Pretend She's Here(56)

I looked at the bears and wished I could touch them through the glass. Their velveteen coats were threadbare. Their eyes were old-fashioned; instead of plastic buttons, they were made of thread stitched in a circle. Their colors had faded in time and light. The bears sat at a low wooden table covered with doll-size teacups and teapot.

“She inherited them from her great-aunt,” Casey said. “So they’re very old.”

Her great-aunt—Sarah Royston’s daughter, I thought. “Nora?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you play with them when you were little?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, but mostly they sat on a shelf in our dining room having this same tea party, all through my life.”

“What made your mother and Mrs. Benjamin do this?” I asked, gesturing around to the holiday displays.

“The tree business wasn’t doing that well,” he said. “Local families always bought their trees here, but this is such a small town. My mom had the idea of pulling people in from far away. Now just about everyone in Maine makes a trip here to see the display and, while they’re at it, buy things.”

“That was really smart of her,” I said. “And she was a good friend.”

“My mom was both,” he agreed.

“I’m sorry you lost her,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “She was the best, and losing her was the worst. She took amazing care of me, and I wish I could have done better for her.”

“What do you mean?”

We just stared at the bears for a while before Casey answered. “She fell one night—in the dark, a dumb thing, taking the garbage out. My dad was away, I should have done it, but she wouldn’t let me—she was always afraid I’d bump into something. Anyway, she twisted her ankle really bad, and it turned out she had a hairline fracture. They gave her oxycodone at the clinic.”

“Painkiller?”

“Yep. She was only supposed to take it for a few days.”

My heart skipped. I already knew what he was going to say.

“She told the doctor the pain wasn’t going away so he refilled the prescription. And then again, and then I’m not sure how she kept getting them, but she did.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling a pit in my stomach.

“One day she took too many. She never woke up.”

“Casey …” I said, my mouth dry.

“I tried to stop her, all along. I’d find her pills, throw them out. But she’d always get more.”

“I …” I began, looking for the words. “My mother drank. We used to hide her bottles. It was so hard to see her checking out—she was awesome till she took that first drink of the day, then it was pure oblivion.”

“I had no idea,” he said. He thought I was talking about Mrs. Porter. I’d never even seen her have a glass of wine. He held my hand.

“Yeah. The minute she drank, she just … went away,” I said.

“My mother did, too, with the pills,” he said. “I would have done anything if she’d quit.”

“But that’s the thing about addiction,” I said. “There’s nothing anyone can do until the person wants to stop. They have to do it on their own.”

“My mother couldn’t,” he said. He blinked, looking at me.

“Do you get mad at her?” I asked.

“How do you know?”

“Because she didn’t stop. You wanted her to, begged her to, but she didn’t. It’s a disease; we know that, but still. It took her away. It took mine away, too. I was so angry all the time.”

“Me too,” he said. “When she’d be high, she’d cry. She’d say she hated herself, ask me to forgive her. She’d get all maudlin about stuff like I’d never get a license, I could never play on sports teams. As if I cared. But it started to feel she was looking for excuses for why she was using.”

“But she taught you to play guitar,” I said. “And she trained you to keep bees.”

“Toward the end, she never thought that was enough. There was nothing I could do to stop her, or help her,” he said.

“You both look so happy in that picture in your kitchen. All I see is love,” I said, meaning it more than one way.

“That’s all I see, too,” he said.

He was staring straight at me. It pierced my heart, told me he felt the same way.

Suddenly the cheerful scene around us felt too noisy and close. We walked outside into the clear, cold air. I wanted to be alone with Casey—there was so much I wanted to say to him—but all the others were waiting for us outside the barn. Mark had gotten out the toboggans.

My mind buzzed. We all started marching along a trail into the pine forest, up a steep hill. It was so dark in the trees, a few kids snapped on their phone flashlights. But Casey seemed to know where he was going without light. He and I held the same cord, pulling our toboggan behind us. I stumbled on a rut, and he caught me.

“I know the way,” he said. “I’ve been coming here since I was five. I know every bend, every tree. You’ll be fine—don’t worry.”

Implicit in those words was that he was protecting me. In another place and time, I might have bristled; I’d always thought of myself as strong woman personified, the tough younger sister of a big Irish clan. But everything I’d been through had made me feel insecure and threatened, and it felt good to have Casey there for me.