Someone Like You (17 page)

THERE WAS TIRED and then there was first-trimester tired.

“Please tell me I didn’t fall asleep with my head in the pizza,” Cat said as she dragged herself up from the kitchen table.

“You snored!” Annabelle said with a giggle. “I heard you.”

“I seem to be doing a lot of that lately.” She pretended to tickle the little girl. “Ladies, feel free to watch TV or do jumping jacks in the living room, but I’m going to call it a night.”

Annabelle’s giggling grew louder. “That’s silly. You’re too old to go to bed so early.”

“Annabelle!” Joely’s cheeks blazed with embarrassment. “Apologize right now.”

“For what?” Cat said as she slid her plate into the dishwasher. “She’s right. Not too many thirty-eight-year-old women go to bed at seven o’clock at night.”

“Are you okay?” Joely asked. “Is this normal?”

“That’s what they say. Supposedly I’m going to wake up on day one of trimester number two and feel like a nineteen-year-old cheerleader.”

“Too bad I won’t be here to see that,” Joely said, laughing. “That might be worth hanging around for.”

“You can hang around for as long as you’d like,” Cat said. “Both of you.”

Joely shook her head. “No, we need to get home. William will be back from Japan and—”

Cat raised her hand to stop the stream of words. “You don’t have to explain, honey. She’s his daughter. I understand.”
I understand more than you think, Joely. You haven’t even been here a full day yet. Is it time to run already?

Cosmo and Newman were curled up in the middle of Cat’s bed, dark heads pressed closed together.

“Shove over, guys,” she said, collapsing next to them.

Cosmo opened one eye and meowed.

“I’ll shower in the morning,” she promised, curling around the aging tuxedo cats. “I’m too tired to think.”

Except she wasn’t.

The second she rested her head on the pillow and closed her eyes, the entire crazy-quilt day rushed toward her at supersonic speed, and there wasn’t time to duck. It hit her full force, and all she could do was lie there and stare up at the ceiling until her heart slowed down to something close to normal.
Too much,
she thought. The whole thing was way too much. She was still trying to adjust to the fact that she was thirty-eight years old and pregnant for the first time. That alone would be enough to send a woman into emotional overdrive, but add Mimi’s accident into the mix, and you had trouble.

She was accustomed to being in control of her life. Her organizational skills, honed during childhood, were her safety net. Most creative types sailed through their days on a whim and a wish, but not Cat. She believed in being prepared, and the fact that Mimi’s accident had so totally broadsided her had shaken her faith in her own judgment and ability to cope.

Grandma Fran’s house was a total loss. Anyone could see that. It would cost more to rebuild than it was worth and, besides, what was the point? Mimi wouldn’t be living there again. That much was certain. Her mother would need full-time, live-in help, and that cost money. Better they sold the house and land to the highest bidder and used the proceeds to settle Mimi comfortably in an assisted living facility or, God forbid, an actual nursing home.

She was glad Joely was there. They might have chosen separate paths as adults, but their shared childhood was a bond that could never be broken. She wished Joely could have known their mother before the bad times came to stay, but more than that she wished Joely could have known their father. A few weeks ago she’d caught the scent of cherry pipe tobacco, and it awakened memories that had lain dormant for over twenty-five years.

It was nice to be reminded that it hadn’t all been bad.

They say a girl never forgot her first love, and there was bittersweet truth to that. Her father had been Cat’s first love. She had adored Mark Doyle with every fiber of her little girl’s heart, and when he walked out the door that October morning in search of a guitar string, a part of her heart had stopped beating.

Maybe she was more like Mimi than she had ever realized. The ten-year-old child she had once been was still waiting for him at the front door of the Pennsylvania cottage if only for the chance to say good-bye.

 

JOELY SAT IN the middle of the sofa in the middle of Cat’s living room and listened to . . . nothing. It was nine-thirty eastern daylight time, and she was the only one awake in the entire house. Cat was sound asleep on top of her bed with two very large, very protective felines wrapped around her. Annabelle had fallen asleep on the sofa, and Joely had quickly settled her in for the night in the guest bedroom. Mimi’s beloved Trixie had scooched over to make room for the child, then reclaimed part of the pillow.

That was all fine and good for those involved, but it left Joely wide-awake, wired, and alone with her thoughts, which was her least favorite place to be.

No, scratch that. It was her second least favorite place to be, the first being her old hometown of Idle Point.

She was more than ten years gone from Idle Point, but the need to escape felt as urgent as it had when she was a teenager. Grandma Fran’s wrecked house. Her mother’s wrecked life. The memory of Ty Porter’s wrecked future.

No, she wasn’t going to think about that. The town had grown up since the accident. The old landmarks were long gone. There was a four-way traffic light where the blown stop sign had been, but she could see the ghosts just the same.

She had tried phoning William’s cell twice. Both times she had left voice mail messages behind, and her disappointment had been surprisingly intense. She wasn’t a “sound of your voice” kind of woman, but the sound of his voice would have been nice.

She wandered into Cat’s kitchen in search of leftover pizza. There was something irresistible about cold pizza washed down with a can of beer. Not that Cat would have any beer in the house. Cat was more Beaujolais sipped from a fabulous wineglass she’d found at some yard sale or the front porch of a down-on-its-luck antique shop.

Joely settled for Pepsi straight from the can. She ate standing over the sink, watching the pizza crumbs fall into the drain.

“Now what?” she asked the appliances when she finished. It was ten minutes to ten, and instead of being sound asleep the way any normal jet-lagged westward-bound traveler would be, she was more wired than ever. The thought of forcing herself into bed—and deeper into her own head—made her feel like the walls were closing in on her.

She used to feel that way all the time when she was growing up. There were nights when she could almost see the house, her family, her future, closing in on her, and she’d practically explode from the house and head for the beach by the lighthouse where she could breathe.

Wasn’t it just last night that she had been looking up at the Scottish sky and longing for the inky blackness of a Maine summer night? The one thing, besides her sister, that she remembered with fondness, and she wasn’t out there enjoying it.

She checked on Annabelle, who was out like a light, then scribbled a note for Cat, which she left propped up on the kitchen table. A long walk under a Maine night sky was exactly what she needed. Maybe then she’d be able to sleep.

THE SQUEAK OF her door pulled Cat up from sleep. Who needed a burglar alarm when you had a door that squealed like a stuck pig every time it opened or closed? She was reasonably certain it was just Joely heading out on one of her midnight rambles, but she knew herself well enough to know she wouldn’t fall back to sleep until she knew for sure.

She extricated herself from her spot between Cosmo and Newman and tugged her clothes back into place. Yawning, she stepped out into the hallway and quickly checked the guest room. Annabelle was sleeping soundly, her arm around Trixie. No sign of Joely in the living room. She popped her head into the kitchen and found a note propped up against the sugar bowl.

“Gone beachcombing,” the note read. “Be back soon. Please keep an ear open for Annabelle.”

She smiled and tossed the note down onto the table. It was nice to know some things never changed. Her sister might not share her love for the town of Idle Point, but that crescent stretch of beach cradling the lighthouse was something else again.

For a second she considered joining Joely on her nocturnal ramble, but then she remembered there was a sleeping child in her guest bedroom.

“Better get used to it,” she said to the empty kitchen as she grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. This time next year there would be a sleeping child in her guest bedroom every night. Except it wouldn’t be a guest bedroom any longer. It would be a nursery.

And the child would be hers.

The realization was better than caffeine and a cold shower. She was wide awake now and likely to remain so for awhile. Before sperm met egg, she had been nocturnal by nature. Her most creative and productive hours began after the sun went down, but pregnancy had turned her body clock on its ear. This was the first time in weeks that she had been alert after dark.

She had maybe twenty rows left to finish the sparkly leg warmers she’d been working on in the doctor’s office. If she finished that up tonight, then she would be free to cast on the elaborate lace shawl she’d promised Nona at HBO for the series finale and at least get the establishing rows in place.

Then again, maybe she’d fire up her laptop and do a little Web surfing. This really was the golden age of information. Everything she could possibly want to know about pregnancy was only a click away—and more than a few things she didn’t want to know as well. She wasn’t a group kind of woman, but she’d been toying with the idea of joining a few e-mail lists for pregnant women of a certain age. She had even gone so far as to request information on how to join.

Maybe they’d sent her the secret password. It might be waiting in her in-box right now. And if she happened to stumble across a note from Michael, that wouldn’t be so bad either. Not that she was expecting an e-mail. Unlike every other writer she had ever met, Michael didn’t travel with his laptop, so unless he stopped in at an Internet café in L.A., there wouldn’t be any mail from him until he returned to New York.

She curled up in the corner of her sofa with her laptop balanced on the arm and clicked on the e-mail icon. Spam. Spam. Really ugly spam. A note from one of the actresses on
Pink Slip
about commissioning a sweater for her real-life daughter.

And one from Michael.

He knew her too well. Full-on sentiment wasn’t their style, even if she sometimes had the feeling he was a closeted hearts-and-flowers type who was tempering his own romantic enthusiasm out of respect for her sensibilities.

She didn’t put a whole lot of stock in the idea of soul mates or the outdated notion of one Mr. Right in a sea of Mr. Wrongs. Or at least she hadn’t until she met Michael. Who knew it could be so easy? They fell into step with each other as if they’d been together all their lives. The heat was there—lots of heat—but there was more to what they had than sexual chemistry.

When she met him she saw her future, doors swinging open, wide open, to possibilities she had never let herself consider. Under normal circumstances that would have scared her back up to Idle Point permanently, but not even the strongest woman could fight her own destiny.

She pressed Send and was about to shut down the laptop when the phone rang.

“Now that’s fast,” she said, laughing into the receiver. “Are you using speed dial?”

A slight pause then a very British, “Pardon?”

“Oh.” She switched ears. “You’re not Michael Yanovsky, are you?”

Another slight pause. “Cat, it’s William Bishop.”

“William, hello.” What was it about men with accents that turned American women immediately into goofy thirteen-year-olds with bad skin and braces? “How are you?”
Great, Cat. Even a thirteen-year-old would come up with something more original
.

He inquired about Mimi, and she gave him a truncated version of the facts as she knew them. She had expected him to move quickly past the obligatory health check to the real reason he’d called, but he surprised her by asking follow-up questions. He surprised her even more by listening to her answers.

William had always been a shadowy figure to her. She knew the vital statistics—widowed, a father, thirty-five years old, and successful—but Joely had never given her much of an idea of the man behind the data. She liked what she was hearing from the man himself.