Second Chance Spring

by Delancey Stewart

  “She could call us now and then,” Amber said, and a little edge of resentment was clear in her voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll call me, won’t you?” Amber looked worried suddenly. “I don’t think I can handle Mom all by myself, Paige. You have to call and come back sometimes, okay?”

  “I’ll only be a couple hours away. I’ll be back all the time.” I thought about that. I’d have to stay with Mom. My house would be rented out. I’d be like a visitor in my own town, and there’d be no chance meetings of hot neighbors in the street if I wasn’t at my house.

  God, I wished I could get Cormac out of my head.

  “It’ll be good Paige, you’ll see.” My sister squeezed my arm and I could see in her eyes that she was as uncertain as I felt.

  Ellie is watching you

  Cormac

  I pulled into the parking lot at Shoot It and Stuff It Taxidermy in the tiny town of Cahoots, Virginia and shook my head. This place was as far flung as you could get—I’d gotten here only through the grace of Google maps and a fair amount of guessing, since most of the roads I was directed to take turned out to be deer trails or gnome paths nowhere near wide enough for my car and generally unpaved. The building was essentially a huge wooden shack, with an enormous stuffed elk stuck to the top of the front wearing a T-shirt with the place’s name on it.

  I needed to do better vetting my clients.

  And I would have, had I not been slightly desperate to keep the dollars coming in to feed my family.

  There were no other cars in the lot—if that’s what you could call the small clearing in front of the building where I currently sat in my car. The woods around the place were dense, and at this point they were fairly dark, and while I wasn’t a guy who got easily spooked, there was a lot here that didn’t feel right. Not the least of which was the way that stuffed elk up there was glaring down at me.

  I got out and went to the front, ringing the bell next to the door and wondering if I was perhaps about to be murdered by some kind of Appalachian backwoods crazies, but the place remained silent in the wake of the bell.

  “No one home,” I whispered.

  I got back in my car and picked up my phone to call Antoine. I wasn’t sure what exactly it was he thought I could only understand by seeing this taxidermy shack in the woods. Unfortunately, I had no bars here, and realized I was too far from civilization to make a call.

  I retraced my path in the car back to a somewhat major road, where my phone picked up a signal finally. From there, I mapped to a hotel, checked in and settled into a room for the night. As I ate a microwaved dinner from the lobby, I finally got hold of Antoine.

  “Cormac, you’re really in Cahoots?” he sounded strangely excited, considering I told him I would be coming out this week. I also didn’t like the implication that we were in on something together. I already thought there might be something not quite right going on, and the skeevy operation out in the woods wasn’t helping my impression.

  “We’re not in cahoots,” I said.

  “You’re not here? Cahoots, Virginia, right?”

  I had forgotten the bizarre name of the town. “Oh, yes, sorry. I’m here. Yeah, I, uh, went up to the shop.”

  “Oh, you saw Ellie,” he said.

  “No, no one was there. Maybe it was after business hours.”

  “Ellie, the Elk.”

  “Oh, yeah. The sign, I saw that.” I shuddered at the memory of the thing watching me wander around.

  “There is camera inside. Cool, right?” So he had me on camera wandering around. Great.

  “Do you need a big security system all the way back there in the woods?”

  “You would be surprised, Cormac. This is what I want you to come here to see.”

  I had no idea what he could possibly need to show me in order for me to properly do his taxes, but this was evidently what my life had become. “So should I come back by tomorrow?”

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “You come tomorrow. I have something special for you.”

  “Antoine,” I said, picturing a stuffed polar bear or something waiting for me, “I can’t take any more gifts. And I have all the taxidermy I need for now, thanks.” I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but I really was. Not grateful.

  “Well, you come and see. Then you decide if one man ever has enough stuffed animals.”

  Now there was a quote.

  “Sure,” I agreed. “What time?”

  “You come when you like.”

  “How’s nine?” I asked, hoping I could wrap things up and get home.

  “At night?” he asked, sounding like this might be fine with him.

  “I was thinking morning.”

  “Oh no, much too early.”

  “Ah, okay. Noon?”

  “You come at four.”

  So whatever time I wanted was actually whatever time Antoine wanted. “It’s just that I’ve got a long drive home, and—”

  “Oh, no problem,” he said. “You stay another night. Go home the next day.” No problem for him, he meant.

  I sighed. “Okay,” I agreed reluctantly. “I’ll see you at four.”

  “Good job, Cormac,” he said by way of goodbye.

  “Um. Bye.”

  Antoine was a very mysterious and confusing taxidermist.

  I threw away my dinner tray and gazed suspiciously at the hotel bed, which had a sag in the center and was covered with a geometric spread that made my head hurt. I pulled the spread down to the foot of the bed and was relieved to find clean-looking sheets and a warm blanket with no apparent holes or stains. This wasn’t exactly the Ritz, but it had decent ratings, and I didn’t want to spend a fortune on this adventure into the land of bizarre taxidermy and shady taxes.

  The television offered little to catch my attention, and as I sat in bed, propped up by the pillows, my mind wandered while Law and Order blared.

  Pretty much everything in my life felt wrong. And not just this current situation.

  The girls had been acting strangely. Despite Luke being home, they both seemed to be moping and sad, and I couldn’t figure it out. April had suggested they were just channeling the emotions I was putting out, because she’d said I seemed particularly angsty when I dropped them off. Kids, she reminded me, are very perceptive.

  That was bad because my own mood was definitely not in the bright and sunny realm, and hadn’t been for years. Except for a brief little dip out from behind the clouds when I’d gone a few steps too far with my pretty neighbor.

  I cringed as I thought again of Taylor’s words, of the way Paige’s face had shadowed with hurt and surprise. My heart twisted inside me. This was what I’d been trying so hard not to think about, but here in the middle of nowhere, in this shitty hotel room, there was little else to do. And even when I was pointedly not thinking about her, I often found myself thinking about Paige.

  And in my darkest moments, I wondered why things couldn’t have worked out differently, why I hadn’t been brave enough to really let myself try. Instead, I’d ruined any chances from the start by telling her I wasn’t looking for anything. Because really? I hadn’t been looking. I’d been treading water, just trying to survive each day since Linda had died.

  What I hadn’t expected was to be thrown a life raft made of laughter and shared evenings, dogs and happy children.

  If I’d know that really, I was looking—I’d been looking desperately—then maybe I would have done things differently.

  Now Paige was gone, or practically, according to Leslie. And I was here, in Cahoots. And nowhere.

  My phone buzzed at my side as I wallowed in my misery, wishing I had brought some HalfCat along with me. I had no doubt there was moonshine somewhere nearby, but I wanted to get out of here as soon as possible and a hangover probably wouldn’t help.

  I picked up the phone to see my brother calling to FaceTime.

  “Hey,” I answered, hating the way I looked on the screen. Callan’s face appeared, and he gave
me his freeway billboard smile. Handsome fucker.

  “Your daughters wanted to say goodnight,” he told me.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to coax some enthusiasm into my voice. If kids picked up the way we were feeling easily, what the hell would they get right now? I felt lower than I could remember feeling in a long time, thinking of the empty house across the street, my own empty heart.

  “Daddy!” Maddie’s happy face filled the screen, blue eyes and wild blond curls brightening my mood immediately.

  “Hey you,” I said, smiling at my bright and gleeful daughter. “How are you? Having fun with Uncle Cal?”

  “We had ice cream for dinner!” She cackled madly and made a series of faces that made me wish I could memorize every single expression and save it in a log inside my head to flip through later.

  “You did, huh?” I chuckled. Cal had never promised not to spoil them rotten.

  “I did,” Maddie said, her smile dropping. “Tay-were won’t eat nothing.”

  “Anything.”

  “Right. Nothing.”

  “Why won’t Taylor eat?” I asked, a little spark of worry igniting inside me.

  “She not hungry, silly!” Maddie laughed again, and I figured Taylor not eating was probably nothing for me to be worried about. Still, not eating ice cream might be. “She wants to say hi.”

  Taylor’s serious face filled my screen next. “Daddy,” she said, sounding like an executive who’d just called me into her office to be fired.

  “Hey Tay,” I said, trying to add enough levity to my tone for us both.

  “When will you come home?” she asked.

  I sighed. “I want to come home now,” I told her truthfully. “But I think I’ll have to spend another night. So day after tomorrow?”

  Taylor’s eyes filled immediately with tears and she sniffed hard and then said, “No.”

  “I don’t have a choice, honey. This is work.”

  “I want you to come back,” she said seriously, her voice shaking with an edge of hysteria. Then the serious demeanor broke and her face crumpled as she said, “Please come home, Daddy. Please, please.”

  My heart shredded inside me and a little burst of adrenaline ignited my body, making me sit up taller. I hated this. There was nothing I could do from here. “Tay,” I said, trying to make my voice soothing. “I’ll be home soon, I promise. You’ve got Uncle Cal and Aunt April, and …”

  “No!” she wailed. “They’re leaving too! Everybody is leaving!” The phone dropped and I heard Callan’s voice as Taylor shrieked and cried, her voice moving farther from the phone’s speaker. After a second of darkness, April’s face appeared on the screen.

  “Hey,” she said, her eyes full of sympathy. “Sorry, I hoped seeing you would make her feel better.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, worried.

  She sighed. “I think she’s fine, Cormac. But she’s just been really quiet and withdrawn. And when Cal and I talked about the honeymoon we’re planning, she got up and left the table and went to her room. It took me a while to get her to come back downstairs.”

  “Why is she upset about your honeymoon?” I wondered.

  “Well,” April said, dropping her eyes for a second. “Can I just say something? It’s kind of not my business, but we’re family now, right?”

  I sighed. “Just say it.”

  “I think she’s pretty sensitive about people leaving. You know, after her mom …”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I mean, there was that. And then the thing with Paige, right? And then right after that you go on this trip, and then we told her we were going to take a trip. To her, it probably feels like everyone is leaving her. She’s scared.”

  “I’ll be home in two days!” I knew that wasn’t the point, but I felt completely powerless and exasperated. “And Paige … what does Paige have to do with anything? Taylor didn’t even like Paige.” I wasn’t sure how true that was, but all I could think about was the way Taylor basically screamed at her and drove her away.

  “Maybe she did,” April said. “Maybe she was just worried. Kids don’t process their feelings like we do.”

  “I know that.” I snapped. I knew my daughters. They were my daughters, after all, and we’d been through hell together. The three of us. I knew them better than anyone.

  “Right, of course.” April looked sorry she’d spoken, and turned away to someone I couldn’t see. “I’ll give you back to Cal.”

  Shit. “No, wait. I’m sorry April. I’m just … I’m in a rough place right now. I didn’t mean to snap at you. You’re probably right about Taylor, I just … god, I can’t do anything from here.”

  “She’ll be okay,” April assured me. “And don’t worry about me. I put my nose where it didn’t belong.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Okay, well, here’s Callan.”

  And I’d managed to fuck up yet another relationship with a woman. I was totally winning at life.

  “Nice work,” Cal said.

  “Shove it,” I told him.

  “Two days, huh?”

  “Yeah. Thanks for watching the girls. Think Taylor will be okay?”

  Callan glanced over his shoulder. “April just put on Frozen 2. I think she’ll come around. I might lose my mind, however.”

  “I get that.” I sank back into my pillows feeling completely empty. “Thanks, man. I’ll call tomorrow, okay?”

  “Yeah. Night.”

  I turned off the television and set my phone to charge, and then tried to go to sleep, which turned out to be nearly impossible in Cahoots, Virginia.

  Morning came in a wash of rain and a tumult of thunder and lightning that matched the furious storm of my emotions. I had left Singletree feeling like getting away would be good for me, as if the act of driving away kept me from having to face Paige leaving.

  Because it wasn’t just Taylor who was suffering some abandonment issues, and as I watched the water stream down the windows of the diner I found in downtown Cahoots, I finally admitted it to myself.

  Cold eggs and dry wheat toast might have helped me come to grips with my own emotions, but more likely it was the knowledge that I was in a bit of a now-or-never situation. My heart ached in a way it hadn’t done since Linda had died, only this time I knew it was different. This time there was a chance to reach out and try to change things, try to create a different outcome.

  Cahoots, Virginia was the perfect place for me to understand the things I’d been forcing myself to ignore before. The cold isolation of a stiff impersonal hotel room was exactly what I’d needed to show me that the path I was on wasn’t leading in the right direction. This was not what I wanted, not for me and not for my girls.

  Sure, keeping things distant and impersonal ensured you’d never feel much of anything, but it was no way to live. I didn’t want to live like this—with taxidermy and dirty wallpaper as a metaphor for my emotional life.

  That said, I couldn’t accept another woman I loved leaving me. I wouldn’t fucking survive it.

  I stared into the depths of my coffee cup and let that awareness fully sink in—I was already in love with Paige. It was the exact thing I’d been trying to avoid, but it was too damned late to do anything about it. And now? Now I could watch her leave—hell, I’d practically pushed her out of town myself—or I could try to keep her.

  I just wasn’t sure I was reason enough for her to stay if she’d already made up her mind.

  But I had to try. I had to hope that a sad lonely accountant with a really extensive exotic taxidermy collection and two big-hearted little girls would be enough.

  “Cormac, here you are!” Antoine greeted me outside the building, keeping me standing on the barely adequate overhang as the rain continued to sheet down. He was a small round man with sparse dark hair swirled around the top of his head and a thick full beard streaked with grey. His forehead was unnaturally shiny and I had an urge to offer him a handkerchief with which to wipe it. However, I didn’t car
ry a handkerchief, and that would have been weird anyway.

  Today there were several cars out in front of the building and light poured from the two windows up front.

  “Yes, I’m here, but barely,” I said, indicating the rain. We shook hands. “Good to meet you in person, Antoine.”

  “Yes, good. Let me give you tour.” Again I got the distinct impression of an eastern European accent of some kind. Russian?

  Antoine walked me through a complex operation involving an enormous deep freeze, several sewing stations, and large tables where a couple guys were elbow deep in the process of skinning things. I suppressed the urge to gag and turned away from that particular activity.

  A variety of lifelike animals were watching us from the walls, tables and corners of the rooms. A grizzly bear stood on its hind legs in the corner, something about its expression making me extremely uncomfortable.

  Taxidermy was creepy as hell.

  “This,” Antoine was saying, “is kiwi.” He pointed to the long-beaked bird one of his men was working on. “And here,” he said, pointing at the other guy, “is baby rhino.”

  Something about that last one struck me wrong. “Uh, wouldn’t it be illegal to kill a baby rhino? They’re practically extinct, right?”

  Antoine laughed and clapped me on the back. “Very good, Cormac. No, of course we don’t kill rhino.” He didn’t, however, explain where the baby rhino had come from. “We have customers who like very exotic animals. Like the ones I send to you. You like your quokka?”

  Did I like my quokka? “Uh, sure. Yeah.”

  “Very exotic. Hard to get. You can’t find stuffed quokka in America.”

  Just then a very large man with a ski cap pulled down over his ears burst through the front door, scanned the room, and finding Antoine, barreled over to where we stood near a bald eagle dangling from the ceiling. “Boss, got that, uh …” he glanced at me, his red face clouding as his beady eyes narrowed. “That …”

  “Specimen?” Antoine suggested.

  “Yeah. Specimen. Need to get it in the freezer right away.”