Try - The Complete Romance Series (4 page)

I’d asked Mackenzie about it after the
second or third session; Landon was full of energy right when we got home but
within about an hour he would be near to falling asleep on the couch, right
over his dinner plate. “You may want to see about putting more protein in his
lunch,” she’d suggested. “He’s building muscle, which takes fuel. After the
first week he’ll mostly be back to normal, but you’ll be able to speed his
recovery up with really, really good nutrition.”

As if she’d read my mind, Mackenzie asked
what Landon had had for lunch that day. “I had a tuna sandwich, an apple,
carrots, and some pudding,” Landon told her. “Oh! And dad packed me almond
butter too. It was the chocolate kind. I had that during recess though.”
Mackenzie grinned, including me in her smile, and I shrugged, feeling proud of
myself.

“That’s a great lunch! Did you eat all of
it? You need lots and lots of food to get back to being strong,” Mackenzie
said.

“All of it!” Landon nodded. It had been a
minor miracle when Landon had decided that he liked tuna sandwiches—they were
easy as anything to make, and I could at least make sure he was getting
vegetables a few days a week. I tried to change it up—too much tuna wasn’t good
for kids, at least I’d head that from one of the moms in the office.

“Tell her what you had yesterday,” I
prompted Landon.

“A hamburger! Dad put a fried egg on it
for me.”

“He’s a fiend for eggs,” I explained to
Mackenzie. She helped Landon finish the exercise he was working on and gestured
for him to take a break.

“Eggs are great,” she said. She looked at
Landon and wrinkled her nose. “I had chicken and rice for lunch. Not very
exciting at all.”

“Did you make it yourself?”

“I did!” Mackenzie smiled more broadly at
Landon than I thought any woman could possibly smile at a child that wasn’t her
own, and I wondered for a moment if she smiled like that at all of her
patients. “It’s my grandma’s recipe. Very good for you.”

“Dad says that Brussel sprouts are good
for me, but they taste so nasty,” Landon said to Mackenzie.

“They are very good for you indeed,”
Mackenzie said. She glanced at me. “If you want, I have a recipe for them that
tastes really good.”

“I’d love to hear it,” I said, thinking about
the struggle to get Landon to eat certain vegetables. I didn’t think it would
be any easier if his mother had lived—but it was hard not to wish for someone
who could share the burden with me.

“What I do is to cut them in half, roast
them in the oven with some salt and pepper and oil, and then toss in some dried
cranberries and some pecans at the end. I’ve accidentally eaten a whole pound
sprouts that way, they’re so good.”

She went back to working with Landon, and
I watched, sitting by myself and trying not to eavesdrop on the other sessions
going on in different parts of the room. Landon had really opened up to
Mackenzie—normally he tended to be a little shy with new adults until he’d
gotten to know them a bit, but he was chatting away, telling Mackenzie about
his Christmas list, about his classmate Jessica, about the classroom pet
turtle. I tried not to laugh at how excited Landon was as he went through the
exercises; as the session started to draw to a close, Mackenzie brought him to
a table with heat and cold pads, TENS pads, and more. “I’m going to give you a
quick rub-down, okay big man?”

“Is that okay, Dad?” he asked me.

I nodded. “It’ll help you keep from being
sore tomorrow, buddy,” I told my son. Mackenzie reached into some kind of jar
and scooped up some blue-green gel, and started rubbing along Landon’s leg,
stopping just above his knee as she spread the goop around.

In minutes, Landon was sprawled out, a
blissed-out look on his face. “Oh man it feels tingly and nice,” he told me,
looking at me upside-down from the table.

“It’ll wash off in the bath,” Mackenzie
told me. “Actually, if he runs into soreness at night or in the mornings, you
could probably use some of this.” She picked up the jar and showed me the
label. “But if it’s persistent pain, you should take him to the doctor.”

A few minutes later, Landon was grabbing
his crutches and moving around in circles as I stood with the physical
therapist. “He’s doing really well,” Mackenzie said, putting the clipboard
aside and sitting down at her desk. “I’m really pleased with his progress. He’s
going to have to keep going, but I can tell you’ve been working with him in
off-hours,” she said, giving me a little smile.

“Even after only a couple of sessions?”
Mackenzie nodded.

“He’s retaining the exercises really
well—which tells me he’s practicing them away from here. I’ll evaluate him in
another couple of sessions, just to measure his progress, but he’s making a
very good recovery overall.”

“I’m relieved,” I said, grinning as I saw
Landon talking to one of the other kids his age that had finished up. “I’m
actually worried sometimes that I’m not doing things right—that I might be
undoing all the progress he makes here.”

“Unless you’re pushing him beyond what he
can do, you should be fine,” Mackenzie said, smiling at me. I had an idea and
for a second I rejected it; but then I thought about it again and decided to go
full speed ahead.

“I know this probably isn’t the thing to
do, but could I have your number? In case something happens, I’d like to be
able to call you and hear if I should take Landon to the hospital or if I’m
just being overprotective and worrying too hard.” Mackenzie looked up at me for
a moment, her big, bright eyes uncertain, but then she shrugged.

“As long as you keep it professional, I
don’t mind,” she said finally. I watched her grab a scrap of paper off of a pad
on her desk. She scribbled a number on it quickly and handed it to me. “I’m
always happy to answer questions or help people with concerns that they have.”
I nodded.

“I really appreciate it,” I told her. I
realized that Landon and I had stayed more than ten minutes past the end of our
appointment time. “Come on shrimp,” I called to him. “We need to get you home
and get some dinner in you.”

“I’ll see you again soon, Landon,”
Mackenzie told my son, waving back at him as I led my little boy out of the
clinic.

Chapter Five - Mackenzie

I wandered into the kitchen in my
apartment as the microwave chirped at me again and again, words flashing on the
screen telling me that my food was ready; it was only about eight o’clock, but
I was already starting to get sleepy and I told myself that it was for the best
that I hadn’t gone to Cynthia’s party after work. “Just look at what I would
have missed out on,” I said wryly to myself. I’d managed to get two loads of
laundry done and take a shower between leaving work and finally getting hungry
enough to heat up some leftovers in the microwave. If I’d gone to the party, I
would have ended up crashing at ten or later, with the laundry undone, and I’d
have to wake up an hour earlier to get my shower in so that I could get my hair
dry before I left for work.

The truth was that while part of me had
wanted to go to the party, I had ended the day tired, and I knew I wouldn’t be
a very good addition to the festivities. I love the holidays—but being around a
bunch of happy couples was not my idea of a great way to celebrate, and I knew
that I’d be one of maybe five people at the party who didn’t already have
someone. With odds like that, I’d either end up being chased underneath a fake
mistletoe branch by a desperate guy for a “joke,” or I’d be in the corner most
of the night, talking to whoever passed by but mostly just looking a little
pathetic. I’d told Cynthia that I had a bunch of stuff to catch up on at the
apartment, but mostly I was catching up on one of my favorite sitcoms.

I took my food out of the microwave and
stirred it, checking the bottom of the Tupperware to make sure it had heated through.
I decided that just because it was a night in, it didn’t mean that I couldn’t
celebrate a little, and opened the fridge to get the half-empty bottle of wine
out of the door. I doubted that the vintners that had bottled it expected for
someone to pair it with a tuna casserole, but I figured that a white wine at
least went with fish.

Glass of wine and Tupperware in my hands,
I went back into the living room of my apartment and started the stream of my
show up once more. There was a third and final load in the washer—delicates,
including my underwear and a few dresses that I thought I might eventually pick
out to wear for drinks with the girls at the office another time—and a stack of
files that needed to be updated. I had to be careful about what parts of the
files I updated from home; I couldn’t risk anyone seeing them, but there
weren’t always enough hours in the day to get everything written down, and the
office after hours was a creepy place. I didn’t bring any identifiable
information home with me—just the narrative parts of the file where I could
transcribe my notes about how a patient did at a particular task, how they were
improving...things like that. I’d put them back the next morning and the woman
responsible for digitizing them would get to them whenever they came up on her
list.

I finished my dinner quickly, trying to
get as involved as possible in my show; it didn’t seem to have the same allure
as usual, but I kept hoping it would click, that I’d start laughing at one of
the character’s antics and everything would be right with the world. I had
started to work on my files, listening to the show more than watching it, and I
heard by phone across the room, buzzing and ringing where it was plugged into
the wall. “Huh.” I put the file I was writing on aside and stood up, able to
feel the lingering fatigue in my legs. “Maybe I would have been better off
hitting the gym instead of coming straight home,” I said, thinking out loud as
I walked across the room to where my phone lay on a side table.

The number flashing on the screen was
totally unfamiliar, and for a second I thought about just letting it roll over
to voicemail.
It could be someone from
the clinic, or someone calling me from a friend’s phone because of an
emergency.
I took a quick breath and unplugged my phone from the charging
cable, tapping the “accept” icon and bringing it to my ear all at once.

 
“Hello?”

“Mackenzie?” The voice was tantalizingly
familiar but not enough for me to immediately place it.

“Speaking,” I said, taking the safe
assumption that it had to be someone I didn’t know that well.

“It’s Patrick—Patrick Willis, Landon’s
dad.” I smiled, walking back over to my couch and sitting down.

“Is something wrong? How’s Landon doing?”
It had been a day off for Landon’s PT, so I hadn’t seen him earlier in the day.

“He wants to go ice skating this weekend,”
Patrick said, sounding both amused and concerned. “I told him I had to check
with you to make sure it was okay.”

“As long as he doesn’t overdo it, he
should be all right,” I said, thinking about the question. “Stay close to him,
if you’re going with him, and if he looks wobbly, get him off the ice for a few
minutes. His muscles are still weak.”

“I remembered what you said about the
stabilizer muscles,” Patrick said. “I just didn’t know if they’d stand up to a
long day of skating.”

“Probably not a whole day,” I said. “He’ll
tire out pretty fast on the ice, but it would actually be a good thing to do
with him—functional therapy, they call it. He’ll work the muscles out in a way
that we just can’t really duplicate in therapy.”

“Is that good?” I nodded even though I
knew Patrick couldn’t see me.

“It is. Our goal with the PT is to get him
up to natural functioning, so little things that he can do to further that are
great.” I licked my lips and picked up my half-finished wine, taking a quick
sip. My heart was beating faster in my chest.
Down girl! He’s a patient’s parent—off-limits.
“I would say if he
wants to do something and feels up to it, obviously keep an eye on him, but he
should at least try. Other than any kind of contact sports, of course.”

“Of course,” Patrick agreed. “Is—is
skating not a contact sport?” I laughed and had to bite my lip to stifle it.

“Not strictly speaking,” I said, as soon
as I could recover my composure. “I’m thinking of things like hockey, or soccer
or football, things like that where he’s likely to end up getting hit or
hitting the ground as part of the game.” I thought for another moment. “If you
want to feel safer, I’d say get him one of those ACE bandage braces for his
knee. He doesn’t have any real problems with his ligaments, but with the
weakness he’s still got going on in the other muscles, it’ll give that leg some
more stability.”

“Thank you so much,” Patrick said, and the
relief in his voice was so intense it almost embarrassed me. “I didn’t want to
have to tell him that he couldn’t go ice skating.” I grinned.
He really is a good dad, all things
considered.

“He’ll probably get tired pretty quickly,”
I told Patrick. “It takes a lot more effort to do something like that when your
muscles are still weak. Make sure he takes lots of breaks, keep his fluids up,
and if he starts looking wobbly, insist on him sitting down until he can stand
steady.”