Days Like This (42 page)

“Is it my fault?” she said aloud.

“It’s not your fault,” Paige said,
still rubbing.

“How do you know that?”

“Because.”  Paige rocked back on
her heels.  “I’ve seen the way you are with him.  You’re open, and genuine, and
you clearly think he walks on water.  But he has this major hang-up about
Danny.  He can talk all he wants about you not being able to let go, but
personally, I think he’s the one who’s still hung up on the past.”

Her stepdaughter picked up the
towel and stood.  “He has this sick and twisted view of things.  Even I can see
the truth.  I’ve tried to tell him, but he won’t listen to me.  I’m just a
kid.”

“How do you know so much at fifteen?”

“Please. I’m almost sixteen. 
There’s a world of difference.”

“Yes, you are.  And there is.  Thank
you.  For the blanket.  And the foot rub.  I can almost feel my feet now.”

“No big deal.  Anybody would have
done it.”

“The Paige who came to us three
months ago?  I’m not sure she would have.”

“You’ve been good to me.  And I
know you’re not my mom, and nobody will ever replace her.  But, hey.  You’re
okay.”

***

They ate a mostly silent dinner
together.  Every time she heard a car approaching the house, Casey jumped out
of her chair and ran to the window.  The plow passed, first going one way, then
the other.  But still no sign of Rob.  She knew he’d need time to cool off. 
But as that time grew progressively longer without so much as a phone call, needles
of fear began to dance in her stomach.  Danny had died on a night like this, on
a slushy Connecticut highway.  It wasn’t fit outside for man or beast, yet the
man she loved was out there somewhere, driving around, angry and upset.  She
told herself he was level-headed—which was mostly true, except when he was
being an idiot.  Told herself the Explorer had 4-wheel drive with decent enough
traction to get him over the Himalayas, let alone a back road in Maine.

Told herself he wasn’t holed up
in some motel somewhere, contemplating a divorce settlement.

Two hours passed, then three,
then four, and she flashed back to the time, many years ago, when Danny had
stayed out all night.  She’d lain awake until dawn, and when she finally heard
his key in the lock, she’d been furious.  All those hours she’d spent awake,
imagining all the terrible things that might have happened to him.  At the peak
of their knock-down-drag-out fight, he’d confessed to cheating on her.  She’d
been pregnant that time, too.  She’d been so devastated by his admission that
she’d lost the baby, slouched on the kitchen floor in Freddy Wong’s
roach-infested apartment building, the blood pouring out of her and pooling
between her legs.  Funny how those old memories came back to haunt you at the
times when you were most vulnerable.

A little past ten, Paige went to
her room and shut the door.  Casey paced the floor, her anxiety growing with
each tick of the clock.  Where the hell was he?  Off the road in some ravine,
where he wouldn’t be found until morning?  Sitting at the Jackson Diner over a
cup of lukewarm coffee with too much sugar in it?  Driving aimlessly, because
this was Jackson Falls on a snowy November night, and even the bowling alley
was shut down?  Where on earth would he go in this one-stoplight town?

Then it clicked.  Six months
after Danny died, she’d had a huge fight with Rob.  They’d said awful things to
each other, and she’d thrown him out of her house and told him not to darken
her door again.  Of course, being Rob, he’d come hammering at her door early
the next morning, just in time for a cup of the coffee that she, being Casey,
had made in anticipation of his arrival.  He’d spent a mostly sleepless night
on Jesse Lindstrom’s couch.

The same Jesse who was now
married to his sister.

Casey snatched up the phone and
dialed the number.  Her sister-in-law picked up on the third ring.  “I’m sorry
to call so late,” she began, “but—”

“He’s here,” Rose said.  “He’s
been here for three hours.  Jesse and his friend Jim Beam are trying to peel
him off the ceiling.  What the hell happened?”

A solid wave of relief poured
over her, and her knotted insides relaxed a little.  “I don’t know.  I honestly
don’t know.  I came home from town and the minute I walked through the door, he
went into meltdown mode, and—oh, God.”  Her voice broke.  “I’ve been so
scared.  I was afraid he’d gone off the road in the snow.  I imagined all kinds
of horrible things.”

“You can stop panicking.  He’s right
here with us, and we’ll keep him until it’s safe for him to drive.  You might
as well go on to bed.  Once he calms down, I’ll point him in the direction of
home.”  Rose hesitated.  “Just be forewarned:  it could be a while.”

“That bad?  Still?”

“That bad.  I honestly don’t
believe I’ve ever seen my baby brother quite this wound up.”

“I’m sorry, Rose.  I’m so sorry
to get you involved in this mess.”

“Don’t worry about it.  I’ve been
dealing with his messes since birth.  Get yourself some sleep, and we’ll talk
in the morning.”

***

She awoke with her vision blurry
and her head grainy.  The room was still dark, and her husband was sitting on
the edge of the bed with his head cradled in his arms.  For an instant, her
heart stuttered and scrambled around inside her chest.  She rolled onto her
side and reached out a trembling hand to touch the small of his back.  He
stiffened.  “Hey,” she whispered.

He raised his head.  Without
looking at her, he said, “Hey.”

“I wasn’t sure you were coming
back.”

He let out a soft sound, halfway
between a sob and a snort.  “Neither was I.”

She ran her fingertips up his
spine, between his rigid shoulder blades and back down, and he exhaled
sharply.  “When I left here,” he said, “I kept asking myself what the hell I
was doing, leaving you like that.  But I was hurt, and scared, and pissed off. 
And a little crazy.  I wanted to get away from you.  I wanted to hurt you the
way you were hurting me.  I wanted to grab you by the wrists and shake some
sense into you.  I wanted to strip you naked and throw you down on the bed and
make you forget he ever existed.  I wanted to turn my back on you, say
fuck
you
, and never see you again.”

The hard muscles of his back
refused to yield to her stroking fingers.  “But it didn’t take me long to
figure out that no matter what I try or where I go, I can’t do it.  I can’t get
you out of my head.  You’ve been there for too long.”  He finally turned and
looked at her.  “We’re too embedded in each other to separate the strands. 
Almost two decades.  Casey and Rob.  Rob and Casey.  Who the hell knows where
you end and I begin?”

A flicker of pain licked and
darted around her heart.  “I know you love me,” he said.  “We’ve loved each
other for so long, I can’t begin to know where or when it all started.  But,
you see, the problem is, you love him, too.  You’re still not over him.  I’m
not sure you ever will be.  And I just don’t know where to put that any longer.”

“You’re so wrong,” she said.

“I know it should be enough, knowing
that you love me.  But it’s not.  Because no matter what I do, no matter how
much time passes, you’ll never love me the way you love him.  I just can’t
compete.  I’m fighting a losing battle with a ghost.  And maybe I could live
with that, except for that one little inescapable truth that keeps me awake at
night:  If he was above ground, we wouldn’t be sitting here having this
conversation.”

She got up from the bed so
abruptly that the mattress rocked, strode naked across the room, and took her
robe from a hook on the bedroom door.  She pulled it on, tied the belt, and
spun to face him.  “You’re an idiot,” she said.  “A complete and utter cretin,
and I can’t believe I have to explain any of this to you.  But it doesn’t look
like you’ll be pulling your head out of your ass anytime soon, MacKenzie, so we
are going to have this out, here and now, and be done with it.”

He didn’t respond, just sat with
his elbows resting on his knees, those green eyes unreadable. 

“I am so damn furious with you!  How
could you do that to me?  Knowing how Danny died, and what it did to me
afterward—what it’s still doing to me—how could you drive away from me like
that, in a blinding snowstorm, mad as hell, and then not come home, and not
call, and leave me spending hours wondering whether you’d gone off the road and
were dead in a ditch somewhere?”

“I figured you wouldn’t even
notice I was gone.  The way you keep wallowing in your misery—”

“That’s bullshit, MacKenzie!  Do
you hear me?  Absolute and utter rubbish!  I am not wallowing, and if you’d bothered
to let me get a word in edgewise, maybe you would’ve figured that out.  In case
you hadn’t heard, there’s this little thing called closure—”

“Something you should’ve gotten a
long time ago, sweetheart!  That train should have already left the station.”

“Oh, for the love of God.  How
can you be this stupid and still walk upright?  You are one hard-headed jackass,
and I cannot imagine what I ever saw in you.  That train has not left yet, not
for either of us, if you want the God’s honest truth.  So you—”  She moved
closer, poked him hard in the chest with her forefinger.  “—can just get down
off your high horse and stop acting like a two-year-old.”

“I’m not the one acting like a
two-year-old!  And stop poking me.  If you’re that mystified about what you
ever saw in me, maybe it’s time to rethink this whole damn marriage thing!”

“Oh, that’s just priceless!  We
have something really good going here, and you’re determined to tank it!  Well,
guess what?”  She poked him again, hard.  “I’m not letting you get away with
it!  Do you hear me?  You may have managed to screw up your other marriages,
but you’re not screwing up this one. 
Because I won’t allow it!”

He rose to his feet and loomed
over her.  “Goddamn it, stop poking me!”

“You’re damn lucky that’s all I’m
doing, because I am so furious with you right now that I’d like to hit you!”

He squared his jaw.  Braced his
feet apart in a combative stance.  “Go ahead.  Hit me.  I’m a big boy.  I have
broad shoulders.”

“Don’t tempt me, Flash.  What the
hell is wrong with you?”

“I’m done playing second fiddle!”
he bellowed.  “That’s what the hell is wrong with me!  I’m over it, do you
hear?  I did it for too long, and I. AM. DONE!  I’m not standing behind any
man, dead or alive, ever again.  If you can’t deal with that, too bad!  Because
that’s the way it’ll be from here on in.  Starting right now!”

“Is there something fundamentally
wrong with you, MacKenzie?  Something that makes you look right through me and
see what you want to see, instead of what’s really there?  Because I can’t come
up with any other explanation for how you could possibly spend more than five
minutes in the same room with me and not realize that I am absolutely, utterly,
batshit crazy in love with you!”

He opened his mouth to speak. 
Closed it as her words gradually sank in.  Still furious, she said, “Of course
I don’t love you the way I loved him.  I was a
child
when I fell in love
with him!  What you and I have is so much bigger, so much more than what I had
with him, that they’re not even in the same ballpark.  All those years, I
believed he was the love of my life.  But I was wrong.  It wasn’t him.  It was
you
. 
I’ve never felt this way about anybody.  Are you hearing me? 
Never
.  How
can you possibly not know how I feel about you?  How can you possibly not feel
it when I touch you?  When we dance together in the dark?  Or when we make
love? 
Especially
when we make love?  How can you not know that you’re
the reason I get up every morning?”

“You haven’t exactly—”

“Shut up.  It was a rhetorical
question, and I’m nowhere near done talking.  I suppose I shouldn’t blame you
for not knowing, when I wasn’t even fully aware of it myself.  But you’re so
damn smart about everything else that I can’t understand how you can be the
village idiot when it comes to relationships. Of course he still holds a piece
of my heart!  He always will.  That eighteen-year-old girl is still inside me
somewhere, and when I’m ninety she’ll still be there.  She loved him at
eighteen, and she’ll love him at ninety.  I can’t help it, I can’t change it,
it’s just the way it is.  You’ll have to learn to accept it if there’s any hope
at all of us making this marriage work.”

“Good to know.”

“I told you to shut up!  When I’m
done having my say, then you can make your editorial comments.”

He scowled, but kept his mouth
shut.

“The problem, you idiot, is that
you have it backwards.  It’s not that I don’t love you the same way I loved
him.  It’s that I never loved him the way I love you.”

“What the hell is that supposed
to mean?”

“It means that he was a fantasy. 
A young girl’s dream of what love was supposed to be.  But you,
MacKenzie—you’re the real deal.  And you own my heart, all but that tiny sliver
that will always belong to him.  You hold it in the palm of your hand, and with
one wrong move, you could crush it.”

“Yet you keep going back there. 
To the cemetery.  To him.  Do you have any idea what that does to me?  Every
frigging time?”

“I do.  And that’s why I went
there last night.  To give him the cufflink.  To tell him I wouldn’t be coming
back again, because I’m your wife now, and every time I go there, it feels like
I’m cheating on you.  And I’m so tired of hurting you.”

“Yeah, well, that makes two of
us.”

“Stop it!  Do you truly have no
idea what you are to me?  You’re my best friend, my lover, my partner.  You’re
my foundation, my Gibraltar, and my soft place to fall.  My playmate, my eye
candy, and my sex toy.  My teacher, my conscience, and the voice inside my head
that makes me want to be a better person.  My entire adult life is tangled up
with yours, and like you said, we’ve been together for too long to untangle all
those threads and figure out which of them belong to which of us.  It doesn’t
even matter any more.