The Miles Between Us (28 page)

“That wasn’t your responsibility.”

“It damn well was! He was my best friend! He’d lost his daughter, and his wife had just left him. I should’ve stuck around. Instead, I ran like a spoiled little girl, off to the middle of nowhere to find myself. Jesus Christ, Casey, how self-indulgent can you get?”

“You don’t have a self-indulgent bone in your body
. It was time for you to leave. You’d stayed in Danny’s shadow long enough. You needed to step out into the light. And that’s what you did.”

“Yeah? Well, the timing sucked.”

“Yes. The timing sucked. But that wasn’t your fault. It was long past time for you to go solo. You did what you had to do.”

“And then, there was you.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

He ran a hand through his hair
. “I mean that there was a part of me that was waiting for your marriage to crash and burn so I could rush in and sweep you off your feet.”

She
pulled on her robe, knotted the belt, crossed the room and slid her arms around his waist. “And if you recall, my marriage did crash and burn. But I don’t remember you rushing in like a white night to rescue me. Stop rewriting history.”

“I’m not rewriting history. I’m just seeing it with new eyes.”

“Those new eyes are lying to you. Look, Flash, I’ve known you for two decades. You would never do anything to deliberately hurt anyone. It’s not in you. You’re a good man, one of the best. I dare say there’s only one man on the planet who comes near to you in my estimation, and that man would be my dad. He’s not perfect, and neither are you. But you’re both good, kind, moral, upstanding men who’ve spent your lives putting other people first. You would never have deliberately hurt Danny. You loved him. We both did.”

“And isn’t it convenient for me that he’s dead now, and I’m sleeping with his wife?”

“You’re sleeping with
your
wife,” she said. “Where is this coming from? Why now, out of the blue?”

“It’s not out of the blue
. I’ve been wrestling with this for a while now. I’m having trouble getting past the guilt. But to answer your question, Phoenix and I left things on a really sour note.”

“Ah.
So that explains why you’ve been stewing for the past few days. What happened?”

“I’m not sure I should’
ve done what I did. But I was pissed, and he was being a little prick, and I thought he needed some tough love. So I walked out and left him sitting alone in a restaurant in Brooklyn.”

“
Brooklyn?
My God, Rob, that’s like a foreign country.”

“I know
. But I did call Luther and tell him what I’d done. I left the ball in his court. I assume the kid made it back to his hotel in one piece. It’s been a few days, and if anything happened, I would’ve heard by now.”

“I still don’t get it
. What does any of this have to do with Danny?”

“You don’t see it
, do you? Ah, hell, you’ve barely spent any time with him. And it’s a vibe, more than anything else. I guess I shouldn’t expect you to see it.”

“See what?”

“He reminds me so much of Danny. Maybe that’s part of the reason for the itchiness between us. He rubs me the wrong way.”

It was all beginning to make
an odd kind of sense. “And that bothers you.”

“
Damn right, it bothers me! I wasn’t there when I should’ve been for Danny, and then this kid comes along, and he looks like Danny, and he acts like Danny, and he’s a mess like Danny. And somewhere inside me, there’s this crazy idea that maybe, just maybe, I can redeem myself. Maybe, if I help this kid out, I can level out my Karma a little. Get rid of some of the guilt that’s been such a heavy weight on me ever since Danny died.”

She let out a hard breath
. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you can’t change the past by changing the present. The past isn’t something that can be resurrected.”

“Maybe not, but you can balance the scales a little. The kid is headed down a bad road
. I’ve tried to help him. Tried to talk to him. He refuses to hear anything I’m saying.”

She lay her head
against his chest, listened to the strong, steady beating of his heart. “I think,” she said, “that this calls for two glasses and a bottle of wine. We’ll get a little vino inside us, and then we can talk this out. You game?”

He shrugged
. Tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Yeah, okay.”

The kitchen tiles were cool under her bare feet as she crossed the room in the dark. She opened the cupboard and took out a couple of wine glasses, and that was when she saw the blinking light on her cell phone
. Casey set down the glasses and picked up the phone, pushed a button to light up the screen, and saw that she had two voice mail messages. That was odd. Only a few family members had her cell number, and any of them would have called the landline instead of the cell.

Curious, she dialed into her v
oice mail. The first message was from Rob, checking on her whereabouts the day her battery had died. The second call had come in yesterday, while the phone lay dead in her purse. “Casey?” said a cheery voice. “This is Deb Levasseur. I’d like to see you. Sometime this week, if possible. Can you give my office a jingle and set something up? Thanks! Hope you’re having a restful Labor Day.”

What the hell
? She listened to it again, but the message didn’t change. Deb Levasseur, her OB/GYN, had called her on a holiday to ask her to schedule an appointment. And Deb had called her cell phone number.

The cell phone number she’d never given to Deb.

Everything inside her went still. There was only one reason Deb would have called. And only one person who could have given her that number.

She didn’t want to believe he’d betrayed her that way. But she knew, without even confronting him, that he had
. Her sweet, well-meaning, overprotective husband. Rob, the perennial fixer-upper, who could never leave anything alone, but had to grab it between his jaws and shake it, like a pit bull with a piece of meat. It was the way he was wired, and she loved him in spite of it. But right now, she was so furious with him that she couldn’t remember why she loved him.

She set down the cell phone. Left the bottle of wine and the glasses on the counter
. Right now, she was more likely to beam him over the head with that bottle than drink from it. She’d told him, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn’t ready to ask for professional help. She’d told him that she would deal with her psychological issues on her own. Yet he’d ignored everything she said, and he’d gone to Deb behind her back.

That little Karma issue he’d
been talking about? After what he’d pulled, it would take him seventeen lifetimes just to work his way back to where he’d been this morning.

Slowly, deliberately, hating what she was about to f
ace, she marched up the stairs and down the hall. She paused before the open bedroom door, took a breath to calm herself, then stepped inside and closed the door quietly behind her.

Rob
came in from the bathroom, towel in hand. He looked up and saw her face, clearly read the proclamation of war in her eyes. “What?” he said, all innocence.

“
I just discovered a voice mail message on my cell phone,” she said. “From Deb Levasseur.”

He paled
. He didn’t say a word, but he didn’t have to. The color draining from his face confirmed what she already knew. “Damn you,” she said. “What did you tell her?”

“Babe, you have to underst—”

“What the hell did you tell her?”

He closed his eyes, swallowed.
“Everything,” he said, and his shoulders sagged. “I told her everything.”

“How could you
? How could you betray me like that, after I told you I’d handle it myself?”

“You’re not handling it!” he
shouted. “You’re nowhere near handling it!”

“So you went running to my OB/GYN. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I’d like my wife back. And I went to Deb because I didn’t know where else to go. You sure as hell haven’t been any help to me in that arena. I trust her. You trust her. I thought she could set us up with someone.”

“Us
? Set
us
up?” She ran a hand through her hair. “Damn it, Rob, this isn’t about you! I don’t need some stranger poking into my head and trying to put a Band-Aid on my boo-boo. It’s my damn boo-boo, and I’m entitled to it! You don’t have any idea what it feels like to be pregnant, and then suddenly you’re not pregnant any more, only you don’t have a new little baby to hold in your arms, just empty space. You have no idea!”

“No,” he shouted, “
and you have no idea what it feels like to watch your wife go slowly insane! Chasing ghosts through New York City traffic, having nightmares and crying jags for no reason, taking crazy trips down memory lane! It’s like having a two-year-old in the house, one that needs to be watched constantly. I can’t handle it anymore!”

“You can’t handle it anymore because you know I’m right!”

“No! You’re not right! You’re being a spoiled, self-involved little brat! You want what you want, no matter how it affects me, or Paige, or Emma. You have this fucking obsession about having another baby, even though you know it could kill you. If you gave a rat’s ass about us, you’d realize that it would destroy us—all of us—if anything happened to you!”

“It’s not an obsession!”

“I don’t understand. What the hell happened to that smart, beautiful, reasonable woman I married? She’s gone, and this woman that took her place? I don’t know her. I don’t even
want
to know her!”

“If that’s how you really feel, there’s a door right over there
. Maybe you should take it! You have no empathy whatsoever. No understanding of what I’ve been through. You just don’t care!”

“What about me?
Have you even thought about me in all of this? You lost a baby. I lost a baby
and
my wife, and I’ve been struggling ever since to find her and get her back. You’re the one with no empathy. It might surprise you to know that I have feelings, too. You’ve disappeared so far inside yourself that you don’t even see me anymore. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“You’re missing the point!”

“No. You’re the one who’s missing the point. I’ve always been told that marriage was about compromise. But you refuse to compromise. You refuse to even acknowledge my viewpoint, because it doesn’t match yours. I love you. I’ve always loved you. But right now, I don’t like you very much!”

“Why are you being such a jackass?”

“Because that’s who I am, babydoll.” He bent and picked his shirt up off the floor, shrugged into it, haphazardly buttoned it. “And for some inexplicable reason—” He shoved bare feet into his sneakers. “—even though you keep stomping all over my heart, I can’t seem to give up on you. Sometimes, I wish I could, but I can’t. What kind of damn fool that makes me, I don’t know. But right now, I don’t want to be anywhere near you. So I’m leaving. I’ll be back when I’ve cooled off. In the meantime, you might want to think about your priorities.” He paused, hand on the doorknob. “Because right now, they are seriously fucked up!”

He slammed the door behind him,
stomped down the stairs. The front door closed with a thud. A minute later, the Explorer’s engine roared to life. Then he was gone, down the driveway and out of sight. She stood at the window, fists curled in fury, and watched his tail lights until they disappeared from view.

The man was wrong
. He was wrong on so many levels that she couldn’t count them all. Her desire for another baby was not an obsession. It was a need, a physical ache, a maternal yearning so strong she couldn’t control it. Did that qualify as an obsession? He’d called her self-involved, and that was the most hurtful thing, because it simply wasn’t true. Her family was the most important thing in her life. She adored Emma and Paige. She even adored him, when he wasn’t acting like a self-righteous, abominable ass.

There wasn’t a grain of truth to anything he’d said
. He’d simply said all those terrible things because he was furious with her. She’d caught him sticking his nose into something that wasn’t his business, and she’d called him on it. Rob MacKenzie didn’t like to be wrong. He thought he knew everything. And most of the time, he did. Most of the time, he was right. But not this time. This time, he was dead wrong.

This time, he was the village idiot.

But he was her idiot. And because of that, she dropped her face to her hands and cried.

Rob

He’d been driving aimlessly for an hour. Too fast, but that was nothing new. It should have helped to cool his anger, driving fast through the velvety darkness, with the windows open and the radio blaring, the night air threading fingers through his hair.

Except that it hadn’t. The fury was still there, festering in his gut, twisting and knotting his insides until they felt like a box of snakes. That damned Irish temper. The MacKenzies weren’t known for mincing words or for backing down. They were jackasses, and proud of it, with hair-trigger tempers that could ignite with little provocation. He’d inherited that temper from a long line of MacKenzie forebears, and he’d passed it on to Paige. The jury was still out on Emma; his youngest daughter was strong-willed, but she seemed to have a cool head and even temper.

It would probably make her journey through life one hell of a lot easier than his.

Rob gripped the wheel harder, his shoulders aching, his muscles taut with tension. Arguing had been futile. They hadn’t resolved a thing. His wife might not possess the famed MacKenzie temper, but Casey was about as malleable as a chunk of granite. The woman refused to back down, refused to admit that he was right. He loved her, but at times, he wanted to throttle her. This was one of those times.

Tires squealing, he took a hard right turn onto yet another anonymous blacktop road. He was hopelessly lost. These twisting back roads made no sense to a boy raised on the streets of South Boston. He’d lived in Maine for three years, but he still didn’t have a clear picture of the lay of the land. It all looked the same to him. Trees, trees, and more trees, interspersed with fields and pastures and crumbling nineteenth-century barns. Casey, who’d grown up here, knew intimately every acre of land from Jackson Falls to the New Hampshire state line. He could spend the rest of his life here and never absorb what came so naturally to her. What was the saying he’d heard?
Just because the cat has kittens in the oven, it doesn’t make ‘em biscuits.
He was an outsider. No matter how long he lived here, no matter that his wife and his daughter had both been born here or that he paid substantial property taxes, he would always be viewed with suspicion.

The road curved to the left. He stepped on the accelerator, felt the quick response of the engine, the rush of adrenalin
e as he steered into the darkness with no idea of what awaited him on the other side of that curve. It chapped his ass that she didn’t give enough of a damn about him, about Emma or Paige, to listen to reason. He wasn’t the villain in this piece. He was just a guy who loved his wife, a guy who was trying to build a decent life with her.

A guy who didn’t want to lose her.

He rolled into the straightaway and started down a steep hill, wheels humming against the pavement. They’d always been so connected they could finish each other’s sentences. But the last few weeks had created a rift in the tightly-woven fabric of their relationship, had opened a vast gap between them that he had no idea how to breach. And, damn it, he was tired of fighting. He just wanted his life back.

The radio was playing an up-tempo Tom Petty song, a little too bouncy for his foul mood. His attention temporarily diverted from the road, Rob punched buttons until he found WTOS, the Mountain of Rock, where George Thorogood was belting out a song about being bad to the bone.

There. That was more like it.

When he returned his attention to the road, the doe was standing directly in front of him, frozen in time and place, her eyes glowing in the reflection from his headlights. Rob hit the brakes so hard the car fishtailed. He gripped the wheel with both hands and veered to the right to avoid her. His right-front tire dropped off the pavement to the soft shoulder. The deer bounded
away into the woods. Cussing, still moving too fast, he yanked the wheel to the left and over-corrected.

Time seemed to slow as, tires screaming, the car lost control. He had a single instant of clarity, a single instant of knowing he was going to die, a single snapshot of Emma’s face in his mind, before he reached the opposite shoulder.

And the car went airborne.