“Doesn’t make you any less dead.”
“I hear you’re sleeping with my wife these days.”
“She’s not your wife. You’re dead and buried. She’s my wife now.”
Danny shrugged, blew out a cloud of smoke and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Semantics. Nothing more than semantics.”
“What do you want, Dan?”
“Me? I don’t want anything. I’m not the one in a pickle, my friend.”
“Yeah? Well, I didn’t ask you to come here, so you can just go back to wherever you came from. You’re not real, anyway, so what difference does it make?”
Danny drew on his cigarette, held it out, and studied it. “So this is what you want? This is how you want to go out, in a blaze of glory? A car wreck, like I did?”
“Fuck you, Fiore.”
Danny grinned. “That’s more like it. Good to see you still have a little fight left in you.”
“I have plenty of fight left in me.”
“Then why the hell are you still here? Lying helpless, like a turtle on its back? Get up off your ass, MacKenzie, and do something. Don’t just stay here and wait to die.”
“That might be a little hard to do right now, with a broken—” He waved his arm for emphasis. “—whatever. But trust me when I say that I have no intention of dying.”
“Then act like it!”
“Who the hell are you to tell me how to act?”
“I’m your goddamn best friend! That’s who I am!” Danny tossed the cigarette to the ground and scraped the hair back from his face with one hand. “And you’re not done living yet, not by a long shot. You have a beautiful wife—” Danny winced. “—my wife, as a matter of fact, and a family that loves you. Not to mention a performing career that—”
“My career’s over. I retired from performing. I’m producing now. I’m happier working behind the scenes.”
“That’s the biggest load of bullshit you’ve ever tried to feed me.” Rubbing his thumb over his lip, Danny studied him thoughtfully. “Did you really think you could bury yourself up here in the middle of nowhere, sit around some empty studio, practicing guitar chords, and forget where you came from? Not a chance in hell. We did it together, MacKenzie. We starved together, and we played together, any place they’d let us get on stage, and we made it to the top together, because the only damn thing that mattered was the music. I knew you when you were a scrawny kid who didn’t know his ass from his elbow. Until he picked up a guitar, and then he became a god. You belong on stage. Your talent’s too big to confine to a recording studio.”
“I was never a god. You were the star, Fiore. I was just window dressing.”
Danny snorted. “I hope to Christ you don’t really believe that, because if you do, you’re deluding yourself. You were always the one with the talent. Always! You need to get back out there.”
“It’s too hard without you. And it’s been too long. People’s memories are short.”
“So? Remind them.”
“I have a family now. I can’t go back on the road. Don’t you remember the way it swallowed us up?”
“Stop making excuses. Do it your way. You have the money, the pull, the reputation, to write your own ticket. It’s a changed world, Wiz. The world we knew is gone, but this one’s bigger and broader and better. You can go so much further than I did. Sure, I could sing, but mostly I was a pretty face. Somebody the girls could fantasize about. You, though—you have a talent that’ll just keep growing and growing. It’ll take you into your old age. Another ten years on stage and I would’ve been a has-been. But, you—another ten years and you, my friend, will be a legend. Hell, you’re already halfway there.”
“Pretty words, Fiore.”
“True words. Listen, Wiz. There’s one more thing.”
The nickname was one that Danny had christened him with when they first met. Short for guitar wizard, it was a term of affection and tremendous respect. They’d always been each other’s biggest fan, and to hear it again, after all this time, touched a chord in his heart. “Yeah?” he said softly. “What’s that?”
“Don’t disappoint her like I did. Don’t make her go through that kind of pain again. It would destroy her.”
Rob closed his eyes, swallowed. “I have no intention of doing any such—” His eyes fluttered open, and he realized he was alone.
Danny was gone.
He was delirious. It was the only reasonable explanation. He’d imagined the whole thing. Danny had been a hallucination, a component of his delirium. Nothing more than a projection of his own feelings.
Steeling himself against the pain, Rob rolled onto his side, and with a strength he hadn’t realized he possessed, raised himself on one knee and slowly, agonizingly, dropped onto his belly. He gasped, lungs burning, eyes squeezed shut against the searing pain that stole his breath away. Then lay there, breathless, until the worst of the pain receded. Slowly, gingerly, he opened his eyes.
And saw the cigarette butt, still glowing red, lying on the damp grass.
Casey
Paige met her at the door, her face ashen with worry. “Nothing?” she said.
“Nothing. I checked every place I could think of, and I drove up and down the state highway for a few miles in either direction.” Casey took off her coat and tossed it over a chair back. “Then I realized how pointless it was, considering how many miles of road there are within Jackson Falls alone. I could drive all night and not cover them all.”
“Aunt Rose called. Just to see if he was home yet. She sounded worried.”
Casey crossed her arms over her chest and rubbed her forearms for warmth. “I don’t know what to do. I’m trying not to panic. But this isn’t right. He wouldn’t be gone this long without calling unless something was wrong.”
“Maybe he broke down and he’s stuck in the middle of nowhere.”
“He’d call. He’d walk to the nearest house and use their phone.”
“At—” Paige glanced at the clock on the wall. “One o’clock in the morning?”
“Think about it. This is your father we’re talking about. No fear, not a shy bone in his body, just a lot of brass. Polished brass, but brass nevertheless. He absolutely would walk up to a stranger’s door at one in the morning and wake them up to use their phone. And you know what else?” For the first time, her composure slipped, allowing the panic to settle into her stomach. She tried to control the hitch in her voice, but couldn’t. “He’d manage to talk his way in and make them think he was the one doing them a favor. Because that’s the kind of guy he is.”
The phone rang. She snatched it up, and her sister said, “Did you find him?”
“How did you know?”
“Jesse called us. Is he home yet?”
“No. I looked everywhere. I don’t know what to do, Col. I’m so scared.”
“What you’re going to do is call Teddy.”
“Teddy hates Rob.”
“Jesus Christ, Casey, your husband’s missing, and your cousin’s a cop. Don’t be an idiot. Call Teddy. Harley and I are on our way over. He’s already called Billy to do the morning milking. We’ll find him, hon.”
She wasn’t a particularly religious woman, but when she hung up the phone, she prayed. To God, to the universe, to whoever was in charge of these things. She couldn’t go through this again. She couldn’t be a widow again for the second time before the age of forty.
She couldn’t lose Rob.
Don’t even go there. He’s fine.
But her mind went there anyway. The idea of facing the next fifty years of her life without Rob MacKenzie by her side filled her with a fear like none she’d ever felt. For the first time, she understood why he’d been dead-set against her getting pregnant again. If the possibility of losing her had been half as terrifying for him as this was for her, she really had put him through hell.
I’m sorry, babe. I’m so very sorry.
She refused to allow herself to fall apart. That wouldn’t help
either of them. She had to hold herself together for his sake. If he was out there somewhere, in trouble, they had to find him. All the rest of it, the apologies, the regrets, the compromises, they could deal with later. The only thing that mattered now was finding him.
Her hands were trembling so hard, she could barely find the buttons on the telephone. But her long-time friend, iron determination, helped those shaky fingers to dial Teddy’s number anyway.
Rob
It was the weirdest thing. At first, he’d been cold, so cold. But he wasn’t cold anymore. It had stopped raining at some point. Maybe five minutes ago, maybe five hours. His clothes were still wet, his skin still clammy, but he wasn’t feeling the cold anymore. He’d been drifting in and out of consciousness ever since Danny left, but even when he was awake, he wasn’t lucid. Not really. His brain was fogged, his thinking glacial. Car wreck. That’s what Danny had told him. But damned if he could remember it. No matter how hard he tried, he had no memory of how he’d wound up here.
Bad to the bone.
Why did that damn song keep running through his head every time he tried to remember? If his brain would kick-start itself into working order, maybe it would come to him. But his brain had stopped functioning a long time ago, and he didn’t think it was coming back.
On the road above him, a car passed, its tires swishing on the rain-slicked pavement. He could hear it, but he couldn’t see it, just the sweep of its headlights as it passed. He wasn’t in pain anymore. Did that mean he was dying? He didn’t mind it so much, dying. Not if it felt like this, warm and cozy and simple. He liked simple. Simple suited him.
Get up off your ass, MacKenzie, and do something. Don’t just stay here and wait to die.
Danny’d said that, too. But what the hell did he know? Rob closed his eyes, and a flash of memory sparked behind his eyelids. His hand, fiddling with the radio. He struggled to remember more, but it just wasn’t there. So he concentrated on something else. Tried to figure out what was the last thing he remembered.
It came to him slowly, twisted and mixed-up and crazy, like the kind of wild dream you’d have after eating a heavy meal too close to bedtime. He watched it like a movie inside his skull. The two of them, faces contorted, mouths moving soundlessly. Their words, instead of coming from their mouths, appeared in cartoon bubbles above their heads. Red. He struggled to read what they said, but couldn’t make them out. But the words were red. The color of love. The color of passion. The color of anger.
They’d been fighting. He and Casey had fought before he wrecked the car.
The tiny portion of lucid mind still left to him experienced an instant of panic. Had they been fighting in the car? Was his wife lying, dead or dying, somewhere in the wreck?
No. He’d been alone in the car. He wasn’t sure how he knew it, but he did. He let out a hard breath of relief, and with that breath, the truth, bold and brassy and inconvenient, wormed its way into his fuzzy brain. It was annoying, and not at all what he wanted to hear. Dying out here would be so easy. Comfortable and simple. He’d just drift off to sleep and never wake up.
He couldn’t think of a better way to go.
And a part of him wanted that. Craved it, even. If he shuffled off this mortal coil, the planet would keep on spinning. His daughters, his beautiful daughters, would be fine. Paige was a grown woman, as strong and solid as an oak tree. She would bounce back, and be stronger for the experience. Emma was so young, she wouldn’t remember him anyway. Being without a father would feel normal for her. He’d go out quietly, painlessly. Dying was so much easier than living. Living was a struggle. Life was hard and painful and screwed up. Nothing ever turned out the way you thought it would. It was a roller-coaster ride without any seat belts. All you could do was hold on and hope you survived the ride. Compared to that, dying sounded downright appealing. It would be so easy to leave it all behind: the struggle and the pain and the bullshit.
Except for one thing.
He couldn’t leave Casey.
She was the only thing that tied him to this mortal life, and his love for her was stronger than death’s siren call. As much as he wanted to take the easy way out, he couldn’t. He’d promised her sixty years, and he still had fifty-seven of them to go. Fifty-seven more years of waking up beside her every morning, of falling asleep beside her every night. They would raise Emma together. They would have a long, happy marriage, filled with love and laughter, joy and pain, tears and anger, because that’s what real life was like. And when the time came to leave her, he’d be an old, white-haired man who would look back on his life and his marriage and think, Well done.
He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the white light that blinded him. Why the hell was it hurting his eyes? In all the near-death experiences he’d heard about, nobody had ever said anything about the light being painful.
On the road above, a door slammed, then another. Voices. Two voices. A man and a woman. Were they angels sent to accompany him home? If they were, he wasn’t going with them. He’d fight like hell to stay here. No way was he going with any angel into any tunnel that had a light so bright it hurt his eyes. No way was he going anywhere that would take him any farther away from Casey. As long as he still drew breath, he would find a way back to her.
Footsteps crunched on gravel. Then the woman let out a tiny shriek. And the man said, “Jesus H. Christ.”
Even in his befuddled state, that was enough to confirm to Rob MacKenzie that they weren’t angels.
At least not the kind with wings.
Casey
“He was right,” she said, staring out the window of the truck. “My priorities are screwed up.”
Her brother-in-law Harley, his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, wisely said nothing.
“We had a terrible fight tonight. That’s why he left. We’ve been at odds for weeks.” She paused, wet her lips. “I’m desperate for another baby. He’s afraid to try again. I’ve been in a very dark place ever since the last miscarriage. So wrapped up in loss that I didn’t see what I was doing to him. I’ve faced so many losses in my life.” She turned and looked at Harley. “Sometimes, it feels as though my life has been nothing but loss. My mother, Katie, Danny. Three unborn babies. And this last one sent me over the edge. I don’t know why. But the possibility of losing Rob puts all those other losses into perspective. Because as bad as they were, nothing could compare to losing him.”
“He’s a good man,” Harley said.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she didn’t bother to try to hide them. Not tonight. Not from Harley, who, aside from Rob, was the person she trusted most in this world. “I’m so scared, Harley,” she whispered. “I don’t think I could breathe without him.”
He’d been missing now for six hours. She and Harley had spent the last two of those hours driving around back roads, scouring the ditches for any sign of a crash. Her cell phone gripped tightly in one hand and a flashlight in the other, she’d examined bridges and gulleys, woods and fields. But there was no sign of her husband. Jesse was out searching the roads on the other side of town. Colleen and Rose, who’d both been married to Jesse and weren’t exactly the best of friends, had nevertheless stayed at the house with Paige. Even her cousin Teddy, who’d never tried to hide his animosity toward her husband, had put out an alert and was out there in the dark, in his police cruiser, doing the same thing she was. That was what family did. They took care of each other. They banded together, setting aside their differences. They’d done that for her, for Rob. Because they were family, and because she wasn’t the only one who loved him.
In her hand, the phone rang, and she recognized Teddy’s number. Her breath dammed up in her chest, she looked to Harley for guidance. “It’s Teddy,” she said. “I’m afraid to answer it. I’m afraid of what he’s going to tell me.”
Harley rested a hand on her knee, squeezed it, and said, “You have to answer it, sweetheart. One way or the other, good or bad, you have to know.”
The phone ke
pt on ringing. She took a breath to compose herself, nodded, and answered. Her voice trembling, she said, “Teddy?”
And her cousin said, “We found him.”
* * *
At the hospital, they wouldn’t give her any information, except to say that yes, her husband was here, yes, he was being treated, and no, she couldn’t see him yet. She would have to wait for the doctor to get the answers she sought.
So she waited. With Harley’s comforting hand on her shoulder and fear rendering her almost comatose, Casey sat silently, her head in her hands. Too drained, too exhausted, to even think clearly. Rose and Jesse arrived, solemn and silent. Had she ever known Rose to be silent? Every so often, one or the other of them would get up and approach the reception desk, demanding to know what was going on. The response was always the same. No news. The doctor will let you know when there’s something to report.
Two hours passed. Then three. She’d just dozed off, her head lolling on the back of the hard, uncomfortable chair, when a male voice said, “Mrs. MacKenzie?”
She jolted awake, blinked her eyes, and shot to her feet. “Yes?”
The man in the white coat was tall and slim, with wire-rimmed glasses and a stethoscope dangling from his neck. He extended his hand. “I’m Dr. Wright.”
His handshake was cool, dry, and brief. “Your husband,” he said, “is suffering from hypothermia, a broken pelvis, and a fairly significant concussion. Not to mention a host of contusions and abrasions. We had to stitch a particularly nasty cut on his head, and his nose is broken. When he came in, he was very confused. That was primarily due to the hypothermia, and it appears to be resolving as we’ve gradually raised his body temperature. It took us some time to stabilize him. Hypothermia’s a tricky thing. It has to be treated with kid gloves or it can turn fatal.”
The Miles Between Us Page 26
