Heaven Beside You (30 page)

“I will.”

She had the distinct impression Cass would sit there with her ear pressed to the phone until given further instructions. “Goodbye, sweetie.”

“Goodbye.”

The phone clicked in her ear, and Shirl hung up. She wished Cass was still five, when bad things were spiders and scraped knees she could fix with a well-placed shoe or a carefully applied bandage. Nothing here she’d use a bandage for, but she could think of a couple of creative uses for a shoe.

Andy walked into the kitchen wearing his coat and holding his keys. “Get your coat. We’re going up there.”

“Right now? She won’t like it.”

“No time like the present, and I don’t care if she likes it,” he said. “We’ll take up her mail and her truck and bring down her taxes. It’ll make a good excuse.”

Cass sat on her couch, wrapped in a blanket, staring at a movie. She’d been working her way alphabetically through her collection because she had no desire to make a decision about what to watch next.

The knock at the door would have startled her if she’d still been capable of that kind of emotional response.

Throwing off the blanket, she hobbled to the door, legs stiff from disuse. As she moved, her garage door opened on the other side of the house.

Her mother smiled as she stormed the house carrying a corrugated plastic post office tub. “You know, right after I got off the phone with you, we decided we should just run these things up and collect your taxes so you can get your refund.” Her mother’s practiced gaze took in the mostly empty peanut butter jar with a spoon sticking out of it on the coffee table surrounded by an assortment of mugs and glasses; the pile of DVDs scattered on the floor in front of the television; the blanket on the floor; the dead hearth. Her father walked out of the hall behind Cass.

“Your fire’s out, swee’pea,” Dad said, and dumped an armload of firewood in the wood box. “I’ll shovel out the ashes and start you a new one.” He knelt in front of the hearth, where she’d made s’mores with Jason. The magazines hadn’t completely burned, leaving a hard ridge of charred pages in the middle. A scrap of yellow silk lay on the stones. Probably the hem of her dress.

“Have you been sick, honey?” Shirl pressed the backs of her fingers against Cass’s cheek, looking for a fever or a chill, anything to explain her pale face and greasy matted hair. “You know, you’ll feel a lot better once you’ve had a shower. Let me just brush your hair for you. Come sit at the table.”

Obediently, Cass sat down at the table while her mother got a comb. Her mother clucked, working the tangles out of her hair. “You have such beautiful hair.”

You have such beautiful hair, preciosa.
You’re best dressed when you’re only wearing your beautiful hair.

Cass squeezed her eyes closed. So much easier to be numb.

“Where did this sweater come from? I don’t remember you having one like this.”

“He forgot it,” she said. She rubbed the weave between her thumb and forefinger. When she’d found it in the gray dawn light the morning after he left, she’d put it on and had not taken it off since.

“You’re coming home with us,” Dad announced. “You’re not well.”

“I’m not leaving.”

Though she hadn’t raised her voice and her tone sounded weak, her dad turned away and started building a fire in the hearth without any more of a fight. Cass bowed her head, so her mother could reach the ends of her hair. It felt so nice to be touched. She wanted to cry, but there didn’t seem to be any fluid left in her body.

“You’ve got a limb down out there,” her father said, when the fire started crackling. “I’ll go see to it.”

The limb had fallen in the middle of the night two days after Jason’s departure, cracking like a gunshot and demolishing two of Jason’s pyramids. Then the wind knocked over the two Easter Island heads he’d gotten to stay upright. Olmec had merely sagged, looking more forlorn than he had in the first place. The wind had blown away most of the snow that had settled on the Aztec temple.

Mom stood back to allow Cass to stand up, and smiled at her. “You are such a pretty girl.” Her mom patted her cheek.

You are a beautiful and intriguing woman, Cassandra Geoffrey. You know you’re beautiful, don’t you, bella? You know you’re completely intoxicating? You’re irresistible. So utterly intoxicating. You don’t, do you? You don’t know how beautiful you are.

“I’m gonna take a shower.” Cass ducked her head and almost ran for the bathroom.

The hot water felt good pelting her skin. When had the house gotten so cold? After the fire went out? Or after Jason left?

She washed her hair, letting the stream run over her until the hot water ran out. For the first week after Jason left, it had been too much to move. She had not slept, hadn’t eaten or bathed. When she had taken a bath four days ago, the desire to drown herself had been so strong, she’d been afraid to be around that much water again. Over the year both her marriage and her career disintegrated in New York, she had been miserable, but never so hollow as the past two weeks. The pain of that whole year had been distilled into two weeks.

She peeked out the high bathroom window. Her father attacked the tree limb. He’d successfully trampled the two crushed pyramids into nothing and had taken chunks out of the third. While she watched, he turned to the Olmec head and gave it a swift kick, which explained the earlier damage. If she didn’t put on a better face for them, they would never leave. They, or someone else from town, would be up here every day on some pretext, and right now the last thing she wanted was company. She squeezed the water out of her hair and wrapped herself in a towel.

Her mother stood in the bedroom, pulling the sheets off the bed.

“What are you doing?” she shrieked at her mom before she could stop herself.

“Changing the bed. I thought I would start a load of wash.”

“No.
No
.” Cass dragged the sheet from the floor to the bed. Jason had slept in that bed, and she hadn’t been able to sleep there at all, but she couldn’t bear to change the sheets like she couldn’t take not wearing his sweater.

“You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were thirteen again,” Mom snapped.

“The bed does not need changed. Just leave it alone,” she shot back.

Her mother pursed her lips and stomped out of the room. “I’ll put on some soup, if that’s all right with you,” she shouted down the hall.

“It’s fine.” Cass tucked in the corner of the fitted sheet and replaced the pillow covers. One of them had a long black hair still clinging to it. She pressed the fabric to her face. It still smelled faintly of him. If she closed her eyes, she saw his face when he first woke in the morning. Smiling, reaching for her, his fingers touching her, the callused pads scratching. The soft moan of his breath, as if he couldn’t stand to look at her without touching her, and he couldn’t stand to touch her without making love to her.

She opened her eyes and dropped the pillow. Before drawing the blanket up, she dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. She might never be able to sleep in this bed again. Might have to chop it up for firewood and buy a new one. Maybe then she could bear to have fresh sheets.

A lie. He said what he’d told her about his father was a lie. What else hadn’t been true? That she was beautiful and he wanted her? That she was anything more than convenient?

Her mother stood in the kitchen, stirring soup with a wounded air. “You’re looking thin. Have you been eating?”

“Some. Not much.”

Her mother turned from the soup pot. “I’m not going to ask you, Cassie. You’re a grown woman and you can make your own choices, but I don’t like seeing you like this. And your father, he can’t stand it. For his sake if not for your own, you’re going to have to pull yourself out of this dive. Now, why don’t you gather up your tax stuff so your father and I can drop it off on the way home?” Then she turned back to the soup.

* * * *

Jason stared at the clock on the DVD player. In ten minutes he had to leave to pick up Brian for a songwriting session. Being alone was killing him, yet he couldn’t stand being with people. At home, the silence and his thoughts ate at him, but he hated being out too. Mostly, he hated being. He had the sneaking suspicion everyone else didn’t think much of him either. Two years of this ongoing temper tantrum was too much, no matter how much the band needed him. Brian had been riding with him to act as a buffer. Yesterday Tyler had suggested using GarageBand so they could email material to each other.

Every morning for the last two weeks, he’d woken up sure Cassie was in bed with him. He’d believed he would open his eyes and be in West Virginia with her leaning over him about to kiss him.

Waking up was a nightmare.

Going to sleep was worse. When he slept, he dreamed of Cassie. Talking to her, making love to her. Christ, the other night he’d dreamed they were sitting on the couch watching a great movie. He’d told her he’d never seen it before, and she’d laughed and told him it was part of her witchcraft. She had special movies.

Then he’d woken up to the cold, empty bed, and he still couldn’t remember the plot of the movie.

Standing up, he grabbed his keys. He had to get out of here before he broke something else. Last week he’d had to restring a guitar because he’d very deliberately broken every string. That made him wonder if he was nuts. He didn’t even do stuff like that when Stella dumped him.

At Brian’s house, his little daughter Tessa and son Bubbie sat on the steps with their chins on their fists. Bubbie was imitating his sister, but Tessa’s irritation was genuine.

“What’s the matter?” Jason asked, despite that Brian and Bonnie’s yelling was quite clear from here.

“Mom and Dad are fighting again.” Tessa pouted.

Brian and Bonnie fought all the time. Jason thought they did it as an excuse to have sex. They made up like pros. Jason checked his watch and decided they were going to be late, so he sat down next to Tessa. He didn’t need to call. The other guys would guess why they weren’t on time. There would be some snickering and good natured teasing until somebody said something stupid, and everybody would look to see if Jason was going to blow up this time. That had been the pattern over the last two years, and he didn’t see it changing anytime soon.

“Why do Mom and Dad fight all the time?” Tessa asked.

Jason grimaced. He couldn’t very well tell her what he thought. “They fight because they love each other.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Uncle Jason,” Tessa told him.

“Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense, Uncle Jason,” Bubbie agreed. Then he frowned, taking three pennies out of his pocket. “How many cents should it make, Tessa?”

“Dummy,” she growled.

“Hey, be nice. That’s not what she means, Bubbie. She doesn’t mean cents like money. She means sense like reason.”

“Oh.” Bubbie smiled as if he understood, though Jason was pretty sure he didn’t.

A door slammed inside the house.

“You never fighted with the pretty lady. Daddy says so.”

Jason looked at the pads of his fingers. He and Stella had never fought about anything. He either caved or she went quiet. In one week with Cass he’d shared more heated words of all stripes than in three years with Stella. “I know, but she didn’t really love me. That’s why she isn’t with me anymore.”

The shouting had stopped inside the house. That meant, depending on how sorry they were, it would be fifteen to thirty more minutes.

“I still don’t see why fighting means you love somebody,” Tessa said. She looked at the door, but made no effort to go inside. On some small child level, she knew the drill.

“People fight when they love each other because they have something to save. If you don’t care about somebody, you don’t care if you hurt them and they can’t hurt you so there’s nothing to fight about.” He remembered Cass lighting the fire in his cabin and claiming she had smoke in her eyes to cover the fact she was crying. He put his arm around Tessa’s narrow shoulders. “People who love each other feel bad when they hurt one another, and they fight about it.”

“It’s stupid.”

“Do you care about your brother?”

Tessa looked at her brother like she might survey a squashed toad on the road. “He’s my brother.”

“And what would you do if somebody was hurting him?”

“I’d beat them up.”

Jason grinned. Bonnie’s influence, not Brian’s. “What if the person hurting him was you?”

Tessa’s expression changed. She wrapped her arms around her brother. “I’m sorry I called you a dummy.”

“Okay.” Bubbie hugged her back, beaming.

The front door banged open. A very brief apology this time. “Hey, sorry. I got distracted.” Brian bounded down the stairs, dropped kisses on both children’s foreheads and headed for the car.

Jason settled into the driver’s seat. He’d been aware of the lack of fighting with Stella. He’d told himself they had a very solid relationship and didn’t need to fight. But maybe Stella hadn’t bothered to fight with him because she didn’t care. Or because she didn’t want to piss him off. It was possible. Likely, even.

Cass had never hesitated to fight. With that fair skin and those open eyes, her every emotion was on display all the time. Never had she made him feel like he was playing chess with her, or even demanded any kind of winnings from their bet.

Though she had probably hoped to parlay that bet into some kind of promise, and when he’d stormed out she’d been caught off guard. She had been playing him, she’d been very good. He snorted out loud.

“What?” Brian asked.

There were some things you couldn’t even tell a best friend. Revealing you were a huge sucker was on that short list. “Why do you have a kid named after my sister?” he asked instead.

“Bonnie liked the name.” Brian flushed. “She’s already pissed about the tour next fall. She’s mad because I won’t be home for Christmas.”

“The tour isn’t even planned yet,” Jason protested, then realized what he was saying. “We’ll be home for the day, but we will probably have to head out before New Year’s. Can’t she bring the kids to you?”