Suddenly (26 page)

Besides, she was a good role model for Sara.

MacKenzie Lounge was deserted. He strode through, swung up the stairs to the third floor, and went down the hall to her room. The door was closed, but there were sounds inside. He knocked, called, “Sara?”

“Yes?”

He jiggled the handle, but the door was locked. “Open up.”

It was a minute before she did. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, socks but no shoes. A small television provided background chatter.

“Where ya been?” he asked, trying to keep it light. She couldn’t have forgotten that it was fall break. All her friends had left. The dorm was empty. The dining hall was closed.

She shrugged. “I was just sitting around.”

“But I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re staying with me over break.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

He sighed. “Sara, how could you not have known it? I left a note in your mailbox. I said we’d go to Bernie’s Béarnaise. I said we’d go canoeing.”

“You didn’t say anything about staying with you.”

He took an impatient breath. “Well, where else would you be staying?”

“Here. There are other kids around.”

“Not many, and not in MacKenzie. They’re over in Logan. That’s the only supervised dorm this weekend.” He tried to be level-headed, but he was frustrated and hurt. It was the same hurt he had felt time and again when he had come to visit Sara and been greeted coolly. He felt rejected by the one person he most wanted.

“Okay,” he said, looking around the room, “just put together a few things and let’s go. We can stop by for more tomorrow.”

“I’d rather stay here.”

He flipped off the television. “The backpack will do fine. You don’t need to take much.”

“I have tons of homework to do.”

“You’ll need a skirt or dress for tonight. Remember that purple outfit you wore to the play last weekend? You looked gorgeous. Wear that.”

She turned away. After a minute she crossed to the desk. Keeping her back to him, she said, “You don’t have to do this. I’ll be fine with the other kids.”

He exploded. “Well, I won’t, damn it. You’re my daughter, and this is my fall break, too. I’ve been good. I’ve left you alone to get acclimated to the school like any other student, but this weekend is for regenerating, and I need it. It’s been a whole lot of long, lonely months. I need my daughter. I need my family, if that’s what you and I can be called.”

“We aren’t a family,” she argued, but more meekly.

“We sure as hell are. I’m the father, and you’re the daughter.”

“We barely know each other.”

“That’s why I’ve been looking forward to this weekend. It’s about time we
got
to know each other, don’t you think?”

She shrugged. “Things weren’t so awful before.”

“They were
terrible
. I respected the fact that your mother had her own life, a new life with a new husband, and I tried to give her room to raise you without getting in the way. So what happened? I saw you for a day here and there, and a week once a year with my folks. If I were to do it again, I’d do it differently. I’d fight to see you more. You’d have
my
name. I wouldn’t be so damned deferential to Liv.”

He caught himself before he said more on that score. He had sworn not to bad-mouth Liv, though he held her at fault for the breakup of their marriage. Tempering his voice, he said, “Those years are done, Sara. I can’t force you to like me, but I’m sure as hell gonna try.”

Her shoulders hunched. It was a minute before he realized she was crying. He crossed the floor and took her in his arms. “Ahhhh, baby. Don’t cry. We’ll work things out. I promise.”

She cried quietly. While she didn’t wrap her arms around him, she didn’t pull away, and suddenly the years disappeared. She was a toddler again, crying over a fall, and he was comforting the little girl he adored. “I know it’s hard. Your life’s been turned upside down in the past few months. It’s natural that you’re feeling unsettled. That’s why it’s so important for us to try with each other.”

“I didn’t think you wanted me around,” she hiccoughed.

“This weekend?”

“All those years.”

“Are you
kidding?
” he asked. “You saw the pictures I kept on the mantel. I couldn’t pry many out of your mother, but whenever we were together I snapped away. You hated it when I did that—you always tried to turn away, remember?—but I
lived
through those pictures at times.”

“You never came.”

“I thought I was doing you a favor, minimizing the confusion about who your father was, but there’s another side to that, Sara. You never
asked
me to come. When I’d be leaving you off at Liv’s, you never asked when you’d see me again. I was never told about things like dance recitals, even though your mother had pictures of those all over
her
mantel, and when you started running—which was my thing, you knew that because you’d seen me running when we stayed with my folks—you never said a word.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to know.”

“Well, I did. I thought about you all the time. I never let a birthday go by without a visit or a call, certainly never without a present. There were cards for every other kind of holiday, and I didn’t just sign them ‘love, Dad,’ I always wrote something that I thought would be meaningful, either about what the card meant or what I was doing with my life or what I thought you might be doing with yours.” He smoothed aside a swath of long hair that was just the color as his. “I cared, Sara. I cared all those years, and I care now.”

“But you
hate
it here. You only took the job because you needed somewhere to put me. At the end of the year, you’ll be gone, and I’ll be stuck here alone for two more years.”

“If you stay, I stay.”

She grew still. After a minute’s quiet she asked, “You’re not leaving?”

“I don’t know, but if I leave, you come with me.”

She was quiet for another minute. “That’s because I get a free ride at whatever school you’re at.”

“Cutie, I’d pay tens of thousands if you desperately wanted to be at another school that didn’t happen to be mine. It’s not the money. I want you with me. That’s all.”

She started crying again.

“This was always the best and the worst about being a parent,” he mumbled against the top of her head. “It was the worst, because crying meant you were unhappy, and the best, because I got to be the one who made it better. I wish I could do that now, the way I could when you were a year old, but the issues are more complex.” He held her until the sobbing slowed, then he said, “I do love you, Sara. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true. Give me half a chance and I’ll prove it to you.”

She sniffled. Turning away from him, she pulled a tissue from the box. “I don’t know why you’d love me. I’m not a very lovable person.”

“Whoever told you that?” he asked, suspecting that Liv had said as much more than once. He held up a hand. “No matter. I don’t want to know. Whoever it was was wrong. Everyone in this world is lovable in some way, shape, or form. It’s sometimes just a question of getting around—getting around—” What the hell: “Getting around the shit to the lovable part.”

She was standing by the dresser with her back to him.

“So, let’s start getting around the shit,” he said more gently. “How about it?”

When she remained silent, he knew it wouldn’t be easy, but then he had never thought it would be. One didn’t wipe out years of misperception in a single conversation, no matter how ardent the speaker was. Whether because of Liv, Liv’s husband, Jeff, or something in Sara herself, she had grown up thinking the worst of him. Changing that would take time.

“I really did love that purple outfit,” he coaxed. “Come on. Stick a few things in the backpack, give me some clothes on their hangers, and we’ll go over to the house. I have something to show you.”

The something was a bedroom set for Sara’s room. Noah had shopped around for days, not only for the bed, nightstand, and dresser, but for a thick quilt that matched soft floral sheets, which matched a pale green wall-to-wall carpet. Sara didn’t say anything when she saw it, but he could tell that she was pleased. She stood at the door for a long time, just looking with wide eyes and what might have been, with an optimistic stretch of the imagination, the tiniest ghost of a smile.

Pleased, he hung her clothes in the closet and left her alone to change. Fifteen minutes later, lightheaded with his stunning daughter next to him in the car, he directed the Explorer toward Bernie’s Béarnaise. Passing Tucker General and the medical building beside it, he could have sworn he saw Paige’s car turn in.

Had he been alone, he would have stopped and shared his little victory with her. He thought about her often, usually in the middle of the night when he awoke in a bed that seemed too large, too cold, and too sterile—which was incredible, since he’d been sleeping in the very same bed for years and had never felt quite those things. Paige was a tickle at the base of his spine that, if left to its own devices, spread to his front and lower. She was unfinished business.

For a minute, even with Sara, he thought of stopping. Then he decided against it. This was a time for Sara and him. It was important that nothing at all intrude.

Paige parked and trotted into the building and up the stairs. When she entered the office, Ginny was standing by the phone clutching a brown paper bag.

Worriedly she whispered, “I bought a quart of milk during lunch and left it here by mistake. When I stopped back to get it, I saw him.”

Paige patted her arm. “I’m glad you did. Thanks, Ginny. I’ll go see him.”

Peter was in his office, sitting at the desk, but barely. He looked as though the weakest nudge would send him crashing to the floor.

“Hey.” Paige smiled as she approached the desk. “What’re you doin’?”

Peter moved his forearms over something that had been crushed and unfolded. “Jus’ neaten’ up.” His fingertips glanced clumsily across two bottles of Scotch. The nearly empty one fell over. He grabbed for it and missed. Paige set it straight. While he swore under his breath about the waste of good brew, she mopped up what little had spilled.

“You’re usually over at the Tavern by now. Have you had any dinner?”

“Don’ wanna eat. No point.”

“Sure there is. You have to keep up your strength. You have patients who depend on you.” None of whom, she prayed, would be calling with an emergency this night. Then again, she could cover any emergencies, but if he went staggering down the street, the whole town would know by morning that its favorite son had been drunk.

Paige had never known him to be drunk before. She wondered what was behind it.

He moved his forearms again, as though trying to hide what was beneath them.

“Whatcha got there?” she asked.

“Not a thing,” he answered, enunciating each word.

It was a photograph. She could see that much, though no more, and felt a wrenching depression deep inside. “Oh, Peter. You told me you destroyed them.”

“Tried,” he said. “Right in the basket. But I pulled ‘em back out. Therrrrre all I have of ‘er now.”

“But it’s not right,” she pleaded. “You know it’s not. Those pictures are inappropriate, whether she was eighteen or not.”

He barked out a laugh. “Hah! She wazzzzn’t eighteen! Maybe wished she was, but she had these teeny-weeny lines on ‘er hands”—he gestured—”and on her neck, and these teeny-weeny veins on ‘er thighs, she din’t like
those
, lemme tell you.”

Paige took the opportunity of his gesturing to lift the photograph from the desk, but even before she turned it right side up she had an odd sense of what she’d find. It was a picture of Mara, fully dressed, grinning for the camera with a silliness that few people ever saw in her.

The great depression widened inside her. Not pedophilia, but what? Fascination? Obsession?
Love
?

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “I didn’t know you’d taken pictures of her.”

He reached for the photograph, put it back on the desk, and scrubbed its surface with his palms in an attempt to erase the creases. “Hunerds,” he said, then, “More’n hunerds.”

Paige pulled up a chair and sat close beside him. “She must have liked that. She must have felt wanted.”

He frowned. “She wazzz…wazzz…wanted.”

“Loved, too?”

“Loved. Mmmm.” He frowned again. “She said I ruined things.”

“Ruined what?”

“Us. That I always found ways to wreck things.” He looked up at her and added, “With women,” in a knowing way before returning brooding eyes to the photo. “Said I din’t think I was worthy of anything good. Zzzz’at stupid?” he asked, looking up again, but before Paige had to answer, he reached for the Scotch.

She held the bottle. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

“Never enough when you’re ‘lone.”

“You’re not alone. You have friends all over town.”

“But she’s gone,” he said, and suddenly his face crumpled. To Paige’s horror, he began to cry.

She touched his shoulder. “Oh, Peter. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Love. Tragically so.

“She’zzz th’best,” he said between sobs.

“I know.”

“An’ I never told ’er. She killed hersssself ‘cause she din’t think anyone cared.”

“That wasn’t why. It was a combination of things—”

“I did it I did it.”

Paige gripped his arm. “No, Peter. It wasn’t you, any more than it was me or Angie or Mara’s family. We all thought she was tougher than she was, so we made mistakes with her, but it wasn’t any one of those that sent her over the edge. It was lots of things, some of which we had absolutely no control over.”

Peter was shaking his head.

More softly, Paige said, “We don’t know that it was suicide.”

“I did it, me.”

“It might have been pure exhaustion. Mara was always pushing herself. This time she might have pushed too far.”

When he reached for the Scotch this time, she moved both bottles to the credenza behind the desk.

“I need it,” he whined, then added, “I don’ feel so good,” just as he turned an ominous shade of green.