Chapter Fifteen #2
“It must have been serious.” She says it with sympathy that’s a shade too practiced to feel real. “Were you alone?”
“I was alone.” I roll down my sleeve. “Casey was my nurse.”
“What happened?” Sienna asks. She’s standing in the doorway of my office, with Bart under one arm. She hasn’t voluntarily come to find me before, and I don’t know how much she heard beyond Casey was my nurse.
“Car accident,” I say.
“Did it hurt?” She takes a step into the room but pauses.
“Yes.”
She considers this. She comes two steps closer.
She’s studying the scar with the same critical attention she gave the silk elephant, assessing whether it’s real.
“I have one too,” she says. She pulls the collar of her shirt down to show the central line scar above her collarbone.
It’s small, puckered, and a shade lighter than her skin.
“Mine is from when I was in the hospital.”
I’ve seen it before, and it makes it hard to breathe every time, but I just ask, “Did it hurt?”
“Yes.” She pauses. “Mommy held my hand the whole time. She told me to count elephants. I counted nine and then I fell asleep.”
My mother scowls, but I don’t pay much attention to her. “Nine is a lot of elephants.”
“Bart knows all of them.”
She watches me, and I watch her. This is the longest conversation we’ve had, and it’s about scars.
I don’t know what to do next because every conversation I’ve ever had has had a structure, an opening, a negotiation, and a close, but conversations with four-year-olds don’t work that way.
They end when the four-year-old decides they’re over.
“You can touch it if you want,” she says. She tilts up her chin so the scar is more visible.
I don’t trust myself to move. I’m sitting in a desk chair in my office looking at a scar on my daughter’s collarbone. If I touch it, I won’t be able to keep my composure, and a four-year-old should never have to witness that. Casey isn’t here to hold things together. I’m on my own.
“Maybe next time,” I say.
“Okay.” Sienna adjusts Bart. She leaves.
My mother lingers for a moment, but after looking at me, she leaves quietly too.
I close the door to my office behind them.
I sit at the desk for a long time, because I need to be a man who just learned that his daughter remembers her mother holding her hand while someone placed a central line below her collarbone, and I wasn’t there.
I wasn’t in the room. I wasn’t in the city.
I wasn’t anywhere Casey could reach if she’d wanted to reach me, and the question of whether she wanted to reach me is one I keep putting down and picking back up.
She hid my daughter. She cheated on me and then hid my daughter for four years.
I keep coming back to that because the anger is clear and simple.
The anger makes sense. Casey betrayed our marriage, and when I confronted her, she left and took my child.
That’s the version I’ve carried for four years, and it fits. It explains everything.
Except that this Casey doesn’t match that version.
She’s been managing a very sick child’s medications like she did when I was her patient.
She hasn’t asked me for money. She hasn’t leveraged Sienna’s illness for a settlement.
She used to drive a car with a check-engine light.
I don’t know what she drives now, but she lives in a two-bedroom apartment she pays for herself.
None of that fits the profile of a woman who married me for access and cheated when she got bored.
I don’t know what to do with the mismatch. I’m not ready to examine it. Examining it means questioning Brittany, and questioning Brittany means questioning my mother. I’m not prepared to delve into all that while my daughter is sleeping down the hall with a central line scar and a stuffed elephant.
At 2 a.m. I open my laptop. I pull up the security app for the estate, the old system, the one that was installed years before Casey ever lived here.
The footage archives automatically and overwrites every ninety days.
Casey left almost five years ago. The footage is gone.
I knew it would be gone before I opened the app.
I look anyway. I click through empty folders, month after month of overwritten files, looking for November, looking for the night she left and for whatever the camera in the foyer would have captured.
Casey walking past the wing chair. Casey reaching for the front door with a bag on her shoulder and a pregnancy she never announced, because I’d already told her to leave.
I want to see whether she hesitated. I want to see if she looked back.
I want to know if there was a second where she waited for me to stop her.
I already know I wouldn’t have stopped her, but maybe if I’d seen her...
No, I accepted the marriage was over the moment I learned she’d been cheating on me.
I never went after her, and I wouldn’t have.
It’s all gone, overwritten years ago by a system designed to forget. I wish my brain was wired the same way.
I close the laptop. The office is dark, and the house is quiet. Casey is asleep beside Sienna in that canopied princess bed, where she’s slept every night since they arrived, while I sleep alone in a room down the hall.
I’ve never spent the night here with Casey, so why can I so vividly imagine her lying curled against me in the king-size bed in the room I’m using while we stay here for the duration of Casey’s treatment?
“What were you hoping to see?” I ask the empty room.
I don’t have an answer.