Casualties (26 page)

“Why do I have the feeling that you won't let me alone until I say yes?”

“Because it's true.”

The thought of riding with an irritated, restless Ruth dissolved the rest of Casey's resistance. “All right.” He shoved open his door so they could switch seats. “If we're stopped again, that's it. You're on your own.”

Ruth glanced at Casey, his head lolling against the window, apparently oblivious to the sunlight streaking through the windows or the sweat gathering on his skin beneath the rims of his sunglasses. He'd dropped into sleep within minutes of giving her the wheel, as if he were trying to get away from the mess he'd gotten himself into the only way he could.

She hit the accelerator but the landscape seemed to push back. Sky empty of clouds or variation of any kind stretched endlessly over a road that seemed to reproduce itself every twenty miles. The same median of yellowed grass coursed through the middle; on either side stretched fields of the same color, some cordoned off into patches by small lines of trees. Green highway signs were the only way she could gauge their progress, if it could be called progress. A hundred miles to Omaha. She'd never been to Omaha, had no desire to go, yet here she was racing toward the city as if by driving fast enough, she could escape the fumes of self-disgust triggered by her short conversation with Terri.

Terri hadn't said anything about the flash drive or the
contractors on the phone. Maybe she'd given up on Ruth, which should have been a relief but somehow wasn't. Instead, Terri had just asked her to call Neal and her family. She'd sighed in a way that suggested she wasn't even sure that Ruth could be counted upon to do this.

Ruth looked again at Casey, half wishing he'd wake up and distract her but he snored on, leaving her with the echo of Terri's sigh and her own shame when she pictured her family. She imagined her grandmother's gentle eyes, surrounded by wrinkles of age and worry. Kevin would hide his concern as well as he could, but he would be checking the answering machine at his shop to see if she'd returned any of his calls.

Mom, c'mon. It's home.

There was a sensation in her chest like a balloon inflating, pushing against her heart, her ribs. Her fingers cramped. She flexed them and glanced at Casey again to see if he was surfacing, but his jaw remained slack and his eyes closed.

Damn him. Damn them all. If she talked to them, they would tell her to come home, to bring Robbie's ashes so they could say good-bye.
Not yet. Please, not yet.

Ruth started to pull out to pass the pickup in front of her, but a horn blasted as an RV appeared suddenly behind her. She jerked the wheel to get back into her lane.

“What are you doing?” Casey's voice was the sharp, startled bark of the newly awakened.

“Driving.” The sound of her own voice steadied her.

“Keep your eyes on the road. Where are we, anyway?” Casey rubbed his eyes underneath his sunglasses so they tipped cockeyed across his face.

“We're somewhere past the middle of Nebraska heading for the middle of nowhere,” she told him. Yes, this was better. Talk like this kept her in the present. They had miles to go before she had to make any calls, any decisions. The tightness in her chest began to ease.

“What the fuck is that on the radio?”

Ruth had not realized it was even on.

“Jesus, let me do it.” He leaned forward and started pushing the tuner. “Don't know why I bother, you hate anything good anyway.”

“That's not true.”

“Okay, what's your favorite song? I don't mean that crap you made me listen to before. What music did you make out to when you were a kid?”

“The Allman Brothers. ‘Melissa.'” Ruth said it without hesitation, and when he laughed, she felt her cheeks warm.

“Look at that, you're turning red,” Casey said. He fiddled more with the tuner. “So, Ruth, what did you do for fun when you were a kid?”

She thought about changing the subject but couldn't think of anything new to say. “There wasn't much to do. It was winter nine months out of the year.”

“What do you remember about Jersey? Ever go to the shore?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah? Where did you go?”

“I forget the name of the beach. But I remember the waves seemed huge.”

Once, in the days before her mother left, a wave had knocked Ruth down, but before she could panic, her father swept her up and lifted her to his chest. Her mother wrapped a towel around her and Ruth was enclosed by her parents and filled with a bliss she could recall even now, forty years later. Lost in the memory, she inhaled deeply, half expecting the tang of salt, sweat, and baby oil. Instead she smelled spent coffee cups and sweat. Without looking, she sensed Casey eyeing her from the passenger seat.

“They probably weren't that big; I was pretty small,” she said. “Hey, is there any water left?”

Casey reached down between his legs into a plastic sack and pulled out a full bottle.

“When did you leave Jersey?”

Ruth couldn't tell if he was really interested or just filling time. She wasn't sure it mattered. “We moved when I was nine and my brother was seven. My father got sick. Cancer. We went to live with my grandparents. My father died. Then my mother left.” Ruth tilted the bottle of water to her lips and swallowed.

A minute passed. Ruth turned to Casey and saw him staring straight ahead, as if seeing another landscape entirely. “Where'd she go?”

“Back to New Jersey at first, then New York. She was supposed to get a job, then find a place for us all to live.” She wanted to stop talking, but before she could think of a way to derail his questions, he asked the very one she'd asked her mother when she finally tracked her down.

“Why didn't she come back?” Casey mumbled, as if he weren't sure he wanted to know. He was staring down at the backs of his hands as if he'd found something he didn't like in the tanned skin and ridged knuckles.

“She got married again. Then again. It was never the right time.” That was all he needed to know. Ruth took another slug from the water bottle.

The truth was harsher. “The longer I was gone, the easier it was to stay away,” Stella had finally told her when Ruth found her twenty-six years later in Boynton Beach, Florida. Her mother had stared at her over the top of a gin and tonic and said those exact words. She'd started out defensively, leaning back into the corner of her shabby brocade sofa in the darkened condo: she cared so much about Ruth and Kevin; she would sacrifice rather than uproot them; her second and third husbands had not wanted more children. Then came the truth: just easier.

“I did you a favor,” Stella had said, her voice as cold as the cubes in her gin. “Look how you turned out.”

Now Ruth shook her head. “Let's talk about something else.”

Casey reached into the backseat and wrestled a can of Coke out of a bag. “We have a lot in common, don't we?”

“What?”

Still holding the can, he wiggled two fingers. “Both of us were born in New Jersey and both of us were raised by old people.” He ripped the tab off the top, sending a froth of brown down the front of his Hawaiian print shirt, the same one he'd worn the day they left.

Ruth glanced sideways at Casey while he mopped up the mess, swearing under his breath. Sure. Twins under the skin. Ruth shook her head. He was obviously intelligent, but he apparently wanted to obscure that most of the time. Right now, he was hiding behind a lot of questions he kept throwing at her like darts. She didn't want to talk about herself anymore.

“Who's the little girl in the picture?” Ruth asked, looking back at the road. The shifting in the passenger seat ceased.

“What picture?”

The sudden wariness in his tone startled Ruth. “The one in your wallet,” she said, carefully.

“What were you doing with my wallet?”

“I needed money to pay for that peanut butter you ate last night.”

He went quiet and stared out the passenger window. Ruth thought he was through talking, but he cleared his throat. “That girl, she's Mike's daughter, the guy I told you about. I'm going to see her, give her something that belongs to her.”

Ruth glanced sideways again. “Must be something pretty important if you have to deliver it in person.”

Casey grunted.

“She looks pretty young. Does she know you're coming? Or maybe her mother?”

Casey shook his head.

“Well, kids like surprises, they say.” That was a lie. She'd always hated surprises, especially when she was young.

“It's an old picture.”

Ruth was about to say something about surprises being worse when you're older, but Casey cut her off. “You've driven over two hundred miles. My turn.”

“I'm fine.” She didn't want to stop.

“I don't care. Pull over, up there.” He pointed to a turnoff about two hundred feet ahead. “It's my turn.”

She could not get him to start talking again after he started driving. The withdrawal was sudden and complete; it stung. Ruth found a news channel on the radio and turned it up loud to goad him. But he didn't seem to notice. She might as well have been alone.

—

The sun lowered in the sky behind them, but Casey was too busy counting the miles to Omaha to notice. Only ten more to go. They'd agreed to stop then, anywhere they could find. He was almost sorry he'd made Ruth let him drive. His back was stiff, his stump throbbed, and the pain in his head winched tighter. The sides of the Jaguar seemed to be closing in on him, but he knew some of that was his fault.

My daughter.
The words were right on the tip of his tongue when Ruth asked about the photograph. He had no right to say them, was the way he looked at it. He'd left all his rights behind him, buried in the bits and pieces of plans he'd dared to make before he'd fucked it all up. She'd been close to five when he left. She was seventeen going on eighteen now, old enough to hate him the way Ruth obviously hated the mother who'd walked out on her. If he'd told her the truth, she would have wanted to know why he left, why he never went back, and none of his answers were good enough.

Her name, Emily, filled his mouth. He wanted to say it out loud, but when he opened his lips what came out was a lie. An easy lie to say but a hard one to swallow. He'd made her Mike's. Even dead, Mike ended up with the best of him.

Damn Ruth, hitting every nerve with her questions, like a kid running a stick along a fence just to hear the noise. His life was none of her business. He knew why he'd lied about Mike being Emily's father. He didn't want Ruth to know he was no better than the mother who'd walked out on her. He was a fucking liar and a coward. One more reason to get the hell out of this arrangement. He needed to pass Ruth to someone else.

“Pull over, there's a restroom up ahead. I can't wait for the next town,” Ruth said.

Casey said nothing as he guided the car into the rest stop and parked.

“Be right back.” The door slammed shut behind her.

He saw her phone on the console between the two seats. He turned it on and, keeping watch on the ladies' room entrance, found the list of her most recent calls. There was Terri, her assistant. Several earlier calls were from Robbie. Casey hesitated. Poor kid. Then, amid these and others with no names, he saw
Neal
over and over again. Bingo. Casey pulled his own phone out of his pocket and punched in the phone number attached to
Neal
. Just as he finished, he looked up to see Ruth emerging from the bathroom.

“My turn,” he told her, pushing the car door open.

“Why didn't you get out when I did?” She sounded irritated.

“Relax, Ruth, it's not as if we're on any kind of schedule.”

As he limped over to the low brick building, he saw her stretch her legs, then lean first to one side and then to the other like a tree bending in a strong breeze. Once he was inside, he called Neal's number. As the ringtone filled his ear, he looked over his shoulder and then chided himself; Ruth wouldn't hear him in here.

“Neal Treadwell.” The voice on the other end of the phone set Casey's teeth on edge. The guy sounded like a pilot or a high-level cop, all business, prepared to go either way—polite to someone higher up, curt to someone wasting his time. Casey started to speak and then the phone beeped.
Fucking voice mail
, Casey thought.
Arrogant son of a bitch doesn't even bother with any kind of message, just says his name like it's supposed to mean something all by itself.

“You don't know me but I think you know Ruth Nolan,” Casey began. Damn, he hadn't thought through what he was going to say. “Listen, I've tried to help her, but she's got more going on than I can deal with.”

A plan, Casey thought desperately. He needed a plan.

“We're headed toward Chicago and should be there late tomorrow or the next day. Call me back and leave a message telling me where you want to meet her and I'll make sure she's there.”

He stopped and tried to think about what else to say. “This is no joke. If you know her, you know she's been through a lot. I've done my best, but it's time for someone else to take over.”

He stopped again and then began to worry that the voice mail would cut him off before he finished. “That's it. Call this number and leave a message about Chicago and where to meet you. I'll make sure she gets there.”