Redemption Road (Jackson Falls #5) (11 page)

And she was gone.

Colleen stood at the door and watched her descend the stairs, her
red parka disappearing into the darkness beyond the yellow arc of illumination
from the light mounted outside the door. Tiny flakes of snow had begun to fall,
the kind that signaled a bitterly cold night. The entire
Bradley-Lindstrom-MacKenzie clan could have their damn party, and more power to
them. She had no interest in partying, had even less interest in meeting
Jesse’s new wife. She wasn’t ready for that, not yet. Sooner or later, it would
happen. It was inevitable; this was a small town, and her ex-husband had
married Rob’s sister. Her introduction to Rose MacKenzie Lindstrom could wait
for another Saturday night. Tonight, she was staying inside where it was warm,
with a roast beef sandwich and a good book for company. The last thing she
needed was some ridiculous family gathering, where all the ghosts of her past
would rise up to bite her on the ass.

When a full stomach and fifty pages lulled her into a drowsy
state, she turned off her bedside lamp and drifted off to sleep. After several
hours of her customary patchy slumber, she’d finally reached REM sleep when a
loud banging ripped her out of the bizarre dream she’d been having, something
about a red bicycle she was pedaling past the Palm Beach house wearing winter
boots. She lay flat on her back, trying to figure out where she was, for a full
ten seconds before it came back to her in bits and pieces: 
Jackson Falls. Casey’s
house. Apartment over the studio.
Colleen reached out, scrabbling around in
search of the lamp. She finally found it, switched it on, and sat up, her eyes
blinking at the sudden light, her movement dislodging the book that had been
lying open on her chest. The banging came again, and she realized that somebody
was hammering on her kitchen door. The bedside clock read
1:42
a.m. Who
the hell would be at her door at this hour?

Her first thought was of her pregnant sister. Had something
happened to Casey? Frightened, she sat up and swung her legs off the bed, fumbled
for her slippers, finally gave up and padded barefoot to the kitchen. Through
the closed blinds she could see the silhouette of a man, illuminated by the
outside light she’d forgotten to turn off before she went to bed.

When she switched on the kitchen light, the banging abruptly stopped.
Colleen hesitated for a brief instant. In south Florida, nobody would answer
their door, especially at this hour, without checking to see who was on the
other side. Or without a semi-automatic weapon in their hand. But this was
Jackson Falls, where, like it or not, everybody knew everybody else. And half
of them were related, if not by blood, then by marriage. This was no serial
killer. There had to be some kind of emergency.

She unlocked the door and flung it open. A gust of arctic air
rushed in, creating instant frostbite in her toes and raising goose bumps on
the rest of her. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it when she recognized
the figure standing outside her door. White flakes of snow gleamed on his
shoulders, his eyelashes. The duffel bag he carried looked like he’d wedged
everything he owned into it, and what in bloody hell was he doing at her door
at two in the morning when he was supposed to be three thousand miles away?

“Can I come in?” he said. “It’s freezing out here.”

She held the door open wider. He brushed past her and dropped the duffel
bag on the table, then stood there, blowing on his gloveless fingers. Colleen
slammed the door shut, turned the lock, and switched off the outside light. Eyes
narrowed, she said, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in California?”

Her son blew on his fingers again. “I’ve left school,” Mikey said.
“And I’m not going back.”

***

“Dad’s livid.”  Mikey shoveled spoonful after spoonful of tomato
soup into his mouth, so rapidly that she didn’t know how he could swallow it
without getting second-degree burns. The toaster popped, and she buttered two
slices of toast, then smeared them with grape jelly, the way she knew he liked
them.

“Can you blame him?” She took a plate from the cupboard, set the
toast on it, then placed it in front of her ravenous son.

“He doesn’t get it. He never gets it.” Mikey folded a slice of
toast, dipped it in his soup, and ate it. Through a mouthful of soggy bread, he
said, “Dad has tunnel vision. He can’t see anything except what he wants to see.
Anything that doesn’t match his point of view isn’t relevant.”

“He’s worried about your future.”
And the big bucks he shelled
out to send you to Stanford
, she thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

“But he doesn’t see that school’s not for me. With Dad, everything
is black or white. Either I get that college degree and the whole world opens
up to me, or I quit school and spend the rest of my life living in a cardboard
box on a street corner in Portland.”

“Mikey, you’re eighteen years old. How can you even know what you
want to do with your life?”

“Exactly!”

“But college is the place where you figure that stuff out. It’s a
place to experiment, to try on different hats, until you fall in love with
something, and realize it’s what you were put on this planet to do.”

“I’ll tell you this much.” His brows drew together, those elegant
blond brows so like his father’s, that same vertical line of frustration arching
between them. “I may not know what I want to do with my life, but I’m damn well
not going to find it at Stanford.”

“How can you know that?”

“Jesus, Mom, I thought you’d be the one who had my back. There’s a
whole big world out there. I don’t want to spend four years sitting in some
classroom. Just because it was good enough for Dad doesn’t mean it’s what I
want. I want to be a free man and explore the world. You, of all people, should
understand that. It’s what you did!”

Not exactly, but now wasn’t the time to tell him that. Someday,
when he was older, maybe she’d tell him the truth. At this point, it would simply
look like she was being defensive, making excuses, trying to assuage the guilt
she wouldn’t be feeling if there wasn’t some truth to his words.

Without conscious thought, she reached out and brushed a scruffy
strand of hair away from his face. He’d learned a few new tricks at Stanford. The
last time she’d seen him, at Thanksgiving, his hair had been neatly trimmed. Now
it fell in a ragged blond tangle over his ears. “It’s late,” she said. “We can
work this out tomorrow.”

Grimly, he said, “There’s nothing to work out.”

“I’ll talk to your father. For now, let’s go to bed. Things will
look different in the morning.”

“Right,” he said, getting up and carrying his dirty dishes to the
sink. “Whatever.”

“The spare bedroom’s on the left. Bathroom’s at the end of the
hall. Are you too big to give your old mom a hug?”

He let out an elongated sigh that carried the weight of the world
and wrapped his arms around her. She squeezed him, this little boy who’d been
her cuddle-bug until the day he started school and found out it wasn’t cool for
guys to accept affection from their mothers. The little boy who’d brought her
wildflowers from the side of the road, and Mother’s Day cards fashioned from
crayons, construction paper, and kindergarten paste. Now he stood a head taller
than her, and she didn’t know whether to kiss him or take him over her knee
and, as her dad used to say, whale the tar out of him.

Blinking back tears, she ordered, “Bed, or you’ll get no cartoons
tomorrow.”

He grinned, so like his father that for an instant, it was like
going back twenty years in time. “Goofball,” he said, stepping away and
shouldering his duffel. “Night, Mom.”

“Night, sweetheart.”

Back in her bed, she lay in the dark, listening to the sounds of
her son settling in. Drawers opened and shut. The bathroom door closed a little
too hard. Behind it, the toilet flushed, then she heard the buzz of his
electric toothbrush. Two-thirty in the morning, and he was brushing his teeth. He
might look a little scruffy these days, but underneath that scruffiness, Mikey
was still his father’s compulsive, neatnik son.

Jesse.
She’d hoped to postpone facing Jesse, but that wasn’t going to
happen now. Somehow, despite their differences, they were going to have to
figure out together how to deal with this catastrophic turn of events. Somehow,
she was going to have to convince Jesse to let their son stay with him until they
managed to tag-team him into caving and returning to school. It wasn’t that she
didn’t want Mikey. It had been her dream for years, to have her son back in her
life. Being a part-time, long-distance mother was heartbreaking.

But the timing was all wrong. She wasn’t planning to stay here. If
she let herself get tangled up in Mikey’s problems, where would that leave her?
Despite what the family chose to believe about her, she wasn’t one of those
mothers who ate her young and then spit them out. If Mikey hurt, she hurt. It
had been that way since the first moment she’d laid eyes on him, eighteen years
ago, all bloody and red-faced and squalling. She might have been just
seventeen, but motherlove had been instantaneous and all-encompassing. In those
eighteen years, nothing had changed. He was still the one person on this planet
that she would take a bullet for.

But there were other considerations, practical considerations. She’d
watched him inhale those two slices of toast and that bowl of soup as if they
were his last meal. Mikey might be eighteen, but he still had a growing boy’s
appetite. And Rob might be paying her well, but not that well. Except for the
piddly sum she’d placed in her escape fund, she was broke until payday. There
was enough food in the house for one person, but how the hell was she supposed
to feed Mikey? If she used the escape fund to feed her son, how would she ever manage
to leave this shithole of a town?

As much as she loved him, as much as her heart beat faster in
gratitude because, due to some inexplicable miracle, he was here, in the room
across the hall, this situation with Mikey had
disaster
written all over
it.

With a sigh, Colleen rolled over, plumped her pillow, and lay on
her side, watching the big red numbers on her bedside clock change with agonizing
sluggishness. When she finally fell asleep, sometime well after three-thirty,
she was still turning it all over in her mind, looking for the magic answer
that would make everybody happy.

Except that there was no magic answer. Colleen Bradley Lindstrom
Davis Berkowitz had stopped believing in magic a long time ago.

Mikey

He took the stairs outside his mother’s apartment two at a time,
walked around the corner of the studio and stood for a while in the driveway,
looking at the house. It was an ordinary house, yellow, tastefully trimmed in
plum and sage, with a wraparound porch, a turret, a roof with lots of different
angles. A gingerbread house. There was nothing remotely intimidating about it. So
why did it seem so formidable?  Maybe because this was a fool’s errand. The
last time he’d tried to talk to her, she’d thrown him out of the house. There
was no reason to think anything had changed in the past eight months. But if he
went away again without even trying, he’d never know.

Hope and terror warred in his heart as he navigated the icy path
to the front steps. Four steps up, four more across the porch, and he was at
the door. He rang the bell, then crammed his trembling hands into the pockets
of his jeans.

Paige’s father answered, eyes widening in surprise. “Mikey,” he
said. “I thought you were away at school.”

“I was. Is Paige home?”

The warmth in Rob’s eyes cooled considerably. There was no
hostility, but the man obviously knew something had gone down between them, and
he wasn’t happy about it. “Did she know you were coming?”

Hands still in his pockets, he rocked on the balls of his feet. “No,”
he said. “I haven’t talked to her in eight months.”

Rob looked at him, long and hard, then said, “I’ll tell her you’re
here. But if she doesn’t want to talk to you—”

“I won’t push it.”

He stood in the foyer, feeling out of place as Rob’s footsteps
climbed the stairs. He heard a soft rap, a door opening, muffled voices, one
male, one female. Then nothing. The wait went on forever. He was about to turn
tail and run when light footsteps descended the stairs and there she was,
standing wordlessly in front of him, so beautiful she took his breath away.

He examined every inch of her face, that gorgeous face that
haunted his dreams, the strong jaw, the sculpted cheekbones, those huge
MacKenzie green eyes. The fall of blond curls that, no matter how hard she
tried, she couldn’t tame. Her long, slender legs were encased in denim, the
rest of her lost in the folds of a man’s white cotton dress shirt. “Hi,” he
said.

She squared her jaw. “What?”

So she wasn’t going to make this easy for him. Barely daring to
breathe, he said, “Can we talk?”

“I wasn’t aware there was anything to say.”

“There’s plenty to say. Look, I’m just asking you to hear me out. No
expectations. I just want to talk. Will you come for a ride with me?”

Paige looked at him for a very long time, much the way her father
had, as though he were a bug to be examined under a microscope. Without
speaking, she went to the hall closet and took out a bright red parka and put
it on. The color was stunning, set against her wild hair and her strong
features. She moved soundlessly to the foot of the stairs. “Dad?” she shouted
up the staircase. “I’m going for a ride with Mikey.”

She didn’t say a word as they crossed the porch and headed down
the flagstone walk to the driveway. He’d parked his truck around the corner,
next to a beat-up Vega that could only belong to his mother. Aunt Casey
wouldn’t be caught dead driving something like that, and Paige’s dad would have
long since sent it to the crusher. He helped her up into the cab of the F-150,
then walked around the hood and got in on the other side. Paige busied herself
with the seat belt, pointedly ignoring him. At least she’d come with him. She
hadn’t opened the front door and shoved him back out onto the porch. That had
to mean something.

He started the truck, backed it into the circular drive, turned
around and headed west on Ridge Road. Beside him, Paige sat stiffly, eyes
straight ahead, hands shoved into the pockets of that red parka. Five minutes
passed in silence. Ten. Mikey cleared his throat. “You never answered my
letters.”

“Did you really expect me to?”

“That’s how it generally works.”

She swiveled her head to look at him. “Are you really that stupid?”

He just gripped the steering wheel and stayed silent. “I told
you,” she said. “I told you I wouldn’t write back. I told you I wouldn’t even
read the damn things.”

“So did you?  Did you read them?”

She turned away from him, toward the window, and it was her
silence that gave him hope. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was wrong.”

She turned her head and look at him dispassionately. “About?”

“About us. I was wrong, right from the start. I should’ve given us
a chance. I thought I was doing the right thing, staying away from you. Running
all the way to California to go to school. I thought…with our crazy,
intermarried families, and your dad…I knew he wouldn’t approve of me going
anywhere near his little girl. He’s a great guy, but he can be a little scary
sometimes. That MacKenzie temper. And I thought it was for the best if we ended
it before it really got started.”

In spite of the fact that his heater was broken, emitting only a
feeble attempt at warmth, a trickle of sweat inched down his spine.

“And my response to that is supposed to be what?”

“I don’t know. Damn it all to hell, I don’t know!”  Mikey yanked
the truck to the right, narrowly missing a mailbox, and came to an abrupt stop
on the shoulder. “All I know is that I’m here, now, with you, and I’m not going
back there. If you don’t want me, fine. I’m a big boy. I’ll survive. But if
there’s a chance for us—even the slightest chance—then I intend to take
advantage of that before it’s too late.”

Stunned, she said, “You quit school?”

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Yeah. I did.”

“Jesus, Mikey, your dad will kill you!”

“We already had one hell of a go-round last night. He doesn’t even
want to see my face right now. Looks like I’ll be staying with Mom for the time
being.”

“Tell me you didn’t do this because of me.”

“I can’t do that, because you’re part of it. But only part. That
first semester, I thought I’d eventually warm up to college. But I couldn’t. I
hated it. The classes were boring, everybody around me was into partying. You
know that’s not my thing. My roommate was a pretentious asshole, the whole
atmosphere was snotty and meaningless. All I could think about was coming home.
To you.”

When she didn’t respond, he put the truck in gear, checked his
mirror, and pulled back onto the road. She said, “I’m halfway through my junior
year of high school. We’ve started looking at colleges. I applied to Berklee. Dad
says I have a good chance of getting in.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Nothing. I’m not saying anything. I’m thinking out loud.”

“I’ve poured out all this stuff, basically just opened the
floodgates and emptied my guts into your lap. It would be really nice if you
could give me some indication of where your head is at.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where my head is at. I’m not even sure
what you’re asking.”

Frustrated, he said, “I’m asking you to give me a second chance.”

“If I did that…and I’m not saying I will…I’d have to give it a lot
of thought first. Weigh all the pros and cons. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool
me twice, shame on me.”

“I’m not fooling you. This is just me, being real, as real as I’ve
ever been in this lifetime.”

“And I’m not that naïve fifteen-year-old kid any more. I just
turned seventeen, and I’m pretty damn capable of analyzing our relationship and
making a rational decision. Which is exactly what I intend to do. So I can’t
give you an answer. Not right now. I’ve been furious with you for so long, I’m
not sure I’m ready to let go of that yet.”

“But—”

“If you know what’s good for you, Mikey Lindstrom, you’ll shut up while
you’re ahead.”

“I—um…fine.”

“I’m not even sure how I feel. No, that’s not really true. I know
how I feel about you. Underneath all the anger and the bullshit, I still feel
the same way I did a year ago. I’m just not sure you’re worth the risk.”

All his hopes, all his dreams, deflated, like the last balloon
left over from yesterday’s birthday party.

“You have to give me time to think it over. When I come up with an
answer, you’ll be the first to hear.”  She tilted her head, studied him
quizzically. “I don’t suppose you’ve given any thought to what you plan to do
now?”

“Do?”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
Do.
Are you planning to get a
job?  Or are you expecting to lie on your mother’s couch all day and
contemplate your navel? You’re eighteen years old and half a year past high
school. Being the star quarterback of the Jackson High football team will only
carry you so far. You have to do something with your life. I’d suggest you
start thinking about it.”

He gaped at her. “Are you in cahoots with my dad? Because you
sound just like him.”

“Do I?”  She turned her attention to the red plaid scarf wound
around her slender neck. Tidying it until it fell in a neat, elegant swirl, she
said, “You should listen to him. He’s a smart man.”

“That’s what people have been telling me all my life. You know, I’m
not quite the mindless idiot you seem to think I am. I do have a plan. Do you
want to hear it, or not?”

She folded her hands primly in her lap. Coolly, she said, “I think
I’d rather wait until I’ve made up my mind about you.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’d like to go home now.” She looked up, met his eyes
without flinching. “Thanks for the talk. I’ll get back to you in a week or two.”