Someone Like You (14 page)

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cat said. “Come in. Say hello. Karen knows we’re in a rush. We’ll be out in three seconds.”

“It’s hardly worth it for three seconds,” she pointed out.

“Then do it for Annabelle. This is all new for her. It will be easier if you introduce her.”

Her sister’s words hit home, and she felt the heat of embarrassment burn her cheeks a nice bright red. This wasn’t like her at all. Annabelle was always,
always,
her number one priority.

“You’re right,” she said as she unbuckled her seat belt. “Of course you’re right. I should have thought of that myself.”

“Oh, shut up,” Cat said with a good-natured laugh. “You didn’t commit a crime.”

But it felt like it to Joely as she unfastened Annabelle and helped her out of the backseat.

“Do they have kittens here?” Annabelle asked as they crunched their way up the rocky path to Karen’s kitchen door.

Joely met Cat’s eyes, and her sister shook her head. “No kittens,” Joely said, “but they have baby lambs.”

“Do they have puppies?” Annabelle asked, clearly unimpressed at the prospect of lambs.

“No puppies,” Cat said, “but they have two great big fluffy dogs named Simon and Garfunkel.”

Joely started to laugh. “Simon and Garfunkel? Tell me you’re kidding.”

“Just wait until you meet Peter, Paul, and Mary.”

“I can’t wait,” she said, adding an eye roll for emphasis.

Karen wasn’t in the kitchen or the office.

“The barn,” Cat said. “That’s where she usually is.”

They walked around the side of the house and were halfway across the yard when two dogs the size of Shetland ponies galloped toward them and knocked Joely flat on her butt. Annabelle shrieked with laughter as the dogs licked Joely’s face and danced around her. And Cat wasn’t any better. She was doubled over with laughter herself.

“Would somebody please do something?” she pleaded as the furry assault continued. “I’m drowning in dog spit!”

“Simon!” a sharp voice called out. “Garfunkel! Get off her this minute!”

Oh God. It was Karen. She wanted to crawl under the dirt and disappear. The girl voted Most Likely to Succeed was not supposed to end up trapped beneath two hundred pounds of crazy dog fur in front of the girl voted Most Likely to Run Away and Join the Circus. Joely had two master’s degrees and was halfway toward a doctorate. Karen raised sheep. This couldn’t be happening.

“This minute, guys!” that sharp, unmistakable voice called out again. “I mean it.”

Simon and Garfunkel jumped away from Joely and tore off, leaving Joely struggling to pull down her sweater, find her left shoe, and recover her dignity.

“It’s been a long time.” Karen, neat and clean in jeans and a bright blue T-shirt, stood over her. “I’ll help you up.”

She flashed her sister a quick
Some help you are
look, then took Karen’s hand and stood up.

“Herding’s in their blood,” Karen said, clearly trying not to laugh. “They were just trying to keep you in line.”

Cat and Annabelle started laughing all over again, and Joely couldn’t help but join in. She introduced Karen to Annabelle.

“Hey, Annabelle!” Karen turned to the little girl whose attention had wandered toward the barn. “How would you like to hold a baby lamb?”

“I guess,” Annabelle said and suddenly clamped herself to the side of Joely’s leg.

“Maybe you could help us,” Karen said, bending down to meet the child’s eyes. “We have some kittens who—”

That did it. Annabelle headed full-speed toward the barn.

“Kittens?” Cat asked. “Where did you get kittens?”

“I forgot to tell you! It happened three days ago. A little surprise, courtesy of Mr. Big and Samantha.” Karen turned to include Joely in the conversation. “We brought her in to Gracie so she could put her out of the kitten business and found out she was going into labor.”

A squeal followed by loud whoops of laughter floated toward them from the barn.

“Uh-oh,” Karen said. “I’d better see what’s happening.”

“Maybe I’d better come, too,” Joely said.

“She’ll be fine. Believe me, I can handle one more with my ovaries tied behind my back.”

A mind-blowing metaphor that knocked the words right out of Joely for a moment.

“We’ll be back in two hours,” Cat said, leaping into the discussion. “Thanks for helping out.” She flashed Joely a
Let’s go
look.

“Yes,” Joely said finally. “Thanks a lot for watching Annabelle.”

“No problem,” Karen said. “Good to see you again.”

She disappeared into the barn.

“See?” Cat said when they climbed back into the car. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“At least the dogs didn’t bite me.”

“You should see Karen with her kids. She’s one of those great earth mother types. I don’t know how she manages to homeschool them and keep up with work at the same time.”

“What about Danny?” she asked as they drove past the old high school. “What’s he up to these days?”

“He owns a computer shop in town. He buys, sells, repairs, builds.” Cat eased to a stop at a traffic light. “Now he’s building Web sites for some pretty big concerns.”

“Sounds like he’s doing well.”

“He’s doing great,” Cat went on. “They both are. They’re a terrific team. Everybody says—” She glanced over at Joely. “This doesn’t bother you, does it? I mean, you haven’t been carrying a torch for Danny all these years, have you?”

“God, no!” She started to laugh. “To be honest, I was afraid he might have been carrying a torch for me.”

“If he is, it’s the best-kept secret in town, and you know this town isn’t good at keeping secrets.”

“Phew!” She pretended to wipe sweat from her brow. “That’s a relief.”

“She has three kids, honey. Annabelle’s in good hands.”

How easily they had slipped back into their old ways.

“You always could see right through me.”

“Not always,” Cat said, “but this time it’s easy.”

“I’ve never left Annabelle with a stranger before.”

“What about that Mrs. Macdonald of yours?”

“She wasn’t a stranger. She’d been with William’s family for years.”

“How feudal of them.”

“Mrs. Macdonald was like a grandmother to Annabelle.”

“Karen’s not a stranger,” Cat reminded her. “She sat behind you in French.”

“She’s a stranger to Annabelle.”

“You’re right,” Cat said. “I should have realized that.”

“The place has changed so much,” she said as they drove down Main Street. “What’s with all the condos? We’re starting to look like the suburbs.”

“You don’t know the half of it. The town council is thinking of making part of the beach private.”

“Get out! That’s terrible.”

“Tell me about it. Suddenly we’re attracting a well-heeled crowd, and they’re demanding their privacy.”

“It’s like that back home, too,” she said. “So many of the big houses are being bought up or rented by—” She started to laugh. “Well, by people like William to be honest. The old families aren’t taking it well at all.”

“I thought he
was
one of the old families.”

“Not an old Scottish family,” she said. “Believe me, that makes a big difference.”

“Is it like the difference between Kennebunkport and Bangor?”

“Worse.” She thought for a second. “Like the difference between the
QE II
and that rowboat Grandma Fran kept in the backyard.”

“Your Down East accent is gone,” Cat observed. “You’re starting to sound very English.”

“The butcher back home thought I was from Brooklyn.” They both laughed. “He thinks every American is from Brooklyn.”

Cat pulled into a spot and turned off the engine. “Ever been homesick?”

“What a crazy question,” she said, forcing a little laugh. “Have you?”

“Sure,” Cat said. “Every single day when I was in college.”

“You commuted to Bowdoin. You slept every night in your own bed. When did you have time to be homesick?”

“What can I say? This is where I’m meant to be.”

“Or maybe it’s just where you ended up.”

“All I can tell you is that the second Mimi rounded the curve near the lighthouse and I saw the sign Welcome to Idle Point for the first time, I knew I was home.”

 

 

“Tell me the truth,” Joely said as they neared Loch Craig.

“How badly are bipeds outnumbered around here?”

William’s laugh always surprised her. William was a successful, sophisticated financial planner with clients in every part of the globe. His suits were Savile Row and Armani. His shoes were handmade for him by a cobbler in Rome. Very few English business types of her acquaintance knew how to really laugh, but William would have been right at home at a Three Stooges revival.

“I think the sheep-to-human ratio is fifty to one,” he said, then laughed again at her gasp of surprise. “They’re nonviolent, Joely. You’re not in danger.”

Which of course made her laugh despite the growing awareness that he knew nothing at all about the kind of woman she was. She hadn’t a bucolic inclination in her entire body. She thrived on noise and crowds and exhaust fumes. Her heartbeat was synched to city rhythms. Despite the fact that she had grown up in a nowhere town in Maine, you could take everything she knew about country living, multiply it by five, and still end up with nothing at all.

Why on earth had he rented this ramshackle accumulation of stones and timber in the middle of nowhere when he could have easily leased a beautiful flat in town with access to all the things a man in his position needed to do business?

The kid,
she thought, spirits sinking even lower. When you had a child you were supposed to give up your old ways and say good-bye to city life and hello to horses and hounds.

“Here we are,” he said as they reached the end of the drive.

“Do you always keep your front door open?”

“Mrs. Macdonald’s expecting us. She thinks it seems more welcoming this way.”

Grandma Fran had believed in an open-door policy, too. Cats, dogs, neighbors, and her daughter Mimi came and went at whim. If it hadn’t been for Grandma Fran, Joely and Cat would have ended up living in the back of a Volkswagen bus until they were old enough to strike out on their own. That little house had been their haven, and her sister had been her protector for as far back as she could remember. Cat claimed she could hear the house’s heartbeat deep inside its walls, but Joely knew it was only the sound of bad plumbing.

She was a scientist by training and by temperament. She knew that houses were inanimate objects built to provide shelter, and families were groups of people thrown together by an accident of genetic timing. To romanticize either one was simply asking for trouble.

The world of emotions was as alien to her as a Pillsbury Bake-Off. She believed in what she could see and touch and quantify. You couldn’t see happiness. You couldn’t gather up dreams and arrange them in neat columns in a lab notebook. You couldn’t reach back into yesterday and make things turn out the way they did in children’s storybooks.

Joely knew who she was, what she wanted, and how to achieve it. She always had. She wasn’t afraid of hard work or failure. The choices she had made along the way weren’t always popular, but they were the right ones for her. She had her future mapped out by the time she was ten years old, and after all the years of schooling and struggle, she was finally in full control of her destiny.

And then she stepped into the foyer of William’s rented house on that rainy springtime afternoon, and all of her most cherished assumptions about life, and about herself, flew up the chimney like woodsmoke. The sense of recognition struck her like a physical blow. An emptiness inside her heart, an emptiness she hadn’t been aware of, was suddenly filled to overflowing. It was as close to love at first sight as she had ever come, and it took her breath away.

She loved everything about William’s house, from the worn Turkey carpets underfoot to the smells of heather and thyme and dampness that seeped through the walls. The overstuffed leather couches, the polished wooden balustrades, the portraits of somebody else’s ancestors that lined the hallways—it was all exactly the way it should be.

The drafty old house with the leaky roof and an ancient Aga as temperamental as an aging tenor felt like home to her, a home she had never known before, never even wanted, but one that had been waiting for her, right there at the edge of her consciousness from the day she was born, and she found herself wanting to hang on to the illusion for as long as possible.

 

“SO HOW ABOUT you?” Cat asked as they waited for the hospital elevator to take them up to ICU. “I still want to know. When was the last time you were homesick?”

“Now,” she said as the doors slid open. “Right now.”

“I NEED CHOCOLATE,” Cat said as they exited the elevator two hours later, “and I need it now.”

“I need a vodka martini,” Joely said, “but I’ll settle for a hot fudge sundae.”

“The Ice Cream Cottage,” they said together, and then they started to laugh.

“Why are we laughing?” Joely asked as they almost ran across the hospital lobby toward the exit. “It was horrible up there.”

“You won’t get an argument from me.” Cat hit the exit like a Patriots linebacker on Super Bowl Sunday. “It was pretty bad.”

“She asked for him,” Joely said as she pushed through the door after her sister. “She opened her eyes, looked straight through me, and she asked for him.”

“At least she’s coming out of the coma,” Cat said. “That’s something.”

“Doesn’t it bother you at all?” Joely asked. “I mean, I wasn’t expecting miracles here, but she’s our mother. You would think she’d—”