When she sat back down, he got his first look at the gash on her arm. “Holy mother of God,” he said, and caught her wrist and turned it so he could count the stitches. Eighteen. He closed his eyes and dropped her arm, suddenly nauseated. “My turn for the bathroom,” he said. “Will you be all right for a few minutes?”
“I’m not an invalid,” she said, and took a bite of toast.
The men’s room was pretty bad. Not the worst he’d seen, but definitely somewhere in the top ten. He used the facilities, then stared at his face in the mirror and decided he looked worse than she did. He splashed cold water on his face. There were no paper towels, so he dried himself with the tail of his shirt. “MacKenzie,” he told his reflection, “you are one class act.”
The drive to Jackson Falls took a hundred years. The sand trucks had been out, but the roads still weren’t great, and his speedometer never once passed forty-five. It was afternoon when they finally reached her house, and then he discovered that her keys were locked in the house and Danny’s were still in the ignition of the wrecked BMW, and he had to break a window so they could get in.
The house was eerily silent. He stood over her and picked a shiny sliver of glass from her hair. “I think you’d feel better,” he said, “if you had a hot bath and a shampoo. Will you try? For me?”
She shrugged.
He’d never felt so helpless in his life. She needed somebody to undress her and bathe her and put her to bed. There was only so much he could do. What she needed was another woman. In desperation, he called Trish Bradley.
It was the right thing to do. Trish fussed and clucked and cooed over Casey like she was a small child, and he felt a tremendous relief as the weight of responsibility was temporarily lifted from his shoulders. While Trish was taking care of Casey, he drove back into town and got her prescriptions filled. When he returned, she was sitting at the kitchen table in a flannel nightgown, smelling of soap and eating a bowl of beef stew. He found a roll of plastic in the shed and some masking tape in the kitchen drawer, and he patched up the broken window until he could get the pane replaced.
Then he went upstairs and called his parents. He knew they’d be waiting to hear from him. He filled them in, reassured them that he had everything under control, promised to get the car back to them as soon as possible. Then, while the family took turns fretting over Casey, Rob kept himself busy fielding phone calls. They all called: People Weekly, the Star, Rolling Stone. Entertainment Tonight. MTV, CNN, and all three of the major networks. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Sun. AP and UPI and the various wire services. The goddamn National Enquirer. For each caller he had the same brief, canned response. Yes, the reports of Danny Fiore’s death were true. No, Mrs. Fiore was not available for comment. While he swallowed gallons of Trish Bradley’s potent coffee, the phone rang off the hook, until his voice gave out and he was forced to turn off the ringer and unplug the answering machine.
He folded his arms on the kitchen table and lay his head down and closed his eyes. He’d been up for thirty-six hours, and Trish tried to badger him into resting, but after all that coffee, he was too wired to sleep. Instead, he put on the gray sweats he’d left in the guest room closet the last time he visited, and he went running. It was eight miles from Casey’s house to the town line and back, and while he was running, he didn’t have to think, didn’t have to feel, didn’t have to do anything except breathe in and out and will his muscles to keep moving.
When he got back, most of the company had left, but Trish and Bill were still there, drinking coffee at the kitchen table. The way Trish made coffee, none of them would sleep for a month. “Where’s Casey?” he said.
“Upstairs, resting,” Trish said. “Hey, don’t wake her up!”
He squared his jaw. “She’s not sleeping,” he said.
He knocked softly on her bedroom door and opened it a crack. “It’s me,” he whispered. “You awake?”
She raised her head. Her shiner was already turning alternating shades of green and yellow. She patted the bed and he sat down on the edge. “You’ve been running,” she said.
“How’d you know?”
“The way you smell.”
“Great. I’ll go back down and shower.”
“No,” she said. “I like it. It’s the way you always smell when you’ve been running.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, “we have to talk about the funeral.”
She closed her eyes. “I can’t make it go away. I keep trying, but it won’t go away.”
He swallowed. “I’ll do it all, if that’s what you want.”
She took his hand in hers and stroked the palm with her thumb. “This isn’t easy for you, is it?”
“It’s easier if I keep busy.”
“I trust you, Flash. Absolutely.”
“I know. I just didn’t want to overstep my boundaries.”
“I think we’re beyond boundaries,” she said. “We have been for a long time.” She sat up groggily, got up from the bed and moved stiffly, like an old lady, to the desk. “Will you do something for me?” she said.
“Anything. Anything at all.”
She pulled two cards from the Rolodex, moved slowly back to the bed, and handed them to him. “Will you call these people?”
The names meant nothing to him. Anna Montoya and Eddie Carpenter. “Sure,” he said. “Who are they?”
She sat down on the edge. “Danny’s parents,” she said.
“Danny’s parents? But I thought—” He stopped abruptly, wondering just how well he’d really known Danny Fiore.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “Maybe someday I’ll tell it to you.”
He spent the rest of that day on the telephone. When he finished with the mortician, he made all the necessary calls to reschedule his life, both personal and professional, for the foreseeable future. And then, long into the night, hours after he should have been in bed asleep, he called everybody he could think of who’d known Danny Fiore. He couldn’t let Danny go without a proper sendoff.
He finished the last call at two in the morning. Hung up the phone, poured himself a shot of Danny’s good bourbon, and sat alone in the dark, brooding. Thinking about his life. His screwed-up past. His uncertain future.
And about Danny’s widow.
In despair, he dropped his head onto his folded arms and fell asleep right there at the kitchen table.
***
The funeral parlor was in an old Victorian mansion on a quiet side street in town. Rob helped Casey out of the LTD and took her by the arm, and with slow, measured steps they walked the half block to the entrance. Trish met them at the door, patted him on the arm and spirited Casey away into the next room, where people were gathered in small, hushed clusters. The cloying smells of death and flowers hit him simultaneously, and he panicked. There was no way he could go through with this. He spun around and escaped through the door he’d come in, thundered down the steps to the flagstone walkway, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette.
He drew the smoke in deep, his surprised lungs expanding in welcome. Beside him, Travis Bradley said, “I thought you quit smoking, MacKenzie.”
He let the smoke out slowly. “I did.”
“Taking it up again, are you?”
He took another long, sweet draw on the cigarette. “I don’t think I can do this, Trav. I don’t think I can go back in there.”
“Get rid of the damn cancer stick. We’ll do it together.”
Reluctantly, he dropped the first cigarette he’d had in eighteen months and stepped on it, and with Travis by his side, he walked back through the door.
Some of these people he knew. Most of them he didn’t. He looked everywhere but at the casket as side by side with Travis he took the longest walk of his life. “Who’s the guy hanging over Casey?” he demanded.
“That’s my cousin Teddy. He’s a pain in the ass. The stevedore over in the corner is his mother, my Aunt Hilda. She’s Dad’s older sis
ter. The pretty one who looks like Casey is my mother’s sister, Elizabeth. And the ravishing blonde beside her is the love of my life. Keepa you hands off.”
And then they were standing in front of the casket, and he couldn’t avoid it any longer, because this wasn’t just death, this wasn’t just some abstract concept, this was real, and this was Danny.
Except that it wasn’t Danny. It was some wax figure that looked a little like Danny, hands folded in mock reverence, wearing the clothes that Rob himself had picked out of Danny’s bedroom closet. They’d combed his hair wrong and they’d put some gunk on his face to make him look like he was in the full flush of vibrant good health, except that he wasn’t, he was dead, and nothing they could do would make one iota of difference.
He clutched the edge of the casket. “Fiore,” he said, “you goddamn stupid son of a bitch.” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “How the hell am I supposed to get through the next fifty years without you?” This wasn’t in the script. There were too many words left unsaid, too many songs left unsung. Before his eyes, Danny’s face blurred and disappeared. “Jesus, Trav,” he said, “get me out of here before I lose it.”
Travis hustled him out a side door and onto the verandah. Rob sank onto a wicker chair and buried his head in his arms, and while Travis patted his shoulder awkwardly, he sat there and bawled like a baby.
He felt better afterward. Not great, but better. “Damn,” he said, trying to find a discreet place to wipe his runny nose. “Why the hell can’t I ever remember to carry a handkerchief?” Danny had always carried a handkerchief. There was one tucked into his breast pocket right now. Maybe he could sneak in and blow his nose on it and then put it back. The thought actually brought a smile to his face because he knew what Danny’s response would be.
“What?” Travis said.
“Nothing. Geez, I must look really great.” The mental picture of his ugly mug with a drippy nose and swollen eyes was frightening.
“Nobody’s looking at you, MacKenzie. Nobody’ll even notice. You ready to go back inside?”
“No. But I can handle it now. I guess I needed that.”
There were new faces he hadn’t seen the first time around. Casey was still sitting in the same corner, and Teddy was still monopolizing her, and he developed an instantaneous, bone-deep dislike for Cousin Teddy. Casey looked up and saw him, and something in his face must have gotten through to her, because she spoke to Teddy and then she got up and threaded her way through the maze of people to him.
He opened his arms and she stepped into them, and they clung to each other in absolute understanding, rocking back and forth in a private world of pain that nobody else could penetrate, only it was all turned around backward, because he was the one who was crying while her eyes were dry, and she was the one who gave comfort although it was her husband who was dead. “I love you,” she whispered fiercely. “I hope you realize that.”
He tightened his arms around her. “I know, sweetheart. I love you, too.”
“God, Rob, what am I going to do?”
He smoothed her hair. “They say it gets easier with time.”
“According to who?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Some goddamn fool.”
“Will you come with me? To see him?”
This time it was easier. He stood guard so she could have privacy, glowering at anybody who came within ten feet of her. “Rob,” she said, “do you have a comb?”
He patted empty pockets, shrugged apologetically.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” she said without censure. “Will you find me one?”
He bummed a comb from Travis and watched while she fixed Danny’s hair. “Thank God you did that,” he said. “It was driving me crazy.”
She stepped back, and he thought he detected a tremor in the hand that held the comb. “I’d like to go home now,” she said.
At three-thirty the next morning, he was awakened by a light in the kitchen. He stumbled out of bed and pulled on the gray sweats that were balled up on the floor. He found Casey sitting at the table with tweezers and manicure scissors, trying to remove her own stitches.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said. “Have you gone around the bend?”
Her eyes were glassy, whether from grief or Valium, he wasn’t sure. But the frustration he recognized. She shoved a clump of hair away from her face. “Damn it all, Rob, will you help me? This is making me crazy.”
He peered closely at her arm. The wound was still red and angry-looking, and he felt mildly nauseated. “You need a doctor for this kind of thing, Fiore.”
“Bullfeathers. You city boys are all alike. Around here, we don’t go running off to the doctor for something as simple as having stitches out. We just do it ourselves.”
He couldn’t believe he was allowing himself to be roped into this. He scrubbed his hands with hot water and antibacterial soap and dried them on a clean paper towel. And scowled. “Did you sterilize those things first?”
“They’re clean.”
He wasn’t convinced, but he knew it would be useless to argue. One way or another, she would get her way. One way or another, she always did. He pulled a chair up at an angle to hers, stretched her arm across the corner of the kitchen table, and picked up the tweezers.
It took him two hours to remove those eighteen stitches. By the time he was done, her face was the color of Philadelphia cream cheese, and he had rivers of sweat pouring down his sides. She never made a sound the whole time, but he knew precisely how many times he had hurt her. He cleared away the mess, then took a wad of cotton and applied peroxide to the jagged gash. He knew damn well it hurt, but she just bit her lip and took the pain. “Never again,” he said, capping the bottle and tossing the cotton into the trash. “You hear me, Fiore? Never again.” And then he went into the living room and collapsed in a shuddering heap on the couch.
chapter twenty-eight
None of this was real.
Not the vast crowd of friends and acquaintances whose stunned silence was occasionally punctuated by weeping. Not the flowers whose cloying odor made Casey retch, so many flowers that the church couldn’t hold them all and Rob had ended up sending out a truckload to be distributed to a half-dozen local nursing homes. Not the incessant drone of the minister, who spoke in a language which should have been familiar, but which made no more sense to her than Mandarin Chinese. Not the intricate patterns of stained glass, nor the crimson carpet at her feet, nor the hard wooden bench behind her rigid back.
And certainly not the mahogany casket before the altar.
If she breathed too deeply, if she moved too suddenly, the steely band of control that held her together would loosen and she would shatter into a billion crystalline fragments. She concentrated her attention on Rob’s knuckles, bone-white between her clenched hands. In a world turned alien, Rob alone remained familiar. Rob alone could hold her from tumbling headfirst into the black abyss that gaped open at her feet.
The minister finished his sermon. As Bob Dylan sang softly from the overhead speakers, they came forward to speak, one by one, dozens of people Danny had known and worked with over the years. His friends. Her friends. Their friends. They all shared memories of Danny, pieces of the relationships they’d shared, if only for a brief time, with Danny Fiore. She listened woodenly to their stories, knowing she should feel something besides indifference. Her attention wandered, and then Rob was leaning toward her. “Casey,” he said, into her ear. “It’s over.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending, until she realized people were stirring, lining up to file past the casket. She released his hand and watched as the color returned. Row after row, they came forward to pay their last respects to her husband. Each of them stopping to speak to her, to offer their condolences, to give her a widow’s due respect. Until the last of them had gone, and she and Rob were the only ones left.
He touched her shoulder. She stood up, and the room seemed to be revolving in slow motion. Each of her legs
weighed a thousand pounds. Lifting first one leaden foot and then the other, she followed Rob’s lead in a macabre dance. When she reached the casket, she stopped. Rob released her arm and stepped back, and she lay her hands against the polished mahogany. It was hard, cold, smooth as glass, lined with scarlet satin and ornamented with shiny brass handles. She slipped off her wedding ring and worked it onto the pinkie finger of Danny’s left hand. It only went as far as the first knuckle. She lay both her hands on his, took a long last look. Bent and kissed those cold lips. “Ciao,” she whispered, “caro mio.” And she raised her chin and turned away.
Rob was standing with his back to her, his shoulders squared, his head held stiffly erect. She wet her lips. “Rob?” she said.
He took a long, shuddering breath, but didn’t turn around. “Yeah,” he said softly.
“I’ll be waiting in the foyer.”
He nodded, still not looking at her, and she left him there with Danny. In the church’s cloak room, she gathered up her coat, her scarf. Shrugged into the maroon cashmere dress coat with its blood-red silk lining. Wrapped her scarf around her neck. She met Rob in the foyer, and without speaking, they walked together out the front door and onto the church steps.
They were waiting outside. Hundreds of them, held back by uniformed security guards and yellow crime scene tape. The curious, the thrill-seekers, the weeping women, the press. At her side, she felt Rob stiffen as flash bulbs went off in their faces. Like a wraith, Travis appeared at her other side and silently offered his arm. “Just fifty feet,” Rob said. “That’s all you have to do, and then there’s a limo waiting.”
She nodded her understanding.
A muscle twitched in his cheek. “Ready?” he said.
She concentrated her attention on the rough tweed of his jacket, scratchy against her bare wrist. Took a deep breath of brisk December air, looked at Trav, and nodded. Raising her chin, she said, “Ready.”
Faces, twisted with emotion, loomed like Mardi Gras masks. Arms reached out to her, hands grabbed, patted. Voices called out her name. By touching her, talking to her, in some twisted way they were touching Danny. Fame by association. Some of them used it, like trading cards: I sat on an airplane once, all the way to Cleveland, next to Mick Jagger’s hairdresser’s next-door neighbor. Yeah? Well, I touched Danny Fiore’s wife the day they buried him. Another flashbulb went off, another reporter called out. Mrs. Fiore! Mrs. Fiore, do you have a statement for us? A young woman plucked at the sleeve of Rob’s jacket as he snarled, “No comment!” over his shoulder.
Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Page 34
