Casey's Home (18 page)

“I don’t think it works that way,” he
said, a bit morosely. “Look at me.”

“I didn’t say it was true,” I noted. “Just
that it feels that way. So is that it? That’s everything you’ve done for
seventeen years? You got married and divorced?”

He leaned forward and tossed our plates
into the trash. The sun, an orange neon glow from behind the house, sent
slanting, shifting rays into the dim light of the yard. I watched a single
grain of pollen float slowly by, as if suspended by a string. I knew what he
was thinking, because I had thought it too. What if the sum of all those years
really was nothing more than that? Could he bear that? Could anyone? And yet we
did bear it, nearly all of us. That was what made living with someone like
Billy Wells so impossible.

“That about sums up what you wouldn’t know
anyway. I coached, I got married, I coached, I divorced, I kept coaching...”

I laughed. “That’s pretty damn sad,” I
said, coaxing him. “Surely you’ve had other relationships? Traveled? Done
something.”

He had done those things, I knew, and
others that he didn’t feel like talking about. None of it would tell me what he
knew I was asking, what he was now probably constantly asking himself, unable
to stop. What the hell was he going to do?

“Yeah, I suppose,” he said at last.
“Nothing worth mentioning. How about you? I read your book.”

“You did?” I was apprehensive, as always.
What did he think of it, I wondered, but was too proud to ask.

“Yeah,” he said and then chanced a glance
over at me. He was such a sly thing, I thought, watching his dark eyes. He knew
I was looking. “I nearly drove to Charleston once to get you to sign it. I kept
wondering what you’d write in it. Then I decided I didn’t want to know.”

I was momentarily stunned. What would I
have written? I remembered the tour for the book and thought: God only knows,
but I’m so glad he didn’t come.

“I’m sure it would have been nice,” I
said, smiling coyly to deflect where we were headed.

“I’m sure,” he agreed easily and we
skipped right over the rough patches. “So, have you written anything else?”

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly. “A few stories
and such. I haven’t written anything worth reading in ages, though.”

“Why not?”

“Guess I told my story...” I pulled out
the usual line, “... and there’s nothing more to say.”

“Oh come on...” he began, but stopped
after looking at my face.

“I’ve been thinking about another book,
maybe. About this...” I waved my bottle of root beer out at the fading light.
“But I don’t know. I’m not sure I know how to talk about it all yet.”

“It’ll come,” he said and I smiled. Faith
in me was such an easy thing for everyone else.

“Probably,” I said. “Or I could just start
writing romance novels and retire to a big pink mock-castle in New Hampshire.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. “Not that I’d know
much about that, either.”

“Pink castles?” he said, grinning.

“Romance,” I answered, knowing he knew
what I was going to say.

“Well, don’t they always say to write
about what you know?”

I had heard this advice so damn many
times, and that night, sitting in the backyard of Ben’s house, I was acutely
aware of the many, many things I did not know. My words slipped out before I
could stop them.

“Hell, I guess I could write novels where
people have lots of meaningless sex.”

Nearly choking on his drink, he looked at
me out of the corner of his eye. What the hell did that mean, he was clearly
thinking, and he had no idea how to react. That was all right, neither did I.
We were quiet for a moment, and he decided to let it go. Just as he turned to
me to say something, and I could tell it would be chipper, I sat up. I had no more
nerve for that, not tonight. Maybe not on this trip, though I knew I would
never come back, not there.

“I’d better get back. I’ve got a ton of
stuff to go over with Lee.”

When I started talking about meaningless
sex, it was probably time to go home.

“I’m glad you came by,” he said, standing
next to me in the soft purple dusk. “It was great to see you again.”

“Yeah,” I said without looking at him.
“Yeah, it was.”

He walked me to the car, and I found
myself wondering briefly if I had left anything around he might have to bring
over later, but then I could see my purse lying on the front seat. We paused as
I opened the car door and he smiled at me, probably wishing he knew what I
wanted him to say.

“Ben...” My voice seemed very, very quiet.
The cicadas had paused, as if on cue, and when I slipped one hand over his they
started up again.

“Mmm,” he murmured. A very noncommittal
sound.

“Thanks,” I said at last, tightening my
fingers around his.

“Don’t leave without stopping by again,”
he said, though we both knew I probably wouldn’t do it. I was tired of lying,
so I avoided promising anything.

“I’ll see you at the funeral,” I said.
“Right?”

“Right,” he said, and I was relieved
beyond measure, and at the same time deeply ashamed by it. “Right.”

1998

The water in Lee’s pool was as warm as night air, as
warm as a puddle, as the downy comforter on the guest bed. I moved through it
easily, at first, lying on my back and watching the bright white disk of the
sun pass back and forth overhead. I didn’t like putting my face in the water, I
never have. There was some stupid fear there, something hazy about choking,
smothering, like a fear of spiders or big dogs. Lazily, I backstroked.

This was the obligatory pool of
the wealthy South. The blue line of watery demarcation stretched from Los
Angeles all the way across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, parts of
Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, finally settling here, in Florida’s basking
North. Even if you lived by the water, as Lee did, just a brief drive to the
sea itself, somehow you had to have an Olympic-standard pool with bright
turquoise tiles and bright turquoise water. No one, except visitors from the
cold Northern states and kids, actually swam in these pools. Expensive and
useless, they served as deadly magnets for children and small animals, as
watering holes for migratory birds, as rubbish sieves for every dead bug and
fallen leaf in the neighborhood. Lee’s pool had just been serviced and sparkled
like the giant aquamarine ring on her right hand. My arms tired from the
constant lifting up and over so instead I lifted them out from my sides and
brought them back in. Eventually, even that became too much effort and I kicked
my way across the opalescent surface with only a slight fluttering of my hands:
a giant, small-finned fish.

Lee’s pool was very chic and
modern. No kidney-bean curves there; this pool could be used to train
Olympians. Greg Louganis would have felt right at home on the diving platform
high above my head, casting its soothingly dense shadow across one corner of the
water. Heavy Adirondack chairs painted blinding white ringed the tiled edges. I
was in a David Hockney painting. Lee was lounging on one of those chairs,
wearing a sleek black two-piece that would not be out of place on an extra at
Cannes. To top it off, she wore pointy black sunglasses, which gave her eyes
the liquid coal stare of an alien. If aliens were invited to Cannes, that is,
and perhaps they were. They would be indistinguishable from the other actors.
My thoughts melded together underwater, where the only sound was the deep huff
of my own breathing. I wondered if Lee’s suit was black for mourning, if
normally she stretched out across her blue-and-white striped beach towel in
pastel pink, for instance. It seemed unlikely. I decided that people who wore
black all the time only ended up negating its funereal power. You couldn’t be
that depressed every moment of the day, could you?

Perhaps Lee was in some sort of
perpetual mourning, for her entire existence. Perhaps that way she was able to
remain aloof and unsurprised when something else fell apart. But I couldn’t see
exactly what she was mourning for, unless it was all that debt. She had a
lovely home, a handsome and reasonably loving husband, she didn’t have to work
or even raise her two lovable boys, one of whom had just cannonballed into the
deep end of the pool. Todd and Alex were eight and ten years-old, respectively.
They couldn’t have been more different if they were Lee and I. This seemed to
be a theme in our family – like snowflakes, no two siblings were alike.

I was ambivalent toward my
nephews, just as they were toward me. They rarely ever saw me, after all, and I
didn’t shower them with gifts the way distant aunts were supposed to do. Mostly
they ignored me, as I did them. Alex looked a bit like Lee, with her dark
coloring, but he was tall and strong, like his father. He had Lee’s chilly
personality and had already perfected a tolerable lip-curling sneer. Todd was
shorter, small for his age, but stocky, like a small bull-dog. He looked, really,
like my father. But he was truly Jake’s son, friendly and easy-going, selfish
and slightly proud. They wrestled now at the edge of the pool by the hot tub (a
hot tub, I ask you, in Florida), their cries and shouts submarine-hollow to my
submerged ears. Finally I settled onto the concrete steps at their end of the
pool to rest, the rough surface scratching at my skin right through my suit. I
perched there like a water bird, keeping as much of my flesh off the steps as
possible, wobbling uncomfortably. The boys splashed a few feet away, screaming
over a set of Styrofoam rings. One of the pastel shapes flew past Todd’s grip
and landed, a life preserver at my side. Todd looked at it in horror, like a
baseball gone into the evil old neighbor lady’s yard, never to be seen again.

“Um, Aunt Casey?” he said
tentatively, no longer a water warrior, but a sweet eight year-old boy. “Could
you throw that ring over here please?”

“Sure,” I said, and tossed it to
him, ringing him like a fairground prize. “Do I win a goldfish?” I asked and
they both stared at me as if I was from Mars.

Bored with the cool breeze that
dried my shoulders, I slipped back into the water and drifted past them again.
The boys appeared in my peripheral vision as a jumble of arms and legs, and
pink and yellow Styrofoam, spouting water from their mouths like fountain
cherubs. Lee ignored them, content to read some sleazy romance novel, its title
in raised blood-red ink, and sip iced tea. She was very cosmopolitan. I treaded
water in the deep end.

We were such a strange family.
Tomorrow I would be dressed in black as well, a true mourner at my father’s
funeral. It seemed surreal, as I pushed off from the far wall and torpedoed
toward the middle of the pool. The sky was a very pale blue, washed out by a high,
thin layer of moisture from the sea, but the air was still sticky-hot on my
sunscreen-coated nose. Last night, lying in the unnaturally cool interior of
the guest bedroom, I burrowed deep beneath the covers like some arctic animal
beneath the snow. Guiltily I thought of my father, dead somewhere, cold in a
morgue, with no warm blanket and soft goose down pillow. How ridiculous it was
to miss someone so much when they died. For the last seventeen years I could
have, at any time, boarded a plane and flown out there to visit. Hell, I did,
nearly once a year. And what a chore it was. “I have to go see my family,” I
would say and roll my eyes as if it were either that or they ripped out all my
fingernails. “Oh God, poor you,” was the inevitable response.

But here I was, moping and
sniffly, trying to remember every single thing he’d ever said to me in my
lifetime, as if that were possible. If only we could miss people while they’re
still alive, it would make things so much easier. Even as my mother lay dying
in our own home, I didn’t want to spend every second with her. I mean, there
she was, just a few doors down the hall and it was such a bother to my fifteen
year-old self to drag my reluctant body over to her bed and sit with her for an
hour. When she was gone, of course, we lamented the time we would never have.
But hell, had we taken full advantage of the time we were given in the first
place... It made no difference now, of course. I was still miserable.

At last I grew tired of the same
routine, back and forth across the pool. The boys looked at me strangely.
Clearly no one had ever done that in their pool before. Why, for heaven’s sake,
when there was a twisting plastic slide at the deep end and if you hooked up a
hose to the top, it was a water slide. Alex wrestled with the hose until he had
created just the right cascade and the two boys shot out of the end like slick
missiles. I figured I was done.

Lee looked up briefly as I
settled next to her, my suit drying almost instantly in the sudden heat.

“How was your swim?” she asked,
with the voice of someone who really could care less.

“Fine,” I said. What the hell
else would it have been? Certainly had it been terrible, I would have gotten
out.

“Do you need a book?” she asked.
I shook my head. I was not there to disturb her.

For at least half an hour, we
were peaceful, listening to the triumphant shouts of her children as they
managed to nearly drown each other in turns. “No running!” Lee said at one
point, as if that were really the issue. Todd leapt onto his brother from the
edge of the pool and they both slid under in a flurry of bubbles and squeaks.

“So how was it, yesterday?” she
said at last and I was so near catatonia I actually had to struggle to recall
the events of the day before.

“Fine,” I managed at last.

“Did you tie things up?”

Did I? I had a vague suspicion
that if I were to examine things closely, I would find I had loosened and
frayed the knotted ends.

“I suppose so,” I said.

Lee pursed her lips, a sure sign
of advice to come, and lowered the Ray Bans far enough to look disdainfully
over them at me. “You really have no clue,” she said. “Do you?”

“About what?” The list was
endless, she might as well narrow it down.

“Men,” she said significantly.

“No,” I agreed. “No clue.”

She shook her head and went back
to reading. Perhaps those books served as some sort of bible. I should start
reading them as well. Then I too could have lived like this, always
anticipating disaster.

We both looked up as Jake
appeared in the doorway, a living example of what I didn’t get. He looked
vibrant and alive compared to the two of us, dead fish flopping at the edge of
the water.

“Boys!” he shouted and they
looked up from whatever strategic victory they were engineering.

“Dad!” they shouted in unison. It
was rather sweet, I thought with no small amount of longing.

For a moment, all three of the
family males paused, as if they were communicating telepathically. Maybe they
were, because suddenly Jake stripped off his shoes and before Lee could so much
as holler “stop!” in horror, he launched himself at his sons.

“Cannonball!” he shouted and hit
the water fully-clothed, leaving the two of us landlubbers to sputter on the
sidelines, drenched. There was now more water beneath us on the blue and white
tiles then there was in the pool, or so it seemed. The boys squealed like
piglets and attacked his rising figure, throwing themselves on him as he
grinned at us from above their heads.

“Come on in, ladies!” he cried,
heedless of Lee’s ruined romance.

“Men,” Lee said, gesturing at the
writhing mass in the deep end of the pool as if that should explain it all to
me. “Just look at them.”

So we did. I didn’t feel any
wiser. Instead, I decided to get up and go inside, where I knew a thick white
towel awaited me. Lee followed me in, shutting the French doors less, I
suspected, to keep the cool air in than to keep the noise of her husband and
children out.

I picked up the towel from the
chair by the door and wrapped it around my waist, pareo-style. I’d become so
Floridian already, resurrecting rituals from my past with an ease that
astonished me. Tucking my damp hair behind my ears, I made my way to the cool
leather seat of the stools in front of the counter. The bright sunlight,
instead of highlighting the sterility of Lee’s kitchen, brought out the little
blue tiles above the counter, the bright red ceramic bowl she kept fruit in: an
old Dutch still life.

Lee crossed to the kitchen and
poured us two tall glasses of orange juice, spiking them with a bit of vodka
from a cupboard over the stove.

“You must think I’m an
alcoholic,” she said suddenly as I sipped my drink. In fact I wasn’t thinking
of her at all.

“I understand this isn’t exactly
your normal routine,” I told her. I had decided not to judge my sister. Not
because I wanted her to be free but because it was simply too difficult. I was
too busy judging myself, my father, even Ben.

“No,” she agreed. “Normally I’m
much more shallow.”

For a moment I thought she was
serious and then they appeared: laugh lines. Something I wouldn’t have thought
she even had, but there they were. Her pale skin was tinged pink by the sun and
I was surprised by the tawny freckles that traced the bridge of her nose.

“You look like Mom,” I said.

“Really?” she asked, patting her
dark hair. “I always thought she was prettier.”

“No,” I assured her. “She just
smiled more.”

That truth left us both silent in
the cool vault of her house. There was too much space there. It was somehow
intensely confining, like being left alone in the wilderness. Where could you
go when there was no comforting destination?

“You should stay here,” she said
at last, voice soft. “You could come out and live at Dad’s.”

This was an extraordinary
proposal. I stared at her.

“And do what?”

She didn’t answer, just took her
now-empty glass to the sink, rinsing it slowly clean and setting it on the
counter upside-down. I downed the last of my own drink and offered her the
glass. I was thinking, not terribly comfortably, of a similar conversation the
day before. Why did my happiness always seem to depend on someone leaving?

“I like my job,” I said at last,
surprised to find that this was actually true.

“I understand,” she said. The
offer had been rescinded. I wondered how long it would have stood, had I
accepted it in the first place?