Casualties (28 page)

“You okay, miss?” The waitress stooped as she placed two more drinks on the table. Her casual tone, her dark eyes curious beneath the cowboy hat all the servers wore, snared Ruth before the tears surfaced. Ruth nodded and reached for her martini with both hands.

“Then here's the check. You want me to wrap that steak up for you?”

“No,” Ruth said. “Thank you.” Then she closed her eyes and drank.

Casey lay rigid, aware of every breath from the other side of the bed. He knew Ruth was awake. She had not moved in twenty minutes but she wanted to, he could tell; the stillness of her body was too exaggerated, each inhalation too hushed, too controlled. She was trying not to wake him and her obvious effort made him want to yell at her to just roll over already.

The booze at dinner should have knocked them both out after all that driving. They'd fallen into the double bed, the border between them drawn without discussion. Ruth curved away from him on her side. He stretched out on his back, hands folded on his chest. For a little while they must have passed out. Now each was wide awake and pretending not to be.

Ruth's stomach growled through the darkness. Her breath caught and the bed shifted under them as she curled into a fetal position. He turned in her direction. “I told you to eat more.”

“Go to hell.” Her voice was hoarse and ragged but she said the words without real rancor. He laughed out loud.

“Guess I had that coming.”

The mattress squeaked as she craned her neck, looking over her shoulder at him. “Why aren't you asleep?”

Because my head hurts, because every time I close my eyes, I see a guy I haven't seen since I sent him off to die and he isn't happy with me. Because I'm scared shitless and I don't know why.

“Just can't,” was all he said.

Ruth sighed. She leaned up on one elbow and fumbled on the bedside table for a bottle of water. She gulped down the water until the sides of the bottle buckled. Then she burped.

A laugh exploded out of Casey. Too loud, out of proportion to the event that triggered it, but it was a relief to let it go. He gave it all he had.

“You're still drunk, aren't you, Ruth?”

She didn't answer, just seized her pillows, jammed them against the flimsy headboard, and settled back against them, her head tipped back and eyes aimed at the ceiling as if looking for a place to put her irritation. He could make out her profile and follow it down the outline of her body under the thin sheet. She was wearing the same top she'd worn all day and a pair of shorts, but her skin smelled like the minty soap in the motel. That had been the high point of their day so far, taking turns in the motel's shower and shedding the road. He wanted another shower to wash away the remnants of that last awful conversation where he got on his high horse and called her son's life a waste.

“Go ahead and read if you want,” she said. The way she said it, kind of tough but also eager, made him feel good and bad at the same time. He wanted to make up for what he'd said but his head was throbbing, and so was his leg.

“Not right now. Maybe later.”

She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, pale in the half light. She looked like a kid, an exhausted, sad kid. He reached for the bedside lamp.

“I changed my mind. Go ahead and get the book. It's over there, in my bag.”

The bed shifted under him when she rose.

“I'll take some water too, if there's any left,” he said. He reached for the white plastic bottle of pills next to the bed.

“Didn't you just take some of those?”

She was right. More pills now probably wouldn't do anything but screw up his stomach. He leaned back against the headboard and opened the book. Beside him, the bed shifted again and Ruth leaned back, too, her legs stretched in front of her. He began to read aloud. The letters swam on the page. He pushed on for three or four pages and then paused for a drink of water. Ruth was still sitting up but her eyes were closed as she listened.

“I used to read to Robbie. When he was a baby.” Her voice was low.

“I'm sorry about what I said back at the restaurant.”

Ruth opened her eyes but did not look at him, just nodded and stared at her hands, entwined in her lap.

He picked up the book, then let it fall flat on his lap again. He was a little too drunk and way too tired. His head hurt like it used to after he was blown up. The headaches used to come all the time. Now they were back.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Why don't you take the next few pages?” He handed her the book without waiting for her answer.

Ruth didn't move. Then, “Why not?”

She was self-conscious at first, but as she went on, the pinch in her voice relaxed. Casey knew she'd climbed into the story, could see the room Ishmael and Queequeg shared at the Spoutwater Inn while they waited for the boat to Nantucket.

Casey stopped listening. He knew how it went. He thought instead about another woman lying next to him in bed, reading. Lifetimes ago, when his future stretched in front of him like the Manhattan skyline, millions of possibilities living in those buildings, roaming those streets, lighting up the night.

Carla's voice was husky and sweet. Not like Ruth's, which
emerged from her mouth in flat, abrupt volleys, the voice of a person who wanted to sound strong. Carla was already strong. She would make love to him and then read to him. He was seventeen and she was twenty-eight. She taught literature in a private school on the Upper East Side but lived not far from him in Jersey City, in a one-room apartment with a Murphy bed.

She'd found him in the Strand, browsing the stacks and piles of books on a rare afternoon when Mike was gone off somewhere and he had nothing but time. Then he fucked up, Carla cut him loose, and Mikey died. Out of it all came Emily.

“Are you getting tired?”

He opened his eyes and saw Ruth peering at him, appraising him, like a nurse.

“Yes. No. You're doing good, Ruth.” Still, he was glad when she marked the page and put the book on the floor next to the bed. She slid down a little then, her head still propped up on the pillow, and let out a sigh. Her hands were looser, her body not so tense.

“What did you read to Robbie when he was a kid?”

Ruth looked at her hands. “He liked animals. I must have read
The Jungle Book
a thousand times.”

“Mowgli.”

She looked up. “Another one of your favorites?”

“My grandmother told me I used to cry when we got to the part where the big black cat brings Mowgli to the village and tells him he has to go live with his own kind.”

A smile started in the corner of Ruth's mouth but flickered out before it was finished. “Robbie did too, until he got older. I think he thought if we kept reading it again and again, someday the ending would change.”

Casey had tried that. He'd gone over and over everything. Each time, he saw how one word, one decision, one accident of timing could have changed everything. A fleet of trucks droned by on the highway; the bed shook slightly as the noise swelled and then abated.

“What ending do you want, Ruth? If you could rewrite your life's story?”

Instantly, the current between them shifted. Casey felt Ruth retreat even though she did not move.

“I shouldn't have asked that. Sorry.”

Ruth nodded without looking at him and gulped down some water.

“They're getting a little better, the bruises.”

Ruth put her fingers to her lip and then walked them slowly to her eye, as though rediscovering the purpled skin. “Yes.”

The need for physical contact, raw and selfish, flooded through him.

“Do that to me.”

“What?” Her hand froze, suspended next to her face.

Casey took it and pulled it toward him, pressing his forehead into her palm. Her skin was cool from the bottle of water. He closed his eyes.

“Just touch me. It feels better when you touch me.” The words welled up. The loneliness he felt had been part of him for so long he did not know where it ended and he began. It hurt worse than the pain in his head. When he turned toward Ruth, she was only inches from him. She shook off his hand and then placed her palm back on his forehead, as if checking for a fever. Then, hesitantly, as if she were afraid she would do something wrong, she began to stroke the skin along his hairline and then, with more confidence, along the ridges beneath his eyebrows and then, finally, traced circles in the hollows of his temples. He sank back into the pillow, as Ruth leaned over him, working her fingers across his skin. Words of gratitude started to form but fell away before he could utter them. What came out was a sound, half moan, half sigh.

“Shhh,” Ruth whispered. It was the last sound he heard before sleep overtook him.

—

Sometime later, one hour or maybe three, Ruth woke up. She'd fallen asleep curved toward Casey's body, her arm across his chest. The light from the wall above the bed shone down on her. She glanced at Casey's face, his closed eyes, the furrows of his forehead smoothed out. Carefully, so as not to wake him, she leaned up on her elbow and reached to click off the light. In seconds Casey's hand was reaching for her. His hand ran up her back under her shirt. He buried his face in her neck.

“Don't go.”

Ruth lay completely still for a few seconds. Then she tightened her arm around him, gathering him into her chest, pressing her leg between his so his stump could rest on her thigh.

“I won't.”

—

Ruth had lost all sense of time in the slipping in and out of sleep. She was aware of Casey's back spooned against her belly and breasts. Her arm still covered him; it rose and fell with each breath he took. Without realizing it, she began to breathe with him. She pulled herself closer, felt his heart beat beneath her palm, pressed her cheek against his thin cotton shirt until it too rose and fell with each breath. He stirred and turned toward her. Ruth began to pull away, until he closed his hand over hers possessively. She remained still when he lifted her fingers to his mouth. Slowly he explored her hand with his lips, brushed them against each of her fingers and then took one, then another into his mouth and began to suck gently.

Ruth did not look at his face. He did not look at hers. His hands traveled over her breasts, lifting her shirt so he could reach them with his mouth. Then he moved his mouth down her belly; Ruth pushed down her shorts so that he could keep going. The bruise on
her hip flared again when he pressed his hand to it and pulled her closer so that his tongue and lips could find her. She clutched his hair, dug her fingers into his scalp, and then gave herself up to his mouth and his tongue.

Afterward, when she was quiet, Casey leaned up on his elbow; he was still hard. His breath came shallow and fast.

Ruth pushed him back and then straddled him. “Your turn,” she said.

—

The sun lasered through a break between the curtains and burned against Ruth's eyelids. She rolled over and peered through slitted eyes at the dented pillow and tangled sheets, and listened to the drumming of water against tile in the bathroom. Casey was in the shower. She pushed herself up and then sank against the headboard, pinned there by hangover and shame. She closed her eyes so she wouldn't see the green box on the bureau across the room or the duffel on the floor below it. Robbie couldn't see her, she told herself. He didn't know that she'd left him for a while. Still, the guilt washed over her like it had been sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for her to wake up. She wanted to be the one hiding in the bathroom, washing the sex off her body.

A phone rang, and Ruth jumped. His cell, on the table next to his side of the bed. She had forgotten he even had a phone. The sound kept coming, and each ring drilled down behind her eyes. She couldn't stand another minute of it. She reached for the ancient mobile on the bedside table and flipped it open.
Neal.

“Oh. You're awake.” Casey froze in the bathroom doorway, his expression as uncertain as his tone. He gripped his toothbrush in one hand and a black shirt in another. His hair, wet and slicked back, dripped onto his shoulders. “Ruth. Let me explain.”

“You didn't do much explaining last night.”

The phone went silent in her hand. She'd held Casey, touched
him, let him touch her, and all that time he'd been waiting for a call from Neal. Everybody was trying to make decisions for her, even a man who hadn't made many good decisions for himself as far as she could see.

“I never planned that,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

Ruth couldn't look at him. She saw Robbie's duffel and couldn't look at that either. Neither one of them had planned what happened the night before. “It doesn't matter. It's done.”

They were halfway to Des Moines before Casey heard another word out of Ruth. He was beginning to think the silence would last all the way to Chicago when she broke it with a question.

“Who's the money for?”

He pretended to be checking the rearview mirror as he drove, and tried to think of ways to change the subject. He'd been thinking about the money. They would be in Chicago soon enough and then, whether she called her boyfriend or not, they could settle up and part ways. It would be for the best.

“Who's the money for?” she repeated.

Casey drummed his finger on the steering wheel, glanced again in the rearview mirror. He didn't want to talk about Emily, not now. Then she surprised him and changed the subject herself.

“Tell me about your friend Mike.”

“Why does that interest you?”

“It doesn't, but I'm tired of sitting here hating you.”

“We could talk some more about what you are going to do.”

“I'm also tired of your advice. And the radio. And I'm sick and tired of cornfields and tractor-trailers. It's your turn.”

He didn't have to answer, but what did it matter? Soon they were never going to see each other again. Casey felt guilty for reasons he couldn't understand. Maybe he owed her something to make up for last night. Certainly he owed her something for calling Neal, an act she obviously viewed as a betrayal. Still, he waited; talking about Mike was not an easy place to start. He passed a van full of kids and a couple of trucks before settling back into the right-hand lane.

“What do you want to know?” he finally said.

“You said he was like family but not family. Obviously he was important to you.”

Casey nodded. “He was. We met on a playground when we were four or five. I ended up living with his family when my grandmother died. We were both thirteen then.”

He remembered how they all stood in the kitchen of his grandmother's apartment on the day of her funeral. Mikey hunched in the doorway, shifting his shoulders under the jacket he'd borrowed from his older brother for the service. “You'll live with us, of course,” Mike's mother, Katie, said. “Your grandmother arranged it before she went. Besides, haven't I always called you my eighth kid?”

Katie had always liked Casey and so had her husband, Brendan, a captain in the Jersey City fire department. Adults generally did. He'd grown up with two old people who did not believe in talking down to children or spoiling them. His grandmother had taught him to read at four; she wanted him to go into school ahead of the other kids. “I won't have people look at him like he's less than they are because he's an orphan,” she'd said to her husband one night when she thought Casey was asleep. “I know those teachers, those nuns. They're hard enough on the boys as it is.”

Ruth's voice again broke into his thoughts.

“What about your parents?” she asked.

“They died when I was a baby. My dad in Vietnam and my mom a year later in an accident. That's why my dad's folks raised me.”

He didn't wait for Ruth to ask the next question. “Granddad passed when I was six or so and then it was just me and Mary Fran, my grandmother, until I was thirteen. Then she died, too. Cancer, like your dad.”

Mikey, the youngest of six boys, had been Casey's best friend since he was four years old. He told Ruth how they met—head-on, literally—two blocks from their houses in a little playground with a metal jungle gym, a triangle of grass, and a sandbox. The kicking, wrestling, slugging, spitting, bleeding was all over a small red metal fire truck each claimed he found first. It was Casey's granddad, Timothy MacInerney, who pulled them apart.

“Okay, okay, that's enough, now.”

He remembered his granddad's voice and his strong, big-knuckled hands. Timothy was a fireman, like Mike's father. That was why each boy thought the truck ought to be his. But Timothy had taken the toy, walked over to a woman comforting a crying toddler, and handed it over. The little boy stopped sobbing the minute he had the truck in his fist. Both Casey and Mikey mourned the loss of the truck and instantly began to conspire about ways to get it back, or, better yet, find an even better one.

“We were never apart after that,” Casey told Ruth, his eyes fixed on the road ahead but inwardly scanning years of memories. “Holidays, it didn't matter, we saw each other every day.” The O'Brien household was a Ferris wheel of activity and Casey couldn't wait to get there. He'd walk in the door and find himself hoisted up in the commotion of shouts, laughter, arguments, reconciliations, near violence, and ready affection.

He shuffled through the images of himself and Mikey, stopping when he came to the ones that were easy to talk about. Finding Moira's first bra and then hanging it from the kitchen window that looked out over the avenue. Hiding the priest's reading glasses just
before mass, eyes wide with innocence as they sat alongside the altar, their hands in their laps, their knees bouncing under their cassocks. Stealing gum or candy on a dare from the bodega in the neighborhood that served a growing number of families from Puerto Rico and South America. Later, pushing the car they bought together, a Camaro from the late seventies, to a speed of a hundred miles an hour down the Garden State Parkway, getting to the shore at midnight on a Friday and then sleeping in that same car before hitting the beach on Saturday and staking out their claim.

Casey felt Ruth's eyes on him. Her head was cocked a little, the dark glasses pushed up onto her hair, like a headband. “What?” he said.

“Nothing. It sounds like a Disney movie, is all. A couple of scamps in altar boy outfits.”

“What, you think I'm making it up?”

“Are you?” She smiled a little. “No, tell me the rest. What did you do that was so bad you had to choose between jail and the Army?”

Casey knew he didn't have to answer her. But her question kicked open a door inside him.

“You know how the movie goes. Disney stuff turns into crazy shit or stupid shit. We did our share of both, wound up in juvie court a bunch of times. Then Mike got into coke and decided to sell pot to pay for it, got in over his head. Got busted in his senior year. After that, his dad told us we were on our own. We were nearly eighteen. Judge gave us a choice. And the Army looked better than jail.”

“Us? I thought you said it was Mike's business.”

It had been. Even as a kid, Casey knew where the line between wild and stupid lay. You had to pick your spots, let some stuff go. But Mike never knew when to stop, and he expected Casey to be right by his side. They all did, even the parents. “I know he'll never go too far if you're with him,” old Brendan O'Brien said when Casey first moved in. And four years later, when Mike's father came down to the police station to bail them out, he had nothing but weary
resignation to offer Mike, but he cut Casey to the core with a look of sad puzzlement and one sentence. “I counted on you.”

Casey did not bother to explain to Ruth that Mike had stored his inventory in the car they shared. He'd also made sure that some was in Casey's locker at school. Casey hadn't understood it all then, at least not in a way he could articulate. All he knew was that underneath the old Mike-Casey bond ran a sewer of feelings that had begun leaking fumes soon after Casey moved in with the O'Briens. Suddenly it was a crime to get the excellent grades that came so easily to him and so hard to Mike. He cringed inside every time Katie or Brendan O'Brien laughingly told Mike to stick with Casey so he'd “keep out of trouble.” Years later, in one of his unsuccessful stints in rehab, someone had pointed out what should have been obvious: Once he'd moved into the O'Brien house, Mike was not supposed to be at the bottom of the O'Brien brothers' pecking order anymore.

“Are you still there?” he heard Ruth say. He didn't realized that he'd fallen silent.

“I told you, he was like my brother.”

Ruth shook her head. The look on her face reminded him of Carla's when he saw her for the last time. “Fuck it, why am I telling you all this anyway?” Casey said.

“Sorry. Really. What happened to Mike? Why didn't you go to college after you got out of the service? How did you wind up in Nevada?”

She prodded him with more questions, but Casey was through talking. He turned up the radio and tried not to think about the answers raised by Ruth's idle curiosity. He fought the resentment she'd awakened but there it was, as hot and mean as it had been all those years ago when he'd also loved Mike and the whole O'Brien family. He loved Mike, who had known him better than anyone else. He also hated him. Hated him for the way he fucked up and expected everyone else to figure out how to fix it. For the way he used his looks and his smile to get what he wanted from his parents, or from girls
they knew. For the way he derided Casey for getting decent grades and talking about college. For his secure claim on all the things that had been taken from Casey: home, parents, acceptance. Mike just assumed that whatever he had, Casey wanted and that whatever Mike shared would be enough. The way he saw it, Casey owed him.

—

They stopped for gas at a rest area before they reached Des Moines, and then Ruth took the wheel. Pieces of Casey's story were missing; she heard the spaces between the things he chose to tell. She didn't care. As long as she could keep him talking, she didn't have to think about the night before, or what lay ahead when they reached Chicago. From the corner of her eye, she saw him lower the back of the passenger seat. He settled back and closed his eyes. “Wake me when it's my turn again.”

Then he was asleep, or pretending to be. The anxiety she'd been struggling to keep at bay since the morning sensed an opening. Ruth grabbed a bottle of water from the holder, tilted it to her mouth, and sucked it dry. She tossed the empty to the floor by Casey's feet. He didn't stir.

Ahead of Ruth unspooled more pavement, more tired grass, more stands of corn but no answers. A sign for Des Moines loomed and then the city itself appeared. Only five or six hours until they reached Chicago. That was where he probably would take his leave. Get his money and try to hand her over to Neal if she had to guess.

Casey had asked her that morning why she was running, and she couldn't answer. She had no answers for anyone: not Kevin, not Neal, not Terri or the woman who had e-mailed her for help.

Ruth's heart was beating too fast. The steering wheel grew slippery under her palms. She hit the scan button on the radio, looking for something innocuous. No words, just sound. The traffic thickened and slowed; it seemed to wrap itself around the Jaguar like a trap. A thought reached out like a rope and she grabbed it. It was
her damn car; she could drive it where she wanted. She took the next exit, and in seconds she was heading south, through some suburbs. They didn't need to go to Chicago. They could handle their exchange anywhere. Casey could still get to New Jersey. An hour passed. Then another. Her left hip stiffened and a nerve running up her right leg into her back felt like a hot wire from sitting in the same position for so long. But she didn't want to wake Casey by stopping. He'd be surprised when he woke.

I don't feel good, Mommy.

Ruth whipped her head around to look in the backseat as the car swerved. She knew Robbie wasn't really sitting there in the backseat, his comic book tossed aside, but she saw his face, plump and flushed with fever. She heard the scratchy voice he'd had at eight when he was coming down with strep throat. She'd left work early that day to take him to the doctor, then drove him home where her babysitter was waiting. She was supposed to meet Don at the airport for a flight out that night. She hated leaving Robbie, but she and Don had been through this before. “Children are sick all the time,” he said. “They get better. Business opportunities come and then they disappear just as fast. I'm investing in you for a reason. Are you willing to invest in yourself?” A meaningful pause. “Your choice, of course.”

The horn of a passing RV jerked Ruth's attention back to the road but once it passed, she glanced again in the mirror. She saw only the metal box and the duffel that wedged it tightly in place. Inside the duffel were the photo album and the diary. The photos of him as a boy and the words he'd scrawled before he died squeezed in with the clothes that still smelled like him, except for the shirt he'd worn in her office, all dressed up. She'd pushed Robbie away and told him she'd see him later. Ruth struggled to breathe, but this time the panic won.

“You okay over there?” Casey finally woke up and tilted his head toward her. He glanced out the window, then at his watch. “Shit, Ruth, it's nearly four. Where the hell are we?”

He yanked off his sunglasses and grabbed the map. “What the fuck? How did you get off Eighty? Why didn't you wake me up?”

A wave of nausea broadsided Ruth. She aimed for the shoulder running along the road.