Days Like This

by Laurie Breton

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I was so damn pissed at you.”

  “Likewise.”

  “Just between you and me—” He kissed her shoulder. “—I’m pretty sure it was that hot puddle of lust thing that was the tipping point.”

  “Stop teasing me. Please.”

  “That was the sweetest thing anybody’s ever said to me. The whole damn speech was sweet. I mean, I realize I’m no Jon Bon Jovi, but at least I have sexier feet than he does.”

  “If you don’t stop, I’m going to slug you.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I deserve it.”

  “Maybe you do, considering the way you left me standing barefoot in the snow.”

  “That was pretty bad, wasn’t it?”

  “It was. Bloody Irish drama queen.”

  “Hey, I only have a meltdown once or twice a year.”

  “Do you suppose that from now on, you could schedule them in advance, so in the future I can plan to be in Aruba during your biannual breakdown?”

  “I’ll try to work it into my schedule.”

  She floated for a time, wallowing in contentment. “You do realize I’m going to get fat and ugly? You’ll probably rue the day you met me.”

  “You could never be fat or ugly.”

  “Says the man who wasn’t around during my third trimester the last time I was pregnant.”

  “You’ll always be beautiful to me. When you’re nothing but a toothless hag in the nursing home, with your boobs hanging to your knees, I’ll still be trying to get into your pants at least once a day.”

  “What a lovely picture you paint. And what happened to Paris?”

  “I’m sure they have nursing homes in France.”

  “Funny boy.” She wriggled away from him and sat up on the edge of the bed.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Mrs. MacKenzie?”

  Tightening the belt to her robe, she said, “Bathroom. You might as well get used to it. I’ll probably be spending most of the next seven months in there. Then I’m going downstairs for a drink. I’ll be right back.”

  It was cold in the kitchen. Even though she and Danny had paid a fortune to have insulation blown into the walls, the old farmhouse was still like a barn, too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. Without bothering to turn on the light, she got a drink of water, then walked to the window and stood with her nose pressed against the pane. The snow had stopped, and a vast blanket of stars spread across that dark winter sky.

  The door to Paige’s room was ajar, the stereo playing softly. She pushed open the door, tiptoed across the room and shut it down. Then hesitated. Something felt off. She listened for the sound of breathing, but all she heard were the sounds of an old house settling down on a cold November night. She moved silently to the bed, reached out, made contact with empty space. Felt around, realized the bed was cold. And empty.

  She marched to the doorway and turned on the light to confirm what she already knew. Paige wasn’t here. Nor was Leroy. His crate was empty and his pink leash, which normally hung on its hook beside the door, was missing.

  At some point when she and Rob were too busy yelling at each other to pay attention, both kid and dog had flown the coop.

  Don’t panic, she told herself. She’s probably just with Luke. Or Lissa. Or—glancing at the clock, she realized it was nearly 1:30 in the morning. And it was freezing out there.

  “Rob?” she said, moving through the living room to the staircase. “Rob!”

  A moment later, like a wraith out of the darkness, he appeared at the top of the stairs. “What’s wrong?”

  “Did you talk to Paige when you came in?”

  “No. Her door was shut. I figured she was asleep. Why?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “What the hell do you mean, she’s not here?” With his long-legged stride, he thundered down the stairs, two at a time.

  “She’s gone. With Leroy. His leash is missing.”

  He moved past her, headed toward the kitchen. “Goddamn it. When I get my hands on that kid, I swear to God I’ll—”

  The phone rang. He stopped dead, and they stared at each other. Her heart pounding in her chest, Casey said, “Maybe that’s her.”

  He headed for the kitchen at a trot, caught the phone on the third ring. “Hello,” he said. “Yes. Uh huh. What?” He glanced at the key rack on the wall, and his face went several shades paler. “Jesus Christ Almighty. Is she okay? I—yeah, of course. We’ll be right there. Thank you.”

  He hung up the phone, rubbed his hands over his face. “Rob?” she said.

  And he said, “That was Teddy. We have to go to the hospital. Paige just totaled the Porsche.”

  Rob

  The drive to the hospital was a blur, his hands clamped on the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles lost color. Acres of darkened forests and fields whizzed past his window, while visions of death and dismemberment danced through his head. With squealing tires, he wheeled the Explorer into the County Hospital parking lot and found an empty space. They released seat belts, opened doors, and raced through the Emergency entrance. He strode up to the admitting desk and shoved aside a woman who was standing there. Her mouth fell open. Brusquely, he said to the nurse behind the desk, “My daughter’s here. Paige MacKenzie. Auto accident.”

  “Down that hall and to your right. Hold on, I have paperwork you need to fill out! Mr. MacKen—”

  He didn’t wait to hear the rest of her sentence. With Casey by his side, he sprinted down the hallway, took a right at the end, and went through a set of double glass doors that read EMPLOYEES ONLY. They were in a treatment area, with a cinder block wall on one side and draped cubicles on the other. He hesitated for an instant, and then he heard her voice at the far end of the hallway. “I want my dad! Nobody’s fucking touching me until my dad gets here!”

  Relief weakened his knees and sharpened his tongue. He felt an instant of ridiculous, unwarranted pride. She was a MacKenzie right to the marrow. Every potty-mouthed, argumentative, prickly inch of her. He slowed his pace, moved toward the cubicle, pulled back the curtain, and opened his mouth to spill all the furious, terror-driven words that were bottlenecked inside him.

  Sitting on a white-papered examining table, his daughter glanced up at him with huge green eyes. MacKenzie green. She had a nasty scrape on her chin, a bloody cut at her temple. Tiny fragments of glass in her hair and on her face. For an instant, he was hit with a feeling of déjà vu so powerful, as he remembered Casey after the accident that had killed Danny, that the room started to spin. He closed his eyes, searching for the inner strength he knew was there somewhere. He was a MacKenzie. They were all tough as nails. A little steadier, he opened his eyes again. His daughter’s clothes were bloody and torn, and she looked terrified. But she was alive. That was the only thing that mattered.

  “Dad,” she sobbed, and began to cry.

  Nothing in thirty-seven years of living had prepared him for the impact of that single syllable. All the words he’d intended to say simply disappeared. They would undoubtedly come back later, after he saw what was left of his car, but for now, they were gone, replaced by a wave of emotion so strong it nearly brought him to his knees. Fatherlove. For an instant, he just stood there, amazed by the depth of his feelings. Casey had tried to explain it to him a long time ago, but he hadn’t understood. Not intellectually, and certainly not viscerally. Until now.

  He swiped a tear from his cheek and said brokenly, “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m here.” He crossed the room, took his daughter’s hand in his, and squeezed it. “Promise me you won’t scare me like that ever again.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “I wrecked your car.”

  “Shh. It’s okay.” He rubbed his thumb against the palm of her hand. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Struggling against a fresh burst of tears, she said, “But you love that car so much. You paid a lot of money for it, and—”

  “Jesus Christ, Paige, do you really think I g
ive a good goddamn about the car? All that matters is you! I’ve never been so scared in my life. If anything happened to you—” He closed his eyes, fought back nausea. Opened them again. “I can get another goddamn car. I can’t replace you!”

  “But I thought—”

  “You thought wrong. Have I been such a lousy father that you actually believe I could care more about a car than I do about you? Damn it, Paige! No matter what you do, no matter how hard you fight me, no matter how deliberately obnoxious you act, you can’t make me stop loving you! Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

  Tears streamed down her cheeks. He dabbed at them gracelessly, smeared a streak of blood, and realized he’d made things worse. Leaning in close, he said softly, “Whatever the problem is between us, we can fix it. There’s nothing so bad it can’t be fixed. Right?”

  She opened her mouth. Closed it. Nodded.

  Some of the tension inside him began to unknot. He could breathe again, for the first time since he’d picked up that ringing phone. “Okay.” He took a practice breath, just to be sure. “Now I can say it. What the hell were you thinking?”

  Paige swiped furiously at a tear. Instead of answering, she asked, “Where’s Casey?”

  “I’m right here.” His wife stepped through the opening in the curtain and squeezed into the rapidly-shrinking examination room.

  Paige looked at her father, at Casey, then back at him. “Are you two getting a divorce?”

  He gaped at her in astonishment. “A divorce? Of course not. Why would you think—”

  “The fighting. It was horrible. I thought things would be okay when you came back, but they weren’t. And I assumed—”

  “The worst,” he said in resignation. “Because you’re a MacKenzie.”

  “Oh, honey,” his wife said, squeezing past him to take his daughter’s hand. “Married people fight sometimes. We get mad, we yell and scream at each other, throw a few things, slink off to separate corners to lick our wounds, and then we get over it. Because we love each other. Nothing can change that.”

  His daughter looked bewildered. “But he said such awful things to you.”

  Her words nearly tore his heart in two. This was all his fault, and only he could fix it. “I say a lot of things,” he told her. “Most of them I don’t really mean. Don’t you worry, baby. Nobody’s going anywhere. We’re a solid family unit, the three of us.” The four of us, he corrected, but now wasn’t the time to divulge that little piece of information.

  “You were so mad.”

  “And you got caught in the middle. I am so damn sorry, Paige.” A tear broke loose and trickled down his cheek.

  “And I’m so damn relieved. I wasn’t ready to move again. Hey, do you know where Leroy is? They took him away from me. They wouldn’t let him in the ambulance.”

  “Leroy’s fine.” He reached out, touched his daughter’s cloud of golden curls, so like his. Felt the connection between them, that stench of MacKenzie that couldn’t be removed, no matter how hard you scrubbed. “Teddy took him home to his wife. We can pick him up in the morning.”

  The doctor cleared his throat, and Rob got the hint. He removed his hand from Paige’s hair and took a step backward. “You let the doctors patch you up,” he said, “and then we’ll go home. Later, we’ll talk about what you did, and what Casey and I are going to do about it. But not just yet. Right now, we have more important things to worry about. Capisce?”

  She sniffed. Nodded. “Capisce.” Her voice sounded stronger. More confident. More Paige-like.

  He stepped away from the examining table, nodded to the doctor, and followed Casey out into the corridor. Once he was out of Paige’s hearing range, he pressed his forehead to the cold cinder block wall and let out a harsh, ragged breath. Casey touched the small of his back, ran her hand up between his shoulder blades. “It’s okay,” she said.

  “It’s not okay. This is my fault. I’m the one who taught her to drive the damn car. I thought I knew what I was doing. I failed miserably.”

  “Kids don’t come with a handbook. You learn by doing. You have to expect to make mistakes.”

  “She could’ve died.”

  “She didn’t die. She’s still the same feisty kid she was yesterday. A little humbled, maybe, but still the same warm and wonderful Paige we’ve come to know and love.”

  A soft snort of laughter rose in his chest, unexpected and uninvited. It came out of him sounding like a pig rooting for truffles.

  “However,” she said, “I’m thinking a little family counseling might be in order.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “Okay.”

  “She’ll be fine. We all will. And I am so proud of you right now.”

  He’d finally stopped shaking. Turning from the wall, he looked at her curiously. “Why?”

  “You crossed a line tonight. You became somebody’s dad. And you rose to the occasion with grace and dignity.”

  “Don’t make me sound like a saint. I’m not. I’m just an ordinary guy.”

  “Right. You go on believing that, my darling.”

  Her words caught his heart and squeezed it like a fist. He took in a sharp breath. “You’ve never called me that before.”

  “An oversight I intend to rectify as often as possible in the future. A lot of firsts tonight.”

  “Yeah. A lot of firsts.” No wonder his head was spinning. The last few hours were more than any mortal man should be expected to process.

  She threaded an arm through his and nodded in the direction of the admitting area. “Come on, babe. If you don’t fill out that paperwork, they’ll hold Paige for ransom.”

  They began walking arm in arm down the corridor. “They probably wouldn’t keep her for long,” he said. “Didn’t you ever read ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’?”

  His wife leaned her head against his shoulder and said, “You are so very, very bad.”

  “But so very, very right. And you love me anyway.”

  “I do. I can’t for the life of me figure out why, but the disease seems to be incurable, so I guess you’re stuck with me.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. They paused, and she gazed up at him expectantly. “I’d planned to bring this up earlier, before everything went to hell. Tomorrow morning, there’s someplace I want to take you.”

  “All right.”

  “No questions?”

  “You know me better than that, MacKenzie. I never question your judgment. I’ll find out when we get there.”

  “Do you have any idea how much I love you right now?”

  She smiled that amazing Mona Lisa smile, and his insides melted like butter. “Yes,” she said, “I do believe I have an inkling.”

  Casey

  She’d been down this road before. Literally. Growing up in this tiny town, she knew every back road, had ridden most of them on the school bus that traveled twice each day in a big circle from the elementary school to the town line and back. Ridge Road ran parallel to Meadowbrook Road, where she’d grown up, but at a higher elevation. She’d traveled it every school day for thirteen years. The view from up here had always impressed her, even as a young girl. Especially at this time of year when, with the trees bare of leaves, it felt like she was sitting on top of the world.

  Ahead of them, on the right, she saw a bright yellow FOR SALE sign. Rob clicked on his blinker and slowed, turning into a dirt driveway that was little more than two gravel tracks winding through a field of yellowed winter grass. He stopped the car, put the shifter into Park, and looked at her.

  “I suppose,” she said, “you’re going to tell me why we’re here.”

  “Let’s get out.”

  She stood with him in front of the Explorer, a cold November wind whipping her hair around her face. “There used to be a house here,” she said. “It belonged to the Sirois family. I went to school with Donald Sirois. The house burned down a decade ago.”

  “There’s twenty acres. Mostly open fields, with a few nice old hardwood shade trees. A small orchar
d. Lots of room for a garden. Jesse says the deer like it here, especially in the fall, when the apples ripen. Turn around.” He took her by the shoulders, guided her. “Take a look at the view.”

  Across the road, the land fell sharply, a winter-yellow field that led to a deeply wooded hillside. In the distance, there were lakes and mountains as far as the eye could see. “The sun sets over there,” he said, “right behind the mountains. At sunset, all those lakes turn sky-blue-pink. Imagine having that view out your window every day for the rest of your life.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” She was pretty sure she knew, but she wanted to hear it from him.

  “Don’t you think this would be the perfect place to build a house? Our house. One with no ghosts and no memories. A home where we can raise our kids.” He took her hand in his, wrapped his fingers around hers to take away the chill. “I have piles of money just sitting around. Why not use some of it? We could design the place ourselves. Build it exactly the way we want it, to suit us. Roomy and beautiful, but not pretentious, because we’re not pretentious people. Lots of warm wood and old-fashioned charm. A modern kitchen, with every fancy gadget you want. A master bedroom suite with a huge soaking tub. Maybe a wraparound porch, where we could put a swing, like the one we have now. Whatever you want, just name it, and it’s yours. I want to build this for you. For us. To give us a fresh start.”

  “You want me to sell the house.”

  “Look, I know you love that house, babe. I like it, too. But everywhere I turn, I see Danny. If it’s that way for me, it has to be a thousand times worse for you. I don’t think we’ll ever get past him as long as we stay there.” He tugged at her hand, led her up past the cellar hole to the half-acre of flat land behind where the house had stood. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. About my life, my career, where I want to go from here. I’m a family man now. I have a wife and a daughter, and a baby on the way. I don’t want to spend my life on the road, leaving you behind, missing birthdays and first steps and first smiles and all those little things that only happen once. I want to move away from performing and into the production end of the business. Writing and producing albums for other artists. With you as my partner. Like we did for Danny. We could build a studio—a real studio—right here, behind the house. Sure, we might have to spend some of our time in New York or L.A. But with a state-of-the-art facility, plus our expertise, we can make them come to us. It’s like that Kevin Costner movie. If I build it, they will come.”