The Miles Between Us (15 page)

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 entryway 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, i
n 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 b
etrayal 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 poison, 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.

He took a sip of beer, irritated by the itch the music
spawned inside him. Why now, with Casey falling apart, his marriage in crisis, his life in limbo, were his insides suddenly screaming at him to get back up on the stage he thought he’d left behind forever?

It wasn’t
an option. Not even worth considering. Going back onstage meant going back on the road. He was a family man now, with a wife, two kids, a big house in a small town. He drove a frigging Ford Explorer, for the love of Mike. He hadn’t bothered to replace the Porsche after Paige totaled it. What was the point, when he couldn’t even fit his growing family in it? His days of cruising the freeways, stick shift in hand and wind threading fingers through his hair, were over. He was rapidly approaching forty, far too old to play rock star. Time and the world had moved on, had left him sitting on his ass in the dust. Nobody wanted to hear the kind of music he wrote; he and Casey were Edsels in a Lexus world. It was the kids, the teenagers and the twenty-somethings, who bought record albums and concert tickets. Those kids wanted to hear songs about love, about sex. He was writing songs about growing older. While he’d been otherwise occupied with the business of living, his brand, his style, his music, had become obsolete.

The very idea of going back out there was ludicrous.

Besides, how would he raise the issue with his wife, who already had enough catastrophe happening in her life?
Guess what, honey, you’ll never believe what happened the other day. I played an impromptu concert for thirty people. Did you know I have fans? Real, live fans who want to see me back in front of the footlights? And the weirdest thing is that for those few short minutes while I was playing, I was able to breathe again, for the first time in so long I can’t remember when I last breathed.

She would laugh at him
. And if she didn’t laugh at him, she would list all those reasons why it wasn’t feasible: the house, the kids, the Ford Explorer. His Two Dreamers Records, the goddamn sheep ranch she was building in their back yard.

The
n, there was the other piece of the pie he had to consider:  this strange, dark place where his wife was living. The glass bubble she’d surrounded herself with, the one nobody could breach. Her poor, broken heart that even he couldn’t mend. How could he come to her, confide in her about what amounted to little more than growing pains, when her own pain was so much bigger than his?

Sacrifice
. Wasn’t that what love and marriage were really about? Sacrificing your needs, subjugating your desires, in favor of the needs and desires of your loved one? That was the kind of man he was, the kind who would lay down his life for the woman he loved. Hell, that was the kind of woman she was, the kind a besotted man would gladly die for. And the road ran both ways, thanks to that damned invisible cord that connected them. Even before their long-time friendship had ripened into something more, she would have walked through fire for him.

So it wasn’t like he had a choice
. This woman who was so obsessed with the thought of having another baby, this woman who was so preoccupied with her pain that some days, she barely remembered he existed, was still the woman he’d married, the woman he couldn’t breathe without. She might have been swallowed by grief, but Casey was still in there somewhere, locked inside that stranger who slept in his bed. Eventually, she would heal, and then she would come back to him fully. Even if she didn’t, he would wait for her. It was the way he was made. He would always wait for her. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else. He couldn’t imagine his life without her.

In the meantime, he’d continue to do what he’d recommended to Luther
: pull himself up by the bootstraps and keep on keeping on.

And rid himself, once and for all, of any asinine ideas about going back onstage.

* * *

When he got back,
Casey was sitting on the couch in the dark, staring at the muted television. He closed the door quietly and bent to take off Leroy’s harness. She looked up from the television and their eyes met, but neither of them spoke. Rob unclipped the harness, swept his hand down the dog’s back, from his ears to the base of his tail, then clapped him gently on the rump. “Go on, buddy,” he said. “Time for bed.”

H
e cracked open the door to Paige and Emma’s room, and Leroy squeezed through. Walking barefoot to the kitchen, he took a couple of beers from the fridge. He popped the caps, tossed them in the trash, then carried the bottles to the couch and eased down beside his wife. Silently handing her a bottle, he propped his feet on the coffee table. “So,” he said, and took a long, cold swig of Heineken. “Are we talking about this, or what?”

The flickering
light from the television screen lent a nightmarish cast to her face. With her free hand, she swiped furiously at a tear. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He leaned his head back against the couch
. On the silent TV screen, a black-and-white Lucy, her wayward curls done up in a checkered kerchief, was wailing, face scrunched up dramatically, while a monochromatic Ricky Ricardo rolled his eyes and muttered what was undoubtedly a string of incomprehensible Spanish.

“Seems to me,” Rob said,
running his thumb around the rim of the beer bottle, “that you’ve been spending an awful lot of time lately being sorry.”

She studied him mutely
. Then said, “This is not who I want to be.”

“Who do you want to be?”

“Me,” she said. “I want to be me! Whoever the hell that is.”

He took another sip of beer
. “I had high hopes for tonight.”

“
Yes. So did I.”

“
Every morning,” he said, “I wake up and I can’t wait to see your face. You’re the reason I get out of bed every day. Even in sleep, you’re the bright, shiny thing my world revolves around. The glue that holds me together. That holds this entire family together.”

“I’m not holding much together right now
. That’s what you’re saying.”

“No,” he said bluntly. “
You’re not. You’re coming unglued. And the more you come unglued, the more our family falls apart. There’s only so much I can do. I can try. I
am
trying. But I don’t have the magic that’s inside you. That’s something only you have. I depend on that magic to always be there, and without it, I don’t know what to do.”

“Just love me
, Flash. That’s all I ask.”

He slammed the beer bottle down on the coffee table
. “Don’t you ever,
ever
doubt my feelings for you! You have been the most significant person in my entire adult life. The other half of me. The goddamn air that I breathe!”

“
Damn it, Rob, be quiet! You’ll wake the girls.”

“I don’t understand,” he said in a stage whisper
. “I don’t understand what happened here tonight. I don’t get how something so right could go so wrong, so fast.”

She set down
her untouched beer, stood and crossed her arms. Walking to the window, she drew the curtain aside and gazed out at the lights of Manhattan. “I’m afraid,” she said, her back to him. “I’m afraid all the time. I’m afraid when I wake up in the morning and I’m afraid when I fall asleep at night, and I’m afraid all of the time in between.”

I Love Lucy
segued into a commercial for the Clapper.
Clap on. Clap off
.

Casey turned around,
slender arms still crossed over her chest. “I don’t know what to do about it,” she said. “I don’t know where to put it. It’s something new to me, this fear.” She reached a hand up, scraped her hair back from her face. “No, that’s not right,” she said. “What’s new to me isn’t the fear. It’s being controlled by the fear. No matter what happened to me in the past, no matter how scary life got, I always dealt with it.” She paused, took a breath. “But I’m not dealing anymore. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why. I just know that I’m clinging to what’s solid and familiar to me. The things that I believe are good and right and true. Because all the rest of it is a dark and murky place, a drop-off-the-face-of-the-earth, there-lie-monsters kind of place.”

He squared his jaw
. “Great. So where does that leave us?”

“I’m trying to keep it from affecting us.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re not doing such a hot job of that.”

“You don’t understand.”

“No,” he said, “you’re the one who doesn’t understand.” He got up from the couch, crossed the room, and took her face between his hands. “You think you’re afraid?” His thumb gently rubbed at the soft skin of her cheek. “Try walking in my shoes. I waited sixteen years for you, and now that I finally have you, I can feel you pulling away from me, a little more each day. It scares the bejesus out of me. It would almost be better if you just ripped off the Band-Aid in one fell swoop. Because this step-by-step bullshit is making my head explode.”

Disappointment clouded her eyes
. “You have it all wrong, MacKenzie. As usual, you’re completely and utterly missing the point.”

“Oh?” he said
. “And just how am I doing that?”

“You’re missing the fact that you
are the most solid and familiar thing in my universe.”

“Look, I’m a patient man, but—”

“Patient?
Patient?
You’re hot-headed, quick to jump to conclusions, jackass stubborn, and prone to tantrums when you don’t get your way. I’m not sure how you equate any of that with patience. Even so, you’re still my happy place.”

“
Yeah? Well, I’m not feeling very happy right now.”