Days Like This (45 page)

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.”

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 give 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.”

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.