Coming Home (2 page)

Biting her lower lip, Casey turned back to her reflection.  “Did
you and Bill plan to have kids right away, or did it just happen that way?”

Trish’s mirrored reflection, standing behind her, rolled her
eyes.  Making a minor adjustment to the collar of the wedding dress, she said, “Let’s
just say that Billy was a bit of a surprise.  As a matter of fact, there’s a very
good chance that I got pregnant on my honeymoon.  There’s nothing more fun than
starting out a marriage with morning sickness.  Why?  Are you worried that
Jesse will want to start a family right off?”

“Actually, just the opposite.  We’ve talked about it.  I’m ready
now, but he wants to wait until he finishes college.”

“That makes sense.”

“I know it’s the sensible thing to do.  The logical thing.  But
every time I hold one of your babies, scrubbed and rosy and sweet-smelling from
the bath, logic and sensibility just fly right out the window.”

“Sweetie, you’re only eighteen.  I realize you’re not like most
eighteen-year-olds.  You had to grow up fast when your mom died.  But there’s
plenty of time for babies.  Why rush it?  Believe me, once those kids start
coming, you’ll look back at the days you and Jesse had alone together and wish
there’d been more of them.”

“You’re right.  I know you’re right.”

“Listen to me, and listen good:  If you have even the slightest doubt
about this marriage, now’s the time to say so.  It gets a lot harder to
disengage once you’ve taken those vows.  I love you both.  I don’t want to see
anybody get hurt.”

“It’s not like that.  Really.  This is all just idle speculation. 
I’m sure you’re right, and I’m just experiencing cold feet.  Please forget I even
brought it up.”

Her sister-in-law didn’t look convinced.  “If you need to talk—about
anything—you know where to find me.”

Trish went back to hemming the skirt, and Casey stared into the
eyes of the woman in the mirror.  A stranger, ripe with promise and
possibility.  Inexplicably, her thoughts drifted to Danny Fiore, and she wondered
if he had found her attractive.  Her breasts were small, but her derriere was
okay, and she had great legs.  What had Danny thought when he looked at her? 
Had he seen her as a woman, or merely as a means to an end, someone who had
written some songs he desperately wanted to get his hands on?

She was mildly appalled by her thoughts.  This was dangerous
ground she was treading.  In four weeks, she intended to become Jesse’s wife. 
Flesh of his flesh, joined to him, in the eyes of God and the world, until
death.  How could she even look at another man?

The question troubled her all the way home.  In the glow of the
dashboard lights, she studied Jesse’s profile, the taut line of his jaw, the
high cheekbones and the hollows beneath.  Jesse Lindstrom was a strikingly
handsome man, with his Swedish father’s silver-blond hair and the high
cheekbones and dark eyes he’d inherited from his mother, a full-blooded
Passamaquoddy Indian.  To his credit, Jesse accepted his looks
matter-of-factly, without a trace of vanity.  Oblivious to all the attention,
he went his quiet way, with eyes for only one woman.  She’d known since she was
twelve years old that someday she would marry him.  So why couldn’t she summon
more enthusiasm for their impending marriage?

He dimmed his headlights for an approaching car.  “You’re quiet
tonight,” he said.

“I just have a lot on my mind.”

He didn’t question her further.  That wasn’t his style.  He turned
into her driveway and cut the lights and the engine.  The pickup rolled to a
stop, and he leaned toward her, cupped her chin in his palm and drew her mouth
to his.  For a time, there was only the two of them, only the sound of their
breathing and the distant call of a whippoorwill.  “Four weeks,” he said in a
ragged whisper, his breath moist and hot upon her ear.  “I might not make it.”

In the distance, a cricket chirped.  Casey pressed her face against
Jesse’s shirt and felt the erratic racing of his heart and wondered why she
felt nothing when he took her in his arms.  It was not a desire to remain pure
until her wedding night that had kept her a virgin.  Nor was it fear of
pregnancy, for Dr. Grimes had put her on the pill weeks ago.  It was her own
indifference.  When Jesse touched her, she felt none of the fireworks she’d
heard about.

But she couldn’t tell him that.  She wouldn’t hurt him that way. 
A marriage was based on more than sex. She and Jesse would build a life
together, they would have a home and children.  Those were the things that
mattered.  Sexual attraction faded with youth.  What she and Jesse had was much
more lasting.  She would do her best to nurture it and keep it thriving
throughout the years, so that Jesse would never regret marrying her.

She tried not to think about the possibility that she might regret
marrying him.

The hunger began early in him.

Danny Fiore couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t thrummed
inside with music.  His earliest memories were of his mother, barely more than
a child herself, singing him to sleep in a sweet, clear soprano.  By the time
he was two years old, he was singing with her.  By the time he was four, at an
age when other kids could hardly carry a tune, he’d already begun harmonizing
with the pop songs he heard on the radio.  His ear was flawless, his pitch
true, his understanding of music elemental, its concepts vividly clear to him
long before he ever learned the words for them.  At the age of six, he began
picking out simple tunes by ear on his grandmother’s old Baldwin, and she hired
a piano teacher for him.

Loretta Lucchesi’s tastes ran to classical German composers,
heavily interspersed with Italian opera.  He reluctantly learned to play Bach,
Beethoven, Vivaldi.  But he hungered for something else, something to make his
blood run and his toes tap.  He found it when the Beatles crossed the Atlantic
and changed the face of popular music forever.  The piano ceased to be an
instrument of torture the instant he realized he didn’t have to play the
classics.  Danny began working his way feverishly through rock and jazz, rhythm
& blues, old standards.  Because the piano wasn’t portable, he bought a
secondhand Fender guitar and taught himself to play that.  But it was his
voice, had always been his voice, that was Danny Fiore’s true instrument.

Thirteen months in Vietnam cured him of his youthful naiveté. 
When he came back, Danny had changed.  His world had changed.  He moved out of
his grandmother’s apartment over the butcher shop on Salem Street and into a
room in the heart of Boston’s Combat Zone, where junkies slept in doorways,
triple-X-rated movies played day and night, and pimps and hookers plied their
trade.  He claimed an empty street corner near Filene’s, sat down on a milk
crate with his Fender, and began singing for the tourists. 

Danny never looked back.  The music hummed and throbbed inside
him, and he came alive in front of an audience.  His music was his mistress, a
siren far more seductive than any mortal woman.  And unlike mortal women, this
lady wouldn’t disappoint him.  She was going to take him straight to the top.  With
a little help from Casey Bradley.  Danny was a singer, not a songwriter, but he
possessed an artist’s appreciation for a good song, and Casey wrote songs that
sent an icy blue finger down the center of Danny Fiore’s cynical spine. 

He plumped the pillow behind his head, took a drag on his
cigarette, and watched the smoke rise toward the water-stained ceiling of the
attic bedroom where his buddy Travis had spent his adolescence.  Drawing the
ashtray across the night stand, he said, “Tell me about Casey.”

Sprawled across the other bunk, Travis looked up from a tattered
Star
Trek
paperback.  “What about her?”

“For starters,” he said, “how come you forgot to tell me she’s a
knockout?”

Travis blinked.  “A knockout?  My sister?”

He drew deeply on the cigarette.  Exhaled.  “Christ, Trav, are you
blind or just retarded?”

Travis returned to his book.  “She’s not your type.  My sister’s
too level-headed to look twice at a bozo like you.”

Dryly, he said, “I didn’t say I wanted to marry the girl.”

“Don’t go getting any ideas, Fiore.  Casey is off limits.”

Obviously.  The rock she wore on the third finger of her left hand
clearly advertised her status.  But it didn’t diminish his curiosity.  He knew
instinctively that here was a woman who would never play games, a woman who
would meet a man halfway, a woman who would demand as much as she gave.  With
Casey, a man would never wonder where he stood.

She scared the hell out of him.

And what the devil was she thinking of, marrying that Lindstrom
character? Danny thought of her eyes, the color of jade:  cool, but with a hint
of fire buried somewhere in those smoky depths.  He’d be willing to bet that Lindstrom
hadn’t tasted any of that fire.

He wondered why the thought gave him so much satisfaction.

When he crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray and sat up,
Travis eyed him warily.  “Where are you going?” he asked.

Danny pulled on his shoes and began lacing them up. “To buy your
sister a cup of coffee,” he said.

***

The Jackson Diner was deserted at this time of night, except for a
lone trucker who sat at the end of the bar, sipping coffee and reading the
newspaper.  Elsie Cameron was washing out the pie case with a wet rag, and from
the kitchen came the scratchy buzz of Todd Whitley’s radio, tuned, as always,
to a country station out of Portland.  Their coffee sat forgotten before them
as Danny Fiore traced a pattern on the chipped Formica with his spoon.  “I
tried to fit in at B.U.,” he said, “but I wasn’t like the other kids.  Most of
them came from money.  I came from Salem Street.  Little Italy.  I was there on
an academic scholarship, and I had a chip on my shoulder the size of the Tobin
Bridge.”  His smile was rueful.  “I didn’t even dress like the rest of them. 
The other guys had ripped jeans, scraggly beards, hair down to their asses.  I
was the only one wearing chinos and a DA.”

“So,” Casey said softly, “what happened?”

“I lasted one semester.  I had a straight 4.0 average, and I
dropped out of school.”  Playing with a packet of sugar, he said, “It wasn’t
more than a couple of months before Uncle Sam caught up with me.”   His voice
grew tight.  “I was one of the lucky ones chosen to fight for truth, justice,
and the American way.”  He shoved the sugar packet aside.

“Vietnam?”

“I wasn’t exactly what you’d call politically astute.  Up to that
point, Vietnam wasn’t much more to me than a name on a map.  I never did figure
out what we were doing there.  Fighting Communism, they told us.  I spent
thirteen months in that hellhole.”  He stared into the depths of his coffee
cup.  “When you come back from there,” he said, “everything’s out of sync.  The
whole world has moved forward, but you’ve stayed in one place.”  He looked at
her with those blue eyes.  “You know what I mean?”

Frowning, she nodded.  He ran the fingers of both hands through
his long hair.  “And the worst thing is, it’s still with you.  It’s with you
when you close your eyes at night and when you open them in the morning and all
the time in between.”  He stopped abruptly and looked at her in surprise.  “I’m
sorry,” he said.  “You don’t want to hear all this.”

“Yes,” she said.  “Yes, I do.”

“I didn’t mean to spill my guts.  I never do this.  You have a
strange effect on me.”  He studied her quizzically and cleared his throat. 
“So,” he said, “how long have you been writing music?”

His abrupt change of subject startled her.  “Oh,” she said, “since
about forever.  I come by it naturally.  Mama was a concert pianist.  A very
good one.  By the time she was sixteen, she’d already toured Europe.  When she
was eighteen, she came down with pneumonia, and her parents sent her to
recuperate at her Aunt Elizabeth’s house.  She met Dad when he came over one
day to complain that Aunt Elizabeth’s sheep dog had gotten loose again and was
chasing his heifers around the pasture.  Trying to herd them.”

Danny grinned, and she responded in kind.  “Six weeks later,” she
said, “they were married.”

“And she gave it all up for love?”

Casey smiled ruefully.  “When I was twelve, I thought it was the
most romantic story I’d ever heard.”

“And now?”

“Now,” she said, resting both elbows on the table, “I wonder how
she could have given up that much of herself.  Even for somebody she loved.”

 “I’m dead serious about this,” he said, leaning forward intently
over the table.  “I’m going all the way to the top.  I’m going to be a star,
and I don’t want just anybody’s songs, I want yours.  I don’t intend to give up
until you say yes.” 

I’m going to be a star
.  He spoke the words as casually as though he’d said he was going
to be a doctor, or a plumber.  If anybody else had uttered them, she would have
laughed.  But there was an intensity about Danny Fiore that refused to be
denied.  A shiver skittered down her spine.  “I’m flattered,” she said. 
“Really, I am, but—”