by Robyn Carr
“Chased? As in nightmares?”
Kyle had scraped off all his shaving cream and was ready for more. He grabbed the can and gave it a squirt. Bad aim. It snaked toward Mike’s ear. Chris grimaced. Then she laughed.
“Not exactly nightmares,” she said, reaching for a towel and wiping Kyle’s face. “No more,” she told her son. “You’re done.” She wiped Carrie’s legs. “More like a vivid imagination.”
“You overthink everything,” he told her, starting to shave the other side of his face.
“Want some breakfast, Carrie?” she asked.
“We had pancakes already. Clown pancakes.”
“Oh. Okay. Go watch TV.”
He wiped his face clean. He turned around. “So, what chased you all night?”
“Just your basic neurotic fantasies.”
“You want a lock for your door? Think you’d sleep better?”
“How’d you know?” she asked, amazed that he had seen through her that quickly, that easily.
“Well, to worry about things that have happened is one thing, but to worry about things that might happen…well, you seem to specialize in that. But you have a long way to go to catch up with Mattie.”
“Mattie?”
“My mom. Guilt and worry. She’s got a Ph.D. Dr. Ma.”
“Well, gee, we’re strangers, you know. All you have to do is read the newspapers to—”
“Chrissie,” he said solemnly, touching her nose and leaving a little spot of shaving cream. “We’re not strangers anymore. And we almost never were.” She looked into his green eyes. “Chrissie, Chrissie, maybe you have good reason to be careful. Me, too. But honest, there isn’t any reason not to get a good night’s sleep. Take it easy. I like you guys. I’ll take good care of you.”
“I don’t want to be taken care of,” she said, though not very vehemently. It was, in fact, something she still wanted very badly sometimes, something she hadn’t grown out of naturally before her parents were suddenly killed. But she’d spent four years remembering that such wants were immature, grounded in ignorance and double-edged. Let someone take care of you, and they might just take care of you.
“Fine,” he said, smiling. “So, wanna chat awhile? Or can I take a shower?”
“But you took a shower last—” He smiled more deeply. “I think I’ll go eat something,” she said, turning away.
“I have the day off,” he called after her. “Wanna rent a movie for the kids or something? I left two clown pancakes for you in the kitchen. There’s coffee, too. Chrissie? Chrissie?”
She leaned against the wall outside his bedroom door, arms crossed over her chest. She didn’t answer him. She wanted to eat the clown pancakes. Rent a movie. She wanted all of it. Oh, please, God, don’t let me wake up for a while. Please.
There were a lot of things besides men and sex that Chris had given up. She had simply been too busy to notice. Leisure time had been the first thing out the door behind Steve. Things like walking around the mall, or sitting at a picnic table tossing birdseed to ducks. Things like sitting down to a meal with her kids rather than cooking something for them while she ate out of a pan over the sink. And friendship—having someone reach for your hand or give you a hug at precisely the right moment. These were the kinds of simple things that made life satisfying.
“I didn’t think I was smart enough for college,” Mike told her when they were walking around the mall. “I missed that gene the other kids got, the one that made them ambitious and convinced they were smart enough. I worked construction for a couple of years out of high school. Then I drove a truck until I got hired at the department. Like I said, I always just wanted physical work and a solid paycheck. That’s all.”
“But what kind of gene does it take to never doubt, not for one second, that you’re going to get out of that burning building?” she asked him.
“I doubted it once or twice,” he said.
“Too scary.”
“Wanna know what’s scary? Fear itself. I’ve seen two guys, in my twelve years, get scared. Too scared of the fire to do it anymore. They all of a sudden couldn’t go in. Whew.”
I can relate, she thought.
“That’s why I try not to think too much.”
“If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen?”
“Sort of. Ever read any of those books, you know, the how-to-get-through-anything, or how-to-love-someone-who-loves-someone-else, or—”
“Pop psychology?” she supplied.
“Yeah. Well, I went through about fifteen of them in the two years after Joanie and Shelly. Love Yourself First. Grief Management. Living Alone Happily. Think, think, think.”
“Didn’t they help?”
“Yeah. They gave me something to do while I was letting time tick away. I’d be right here, right now, doing exactly what I’m doing if I hadn’t read a word. In fact, most of the ones I read about grief said you just have to admit your feelings and feel them. Hell, I couldn’t help that.”
She laughed sympathetically.
“How many of those books have you been through?” he asked her.
“Oh, twenty or a hundred.”
“And did it ever turn out that your husband hadn’t walked out after all? Did you ever slam the cover shut after the last page and find your life any different?”
“You’re an analyst’s nightmare,” she suggested.
In the park, tossing birdseed to the ducks, she told him a little about herself and her divorce, though she remained cautious of the exact circumstances.
“He said he was going to a business meeting in San Diego,” she explained. “Then the phone started ringing—people were looking for him. He didn’t call. I was afraid he was dead. I called his office. They hadn’t heard from him, his secretary said. I called the police; he wasn’t missing long enough. I started dialing every hotel in San Diego. It was horrible. It was two weeks, then four. I started to find out how little I knew about him and his life away from me. I realized I was pregnant, and even though I had a little money and could pay some of the bills, I didn’t know how to go about finding this joker.
“When I started calling some business acquaintances I’d heard him mention, I found out he’d done a lot of lying. The big wheeler-dealer was a con artist, and he’d skipped town. Literally.” She decided not to mention that she herself had been conned.
“What did he do for a living?”
“He said he was a lawyer. I’m even starting to doubt that.”
“And you never found him?”
“Once I had myself convinced I wasn’t a widow but an abandoned wife, I hired a lawyer. The lawyer found him in another state. Do you know what I asked the lawyer to do for me? I asked him to ask Steve if he would please come home, for the children.” She turned her head and looked at him. Tears filled her eyes. “He said, ‘Children?’ He didn’t even know about Kyle.”
That was when he reached for her hand. He gave it a squeeze and did her the courtesy of saying nothing.
“After he walked out on me when I had a one-year-old and was pregnant, I asked him to come home. Can you beat that?”
“’Course you did, Chrissie. Whenever something bad happens, the very first thing you want is for it not to have happened.”
“The kids don’t even know him.”
“Kids. They’re always the lucky ones, huh?”
He put his arm around her shoulder. Carrie and Kyle hopped around while ducks chased them for birdseed.
“What I’ve been trying to figure out for the past four years is how I could have been that stupid. I believed everything he told me. I trusted him completely, even though he did all these things that should have signaled me he was a liar. Not being where he was supposed to be, not getting home when he was expected, not following through on any of his promises, not showing any real affection. He was so good-looking and entertaining and funny that I, big dope that I was, went right into a coma and didn’t wake up until he left me.”
Mike squee
zed her shoulders. “I don’t mean to butt in, Chrissie, but aren’t you blaming the wrong person?”
“I don’t ever want to be that stupid again, know what I mean? Hey!” she said when he pinched her upper arm. “What was that for?”
“Just making sure you’re wide-awake,” he said, grinning.
Later that evening, after the kids had gone to bed, they stayed in the living room, Mike in his recliner and Chrissie curled up on the couch. He had made them each an Irish coffee. And they talked. About what he’d done with the past ten years. About his women.
“My mom thinks I’ve been celibate for ten years. That’s fair, since I think she has. She’s always worried I’m alone too much, but she has to know where I am every second, so I can’t really be alone with someone, right?”
There had been only a few women in his life over the years. Sometimes he knew right away it wasn’t going anywhere, and he’d end it after a couple of dates. No one-night stands; he’d never understood how people could do that. Men did it all the time, he knew, but it didn’t appeal to him. There was a guy, Stu, he worked with, for example, who seemed to be hot to trot every minute. A married guy, no less.
Then a few years back there had been two women at once; he dated them both on and off for a whole year. One was a flight attendant who was out of town a lot, and with his twenty-four-hour shifts at the department, it was hard for them to connect. They seemed to get bored with trying. The other one he liked pretty well, but he knew she was on the rebound. She’d broken up with a guy she had really been in love with, then ended her affair with Mike when the guy came back. “My sister Maureen found out about me seeing two women at once and gave me a book about fear of intimacy. She’s the family counselor. I told her to shove it.”
“Well, that was a nice thing to tell her.”
Then there had been the woman in Tahoe. An artist. She threw pots, painted, sculpted, did incredible and beautiful things, things no one would ever think of doing, and lived in a small adobe house furnished by her own hands. She had made the rugs, furniture, wall hangings…everything but the toilet.
“When I first met her I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. She’s a little older than me—she’s over forty. After a year of driving to Tahoe every time I got a few days free, if she had a few days free, too—she traveled and taught, gave workshops and all that—I started to figure out there was something missing. I admired her. Envied her. That talent, skill. Those ideas. Like a pioneer. I couldn’t wait to get to her place and see what she’d done. I was actually surprised to realize I didn’t love her. I liked her a lot—still do.
“She’s one of the neatest people in the world. But you know what was missing? She needed absolutely nothing from me. There were things I could give her, like friendship, or like, you know, the physical stuff. But she never suffered without it, either. The last time I was in Tahoe and gave her a call for the first time in almost a year, she said, ‘Mike!’ real excited-like. ‘You’re back! Come on over!’ Then I realized she had never once, in over two years, called me in Sacramento. A real free spirit. She needed herself, period. Amazing.”
“I think that’s where I want to be,” Chris said.
“Would that be good? I don’t know. What if everyone was like that, really? Totally without needing other people?”
“There might be a lot of people who were in places they wanted to be, not trapped in places because of need,” she suggested. “Need weakens you.”
“Lip service,” he scoffed. “You say that because you had a bad experience needing somebody you shouldn’t have trusted. But you were pretty young.”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“I’m not talking about that trapped kind of needing; that’s no good. I’ve never been trapped by anything, but I know it would be no good. I’m talking about give-and-take. Like, I could get by just fine without my family butting into my business every single minute, but there’s not a one of them I could give up. Plus, I complain, but if they didn’t butt in, I’d probably feel ignored. Do you know what I’m talking about?” he asked seriously, his brow furrowing. “If nobody needs you, then when you’re gone, you just slip through the cracks and disappear, and everything stays the same. You’ve had a whole life, and you’ve made no impact.”
“But your Tahoe friend has,” Chris argued. “Her art!”
He drained his Irish coffee. “I don’t have any art.”
“You’ve saved lives in fires! That’s impact!”
He got out of his recliner. “People I’ve rescued don’t call me Sundays and say, ‘Come and watch the game.’ They won’t know I’ve gone when I go. I’m just doing my job, and that’s not the same thing, is it? I sort of felt as if I was just doing my job with the artist—that she didn’t need me for anything and wouldn’t know I was gone if I was.” He flipped on the TV. “Wanna see who’s on Letterman?”
“Sure,” she said, after a moment. “But did you need her, the artist?” she couldn’t help asking.
“Yeah. I guess. I think that’s why it ended as undramatically as it did; she didn’t need me back. No connection.”
No wonder he’d told his sister to shove it when she gave him the book. He wasn’t as afraid of intimacy as he was of never having it again. That real, vulnerable intimacy of needing another person. And having that person need you back.
Chris couldn’t dispute its worth. She had two little people depending on her, really needing her, and often that was what kept her going, kept her from self-pity. But, she wanted balance—to be able to lean on someone who wouldn’t betray her or control her or collapse under the weight of her need. She knew, unfortunately, how unlikely it was she would find such a person. Thus, she was on her own.
Maybe Mike wasn’t afraid of needing because he hadn’t been let down. He’d been tricked by fate. There was a difference.
Many times she had asked herself, if Steve had been honest, loving, devoted and dependable but had died, would her loss and pain have been terrifically different? She never answered herself, because the answer seemed almost as shameful as what had happened to her.
“More Irish?” he asked.
“Yes, please.” Maybe it should be a double, she thought.
Chris worked three six-hour shifts at the grocery store during the week before Thanksgiving. Mike worked two twenty-four-hour shifts. That left a lot of time to be filled with chores, cooking and watching movies or television. They shared the cooking, but Mike had her beat by miles; firefighters were great cooks, she had learned. There was time to talk—not only the kind of talking that’s done when all is quiet and dim, but also the kind of casual talking you do while one of you is sweeping the kitchen floor and one is loading the dishwasher.
“What about that book of yours?” he asked her while she was folding some clothes. “Shouldn’t you be working on that book?”
“I have sort of missed Jake—he’s the twelve-year-old I’ve been writing about. He’s had a rough year—seventh grade.”
“Well, why don’t you work on Jake while I make dinner. It’s my turn, right?”
They had done it, as he’d said. They’d stopped the clock. She hadn’t worried about the burned-down house or the kids or anything. She slept well; the sound of his snoring had become as comforting as the purr of a well-tuned engine. She threw his shorts in with her dirty clothes. He washed her old Honda when he washed his Suburban. He brought doughnuts home with him in the morning when his shift was relieved. She brought ice cream after work.
Chris turned off her brain. She refused to analyze. She scorned common sense. She was briefly, blissfully content. The dog ate Mike’s socks, the kids spilled on the floor, there was warmth and an extra hand to wipe off a chocolaty mouth, to hold a tissue and say, “Blow.” And in the eyes, the smile, the occasional touch of a hand, there was a pleasant tug-of-war of sexual possibility.
Chris knew that the past seven years of her life constituted a trash heap of problems that should be sorted out, organized, settled a
nd resolved. No way she could make that mess go away. She should contact her estranged Aunt Flo; she should reaffirm her goals and sense of direction.
But she waited. She couldn’t bear to upset the applecart, couldn’t bring herself to spit in the eye of good luck. In fact, if real life would be so kind as to not intrude for a few short weeks, she had the potential to be disgustingly happy.
Chapter 6
There was nothing to prepare Chris for the Cavanaugh family. After having met Mike’s father, she had been afraid to meet his mother. The prospect of meeting them all simply terrified her. But she couldn’t think of how to refuse. She was scheduled to work until two o’clock on Thanksgiving day, and Mike suggested that, since he was not working, he would babysit until she was finished, and then they would have turkey dinner with the Cavanaugh clan.
Clan, indeed. What would they ask her? she wondered. Would they ask if she slept with him? Should she say no politely? Or indignantly? Or disappointedly. Would they ask her how long, precisely, she would be staying with him? Should she say: “Look, Mike is a good and generous man, and he needs my little family for a while, to complete his grief, as I need his strength and friendship, and you must not interfere”? Or should she say, “Until December 26”?
“So this is Chrissie,” said Christopher Cavanaugh, the brother closest in age to Mike. “Glad you could come over. Well, you don’t look too badly singed. Everything going okay since the big burnout?”
“We’re getting it together, I guess,” she said, weak-kneed and shaking inside.
“My wife, Stacy. Stacy, here’s Chrissie. Palmer, isn’t it? My partner’s name is Palmer. Rusty Palmer. You know any other Palmers in Sacramento?”
She didn’t.
Christopher Cavanaugh was an orthodontist. His wife, Stacy, managed his office. They had three children, the oldest in braces. Next came Matthew, about thirty-two. Wife, Maxine. Three kids, aged four, six and eight. And then Maureen, whom they sometimes called Mo, and her non-Irish, non-Catholic husband, Clyde. Maureen, a nurse, was in uniform because hospitals, like grocery stores and fire departments, did not close for holidays. She was a petite, feminine version of Mike: curly brown hair, bright green eyes, that notable, crooked Cavanaugh smile that seemed so perpetually full of fun. Then came Tommy, the professor-coach, his wife, Sue, and their two little kids. And finally Margaret, the twenty-six-year-old baby of the family, who was a graphic artist, and her husband, Rick, and her huge stomach, which would soon provide Cavanaugh grandchild number eleven.
