The Miles Between Us (24 page)

Casey

Worn smooth by generations of feet, t
he stair treads sagged in the center. Graffiti covered the walls.
Brenda loves Joey. Legalize marijuana! There once was a woman from France/who went to a dance without pants
. The single light bulb hung bare from the ceiling, just as it had fifteen years ago, so dusty it barely illuminated the narrow stairwell. The higher she climbed, the greater her trepidation. There was no way of knowing what manner of ills she would release by opening that door and scattering them, to be carried away on the winds like the silk from a split milkweed pod. Her breath tightened in her chest as she approached the second-floor landing, where the stairs turned and continued on up to the third floor. Casey paused before the door, raised her hand and slid the key into the lock. There was a single sharp click, and the knob turned in her hand. With a squeal of rusty hinges, the door swung open.

She pushed it wider
. Inhaled a deep breath to still her trembling.

And
stepped into her past.

The apartment had been empty for a long time
. A musty smell hovered on the air, and a layer of dust, thick enough to write her name in, covered every surface. Heat, dense and humid, made it difficult to breathe. The sound of her footsteps on ancient hardwood ricocheted off bare plaster walls as Casey crossed the room and wrestled open a grimy window. A breeze rolled in, gusty and wonderful, carrying on it pungent odors from the restaurant downstairs. She’d forgotten that the smell of cooking food drifted up here. Had forgotten what it felt like to be young and hungry and tortured by those smells, by the piquant Asian delicacies Freddy’s chef prepared.

She
opened a second window, reveling in the feel of the wind cooling her overheated skin, took a hard breath, and turned to face her fate.

Had
the living room really been this small? She remembered it being bigger. But time had a way of warping memories, of shaping them into what you wanted them to be, instead of what they really were. The room was maybe ten feet by twelve. Big enough for a couch, a chair, a coffee table. On the long wall, under the windows, Rob had slept on the ancient couch she’d picked up somewhere—she couldn’t remember where—because there was only one bedroom. He’d spent his nights sprawled like an octopus, all outflung arms and legs. One pillow over his head and one under it, bony knees poking out from beneath his old blanket. A second blanket folded under his hips to protect the family jewels from the broken spring that delighted in terrorizing him. He’d never complained. Rob wasn’t one to complain. He just took life as it came, and when it threw him a curveball, he dealt with it.

The kitchen was the same as she remembered
. The old slate sink, the window that leaked when it rained, the old-fashioned black-and-white floor tiles where she’d sat and watched the blood pouring from between her legs when she lost that first baby. This kitchen had been the bane of her existence, overrun with cockroaches, no matter what she did. She’d tried Raid. Mothballs. She kept all her perishables sealed in Tupperware, never left dirty dishes in the sink, obsessively kept the counters wiped down with dish soap and Clorox. None of those things had made one iota of difference. Once or twice a year, after extensive prodding, Freddy would pay for an exterminator, and they’d have a month or two free of the damn things. But that didn’t last, either. Eventually, they learned to peacefully coexist with the creatures. It was either that, or move, and moving involved things they couldn’t afford, like security deposits and moving vans.

Now that the place was empty, she found no evidence that the roaches had ever been here
. Maybe because there was no tenant, and therefore no food to draw them. Undoubtedly, they found plenty of that downstairs. Holding her breath, she gingerly opened the cupboard door below the sink. But nothing scattered and ran. The cupboard was empty, except for the open container of Comet the last tenant had left behind.

The stove was new-ish
. Knowing Freddy, he’d either bought it at a scratch-and-dent sale, or it had conveniently fallen off the back of a truck somewhere in Jersey. The refrigerator, one of those old round-shouldered things with a latch handle you pulled to open, sat silent. When she lived here, it had hummed and buzzed and sometimes clacked and hammered. Circa 1940, it had a minuscule, boxy freezer compartment tucked in the upper-right corner. She’d kept it stocked with fudge ripple ice cream, store brand, the only luxury she was willing to pay for. Late at night, while her husband and the rest of the world slept, she and Rob would sit at her old wooden kitchen table, eating ice cream and playing around with chords on his guitar.

She touched the
refrigerator’s shiny chrome handle. It was smooth and cool. Hard to believe it was still here, after all these years.
They made them to last in those days.
The thought came unbidden. Like her, the refrigerator had weathered a multitude of seasons and survived them.

The bedroom was more difficult, for she had no idea what would be waiting behind that door
. She pushed it, and it opened with a squawk of protest. The room was dark, its lone window on the back side of the building, oblivious to the afternoon sun. There was barely enough room for a full-size bed in here. She and Danny hadn’t minded. They’d been young and in love, and despite his six-foot-four, 190-pound frame, they’d never felt confined or cramped. This was where she’d slept with him, where they’d conceived a baby that had never drawn breath, where he’d admitted to sleeping with another woman.

She knew all these things intellectually, but couldn’t connect to them emotionally
. She’d expected to find pieces of her heart shattered all over the floor. But this was just another empty, dusty room with holes in the painted plaster and a closet door with a broken hinge.

How was she supposed to feel about that
? There should have been a flood of emotion, painful memories assaulting her. Resentment, fury. Instead, there was nothing. It was as though the events that had shaped her life had happened to somebody else. Watching them unfold in her mind, like images on a television screen, she could feel empathy for that hapless young woman who’d lost her baby, whose husband had cheated on her.

But she couldn’t feel her pain.

Numbly, she moved on to the bathroom. Nothing had changed here. The same cracked mirror over the sink, the same tired blue floor tiles, the same stained porcelain fixtures. Behind the toilet, almost hidden in a nest of dust bunnies, lay the corpse of a cockroach. Dry, long dead, a lone reminder of the past, a welcome home of sorts. She fought back hysteria, unsure whether to laugh or cry; after everything that had happened to her here, it was the damn cockroach that got to her.

That and the sunlight filtering through the maple tree outside the kitchen window
. It spilled through the dirty windowpane and lay in dappled patterns on the counter. She’d always loved the way the afternoon light illuminated her kitchen. In summer, filtered by greenery, it was soft and golden-green and comforting. In winter, it poured in between bare branches like a river of lava, setting fire to the kitchen and raising the temperature of the room, for just a while, above its customary fifty degrees.

As she stood in the kitchen, a long-forgotten memory drifted past. A hot summer night, the Fourth of July. The two of them, she and Rob, sitting on the back fire escape, drinking warm beer
, as heat lightning flashed in the distant sky and firecrackers went off all around the city. There’d been magic in the air that night, and she struggled to remember why Danny hadn’t been with them. Had he been working? Sleeping? She had no idea. Odd, that the clearest, the warmest, the most vivid memories she had of this place all included Rob. And almost none of them included Danny.

The first tear spilled and rolle
d, landing with a plop on those black-and-white kitchen tiles.  What now? She’d been so certain, so sure that coming back here, where she’d lost that first baby, where her cheating husband had stolen away her trust and her innocence, would bring the answers she so badly needed. But it hadn’t. It was clear that the ghosts she’d hoped to find didn’t exist. The answers she’d sought would not be found here.

Devastated
, she slumped to the dusty floor and, knees bent and back braced against the wall, she wept. Not for the young woman she’d been, the one who’d suffered so many losses. Not for the lost babies, although she’d loved them, every one.

Instead, she wept for the strong and confident woman who’d lost her strength and her way, the woman who, like Little Bo Peep with her sheep, didn’t know where to find them
. Rocking like a child, she sobbed for the woman she was meant to be, and for the woman she’d accidentally turned into. Sobbed and shuddered because she couldn’t find a way to meld the two together and become whole again.

Heedless of her pain, time continued on.
The sun’s position changed, and the afternoon light marched across dirty floor tiles. Eventually, inevitably, the crying ended. She stood on wobbly legs, brushed the dirt from her pants, and went into the bathroom to check the damage.

It was bad
. Really bad. Her eyes were red and puffy, and mascara streamed down her cheeks in matching rivers of black. Casey propped her purse on the edge of the bathroom sink, took out a fistful of tissues, and turned on the water. It ran rusty at first, then cleared. She wet the tissues and cleaned up the mess she’d made of her face. Rob would take one look at her and demand to know why she’d been crying. As if he thought she could explain her own madness.

Shuddering, she checked the mirror a final time
. This was as good as it was going to get. At least the black streaks were gone. She tossed the ruined tissues in the toilet and flushed them. Gathering her dignity around her like a warm, comforting cloak, she went back to the living room and closed the windows. Picked up the key she’d left on the kitchen counter. Took a last look at the place she’d once called home.

Then went back downstairs to return the key to Freddy.

* * *

When she opened the door to
their apartment, Rob was pacing the living room, his hair a mess, as though he’d been running his fingers through it, over and over and over. He stopped, wheeled on her, and said, “Where the hell have you been all afternoon?”

“What?”

“I’ve been calling and calling, and you didn’t answer your phone!”

“My—
” Baffled, she opened her purse and took out the cell phone, noted its blank screen. She pushed a button, then another, but there was no response. “The battery must have died. Why? What’s wrong?” Panic shot through her. “Is Emma—”

“Emma’s fine
. And I don’t know what’s wrong. Maybe you’d like to tell me!”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“I know,” he said. “About what happened the other day. With the little girl.”

She
turned and stared at Paige, betrayal a hard pain in her chest. “You told him?”

“I’m sorry,” Paige said
. “You scared me. I love you. I was worried about you.”

“Don’t blame her
. I bullied it out of her. Why would you hide something like that from me?”

She turned her attention back to her husband
. “Maybe because I knew you’d react the way you’re reacting!”

“Where were you this afternoon?”

Casey straightened her spine and raised her chin. “If you really have to know, I was at the apartment.”

He narrowed his eyes
. “Apartment?” he said. “What apartment?”

“Freddy’s goddamn apartment!”

“Freddy’s—Freddy
Wong
?”

“Do you know any other Freddy?”

“You went back there? I don’t understand. Why on God’s green earth would you go back there?”

“Because
! Because I was looking for something. I thought maybe I’d find it there!” She paused, took a hard, sharp breath. Said softly, “I didn’t.”

A
nd all the anger drained out of him. She could actually see it dissolving, flowing away from him like a red river of pain. “Shit,” he said, and took two giant steps across the room and folded her into his arms. “What the hell were you thinking?”

She clung to him, shook her head, unable to articulate her jumbled emotions
. Pain, anger, disappointment. Crushing disappointment. “Just hold me,” she said.

“We have to talk about this
, babe. We have to talk about a lot of things.”

“Later
. I can’t do it now.”

His hand came up to stroke her hair.
“Fine. But not much later, okay?”

She
nodded, raised her head, saw the clock on the wall and realized what time it was. “Why are you home so early?”

“I came home to talk to you.
” Catching a loose strand of hair that had broken free from her braid, he tucked it behind her ear. “But it looks like we have bigger fish to fry than the little minnows I was planning on.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” He caught her chin in his hand and studied her face. His beautiful green eyes were pained, and it broke her heart to know that she was the one who’d put that pain there. “We’re in this together,” he said. “We’ll fix this together.”