Zero Visibility (8 page)

“So, tell me about the bike,” Cassie said, turning slightly and giving Emerson her full attention.

“I went to Wheels. I hope that’s the place you were talking about because it’s the only bike shop I could find, and Mindy knew you.”

Cassie smiled. “That’s the place. Mindy’s awesome.”

“She was. She fit me for a bike, let me rent it on a day-to-day basis. I hopped on and rode for more than ten miles. It felt great.”

“I’m so glad.” And she was. Something about Emerson’s demeanor was a bit different, and she said so. “You seem much more relaxed. Not that I know you well,” Cassie rushed to add, laying a hand on Emerson’s thigh. Realizing it, she snatched it way as if she’d been burned and rushed to keep talking. “But, you just seem…I don’t know. Easier.”

Emerson looked at her for a long time, until Cassie began to worry that she’d gone too far, was too touchy, had gotten too personal. “Biking helped a lot.”

“Are you making any progress on your mom’s stuff?”

Emerson rolled her lips in, grimaced. “Do you think we can talk about something else?”

Cassie blinked. “Oh. Sure. Of course.” Interrupting her apology, a girl’s voice called out.

“Cassie!”

Before she could say a word, ten-year-old Grace Turner flew at Cassie and wrapped her arms around her. Cassie swallowed down her shock and hugged the girl back. “Hey there, Gracie.”

“I saw you from way over there,” Grace said, helping herself to a seat on Cassie’s lap, despite being a bit too big to do so, as she pointed at a faraway entrance. Her face was wide with a smile, showing overlapping teeth that were going to cost her parents several thousand in braces soon.

She no sooner thought of Grace’s parents then her mother, Vanessa, appeared, looking just as uncomfortable as she usually did lately, and even more so when her eyes stopped on Emerson. “Hi,” she said and forced a smile that came and went in a blink.

“Hey.” There was an awkward beat, then Cassie continued, asking about Vanessa’s nephew. “Here to watch Kyle?”

Vanessa nodded.

“He looks good so far.”

Clearing her throat, Emerson stood up and held out a hand to Vanessa. “Hi there. I’m Emerson Rosberg.”

“I know who you are,” Vanessa said, before quickly catching herself, forcing another smile and taking Emerson’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“God.” Cassie shook her head. “I’m so sorry. Where are my manners? Emerson, this is my…friend, Vanessa Turner. And this,” she tickled Grace’s ribcage and was rewarded with giggles, “Is Grace-face.”

Emerson gave a nod and a smile.

The crowd cheered suddenly, and the four of them looked toward the rink to see what had transpired. A near-goal, apparently. After a moment, Vanessa held her hand out to her daughter. Cassie stared at it, at the pale skin, the neatly manicured nails, the wedding ring. She swallowed hard.

“Come on, Grace. Daddy’s waiting for us.”

“Aww. I want to sit with Cassie.” Grace wiggled her bony butt on Cassie’s lap as if digging in.

Cassie bounced her knees a couple times and said quietly to Grace, “Be a good girl, and do what Mommy says. Okay?”

Grace sighed dramatically and took her time sliding to the ground. “Fine.” She held out her hand, and Vanessa grasped it.

“It was nice to meet you, Emerson,” Vanessa said.

“Same here,” Emerson replied as they watched the two walk away. After a moment, Emerson said, “Wow. That wasn’t awkward at all.”

Cassie sighed, shook her head with a grimace.

“What was that about?”

Cassie looked down at her hands in her lap and tried not to let the nausea take over. She inhaled slowly, swallowed, let it out. When she looked up at Emerson, she hoped the wetness in her eyes wasn’t glaringly obvious as she tossed Emerson’s words back at her. “Do you think we can talk about something else?”

Emerson held her gaze, and her expression softened. “Sure.”

Vanessa Turner was overwhelmed
. Overwhelmed and irritated and fed up. And nervous. A little nervous.

“Stop pushing me, Jeremy.” Vanessa’s daughter was learning to stand up to her big brother when he got all alpha male on her, not that it did any good. Jeremy still bumped Grace out of the way and went into The Sports Outfitter ahead of her, muttering an unflattering name at her under his breath.

“Hey.” Vanessa swatted the back of his head, not hard, just enough to get his attention. “Don’t talk to your sister like that or we will turn around and go home, and you can keep wearing sneakers that don’t fit. Understand?”

“Whatever.” He took a left in the store and headed towards the shoe section.

That was the most dialogue she had with him on an average day, and she sighed now in frustration. Jeremy was thirteen. He’d be fourteen in a couple months. He was already the epitome of a teenager: sullen, brooding, bored with everything except his iPhone (which she could kill Brian for getting him), and his video games. He did all right in school, thank god, but there were another four or five years of this to come. This was only the beginning. Vanessa didn’t know how she would survive.

The store was busy. That was good. More people meant less focus on her. Maybe they could get the kids sneakers and get out before—

“Cassie!” Gracie ran from Vanessa straight down an aisle, slickly dodging several customers in her path, and threw her little arms around Cassie’s hips.

Okay. Jumping in with both feet, I guess.
Vanessa slowly followed the same path her daughter had taken.

“Hey there, Grace-face. Two times in one week I get to see you?” Cassie squatted down so she was eye level with Gracie, something Vanessa always found endearing. “What’s new?”

“Hopefully, some sneakers,” Grace said looking around. “Where’s Gordie?”

“He’s downstairs helping my mom.”

Gracie turned her big blue eyes in Vanessa’s direction. “Can I go down and see him, Mom? Can I? Please?”

Vanessa had a hard time denying her daughter anything (which was going to be a problem down the road, or so her sister kept telling her), especially when she remembered to say please. “You are not to bother Mrs. Parker.” As Gracie skittered away, Vanessa added, “I mean it!”

And then they were alone.

Not alone, obviously, as the store was full of people. But it felt like they were alone. Cassie’s big brown eyes caught hers, then darted away. “How are you?” she asked.

Vanessa cleared her throat. “I’m okay. I’m good. How about you? How are you?”

Cassie nodded, her voice low. “I’m good.”

“You look great.” It was true. Cassie rarely dressed up, but she didn’t have to. Her beauty was natural. Athletic. She wore olive green cargo pants and a black quarter-zip pullover. Black always made her look so attractively mysterious, made her dark eyes even darker.

“You, too.”

The awkwardness stretched.

“Good game the other night,” she said.

“It was.”

Vanessa looked around for something else to say. “Busy today. That’s good.” She swallowed hard, the same word flashing through her head over and over:
Lame. Lame. Lame.
Why did conversation have to suddenly be so hard? She and Cassie could talk about anything and everything.
Had
talked about anything and everything.

“Yeah. It’s busy season.”

Cassie looked down at her hands, then up at the store. Vanessa looked down at Cassie’s hands, and her gaze stayed there as memories flooded her brain, memories of those same hands holding her face, tangled in her hair, kneading her breasts, those fingers sliding through her wetness and right into her body, her muscles contracting, trying to hold them there forever…

When she looked up again, Cassie was watching her, the expression on her face a mix of anger, hurt, and longing. There were so many things Vanessa wanted to say at that moment.
I’m sorry. Forgive me. I love you.
And she wondered about Emerson Rosberg. Were they seeing each other now? She wanted so badly to know, to ask. Instead, she remained silent.

“Excuse me.” A woman of about fifty approached Cassie with a question, and Vanessa bowed out politely to let Cassie work, simultaneously annoyed with the woman for interrupting and relieved to be released from the painful awkwardness.

Now if she could only ditch her kids so she could go out to the car and sob her eyes out, her day would be complete. As it was, she’d managed to completely avoid seeing Cassie for nearly three weeks, yet she’d still cried at least once every single day. And then she’d seen her at the rink Tuesday. Her and the Rosberg woman, smiling, their heads close together. It had been inevitable that she’d run into Cassie eventually. It was a small town. But seeing her with somebody else…

Her stomach churned.

Vanessa wandered to the shoe section where Jeremy was absorbed in texting on his phone rather than looking at sneakers, and she just did not have the energy to fight him. She felt like a deflated balloon, and she was on the verge of tears. Detouring away from Jeremy, she wandered toward the women’s clothing and tried to focus on the racks for a few moments hoping to collect herself.

Brian was worried about her. They’d been married for fourteen years; he knew her, and he knew when something was wrong. She’d lost weight. She wasn’t eating. Her sleep was restless. She seemed far away and sad all the time. These were things he’d noticed, things he’d brought up. He wondered what he could do to help. Worse, he worried that he had done something, that she was upset with him, that he had somehow caused this depression she seemed to be in, this funk. He brought her flowers. He made dinner for her and the kids when he was home before her. He’d made a conscious effort to pick his dirty laundry up off the floor around the hamper and actually put it
in
the hamper. He was trying so hard.

He had no idea.

The guilt was crushing her.

It was a good thing, then, that Cassie had ended things with her. She’d had to, she said. She didn’t want to. She’d
had
to. There was no choice any more. She said she couldn’t go on sneaking around, pretending not to be who she really was. She wanted Vanessa to leave Brian so they could be together, and there were times Vanessa thought it might be the path to take. Cassie had left Mike. More than two years ago. It hadn’t been easy. She’d been the talk of the town for a while, though nobody really knew the details. Mike was a great guy. He’d understood. He’d known Cassie since they were kids, they’d been married for four years, and he understood. She was gay. Simple. It wasn’t about him. It was about her. He’d gotten through it. He’d remarried recently. He and Cassie were still good friends.

Cassie had been so patient. She’d waited. And waited. And waited. But there was a difference she couldn’t seem to accept no matter how many times Vanessa tried to explain it.

Vanessa loved Brian.

She loved Cassie, and she loved Brian, too. The same way. And she didn’t want to leave him.

So Cassie had left her.

Exactly three weeks and two days ago, Cassie had put an end to their relationship, said she was tired of waiting, that she wanted to be with Vanessa, and if that wasn’t going to happen, she needed to move on. Vanessa felt like a piece of her had been ripped away.

The tears were not going to be held back any longer. Vanessa grabbed two shirts off the rack without even looking at them and hurried into an empty fitting room where she clamped one hand over her mouth and used the other to brace herself against the wall. She’d become alarmingly skilled at silent crying, and she did that now, letting out as much of the hurt as she could. There was no way she wanted Cassie to see her like this. Cassie did what she had to do for herself. Vanessa knew this. She even understood it. That wasn’t to say it didn’t gut her completely.

It took her a few moments to pull herself together, and she hoped Gracie was still downstairs with Cassie’s mom, absorbed in doting all over Cassie’s dog. Just that morning, Vanessa’s daughter had commented how Cassie didn’t come over any more, and said she missed her. “I miss her, too,” had been Vanessa’s response, and truer words had never been spoken.

Brian was in sales, which meant he travelled a lot, so it was only natural that Vanessa would call a friend to come over while he was gone, somebody to keep her company. In fact, he preferred that she did just that. The thought of her stuck with the kids for days on end with no adult company bothered him. “Have Cassie over for dinner,” he’d tell her over and over. So she did. They’d also had “girls’ weekend” on five separate occasions. Vanessa told Brian it was only fair, since he did so much traveling, that she had the opportunity to get away as well. Brian, of course, was all for it. “Go. Have fun. I’ve got the kids. Enjoy yourselves.” And they had. Usually, a cabin or a hotel room was involved. Their schedule was simple: make love, sleep, make love, eat, make love. Those were the only times she and Cassie had been able to actually spend the night together, to go to bed together and wake up with each other, and it was blissful. The ends of those weekends were hard for both of them, but they seemed harder on Cassie. Vanessa went home to her husband and children, whom she’d missed terribly. Cassie went home without Vanessa. Their last weekend together was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or so Cassie had told her.

I can’t stand it, V. I can’t stand having you all to myself and then having to give you back. It’s tearing me apart. I can’t stand it. I hate sharing you.

Vanessa could still hear Cassie’s anguished voice in her head. She would never go so far as to verbally give Vanessa an ultimatum, but that’s essentially what it had been. She imagined in Cassie’s mind, it was “Brian or me.” In Vanessa’s mind, she heard, “Your entire family, your home, and your whole identity and existence, or me.”

It wasn’t a choice she wanted to make. It wasn’t a choice she
could
make, so Cassie had made it for her.

Rifling through her purse, she found a tissue, blew her nose, and blotted under her eyes. Thank god she’d started using waterproof mascara or she’d have spent the past three weeks looking like a raccoon. In with a deep, cleansing breath, out with all the negative energy. She did this three times, shook her hands vigorously, and opened the door to the fitting room. Time to find her children. There were shoes to purchase.