by John Saul
“I don’t want to see you,” she’d told Keith on the phone. “I don’t suppose I can stop you from seeing Cassie, but I don’t have to see you myself.”
“But why?” Keith had demanded. “What did I do?”
“Tommy left me,” she’d said bitterly. “He left me because I couldn’t trust him, couldn’t let myself depend on him. And that’s your fault. Thanks to you, I can’t trust anybody.”
Immediately Keith had understood what had happened. Once more Diana’s insane jealousy had destroyed her marriage. It wasn’t, he knew, that she hadn’t been able to trust or depend on him. Somewhere, deep inside her, there was a demon who whispered to her every minute of every day, telling her that people didn’t like her, that they looked down on her, that she wasn’t good enough.
But the worst of what the demon whispered was that her husband was cheating on her.
And though it was untrue—Keith had never betrayed her, had never even contemplated doing so—Diana had believed the demon within her. She had begun questioning his every move. When he wasn’t with her, she sat alone at home, imagining him in the arms of another woman. Eventually she’d come to the conclusion that a baby was the answer to their problems, and Keith had finally agreed with her. It had occurred to him that Diana’s jealousy might be rooted in her deep-seated conviction that Keith didn’t truly need her. A baby might change that, giving Diana both the self-esteem of being a mother and a new focus for her energies.
And so they had conceived Cassie.
But Diana’s jealousy had only worsened, until finally, unable to deal with it any longer, Keith had left.
Diana had never forgiven him. When the divorce had finally come, he’d given up his rights to partial custody of Cassie rather than subject the child to what Diana swore would be an unending fight through the courts. As soon as she’d won, Diana had taken Cassie to California.
Each year Keith had gone by himself to Los Angeles for a week, checked into a hotel, and spent as much time with his daughter as Diana would allow.
But on that last trip Cassie had barely spoken to him, and toward the end of the week Keith had finally discovered that Diana had convinced the child, too, that the loss of her stepfather was her father’s fault.
One week a year, Keith had decided, was not enough to repair the sundered relationship. The following year, when Diana had told him that Cassie didn’t want to see him, he and Rosemary had decided it would be better for Cassie, if not for Keith, to stay out of the situation entirely.
Then, four days ago, Diana had gone out after work for dinner with some friends, but never made it home.
It had been three o’clock in the morning when Rosemary had sleepily answered the phone, to be told her husband’s first wife was dead.
Cassie, not knowing what else to do, had given the police her father’s phone number, but Rosemary had learned the next day that Cassie had also warned them not to be surprised if Keith hung up on them. Her exact words were, “He hung up on my mom and me a long time ago.” When Rosemary had repeated them to Keith, he’d winced with a pain that was almost physical.
Had it been any other time, Keith would have been on a plane to Los Angeles immediately, but when Rosemary was finally able to reach him, he was two days out of False Harbor, with no one else on the boat who was capable of skippering it alone. And so, through a series of tense radiotelephone calls, arrangements had been made for Cassie to fly to Boston, where he would meet her and bring her to False Harbor to live with him and his second family.
As for Jennifer’s question, he had no simple answer for it.
As far as he knew, no, Cassie did not like him.
On the other hand, she hadn’t seen him for five years, and hadn’t lived with him since she was two.
But he was still her father. He still loved her, and now that she needed him, he would be there.
“She’ll like me,” he finally told Jennifer. “She’ll like us all.”
Then, after kissing his younger daughter and giving his wife a hug, he left the house and hurried out to the car. Five minutes later he was out of False Harbor and on the highway to Boston.
Cassie felt a gentle tap on her shoulder, and glanced up from the book in her lap to see a stewardess leaning over the two vacant seats between her and the aisle. She reached up and pulled one earphone of her Walkman away from her head.
“Your seat belt,” the stewardess said, pointing to the sign that glowed on the bulkhead three rows ahead. “We’re making our final approach. We’ll be landing in five minutes.”
Cassie nodded silently, removed the headset, and dropped both it and the Walkman, along with her unread book, back into the big leather tote bag that had been her mother’s. The previous night, when she’d decided to take it with her, she had thought that the bag might make her feel better, might give her at least a tenuous connection with her mother. But every time she looked at it, her eyes flooded with tears, and already she was wishing she’d left it behind with everything else in their little apartment in North Hollywood, to be packed for shipment by the movers who would arrive the next day. She looked resolutely away from the bag as she fastened the seat belt, and her gaze drifted out the window to the city that lay below.
All through the five hours of the flight, she had entertained the impossible hope that she might recognize Boston, but deep inside had known she wouldn’t. Now she discovered she’d been right. As the plane soared out over Massachusetts Bay, then banked into the final turn before gliding over Boston harbor to touch down on the runway at Logan Airport, Cassie searched the landscape below for something—anything—that looked familiar. But there was nothing, and as the plane sank lower and lower, until finally only the buildings along the waterfront were still visible, she turned away from the window. Why, after all, should anything look familiar? She hadn’t been here since she was barely two years old. How could she remember it? Besides, if it hadn’t been for the accident, she wouldn’t even be trying to remember it. For a split second she felt a flash of anger toward her mother, then resolutely put the feeling aside. The accident, she told herself one more time, was only that—an accident. But still the thought remained. Twice since her mother had died, Cassie had awakened in the dark, her body trembling and damp with a cold sweat, for the dream she’d first had the night before her mother died had come back.
In the dream she was standing by the freeway watching the traffic rush by, and then, far in the distance, she had seen her mother’s car. In the dream it looked just like all the other cars on the freeway, there didn’t seem to be anything different about it. But still, somehow she had known that that particular car was her mother’s. And then, as the car passed her, she saw her mother turn and look at her. The odd thing was that the woman in the car, whom she knew was her mother, didn’t look like her mother at all. While her mother’s hair was a sort of drab brown—at least at the roots—the woman in the car in her dream had long black hair which fell around her shoulders, and deep blue eyes which seemed to penetrate right into Cassie’s soul.
Her mother’s eyes had been brown, like Cassie’s own.
And then, in the dream, her mother had said something.
Cassie couldn’t quite make out the words, but a second later her mother had begun laughing, and the car suddenly shot forward. A second after that it veered sharply to the left, smashed headlong into the concrete supports of an overpass, and burst into flames. Cassie had awakened then, sweating and shaking, her ears still ringing with the sound of the explosion, her vision still filled by the sight of her mother’s face—the stranger’s face—flame consuming her as she stared at Cassie and uttered a single word: “Good-bye.”
Then she’d started laughing, a high-pitched screeching laugh, as if she didn’t care that she was leaving Cassie alone in the world.
But the strangest part of the dream was that the woman in the car—the woman Cassie was still certain had been her mother—was a stranger.
It didn’t make sense. Had her
mother killed herself, or had Cassie herself, in some unknown way, caused the accident? And yet she knew she couldn’t have caused it, for she hadn’t even really seen it, except in the dream.
The very next night the dream repeated itself—this time in horrible reality. And Cassie’s feeling that she might somehow have caused the accident still persisted.
She felt a slight bump as the plane touched down. She tightened her grip on the armrests as the engines reversed, fighting the ground winds, and the plane slowed to a stop. A few minutes later it was parked at the gate and the jetway was swinging slowly around to link up with the door. Beyond that door, waiting for her, was the man who had abandoned her when she was only a baby, and eventually even stopped visiting her.
Why couldn’t she have stayed in Los Angeles? At least there she would have had her friends around her.
As the other passengers streamed up the aisle past her, Cassie stayed in her seat putting off as long as she could the moment when she would have to get off the plane and face her father.
What if he didn’t even recognize her? Would she have to go up to him and say, “I’m Cassie?” No, that wouldn’t happen. There wouldn’t be anyone else left on the plane, so he would have to know who she was. Finally, when the last person had disappeared from the aisle in front of her, she released the seat belt, pulled her coat down from the overhead compartment, and picked up her tote bag. She passed the stewardess at the door, saying nothing when the woman wished her a nice day, then moved slowly down the jetway. A few seconds later she stepped into the terminal and looked around.
The last of the passengers was drifting away, and a few people sat in chairs, baggage at their feet, waiting for the next leg of the flight.
But no one at all was waiting for her.
Her first instinct was to turn around and hurry back into the airplane, but she knew she couldn’t do that. Suddenly she felt embarrassed, as if everyone in the airport were watching her. What should she do?
Maybe she had misunderstood, and her father was going to meet her at the baggage area. But no, she distinctly remembered his telling her that he would meet her at the gate and she needed only to pack enough for a few days. Everything else would be shipped, and what she didn’t have room to pack in a bag small enough to carry on, they could buy. She wasn’t to worry about checking luggage. That, in fact, was the other reason she had chosen her mother’s tote bag. It was big enough to carry a lot of things, but had a shoulder strap.
She looked around once more. He had to be there. He had to! He couldn’t make her fly all the way across the country and then just not show up. Or could he?
She remembered how her mother used to talk about her father: “I could never trust him. Every time I turned around, he was gone, and I could never be sure he’d ever come home again. And then one day he didn’t. There wasn’t any warning, any sign that anything was wrong. He just didn’t come home one day, and the next thing I knew, he was divorcing me! And he did the same thing to you, Cassie! Just stopped coming to see you, and stopped writing to you! Just like that. In a way, it’s lucky for you you’re finding out what kind of man he is now, before he can hurt you any more.”
But he wouldn’t do that, Cassie told herself. I just talked to him last night. He promised he’d be here.
But he wasn’t.
A few yards away a bank of telephones lined one wall of the terminal area. Cassie started toward it, fishing at the bottom of the tote bag for some loose change. She would call him and find out what had gone wrong.
When she’d let the phone ring twenty times, she hung up. She slumped down on the floor, staring up at the phone, her eyes flooding with tears. What if the same thing had happened to him that had happened to her mother? What if he was on his way to Boston, and there had been another accident?
What if he was dead?
Then, as if from a great distance, she heard her name being called. She looked up, and there he was, hurrying toward her.
“Cassie? Cass!”
She stood up and started to take a step toward him, but then he was there, his arms around her. She stiffened for a moment before she let herself relax slightly.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Keith whispered in her ear. “I would have been here in plenty of time, except for the tunnel. It’s my own fault—I should have left a little earlier.”
Cassie pulled back and tipped her head up to look at him. “I—I was afraid something had happened. I was afraid—”
“Shh,” Keith purred, pulling her to him again. “You’re safe, and I’m safe, and nothing’s going to happen to either of us.”
Taking the heavy tote bag from her, he led her out of the terminal.
Neither Keith nor Cassie spoke much on the long drive from Boston down to Cape Cod, for Keith was reluctant to press his daughter to talk until she felt like it, and Cassie was, for the moment, content to sit curled against the door, staring out the window at the passing scenery, still hoping for a feeling of familiarity to come over her.
But none did.
Instead she had a growing sense that here, in the part of the country where she was born, everything was too small. As they left Boston, and suddenly the urban area ended—replaced by gently rolling hills covered with forests which had a miniature look to them—she suddenly realized that she had no idea which direction they were going.
At home she’d always known which direction was which, just by the positions of the two mountain ranges that bounded the San Fernando Valley on the north and the south. But here, no matter which way she looked, there were no mountains.
Cassie began to have a feeling that the countryside was closing in around her. She tried to get over it by concentrating on the forests, but they, too, had a different feeling to them. Her only previous experience with forests had been in the Sierras, or among the redwoods of northern California, where enormous trees, widely spaced and primeval, dominated the woods with their splendor. Here even the trees seemed small and crowded together, and looked to her as if they were fighting to survive. Then, finally, they turned off the main highway and began winding along a narrow road, passing through one small town after another. Suddenly things began to look more familiar.
It wasn’t memory, she decided, or the feeling that she’d been here before. Instead she recognized the towns from pictures she’d seen in magazines, from movies she’d been to, and from television shows she’d watched. Small towns with well-kept yards, which seemed to begin quite suddenly, emerging from the surrounding woodland with no warning, then as suddenly disappearing again. Not at all like the towns she was used to, where you couldn’t really tell where one ended and the next one began. In California, when you went out into the desert, the towns always seemed to start slowly, with a lone house or two sitting back from the road, surrounded by wrecked cars. Then, a little father on, there would be a junkyard, or a gas station, and then more houses, until eventually you would find yourself in a town, not quite certain when you had gotten there.
Here, in New England, you knew. First you were in the woods, then you were in the middle of a town, then you were in the woods again.
“Are all the towns like this?” she asked her father.
Keith, startled out of a reverie, glanced over at her. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. So … well, all the towns seem separate, as if they’re all by themselves. At home everything runs together.”
Keith smiled. “I noticed the same thing when I used to go out there. I could never tell the difference between North Hollywood and Studio City and Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks. I could never see how anyone could stand it.”
For the first time since her mother had died, Cassie found herself giggling. “That’s because there isn’t any difference,” she said. “They’re all the same. The whole Valley’s all the same.” Her smile faded. “Is that how come you stopped coming to visit me? Because you didn’t like the Valley?”
Keith said nothing for a moment, then shook his head. “I wouldn’t hav
e cared where you lived. I just thought—Well, it doesn’t matter now.”
Now it was Cassie who fell silent. He doesn’t want to talk about Mother, she thought. Her mind drifted back to the last time she’d seen him, right after Tommy had moved out. She’d wanted to talk to him then, wanted to ask him what had happened when she was little and he’d left her mother. But she’d been afraid to. Her mother had told her often enough that all he’d do was lie to her and that she shouldn’t believe a word he said. So she hadn’t said anything at all that day. And then she’d never seen her father again.
“You could have written to me,” she said finally.
Keith looked at her once again. She was facing straight ahead, her eyes apparently fixed on the highway, but he could see they were glistening with tears. “I did write to you, honey,” he said quietly. “I wrote to you every month. And I sent you Christmas presents, and birthday presents too. But I never heard anything back.” Keith waited, but Cassie said nothing. “Your mother never gave them to you, did she?” he finally asked.
Cassie hesitated, then shook her head.
For the rest of the trip to False Harbor, neither of them said anything.
Eric Cavanaugh was mowing the front lawn when he saw the Winslows’ station wagon pull into the farthest of the twin driveways that separated his house from the Winslows’. He waved, and was about to call out a greeting, when the passenger door opened and a girl got out.
She looked about the same age as he was. Her face was pale, and her dark brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail, made her skin seem even whiter than it was. She was wearing a pair of red jeans, with sneakers of the same color, and had on a white blouse. As he watched, she opened the back door of the station wagon and pulled out a brown raincoat and a bulging leather bag. Though Eric couldn’t see anything about her that looked much different from all the other girls he knew, he had a distinct feeling that there was something odd about her. Then he heard Mr. Winslow speaking to him.
