Days Like This (18 page)

Post-traumatic stress
disorder.
  Back then, neither of them had known there was a name for it. 
Back then, nobody talked about it.  Nobody spoke about the horrific nightmares,
awash in unspeakable atrocities.  Nobody admitted to waking in the middle of
the night, crying and shaking.  He’d called it his dirty little secret, and for
more than a dozen years, she’d carried that terrible burden right along with
him.  Nobody knew.  Not even their closest friends, not even Rob, who had spent
several of those years living with them.  For all that time, she’d helped Danny
to keep the black, broken thing inside him hidden away from the rest of the
world. 

But no matter how hard she tried,
no matter how hard she’d loved him, she hadn’t been able to fix it.  She’d been
too young and too naïve back then to understand it wasn’t something that could
be fixed.  Danny Fiore might have left Vietnam behind, but Vietnam had never
left him.  It had eaten away at him for two decades, corroding his insides and
tainting every aspect of his life.  In the end, it had killed him.  It just
took twenty years to get around to it.

 “Sometimes,” she told him now, “I
can almost feel you standing behind me, feel your breath on the back of my
neck.  Or see you turning a corner a split second before I get to it.  Almost,
but not quite there.  Some phantom presence.  Then I realize it’s not really
anything new.  Because sometimes I felt that way even when you were alive.”

He’d been gone for nearly four
years.  It didn’t seem possible.  He’d told her once, when they were
ridiculously young and madly in love and trying to glue things back together
after she found out he’d cheated on her, that if anything ever happened to him,
she should get married again.  Marriage, he’d said, was something she did
well.  She hadn’t wanted to hear it, hadn’t wanted to imagine anything might
ever happen to him.  They were both going to live forever, weren’t they?

In the distance, the lawn mower
picked up a rock and emitted a sharp grinding noise before resuming its
staccato buzz.  “You were right, you know,” she told him now.  “I like being
married.  I always did.  I think I’m good at it.  And I’m happy with him. 
Sometimes I miss you so much it’s an ache inside me, but I’m happy, Danny, for
the first time in years.”

She raised her face to the
morning sun and contemplated the vastness of the blue sky overhead.  “Something
amazing happened.  Remember when you told me that if Rob would only settle down
and have kids, we could borrow his?  Well, he just found out he has a
daughter.  Her name is Paige, she’s fifteen years old, and she’s come to live
with us.”

There was no confirmation on his
end, but she knew he was listening.  “Of course I realize she can’t be a
replacement for Katie.”  Nothing and nobody would ever fill the permanent Katie-size
hole inside her.  “But I think it will be a healing experience, having another
little girl to love.  She won’t take Katie’s place in my heart, but she’ll take
her own place, and I hope it will help.”

She plucked a buttercup and tickled
herself under the chin. Sighed, and said, “Everything just went to pieces after
Katie died.  I know I blamed it all on you, but it wasn’t all your fault.  I
should have fought harder to save our marriage.  I was just so tired of
fighting.  It seemed as though I’d done nothing but fight to hold us together right
from the start.  I didn’t expect marriage to be easy, but sometimes, Danny, you
made it so much harder than it needed to be.  When Katie died, I was so
furious.  With you, with the universe.  I’d spent so many years taking care of
you, and when we lost Katie, for the first time ever I stopped caring about
your pain and started worrying about my own instead.  I’m so sorry.  You were
hurting so much, and instead of helping you, I let you pull away from me.

“I don’t know if you ever thought
about this,” she continued, “but I think about it a lot.  About how random life
is.  About how a single decision, a seemingly innocuous instant in time, can
alter the course of your life.  All these little decisions we make every day? 
They’re all connected.  And once a decision is made, once a path is taken,
everything else falls into place like dominoes.  If only I hadn’t gone to New
York, if only you’d taken Katie to the hospital sooner, would she still be with
us?  If only we hadn’t bought the house in Maine, you would never have been on
that snowy Connecticut highway on that December afternoon.  Would you still be
alive?  Or would Fate-with-a-capital-F have sent a chunk of ice falling from a
747 out of LAX to bonk you on the head, sitting on your own deck in California? 
I wish I had the answer to that question, because sometimes I feel so guilty. 
If I hadn’t taken you back, you might still be alive.  And how different would
my life be now?”

She knew it was pointless to
speculate.  So why couldn’t she stop doing it? 
If only
were the two
most useless words in the English language.  She couldn’t change the past;
today was the only thing that was real.  And she was so happy with her life
today.  As much as she’d loved him, she was so much happier now than she’d been
with Danny.  But if he’d lived, eventually she would have been forced to make a
choice.  And, God help her, she still wasn’t sure she would have made the right
one. 

“He’s a good man,” she said,
sounding defensive to her own hyper-critical ears.  “What I have with him—it’s
nothing like what you and I had.  There’s no comparison.  It’s apples and
oranges.  He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.  The most amazing man I’ve
ever known.”

Her chest tightened, making it
hard to breathe.  She should stop coming here.  It was bad for her mental
health.  Every time she left here, she felt so disoriented, her loyalties so
divided, it always took her a while to regain her equilibrium.  To get past the
guilt she experienced on so many levels.  Not only because she felt some
measure of illogical responsibility for his death.  Not only because she’d
fallen in love with Rob while she was still married to Danny.  But also because
she’d survived and he hadn’t.

She’d walked away from the
crash.  Bloodied, bruised, and in shock, but alive.  He’d left in a body bag. 
And no matter how many times her rational side reminded her of how ridiculous
she was being, her irrational side continued to feel survivor guilt.  Why had
she survived, when he hadn’t?  Had it truly been an accident, or was it all
preordained?  Did she have some reason for being on this planet that she hadn’t
yet discovered?  Had he already done whatever he’d been sent here to
accomplish?  Or was it decided not by Fate-with-a-capital-F but by something as
random and meaningless as where they’d each been sitting when the car went off
the road?

It was a question she’d never be
able to answer, and suddenly the unanswered questions, the memories, the guilt,
were too much for her. 

“I can’t be here anymore,” she
said, possibly to Danny, more likely to herself.  “I have to leave now.  I’ll
come back another time.” 

And she fled, rushing down the
hillside to the car she’d left parked on the grassy shoulder of the road.  She
climbed in and slammed the door, inserted the key and cranked the Mitsubishi’s
starter.  The engine roared to life.  For an instant, she lay her forehead
against the steering wheel and closed her eyes as her stomach roiled with
nausea.

“Get a grip,” she muttered.  She
raised her head, put the car into gear, and pointed it in the direction of home. 

She’d been to the goddamn
cemetery again.

That grave site, high on a hill,
was her own personal Mecca, and his wife went there with pious regularity to
pray to her fallen god of rock & roll.  Even when she didn’t tell him where
she’d been, he always knew.  She came home reeking of it.  For hours afterward,
the weirdness vibes would emanate from her like strong perfume on a hot summer
day, while his stomach felt like he’d swallowed razor blades.  Before they got
married, she’d sworn to him that she had let go of Danny, that she’d put him
behind her.  But it simply wasn’t true.  She might have made a valiant effort
to exorcise her first husband, but it hadn’t worked.  Danny Fiore still lived
inside the heart, inside the head, of the woman he loved.  And Rob MacKenzie
didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.

For more than a dozen years, he
and Casey had been something more than friends, something less than lovers. 
Danny had always stood there between them, larger than life.  The
interrelationships between the three of them, both personal and professional,
had been so complex.  Then Danny was gone, ripped away from them suddenly,
senselessly, and without warning.

He’d had this crazy notion when
they wed that because they were so solid, because of all those years of being Casey-and-Rob,
the adjustments that plagued other newly-married couples wouldn’t touch them. 
But he’d been wrong.  There were times—infrequent times, fleeting times, but
still very real times—when he actually wondered if they’d done the right
thing.  Maybe, he thought, they should have waited a little longer, dated for a
while before taking the matrimonial plunge.

Then he’d look back over the years
of their relationship and realize how crazy that sounded.  How long was a man
supposed to wait?  Sixteen years should be long enough.  And what would have
been the point of dating?  After all those years of living inside each other’s
pockets, inside each other’s heads, they already knew everything they needed to
know about each other.

No, getting married hadn’t been a
mistake.  The mistake would have been to wait any longer.  This was the woman
he was meant to grow old with, to make babies with, to rock on the porch with
in their doddering old age.  There was respect between them, and tenderness,
and a connection he’d never experienced with any other human being.  The
attraction between them was explosive, the sex spectacular.  None of those
things was the problem.  The problem was Danny Fiore, the elephant in the
living room, the invisible landmine they both tiptoed around for fear of
stepping on it and blowing the whole thing sky-high.

He tried not to let it bother
him, but sometimes the resentment bubbled up inside him until he wanted to
scream.  Because sometimes, he felt invisible.  Sometimes, he felt as though
he’d simply stepped into Danny’s shoes, Danny’s life, and nobody had even
noticed that he wasn’t Danny.  After all, he was living in Danny’s house. 
Sitting on Danny’s couch, watching movies on Danny’s VCR.  Lathering himself in
Danny’s shower, and sleeping with Danny’s wife. 

Even though, technically, she was
his
wife now, how much had really changed?  Aside from the sex, their
relationship was pretty much what it had always been:  They were, first and
foremost, friends.  They took care of each other, nurtured each other, kissed
each other’s boo-boos when the world hurled painful slings and arrows, and complemented
each other’s strengths and weaknesses.  Nothing had really changed.  Except that
they’d stopped working together. 

And it was all his fault. 

The two of them had started
writing songs together pretty much by accident.  One afternoon, he brought
Danny’s wife a half-finished song he’d been writing, thinking that maybe she
could add some lyrics to it.  They sat down at Danny’s old upright piano to
work on it.  Hours later, when Fiore came home from work, they were still
there, sitting in the dark because neither of them had even noticed the sun had
gone down and the sunny day had turned to twilight. 

Casey was fond of telling anybody
who would hold still long enough to listen that everything she knew about
music, he had taught her.  And it was partly true, except that she was
deliberately forgetting the road ran both ways, that she’d taught him as much
as he’d taught her.  True, he’d spent months tutoring her, passing on to her
every bit of music theory he’d picked up in two years sitting in a classroom at
Berklee.  The rest of what he’d taught her came straight from inside him, more
a matter of instinct than of factual information. 

They were coming at this
songwriting gig from different places.  Her major influences were folk/rock
artists like Carole King and Carly Simon and Jackson Browne.  His tastes were
more eclectic:  anything blues-based, anything Motown, anything written by
Becker and Fagen.  Her favorite album was Carole King’s
Tapestry
; his
was Steely Dan’s
Can’t Buy a Thrill
.  Pretty much the only thing they
agreed on was that
Stairway to Heaven
was the greatest rock song ever
written.  It was a little unconventional, the way they connected, but Rob
MacKenzie had never been one to concern himself with rules.  He just made up
his own rules as he went along. 

Because they were coming from
such different places, they butted heads on a regular basis.  Sometimes he won;
sometimes she did.  They might not agree on much, but they both knew
instinctively that the marriage of these two vastly different sensibilities
created something that was absolute dynamite.  He taught her how to write a
song with multiple layers of meaning; she taught him how to write one with
commercial appeal.  They both understood that the primary currency any song
possessed was its emotional impact.  Although they both wrote music, both wrote
lyrics, he was better at expressing emotion through musical notation, while she
was a vastly superior lyricist.

When they hit a wall, when the
music or the lyrics wouldn’t come, or they couldn’t settle a disagreement, they
would set the work aside, and they’d play the piano and sing together.  Just
fooling around, being silly, having fun.  It was never their own music they
sang—because that was work, and this was play—but other people’s.  Sixties pop,
early Beatles, fifties doo-wop.  Anything that would give them the opportunity
to harmonize.  They’d take turns, one singing lead while the other sang
harmony.  Then they’d swap parts.  Neither of them had the kind of vocal talent
Danny possessed, but they could both hold their own, and their voices blended
into the sweetest of harmonies.  Most of the time, they sounded amazing
together.  Once in a while, one of them would drop the ball and trip up the
other one, and they’d collapse over the keyboard in fits of uncontrollable
laughter.