dialing the number before he remembered, and felt that squeezing pain in his chest as he slowly hung up the phone. Danny had been the linchpin around which his life had revolved for nearly two decades, and even though he’d witnessed death with his own eyes, it was still difficult to believe. It wouldn’t sink in for a while. And until it did, he was doomed to flounder, lost in a world of which Danny Fiore was no longer a part.

  He called Kitty Callahan instead, and they had dinner at a quiet, out-of-the-way place he knew, in a neighborhood where the rich and the chic never wandered unless they took a wrong turn somewhere. While Gloria Estefan bubbled from the overhead speakers, they had a few drinks and talked about old times. Afterward, he went home with her. They’d been friends for years, casual lovers on occasion, and he knew that whenever he sought comfort, he could find it with Kitty. But tonight, the comfort he’d always found so satisfying failed him. Not that there was anything wrong with the sex. Sex was sex, and Kitty was good at it. But it failed to fill that yawning hole inside him. This time, after they made love, he did something he’d never done before: he climbed out of bed, put his clothes on, and went home.

  The Hotel California was too silent, too empty. He changed into his sweats and went running. On silent streets, through the velvet California night, past block after block of single-family bungalows tucked beneath sprawling eucalyptus trees, he ran with a steady rhythm, letting his thoughts run with him. Danny Fiore had always been so certain of precisely where he was headed. For Rob, he’d been a touchstone, a talisman. Without him, Rob wasn’t sure where his own life was going. His career was established. He had more money than he would ever know what to do with. But there was an emptiness inside him that threatened to swallow his soul.

  He was thirty-three years old, too old to be sleeping in beds all over town. What he needed was some kind of normalcy to his life. Something permanent. Somebody waiting for him when he came home from the road. Danny’s death had forced him to face the truth. His life was going down the toilet, and if he didn’t make some changes soon, he was in danger of turning into one of those wild-eyed, grizzled hermits who lived among piles of moldering newspapers and spoke to nobody but the cat.

  And that was precisely who was waiting for him upon his return. Igor, fresh from a long nap and primed for nocturnal adventure. He let the cat out, stripped off his clothes, and showered. Alone. Toweled off and climbed into his bed, still alone. Turned on the stereo and lay there pondering the mysteries of the universe while Bob Seger crooned a haunting refrain about loneliness, about lost loves and missed chances down on Main Street.

  He picked up the telephone. It was 2:30 in the morning on the East Coast, but Casey answered on the first ring. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  He shifted the telephone receiver, positioned himself more comfortably in the bed. “You weren’t sleeping,” he said.

  “Bad night. You?”

  “Bad night.”

  “No hot date?” she said.

  He thought fleetingly of Kitty Callahan. Not even close. Not tonight. He cleared his throat. “No hot date,” he said. “How are you? Really?”

  “I won’t lie and say it’s easy, because it isn’t. But I’m surviving, one hour at a time.”

  “You could come visit me. Hop on a plane and get out of the ice and snow.”

  “It’s too soon. I need to be here right now.” She paused. “He’s here,” she said. “In this house. Everywhere I look.”

  “I know, sweetheart.”

  “Right now, that’s what I need. It’s all I have.”

  He sighed, but didn’t argue. He rolled onto his side and shifted the phone to his other ear. “You’d tell me,” he said, “if you were in trouble. Right?”

  “I’m not in trouble. I told you, I’m stronger than you think. You’re the one I’m worried about.”

  “Don’t be,” he said gruffly. “I’m fine.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Flash. You’re not handling this well.”

  He wrapped the coiled telephone wire once around his hand. Twice. “I’m handling it,” he said, “the only way I know how.”

  “And that’s the same thing I’m doing.”

  “I’m one hell of a comfort,” he said, disgusted with himself. “I shouldn’t have called.”

  “Rob,” she said softly, “what’s wrong?”

  He took a deep breath. Unwound the cord from his hand. “I went out with Kitty tonight,” he said. “Kitty Callahan. I slept with her. It’s not the first time.”

  Softly, she said, “And?”

  “I didn’t feel a goddamn thing. She’s a nice girl, but I didn’t feel a goddamn thing. What does that say about me?”

  “That you were lonely. It’s not something to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m thirty-three years old,” he said. “I’m too old for bed-hopping.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You are.”

  He plumped the pillow behind his head, propped himself against it. “You never talk about Katie,” he said. “Does it bother you? To talk about her?”

  “It doesn’t bother me. Sometimes it makes other people uncomfortable. Why?”

  He toyed with the telephone cord. “I was just wondering what it feels like. To have a kid of your own.”

  “For me,” she said, “it was the most incredible feeling of love I’d ever known. I don’t think you can understand the depth of that kind of love until you’ve experienced it. You’d fight off snarling wolves for that child. You’d give your life gladly. And the feeling you get from knowing that you and the person you love most in the world created that exquisite creature together, that it came from an act of love, is the most profound emotion you’ll ever experience.”

  “One I’ll probably never know,” he said darkly.

  “Yes,” she said. “You will. I promise. It’ll happen.”

  “I have to go,” he said. “It’s the middle of the night. You need your sleep.”

  “I don’t sleep much these days.”

&nbs
p; “I’m sorry,” he said. “The last thing you need right now is me dumping my pathetic little life into your lap.”

  “Wrong. I’m grateful for the distraction.”

  “Oh. Well, in that case, I guess it’s okay.”

  “It’s always okay. You know that.”

  “I know. Next time it’s your turn to cry on my shoulder.”

  “I’ve done more than my share of that lately,” she said. “We have a mile or two to walk before we even up those odds.”

  “Get some sleep,” he told her. “That’s an order.”

  “And you know just how good I am at taking orders.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched. “G’night,” he said.

  “Night, lovey.”

  He hung up the phone and lay there in the darkness, soothed by the strength of the aura that surrounded her, and fell asleep thinking about what she’d said.

  ***

  When Trish, trying to be helpful, sent Danny’s suede jacket out to be cleaned, Casey tumbled headfirst into the abyss.

  Her sister-in-law was suitably repentant, but the damage was already done. The coat had held Danny’s scent, and had comforted her through several extremely dark nights. It came back minus the blood and the broken glass, and smelling of chemicals. Trish looked so contrite that Casey didn’t have the heart to scream at her. “Just leave, please,” she said, and Trish, not knowing what else to do, got in her car and drove home.

  Curled up in a ball on the kitchen floor with the jacket in her arms, her face crushed against it, the scent of leather mingling with that of cleaning compound, she wept and ranted into the dark, empty house, her own voice echoing back to her because nobody else was there. She smashed dishes, put her foot through an old door. Broke her favorite crystal pitcher, then sliced her hand and watched helplessly as the bright red lifeblood flowed out of her. She cried until there were no more tears left, and then she fell asleep on the couch, her head cradled on Danny’s jacket.