The Miles Between Us (10 page)

And
stayed awake for a long time, pondering his future.

Casey

She knew she was dreaming, but the dream started out so lovely that at first, she just went along with it. Beneath a stunning blue sky, the Pacific sparkled like a polished gemstone. At low tide, the waves rolled in like champagne bubbles, mellow and harmless, popping just before they reached the shore. They were on the short stretch of beach that fronted their Malibu home, tucked in between neighboring properties that made their relatively modest house of redwood and glass look like a shack. The home to her left belonged to a famous television actor whose hit show was watched every week by millions. The one on her right was owned by the widow of a Hollywood scriptwriter who’d penned more than two dozen successful action films in his decades-long career.

They’d brought everything they needed for a fun mother-daughter afternoon at the beach: two lounge chairs, one Mommy-size, the other Katie-size; beach towels, sunscreen, beach toys. Flip-flops, bottled water, a bag of potato chips. A portable radio and a magazine. Perched sideways on her lounge chair with her toes buried in the sand and Katie propped between her knees, her tiny body humming with impatience, Casey slathered sunscreen on her daughter’s shoulders, her cheeks, the bridge of her nose. At five, Katie was losing her baby fat. That sweet, round face was becoming less round as the bone structure beneath became more defined. She wore a bright pink two-piece bathing suit, her blond hair in loose braids, and a white sun hat which she kept losing—Casey suspected deliberately—in the sand. Her baby was growing up too quickly. A hard fist wrapped around her heart and squeezed. She wasn’t ready for this. Wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready for her little girl to grow up.

“Big hug,” she said, wrapping her arms around that warm little body, burying her nose in Katie’s neck, inhaling the mingled scents of salt air, sunscreen, and little girl.

“Enough, Mommy!” Katie said with indignation, squirming to escape from her mother’s embrace. Casey let her go, sat watching those chubby little legs pump as Katie raced toward the water, her pigtails bouncing, her red bucket clutched tightly in her hand. Her daughter plunked down on the wet sand at the water’s edge and began digging with a blue plastic shovel.

“Don’t go in the water without me,” Casey reminded her.

Katie glanced up, gave her a withering look, and said in a sing-songy voice, “What do you think I am, stupid?”

Casey raised her eyebrows, and Katie, being nobody’s fool, returned her attention to digging. Katie was going through a stage. She was, by turns, charming, funny, and delightful. Of late, she’d also been sassy, impertinent, and naughty. This had been going on since shortly after she started preschool, where she’d quickly discovered the fearsome power of peer pressure. Casey had interrogated other mothers, who’d assured her it was temporary and that her best course of action was to ignore it. Leanne Ackerman, the mother of Katie’s best friend, said, “She’s pushing the boundaries. Trying to find out how far she can go with you. It’s normal, and if you respond negatively, you’ll reinforce the behavior. Don’t give her the satisfaction. When she fails to get a rise out of you, she’ll move on to something different.”

“Something worse? I certainly hope not.”

“Oh, hon, just wait until the teenage years. The real fun is still ahead of you.”

She would cross that bridge when she came to it. In the meantime, in spite of her daughter’s occasional foray to the dark side, life was pretty close to perfect. Could there be a better way to spend a lazy summer afternoon? Sun, sand, salt air. The ocean’s rhythmic roar, the Monkees
on the radio singing
I’m Not Your Stepping Stone
, and Katie, her beautiful Katydid, who owned every inch of her heart, playing at the water’s edge.

Casey loved being a mother. Loved the damp hugs and the sticky kisses and the messy little fingers. Loved making PB&J sandwiches with the crusts cut off, loved dressing her daughter in girly, ruffled dresses, loved reading to her at bedtime from
The Cat in the Hat
and
Charlotte’s Web
and
The Wind in the Willows
. She loved sitting together at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and a box of crayons, using their imaginations to create whatever they fancied. She loved perching Katie on a kitchen stool, wrapped in a red apron that was five sizes too big, and teaching her to bake cookies, just the way her mother had done when she was a girl. Danny had been her universe until the day Katie was born. How could she have foreseen the vast difference between her love for him and what she felt for her firstborn child? How could she have understood how that child would exponentially expand her universe? How could she have known that her life wouldn’t truly begin until she became a mother?

“Look, Mommy
! See what I can do!”

Somehow, despite her warnings, during the second when she’d been lost in thought, Katie had waded into the surf and now stood chest deep, her little arms outflung in a wordless “Ta-da!”

A dense bed of kelp floated on the incoming tide. On the horizon, storm clouds had gathered, and as she watched in horror, the wind picked up, kicking up the surf that a moment ago had been as tame as bath water. “Katie!” she shouted. “Come back here!”

In too deep to have solid footing, her daughter bobbled and swayed in the rushing surf. “Look, Mommy,” she said. “I can swim!”

And, fearless, she ducked her head underwater.

Except that she couldn’t swim. Danny hadn’t wanted her to learn. He’d said there was no need until she was older. They never allowed her on the beach alone, and he didn’t want people at the YMCA staring at her, whispering about her, because she was his daughter.

But Casey was a strong swimmer, and as a massive breaker rolled in like a shark at feeding time toward the last place she’d seen her daughter, she raced across the sand to the water, screaming Katie’s name as she ran. She splashed through the shallows, reached deeper water just as the breaker slammed into her. It took her down and under, tumbled and tossed her until she had no idea which way was up. She swallowed salt water, scrabbled in the loose sand driven up her nose by the force of the water. A clump of seaweed slapped her in the face, and she gasped, took in more water. Frantic now, struggling against the undertow that threatened to pull her out to sea, she began swimming, searching desperately for the child who had disappeared right before her eyes.

But it was murky and dark beneath the surface, and her lungs were on fire, her body weakened by her desperate attempt to hold her breath. Just as the lack of oxygen forced her to breathe, the roiling sea coughed once and spit her out. Choking, gasping, she struggled to her feet and wiped the sting of salt from her eyes, felt its agonizing burn through her sinuses.

Tangled in a bed of kelp, a tiny body floated face up on the surface of the water, bobbing gently in a sea that had gone dark and flat. Eyes wide, staring but unseeing, Katie now wore a lacy white dress. A burial gown. With a cry of despair, Casey fought her way through water that had turned the consistency of Jell-O, one laborious step after another bringing her closer, closer, until she reached her lifeless daughter, swiped a soggy strand of hair away from the child’s face, and realized that it wasn’t Katie at all.

It was Emma.

Nooooooooo.
She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. She was helpless, ineffectual, powerless. But inside her head, the screaming was so loud her brain threatened to implode. Casey untangled the dead child from the kelp, took her daughter in her arms like a rag doll, and slowly, laboriously, made her way through the water to the shore. Reddish drops of sea water dripped steadily,
plunk, plunk, plunk
, from Katie/Emma’s hair. A tiny splotch of red appeared on the front of the burial gown. As she watched, the spot grew larger, then began to drip, running faster, faster, until it carved a river of red in the wet sand.

Behind her, instead of the hiss of waves, there came a soft murmuring, like the buzz of a beehive in early summer. With the limp child still in her arms, she turned and saw them. Her dead babies, their precious souls instantly recognizable. While she stood rooted in place, the buzzing grew louder. Those three dead babies multiplied into a hundred dead babies. A thousand. A sea of dead babies where there once was water, a chorus of voices taunting her, judging her, terrorizing her.

“Baby killer!” a voice said, and then another, and another, like bullfrogs randomly chirping in a dark spring bog. “Murderer!”

“No!” she shouted, although she didn’t open her mouth. “I’m not a killer
! I’m not! I loved my daughter!”

“Your fault,” the voices whispered. “
Your fault, your fault, your fault
. Baby killer!”

No. Oh, no.
A wave of grief and despair washed over her, brutal, unbearable, so powerful it brought her to her knees. She knelt on the sand, her dead daughter in her arms, opened her mouth, and let the pain pour out in a shrill, piercing scream that went on and on and on.

“Casey.”

The voice intruded into her dream. It was a familiar voice, but she couldn’t place it, couldn’t respond, because every ounce of her was focused on the utter blackness of her grief. The poison continued to pour forth in the keening of a grieving mother, until she thought surely her insides would come up next because there was nothing left to hold them in.

“Babe, wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”

She awoke with a gasp. Blinking in the light from the bedside lamp, she was unable, at first, to tell what was real and what was not. Rob lay on his side next to her, one hand curled around her hip, the other stroking her temple. “Emma,” she said. “Emma!”

“Shh.” Rob gathered her in his arms and began rocking her. “Shh,” he said, his fingers gentle in her hair. “Emma’s fine. She’s sleeping.”

“No.” She struggled to escape, terror giving her a strength she never knew she possessed. “I have to see her!” She shoved him away, sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I have to make sure she’s okay.”

“Stay here.” He put a hand on her arm to impede her. “I’ll get her.”

Dazed, she sat with her heart pounding, the pain and the grief and the despair still clutching her in their grip. He returned with a sleeping Emma cradled limply in his arms. For an instant, her heart rate accelerated, until he placed the child in her arms and Casey saw the rise and fall of her chest.

She brushed a damp clump of hair away from Emma’s face, buried her nose in her daughter’s soft little neck, inhaled the incomparable aroma of baby powder and sham
poo and sleeping baby. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

“A bad one?” he said.

“You don’t want to know.” As she rocked her beautiful, perfect, very much alive daughter, Casey said, “She’s sleeping here with us tonight. I’m not letting her out of my sight.”

Her husband knew better than to argue. He turned out the light and wrapped an arm around both of them. And with their sleeping daughter cradled between them, her breathing soft and even, they returned to a fitful, restless sleep.

* * *

“And then,” she said, “your father woke me up.”

“Jesus Christ,” her stepdaughter said.

They were sitting on a bench
in a small riverfront park in Lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center. Nearby, a group of excited Japanese tourists grouped and regrouped for a series of photos set against a backdrop of New Jersey skyline. “Did you tell Dad what you just told me?” Paige asked.

“No.” Beside them, clad in a pretty yellow sundress that matched her hair, Emma sat in her stroller, squinting into the sun as she contentedly watched a tugboat chug upriver. “I couldn’t talk about it last night. All I could do was hold Emmy and try to stop shaking. And this morning, in the bright light of day, it all seemed so silly and ridiculous.”

“Fear’s never ridiculous.”

“I suppose you’re right, but I just didn’t want to get into it with him.”

“Dad left pretty early this morning.”

“He had a busy day ahead of him. You take studio time when you can get it. That week he lost really screwed up his schedule. Now he’s rushing to get the job done on time.”

A man walking a white Pomeranian passed them. Leroy, napping on the bench beside Paige, lifted his head and growled low in his throat.

“Mind your manners,” Paige told him, and he
laid his head back down on his paws and returned to napping. Paige stretched out her long legs, so much like her father’s, and said, “Is everything okay between you and Dad?”

“Of course,” Casey said, surprised. “What makes you ask?”

“He’s been so quiet. Ever since you lost the baby. The bounce is gone from his step.”

“Really?” She turned her head and met Paige’s eyes.

“You didn’t notice? Things have been kind of weird.”

She hadn’t noticed, and guilt gnawed at her. How was it possible? How could she have been so wrapped up in her own pain that she hadn’t noticed Rob was struggling? “Your father worries,” she said. “He can’t help it. It’s built into him. And he’s had a lot to worry about lately, thanks to me.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s not like you miscarried on purpose.”

“No. But I allowed myself to get pregnant, knowing how risky it was. So who else can I blame but myself?”