Turning Nineteen

A change of pace –a little bit about Cassie’s history.

October 5, 1980

Cassie is curled up on the threadbare red sofa with a Diet Pepsi and last month’s People magazine open to a page she doesn’t see. Her eyes are on the door where any minute she knows Billy will walk into the tiny Chicago apartment. It’s nine at night on her nineteenth birthday and they are going out to celebrate as soon as he comes home. She’s been waiting for three hours beside the phone.

She’s beginning to get that feeling she always has when Billy’s late – that he’s taken off on one of his adventures again. That’s what he calls these vanishing acts. Adventures. He will disappear for days at a time without telling her where he’s going, or even that he is going. She’ll call his friends and his sister, but no one will know where he is. They’ll all say don’t worry, Cass, you know Billy. He’ll come back when he’s ready, he always does. So she will try to relax and go to her job and pick at her lunch and hope that he’ll be sitting on the front porch when she gets home. Then one day there he’ll be, acting like he’s only been gone to work for the day and has come home for dinner.

“Hi babe. I forgot my keys,” he’ll say with a shining smile and no sign of apology in his gray-blue eyes. She’ll light into him, so angry and so glad to see him, then angry again.

“Don’t ever do that to me again,” she’ll say. “Don’t go off and leave me here to worry about where you are and whether you’re even alive and if you’re coming back to me. Don’t leave me all alone, Billy. Promise me.”

“Sure, I promise, babe,” he’ll tell her, brushing back that curl of caramel hair that always falls in his eyes. “We’re in this together. You know that.”

He’ll give her a gentle kiss and put his arms around her, holding her in that way he has of making her feel safe. She’ll kiss him back, reluctant at first to give in to him again, then letting go of her anger altogether. Skipping dinner, they will end up in the bedroom making love like they always do and fall asleep in each other’s arms. But in the middle of the night Cassie will wake up with a gnawing hunger, lie awake listening to Billy’s faint even breaths and wonder what she’s doing there.

Tonight, on her nineteenth birthday, waiting in her good dress for Billy to come home, she knows she can only depend on herself. She thought she could build a new family with Billy to replace the one she ran from two years before, but she was wrong. She is her only family.

At midnight she falls asleep on the sofa, tears forming a crust on her eyes. Tomorrow she will quit her job, put all her belongings in one small blue suitcase and take the bus to California, as far away from here as she can get.

Copyright 2010 by Liz Zuercher