Cassidy

 

After I make Brynn some toast with butter, sugar, and cinnamon, I spend the morning outside, milking Annie and mucking out her stable, and collecting eggs from the girls and vegetables from the greenhouse. I spray organic pesticide on the indoor plants, and change out the tray in the composting toilet, dumping what’s been cultivated about a quarter mile from the house, in the fertilizer heap. I decide to leave wood chopping, cistern filter changing and treating, and solar panel cleaning for the afternoon.

At about noon, I head back inside to make some lunch and check on Brynn.

The curtain to her room is open, which must be her doing, since I’ve been careful to leave it closed, and I peek in to find her sitting up and reading Then Came You, by Lisa Kleypas.

Like most of the other books in the house, I’ve read it at least a dozen times, and though I prefer science fiction and fantasy to romance, it’s among the better choices in Mama’s old love story collection, which is why I offered it to Brynn.

Well, that, and because there is a quote in the book that I should keep in mind while Brynn is visiting: “Sooner or later everyone was driven to love someone they could never have.”

A good reminder . . . especially since my thoughts are increasingly—heck, constantly—of Brynn. And my feelings for her? Growing exponentially. After last night’s fever scare, I know that losing her will hurt. When she returns to the world, I will grieve the loss of my angel.

And you know what?

So be it.

All morning I have, more or less, resigned myself to that fate. I’ll have a lifetime to get over her once she goes. I’m determined to enjoy her—her company, her smiles, her occasional chuckles, her warm body sleeping beside mine—while she’s here.

Although, if I am honest, my warm and happy feelings for Brynn are compromised by another, darker, feeling that I haven’t known in a long, long time: jealousy.

And one question has circled relentlessly in my head since yesterday:

Who.

Is.

Jem?

“Hi.”

“Uh . . . oh!” I stutter. “Hi.”

“How long have you been there?”

“Just a minute. Came in to check on you.”

She holds up the book, then grins at me. “I like this one.”

“Me too.”

“Wait. What?” She smiles so wide, I wonder if it hurts her healing lip. “You read this?”

I shrug. “When you live out here, you read everything you can.” Five, six, seven, twenty times.

“Huh,” she says, still grinning. “It’s good. He wants to marry her.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “Should she marry him?”

“I don’t know yet.” She looks back down at the book. “I mean, I know she will because they’re the main characters, but . . . I don’t know. I’m not sure they’d be good for each other yet. She’s wild and crazy. He’s . . .”

“What?”

“Will he be happy with a wild woman? Or does he want some prim society girl?”

“I guess you’ll just have to see what happens.”

“I guess so.”

I am so curious about Jem, I use this moment of speaking loosely about fictional relationships to try to figure out who he is.

“Were you ever married?”

“No,” she says softly, her smile quickly fading.

Part of me feels like I should apologize and slink away for violating her privacy, but my jealousy, hot and low in my stomach, boils up, refusing to back down. I want to know. I need to know who he is and if he has a claim on her.

“Who’s Jem?”

Her eyes widen, and she takes a soft, jerking breath. “W-what?”

“You mentioned his name yesterday when you were . . . out of it.”

She nods distractedly, still staring at my face with sad, surprised eyes. “Oh. Right.”

My arms are still crossed over my chest, and though I don’t take pleasure in her distress, it’s the collateral damage of assuaging my curiosity and, therefore, jealousy. Negative emotions like envy, anger, and greed frighten me because I feel sure that the seven deadly sins are even deadlier for someone like me, who has the blood of a murderer in his veins. Part of being Cassidy Porter means handling such feelings head-on and quickly, lest they become a gateway for behavior. I won’t let them fester. I won’t let them guide me into darkness if I can help it.

Realizing that I’m patiently waiting for an answer, she furrows her eyebrows, then says, “I was engaged to Jem. But he . . . he died.”

Later I will feel ashamed of the sharp relief I feel at hearing her words. But for now? I let that relief cover me like a blanket, soothing the beast within me.

“I’m . . .” I uncross my arms and clear my throat. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She nods, reaching up to swipe at her eyes, which I now notice are glistening. “He was a good man. He was from here. Maine. Bangor, but we met in California.”

“How long ago did he . . .?”

“Two years,” she says, sniffling, then offering me a brave smile. “He was shot. He was, um, he was at a concert. He was caught in one of those mass shootings.”

“Mass shootings?” I’ve never heard of such a thing.

She takes a deep breath. “It’s when, um, someone goes to a crowded place and shoots a bunch of people. That’s called a mass shooting.” She exhales slowly, like she’s forcing herself to let go of memories that hurt worse than any of her healing injuries. “I lost him.”

My shame doubles as I realize I have forced her to talk about something incredibly painful just to satisfy my jealousy. Before now, I have never heard of a mass shooting, but for me, with only history as context, it conjures images of Nazi soldiers firing on innocent people wearing yellow stars pinned to their coats. The mental image horrifies me.

When I search her face, I see that same elapsed horror in her eyes. She has had to come to terms with this mass shooting concept—something so unspeakable, it should be impossible.

My heart aches for what she has endured.

“God, Brynn. I’m really, really sorry.”

She gives me another brave smile and nods. “He was a good person.”

“I’m sure he was, if you loved him.”

“I did love him,” she says softly. “I didn’t want to live for a while after I lost him.”

“I lost my mother to cancer,” I hear myself saying. “I was close to her. It was . . . awful.”

“How long ago?”

“Thirteen years,” I say, though the number surprises me because it feels much more recent.

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

She winces, and a small sound of pain escapes her lips. Leaning to her left, she places the book on the bedside table, then reaches her hands out to me.

Gramp wasn’t much for grieving. He loved my mother, and I know it hurt him to lose her, but he poured his grief into work, keeping busy and exhausting himself before bed every night. Me? I had no one to talk to, no one to hold me or let me cry about the parent I’d lost.

Except now . . . now here is this angel-woman holding out her hands to me in sympathy and compassion. I take them in mine, lowering myself to the bed beside her, drinking in the soft kindness of her eyes as she squeezes my hands.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You were so young. I can’t imagine losing my parents. They’ve . . . I mean, they were everything to me after I lost Jem.” She gasps softly. “Hey! Did you manage to call them?”

“Your folks? Yeah. I left a message. I said you’d been injured, but you were okay and you’d call them when you could.”

“You’re very kind, Cass.” She breathes deeply and nods, still holding my hands. “Your mom must have been amazing.”

She’s always been there for you, son.

Gramp’s words from our talk in the greenhouse come back to me so fast, you’d think he just said them yesterday.

“She was,” I say, wondering how bad it must have gotten for her in those years after my father’s arrest and conviction. She never really talked about it, but it must have been hell. She would have been a pariah, and yet she protected me the very best she could.

“You okay?” asks Brynn, her voice gentle.

I look up at her and nod. “I don’t talk about her much. It’s . . .”

“I know,” says Brynn. “It’s sad. And it hurts.”

I nod, amazed by her empathy, by her ability to understand how I’m feeling. Somehow it lessens the sadness in that moment. And the pain. As I look into her eyes, she smiles back at me, and the miracle of it is that it’s possible I might be doing the same for her. That, by sharing our pain with each other, we aren’t doubling it, but halving it.

“You know?” she says, squeezing my hands again. “He would have . . . he would have loved it here. Jem.” She turns to the windows and looks out at the mountain. “Oh, man, he would have really loved this place.”

“Yeah?”

“He loved Katahdin.” She sighs softly, facing me. Her eyes drop to our joined hands, and she gently untangles hers from mine, pulling them away. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure. Anything.”

“The whole reason I was here was to bury his cell phone on the mountain. About a week ago, I took it out of an evidence bag for the first time, and I realized it had a smudge of blood on it. I came here to bury that small part of Jem up on Katahdin. I thought I should do that.”

“That’s what you were doing? When you were attacked?”

And suddenly I realize that last night wasn’t the first time I heard Jem’s name. I remember the first time I saw her—the way her friends kept asking her to turn back with them and the way she kept refusing:

I wish I could. But this is something I need to do . . . I’m coming, Jem. I’m coming.

“You were burying him,” I whisper, running a hand through my hair as the pieces come together.

“Sort of,” she says, unaware that I’d been watching. “His body was already buried, of course. But . . . I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to say goodbye in my own way.”

I think of Mama and Gramp buried side by side by Harrington Pond, and I understand exactly what she’s saying. Saying goodbye to those we’ve loved and lost isn’t just about burying them, but also about having a special place to remember them. Brynn wanted that place to be Katahdin.

“The phone was in my backpack,” she says. “Didn’t work out the way I hoped it would.”

And now I understand completely.

She wanted to bury her fiancé on Katahdin, and the chance to make that happen had been stolen from her.

I feel anger bubble up inside me.

She should have been able to say goodbye to this Jem, who meant so much to her, who was taken from her so brutally. Instead, she herself was attacked while pursuing that end.

My rage toward her attacker intensifies by the second until I’m practically shaking with it.

“Cass?” she says, cocking her head and looking at me curiously. “You okay?”

I jerk my head in a nod. I need to get control of myself. An emotion like anger stewing inside my body is no good for anyone.

“Want lunch?” I ask gruffly.

She nods and I stand up, looking out the windows at Katahdin’s jagged peaks.

Don’t sit on your anger, Cassidy. Don’t let rage manifest inside you.

First chance I get, I’m going back up there for that phone so that Brynn can finish what she started.

***

Brynn’s fever hasn’t returned, and I’ve made it a priority to flush and re-dress her wounds every twelve hours. Though she still sleeps for long stretches, she’s definitely on the road to recovery now. I figure I’ll be able to remove the stitches in another week or so. We’ll see.

Because she likes the company, most nights after dinner, I read in the rocker in her room while she reads in bed. Occasionally we share some funny bit of writing with each other, or some pretty turn of phrase. I’ve come to treasure these quiet moments together, reluctantly leaving her around midnight, once she’s fast asleep and the uncomfortable spindles on the back of the wooden rocker start digging into my spine. She hasn’t asked me to hold her while she sleeps again, though I silently long for the words, willing them to issue from her lips night after night. I don’t know what it is I want from her—I don’t allow my mind to wander to carnality, but have to fight against it heading there on its own.

I’ve never been with a woman, of course. I’ve never even kissed a woman. And despite those old magazines from Gramp, I’m not totally certain I’d even know what the hell I was doing, given a chance. But I’m a man, not a child, and I can’t help my longings. When I head back to my cold, dark room after a warm evening in hers, it feels punitive somehow—much lonelier than it actually is. An ache rises up, and I have to fight the desperateness of my yearning to be near her. It’s a certain kind of torture, but I wouldn’t trade this time with her. Not for anything. I have a terrible feeling that these moments will be all I have one day, so I am very careful not to jeopardize them.

This evening, however, I’m not headed back to my room.

After I pull Brynn’s covers up to her chin and dim the light in her room, I put on my hiking boots and grab Gramp’s old miner’s helmet from the closet in my room, placing it on my head. I fish his watch from the back of my underwear drawer and slip it onto my wrist, grateful that it winds because I wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to get my hands on a watch battery. I set it to the correct time, then head quietly out of my room.

There is a closet in the hallway, and I open it. Inside are three rifles—mine from childhood, Mama’s, and Gramp’s—all of them oiled and ready. I take out Gramp’s, which is the only one made for a full-size man, and sling it over my shoulder. It’s unlikely that I’ll need it, but I’ll be in the dark forest, and Baxter Park has a good share of wildlife. Night hiking has its risks.

I look in on Brynn one more time, fairly certain that she’ll be asleep for the next six to seven hours. But just in case, I write out a note:

Went for a night hike. Back by dawn. —Cass

I leave it on her bedside table, then take a long look at her. Her chest rises and falls easily, and her closed lids flutter in the throes of REM sleep. She’s peaceful. And I haven’t a second to waste if I want to be back by sunrise.

“Sweet dreams, angel,” I whisper, backing away silently from her bedside.

The last time I left her, she was in bad shape when I came home. But I know she’s healing now. I don’t have to worry about her fever coming back. And I know she sleeps pretty soundly once she’s asleep for the night. No tossing and turning. No waking up at three a.m.

Besides, I need to do this for her.

And for me. Letting that rage sit and simmer isn’t smart. And the only way to mitigate it is to do something about it. Something real. Something good.

I take a deep breath and sigh, hoping her backpack is still there to be recovered and knowing it’s going to be a long night.