“You can’t,” she said, and she got up and went to the bedroom and shut the door.
***
Casey slumped down to the floor with her back to the door. There were some things she couldn’t say out loud. If he couldn’t understand that, he couldn’t understand her at all. This was the reason she’d avoided relationships for all these years. This was the reason she didn’t let people into her life. She knew that love required trust and honesty, but how could she be honest? Who would love her if they knew what a selfish coward she’d been, if they knew she’d let her baby go without a fight, if they knew she’d let the one chance she had at unconditional love—both giving and receiving it—slip from her life?
She’d let this thing with Brett spiral out of control and now here she was, tied up with him in a crazy business venture that had them both utterly out of their depths. Just because she found him attractive, just because her body hummed in his presence, she’d tugged the wrapping off the corner of her secret, and she couldn’t cover it back up again, but she couldn’t tear the rest of the paper off either.
A sob escaped her chest and she gasped for breath and for control of herself.
“Casey,” Brett said from the other side of the door.
She didn’t answer.
“Open the door. Please.”
“No,” she said, swallowing hard and trying to regain herself.
“I can’t help if I don’t know what’s going on.”
“You can’t help,” she said, and she realized how dramatic she sounded but she didn’t care.
“It’s okay that you want to find your baby. It’d be pretty damn weird if you didn’t,” Brett said.
Casey sobbed out loud. Every feeling she had tried not to feel for twenty years was forcing itself to the surface now. Brett’s kindness sliced right through her to the place where she was still raw and tender, still seventeen, alone, and terrified and desperately in need of love.
She heard the handle of the door turning slowly and instead of protesting, she moved so she couldn’t fall when the door swung away from her back. Then she felt Brett’s hands taking her under the arms and pulling her up to her feet. He wrapped his arms tightly around her and shuffled her over to the bed, where he nestled in behind her. She found his hands and twined her fingers in his, grasping them tightly. Neither of them spoke. Entwined like that, she cried herself to sleep.
When she woke up, daylight was pouring through the windows and the smell of coffee filled the apartment. Her eyes felt swollen and her tongue thick, as if she was hungover. After a confused, sleepy moment, the events of the previous day—Brett’s return, her hysterical breakdown—came back to her and she burned with shame and nervousness. She sat up in bed and wrestled with the elastic snarled in her disheveled hair. As she tried to force her fingers through the tangles, Brett appeared in the door with two mugs of coffee. He smiled.
“You’re up,” he said. He set both mugs of coffee on the nightstand, sat on the edge of the bed, and leaned over to kiss her on the cheek.
She waited for him to say he was leaving. That was what would happen next, she was sure of it. Who would want to spend another minute with a basket case like her?
Instead he reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have pushed you last night. You have your reasons and I should have respected and trusted that.”
Casey studied him, dumbfounded.
“Coffee?” he asked, picking up one of the mugs and holding it toward her.
She nodded and accepted the mug gratefully.
“I wasn’t sure how you take it, but I found half and half in the fridge and guessed,” he said, blushing. “Usually you’re bringing me coffee.”
She took a sip. He must have put three heaping tablespoons of sugar in, but she smiled and said, “It’s good.”
“I promise, what happened last night, I won’t do that to you again,” he said, turning serious. “You don’t owe me an explanation.”
In the bright morning light in the as-yet curtainless room, Casey studied this kind, patient man and wondered where on earth he had come from.
“I want to explain,” she said, holding his gaze.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t,” Casey said. She wanted to explain her feelings to him, and even though she didn’t believe he could ever really understand, she knew he would respect her feelings and he wouldn’t try to talk her out of them.
“I had this really messed up childhood,” she began. And she told him about her mother and how her father had abandoned them. She told him about Ed and how he turned her mother against her because he knew she’d never let him touch her the way he wanted. And she told him about Ryan.
“It sounds crazy now, when I think back,” she said. “We were only seventeen. But I think we would have made it. I think there is such a thing as soul mates.”
Casey looked at Brett with tears on her eyelashes, and he took her hand and squeezed it and said, “Me, too.”
Casey took a deep breath. “And then he died. I was pregnant, and he got in a car accident, and he died.”
When she looked at Brett, she saw that he had tears in his eyes, now. She forced herself to smile a sad smile and said, “It’s okay. It was all a really long time ago.”
“I can’t imagine. My God. Two of my four grandparents are still alive and relatively well and they’re in their nineties. I’ve never lost anyone, really.”
“Yeah, well. And Ryan was dead, and my mom had kicked me out, and I had nothing and nobody. His parents let me stay with them, and his mother started talking about how she could adopt the baby and provide for it and give it this great life—we didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy—and anyway, the more she talked about it, the more it made sense, but then she started saying how kids who are adopted have all these complexes and whatever and wouldn’t it be better if the baby thought she was its mother? After a while I started to think she was right. The best life that baby could have was the nice upper-middle class one that she and Ryan’s father could give it. And they would love it. I knew that. They may not have liked me, but they adored Ryan, and they would give that baby everything. So I agreed. I signed the papers. I gave up all rights and privileges and they paid all my medical bills and gave me ten-thousand dollars when the baby was born.”
Brett took this in for a moment and then said, “So all you’d have to do to find the baby is look up Ryan’s parents.”
“Yeah.”
“That is quite a temptation.”
“It’s better to believe that they gave her a great life and try to move on with living my own. I mean, if I let myself, I’d be a cyber-stalker. That’s no way to live.”
“So you don’t think she ever learned the truth?”
“How would she have?”
“Other people had to know.”
Casey shrugged. Of course other people had known Casey was pregnant, including Ryan’s extended family, and when a baby showed up, they’d know Deb hadn’t been pregnant, but Deb had been resolved to raise the baby without any of the complications of having her know she was adopted. Deb was stubborn. She knew how to get her way.
“What if she found out about you? What if she wants to contact you?”
Casey shook her head. She had often thought of the possibility that she should make herself visible online in case her daughter ever sought her out. But there was a flip side to that. What if her daughter learned about her and never sought her out? If Casey went online and set up a Facebook profile or something, she’d spend all of her days waiting for a message that said, “I think you might be my mother.” No, it was better to be a living ghost. She was thinking of this when Brett started to laugh.
She cocked her head and looked at him and tried to imagine what could possibly be funny.
Seeing her expression, he said, “Sorry. When I was younger I used to date these women who thought they were deep, misun
derstood artists, you know? But really they were suburban rich kids whose biggest problem was that one time daddy found their bag of pot.”
“Let me guess. They had tattoos and funky dye-jobs and wore a lot black,” Casey said.
“And piercings.”
“Ah-ha. So you saw me, with my tattoo and my hair, and I was your type.”
“No. I thought you were the type I should avoid. I learned my lesson with those posers back in my youth. But you, Cara-Jayne Seaver, are not a poser. You are the real deal.”
“Next time you call me that, you’re a dead man,” she said, but in truth the name sounded nice when he said it. Her stomach fluttered nervously. She had bared the worst chapter of her life to him, and he still had plenty of processing to do. He might think over the whole sad tale and head for the hills.
He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the nose.
“So?” she said.
“So what?”
“Aren’t you going to say something?”
“No? I mean, what is there to say?”
Another unexpected reply from this unexpected man. She didn’t want him to offer platitudes or tell her it was going to be okay. She didn’t really want him to say anything. And he wasn’t. How bizarre.
“Look, what happened to you, all of that is awful. I can’t stand the thought of you going through all that suffering alone. And I’m so thankful that you told me, that you trusted me. I promise to live up to that trust.” He picked up her hand and kissed her knuckles.
What a ridiculously perfect thing to say. In return, she was speechless.
***
It was a beautiful fall day, the temperature rising into the upper sixties and the sun shining and you could trick yourself into believing winter was still far away. Casey and Brett boarded the ferry to the island with all the supplies they needed for a week of camping out at the Beach Plum. She’d moved all her furniture already, so it would be a week of sleeping on an air-mattress, but when they weren’t sleeping, they’d be plenty busy. Brett was going to be her helper at the café since her summer employees were gone for the winter.
The minute they got off the ferry, they saw that Rosetta had been hard at work. The pier and the path to the inn were lined with jack-o-lanterns and bundles of hay tied up with festive orange ribbons. The porch of the Beach Plum was adorned with scarecrows, pumpkins, big fake spiders and gauze cotton spread out to look like massive webs.
Inside the café on the counter, Rosetta had left a list of the Halloween-themed names she wanted Casey to use for her menu for the week. She really was going all out. As Brett set about opening windows, Casey looked around her little café.
“You gonna be okay?” Brett asked.
As sad as it was to think of this being the final days of the Beach Plum Café, Casey mostly wanted to get it over with. She’d made peace with it all and had begun to move her life forward. Once Halloween was over, she could begin her new life in earnest. She nodded and said, “Lots to do. We’d better get to work.”
Chapter 45
St. Nabor Island, South Carolina
Calliope ran her business out of the front room of her house. It was a small ranch with weathered shingle siding, tucked away in a quiet part of the island on the sound, nestled between tall trees draped with moss. Angela sat in a wicker chair at a glass-topped table in the small front room, waiting for Calliope to return with tea. The room was decorated in typical beach-cottage style, with pale, slightly distressed furniture and bowls of seashells. Angela had expected something gothic and strange, but this was as normal as could be. Calliope returned with two steaming mugs.
“It’s good that you came. I was hoping you’d call me,” Calliope said, smoothing her skirt as she sat opposite Angela. “So many people don’t seek out a mentor to help them, so they never learn how to control their abilities.”
Angela shook her head. Mentor? Abilities? She didn’t know what Calliope was talking about. She’d come because she had some questions about the last séance. She wanted to know why Randy and Marilyn hadn’t understood what Calliope had been saying. It had been a month since that night and still the question had nagged at her, so finally she’d come seeking answers.
“How long have you known you could communicate with the dead?” Calliope asked. Then, taking in the look on Angela’s face she said, “That is why you’re here, right?”
Angela half-shrugged, half-shook her head, and then she said, “I wanted to understand what happened that night, when you talked to my mother.”
“Let me ask you something,” Calliope said. “Do strange things ever happen to you? Like maybe there’s a light bulb that always flickers when you’re in the room, but it’s fine when other people are there, or you walk into a room and get the chills for no reason?”
Angela bit her lip and thought about it. Nothing like those two examples had ever happened, but she often heard things that other people didn’t hear. Molly and Nicole used to joke that Angela had conversations with the breeze, because she was always saying to them, “Did you say something? Did you hear that?”
“Probably started right around when you hit puberty, right?” Calliope asked.
“I don’t think so,” Angela said. Actually, it had started much earlier than that. She’d always heard things. And the backyard ghost encounters—those had been when she was only eight or nine, long before puberty.
Calliope nodded, she said, “The minute I met you, I knew you had the gift. It didn’t surprise me at all that you were hearing spirits in your mother’s house. You were so raw and vulnerable.”
“So you’re saying that other times, when I thought I heard things and no one else did, that wasn’t my imagination?”
“That’s right,” Calliope said, studying her.
“But—” Angela tried to object, but she had no words. Calliope was suggesting that she wasn’t just being haunted by her mother and brother but that she could actually talk to spirits. That was crazy.
“When your emotions are so close to the surface, it’s easy for the spirits to make contact,” Calliope said. “Spirits latch onto emotions, they feed off of them.”
“So I can talk to other spirits?” Angela asked.
“You can. You’d have to be willing to make yourself available to them, though. You have to learn to open up and offer them your feelings. It takes practice.”
Angela was stunned. These weren’t the answers she’d been expecting. “So this is why I could understand you but Randy couldn’t?” she asked after a few minutes.
Calliope nodded. But it still didn’t make sense. Calliope seemed to have heard more than Angela did that night. And the time before, Angela hadn’t heard Ryan at all when Calliope said she did.
“Why couldn’t I hear Ryan? Why couldn’t I hear everything my mother said to you?”
“Two things. First, spirits attach themselves to places and objects. I’m guessing there are very few objects of Ryan’s in your house, and he never lived there, so you had a hard time hearing him, but there must have been something of his in that desk, so I could hear him. Your mother, on the other hand, is everywhere in that house, surrounding you, so she was hard for you not to hear. Second, you haven’t learned how to communicate with spirits yet. You could hear as much as you did because you have the gift, but like any talent, you have to learn to use it. When we were at your house, your emotions were like a gaping sore, but you were trying hard to keep them in check. If you had let go, if you had let yourself fall into your emotions, you’d have been able to communicate with your mother yourself, instead of only hearing her.”
Then Calliope described a meditation she used to tame her emotions so she could use them in her work. Emotions, she said, are like wild horses. They have to be coaxed very gently and gradually into trusting the conscious mind to care for them. You have to build a pen for them inside you and provide them everything they need. And then, once they know they not only can trust you but also need you, you can let them out of the pen
and know that you can always get them back in.
As she listened Angela’s brow furrowed. Visualize her emotions as wild horses? She couldn’t visualize how such a visualization would work at all.
“If you want to learn to use your gift, I can teach you,” Calliope said. “If you don’t want to learn, that’s fine, but you can’t go out there and dabble without some instruction. It’s dangerous. It can tear you apart.”
Another question occurred to Angela. “How does a person get this gift?” she asked.
“You inherit it from your mother,” Calliope said, matter-of-factly. “It’s passed down mother to daughter.”
“No men ever get it?” Angela asked.
“Sometimes, but it’s very rare.”
Angela knew what Randy would say if he were here. He’d say that she had to learn. They were having dinner together that night, and she could talk to him about it then, she supposed. She also knew what Molly and Nicole would say. They’d tell her to run for her life.
“So my mother, my birth mother, she had it, too?”
“I have to assume so. That’s how it works.”
“Can a person have it and not ever know?”
Calliope nodded. Angela thought that made sense. If it hadn’t been for her mother’s sudden death, she never would have known she had it. She wondered if CJ knew, and if she did, what she felt about it. Another question for her missing parent.
It had taken Angela three days to work up the nerve to call the Beach Plum Café, and when she did, there was no answer, no answering machine. It rang and rang and rang, even though, according to the Internet the café should have been open. She kept trying the number for a couple of weeks, but she never got any answer, and finally two days ago, her call reached a message saying the number was no longer in use.
She had been living with the truth about her family for a month, and she was no closer to understanding if it mattered. Suppose she had lived her entire life not knowing, had gone to her grave believing herself the late-in-life child of Deb and Rich Ellis, their miracle baby sent to help them recover from the loss of their beloved son. Would her life have been incomplete if she died thinking that? Was there any good reason she needed to know the truth?
What She Inherits Page 29
