“Mrs. Gettis check out?” I tried to keep the quaver from my voice because even as I asked it, I could read the answer on Nan’s face.
“No, Cassie. She had a heart attack yesterday.”
“Oh no.”
Nan nodded. “She didn’t make it.” I could feel her watching me, but couldn’t meet her eyes, could barely keep myself upright. “Cassie? Cass?” I nodded, trying to get it together. “Are you okay?” I nodded again, but it was unconvincing. “Should I call a nurse, sweetheart?”
“No.”
“Honey, you’re completely pale. Sit down.” It was a good idea, and I sank into the chair I’d piled pillows on just the day before, gripping its wood armrests tightly. Nan was still watching me, her eyes intense, probing. Her brow was furrowed above that strong, patrician nose, undeniably Greek like my own. I could sense her trying to figure out how to help with her stuck in the bed and me in the chair.
“I’m sorry, Cassie. I didn’t know you’d be so upset or I’d have called you before …”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Death is always hard.”
Well, she was right about that.
Mrs. Gettis had been the first clue, eventually leading me to today. The man I’d followed, the nail in the coffin, so to speak.
“So, now you know,” Nan said as we sat snuggled on the sofa, cupping our mugs, both of us calmer than we should be. Maybe it was shock. Outside, rain pelted the roof and window, adding percussion to our Mozart.
Then Nan asked the question I knew was coming, the one I’d been asking myself since the squeal of tires burned themselves into my brain. “What now?”
I wasn’t in a good mood, but I couldn’t help a small smile. It was her trademark question. Even if Nan had ideas—and she always did—she made me figure things out myself first. She was big into personal accountability. No lesson like one learned the hard way, she often told me.
I didn’t answer. I don’t think she really expected me to.
Through the rest of the day, Nan tried to keep my mind off it—we played Yahtzee and Scrabble, watched Annie Hall, and skipped the news. But in the down moments, and especially when I finally climbed into bed after eleven, my body too worn out to keep up with my feverish brain, I couldn’t stop replaying the scene. Watching him climb off the bus, dial the cell phone, look at his watch, step off that curb, over and over. The visions swirled in sequence, then out, linked by a final haunting question. Could I have prevented it?
Chapter 3
“Who was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court?”
Mr. Dempsey ignored my raised hand, scanning the room. When no one else volunteered, he pointed to me. “Yes, Cassie?”
“Sandra Day O’Connor.”
Mr. Dempsey nodded and Ally Drewnate marked another chalk stroke for our team.
“What was the Zapruder film?”
No hands went up. Hadn’t anyone seen JFK? Nan loved a good conspiracy theory.
“No one?” Mr. Dempsey looked at me. A couple people on my team did too. I shrugged and shook my head. No point in being a show-off.
This was my favorite kind of history class, when Mr. Dempsey ditched the textbook, the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy propped open on his desk instead.
Across the room, Val Wertz eyed the clock. There was a pep rally instead of fifth period today, and she and the other cheerleaders probably couldn’t wait. I was looking forward to it myself; I had The Stand in my backpack. My third time reading it, but Stephen King never gets old.
The bell interrupted Mr. Dempsey’s explanation of the assassination caught on tape.
“Team A wins,” he called while the class filed toward the door. “Thirty-two to seventeen.”
“Cassie does it again,” Jack Petroski said, looking over his shoulder to smile at me as he steered Val through the door.
“Nice going, Cass,” Val agreed. Jack had his arm around her.
I shrugged, trying to ignore the twinge I felt watching them. Watching him. “A team effort.”
Jack snickered.
“Good luck, Val,” I said gamely, waving as I turned down the hallway toward my locker. Val and I weren’t buddies, but there were few people in our class of forty-six who weren’t friendly with each other. Ashville High was too small for battle lines between cheerleaders and nerds, preps and emos. We barely had enough kids to fill the categories.
As I twirled the combination of my lock, Tasha Lusetovich sauntered down the hall, her dark glossy hair pulled away from her face by a blue bandanna. On anyone else, it would have looked like they’d just finished at their uncle’s farm, but on Tasha it was somehow elegant. Like everything she wore. Tasha and I had been fast friends when she’d moved to our small Pennsylvania town from New York two years before. I’d known as soon as I saw her sitting alone on the steps, waiting for the doors of her new school to open, that she’d be interesting. She had ignored all the chattering around her, her nose buried in a thick paperback that turned out to be John Irving. My kind of chick. But Tasha and I weren’t close enough that I’d told her about Robert McKenzie. Only Nan was close enough for that.
Of course I’d looked him up. The dead man. I followed every newspaper article for the week after, until his name, his photos, his life faded from the daily events. Nan neither encouraged nor discouraged me, picking up papers from the supermarket upon request. We didn’t talk about it, but I saw her reading them late at night, her soft white hair fuzzy around the hand that propped her cheek.
He was forty-one years old. One child: a daughter. That part hurt. God knows I knew what she was going through, my own parents killed in a car accident when I was two.
The McKenzies lived in a brick house, ostentatious with white columns and clipped hedges. It was on our side of town, but too far from the apartment to walk. I rode my bike instead, leaning it against a No Parking sign while I pretended to tie my shoe across the street. The curtains were drawn and there was a museum-like quality to the house. Silent. Frozen in time.
I thought about him a lot: about where his life might have gone, where his daughter’s, his wife’s would go now. It was tough to get that day out of my head, even standing in the shiny school hallway two months later.
“Earth to Renfield,” Tasha said, poking my shoulder.
“Hey.” I tossed my history book into the locker. “What’s up?”
She shrugged. “Nada mucho. You coming over today?”