Secrets Of A Good Girl

One of the strangest things about flying, Eric thought as he sipped his complimentary orange juice and stared out the tiny window, was that the sky seemed just as far away as when you were standing on the ground. Clouds were closer, but the blue sky itself still too far away to touch.

Like Cassidy.

He wasn’t used to thinking poetically about anything, really. He’d been like that once. He’d been a young man with his head in the sky, dreaming of his certain romantic future with an auburn-haired woman who’d been destined to be with him as long as he could remember. But when that woman disappeared, that young man then faded away into this older man, an economics expert who thought concretely, who dealt with numbers and facts.

Only a man who’d lost his heart could understand the true concept of risk.

Eric leaned his head back in the uncomfortable coach seat and sighed for the millionth time since takeoff an hour ago. He should have had something stronger than orange juice. Anything to keep him from his own thoughts for the seven hours between Boston and London.

“Are you going to London on business?” he heard a woman ask, and in the split second before he turned his head to the left, he thought, I can’t have a casual chat with someone now. I just can’t. But the person next to him was a snoozing elderly man.

Eric heard a muffled male response and realized the question came from a woman in the seat behind him. “It’s quite a long flight, and I hoped you wouldn’t mind talking awhile,” she said.

The man said yes in a tone that told Eric the woman was attractive and the man was surprised she’d chosen him to converse with. Eric sighed again. The last thing he felt like doing was listening to a cheery get-to-know-you chat.

On the other hand, he’d already seen the in-flight movie a few months ago, and it hadn’t been that great. Maybe eavesdropping would pass the time, help him get away from the musty history museum of his own mind and the full-color portrait of Cassidy Maxwell that was on permanent exhibit there.

“So, are you headed to London on business?” the woman repeated.

Her voice carried over the plane’s engines better than the man’s did, and when Eric didn’t hear his response, he filled in the blank with his own mental answer. Yes, I am, he said silently. I’m going to London on business. Unfinished business.

“A woman, eh?” Eric heard, and gave a start, wondering if she was a mind reader.

“I’m a psychologist,” the woman said to her seat-mate. “I can tell when a man’s crossing an ocean for a woman. Is she your wife or your girlfriend?”

Neither, Eric answered in his head. He sipped his juice.

“Was she your wife or your girlfriend?”

Neither, Eric repeated silently. Cassidy had never been his girlfriend. She was supposed to be, because they’d planned it that way. For years at Saunders University, they’d whispered their plans. Cassidy’s face had shone with anticipation and, every time, he’d felt his own face heating up to match. It was all figured out. Right after her graduation. It was the moment he lived for, drew breath for, waited for…for four long years.

The moment that never came.

“Tell me her name,” the psychologist urged. “Just her first name.”

“Cassidy,” Eric said and, realizing he’d said it out loud, glanced at his neighbor. The man rasped out a snore.

“How long have you known her?”

I met her when she was six and I was eleven.

“And now you’re…?”

Thirty-five. But, he said, and the words were hard to say, even just mentally, I don’t know her anymore.

Cassidy never showed up to her graduation ceremony. Eric never again saw the only girl he’d ever loved. Something had happened. Something to make her run from him and the future they’d planned. Whatever that something was, it was something she never bothered to tell him.

She disappeared ten years ago, he said in his head to the doctor, but I stopped knowing her before that. I just didn’t realize I’d stopped knowing her until she was gone, and then there was nothing I could do.

The doctor nodded in understanding. At least, in Eric’s mind she did. Surprising himself with his candor, he continued his story. She was like my little sister, tagging around after me all the time. When I went off to college in Massachusetts, to Saunders University, I left all my friends in New Jersey. She was just in junior high, just another friend I was leaving behind. She started writing me these letters. The letters were…see, Cassidy never talked much. We hardly ever even talked on the phone the whole time I knew her. She was quiet. Her face did all her talking.

The doctor nodded again, scratching on a pad in Eric’s imagination.

But these letters— Cassidy was smarter than her age, funny, insightful. I read these letters over and over and saw how she was growing up into someone who… I dated plenty of women in college. But what they had to say could never compare to anything Cassidy wrote me.

The plane shuddered, the kind of shake that would rattle a nervous flyer but caused a veteran traveler like Eric to pick up a napkin in case he spilled his drink.

“Did that scare you?” Eric heard the doctor ask.

Sure, it scared me. She was a kid. I was an adult. Finally, I made an effort to distance myself from her. I answered her letters less frequently. I’m sure she noticed, but when I was a senior, she invited me home anyway for her Sweet Sixteen party.

“I see,” the doctor said. She was quite good at her job, Eric thought. She must be expensive. Good thing she wouldn’t be charging him.

I was going to blow off the party, stay at school, but her mother called me and asked me to please come, because it would mean so much to Cassidy. I had a feeling Cassidy had told her mother I was giving her the cold shoulder, and I felt very guilty about it because our parents were close, so I said okay. And I went. And…

“Yes?” the doctor asked behind him. Eric closed his eyes.

Cassidy had opened the door for him that evening. The room behind her was colorful and noisy, filled with friends and fun. She was wearing a tight black shirt and fitted black pants. Eric had glanced over her shoulder, searching for her, before he realized he was looking right at her. Her hair shone around her head and shoulders. He’d never seen her wear black before. He’d never seen her wear makeup before, either, not properly. He’d never seen the delicate skin at her collarbone, sprinkled with freckles, and wondered if the skin below it had the same freckles. She’d stared into his eyes then, and he knew that she knew what she’d become, and what she could do to him.

And later, a few hours later, she’d pulled him into the hall, away from her high school friends, and leaned in, and…

I’m sorry, Doctor, Eric said silently, opening his eyes. There are exactly three moments in my past that I never allow myself to remember. I remember they happened, but I can’t put myself back there again because I can’t live with that intense pain. This is the first of those three moments.

“It’s all right,” the doctor said.

Eric had fled that night, before the party had even ended. Fled straight to the train station, headed back to Saunders, and tried for the rest of that year to forget Cassidy Maxwell.

“Could you?” the doctor asked.

No, I couldn’t.

The next year, Cassidy arrived with her suitcases at Saunders, having just graduated as valedictorian, and signed up as a political science major. Just like Eric. He was now a Saunders grad, but he had an impossible time tearing himself away from the campus now that it had suddenly become more beautiful. He was making political contacts and headway, but found himself visiting Saunders often, dropping in on Professor Gilbert Harrison many times to talk. He didn’t recall what he’d said to tip the professor off, but one day Gilbert tipped him off about an assistant teaching position in the polisci department, and a couple of days later, Eric was standing in front of a lecture hall with Cassidy in the front row.

“That must have been hard,” the doctor said with sympathy.

It was hard, all right. He had been hard, watching Cassidy every day. Cassidy, who’d never verbally strung two sentences together in all the years Eric had known her, would raise her hand and wax brilliantly about any political topic, would debate any controversy with moxie. Young men and women alike were taken with her, and wanted to study with her, have dinner with her, be her friend or more.

But Cassidy’s biggest smiles were reserved for the person she’d been giving them to since she was a child. Eric could read those smiles as well as he always could. She wanted him. She knew he wanted her.

“Then what?” the doctor asked.

Cassidy respected the distance her old friend put between them. Even when that semester ended, he was still a faculty member, and both understood—without speaking to each other about it—that the teacher-student relationship had to be kept that way. But Eric had to be near her, had to be with her. They met off campus many times, and during those times, Cassidy reverted to her wordless ways. They brushed hands in a jazz club. He breathed in the scent of her neck as he pulled out her chair at a coffeehouse. Finally he found himself at four in the morning, sitting with Cassidy under the huge oak on the quad, the entire campus asleep around them.

I’m sorry, Doctor, Eric said in his mind. What I said, what she said, the promise we made—this is the second moment I can’t let myself remember.

“No problem,” the doctor said.

What Cassidy and Eric had vowed to each other kept him wide-eyed awake, excitedly alive, until Cassidy’s last semester as a senior. Then something… A toothache had sent Cassidy into emergency oral surgery, and she was laid up. Eric had tried to help her keep up with her work, but stubborn Cassidy had pushed him away, wanted to do everything herself. He’d seen less and less of her, and when he had seen her, she was pale, thinner, with bags under her eyes as big as coin purses. That last time he’d seen her, two days before her graduation, she’d been in the library, scribbling madly into a notebook. When he’d tapped her on the shoulder, she’d jumped, stared at him with frightening, bloodshot eyes, and bolted from the library, mumbling an apology, or something that sounded like it.