Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
By the time Kyle made it out to the middle school parking lot Casey was gone. He jumped in the pickup and caught up to her on Lawrence, which was empty this time on a frigid night, though he stayed back a safe distance. He wasn’t trying to alarm her or get her to pull over, he just wanted to catch her before she went inside the house. His plan was to stay calm while he asked his question, or, rather, explained what he needed from her. But he was determined.
He followed her when she made the left onto River Road, stayed behind her as she pulled into the driveway and around to the rear of the house. After they both cut the engines and stepped out of their trucks, she turned to face him with a weary sigh.
Kyle held up his hands. “I’m sorry, Casey. But you can’t do that to me.”
“Do what?”
“Dance with me like that,” he said. “Look at me the way you did. Tell me I should stay here, then announce you’re moving and walk away.”
“I thought you’d be happy to hear I think you should stay.”
“I was—until you said you were leaving.”
“I’m trying to do the right thing for both of us.”
“Well that sure as hell isn’t it.”
“Why is it so wrong that I want to leave?” she asked. “ You left.”
“Yeah, I did, and it was the worst decision I ever made.” His voice went hoarse at the end of that sentence.
Casey’s expression softened. “Where’s your jacket, Kyle? It’s freezing out here.” Her breath was a misty cloud in the cold air between them while she spoke, proving her point.
“I don’t care,” he said. “I want to talk about it.”
“Talk about what?”
“What happened to us,” he said. “I want to finally talk about what happened to us. It’s time to confront all of it, Casey.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Says the man who can’t set foot in the house he used to live in.”
His eyes floated above her, to the yellow house with black shutters. The one he’d lived in for half his life. She was right. The thought of going in there scared the shit out of him. He’d spent his happiest times in that house, been the absolute best version of himself. Stepping inside would be like realizing all over again how much he’d lost.
“Listen,” Casey said, her voice gentle but firm. “This isn’t doing either of us any good. It’s just too painful…”
He didn’t think he had the right to stop her when she started backing away from him, toward the house. She was refusing to face certain things, but so was he.
“Just go home,” she said. “I’ll see you later.” She turned, climbed the steps, and went inside.
Kyle stayed where he was, watched her through the window while she hung up her coat, pulled off her hat, moved to the sink for a glass of water. It hit him then that he’d stood in this same spot one night a long time ago, watching fifteen-year-old Casey cry, vowing to take it up with Brad Rentzler. And he’d watched her through this same window two years later, after he wrote her a foolish letter and she called him a fucking coward.
That made the decision for him. Maybe it was reaching back to the night that had started it all for them, maybe it was remembering that forcing his way in to get to her had worked out once before. Whatever it was, just as Casey turned off the light and headed down the hall while looking at her phone, he took the back stairs in two lunges, opened the door, and stepped inside his old kitchen.
It was dizzying, how overloaded his senses became within an instant. The smell hit him first, that familiar scent of clean laundry and trace of wood shavings from the shop. The soft ringing he heard when the door closed behind him was different, new, but it took only a second to realize it was one of Wyatt’s door harps. His eyes roamed over the kitchen and he was transported back in time. Even in the dim light coming from the hall he saw the same appliances, the same table and chairs against the wall, the butcher-block countertop he’d put in a decade ago…
At the sound of his entrance Casey had turned to stare at him, her mouth open in surprise, cell phone clutched in her hand. Star stood beside her, head cocked, like she wasn’t sure how to react to him being back in the house.
He took a deep breath to steady himself, then he looked beyond Casey, to the built-in hutch with the glass doors. He knew then it was the hutch he’d been most afraid of, the one filled with family photos and scrapbooks and souvenirs. But it wasn’t all those keepsakes that had kept Kyle from entering this house since he’d been back, it was the beautiful wooden box in the center. The one Wyatt had spent days and sleepless nights perfecting. He’d constructed it from a warm rich cherry, then sealed it in linseed oil and a topcoat that probably included a layer of his tears. Wyatt had gone to such painstaking effort to get it just right because it would hold his nephew’s ashes.
“Kyle, what are you doing?” Casey asked. He could hear the wariness in her voice.
He pulled his eyes from Charlie’s box. “I need you to say it.”
“Say what?”
“You’ve never said it, and I don’t think you ever would…” He paused, looked across the kitchen at the only woman he’d ever loved, asked himself if he really wanted to lose her forever. Then he reminded himself he’d lost her four years ago. “But if you want me out of your life, if you really want me to let go for good, I need you to tell me the truth.”
Her eyes grew and she swallowed. She looked as scared as he felt. “About what?”
He took several slow steps toward her, stopped close enough to reach out and touch her. “I need you to say out loud that what happened to Charlie was my fault.”
She initially froze. Then she blinked and her eyebrows twitched together. “What?”
Kyle nodded. “I need to hear you say it. Then I’ll know. I’ll know we’re truly done. There is no coming back from that.”
She started shaking her head.
“Say it.”
“No.”
“Just say it, Casey.”
“NO.”
Star let out a worried whine and started pacing the hall.
“How could it possibly have been your fault?” Casey asked. “You weren’t here.”
“But I should have been! I should have been here. I was supposed to come home early that day, you asked me to, but I was too nervous about leaving the garage—like it mattered if I was there.” His voice was getting louder, and he couldn’t help it. Once he’d lifted this lid there was no containing the emotion. “I was the one who was supposed to pick him up, take him home, and finish the goddamn roof. Then he never would have been in the lift by himself…” He paused to suck in air.
Casey held up a hand. “Kyle—”
“I let him help me the day before”—he ticked his sins off on his fingers—“I was the one who left the keys where he could find them, I left the paint can and brush up there—he wouldn’t have known how to operate the fucking lift if he hadn’t seen me do it. If I had just come home none of it would have happened.” He realized he was crying and dragged a wet cheek across each shoulder of his shirt.
“My God,” Casey said. “Do you really think I blame you? Have you believed that all this time?”
He didn’t answer right away. He wasn’t sure when he’d come to believe she must hold him responsible for what happened. At some point the idea had seeped into his subconscious and taken hold because it made sense, explained why she pulled so far away. Even if Casey still loved him—even if she could forgive him—how was someone supposed to spend the rest of their life with the person they held responsible for their child’s death?
“Kyle,” she said, tears pooling in her eyes. “I have never, for one second, blamed you for what happened that day.”
He held his breath and studied her, wanting to believe that but not trusting it. It would be very like Casey to tell this lie for his sake, to lessen his burden.
Then her face crumpled in on itself. “How could I blame you? It was my fault. It was all my fault…” She let out a long shuddering cry, a penetrating wail of grief that came from somewhere deep inside her. A sound he was sure he would never forget. “I was supposed to be skating in the rink with him, Kyle. He wanted to take shots on me and I said he could but I kept him waiting, I kept him waiting for too long. I was so stupid and selfish—I was reading a fucking email .” She paused to gasp in a racking breath between sobs.
Never before had Kyle heard any of this. Casey was finally being honest with him, this just wasn’t the truth he’d expected to hear.
Her words rushed forth, like they couldn’t get out fast enough now that she’d opened the floodgate. “I was reading my phone”—she held it up to him—“a stupid letter from a grad school I applied to. I didn’t tell you about it, I kept it from you because I knew you would worry. I’m so sorry…” Her body was convulsing with the violence of her emotion. “Don’t you understand? I should have known he would do that, get in the lift and try to do it himself. I was so busy reading a welcome letter I wasn’t paying attention to Charlie…” She pounded both fists—one still clutching her phone—against her chest.
He stepped toward her, but she backed up.
“I even saw him go behind the shop, but I thought he was playing snowball fetch with Star so I kept reading !” She slammed both fists against her chest again.
He reached out and took hold of her wrists, but she had a surge of adrenaline going, and when she managed to wrench them free, the hand gripping the cell phone snapped back to hit her in the face. She dropped the phone to the floor and brought both hands to her nose.
Kyle watched her in the sudden silence, reeling from the blow she’d given herself, and he tried to grasp the magnitude of what she’d just said. He’d always assumed Casey blamed him for not being here that day. But she was the one who’d been home with Charlie when it happened, and she’d been carrying this guilty secret alone, afraid to tell anyone, even him. Especially him. This was why she’d turned away from him, to wrap herself around this profound shame and hold it tight.
In the next instant he realized his immediate reaction to what she’d said, his response to her in this moment, was everything. His next words would impact how she continued to bear this burden for the rest of her life.
He stepped close and tugged her hands away from her face to see her nose was bleeding pretty good. He yanked up the tail of his shirt, ripping off buttons in the process, and brought it to her nose with one hand while the other cradled the back of her head.
“Look at me, Casey.” He waited for her to meet his gaze. “If you’re going to lay blame, there’s plenty to go around. You can blame yourself for reading an email, but then you have to blame me for taking Charlie up in the lift in the first place. While you’re at it you can blame Wyatt. I told him for years we should buy heated cables for that roof, and he said we didn’t need them. You can blame Mateo for going home sick that day.” He hesitated before this next one. It was tough to say out loud. “And you can blame Charlie, because he promised me he wouldn’t get in the lift by himself.”
He felt her go slack at that.
“It was an accident, Casey. An awful, terrible accident. You have to let the rest go.”
There was desperation in her expression—he could see how badly she wanted to believe what he said. When he pulled his shirttail away to check on her nose, blood ran down and dripped from her chin. “You’re still bleeding.”
“I’ve been bleeding for four years, Kyle. It never stops.”
“I know it doesn’t. Come on, we need to get you cleaned up.” He took her hand and led her to the bathroom off the hallway. Once they were in there he handed her a wad of tissue. She held it to her face while he crouched down to grab the first aid kit that had always been kept under the sink.
“You don’t need a first aid kit for a bloody nose,” she said. Her voice was all nasal, since she was pinching her nostrils.
“No, but that eye is going to bruise.” As he stood and unzipped the kit, he was hit with a powerful dose of déjà vu. They’d done this before, in this same room, a lifetime ago. But now their roles were reversed. “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I took a first aid course last summer.”
She gave him a smile that was so sad he had to look away.
He dug out the instant ice pack, squeezed until the inner bag popped, and waited for it to get cold. “Let me see,” he said, pulling her hand away. “I think it stopped.” He ran a washcloth under warm water and carefully wiped away the streaks of blood around her nose, mouth, and chin. Then he rinsed it out and did it again. He kept at it longer than he needed to, even after all the blood was gone. Her breathing had settled, and it felt like there was some kind of healing taking place here beyond just her bloody nose.
Next he laid the ice pack against the bridge of her nose and held it there with one hand. Then he shook his head. “You know, all the fights I’ve been in, I never saw anyone punch themselves in the face before.”
When she huffed out a soft chuckle, he could feel her breath on his wrist. “Maybe I’ll just tell everyone you did it.”
“That would be one way to get me ridden out of town once and for all.”
She raised her hand to the ice pack. “I can hold it. You should wash your shirt before that stains.”
He looked down to see a fair amount of blood on his dad’s white shirt, which was also missing some buttons now. That’s when he noticed dark blotches down the front of Casey’s dress, and one of her sleeves had torn at the wrist. “I don’t think this shirt and that dress are ever going to be the same.”
She checked them out for herself. “No, I guess not.” Then she lowered the ice pack and winced. “How bad does it look?”
“Not bad.”
Those deep green eyes stayed on his. “No worse than before?”
“Nope,” he said, giving her a solemn shake of the head to confirm it.
When she turned to lay the ice pack aside, he was afraid she would leave then, end whatever was happening here. So he lifted her hand from the counter. “What about your hand? Maybe we should get it x-rayed.”
Her face flushed at the memory and she smiled. Right then, despite the stained dress, swollen nose, and twenty-four years, she was still the same girl who’d cleaned his wound and thanked him for being different after he rescued her little brother. “My hand is fine.”
“You never know,” he said, examining it closely. “It might be broken.” He turned it over, palm side up.
“I didn’t hit myself that hard.” Her smile lingered until he slid her sleeve up her left forearm and she realized what he was doing. She drew a sharp breath and jerked her arm up tight against her chest.
He slid his fingers into her hand. “It’s okay,” he said, tugging until she finally gave in and let him pull her arm open, laying it bare. Casey looked away, but he studied the long ragged line she’d carved into her own skin, and he counted the faint but permanent marks from twelve stitches. Like his tattoos, her scar told a story. He skimmed the pad of his thumb over it, touched the evidence of such infinite pain, her pain that was inextricably tied to his own, and when he lowered his head to kiss her scar he couldn’t stop tears from coming.
Neither could she. She hung her head and cried, not the tormented sobs from earlier, just gentle weeping.
“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here, Case. Can you forgive me for leaving?”
“I shouldn’t have let you go,” she said. “I’m so sorry too, Kyle. For everything. Can you forgive me?”
He took her face in his hands. “There’s nothing to forgive.” He kept his hands where they were and let his eyes wander over her face, which was roughed up and raw, but also clear and open. It felt like, for the first time in years, there was nothing standing between them. No wall, not even the shadow of one. They stayed that way long enough for their breathing to sync up.
When she slipped her fingers around his forearms he thought she might pull them away, but she didn’t.
So he tipped forward and kissed her forehead, her temple, her cheek, tasting salt on her skin. His heart was beating fast when he pulled back and searched her eyes for the answer to a silent question. In response she leaned forward, touching her lips to his. It was brief, and with the lightest pressure, like a first kiss. Then they did it again, and again, and again, each contact lasting a little longer.
Kissing her was like experiencing something new and coming home at the same time. It had been so long, and it was thrilling, but it also felt completely right. He told himself not to rush it, but her fingers touched his face and plunged into his hair, so he circled her waist and pulled her to him. Even though he knew this was really happening—he could feel her body in his arms, smell her hair and skin, taste her lips against his—he fleetingly wondered if it was a dream. When his hands started wandering over her dress, a little voice told him to slow down, that it might not be a good idea if this happened too fast. But it was hard to listen when it felt like he’d never wanted anything so much in his whole life.
She slid her arms tight around his neck, and he lifted her up, wanting to get as close as possible, feel her whole body against him. When she wrapped her legs around his, he was done second-guessing. He set her on the edge of the counter, and she pulled him toward her with so much force he had to brace an arm against the mirror behind her so they didn’t fall into it.
“Sorry,” she said, her chest rising and falling.
“Don’t be.” He was grateful for the pause, the chance to fully appreciate what was going on. “God, Casey. I missed you so much.”
“Me too.”
“Do you want this?” Maybe the question was unnecessary, given her legs were still twined around his, but he asked it. He didn’t want her to do this because she was carrying around a boatload of guilt. He wanted her to want this.
She responded by looking down at his ruined shirt. Then she reached out and tore it open, the remaining buttons popping off. He watched her seek out the KC tattoo and run her palm over it while breathing a sigh of relief, like she’d been afraid he might have gotten rid of it, or covered it up. His pulse picked up again when she slid her hands down to his waist, leaned in, and kissed the tattoo.
She raised her eyes to his. “Will you take me to our room?”
Our room. He didn’t answer, just scooped her up from the counter while her arms and legs curled around him. Then Kyle carried Casey up the stairs, past all the family photos on the wall that still included him, to the bedroom they’d shared for twenty years.