“You know that Mrs. Austin passed a few years ago,” Connie said. “Cancer.”
“I hadn’t heard,” I said. She was like my second mother in high school, and Cade’s place was my second home.
Until my parents were killed. Until what happened with my sister. I still had a hard time even thinking the word, let alone speaking it. Suicide.
“Oh, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, Junebug,” Connie said. “I thought you might have heard. But no, I guess you probably wouldn’t want to keep in touch with them, after what happened.”
What happened.
My head was swimming, and I could barely hear Connie’s words. It was a mistake coming back here. I knew better than this. After all these years away, I didn't want to deal with dredging up the past. All the sympathetic looks, the head shaking and platitudes about the unfairness of life. I didn't want to hear any of it.
But I'd brought it on myself.
And then, to buy the house right beside Mr. Austin? It made me some kind of masochist. It was some kind of fucked up.
“No,” I said, my voice faltering. “I haven’t talked to Cade in years.”
Not since I left West Bend.
“Oh,” Connie said. “I’m sorry, honey. I overstepped my bounds, mentioning them.”
I cleared my throat, shaking my head like I could discard the feelings threatening to drown me. My head was spinning. “No, Connie,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Coming back here must be hard.”
“No, it’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine.
I thought I had put more distance between myself and this place, enough to return and not be affected. Now I was seventeen again and everything had just happened yesterday.
And then to hear her mention Cade. My heart still raced at the thought of his name, even after all these years.
Even after all that had ripped us apart.
“He joined the Marines, you know,” she said, as if she could read my thoughts.
“Did he?” I asked, like I didn't know what he'd done after high school. Like he hadn't always been at the back of my mind, every time I'd gone to work. Every time I'd treated a Marine in uniform. When I'd deployed with the Marines.
I’d walk out into the waiting area of one of the health clinics, chart in hand, and call for a patient, and there he would be, looking up at me with that same crooked smile he'd always had, that smug sexy smile that made me want to smack him and screw him all at the same time.
And then I'd blink, and he would be gone. I looked for him everywhere, no matter where I was - at the big Navy hospital in Norfolk, overseas in Okinawa. In Afghanistan.
It would have been too easy to just pick up the phone and call him. Or send him an email. But I never did. And then I finally stopped looking for him.
What the hell could I say, after all that had happened? After all that had passed between us?
“He did really well in the Marines, from what I heard,” Connie said, her voice shaking me out of my thoughts. “His dad was so proud of him. Got a Silver Star back in - Oh Lord, it's been a while back now."
“Oh,” I said. That sounded like the Cade I knew. Cade had always been that kind of guy, the one who would run into a burning building to save your dog.
He had always been a good guy.
“Is- is he back here in West Bend?”
“Oh, no, honey,” Connie said. I could feel her gaze on me, knew she was trying to assess what I was thinking. I felt transparent, asking about Cade, and Connie C. was a gossip. The last thing I wanted were a bunch of questions from people in town about why I was moving back home. The last thing I wanted was for people to assume I was moving back home to see Cade.
He’s probably married with kids by now.
“Oh. I didn’t think he would stay here," I said.
Connie leaned closer, her voice dropping. “Ran off to California, the year before his mom died.”
California.
Not here.
I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or relieved.
“Don’t say you heard it from me,” Connie said. “But as I heard, he joined some biker gang. It broke his dad’s heart.”
A biker gang. That didn’t sound like the Cade I knew.
It was years ago; the Cade you knew is long gone.
“I didn’t know,” I said. Of course, I didn’t know much about this place anymore. I hadn’t been back here since the end of my junior year in high school. That was when everything in my life had changed.
Why had I come back here?
My therapist had warned me about this. You’re jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, she had said. You think you can quit medicine and get away from the trauma from Afghanistan, yet you’re running right back to the place where your family died?
She thought it was all about running away from the trauma of Afghanistan. She didn't understand it was about more than that, because she didn't know the whole story behind why I was running. I had to come back here. It was the only place that could heal my soul. I realized how corny that sounded. But I believed that there was something about coming home, back to this place, that could fix the part of me that was broken.