Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Page 13

  The doctor’s eyes softened. “She’s in no danger, son. I’m not a butcher.”

  Casey squeezed his hand. “I’ll be all right. Wait for me here.”

  The door closed, and he was alone. He looked around for a magazine, but apparently these folks didn’t encourage creature comforts. God forbid he should start liking the place too much. He stared at a shapeless brown water stain on the wall, cracked his knuckles and drummed his heels on the floor while visions of death and dismemberment danced through his head. He glanced at his watch. Three minutes had passed since he’d last looked at it, a year ago. How would he ever explain to Danny that he, Rob MacKenzie, was solely responsible for the death of Danny’s wife?

  He looked out the dirty window. Across the street, the torn canopy above the entrance to Florian’s Mortuary hung limply, untouched by any earthly breezes. Was it an omen? Jesus, Mary and Joseph. He shouldn’t have let her come. He should have told Danny what was going on. He should have—

  The door opened, and he shot to his feet and looked at his watch in bewilderment. He’d never attended an abortion before, but he was pretty sure it took more than five minutes. Casey came out alone, still looking terrified, but some of the color had returned to her face. And he knew. “You didn’t do it,” he said.

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t go through with it.”

  Relief washed over him in a gargantuan wave. “You did the right thing, babe,” he said. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Easy for you to say. Danny’ll have a coronary.”

  He folded her into his arms. “Danny,” he said, “will get over it.”

  ***

  She decided to tell him about the baby after dinner. There was no sense in procrastinating. Somehow, she would make Danny see that her pregnancy wasn’t the disaster it seemed. Maybe it was even a blessing in disguise. Maybe the birth of a child would revitalize their flagging marriage.

  When seven-thirty rolled around and he didn’t show, she wasn’t concerned. Occasionally, when the Montpelier was hit particularly hard, Emile would ask Danny to stay late. With finances as tight as they were, Danny never turned down a chance to make extra money. She ate alone, setting aside a plate in case he came in hungry. Rob came in at nine-thirty, showered, and went directly to bed. At ten-twenty, when Danny still hadn’t come home, worry began to gnaw at her. She dialed the Montpelier and asked for the dining room.

  To her relief, it was Leon who answered. But her relief was short-lived. “He got fired,” Leon drawled. “Smack in the middle of dinner. Called Emile a flaming fag, ripped off his bow tie and stomped out. Best entertainment most of these slick dudes have seen all year.”

  At midnight, she went to bed, but sleep eluded her. Instead, she watched the hands of the clock turn with agonizing slowness. It wasn’t until daylight that she heard Danny’s key in the lock, and she began to tremble from a combination of relief and fury.

  He stumbled into the bedroom, his clothes rumpled, the stench of alcohol ripe on his breath. Slumping heavily on the edge of the bed, he pressed his face into his palms. “I got fired,” he said.

  “I heard.” She struggled with conflicting urges: to comfort him in her arms, to pummel him with her fists. Not sure which urge was stronger, she said, “Where the hell have you been all night?”

  “Around.”

  In disbelief, she said, “I’ve been lying here awake for six hours, and you’ve been around? Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been?”

  “You should know better than to worry. If I survived Nam, I can survive the streets of New York.”

  Her fertile imagination, as she lay awake, had pictured in vivid detail every conceivable horror that could have befallen him: kidnapping, arrest, mugging, hit-and-run. She’d pictured him maimed in a gutter, dead at the bottom of the East River. A white-hot fury enveloped her. “How stupid of me,” she snapped. “I forgot you were invincible.”

  Avoiding her eyes, he lit a cigarette and began pacing the bedroom. “I warned you when you married me,” he said, “that I wasn’t perfect.” He took a long drag on the cigarette and blew out the smoke. “I don’t know why you should be so surprised.”

  “This goes way beyond imperfection, Danny. Try irresponsible, immature, and callous, just for starters.”

  The smoke rose in a lazy arc above his head as he stopped in front of the dresser and busied himself lining up her perfume bottles with military precision. “I shouldn’t have married you,” he said. “It was a mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m damn poor husband material.” He picked up her bottle of Charlie, uncapped it, and took a whiff. “I’m no good for you,” he said, replacing the cap. “I’ll just drag you down into the mud.” He lined the bottle up with the others. “I’ve thought it all through,” he said to the wall. “I think you should go home. Back where you belong.”

  “What’s going on, Danny?” she said. “What’s really happening here?”

  “It’s not working,” he said. “I’ve tried. Christ knows, I’ve tried. But I’m not cut out for marriage.”

  “What are you saying? That you want a divorce?”

  He walked to the window and leaned his forehead against the glass. “Yes,” he said.

  Fighting panic, she said, “I won’t give it to you! I’ll fight you every damn step of the way!”

  He hunched his shoulders. “Can’t you get it through your head,” he said hoarsely, “what I’m trying to tell you? I can’t be what you want me to be.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, close to hysteria. “I want you anyway.”

  He whirled from the window and shouted, “Even if I can’t stay out of other women’s beds?”

  Her body went numb very slowly. It began in the tips of her fingers and her toes, worked its way up her arms and her legs, settling somewhere in the region of her heart. “How many?” she whispered.

  “Just one,” he said miserably. “Just once.”

  She’d never known she could feel such hatred for another human being. “You son of a bitch,” she said.

  On her knees on the bathroom floor, she retched again and again while Danny pounded on the locked door. “Damn it, Casey,” he said, “let me in.”

  She flushed the toilet and staggered to her feet, caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was twenty-two years old and looked thirty-five. She splashed cold water on her face, while outside the door Danny pleaded with her. “Let me in, baby. Please. I have to explain to you.”

  She opened the door so suddenly he nearly fell through it. For a stunned moment, they stared at each other, she and this stranger, this man she’d thought she knew. Dully, she said, “Why?”

  “It didn’t mean a goddamn thing. You have to believe me.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It happened. It’s over. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It matters to me!” she screamed, realizing she sounded like a fishwife, but incapable of controlling herself. Danny shot a glance over his shoulder at Rob, still asleep on the couch. “To hell with him,” she said bitterly. “He knows all about it, anyway. We have no secrets, do we, darling? Did you tell him all the juicy details?”

  “Damn it, Casey, it wasn’t like that! I told him because I didn’t know where else to turn!”

  “I guess that’s what friends are for, isn’t it? To listen to the details of each other’s little peccadilloes.”

  “If it’s any comfort to you, he threatened to kill me if I ever told you.”

  Rob sat up and rubbed his eyes, and Casey glared at him. Running a hand through his hair, he said to no one in particular, “I think I’ll wander out to the kitchen and stand guard over the knives.”

  “Good plan,” she said, and stalked back to the bedroom with Danny at her heels. At the bedroom door, she wheeled on him. “Get out of my sight,” she said. “You make me sick.”

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  “To work, darling. One of us has to remain gainfully employed.” />
  He ignored her gibe. “You can’t go to work,” he said. “You haven’t slept all night.”

  She flung open the closet door. “Watch me.”

  “I suppose you think this has been easy on me?” he said, pacing the tiny bedroom. “Feeling like slime and not knowing how to make it better?”

  She pulled a blouse from its hanger. “Spare me,” she said, and yanked the blouse over her head.

  “We have to talk.”

  “Do you really think I could talk to you right now?” she said. “Right now, I want to kill you. I want to plunge a sharp knife into your black, adulterous heart.”

  “Look,” he said, “I know you’re upset. I don’t blame you. But later, after you’ve had time to cool off, we need to sit down and discuss this like two rational adults.”

  Casey pulled a skirt from the closet and stepped into it. “That would be difficult, wouldn’t it, darling? Since only one of us is either rational or an adult.” And she slammed the bedroom door in his face.

  She swept past Rob, hunched over a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter, one hand slowly massaging his temple. He met her accusing gaze. “Hey,” he said, and held out both hands, palms up. “I’m just an innocent bystander.”

  Casey yanked open the refrigerator door and took out a carton of milk, filled a glass and lifted it to her mouth. The milk tasted as though it was on the verge of turning, and she had difficulty swallowing. It threatened to come back up, and she had to choke it back down.

  The first pain struck, low in her belly, as she was returning the milk to the refrigerator. She gasped and clutched at the door handle. Rob stopped massaging his temple. “Hey,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  Before she could answer, she was doubled over by a second pain, stronger than the first. Her legs wobbled beneath her as something wet began to trickle between her thighs. She looked at Rob in bewilderment. “I think I’m bleeding,” she said, and slithered to the floor.

  He caught her before she landed. Bellowing for Danny, he eased her into a sitting position, picked up the phone and began dialing frantically as she sat bowlegged on the floor and stupidly watched the blood seeping through her skirt and puddling on the linoleum between her knees.

  Danny took one look at her and all the color left his face. “Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Christ.”

  “—having a miscarriage,” Rob said into the phone. “About ten, eleven weeks along. Jesus Christ, step on it, will you? She’s losing blood like crazy.”

  “Miscarriage?” Danny looked as though he’d been struck between the eyes with a fence post. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Rob hung up the phone. “Idiot,” he said. “She’s losing your baby.”

  ***

  At the hospital, they took her away from him. When they wheeled her off down the maze of corridors, it took two orderlies and a security guard to hold him back. “Let go of me, goddamn it!” Danny roared. “That’s my wife!”

  “Sir,” one of the orderlies said, “you can’t go with her.”

  “You’re not big enough to stop me!”

  “Either you cool it,” the security guard said, “or I cuff you and call the boys in blue to cart your ass out of here. That what you want? Think that’ll help your old lady any?”

  Danny glared at that steely stare, and then, abruptly, all the starch left him. “Shit,” he said, and closed his eyes. “Oh, shit.”

  “You gonna behave now?”

  Quietly, he said, “I’ll behave.”

  The two orderlies released him cautiously. “Listen,” one of them said, “get yourself a cuppa coffee, park your ass in the waitin’ area, and wait. When there’s any news, you’ll hear.”

  The coffee tasted like battery acid. He tossed it in the trash and sat with his face in his hands. All that blood. Jesus, all that blood. He’d seen it before, in Nam, guys bleeding to death before they could get help. He tried to remember the prayers the sisters had drummed into his head, but it had been too long since he’d held a rosary. “Christ,” he said aloud. “Please don’t let her die.”

  “Mr. Fiore? We need you to sign this release.”

  He looked stupidly at the woman in white who was holding a clipboard and pen out to him. “It’s a standard surgical release form,” she said, shoving the pen into his hand. “Sign and date here.”

  He signed the form and she was gone before he could ask any questions. He paced the windowless room, six steps across ugly gray tile and six steps back, in a desperate attempt to ward off the terror. It didn’t work. His bowels were knotted and his legs felt like overcooked spaghetti. He dropped heavily to an orange plastic chair and ran his fingers through his hair. He couldn’t lose her. Not now. Not ever.

  A half-hour passed with interminable slowness. An hour. He questioned someone at the nurse’s station down the corridor. “No news yet,” he was told. “She must still be in surgery.”

  He returned to the tiny waiting room to contemplate life without Casey. If she died, everything in him that was human would die with her.

  “Mr. Fiore?”

  His heart slammed into his throat. “Yes,” he said.

  The name tag on the swarthy young man’s lab coat read A. Rodriguez. “Your wife is a strong woman,” A. Rodriguez said. “She’s going to be fine.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Danny buried his face in his hands again, not bothering to try to stem the tears that squeezed past his closed eyelids.

  “We performed a routine D&C,” Rodriguez said, “and a cauterization to stop the bleeding.” He frowned. “Mrs. Fiore lost a great deal of blood. I’m keeping her overnight, just to be safe. As long as there are no complications, she can go home in the morning.”

  Now that the terrible moment of fear was past, Danny’s body began to tremble. “I have to see her,” he said.

  “She’s been sedated,” Rodriguez warned. “She’ll be groggy.”

  It didn’t matter. He had to see her, had to touch her, had to verify that rich, red blood was still coursing through her veins. Had to make her know how much he loved her. “I’ve made a damn fool of myself,” he told Rodriguez. “I have to try to set it right.”

  She was lying with her face turned to the wall. He sat in the chair beside the bed, picked up her hand and held it to his lips. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so goddamn sorry.”

  She was silent for so long that he thought she was asleep. “I guess,” she said at last, “that’s supposed to make it all better.”

  He leaned over the bed. “Tell me what you want. Anything. Just say it and I’ll do it.”

  “Oh, Danny. I’m not sure this is something that can be fixed.”

  “We have to try. Christ, Casey, we can’t split up over something like this.”

  She finally looked at him, and her eyes were puffy and bloodshot. “Can you think of a better reason?”

  “I can’t think of any reason. I love you.”

  “You’re the one,” she reminded him bitterly, “who asked for a divorce.”

  “I was talking through my ass. You know better than to listen to me when I do that.”

  She wrapped slender fingers around the bed rail, and he watched as her knuckles, already white, went even whiter. “I think it would be better,” she told him, “if you weren’t there when I got home.”

  The silence grew heavy between them. “I see,” he said at last.

  “I need time,” she said. “I have to figure out what to do.”

  This can’t be happening to us, he thought. Like an automobile accident, it was supposed to happen to somebody else. He cleared his throat. “Will you be all right?”

  “I’ll survive.” She hesitated. “What about you?”

  Fighting panic, he said, “I can stay at Tony’s. There’s a cot in the store room behind the bar. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Then I guess,” she said, “there’s nothing left to say.”

  “I love you,” he burst out. “There’s that.”

  “Don
’t do this to me, Danny,” she said. “Just leave. I don’t want to hear it.”

  ***

  Harsh artificial light from the street lamp outside the window filtered through the venetian blinds and fell in narrow strips across the foot of the hospital bed. Casey lay on crisp white sheets and listened to the lusty squalling of an infant in the nursery down the hall.

  Dr. Rodriguez had been kind. He’d patted her hand and said, “Sometimes these things happen, especially with a first pregnancy, and we don’t know why. But you’re young and strong and there’s no reason to believe it should ever happen again.” Because she’d lost so much blood, Rodriguez had insisted she stay the night. He’d instructed the nurse to give her a sedative, then left her to face her purgatory alone.

  She dozed. When she awoke, Rob MacKenzie was sitting in the chair beside her bed. The door to her room was closed, muffling the sounds that echoed up and down the corridor. She extended a hand. “Hey,” she said softly.

  In the darkness, he took her hand. “Hey,” he said.

  “Visiting hours are over. How did you get in?”

  “It’s amazing,” he said, “how far boyish charm will take you.”

  The silence between them was comfortable, the silence of two people who knew each other well enough to negate the necessity of words. After a time, he said, “You can’t blame yourself.”

  She blinked back tears. “What makes you think I’m blaming myself?”

  With the pad of his thumb, he rubbed her knuckles. “I know you,” he said.

  “Not very pretty, is it? My whole life, collapsing around me like this.”

  Rob squeezed her hand. “I know you may have trouble believing it right now, but Danny absolutely adores you.”

  “Then how could he do this to me? How could he even touch another woman?”

  “He’s human,” Rob said, “just like you and me. Human beings make mistakes.”

  “I’m trying to understand, but I can’t. Since I met Danny, I’ve never even looked at another man.” She closed her eyes, but the picture in her head wouldn’t go away, the picture of Danny with another woman. “I want to kill him,” she said. “I want to kill both of them. I want to rip her heart out.”