Flirting With Pete: A Novel (16 page)

Casey heard the same old anger. Back at the start, they had talked about bad things happening to good people. Joyce hadn’t accepted it then, any more than she was accepting it now.

“Our chances of winning aren’t good,” Joyce went on. “My lawyer said it when I first hired him, and he said it again at the end of the hearing. There were things that the judge did and questions he asked that didn’t bode well for our cause. So what am I going to do? What if he rules against us? I mean, this doesn’t have to be the end. We could take the case to an appeals court. But my lawyer won’t do that. He says we have to abide by the judge’s decision now, and maybe he’s right. There are times when I feel so
sick
of all this that I just want it over. Then I get a second wind and I want to win; I just
do
.”

“If you do win, what then?”

“I’ll have proven something. I’ll be able to put all this behind me and move on.”

“And if you don’t win?”

Joyce was slower in answering. “I don’t know. That’s what’s making me nervous. We keep talking about anger, you and me. But what do I do with the anger if there’s no one left to blame?”

Three client sessions later, Casey was still thinking of Joyce’s words. It had been easy to sustain anger while Connie had been alive; as long as he was living and breathing, he could pick up the phone, send her an e-mail or mail her a note, even pass her a message through an intermediary. Now that he was dead, those avenues were gone. And her anger?

Heading for the garden now, she couldn’t sustain it. She tried. She thought of moving the patio table and chairs to another spot, simply to do what
she
wanted. Three steps out from under the pergola, though, and she couldn’t think of a better spot for the table than where it already was.

The garden was a black hole when it came to negative thoughts, sucking them right in, making them vanish.

The sky was overcast, the air more humid, but the place didn’t suffer for the absence of sun. If anything, the diffuse light gave it a plusher feel. The trees were delineated from each other by color, rather than the texture of their boughs. The flowers were muted, the stones softer.

The instant she unclipped her hair from the wide barrette that had kept it contained, it began to curl and swell. Combing her fingers through sped the process. She lifted the mass and closed her eyes, only to open them seconds later when, with the slide of the screen door and the patter of footsteps, Meg emerged from the house. She carried a bottle of wine and a plate filled with mini skewers of grilled beef and veggies. Casey was wondering how she was going to make a dent in the pile when company arrived to help.

“Just took a chance you’d be here,” Brianna explained gaily as she quickly dug in. “I could get used to this.”

Casey was thinking she could, too.

“So what’s it like, practicing where he practiced?” Brianna asked.

Setting a cleaned skewer aside, Casey sat back in the patio chair with her wine and tried to process her feelings. “Very, very weird. I kept thinking, What are you
doing
here, Casey? He wrote at this desk. He talked on this phone. The ideas that came out of this office are read all over the world. And now all that’s left here is little old me.”

“What’s wrong with little old you?”

“I can’t begin to do what he did. I identified with my one-o’clock client. She’s a really bright, really successful entrepreneur— owns three upscale restaurants that have absolutely taken off— but she suffers from a severe impostor complex.”

“What’s it from?”

“Her father owned a deli. Her mother kept house. They thought she was throwing her life away going to culinary school. They warned her against buying the first restaurant, said she was getting in over her head when she opened the second, and when she opened the third, they took her out of their will.”

“Why?”

“They said that she was reckless and that they didn’t want her squandering their hard-earned savings. So here she is, solidly in the black, doing better each year, and still she feels like those restaurants are a deck of cards on the verge of collapse. Her parents see her that way. It’s been ingrained in her.”

“But that’s not your story. Connie never told you you weren’t any good.”

“Not in words,” Casey said, rubbing the rim of the wineglass against her lips.

“Would he have left you this place, knowing you’d practice here, if he thought you were a lousy therapist?”

Casey shrugged. She had no idea what Connie had thought about her, good
or
bad.

“You have a
great
practice, Casey. Joy and I took the easy way out, going in-house.” Joy worked for the state, Brianna for a rehab center.

“I wouldn’t call what you do easy.”

“But we don’t have to worry about getting clients. They’re always there. You
do
have to worry, and look at the practice you’ve built. Give me a rundown on today’s list.”

Casey could count on Brianna to boost her morale. “Two phobias, the low self-esteem, three adjustment disorders, and one panic attack.”

“Yours or hers?”

“Hers. She couldn’t find the townhouse. She panics when things don’t fall just perfectly into place, and begins to imagine all sorts of things.”

“Like?”

“Her husband’s voice. He has abused her verbally for so many years that she actually hears him yelling at her. It sends her into a tizzy.”

“Has she reached the stage where she knows that he isn’t really there?” Brianna asked.

“Intellectually, yes. Emotionally, no. There are times when she’s paralyzed by it.”

“Should she leave him?”

“Yes— if the issue were simply her own personal development. But it’s more complex than that. They have four children still at home, and the only career she knows is being a homemaker. She considers him her employer. If she quits, where does she go, what does she do, what happens to the kids? No, she won’t leave him. The best I can do is to help her gain perspective— stand back, evaluate what she does well, learn to deal with the things that he says. She really does hear his voice.”

Brianna was suspiciously silent. She sipped her wine, looked momentarily pensive. Then, quietly, she asked, “How’s your mom?”

Casey sent her a sidelong glance. “Speaking of hearing a voice.”

“Do you still?”

“In my way.”

“Casey,” Brianna scolded softly.

“I know. If she’s in the persistent vegetative state that the doctors claim, she doesn’t hear, doesn’t think, doesn’t know. But I feel her there, Bria. I swear I do. I know what she’s thinking.”

“Is there any improvement?”

“She had another seizure today. The doctor says she’s failing.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I should be relieved. What she’s living can’t be called a life.”

“So what
are
you feeling?”

“If she’s failing, I know it’s for the best. I don’t cry anymore. After three years, I’m all cried out. I don’t even start shaking like I did then, I’m so used to seeing her this way.”

“So what are you feeling?” Brianna persisted.

“Devastated,” Casey said with a hand on the ache in her chest.

Over three painful years, Casey had learned that the best way to deal with the devastation was to fill her mind with other things. She was fine when she was with clients, when it was her job to feel
their
thoughts. She was fine when she was doing yoga, running, or playing with friends.

That evening, though, after Brianna left, she had only thoughts of Connie and
Flirting with Pete
for distraction. If the manuscript was part of a scavenger hunt, she was more than game.

She went through the den inch by inch. She didn’t find anything remotely related to the journal, but she did find Connie’s personal files— bank statements, canceled checks, income tax returns. They were in plastic bins in lower cabinets, neatly labeled and consecutively arranged. Sorting through, she learned that he wrote his checks by hand, that he paid his bills promptly, supported public radio and television, and gave large amounts of money each year to naturalist causes in Maine.

He had been born in Maine. He still had a
thing
for Maine. Casey bet that Little Falls was there, fictitious or not.

She sorted through those Maine receipts, hunting for a reference to the town. She sorted through brochures on which he had filled out applications for hikes, canoe trips, bird-watching expeditions, and mountain-climbing adventures. A few looked as though they had never been sent— actually, quite a few, some even with uncanceled checks stapled to the top. Others must have been sent, because there were letters confirming receipt. She read through them all. Nowhere was there any reference to Little Falls.

By the time she had put everything back in its place, she was too tired to return to the condo. With a client coming at eight the next morning, it didn’t make sense.

This time, she went straight to the guest bedroom. Connie was still right down the hall, but after going through his bills and realizing the size of the responsibility he had left her, she was feeling brash. After all, she reasoned, since she was the one— not some ghost— who would be paying those bills now, she had a right to bed down wherever she pleased.

She fell asleep thinking about safe, practical, physical things like heating, air-conditioning, roofers, house painters, and exterminators— but came awake at midnight with a start, sure that she had heard a noise. She sat up in bed and looked around. The room was lit by gaslights from the Court. She could see quite well.

She saw nothing.

Holding her breath, she listened. The city was sleeping, snoring softly outside her window. She didn’t hear anything in the room. She didn’t hear anything in the hall.

Telling herself that her imagination had gotten away from her while she slept, she lay back down and closed her eyes. Seconds later, though, she was up again, this time slipping out of bed. Pulling on the robe, she crept to the door and listened. She had left it half open, and half open it was.

Of course, that didn’t mean anything. Ghosts walked
through
doors.

But she didn’t believe in ghosts.

Slipping out into the hall, she held herself very still and listened. She heard a hum from somewhere deep in the house, but it was a mechanical sound, nothing eerie or odd. Tiptoeing to Connie’s door, she listened. And she did hear something. The sound was very soft. She couldn’t define it.

As always, the door was ajar. Without touching it, she peered inside, but she couldn’t see much.

She wasn’t going in. She wasn’t that brave. Assuring herself that there was a perfectly rational explanation for the sound she heard and that Meg would give it to her in the morning, she backed off. That was when she saw the eyes.

Casey didn’t linger. In a flash she returned to her own room and shut the door tight.

She had imagined the eyes. No psychosis here, simply the power of suggestion. Her neighbor had mentioned a ghost, so a ghost was what she saw. It was not a whole lot different, really, from carrying on a conversation with her mother. The doctors claimed that Caroline hadn’t talked in three years, and who was Casey to argue? If she heard a voice, she imagined it.

Of course, she heard Caroline’s voice because she wanted to hear it, which was not the case with a ghost.

So, was it the strangeness of the house that got her imagination going? Or the fact that the room at the end of the hall had been her father’s and a part of her did want him to be there, after he’d invited her into his house?

Very quietly, she got back in bed. She didn’t take off the robe—
she
wasn’t having any imaginary ghost see
her
in the nude— but lay on her back in the middle of the bed— lay very still with her hands laced at her waist and her eye on the door.

There was no movement. There was no sound. She watched and listened for an hour before finally falling asleep, but she slept uneasily, awakening often to listen and watch. When daylight finally arrived, she was feeling more perturbed at herself than anything else.

Taking a yellow singlet and shorts from her gym bag, she hurriedly pulled them on and stretched a scrunchie around her hair. She gave a moment’s thought to the night sounds she’d heard when she opened the door to her room— and she did glance at that narrow strip of darkness where Connie’s door was open. But she made it to the stairs without mishap. From there, it was a straight shot down, through the front hall, past Ruth’s paintings— keeping her eyes on the stairs— through the office, and out to the garden.

Emerging from under the pergola, she felt instant comfort. Dawn in the garden was fresh, even on another warm day. The air was sweet with… lilacs, she smelled lilacs. This scent drew her to a pair of bushes on her right. Lavish purple clusters in leafy green bouquets rose behind the cultivated flowers. She smiled, closed her eyes, savored the scent.

Minutes later, soothed by the flowers in a kind of spiritual foreplay, she staked out a spot in the garden’s wooded section and lowered herself to the ground. She had the routine down pat, fifteen minutes moving through the postures of the sun salutation, focusing on her breathing as much as she did on fluidity and stretch. She relaxed one part of her body after another, concentrated— really concentrated— on letting go of the tension brought on by scary little thoughts, like ghosts, bombing as a therapist in Connie’s office, and Caroline dying and leaving her alone in the world. Drawing positive energy into her system with each complete breath, she felt the release of tightness in her neck, her back, her belly and legs. When her mind began to wander, she dragged it right back. Again and again, she drew in deep belly breaths and exhaled slowly and completely.

She went through the cycle of poses three times, and when finished she felt infinitely more relaxed. As always, she saved the best for last. Using the trunk of the old chestnut for backup, she fit the top of her head to the ground, clasped her fingers behind it for support, and slowly lifted the rest of her body— hips, then legs, then feet— until she was perfectly balanced and still.