The Miles Between Us Page 13

  “I like. Your turn.”

  He picked up the envelope from the center of the table, ran a finger under the flap, tore open the seal. Pulled out the airline tickets and squinted as he read them. “Nassau,” he said.

  “A week. In February. By that time, we should be good and tired of winter.”

  He fingered the brochure that was tucked into the envelope with the tickets. “This is the same place—”

  “You took me to back in ‘87. I made the reservations a couple of months ago.”

  They both understood, both pretended they didn’t understand, the significance of that time frame. Two months ago. Before the miscarriage. Before she started losing her mind.

  “First time I kissed you,” he said, redirecting the conversation back to the topic at hand.

  She picked up the ball and ran with it. “You did more than kiss me, MacKenzie. You were randy, impertinent, and wildly inappropriate.”

  “And you, my gorgeous sexy woman, loved every minute of it.”

  “I did. But the timing was terrible.”

  “It was. And yet, here we are.”

  “Yes,” she said softly. She picked up his hand, brought it to her mouth, and kissed the knuckles. “Here we are.”

  They finished dinner. Before continuing with the plans he’d made for the rest of the evening, she insisted on finding a pay phone and calling the girls. Just to check in, to soothe her maternal anxiety.

  “We’re doing great,” Paige told her. “We’re just sitting around, getting stoned with my drug dealer while we watch The Shining. Since I didn’t have any cash on me, Vito agreed to take Emmy into white slavery as payment for the drugs. He promises to take really good care of her.”

  “Not. Even. Remotely. Funny.” Casey rolled her eyes and handed Rob the phone. “Here,” she said. “You talk to her. If I ever had any question in my mind that Paige is your daughter, she just removed all doubt. She is clearly your kid.”

  Rob took the phone, raised his eyebrows. “Okay,” he said into the receiver, “what did you say to my wife?” He listened, smirked, caught Casey’s eye and quickly rearranged his face into an expression of extreme gravity. “Uh huh. Okay. Yeah, put her on…hey there, Miss Emmy Lou Who! Are you having fun with Sissy? You are? Love you, baby. Hold on, here’s Mom.”

  She took the phone from him and said, “Hi, precious. Is Sissy taking good care of you?”

  “Da.”

  “You be a good girl, now, okay? Mom will see you in the morning. Big kiss?” She and Emma both made kissing sounds. “Love you,” she said, and then Paige was back. “Don’t keep her up too late,” Casey said. “It’s already past nine-thirty. She’ll be cranky tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, we’re about to hit the sack. There’s nothing decent to watch on TV anyway. Have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Enveloped in light and color and sound, she and Rob walked the streets of Manhattan hand in hand. Times Square was an amusement park, a Disneyland for adults. Fingers linked with his, she squeezed between clots of people blocking the sidewalks: groups of teenage girls talking trash; wide-eyed tourists carrying maps and pointing. Snippets of conversation, in a variety of languages, drifted on the night air. French, Italian, Japanese. They passed a record store that was blasting Springsteen’s Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out onto the street. Above their heads, in a cornucopia of color and motion, lights twinkled and dazzled, touting products, promoting Broadway shows, scrolling the latest news headlines.

  Rob was a calming presence, his touch keeping the anxiety at bay. That feeling of claustrophobia, that otherworldliness she’d been experiencing, subsided. Although it still lay simmering beneath the surface, as long as they maintained contact, she could survive Manhattan—even Times Square—with equanimity. Holding his hand, she felt somehow larger, more significant. Less likely to be trampled under harried, indifferent feet.

  Hand in hand, they window-shopped. Unlike other men she knew, Rob MacKenzie enjoyed shopping. His tastes were eclectic and a little funky, and Casey was happy to be along for the ride. For the first time since they’d arrived in New York, she felt energized, instead of flattened. For a few hours, she could convince herself that nothing was amiss, that everything was normal, whatever normal meant. They joked about the blown-glass pipes in the window of a head shop, laughed at the antics of a trio of Welsh Corgi puppies in another. Paused in front of a hobby shop where an antique Lionel train set was on display. The train chugged along past a water tower, crossed a narrow bridge, and disappeared into a tunnel before reappearing at the other end, circling around, and repeating its journey.

  “I always wanted a toy train,” he said.

  Was that wistfulness in his voice? Who knew? “You should have told me,” she said. “I would’ve bought one for you years ago. Want to go inside?”

  “Nah. Not tonight. Maybe another time.”

  “You’re never too old for toys. Or to wonder what might show up under the Christmas tree.”

  He turned away from the window, flashed her one of those zillion-megawatt smiles, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her, deeply and thoroughly, right there on the sidewalk. As a stream of pedestrians flowed around them, they might as well have been invisible. He broke the kiss, leaving her breathless. A frisson of excitement shot through her, the first she’d felt since before she lost the baby. She reached up and brushed soft fingertips across the bridge of his nose, down his jaw to his ear. “Hey,” she said softly.

  He tangled his fingers in the hair at the nape of her neck. “Hey,” he said.

  “You keep up that kissy-face stuff, we might not make it to the dance club.”

  “Don’t try to weasel your way out of it, Fiore. We are definitely going dancing.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Well, then.”

  The dance club was unique, a high-energy place where the deejay played a wide variety of music that covered four decades. She wondered how he’d found it, then realized it was a stupid question. Rob MacKenzie had contacts everywhere in the New York music scene. No matter what he was looking for, somebody he knew could tell him where to find it.

  Dancing was one of her greatest pleasures. Rob knew this, and had counted on it tonight. It was their thing. Wherever they found a dance floor, they took advantage of it. They danced at home, in the kitchen. In the bedroom. Both of them brimming with music and ready, at a moment’s notice, to let it move them. But tonight, she hadn’t been in the mood for dancing. She’d agreed to it, to this evening, only because her husband was the kind of guy who made a big deal out of special occasions—birthdays, anniversaries, holidays—and she didn’t want to disappoint him. The dark mood she’d been in for weeks didn’t lend itself to partying. But to her surprise, she found that the music and the physical activity helped to lift some of that darkness. When the music slowed, she stepped into his arms, inhaled the familiar scent that was his alone, and relaxed into his embrace.

  “You okay, babe?” he asked.

  “I’m fabulous.” With a soft sigh, she laid her head against his shoulder, stopped thinking, and let herself just feel. His body felt delicious against hers. His lips, brushing a soft kiss to her temple, sent a shudder through her. Casey tilted her head back and gazed into those green eyes that looked back at her with love and longing. Lust, pure and undiluted, flowed through her. It had been far too long since she’d felt anything like this, far too long since they’d made love. While the incomparable Don Henley sang about letting somebody love you before it’s too late, she clung to her husband, fervently hoping that tonight, they could fix whatever it was that had broken inside her.

  She wasn’t sure how long they stayed. An hour, two hours? Wrapped in his arms, she lost track of time. They danced fast to Bob Seger. Danced slow to a Bon Jovi power ballad, their bodies crammed so close it was difficult to tell where she ended and he began. Her brother Bill liked to refer to slow dancing as “priming the pump.” That was exactly what it felt like, a form of foreplay, an ent
ryway leading to what would come later.

  When at last they left the club, fully primed for love, they hailed a taxi and spent the entire trip kissing with a passion she’d feared she would never feel again.

  At their apartment building, Rob tossed a fifty at the cabbie and they walked hand in hand to the door. Rob greeted the doorman as they crossed the lobby to the elevator. Once inside, he backed himself against the wall and pulled her to him. Standing between his outspread legs, she leaned into him and, as the car began to rise, they shared a hot, open-mouthed kiss. Reveling in full-body contact and luscious anticipation, they sighed and trembled, breathed in each other’s oxygen, and grinned like fools.

  Upstairs, in the darkened living room, he took her face in his hands and kissed her again, slowly this time. Breathless and giddy, she ran a hand around the back of his neck, curled her fingers in his hair.

  He broke the kiss. “Go on in,” he whispered. “I’ll be right behind you. I just want to check on the girls.”

  Another sweet, lingering kiss, and they separated. In the bedroom, she stepped out of her shoes, peeled off her dress, her bra, her panties, then stood in front of the mirror with her lips drawn in a narrow line, wondering what had happened to her body while she wasn’t paying attention. The changes were subtle, probably not even noticeable when she was wearing clothes. But naked, in front of a full-length mirror, her flaws were clearly visible. And disheartening.

  So this was what almost-forty looked like. This was irrefutable evidence of the relentless march of time. When had she developed that little pouch of a belly that she now gazed upon with such dismay? And what had happened to her breasts? While she was breastfeeding Emma, they’d grown plump and ripe and impressive. Now, shrunk back to their original size, they were guaranteed to impress nobody. Now, they were just the slightest bit saggy. She was certain there’d been no sag before Emma. And her hips, those perfect hips, had been left the size of a barn door by Emma’s birth. She was as fat as an old cow. When had that happened? When had she become so uncomfortable in her own skin? Worse, when had the thought of her husband seeing her naked caused such shame and embarrassment?

  All the eagerness, all the anticipation, fell like a soufflé as anxiety began to edge in. Casey ran her fingers through her hair, lifted and then dropped it, trying desperately to make it look sexy. But her hair was hopeless. It always had been. No matter what she did, it hung limp and lifeless, incapable of holding any style other than straight-and-parted-in-the-center-circa-1972. She took a final disparaging look in the mirror, turned out the light and crawled into bed. What the hell was wrong with her? She and Rob had always been open and free with each other. He knew, and had explored in excruciating detail, every inch of her body. Did she have unreasonable expectations of tonight? Expectations she knew were beyond the capabilities of her fat, fortyish body?

  Rob came in, closed the door behind him, and undressed in the dark, letting his clothes fall haphazardly. A twinge of resentment niggled at her. He was a grown man, almost forty, and still he dropped his clothes and left them wherever they landed.

  He slid beneath the covers, found her in the dark, ran a finger down her bare hip. In spite of her anxiety, doors began to open at his touch, a series of clicking locks releasing, one after the other, somewhere deep inside her. Rob MacKenzie had magic hands, and he knew how to use them, knew how to stoke her fires with a barely-there, whisper-soft touch of those calloused fingertips. It was all so very lovely, and she relaxed, allowed the anticipation and the heat to reignite as his fingertips traced delicate, delicious pathways along her sensitive skin. Down her hip to her knee. Up her ribcage to her breast. Along her collarbone, making her shudder. Oh, god, it had been so long. She buried her fingers in that sexy triangle of chest hair, wrapped a leg around his thigh, touched her tongue to the wonderful indentation where his breastbone met his ribcage.

  “Hold on,” he whispered. “Let me get something.” With her leg still encircling his, he turned, raised himself, stretched to open the drawer in the nightstand, and took something out.

  “What?” she said.

  He closed the drawer, came back to her and said, “Protection.”

  In the silence, the sound of a foil packet being torn open was unmistakable, and everything inside her came to a screeching halt. “Wait,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I bought a box of condoms yesterday. Why?”

  “Behind my back?” That lovely, anticipatory high deflated like a balloon expelling a noisy rush of air. “You went out and bought condoms behind my back?”

  “Jesus, Fiore, I thought you’d be glad. You haven’t done anything about birth control yet. I didn’t want to push you, so I took the responsibility into my own hands.”

  His betrayal was a hot poker in her chest. “I can’t believe you’d so something like this.”

  “But we agreed to—”

  “You agreed,” she said. “You and Doctor Deb agreed. I never agreed to a damn thing.”

  “Oh, for the love of God.”

  “I am not going to do this, MacKenzie.” Inside her chest, her heart felt as if it would explode. “I am not having sex with condoms. The issue is off the table.”

  “What, so you’d rather take a chance on dying? Because that’s what lies ahead of you if you get pregnant again.”

  “Life is random and uncertain. Every day, we take risks, just getting out of bed. You could walk out of this hotel room and be hit by a bus, crossing the street.”

  “That’s true, but my chances of being hit are a lot greater if I’m roaring drunk and spread-eagled in the middle of the street. Life may be a game of chance, but you can still stack the odds.”

  “I’m not stacking the odds.”

  “No? Well, I am. I’m not having sex without birth control. End of story. Because for some inexplicable reason, I’d like to keep you around for a few more decades.” He flung back the covers, slam-dunked the unused condom packet into the wastebasket, and reached down for the clothes he’d left on the floor.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For a walk. It’s pretty clear that nothing’s happening here tonight.” He zipped and buttoned his jeans, tugged his tee shirt over his head, then rose and stood over the bed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” he said, “but maybe it’s time you got professional help. Because I think you’re starting to lose your frigging mind.”

  He strode to the door, opened it, and stood silhouetted in the illumination from the street light outside the window. “Happy anniversary,” he said.

  And he slammed the door.

  Rob

  He walked off his anger and frustration, block after block, with Leroy trotting along eagerly beside him. What the hell was he supposed to do with her? Over the years, he’d seen her through some rough times. When she lost Katie. When her marriage to Danny fell apart. When Danny died. He’d held her up, been her best friend and moral support, even during the times when she didn’t want his help. Casey Fiore MacKenzie was a strong woman, the strongest woman he’d ever known, and she’d survived those stunning blows with her customary stoicism. When things had gotten dark or disjointed, the two of them had screamed and yelled the poison out of their systems, and then they’d moved on.

  This was different. He didn’t know why a miscarriage—okay, two miscarriages, as long as you were counting—should bring his strong, beautiful warrior woman to her knees. He wasn’t some male chauvinist pig who thought a miscarriage was trivial and she should snap out of it. He was grieving the loss, too, and he understood that it was harder for a woman who had carried that child inside her body, who had bonded with that unborn baby from the moment she knew of its existence. He understood that her loss was so much greater than his. But that loss—and he didn’t mean this to sound disrespectful—seemed so much smaller than the devastating losses she’d somehow plowed her way through in the past. So why was she falling apart now? What was it that made this so different? Why was it that the p
oison, instead of leaving her system, was lodging there, spreading through her veins, tainting her every breath?

  Something inside her was broken, and it scared the hell out of him, because he didn’t believe yelling and screaming would do either of them any good this time around. He’d tried patience, loving attention, a readily available sympathetic ear, and he’d made no headway whatsoever. Whatever was going on with her had finally sunk its sharp little teeth into the fabric of their relationship, and that was something they’d never allowed to happen before. The two of them, their marriage, had reached a corner he wasn’t happy about turning, yet he felt helpless to prevent it. And there was little he hated more than feeling helpless.

  Even at this time of night, the sidewalks were far from empty. Times Square was lit up like high noon. He passed an after-hours jazz club, paused to listen to the notes that climbed the stairwell and spilled out the open door. Looking down at the dog, he debated, then shrugged, made a cluck-cluck sound to Leroy, and they went through the doorway and down the stairs.

  Inside, a three-piece jazz combo played to a packed house. Bass, piano, and drums oozed smooth, cool jazz. Fronting the combo, a slender, exotic-looking woman in a red-flowered sarong was scat singing, her voice climbing up and down the scale, improvised nonsense syllables tripping from ruby-red lips.

  Nobody gave Leroy a second glance. Rob found a seat at the bar, ordered a beer, and sat nursing it while he absorbed the music. Of its own volition, his foot began tapping. He couldn’t help it. He’d grown up on Motown and the Beatles, had never heard of scat singing until his freshman year at Berklee. There, he’d been introduced to jazz, and he’d fallen instantly in love with its complexity, its asymmetry, its unpredictability. With jazz, you never knew what was coming next. It wasn’t a style of music that he wrote or played; for all his skill and experience, he still didn’t consider himself a good enough musician to tackle jazz. But it had influenced his writing, strongly enough so that every so often, you could hear that influence in a chord progression or a series of notes that flew from his brain to his hand to the strings of his guitar.