Cassidy

 

I freeze as the words I’ve simultaneously wanted and dreaded fall from her lips.

I love you, Cass.

I love you, Cass.

I love you, Cass.

For one world-stopping moment, I let them sink in. I feel her love for me in the curl of my toes and in the tips of my fingers and with every throbbing beat of my unworthy heart.

Then I clench my eyes shut and force myself to reject it. Because I love her too—for that reason more than any other—I cannot accept or return it.

Kissing the back of her neck, I lean away from her, carefully withdrawing from her body and turning away to pull off the condom. I tie a knot in the top and throw it in the garbage. I zip up and button my pants, then turn back around to look at her.

She is facing me, the front of her dress soaked, her underwear balled up in her hand, her face hopeful and worried at the same time.

“I can’t take it back,” she blurts out, lifting her chin.

“Brynn, please . . .”

“I need to change,” she says quickly, fingering the bracelet she never takes off. “And then we need to talk.”

I watch her go—the gentle sway of her hips, the soft touch of her bare feet on the floor. She loves me.

Which means she’s got to go, Cass.

You know who you are, whose son you are.

You’ve lived this fantasy for long enough.

It’s time to say goodbye.

When she comes back to the kitchen, she’s dressed in jeans and a tight T-shirt, her feet still bare, her hair back in a ponytail. She stands on the edge of the carpet between the living room and the kitchen, arms crossed over her chest, looking at me with an expression that’s breaking my damned heart.

“I know I said I wouldn’t fall in love with you and that we wouldn’t discuss our feelings . . . but I can’t help it. I love you, Cassidy. You’re the best man I’ve ever known. And when I see my future, I see you in it. I want you in it.”

Me too, sweet Brynn. I see you in my dreams too . . .

I clench my teeth.

. . . but this has gone far enough.

It’s time to wake up and face reality.

“I’ve been counting down the days,” I lie, resting my palm on the back of a kitchen chair, unable to look her in the eyes. “In two days I drive you back to civilization or we hike out of here. But either way, it needs to end, Brynn. We agreed that—”

“No!” she yells, shaking her head as she advances on me, stepping behind the other chair at the table. “No! It’s not over. You can’t mean that, Cass!”

“I do mean it,” I say, forcing these words to be said because the worst possible fate for my Brynn would be to saddle her with me. “We can’t be together. I made that clear from the very—”

“Why not?” she cries, slapping her palm on the table. “Maybe you don’t love me yet, but you care for me! I know you do! Don’t lie to me and tell me you don’t, because I know you do, Cassidy!”

“I can’t love you!” I yell back at her, running my hands through my hair. “I just . . . I can’t. I can’t be with . . . with anyone.”

She steps around the chair, closer to me.

“Why not? What happened to you? Why did you move out here? Why did your mother die without medical treatment? Where are the pictures of your family? Why do you change the subject whenever I ask about your father? Why can’t you love me?”

She screams this deluge of questions at me, and they make me tremble because the answers add up to a truth I must conceal. Those answers remind me, fully and thoroughly, of every reason why I can’t have Brynn Cadogan. She thinks that if we share our pasts and sort through these questions, we might find answers that will help us. But she’s wrong. Answering these questions won’t help her figure us out. They’ll only confirm what I already know—that there is absolutely no future for us.

I stare at her, my jaw clenched and my eyes burning.

She takes another step toward me, within reaching distance now, and gentles her voice when she speaks.

“I don’t care what happened,” she sobs, with tears running down her face. “The past doesn’t matter. Only now. I want to be with you. I love you . . . just the way you are.” She takes a ragged breath, reaching for my arm, but I step back instinctively, out of her reach. Her touch, which I crave, could shatter my resolve, and I can’t allow that to happen. “P-please, C-Cass.”

“No.”

My tears are getting the better of me, so I look away from her, dropping my gaze to the floor in misery.

“Cassidy,” she whimpers.

“It’s . . . just . . . not . . . possible,” I grind out softly.

“Please,” she begs. “P-please listen. We could . . . we could get a little p-place closer to town, b-b-but with lots of . . . of privacy. We could have a . . . a l-life together. R-read and m-make love. We c-could have a c-couple of kids and . . .”

A couple of kids . . . a couple of kids . . . a couple of kids . . .

The words clang around in my head like bullets fired into a metal barrel, and I can’t breathe, because having children would be wrong, would be evil, would be breaking old promises that are still essential and must be kept.

Everything in me rebels against what she’s saying, and a swirling storm of panic whirls up. My fists ball at my sides in protest, and she’s still standing in front of me, talking about little places and privacy and children—everything I want so goddamned desperately and can never have. The world is spinning too fast and there isn’t enough time and I hate who I am and I hear a roar of anguish rise from inside me.

“Noooooo!” I bellow at the top of my lungs, advancing on her like a maniac as she stops talking. “Never! Ever! Ever!” I raise my shaking fist and hold it in front of me. “SHUT UP!”

She gasps, her eyes widening in fear, and lunges backward, away from me, her feet stepping in a puddle on the floor. I watch as she tries, almost in slow motion, to regain her balance, but she can’t. She slips and falls, crying out as her wrist slams to the floor first, breaking her fall.

She screams, then whimpers, curling into herself on the floor and cradling her wrist against her chest as she sobs.

I am standing over her.

I am standing over my beloved, broken girl with fisted hands while she cries.

And suddenly time and space flex and loosen, and I feel the spirit of my father pass through me. And in that split second, I know that there were many, many times that he stood over a woman he had just hurt, watching her cry.

Just like me.

Just like him.

What I have always dreaded, always feared, is happening, is coming true.

I am turning into him.

I blink at her lying there on the floor, my heart racing, my lungs unable to fill. I can’t breathe. I can’t look away. I am so filled with horror and revulsion and self-hate, I want to die.

It was only a matter of time.

My fingers unfurl, and my hands are shaking uncontrollably. I want to reach for her, to help her, to bandage her wrist and apologize for frightening her, for yelling at her, but I don’t trust myself. If I am turning into my father, next time I might do worse than just raise my fist—I might actually use it.

The best thing I can do—the only thing I can do—is leave her, put as much distance as possible between her and me.

I leap over her huddled body, bolt out the front door, barefoot, into the dark night, and start running.

***

It’s a while before I stop, and I do only because my feet don’t have calluses sufficient for running through the woods at night. They are cut up and bleeding from rocks and twigs and uneven ground. They hurt. I deserve it.

I don’t know where that violent, beastly scream came from, but I know it scared her enough to cause her to slip and fall and hurt herself. I know I am the cause of her injury, and I hate myself for it.

I’m not sure where I am, but I was going southeast, toward Baxter Park, when I left the house, so I assume I’ve come up on Daicey Pond at this point. I wade in, letting my feet squish into the cold mud. It eases the sharp physical pain in my soles, but nothing can lessen the anguish in my heart.

I have hurt someone.

For the first time in my quiet life, I have hurt someone.

And worst of all . . . I have hurt someone I love.

Looking up at the dark sky, I consider my options now.

Not that she still wants me after what I did, but I definitely don’t trust myself around her now. If she should mention being together or—God forbid—having children who might inherit and carry the genes of my insane father, I can’t guarantee that I won’t lose it again. My God, I raised my fist to her. If she’d kept talking, would I have actually hit her? I feel sick at the thought. I want to believe that nothing could ever lead me to harm her. But I know what lives inside me. I don’t—I cannot—trust myself.

Live quiet, and no matter what happens inside of you, you won’t never be able to hurt someone, Cassidy. It’s what yore mama would want.

Gramp’s words come back to me, as right and true as the day he said them.

I allowed Brynn to get too close to me.

I allowed myself to get too close to her.

I have put her in jeopardy.

The very thought makes me sob. Tears stream down my face as I throw my head back and scream to the dark, unforgiving heavens, “I’m sorry! I’m so goddamned sorry!”

A drop of water plops on my forehead.

It’s joined by another and another and another, dotting my face and wetting my shirt, mixing with my tears and washing me clean.

And the answer comes to me quickly:

To keep her safe, send her away.

If you love her, let her go.

There is redemption only through action.

There is peace only through righteousness.

I know what I have to do.

***

I take my time hiking back to the homestead because I need Brynn to be asleep when I get there.

Gramp kept a glass bottle of ether in the root cellar, mostly for the animals. He’d use it if they were injured or, once, for a cow during the breech birth of her calf. At the end of her life, when Mama was in terrible pain and the fentanyl prescribed by her doctor wasn’t helping anymore, Gramp would apply a bit of ether to a rag and set it over her nose and mouth so she could sleep easier. I know how to use it.

Brynn must leave, and she can’t come back looking for me. I need to get her away from me, somewhere safe, as soon as possible.

On its own, a fight in the kitchen like ours—an intense, emotional conflict between an otherwise loving young couple—might not warrant more than cursory concern. In fact, between two normal people, such anger without name-calling, threats, or actual physical violence might even be chalked up to passionate argument. But I am not normal. Now that it’s begun, it’s only a matter of time before my behavior will escalate. And Brynn must be far away from me when that happens.

My plan is to use the ether to drug her while she sleeps so she stays unconscious, bundle her up in a blanket on my lap, and drive her to Millinocket under cover of night. I’ll find somewhere safe to leave her, and then I’ll return home to start packing up.

I’ll shut up my house as best I can and disappear into the wilderness. I will find somewhere else to live quiet, and this time, I won’t allow myself to diverge from that course. And if the madness gets bad enough—I gulp with the heaviness of my thoughts—then I will take my own life.

When I get home, I detour to the barn, then head to the house. It’s quiet, and the clock in the tidy kitchen reads 1:10. I move soundlessly across the living room carpet, to Brynn’s room, and step through the doorway. I swallow back the meager contents of my stomach when I see the state of her room and my sweet girl.

She is sleeping on her side, tissues littering the floor by the bed, her wrist wrapped in a dish towel. Hurt and sad, she must have cried herself to sleep, and my heart aches with love and sorrow and regret. It never, ever should have come to this.

You did this to her.

You, Cassidy.

My fingers tighten around the ether bottle and rag by my side.

Now do what’s right.

Make it right.

So I do.

***

It’s a slow ride from my place into Millinocket, and it takes a little over two hours.

The roads are mostly empty—they’re often quiet anyway, but from two to four on a weekday morning, almost no one is around, which is good. I know where the police station is from my very occasional visits to town. It’s behind the post office, where Gramp used to collect his government checks. My plan is to park close by and carry Brynn to the entrance. I’ll leave her there and drive home.

When I stop the quad in the far corner of the parking lot, near the road, I don’t see anyone around. Brynn hasn’t stirred much during our trip, though I’ve re-dosed her twice just to be sure she didn’t wake up. I stopped feeling my arms halfway through the trip since she was lying across my lap. Now I cut the engine, looking down at her face.

I love you, I wish I could say.

And if things were different, I’d love you forever, my sweet angel.

Thank you for giving me the happiest days of my sorry life.

Thank you for seeing the good in me when I know there is so much bad deep inside.

Thank you for loving me when I was certain I’d spend the rest of my life unloved.

I promise—I give you my most sacred vow—that I will never come looking for you again. I will leave you alone to find happiness. I will leave you alone so that I know you’re safe.

You are, and will forever be, my life’s greatest treasure, and I will still be loving you on the day I die, Brynn Cadogan.

I clutch her against me, clenching my leaking eyes closed as I lean my forehead against hers and breathe her in one final time.

“Don’t come looking for me,” I beg her. “If I ever see you again, I’ll never be able to let you go.”

I gather her into my arms and stand up, pressing my lips to her forehead and holding them there for a long moment.

It is a certain kind of death march as I walk slowly across the dark parking lot, to the nondescript brick building before me, because my life will be colorless and loveless when I leave her and go. But still my feet move forward in their labor because I love her and I suspect my descent into madness has already begun

Finally I am near the door, where I find a bench. I can place her on it, and she’ll be just to the left of the police station door. Someone will find her quickly. Or when she wakes up, she’ll figure out where she is right away. Certainly no one will bother her this close to the station entrance. It’s my best chance at leaving her somewhere safe.

Standing behind the back of the bench, I lower her gently before taking a step away. To my right, there is a bulletin board, and a notice behind the glass catches my eye.

TIP LINE OPEN – MISSING WOMAN / DEAD MAN

The Millinocket Police Department is seeking information about the disappearance of a woman from the Chimney Pond Trail on June 19 In conjunction, police seek information regarding the stabbing death of a man found in an Appalachian Trail lean-to one quarter mile west of the Chimney Pond ranger station on June 21.

Events possibly related.

Any details can be forwarded to the MPD.

My held breath burns my lungs as I read and reread the notice once, twice, three horrifying times.

It cannot be a coincidence.

Brynn is the missing woman.

Wayne, her attacker, is the dead man.

My mind flashes back to that afternoon. To hearing Brynn scream. To finding Wayne stabbing her. To throwing him across the lean-to, where he remained unconscious until I left with her.

No. Not unconscious.

Dead.

I . . . oh, my God . . . oh, my God, no . . . I killed him.

I killed a human being.

Brynn stirs in her sleep, whimpering softly, but I turn away from her, and I don’t look back. I turn over my quad and zoom out of the parking lot like the devil’s on my heels.

She will be safe now. And that’s all that matters.

As for me?

I am damned.

I am a murderer now . . . just like my father.