Castaway Cove (4 page)

Jami Young was a pretty woman in her late twenties with brunette hair pulled into a side ponytail. She was wearing jeans and a University of Colorado sweatshirt, and holding a toddler on one hip. Both her smile and her eyes, as she invited him into the house, held hints of the sadness and pity she felt toward him, which did nothing to boost Mac’s mood.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “About what happened to you. And . . .”

She shook her head. “Well, you know.”

“I think that’s going to take some time to sink in,” he admitted. “But right now, I’m here for Emma.”

“Of course. She’s in the backyard playing with Riley. He’s our beagle. She loves dogs, by the way.”

“Thanks. That’s good to know.”

She paused, as if trying to decide how much of what Kayla had shared to tell him. When she put a hand on his arm, Mac braced for yet more bad news.

“She doesn’t know her mother’s leaving.”

“What?”

The woman sighed, and shifted the now wiggling toddler to her other hip. “Kayla said she wanted to avoid the drama of a good-bye. But she plans to call Emma from the road to tell her good night.”

“That’s big of her.” An icy anger flowed over the initial flare of heat.

His daughter was standing with her back to him, throwing a blue ball to the brown and white beagle, who would race to it, baying with joy, then return to drop it at her pink-sneaker-clad feet.

“Good boy, Riley!”

As she picked up the ball and was about to throw it again, Mac said, “You’ve got a great arm! Are you, by any chance, a famous baseball player?”

She spun around, dropping the ball. “Daddy!” Lights on her shoes flashed as she raced toward him across the leaf-scattered lawn, propelling herself through the air and into his outstretched arms.

She flung her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, and held on tight. “You’re home!”

“I’m home,” he said, not wanting to get into the fact that he had no idea where
home
might turn out to be. He smoothed his hand down her flyaway blond hair. “For good.”

“Really?” She leaned her head back to look up into his face. Her blue eyes, as bright as sunlight on an alpine lake, searched his face. “Truly?”

“Really, truly.”

“Cross your heart and hope to die?”

“Cross my heart.” Holding her with one arm, he managed to make a cross on his chest between them with the other.

“Yay!” She wiggled free and began running toward the house. “Let’s go tell Mommy!”

“Good luck,” Jami said as the toddler, who she’d put down on the grass, headed toward the beagle, who was ripping the ball apart with enthusiasm. “If you need backup, or anything, just give me a call.”

She pulled a sticky note with her phone number on it out of her jeans pocket.

“Thanks. We’ll be fine.”

Mac hoped. But he took the paper anyway, because if there was one thing years in war zones had taught him, it was that it was always good to have backup.

He caught up with Emma just as she reached the front porch. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said, scooping her off her feet again. “About Mommy . . . She just had to go away. On a trip.”

“But she didn’t tell me.” Tears welled up in those lake blue eyes and her rosebud lips began to tremble.

Terrific.

“She needed to leave right away, but she figured it would be okay, because then we’d have time to ourselves after me being away for so long.”

“It was a
long
time,” she agreed as he carried her into the house. “What happened to your head?”

“I got dinged up a bit.”

“When you got blowed up?”

Although he’d received a handmade get-well card from Emma, Mac realized he had no idea what Kayla had told her about the attack. Which made this conversational minefield even more dangerous.

“It wasn’t that bad. And I’m fine now.”

“I heard Mommy telling Mrs. Young that you could’ve died.”

“Nah,” he lied. “That wasn’t going to happen. Because I had you to come home to. And your special card made me get better a lot faster.”

“I’m glad. . . . When is Mommy coming back?”

“I don’t exactly know.”

It wasn’t the whole truth, nothing but the truth, but given their past, there was an outside chance that Kayla might change her mind. Maybe not for him, but for their daughter. Surely he could hope for at least that much from her?

“Meanwhile, what would you say about the two of us going out for dinner?”

Mac had no idea what Kayla had left in the refrigerator and pantry, and since if it wasn’t an MRE, bacon, burgers, or hot dogs, he was pretty much clueless, going out seemed like the answer to his most immediate problem: feeding his daughter. “Anywhere you want.”

Her mood turned on a dime.

“Yay! I want pizza!”

Thirty minutes later, surrounded by ringing, flashing arcade games, animatronic singing figures led by a guitar-playing mouse, amusement rides, climbing equipment, tubes and slides, and hordes of kids who appeared to have morphed into perpetual-motion machines with high-pitched voices that the military would probably love to be able to duplicate in order to puncture enemies’ eardrums, Mac realized that this parenting gig could make his tour in Afghanistan seem like a cakewalk.

But he couldn’t deny, as he wiped a bit of tomato sauce off his daughter’s face, that her dazzling smile was worth it. He also suspected that the frantic activity helped keep her mind off her mother’s “trip.”

He’d worried about more questions about Kayla’s departure, but fortunately Emma was wiped out by the time they returned home with the booty he’d helped her win from the arcade games. Whatever other lack of maternal behavior he might be putting on his wife, he couldn’t deny that their daughter was well behaved.

She didn’t argue about going to bed in a pink room that looked as if a bottle of Pepto-Bismol had exploded all over the walls, other than letting him know that “Mommy and I always read a story together.”

After dutifully brushing her teeth with a Disney Cinderella toothbrush, she changed into a nightgown featuring a red-haired archer who was, Emma informed him, Scottish, and the “bravest princess of all!”

Apparently Jami Young hadn’t been kidding when she’d told him that his daughter loved dogs. Emma’s white spindle bed was covered with plush toy dogs of every size and color.

After making space, he lay down beside her and listened as she read aloud the story of Ferdinand, a fierce-looking but gentle bull that would rather just sit in the meadow and smell the flowers than fight. Which had Mac wondering what would happen if some government declared a war and no one showed up.

“And he is very happy,” Emma recited the last line. Having proven a failure in the bull ring, Ferdinand had been sent back to sit beneath his cork tree and smell his flowers.

“So is Daddy.” Mac dropped a kiss on her head.

“Me, too.” She sighed, then wiggled beneath the Disney Princess coverlet, settling into a comfortable position as he put the book back on the shelf. “I’m
sooo
happy you’re home. Will you be here when I wake up in the morning?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good.” Her eyes were already at half-mast. She was asleep before he’d turned off the light.

Two hours
later, having given up on the idea of his wife calling, as she’d assured her neighbor she would, Mac was sitting in the dark with the radio tuned to a country station, working his way through a pricey bottle of single malt Scotch he’d found in a cupboard. Since Kayla had never liked the taste of hard liquor, he had to deduce the bottle belonged to BMW guy.

As Dustin Lynch sang plaintively about cowboys and angels, Mac wished he still smoked, as he had when he’d first started in the business, partly because all the other deejays did, so it seemed cool. If there was ever a night for whisky and cigarettes, this was it.

“And wouldn’t that be a friggin’ lame cliché,” he muttered. He took another hit of the Scotch, enjoying the burn of it sliding down his throat like a velvet flame, and thinking back to that seemingly perfect first morning together.

Over a fluffy asparagus omelet, he and Kayla had shared family stories. He told her about his birth father, an Air Force pilot whose fighter jet had crashed into the Arizona desert when Mac was eleven. And how the doctor who’d later married his mother and adopted him had encouraged him to keep his hero father’s name.

Her father was career Navy, which meant she’d lived a gypsy existence growing up. Despite living in a city where you couldn’t throw a stick on the beach without hitting a sailor, she was firm about the fact that she would never,
ever
marry a military man.

Mac assured her he had no plans to run off to sea.

Having been an only child who’d always wished for a brother or sister, Mac wanted two kids. Maybe three.

An only child herself, Kayla had cheerfully agreed that three was a perfect number. Later, he would realize that she’d never disagreed with a single thing he’d ever said. At least before the marriage.

Their brief courtship led smoothly to the altar, and since they were both young and enjoying life, Mac had gone along with Kayla’s desire to spend a few years just playing before they got down to the serious business of parenting.

Then, two days before their second anniversary, he’d been working a remote radio gig at the San Diego County Fair when an Air Force recruiter had dropped by his broadcast booth, professed to be a fan, and invited him out for a beer after the show. Two beers later, persuaded by the argument that he’d be serving his country by bringing a sense of home to lonely troops stationed overseas, Mac had decided to join the flyboys.

When he’d gone home and announced his decision to Kayla, she’d hit the roof.

“I grew up in the damn Navy,” she’d shouted at him. “You knew I didn’t want to be a military wife!”

More furious than he’d ever seen her, she had picked up a Waterford vase that had been a wedding present. “I married the hot guy on the radio! Not the man terrorists are going to try to kill!”

He had ducked as the vase went flying by his head and shattered against a wall.

They fought for hours, long into the night, until finally, after they’d both run out of words, as the stuttering pink and white light of dawn began to slip into the room, they had sex. Not makeup sex, because nothing had been resolved. Nor did the furious coupling that moved from the couch to the floor in any way resemble love.

She told him, as they were standing side by side in the bathroom, getting ready to go to work, that she’d leave if he went ahead with his plans.

“You’ve got to understand where I’m coming from.” He had tried to explain his decision as he cut a swath down the foam on his face with his razor. “I’ve always had things easy, sliding through life, living in the moment. And sure, I’ve done promos for the military, and gigs like that Wounded Warrior event where we met, but it never really sank in that there are people out in the real world actually putting their lives on the line so I can play songs on the radio and you can dish entertainment gossip on morning TV.”

“We both do our share of charity work.” She’d frowned and begun to attack the circles beneath her eyes with concealer. “Like you said, much of it for the military. Surely that should count for something.”

“Maybe it should. Hell, sure it does. And I can understand why you’d be worried, but it’s not as if I’m going to be out there patrolling dangerous streets or flying helicopters. I’m going to be doing the same thing I’m doing here. In a nice, safe, well-protected studio on a military base surrounded by armed guards.”

“I work on a morning news show,” she had pointed out. “Just because I’m an entertainment reporter doesn’t mean I don’t listen to what’s reported during the hard news segment. Troops
do
die on military bases.”

“I won’t get killed.”

“I’m sure that’s what your birth father said when he climbed into that cockpit before his plane crashed.”

“I guess you had to have been there when I was talking with the guy.”

After shouting at him that she didn’t have to have been there to understand, she had thrown down her foundation brush.

“I’m not kidding, Mackenzie. You wouldn’t be the first person to fall for a slick recruiting spiel. And you damn well won’t be the last. But if you go through with this, I’m out of here.”

She stormed out of the bathroom. While he was in the shower, he heard the front door slam.

And by the time he returned home from the recruiter’s office, where he’d gone after his morning shift, his wife was gone. Two days later, having cooled down, she was back.

Mac quickly came to realize that military life, especially with all the multiple deployments during two wars, was not conducive to marriage. In fact, whenever a call came in asking for a breakup song, he found himself waiting for his own “Dear Mac” letter.

The first time he informed her, over a crackling phone line from Iraq, that he’d decided to reenlist, she’d threatened divorce. Certain that his marriage was finally over, Mac had been surprised that, even as he hated the idea of failing, he was mostly okay with that.

Until, two months after he’d returned from a two-week leave, she e-mailed him with the news that she was pregnant.

Prepared for a battle to convince her to keep their child, he had been both surprised and relieved when she’d told him that abortion wasn’t a personal option. Since her unwillingness to be a single mother apparently proved even stronger than her dislike of being a military wife, their rocky, roller-coaster marriage stumbled jerkily along.

There’d been times over the years when Mac had thought the only reason they’d managed to stay together was because he spent so much time deployed. It was when they were together that old wounds reopened, allowing long-seething anger to explode.

Apparently, he thought, as he lifted the bottle to measure the amount of Scotch left, this time the wound had been fatal. As he refilled the glass, Toby Keith was proclaiming to be not as good as he once was.

And couldn’t Mac identify with that?

His cell phone rang. Digging into the pocket of his jeans, he pulled it out and struggled to focus on the illuminated caller ID.

“Hey, Dad.” Although his father couldn’t see him, he sat up straighter and set the glass down on the side table. “What’s up?”

“Kayla called me earlier.”

“My wife?”

“That would be her. Unless you’ve gotten another one you failed to mention,” Dr. Boyd Buchanan said dryly. “She suggested I call you.” He paused, as if to allow Mac the chance to fill him in on what had happened.

“She left.”

“Ah.” The man who’d become even closer to him than his own birth father, whom he could barely remember, the man he’d called
Dad
since his teens, didn’t seem all that surprised. “Well, that was certainly a possibility, wasn’t it?” They’d discussed the situation while Mac had been a patient at Travis.

“True.” Mac raked his fingers through his surgically butchered hair, then said, “She left Emma behind.”

Silence. The only sound was the
tick tick tick
of the wall clock coming from the kitchen.

Then, finally, “With you?”

There was some hesitation in his dad’s voice. As if he didn’t think Mac could take care of his own daughter?

“Yeah. So, the good news is that although she said her lawyer will be contacting me about visitation rights, it appears she’s giving me custody.”

The breakup of his marriage, which Mac took responsibility for, was proof that he hadn’t been the best husband. And, although it hurt like hell to admit it, he hadn’t been a good father, either.

Nothing like his dad, who’d somehow managed to juggle a high-pressure career with marriage and fatherhood. He’d always found time to check homework, ask about Mac’s day, and sneak in some fishing on weekends.

“The bad news is that I’ve no freaking idea what to do next,” Mac admitted.

Showing the rapid, confident decision-making skills that had always served him extraordinarily well in the operating room, his father didn’t hesitate. “Why don’t you come to Oregon?”

Mac’s mother had died suddenly two years earlier. Her warm and generous heart had simply stopped one day while she was out weeding her beloved garden, and nothing his famed physician father, the paramedics, or the doctors in the emergency room could do had been able to get it going again.

Professing that he needed a change to shake him out of his widowed depression and apathy, Dr. Buchanan had resigned his medical practice and teaching position and moved back home to the small coastal town where he’d grown up, to live with
his
father.

“Actually, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea,” Mac admitted.

He might be a grown man, far different from the self-centered college dropout who’d left Oregon to seek fame and fortune, but right now, the child he hadn’t even realized was still lurking inside him wanted his dad to make things better.

“But what about Pops? Are you sure he’ll be okay with a five-year-old girl living in the house with him?”

This time the pause was long enough that Mac wondered if his cell had dropped the call.

“Dad? Are you still there?”

“Yes.” His father sighed. “Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. About your grandfather.”

“Okay.” Mac didn’t like the sound of that.

“I had to move him to a memory care facility.”

“What?” Could this frigging day get any worse? “Are you talking about a nursing home?”

“It’s a residence facility. But it’s not like it sounds.”

“Shit.” Mac reached for the glass again and tossed back the rest of the Scotch. After his mother had married Boyd Buchanan, Mac had begun spending several weeks each summer in Shelter Bay and his grandfather Maguire had always been the toughest guy he’d ever known. And one of the wisest.

One memorable year, over Thanksgiving dinner, while riding high on the heady self-importance of being an OSU freshman, Mac had asked the older man, a fourth-generation Oregon fisherman, if he regretted not having been able to attend college, which would have allowed him to do something other than fishing.

“Why would I want to give up fishing?” Charlie Maguire had asked. “If you love what you’re doing, boy, you’ll never work a damn day in your life.”

And hadn’t Mac thought the same thing about his own work?

“What the hell happened? Last time we talked you told me that he was doing fine.” His grandfather had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease two years earlier, but whenever Mac had spoken with his father he’d never picked up on a problem.

“I said his condition was being managed,” his father said, correcting him. “As well as could be expected. If you remember, I told you when he was first diagnosed that it’s not like even five years ago, when Alzheimer’s was a sure death sentence. With all the new advances being made, it’s quite likely that your grandfather will eventually die
with
Alzheimer’s, not
because
of it.”

Mac didn’t even want to think about his grandfather, who’d been the solid, unmoving rock of their family, dying. “Then with all that positivity, why the hell is he in a nursing home?”

“Memory care residence,” his father qualified. “There’s a huge difference. And he’s there because he kept wandering off. With the house located right across the street from the harbor, that put him at even more of a risk. He also left a gas burner on. Twice. Once in the middle of the night.”

Okay. Those were definitely dangerous behaviors.

“Plus, although he’s still engaged and can still carry on a conversation, he’s easily confused. There are times he thinks I’m his doctor.”

“Not surprising. Since you
are
a doctor.”

“True. But
his
is thirty years younger.”

“You’ve always looked young for your age,” Mac said, still trying to wrap his mind around the idea of his grandfather losing his mind.

“Dr. Parrish is also a woman.”

Damn. Another sign that the older man’s symptoms had gotten worse. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“I was going to tell you,” his father continued. “But then you had the bad luck to get blown up and I figured you were dealing with enough without having to worry about your grandfather. Who is, I assure you, being very well taken care of. . . .”

Mac heard another long sigh and realized that this wasn’t the least bit easy for his father. Putting himself in his dad’s place, Mac knew the situation would be tearing him apart.

“He’s happy there, Mac. He’s in a bright and cheery home staffed with dedicated professionals who practice a gentle care philosophy dealing with varying stages of dementia. It’s nothing like warehousing, locking people up to stay lost in their thoughts. Everyone has taken time to get to know him, his life experiences, even his sleeping routine, to work out a schedule of activities that are keeping him active but still allow enough rest for him to recharge.

“When he was still living in the house, I put one of those tracking bracelets on him, which he said made him feel as if he were under house arrest. All the daily, minute-by-minute decisions that were confusing him and making him anxious are now being taken care of at Still Waters, which relieves a lot of stress. Not just on me, but on him, too.

“And most of the time, when I visit, he sees me as his son. Not as the mean doctor who was always telling him what to do. Or as his jailer who was trying to keep him locked up. Which was only so he couldn’t drown himself or get run over walking down the middle of Harborview in the middle of the night.”