Face the Music: Beyond Jackson Falls Book 1 Read online

  His dad kept pushing him to earn a college degree, and Uncle Sam would have paid for it if he’d had even a glimmer of interest. In an attempt to appease Jesse, he’d spent an entire afternoon poring over the University of Maine at Farmington catalog his father had brought him. UMF was Jesse’s alma mater, and close enough to home for commuting. Mikey had tried. He’d really tried. He’d read the entire catalog, pretty much cover to cover, but hadn’t found a single thing that grabbed his interest.

  No roots, no goals, no plans, no road map, no job skills, no future.

  He was just like the high school kids Sean was talking about. The low achievers who didn’t give a damn about the world. Except that there was still hope for those seventeen-year-olds. Not so much for him. At thirty, his future stretched out ahead of him, static and unchanging, an empty road with no exits, no side streets, no scenery. Bland and bleak as the rented trailer he lived in.

  Sometimes, it felt an awful lot like death.

  * * *

  IT MIGHT HAVE been the pain that woke him, or it might have been the telephone. He’d fallen asleep on the couch, one hip bone buried in the cushions, his leg dangling off the edge, his neck at an impossible angle. He woke abruptly, temporarily disoriented, then scrabbled to a sitting position. Scraping fingers through his hair, Mikey took a deep breath to ward off the stabbing pain in his leg, then bent and picked up the ringing cell phone that lay face down on the floor.

  When he saw that it was Amy calling, he let it go to voice mail. Amy could wait. Tomorrow would be soon enough to square off with her over the inexcusable rudeness of his sudden departure from Kelley’s. She would undoubtedly have a two-page laundry list of his recent transgressions to discuss. Amy was a nice girl, a sweet girl, as long as he didn’t disappoint her. But lately, he’d been disappointing her more often than not. Tonight, he wasn’t in the mood to defend himself. Tonight, he had other issues to deal with.

  Sometimes he could walk off the pain. It was worth a try. If walking it off didn’t work, he’d have to take the pills. He didn’t like taking the pills, but it was either that or spend the rest of the night fighting back screams of pain. It was so damned unfair. Mikey hated to use that word; it implied weakness, and he detested weakness, especially in himself. He’d always believed that life being what it was, you had to play whatever hand you were dealt. But he also wasn’t one to shy away from reality. And the reality was that Mikey Lindstrom had been dealt a really shitty hand.

  He stood, swayed until he gained his balance, and walked slowly, awkwardly, down the trailer hallway to the bedroom at the end. Since there was nowhere else to go, he turned and walked back, all the way to the kitchen window up front. Back and forth, back and forth, his leg screaming at him with each step. There was a name for it, a name he knew all too well: phantom pain. It was a real thing, fully documented in spite of its impossibility. Medical research said he wasn’t crazy. Mikey wasn’t so sure those researchers had a clue what they were talking about.

  He turned on the television in an attempt to distract himself. But at midnight, with no cable, no satellite dish, no equipment more sophisticated than a roof antenna, pickings were slim. And the pain was white-hot, the kind of pain that had sweat pouring down his back. Furious, he tossed the TV remote across the room and stalked to the bathroom. Mikey turned on the shower, full-blast and as cold as he could get it, then stripped off his shirt and stuck his head beneath the icy-cold spray.

  It was a distraction. Nothing more. It didn’t soothe or comfort, didn’t take away one iota of the pain. But the ten minutes he held his head under that frigid water caused a brief interruption in his perception of the pain. One of his doctors—he couldn’t remember which one, there’d been so many—had told him about this trick. It didn’t take the pain away, but it was enough of a distraction to allow him a temporary reprieve.

  A half-hour later, wrapped in a flannel shirt and a blanket because he was close to hypothermia, he gave in. The instructions on the pill bottle were clear: take two by mouth every four hours as needed for pain. Mikey thumbed the cap off the bottle, dropped two pills into his palm. Hesitated, then spilled out a third one. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and if ever there was a desperate time, this was it.

  He swallowed them without water, one of the clever little tricks he’d learned while living in a tent in the Iraqi desert. He tucked the pill bottle into the pocket of his jeans, and then he did some more walking.

  By 2:30, the pain had reached DEFCON 1. With trembling hands, he popped the cap off the bottle, shook a few more pills into his palm, and tossed them in his mouth. At this point, he didn’t care about the end result. All he cared about was getting rid of this brutal, unceasing pain.

  It would end. It always did, sooner or later. But while he was in the throes of agony, it was hard to remember that it wouldn’t last forever. Furious, he stomped to the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and took out the bottle of vodka he kept for just such occasions. He poured himself a shot, threw his head back and took it like a man, feeling the burn all the way from his throat to his stomach.

  Then he took his keys from the drawer, grabbed a jacket and his helmet, and went outside to the bike.

  * * *

  HE HAMMERED ON Gunther’s door until he thought his hands would bleed. Finally, he heard Gunth thumping down the stairs, grumbling all the way. “Jesus Hieronymus Christ, give me five seconds to get there!” Still muttering, Gunther flung open the door and stood haloed by a single light bulb, his grizzled hair standing on end and his eyes puffy with interrupted sleep. He was barefoot, dressed only in long underwear—tops and bottoms—with a big tear in the knee. Gunther studied Mikey’s face, read everything that was written there and some things that weren’t. His gaze moved to the Harley that was parked a few feet away. He shot a long, hard glance at Mikey and then, without speaking, stepped aside.

  In silence, they climbed the stairs to Gunther’s apartment, where Mikey began pacing like a crazed animal, hands trembling, adrenalin pumping through his veins.

  “Bad one?” Gunth said.

  He hunched his shoulders. “You don’t even want to know.”

  “How many pain pills you take?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t count.” The tremor in his voice maddened him. He was a man, not some adolescent kid whose voice kept sliding up and down the scale. A man who’d spent a decade as a United States Marine. Why the hell couldn’t he act like one?

  Gunther’s lips thinned. “And you washed ‘em down with…?”

  Mikey paused in his pacing, wheeled to face his friend. Defiantly, in spite of the crack in his voice, he said, “Vodka.”

  “Vodka,” Gunth repeated.

  “You got a problem with that?”

  “Don’t bother me, but you might have a problem with it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Jesus, Mike, you took pills, washed ‘em down with booze, and then you got on the bike and came here. You survived Iraq and Afghanistan, when by all accounts you should’ve been dead five times over. Then you came all the way back here to East Nowhere so you could kill yourself on a goddamn motorcycle? You got shit for brains!”

  Furious, he said, “I’m not about to kill myself! I am fine!”

  “If you were fine, you wouldn’t be here at—” Gunth peered at the wall clock. “Two-forty-five in the morning.”

  Mikey ran his hands through his hair and resumed pacing. “You don’t understand. I need those damn pills. I can’t make the pain go away. It’s a monster, sinking its teeth into me and gnawing at me until I think I’ll either scream or go crazy. It’s like being back there, during those first days after it happened. Like my body and my brain are remembering how it felt. I’m reliving it, G. How the hell can something hurt that much when it’s not even there?”

  “I don’t have an answer, but it’s a dangerous game you’re playing, mixing pills and vodka. You could wind up dead. And you need to be careful about the booze. Your mother
’s an alcoholic. It’s in your blood.”

  “I don’t believe in that crap.”

  “Don’t matter whether or not you believe in it, kid. It believes in you.”

  “You give me booze. What’s the difference?”

  “Not as a chaser after a fistful of pills! Mixing those two, that’s bad news. And it’s a slippery slope. First, you just do it once in a while. Then, it’s a couple times a month. Next thing you know, it’s every damn day, and then it’s got you, got you right by the short hairs. That what you want?”

  He clenched his fists. “What I want,” he said, “is to turn the clock back two years. I want a do-over.”

  “Ain’t no do-overs in life, Mike. You know that.”

  “Fuck you.” But even he heard the lack of conviction in those two words.

  Gunther clapped him on the shoulder and said, more gently, “Want me to call somebody for you? I can call Amy.”

  Mikey snorted. “Right now, I’m not too high on Amy’s list of favorite people.”

  “Your dad, then? Hell, even your mother. I can call whoever you want.”

  Paige. He couldn’t explain why her name, her face, came to him in that moment, but it did. What the hell was wrong with him? Whatever it was he’d had with Paige MacKenzie, it had been over for twelve years. Lots of water under that bridge, and he couldn’t go back. If he’d learned one thing in life, it was that there was never any going back. Not that he wanted to. Paige was nothing more to him than a girl he used to know, a member of his convoluted, extended family. “There’s nobody,” he said in resignation. “Dad’s in full-on tough love mode, and Mom—” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. They don’t get it. Nobody gets it. You’re the only one who understands. You’ve been there. You know.”

  “Different era.” Gunther shook his head. “Different war. Not the same at all. You come home, you get a parade. We came home, we got spit on and called baby killers.”

  “Different era, different war, same shit. You’ve been to hell, G. You know where I’m coming from.”

  Gunther acknowledged that small truth with a shrug of one shoulder. “You’re a good kid, Mike. There’s a few of us here who’d like to keep you around. You need to cut the shit and get your head together. Have you mentioned any of this to your VA counselor?”

  “Milligan never saw action. He doesn’t understand, either.”

  He was suddenly weary beyond words. Somewhere in the course of their conversation, he’d stopped trembling and his breathing had returned to normal. The pain was gone, the screaming, white-hot phantom pain in a limb that no longer existed. Gunther, with his keen powers of observation, said, “You coming down off the ceiling now?”

  He’d been dangling on a precipice, dangerously high, and once again, Gunther had managed to talk him down. Gunther was always there for him, in spite of the fact that Gunth had his own demons to face. Big ones. Mikey took a couple of deep breaths and said, “Yeah.”

  “I’ll whip up a pile of grilled cheese sandwiches. You pick out a movie to watch. It’ll be daylight in a couple of hours. Maybe you can get back to sleep once it’s light outside.”

  “Hey, Gunther?”

  At the kitchen doorway, the older man paused, turned. “Yeah?”

  “Thanks. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “You’d figure it out,” Gunther said, and turned back toward the kitchen.

  PAIGE

  FOR THE NEXT five days, she hibernated. She never left the house, talked to nobody but the family. She shut off her cell phone and spent most of the time in her room, where posters of M.C. Hammer and David Bowie still decorated the walls. You can always come home, Casey had told her years ago. I want to make sure you know there’s a place you can come to that feels safe and familiar. So her room had been left untouched, and still resonated with a teenage vibe. Whenever she and Ry had come here for a visit—which wasn’t often—he’d poked fun at the diversity of her teenage interests. Bowie and Hammer? Either/or, he’d insisted, would make sense. But both of them? She must have been one schizoid kid.

  In light of recent events, she was inclined to see a meanness in his words that she hadn’t seen before. How could he not recognize that the two, though light years apart, represented different sides of the teenage Paige MacKenzie?

  The one constant in her life during those five days of hibernation was 17 Harwood Street. Every day at 12:30, she turned on the television in her room and sat there, glued to the screen, watching the man she loved—used to love, the rat bastard, she corrected herself—interacting with the woman who’d stolen him away.

  Of course, “stolen” was totally up to interpretation. Because, let’s be honest, could any man actually be stolen away from a woman against his will? A man in love wouldn’t be looking at other women, would he? She was almost certain of it.

  This masochistic need to see them together couldn’t be healthy, but Paige was incapable of stopping. Instead, she analyzed every scene that Ryan and Vanessa shared onscreen, searching for any indication that there was something more than friendship between the two actors. These soaps were taped about six weeks in advance. Had their affair already begun when these scenes were shot? Or had Ry and Vanessa suddenly realized, after three years of playing brother and sister on a third-rate soap opera, that they couldn’t possibly take another breath without being together in the biblical sense?

  She’d probably never know the answer to that question, but the wondering, and the watching, and the obsessing, were the equivalent of taking a jagged piece of broken glass and gouging herself with it, over and over and over. It hurt so damn much that it sucked the energy out of her, taking her breath with it. What a crap-fest love had turned out to be.

  During the other twenty-three hours of each day, when 17 Harwood Street wasn’t airing, she had plenty of time to lie on her bed, thinking dark thoughts while she listened to her iPod and dissected every moment of their three-year relationship. Her family, much to their credit, tiptoed around her, didn’t pry or offer unsolicited advice. While making it clear that they were here if she needed them, they allowed her to lick her wounds in private. She knew it was hard on them, especially Dad, but they respected her wishes and left her alone.

  On the morning of the sixth day, Paige rolled out of bed, showered, and started opening drawers. If she didn’t get outside of her head and start moving, her brain might implode. When self-pity became self-indulgence, when you began to enjoy the pain a little too much, it was time to get over it. Five days was long enough to sit in the dark and mourn the death of Love-with-a-capital-L. It was time to open the blinds, let in a little sunlight. Start trying to figure out where she was supposed to go from here.

  In the bottom drawer, she found an old pair of athletic shorts and a tee shirt that she’d worn in high school. They still fit, and were reasonably presentable. Maybe a good run would clear her head and drain some of the toxins from her life.

  The kitchen was deserted. She made herself a single slice of toast and took it outside, where she perched on the porch swing to eat it. Around the side of the house, near the garage, came the sounds of male voices and the thump of a basketball against pavement. Paige finished the toast, brushed off the crumbs, and went to join them.

  Dad and Davey were shooting baskets. Davey looked so much like their father that people sometimes referred to him as Rob’s Mini-Me. Long, gangly arms and legs, big feet, and a head of curly blond hair like hers and Dad’s. Emma, that lucky dog, had inherited her mother’s straight, silky hair. Davey, on the other hand, was one-hundred percent MacKenzie. Nobody had yet seen so much as a glimmer of his mother in him.

  Dad tossed the ball in her direction. Paige caught it, dribbled, then jumped and shot. The ball went smoothly through the hoop, dropped, and the game was on. They must have made quite a sight: three MacKenzies, loud and boisterous, aggressively fighting over that basketball, although nobody was keeping score. After a few minutes, she called it quits, said, “I’m going run
ning,” and went back inside the house to get her car keys and her iPod.

  The Riverwalk had been constructed by the town about five years ago as a safe place for residents to walk, run, bike, or just enjoy the outdoors. It was a calming oasis, free of cars and hunters and the craziness of everyday life, and Paige ran here whenever she came home. The paved running path followed the contours of the riverbank, beneath ancient willow trees whose foliage shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. Paige ran at a steady pace. It had been more than two weeks since she last ran, and she felt it in every muscle of her body. Sweat trickled down her spine and poured in rivulets from her temples, drenching her hair and dampening her clothing.

  All the while, she kept up a steady monologue inside her head. Except that it was just one word: Ryan. In time with the slapping of her Nikes against pavement, it kept circling in her head: Ry-an, Ry-an, Ry-an, until she wanted to scream.

  She hated it. Hated this woman he’d turned her into. She’d always kept on moving, no matter what obstacle life placed in her path. That was how she survived. She’d survived other break-ups unscathed. She’d survived her mother’s death, had survived being torn away from Mikey when their elopement slammed into a brick wall. So why in God’s name had Ryan’s defection with that skank Vanessa turned her life upside down?

  It was the betrayal. More than anything, it was the betrayal that wouldn’t let go of her. The end of a love affair was one thing, but to end it the way Ryan had was unforgivable.

  Ahead of her on the path, a dark-haired young woman with a baby stroller stood waiting while a preschooler examined the petals of a cone flower planted along the path. As she neared them, Paige veered to the left, prepared to pass. Then the woman lifted her sunglasses and said, “Paige?”

  She slowed, glanced at the woman’s face, and recognition hit her.