She dug her keys out of her pocket, fumbled with them, then got the car open, sliding in behind the wheel just as the dam broke. She folded her arms across the wheel, buried her face in them, and let sobs carry her away. They were harsh and ragged things, swallowed up by the hiss of the wind and traffic.
Where are you, Em? Where the hell are you?
Emily’s face filled her mind—Emily, ripping her helmet off and slamming it down on the bench between them. Why hadn’t Casey gone with her? Why hadn’t she made Emily come home with her? There were a thousand things she could’ve done that would’ve made a difference—that would have prevented this nightmare from ever getting started. She’d seen something more in Em’s face after the game, hadn’t she? Emily, looking like she’d lost her best friend, not just a fucking game.
I’m the one who lost her best friend, she thought bitterly, and a renewed wave of remorse swept through her. What right had she to feel such things? She was sitting here in her new car, alive and well, while Emily was out there in the cold somewhere—or not.
Again, she pushed that thought away—pushed all the thoughts away. She tried to empty out her head—her heart. She didn’t want to think anymore; she didn’t want to feel anymore.
She sat there for a long time as her sobs slowed and her breaths evened out. Only when she felt a few snowflakes hit the back of her neck did she realize the car door was still open. Sniffling, she pulled it closed, sat up, and began rummaging through her purse for her glasses. Both contacts were gone now.
She was about to start the car when she felt her phone buzz in her pocket, and her heart leapt. She fumbled to pull it free from the depths of her coat, sure that this time it would be Emily. Emily would be fine; she would tell Casey where she was, and Casey would drive there right now and bring her home.
The phone nearly slipped from her cold fingers. She caught it and stabbed the Home button.
“Dad and I both have to work late. Jake and Kristie are at Sally’s. You good?”
Just a text from Mom. A fresh wave of resentment surged up inside her, but she tapped out a response and slipped the phone back into her pocket. At least she would have the house to herself. She really didn’t want to see anyone tonight.
Numbly, she started the car and headed for home, making her slow way through the dark and snowy streets.
***
The chips were gone; Casey had eaten her way through half the bag, sitting alone on the sofa in the dark family room. She hadn’t really wanted them. They’d just been a way to silence the pangs of hunger that distracted her from her misery.
The only illumination came from the TV that had already been on when she’d come home, tuned to one of the twenty-four-hour news channels her father spent far too much time watching. She’d been staring at it for quite some time without really seeing it. The sound was low, the voices little more than comforting babble. Now and then, she caught a fragment of what they were saying—a blizzard here, a shooting there. None of it seemed to matter very much.
She looked down at the empty bag with its orange and black logo. Flyers’ colors, she thought disconnectedly. Halloween colors, too. Just like the streamers outside the entrance to the House of Horrors. She felt nothing beyond the eternal hollow space inside her chest.
She shifted on the sofa, pulling her knees to her chest and staring at the dancing colors from the TV that reflected on the picture window. The ghostly flashes flickered and swam like sunlight on the surface of a pond. For a moment, she thought she saw a face looking in through the window—the face of an old man with one eye hidden behind a milky cataract. She blinked, and the face faded away. Just a distorted reflection of someone on the television, she decided. She went on staring. Dimly, she heard the newscaster saying that Indian authorities were still looking for the man who had presumably attacked someone with a blowtorch several weeks ago. The victim was stable but still comatose in a hospital in New Delhi.
“…There were no witnesses to the attack, but investigators say that the victim’s injuries are consistent with what would be expected from the kind of intense heat…”
A minute passed—or perhaps ten—and finally thirst compelled her to go looking for something to drink.
As she passed the dining table on her way to the kitchen, her eyes fell on her father’s liquor cabinet, and she paused. She felt nothing—nothing but that dull ache of emptiness. She wanted to fill up that hole inside her. She wanted to patch her heart and stop the bleeding, if only for a little while.
She didn’t think about what she was doing. She dropped the crumpled chips bag to the floor and made her way to the cabinet. The key was on top. Dad never bothered to hide it. Hell, he forgot to lock the cabinet half the time. She slipped it into the lock and twisted. The doors swung open. Dozens of bottles stood in neat rows inside like sentries clad in black. Neither of her parents ever touched most of what was in here unless they had company for supper. No one would ever know.
It was far too dark to read any of the labels. She took a bottle at random and closed the cabinet, not even bothering to take the key out of the lock. She’d get it later.
She made her way back to the sofa, not noticing when she kicked the discarded chips bag under the table along the way.
The bottle was only three-quarters full, and its top twisted easily. A strong medicinal odor stung her nose, and for a moment the sharpness of the scent brought her back to herself. What was she doing?
She couldn’t answer the question; she couldn’t even muster the energy to try. She felt nothing.
She drank.
The liquid burned as it went down, exploding into a not entirely unpleasant warmth in her belly.
She stared at the TV. Clips of politicians trading jabs flickered across it, and she caught a few words the reporter was saying. Old people bickering, not knowing or even caring that Casey’s world was coming apart.
She took another sip…and another…
Commercials marched across the screen followed by images of violent devastation in the Middle East. So many horrors…so many horrors…and Emily was gone…
She drank.
A bombing in Kabul…
She drank.
Some poor kid lost skiing in Colorado and presumed dead; when would Emily be presumed…
She drank.
The images began to blur, and distantly she realized this had nothing to do with the imperfect prescription of her glasses.
A breaking news icon appeared in a corner of the screen. An airplane, flying over a densely populated city somewhere, had gone unaccounted for. There was a search in progress, but no sign of a crash or if the plane itself had surfaced, leaving authorities baffled.
“Just like Em,” Casey said aloud to the anchor, and she took another drink.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she scrambled to get it out of her pocket. The bottle slipped through her fingers, caromed off the arm of the sofa, and fell to the floor with a muffled thud.
“Fuck,” Casey said to the arm of the sofa, but there was no real venom in the word. “I’m so going to get it.”
She leaned over, reaching for the bottle and expecting to see dampness soaking into the carpet. She was surprised to see nothing. The bottle was empty.
As she picked it up, she lost her balance and toppled off the sofa, landing flat on her face. Warmth sloshed inside her stomach. Her insides felt loose and bloated, squirming uncomfortably below her ribs.
Slowly, carefully, she picked herself up off the floor, and when the world began to tilt crazily around her, she sank back down on the sofa.
She looked back at the TV. What was it they were saying? Something about how there wasn’t anywhere in that area where the plane could’ve gone down unnoticed, and yet it had disappeared from radar somewhere over St. Louis.
Dropped off the radar, she thought. Just like Em.
She tried to take another drink, remembering belatedly that the bottle was empty.
“Shit.”
Her phone buzzed again, and this time she managed to pull it out of her pocket.
She squinted down at another text from her mother.
“Going to be even later than I thought. Sorry. Don’t wait up, k?”
“Why the fuck would I do that?” she asked the phone. She went to put it back in her pocket but lost her grip on it, and the little slab of glass fell to the floor. Fuck it. She’d get it later.
She set the bottle down with elaborate care on the coffee table and lay back on the sofa again, once more letting the newscast capture her attention.
The missing plane had been a private craft that had left St. Louis just minutes before it had vanished.
But the coverage of the missing plane was interrupted by another story; a massive earthquake had just struck and devastated Indonesia. A tsunami warning had been issued in the region.
She didn’t remember falling asleep.
When she woke, she found herself in her bed. There wasn’t time to contemplate how she’d gotten there though, as she felt the sudden and desperate urge to vomit. Disoriented, she stumbled from her bed and into the adjoining bathroom, only vaguely aware she was still dressed in the clothes she’d worn the day before.
She fell to her knees before the toilet and barely got the seat up in time to expel everything that was in her stomach into the bowl in one enormous stream. Her head pounded dully. The toilet doubled in her vision as her eyes began to stream, and she swiped at her hair, trying to get it out of her face. She heaved, gasped, and, seemingly impossibly, vomited again…and again…and again…
It went on for an age, until she didn’t have the strength to kneel any longer. She lay down upon the cold tiles and closed her eyes against the daggers that the light from the frosted window over the towel rack was driving into her brain.
Some indeterminate time later, she felt a little better and picked herself up off the floor. She made her way through her bedroom, wincing at the orange of the Flyers’ wallpaper that had hung there for nearly a decade, and down the hall to the entirely too bright kitchen. The house was silent, deserted, and full of wintery sunshine. She needed something to drink—something cold.
She made her way to the fridge and reached for the handle, but paused. There was a note on the door, scribbled on a Post-it note adorned with Garfield’s cartoony face and held there with one of her mother’s tacky little fruit magnets.
She pulled it free and held it up to her nose. The effort to read it without her glasses made her head feel as though it had been cleaved in two. The words doubled, tripled, then came rushing back together long enough for her to make sense of them.
There’s orange juice in the fridge and Tylenol on the table. Love, Mom
That was it; no rebuke…no pronouncements of impending consequences…just those few words.
Teary-eyed, Casey poured herself a glass of orange juice and sat down at the dining table, still clutching the note in her hand. She swallowed three Tylenol in quick succession, grimacing at the feel of them as they made their way down her raw throat.
She went on sipping her juice slowly, not liking the way her stomach rolled with each swallow but hating the bitter taste in her mouth even more. She thought about the night before. She remembered, vaguely, about the plane that had gone missing and, even more dimly, about the earthquake. Where had that been? The Philippines, wasn’t it?
Gradually, the agony in her head began to recede, and in its wake, the terrible, empty hollowness returned. She stared into her empty glass for a long time, then got up and went over to the liquor cabinet.
The key was no longer in the lock. It wasn’t on top of the cabinet, either. It was gone. There would be no filling the void…not today, anyway.
CHAPTER FIVE
Casey sat behind the wheel, staring at nothing much. The last few months since Emily’s disappearance were little more than a blur in her memory. All the neat and tidy threads of her life had each come loose, one by one, until the fabric of her existence had first frayed and then unraveled. Mostly, she’d hidden it from everyone around her. That had been hard at first, but she’d been getting better at it. She wasn’t sure why it was so important to disguise the darkness enveloping her; maybe she was just afraid that the sour tang of her own misery would spread to her brother and sister. Kristie could tell there was something wrong, Casey knew, but had so far refrained from pressing her on it. She was a good kid—a good sister.
It was hot in the car. June had been unseasonably warm this year. She slipped the little bottle from her purse—the one that was unmarked with any label—and took a slug from it. The vodka burned going down her throat. It didn’t taste like much, but it helped; it always helped.
She slipped the bottle back into her purse and got out of the car, turning her face into the breeze as she did and letting it blow her hair back behind her.
As she closed the door, she caught a glimpse of herself in the side mirror. She hardly recognized the person who stared back. That stranger’s skin was paler, and there were dark bruises under her eyes. It was just as well that Casey hadn’t been spending much time at home lately. The less her family saw of her, the fewer questions there would be…the fewer lies she’d have to tell.
She started across the row of empty parking spaces. It was a Tuesday afternoon and the little park down the street from her house was deserted.
Not your house anymore, Case, Emily’s voice said in her head, and she winced. Usually, the booze helped with that. Usually, it kept Emily’s voice away.
She stepped up onto the curb and made her way across the strip of grass that separated the park from the parking lot. A path wound its way through a cluster of trees toward a small pond, and her feet traveled its familiar curves on their own.
As young girls, she and Emily had thrown coins into that pond, making wishes and dreaming dreams. Most of those had been about becoming hockey stars and playing for one NHL team or another. They were impossible dreams—stupid dreams—but they hadn’t felt that way then—not while they’d been sitting by the water, tossing pennies and skimming stones and whispering their hopes and fears.
She reached the edge of the pond and stopped, looking down into the murky greenish water. On the far side, some thirty or forty feet away, a pair of ducks swam serenely in slow circles, paying her no mind.
She sidled around to the little bench that was situated beneath a tree facing the water and sank down onto it.
They’d never found Emily. After all these months, they’d never found a trace. Either she’d run away, or she was beyond…beyond helping. Though it was still hard to think about, Casey didn’t believe Emily had run away. She was dead; she had to be. She couldn’t believe, after all they’d been through together, that Emily would have run and never called her.
Casey watched the surface of the pond ripple. She listened to the whisper of the leaves as a breeze blew through the trees around her. She smelled the flowers coming into bloom and the freshly cut grass. These things were familiar and comforting. They were the sights and sounds and smells of hundreds of summer days throughout her childhood, all spent at Emily’s side.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out some coins; two quarters and a penny. They’d only ever used pennies when they were little, but these would do.
She tossed one of the quarters out over the water. It flashed in the sunlight before hitting the surface with a small splash, and Casey watched the series of ever-widening circles spiral out from where it vanished with a kind of sad fascination.
“I wish I could see you again,” she said quietly to the stillness of the park. One of the ducks glanced her way for a moment before turning its attention back to its companion.
Casey tossed the second quarter.
“I hope you’re happier wherever you are now,” she said.
She sat for a long time, clutching the penny in her fist and thinking about Emily before sending it to join the quarters. It skimmed across the water, just like the stones she and Emily had on
ce tossed.
“I miss you, Em,” she said.
It wasn’t the same as having a grave to take flowers to, but it would do. Maybe it was even better. She only knew that she wouldn’t see this place again, and she couldn’t leave without saying goodbye somehow.
Her phone buzzed, and she pulled it out of her jeans pocket out of sheer habit.
“Can you put the water on for pasta at 6?”
Just Mom—again. She would have to deal with that, and soon, but she didn’t want to until she was far away from here. She didn’t want anyone to stop her…to talk her out of going…to make her feel worse than she already did.
She took another swig from the bottle in her purse, carefully packed it away, then headed back to her car.
“Excuse me.”
The voice startled her, pulling her out of her reverie. She spun on her heel, nearly losing her balance, and found herself staring into the face of an old man leaning against one of the trees that lined the path. He wore a frayed and filthy tweed coat despite the warmth of the day. The man’s graying beard twitched as he smiled, apparently amused by her surprise.
“Got a quarter?” he asked, holding out his hand hopefully.
Casey frowned. She was sure he hadn’t been here when she’d arrived. Where had he come from? There were some homeless people in other parts of the city, like where Em had lived, but they were uncommon here, in her neat and well-tended neighborhood.
She reached into her pocket and came out with a dollar bill. It was all the cash she had on her, now that she’d tossed the change into the pond.
She offered it to the beggar, who squinted at it, frowning.
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