THE END
Epilogue
Cassie
When I wokeup the next morning, Mom was gone. Not in her bed, phone on the charger, purse on the kitchen counter. I had a feeling I knew where she was, and I honestly felt happy for her. Lucas seemed like a genuinely nice guy, albeit a little rough around the edges. But I could tell he cared for Mom, and that she felt the same way about him; and that was all that mattered. Mom had been through a lot, and had been alone for a long time, and she deserved some happiness.
God knows things with Dad had been a little…off, the last few years of his life, and the last few months especially. It stung me to admit it, but Dad had kind of…stopped trying. With us girls, and with Mom, especially. He worked a lot, leaving early and coming home late, and when he was around, he seemed…apathetic. Mom had pretended to be fine, but I’d seen the reality under the surface; she had been unhappy. She loved Dad, and would never have admitted anything different, and obviously would never have left him or anything. But she’d just been unhappy. When he died, I think there had been a sense of relief buried way down deep under the grief, and Mom had felt guilty about that, deeply, horribly guilty. I honestly don’t think even now, with this Lucas Badd in the picture, that she’d ever admit to feeling relieved Dad had died.
God knows she missed him, we all did, and we would never have wanted him to die, but he’d stopped trying. It was as if he didn’t care about anything anymore, especially himself. And it had taken a toll on all of us.
I know Dad’s behavior had led Charlie to move out, and to quickly develop a relationship with the smarmy lawyer-politician or whatever he was, whom I’d never liked. To me, it seemed like she had rebounded from Dad to the first available guy.
Dad made things difficult at home and it led me to come up with ever-increasing excuses to stay on overseas tours—to stay away, because I couldn’t handle the way things had become at home.
Dad’s apathy had certainly lit the fire of vehement liberal feminism and social justice crusading inside of Lexie—along with, weirdly, an absurdly high-rev sex drive, which she sated with a revolving door of loser guys…reversing the role of the player where she was the player, the sexually liberated female who just used guys for what they could give her in bed.
Torie…was Torie. But if Dad’s gradual slide into not seeming to care about us girls, or his wife, had done anything to Torie, it was to make her use pot to escape—which had, in turn, made her content to just drift through life without a passion. This worried me—it worried all of us—because she really did have a lot of talents, things she could do and do amazingly well if she were to care enough to try.
Poppy seemed the least affected of all of us, somehow. Perhaps because she’d lived most of her life with Dad when he was on the downward slide of ill health and lackluster fatherhood, so she had just accepted it as a way of life. But, according to Mom, right now Poppy was in a crisis over quitting school—which was crazy to me, seeing as she’d gotten such a huge ride to a prestigious university. She was insanely talented, but you couldn’t always bank on talent alone.
As I was learning myself, the very, very hard way. I was a seriously talented and skilled dancer…with a shattered leg, three sets of plates and screws, and a long road of physical therapy and exercise ahead of me before I could even walk without a limp. So all that talent, all that skill, all those years of hard work…were useless to me. I’d danced until my feet had literally bled, until I couldn’t walk because my legs were jelly and my feet hurt so bad…and I’d toughed it out and had kept dancing. I’d been the lead dancer in the troupe, a position I’d fought for with all the tenacity and ruthlessness I possessed.
And it had been taken away from me in a split second.
Everything had been taken away.
Including Rick.
I couldn’t sit here and think about Rick, or Dad anymore, so I threw my sling bag on, locked the door to Mom’s condo, and set out to walk to the nearest place I could find food and a strong drink—damn the fact that it was only eleven in the morning, I needed a drink. Mom had been watching me like a hawk, refusing to let me drink my stress and bitterness away.
I hobbled in the direction I remembered seeing something like civilization last night when we were driving to Mom’s condo, and I grimly let my mind wander to the blow up with Rick.
He’d been in a medically induced coma for three weeks, and when they brought him out, he wasn’t himself. I’d hoped it would be a temporary thing, but…it didn’t seem that way. He was angry, bitter, resentful, morose. The diametric opposite to the Rick I’d fallen in love with. He had no other injuries except to his head, so once he recovered from that, he would hopefully be back to his normal life. It would take six months to a year, his doctors had said. I had sat with him, reassured him that I loved him. I’d been at his side the entire time he was in a coma, even when I was in a wheelchair myself after my own surgery, dizzy from pain meds that had only partially dulled the ache in my leg, and had done nothing whatsoever to dull the rage and agony in my head over losing my career.
He’d barely spoken to me after waking up, responding in grunts and monosyllables at most. I’d tried cajoling, sneaking into his bed with him, even trying to get sexy with him—but he wasn’t having it. There was no memory loss, meaning, he knew who I was and who he was, he remembered his family who had come to Paris to be with him, he remembered the various members of our troupe who came to visit and support us both every chance they got—he remembered the accident, he knew all about our relationship and the fact that he’d proposed just a month before the accident, and that we were planning a Paris wedding…
He just didn’t want me. He didn’t love me anymore.
And he told me so.
The doctors told me brain injuries were strange, unpredictable things that no one totally understood, and they did things to the victims that couldn’t always be explained.
Such was the case with Rick, my boyfriend of four years, my fiancé. He fell out of love with me upon waking up from the coma.
I’d stuck by him despite the heartbreak, insisting it was a phase, refusing to believe he meant it. Hoping he would snap out of it, that he’d remember that he loved me, that we were going to get married under the Arc de Triomphe, live near the Eiffel Tower, and have three babies. We would open our own dance studio and I would be Madame Goode, because we were modern and sophisticated and I’d be keeping my own name.
But, no. All those plans had faded into the ether.
He told me he was sorry, but things had changed. For him. He felt lost and needed to be alone to figure things out. I wanted to stay with him, help him figure things out.
No.
He wanted to be alone.
It wasn’t fair to me for him to ask me to stay with him when his feelings had changed. He no longer loved me, and didn’t see that changing any time soon.
Was this all because I couldn’t dance anymore?
