Castaway Cove (3 page)

From the stilted phone conversations they’d shared while he’d been at Travis, he wasn’t surprised when Kayla didn’t show up to greet him at the airport. He gave the cabdriver the address of the house he’d never seen, then sat in the backseat, practicing what he was going to say that might make things right again.

The neighborhood was typical of American suburbs, with neatly trimmed front lawns and tidy houses on either side of a street lined with trees that blazed with fall color. Even through his still-blurred vision, the high blue Colorado sky and red, yellow, and bronze leaves on the trees seemed blindingly bright after Afghanistan’s unrelenting brown.

Most of the houses were flying the American flag, which was to be expected in a city that was home to the Air Force Academy. Mac couldn’t help noticing that the flag flying from the front porch of the white rambler the cabdriver had pulled up in front of was not the Stars and Stripes, but a banner that boasted three fall-themed pumpkins.

He rang the bell, then waited for what seemed an eternity.

“Hi.” His wife’s tone, when she did finally open the door, wasn’t angry, as it had been the last time they’d spoken in person. Nor was it the least bit welcoming. What it was, he decided, was disinterested.

“Hi,” he said back, standing there, holding his duffel bag while she subjected him to a slow examination.

“You look good,” she said. Since his mirror revealed that he was gaunt and gray, and sported a bald spot where they’d shaved his head for surgery, Mac translated that to mean that he didn’t look nearly as bad as she’d expected.

“So do you.”

It was the truth. She looked much the same. But different. Her long, straight slide of chestnut hair had been cropped to chin length, now a blazing mahogany that echoed the leaves of the tree on the small front lawn, and the snug purple sweater and skinny jeans revealed that although she’d always claimed to hate exercise, she’d been working out. A lot.

Silence settled over them as they stood there, she inside the ranch-style house, he on the narrow front porch. The only sound came from the blower the elderly man across the street was using to attack a mountain of leaves.

He glanced past her. “Where’s Emma?”

“At a neighbor’s.” The unfamiliar glossy bright hair swung as she tilted her head toward the house next door. “You can make up for all the parenting time you’ve lost later. Right now, I thought it would be better if she wasn’t here for this long-overdue conversation.”

Mac’s internal siren, which had failed to go off when the suicide bomber had driven his jingle truck into the marketplace, began to sound. But feeling the leaf guy’s eyes on them, he wasn’t going to stand out here in public and point out that the child Kayla was referring to was
his
child, too. Ever since waking up to find himself in the Bagram ER, he’d gotten through the pain, stress, and guilt by staying focused on getting back home and holding his daughter in his arms.

Although patience had admittedly never been his strong suit, Mac held his tongue and refrained from starting yet another argument as he walked into the small foyer.

Where the flowered suitcase sitting by the front door suggested that whatever conversation he and his wife were about to have was probably not going to go his way.

“So,” Mac asked, with a casualness he hoped would conceal the IEDs going off inside him, “are you taking a trip?”

Her eyes had gone from disinterested to sad. But he recognized the glint of determination in them as well. “I’m leaving.”

“Can we talk about it?”

His shrapnel-riddled leg was aching, but since she hadn’t invited him to sit down after leading him into the living room, he remained standing. It didn’t escape his notice that the living room of the rented house didn’t have a single personal item in it.

She shrugged. “What’s to talk about? We’ve been over this again and again, Mackenzie. Ever since you decided to go off to play war.”

The scorn in her tone hit a hot button, but rather than get into an argument about the fact that no one in a war zone was
playing
at their job, he didn’t jump at the bait he suspected she’d thrown out there just to get a rise out of him.

“You broke your word to me. Yet again.” She folded her arms beneath her breasts, which, perhaps because she was so toned, seemed larger than they’d been. Or maybe, along with changing her hair, she’d gotten implants.

Not a good sign.

“I’m not going to argue that.” Since it was true. “Does the fact that I honestly intended to leave the Air Force count for anything?”

“Only if you
had
left. Which you didn’t.”

Frustration rushing through him despite his exhaustion, he raked a hand through his hair, flinching as it hit on the stitches that had him looking like Frankenstein’s monster. They’d been due to come out today, but since she hadn’t shown up in California and he didn’t want to let things go further downhill, he’d come to Colorado Springs, hoping to make things right.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I broke a promise.”

He paused, waiting for her to accept his apology. When the silence yawned between them, a deep and foreboding chasm, he forged on.

“But it’s a moot point, since my military career is pretty much washed up.”

It needn’t be that way. He had done stories on soldiers who’d returned downrange after being wounded. A Marine sniper who’d lost an eye had sworn he could aim better with one. Others had lost legs, including an Army helicopter pilot who returned with ones he claimed were better and stronger. Like a real-life Six Million Dollar Man.

But while lying in that bed in Germany, Mac had realized how close he’d come to dying. Which probably wouldn’t have been any big deal for him, because he’d be dead and wouldn’t be around to throw himself a pity party.

But the unappealing fact that had come crashing down on him was that many of the accusations Kayla had thrown at him like Molotov cocktails over the years were true. He’d been driven by ambition and selfishness as much as by patriotism or duty. And by enjoying being at the top of his game, the guy with a worldwide audience, he’d nearly left his daughter without a father.

“So you only came here because you’ve nowhere else to go?” she countered.

“No. I came here because I want us to be a family. Which we haven’t been for a long time.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Totally mine.” Not that she’d been a saint. But even though he might be clueless when it came to reading women’s minds, Mac knew this was no time to start comparing personal faults. Especially since he couldn’t deny leaving her alone for so much of their marriage. “That’s why I’m willing to do whatever heavy lifting it takes to make things work.”

“Heavy lifting,” she murmured, suggesting that she wasn’t exactly enamored of the term he’d chosen. Her gaze drifted out the window. She dragged a hand through her hair. For a brief, suspended moment, Mac thought he felt an encouraging bit of indecision.

“You look like shit,” she said finally, turning back to him. “Sit down before you fall down. I need to make a call.”

With that she left the room.

Since he felt about as bad as he probably looked, Mac lowered himself into a flowered wing chair and stretched his stiff, aching leg out in front of him. And waited.

Early on in his radio life, he’d developed an internal clock that kept him from accidentally ending up with one of the things every deejay dreaded . . . dead air. Which was why he knew she was back in just under five minutes.

“I’m honestly sorry, Mac.” She’d dropped the “Mackenzie,” which she only used when she was pissed. Her tone, lower and less acidic, sounded as if she was speaking the truth. But her expression suggested that anything he might be about to say was too little, too late. “About what happened to you. And what happened to us.” Her fingers slid through that unfamiliar glossy red hair again. “But I’m done.”

He didn’t need to be able to read his wife’s mind to know she was telling the truth. At least what she thought was the truth. He could win her back.

Somehow.

“Where are you going?”

She paused. Just long enough to have him thinking that she’d prefer him not to know.

Then she shrugged. “You know I’ve wanted out of entertainment news, but I kept finding myself typecast in California. Ironically, you being in the Air Force helped me land this job, which was a good way to break in. Meanwhile, I’ve been sending out tapes and was offered a morning news anchor spot in Phoenix.”

Even as he considered that Kayla was proving every bit as ambitious as he’d been, Mac felt a sense of relief. It could work. Phoenix was a big city with a bunch of radio stations. One of them was bound to hire him, especially since there were two air bases outside town that would provide a built-in loyal audience.

“I’ve always liked the desert,” he said. Which had once been true. Before all that time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Maybe I haven’t made myself perfectly clear. I’m going to Arizona. You’re going . . .”

She paused, as if realizing that by moving here, she’d essentially left him without a place to live. “Wherever you want.”

“Even if you don’t want to be married anymore, I want to be where Emma is.” Maybe he wouldn’t stay Kayla’s husband, but he’d be damned if he’d give up his parental rights.

“Well, then, you have nothing to worry about. Because I’m leaving her with you.”

“What?” The bombshell hit with much the same force as the explosion in that marketplace. If he hadn’t been sitting down, Mac figured it would’ve staggered him.

“I’ve spent five years being responsible for her twenty-four/seven while you’ve gallivanted around the world playing music on the radio,” she said. “It’s your turn to pick up the slack.”

Mac’s first thought, and it wasn’t a good one, was how she’d so cavalierly referred to their only child as
slack
.

The second was that just as he wouldn’t have wanted Emma to grow up without a father, surely a daughter needed a mother as much, if not more.

His third thought, and the most unpalatable one, was to wonder what kind of woman could so blithely abandon her own flesh and blood. Maybe she’d changed during their years apart. Or maybe he hadn’t ever really known her.

Maybe he didn’t want to try to fix things after all.

But neither did he want Emma to become collateral damage in the war that her parents’ marriage had become.

“Okay, I get that you’re pissed at me,” he said, trying a new tack.

“Make that fed up,” she countered.

“Roger that.” He got the message loud and clear. “I also understand that it couldn’t have been easy handling everything on your own. But how the hell can you just walk away from our daughter?”

“It’s not as if Emma’s going to end up in some Dickensian orphanage. She has you. I’m not abandoning her, Mackenzie. Obviously she’ll visit me in Arizona. And while our divorce lawyers will have to work out the details, she’ll undoubtedly end up spending much more time with me than she ever has with her own father.”

That accusation was tinged with enough acid to peel paint off the walls. “Bull’s-eye,” he said.

She glanced out the window again. As a car rolled up to the curb, she picked up her bag. “As I said, she’s next door. The house with the rocker and mums on the porch. The neighbor’s name is Jami Young. She’s expecting you. I also boxed up your things when I left our California apartment. They’re in the garage.”

With that she left the room. And the house.

Pushing himself to his feet, Mac followed, standing in the doorway, watching as the driver climbed out of the car, took the bag from her, and put it in the trunk.

Once, after he’d joined the Air Force, because she’d kept pouring wine during an hours-long argument, Kayla had taken a cab to a local hotel, where she’d spent the night cooling down.

But the black BMW parked in front of the house was no yellow cab.

And the guy wearing the gray sweater, black slacks, and what were probably Italian tasseled loafers sure as hell didn’t look like any taxi driver Mac had ever seen.

She climbed into the passenger seat without looking back.

Mac watched the car until it turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

Leaving him all alone. And wondering what the hell he was supposed to do next.

It wasn
’t supposed to turn out this way.

Radio had always been one of the few things he and Kayla had in common. She had, as she’d told him many times, fallen in love with the guy on the radio. The guy he’d wanted to be, ever since his days as a kid growing up in Portland, Oregon, when he would lie in bed in the dark, listening through the static and fades of all those far-flung radio stations riding the nighttime airways.

It didn’t matter whether the station was rock, country, disco, or R&B. Even, on occasion, pop, which he’d mostly thought of as “girlie music.” It was the personalities of the guys spinning the records that fascinated him. They were as much a part of the show as the music they played, and they seemed to be having fun. What was most amazing was that they all seemed to be talking directly to him as if they knew him personally.

All of the men Mac knew as a child had real grown-up jobs. His father had been a fighter pilot. His adoptive father, Boyd Buchanan (whose own father had been a fisherman), was a doctor. The guy across the street went to work every day in a fire-engine-red pickup to build houses, one next-door neighbor sold insurance, and the guy who lived on the other side, the father of Mac’s best friend, taught history at the University of Portland.

All of them were so damn serious about their work. Which was a huge contrast to the excitement he heard from the radio guys. Whether they were talking about the record they’d just played, reading a commercial touting a local bank or car dealership, or just talking about cars, or sports, or what they’d done that weekend, you could tell they were having a high old time.

By the time he was fourteen, the hook had been set. Mac had decided that he wanted to be one of those guys on the radio, to reach thousands of listeners who would hang on his every word, who’d laugh at his jokes, all while probably being paid, like, a million dollars a year.

And they weren’t just on the air. They made personal appearances, too, where they were treated like rock stars. Whenever he showed up at these occasions, it did not escape Mac’s notice that deejays were really, really popular with girls.

When he was fifteen, he built a ham radio and spent hours listening to all the conversations between people in distant places. Growing even more convinced that radio could form bonds between people only cemented his determination to have a career on the air.

After two years at Oregon State University’s KBVR station, impatient to get started with his life, he dropped out of college and landed his first professional job, at a country station in Alturas, a town with a population of less than three thousand near the California-Oregon border. He didn’t make enough to live on, but it didn’t take him long to figure out how to game the system.

When the volunteer firefighters wanted him to mention their Friday fish fry fund-raiser on the air, he suggested they bring some by the station, so he could tell everyone in broadcast range how hot-damn delicious the fish was. And sure enough, the firemen showed up with a platter of beer-batter-dipped fillets, which were as good as advertised.

After glowing mentions for three days, people arrived in droves at the firehouse. Not only was it a good deal for him, since he didn’t have to buy dinner; it was beneficial to the community and only drew in more listeners.

Which made advertisers happy.

Which, in turn, made management happy.

And got him a raise.

Not a huge one. But, hey, every bit helped.

Having a pancake breakfast to raise money for new bleachers for the school’s gym? Bring some pancakes and fried eggs by and he’d fill that gym with pancake-buying fans.

Win/win.

Unlike most deejays, Mac was never fired from a job, but he did swiftly jump from station to station in bigger and bigger markets, until that memorable day while he was in Fresno, when the clouds parted, angels sang hosannas, and damned if he wasn’t offered a gig that landed him in sun-drenched, California-beach-bunny clover at San Diego’s KSUN.

He’d achieved a career beyond his wildest boyhood dreams, and been given more freedom than he probably should’ve been allowed—playing music, making jokes, staging stupid contests, talking about pretty much whatever he wanted to. The days of begging for food on the air were in his rearview mirror.

Like the billboard with his grinning face on it towering over the freeway near Balboa Park, Mac was living larger than large: bantering with listeners on the radio during morning commutes, making public appearances in the afternoon, partying at beach bars late into the night, living on too little sleep and too many of the Advils he ate like jelly beans for the inevitable morning-after hangovers.

Fortunately, once that red control light went on and he was on the air, despite the pounding head and roiling stomach that were the result of living too large, Mac easily slid into his Radio Guy persona, and there was never a hint of complaint from the management guys.

By the time Kayla had arrived on the scene, he was growing tired of burning the candle at both ends. A former Miss San Diego whose title had won her a job as entertainment reporter for
San Diego News in the Morning
, she’d appeared at a fund-raising gig he was doing for Wounded Warriors at the Naval Medical Center.

She’d let him know from the moment they were introduced that she was attracted. Which wasn’t that unusual. In his early days on the radio, he’d viewed his groupie fans as a perk of the job. Like a tasty buffet—and he’d certainly sampled his share of delights.

It had never made sense to get into a relationship when he knew he’d be moving on to the next station. The next town.

But in San Diego his career was finally exactly where he wanted it to be. So when the stunning beauty queen, who’d warned him up front that she wasn’t into one-night stands, invited him back to her apartment at the end of the fund-raiser, Mac couldn’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t move on to the next stage of his life.

And now, it seemed, he was moving on again.

He also realized that he was clueless about how to be a single father to a five-year-old girl.

Who was waiting next door for him.

Reminding himself that having survived a suicide bombing, he could certainly handle this situation, Mac took a deep breath, left the house, and walked across the front lawn to retrieve his daughter.