Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
Angie and Todd and their girls lived in a rambling Victorian on a large corner lot in town. It was surrounded by a wrought iron fence, and the interior was all crown molding, drafty windows, and original fixtures. When they were considering buying it twelve years ago, Kyle had pointed out to Todd the threat of ongoing maintenance issues with such a big old house. He still remembered Todd’s response: Yeah, I know. But she has her heart set on it. Kyle said no more about it. He’d also been a man who liked to give his wife what she most wanted when he could. There was no feeling like it.
He drove straight to their place, hoping Angie was done with her hair clients for the day. When he pulled up, her minivan was there, as well as Todd’s car. It was almost four o’clock, so the kids might be home too. He considered delaying, calling first and coming back later, but he couldn’t wait.
Todd answered the door and pulled his chin back in surprise before his round ruddy face broke into a genuine smile. “Hey, man, good to see you,” he said, offering a hand.
“You too.”
“Come in, come in.” Todd stepped back, waving Kyle inside. He was wearing his insurance office clothes, chinos and a sweater.
Kyle followed him into the living room, with its creaky dark wood floors and large window seat.
“That was a fun scrimmage last weekend,” Todd said. “The boys didn’t look half bad.”
“They’re getting there,” Kyle said. “Thanks for coming. Sorry I didn’t get much of a chance to catch up with you afterward, but I saw the girls from a distance.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe how big they are.”
“Yeah. Blink of an eye, you know?” Todd’s face reddened then, and he glanced down, likely thinking that Kyle did know, but he also didn’t know. He knew how fast kids grew, but his hadn’t lived to be as old as Todd’s. “Can I get you something?” Todd asked, nodding toward the kitchen.
“No, thanks.” Kyle paused. “I hope it’s not a bad time, but I think I really need to talk to Angie.”
He expected Todd to ask if something was wrong or what Kyle wanted with his wife. But after giving Kyle a level look, Todd just nodded. “I’m sure you do.” Like he’d almost been expecting Kyle to show up on their doorstep with questions. “And this isn’t a bad time. Angie’s upstairs. I’ll let her know you’re here, and then I’ll go pick up the girls from gymnastics.” He turned for the stairs.
“Todd?”
“Yeah?”
Kyle looked at him, a man he would never have known if it wasn’t for their wives. He’d been prepared to put up with whoever Casey’s closest friend picked for a husband, knowing there was no way around it, they were going to be involved in each other’s lives whether he liked the guy or not. So he’d been only relieved when Angie had married a good guy like Todd. Kyle reached up to spin his cap around. “I just wanted to say sorry, for the way I left.” He gestured toward the backyard. “We had just started building that little vegetable garden for Angie, and I left you hanging.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Todd said, leaning in and lowering his voice. “It gave me an excuse to put the whole thing on hold, and by the fall she forgot she wanted it.” He shook his head. “I really didn’t want to deal with a fucking vegetable garden in the first place.”
Kyle laughed.
“I’ll get Ang,” Todd said, heading upstairs.
While he waited Kyle tried not to let his gaze rest in any one spot for too long, afraid of conjuring up memories. He hadn’t been back in his own house on River Road, but this felt like coming close to it. He’d spent a lot of happy time here. Todd and Angie’s girls were two years apart, and Charlie had fallen right between them. They all used to spend so much time together, the running joke had been that, despite not having siblings, Charlie was going to develop a middle-child complex. Kyle let his eyes wander to the mantel and, as he’d figured, the photo was still there. The large one of Morgan, Maddie, and Charlie from seven years ago. They’d made a human pyramid on the McCrays’ front lawn, Morgan and Charlie on the ground with Maddie balancing on top. It had been Charlie’s sixth birthday.
When Kyle turned away from the photo, because that was enough of that, Angie was standing there. She wore leggings under a long pullover, her hair cinched back, looking much like she did in high school. They’d gotten off to a tenuous start, Kyle and Angie. She’d been aloof for a while, slow to engage, observing him from a little distance. But it hadn’t taken him long to realize Angie was just protective of Casey. She was around when Casey lost her dad, and while the Higginses were adjusting to Wyatt’s wheelchair, and she didn’t want her best friend to experience any more pain. Eventually she warmed up to him. He’d asked her once, many years ago, what had finally won her over. It was the way you were after her mom died , Angie had said. Young as you were, you didn’t even hesitate to go all in with her, and Wyatt. I figured you had to be the real deal.
She crossed her arms. “What can I do for you, Kyle?”
He briefly considered easing into it— How are the girls? Or Remember the time…— but Angie had a strong radar for bullshit, and given the wariness in her eyes, she already suspected why he was there. So he got right to it. “I know you’re pissed off at me for leaving, and I don’t blame you for that. But I’m hoping you’re the one person around here who’s willing to be honest with me about something.”
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth.
“Angie, what happened to Casey after I left?” The question was no longer if something had happened. About that much he was certain.
Her eyes closed, and she released a long sigh.
“My dad won’t talk to me,” Kyle said. “Neither will Wyatt. If I have to ask around town I will, but I’d rather hear the plain truth from you. Please, Angie. I need to know.”
She looked out her living room window, lips mashed together while she worked through some silent debate. “All right,” she finally said. “But this will take a little while. So let’s have a seat.”
She led him to their cheery kitchen nook, set two glasses of water on the table, and they sat across from each other. The house was silent, and Kyle realized Todd must have made a stealthy exit at some point. Angie clasped her hands together on the table and took a deep breath. Then, in a calm and steady voice, she started talking.
“After you left, Casey seemed okay for a while. At least, as okay as she’d been since Charlie…”
Kyle nodded in understanding. Okay was a relative term, and after losing a child there was a different measuring stick.
“But then she started withdrawing, from everything. It was hard to get her to respond to calls or texts, she quit going to meetings with Coach, stopped visiting Danny or having him at the house. We found out she stopped tutoring and working at the camp for kids with disabilities. Wyatt said she was hardly eating anything, and it didn’t look like she was sleeping much. I tried nagging her to talk to someone, a therapist, but she refused.” When Angie paused for a sip of water, Kyle noticed a slight wobble in her hand.
He tried to stay in the moment, not think about where this was going, but his sense of dread was building. Those were the things that had kept Casey going after losing Charlie—teaching and the hockey program, being around the kids, her volunteer work. Kyle remembered her piling so much on her plate it felt like she was never home, which was the only place he wanted to be.
“So we were worried,” Angie said. “But then the first day of school was coming up, and she was looking forward to it. She redecorated her classroom, worked on new lesson plans. She even agreed to come here for dinner that night, with your dad and Wyatt…” Angie was looking at Kyle, but her eyes were unfocused, like she was more looking through him while she recalled that night.
Kyle was recalling that night too. He specifically remembered it because it was the day Casey stopped responding to his texts. He’d sent one that afternoon since it was the first day of school. After leaving Potsdam he’d sent her occasional one-word texts, always the same thing: Okay? And she always answered: Okay. Until that day. He knew she got the text—he saw the three blinking dots—but she never responded. So he’d spent that evening in a seedy bar on Chicago’s South Side, doing shots and chasing them with beers. After enough alcohol he’d gone looking for a fight and found one. Which is what had brought him to a seedy bar on the South Side in the first place. He’d done a lot of that the first year after leaving home. When the internal pain became more than he could bear, he’d look to off-load a bit of it on someone else.
“The night went well,” Angie said. “She had more energy than usual, she was more engaged. She hung out with the girls, we told old stories, had a few laughs…” Her head shook in wonder. “When she left that night, I felt reassured.”
Kyle curled his hands into fists against the thighs of his jeans. Whatever it was, they were getting to it.
“When they got home,” Angie said, “Casey asked Wyatt to stay up for a little while, have a beer with her. They talked for a long time, mostly about their parents. He said it was really nice, and when they said good night she gave him a hug. I guess Wyatt was almost to the shop when he got a really bad feeling. He went back into the house and called for her, but she didn’t answer. She wasn’t downstairs anywhere, so he yelled upstairs several times and got no response.”
While he listened to Angie, something was tugging at Kyle’s memory. Like another of those puzzle pieces was trying to present itself. Something he’d heard or seen…
“When Casey wouldn’t answer him, Wyatt pulled himself up the stairs to the bathroom. I still don’t know how he did it, but he broke down that door.”
His breathing went ragged. Wyatt had dragged himself up the staircase, thrown himself against a door, afraid of what his sister was doing on the other side. What had she been doing? Kyle needed a minute…
But Angie kept going, like she knew they just had to push through this. “Wyatt found Casey on the bathroom floor. She had cut her left wrist with a razor blade—”
The missing puzzle piece crystallized. The scar. The scar Kyle had noticed Thanksgiving night.
“—and she was trying to cut the right one. But she was weak, because of the blood she was losing…”
She stopped when Kyle dropped his head and gripped the edge of the table as hard as he could. He needed to hold on to something solid, so he could push back against the visual. Casey lying in a pool of blood, the life trying to drain out of a wound she’d sliced into her own arm.
Yet he didn’t feel absolute shock. Had he sensed this, on some level, since he saw the scar? How the fuck else did someone even get that particular scar. This had been the inevitable explanation, the one he’d asked Dad and Wyatt for, the one he’d compelled Angie to give him, all while denying it to himself. But Kyle was well acquainted with the power people had to fool themselves in the name of self-preservation. He’d done it countless times in the days after Charlie died, for the split second when he woke in the mornings before he remembered all over again. And he’d done it two and a half years ago, when he told himself Casey would be better off without him. But three months after he left she tried to kill herself.
To Angie’s credit, even though she had to feel the table quaking beneath her arms, she didn’t pull back in fear, or tell Kyle to let go, or reach out and touch him. She did exactly what he needed her to do. She sat with him while he rode it out. When he loosened his grip on the table she knew he was ready to hear the rest.
“Wyatt called nine-one-one and wrapped her arm, put pressure on it until the ambulance got there. The doctors said he saved her life. They put her on a psych hold so they could do an evaluation, figure out how much of a danger she was to herself. She refused to see any of us the first few days she was in the hospital. Then she asked Wyatt, Danny, and me to come in for a session with her and one of the therapists. When we got there, Casey was calm, collected. She thanked us for coming, apologized over and over again for what she’d put us through.”
Kyle let his hands fall into his lap, his breathing settling a bit. They were past the worst of it.
“She and the therapist had drawn up a safety contract. Casey named the three of us as her support team, which meant that she was accountable to us. She promised to alert us right away if she started to have those thoughts again. She promised to go to therapy as long as the counselor deemed it necessary, she even went to group therapy at the psychiatric center in Ogdensburg for a few months. She agreed to keep a written calendar and check in with us every day… You know how hard that had to be for her, letting other people basically control her life for a while. But she wanted to come home, so she agreed to all of it.” Angie paused to drain the last of her water. “Wyatt asked her how we were supposed to be sure she wouldn’t just try again. She broke down then, cried, and said she hadn’t thought about what it would do to us, but especially to Wyatt. She said scaring him like that was one of the worst things she’d done in her life, and she never wanted to do it again. So we signed the contract. She had one condition though. She made each of us promise not to contact you. We were not to tell you what happened. None of us wanted to go along with that, but she wouldn’t change her mind.”
Kyle braced an elbow on the table and let his head fall against his hand.
“You probably want to be angry with your dad and Wyatt for not calling you,” Angie said. “But they had no choice. And she lived up to her end of the deal. Nothing like that has ever happened again.”
He gave her a weary nod.
“There’s one other thing you really need to know, Kyle. She talked about something else in that session. She told us she knew we would want to blame you for what she did, but there were things we didn’t know. She said you guys couldn’t make it work because of her, that you left because of her. She said it was all her fault.”
Kyle sat there, trying to pin down his reaction to those words—surprise, confusion, sorrow. And he stayed that way for a long time. It wasn’t until the tears dripped from his chin that he realized he was crying.