Someone Like You (20 page)

“I didn’t say she was perfect. But you got to see the real thing up close and personal. You know it can happen.”

“And your parents are about to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. I’d trade you intensity for longevity any day.”

“Let’s make a pact,” he said, draping his arm around her shoulders. “If we’re still alone when we turn sixty-five, we’ll buy a house together and take in stray cats.”

“Zach,” she said, “I have something to tell you, and I think you’d better sit down.”

 

ANNABELLE WAS INCONSOLABLE.

Joely’s embarrassment over her outburst vanished as she held the little girl in her arms and tried to make sense of the jumble of words pouring from her.

“I know you miss Daddy, honey. He misses us, too, but he’s very far away, and sometimes the telephones don’t work the way they’re supposed to.”

“But he always calls us,” Annabelle said between heart-wrenching sobs. “Please call him! Please, Joely, please!”

She had never felt so helpless in her life. She couldn’t let Annabelle see that her own worry level was rising with every hour that passed without a call from William.

“I have an idea,” she said, desperate to stop Annabelle’s tears. “Maybe Daddy left us a message on the computer.”

“Oh yes!” Annabelle brightened immediately. “Maybe Daddy’s wondering why we didn’t write back.”

It was a long shot, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do. She pulled her laptop out of its carrying case and set it up in the middle of the bed.

“Wait a second,” she said, hunting around for an outlet. “We’ll be up and running before you know it.”

Bless Cat for thinking of everything. The telephone on the nightstand had a working data port, and less than two minutes later she had a connection.

“Okay,” she said, fingers flying across the keyboard, “let me access our e-mail, and we’ll see if there’s anything from Daddy.”

Come on, William,
she silently pleaded.
Maybe you’re done with me, but come through for Annabelle . . .

“It’s taking a long time,” Annabelle said, bouncing up and down on the bed, her tears forgotten. “Why is it so slow?”

“Okay, here we go.” They watched as the screen filled up with notes and messages about Viagra, school reunions, real estate opportunities, two notes from Sara, and—thank God a million times—one from William.

“Here’s a note for us from your daddy,” she said, moving over so Annabelle could see the screen. “Looks like he sent it this morning.”

Oh God. She had totally forgotten about the Sinclairs’ annual holiday trek to Loch Craig to fetch Annabelle for a weeklong visit touring the Highlands. She quickly closed the e-mail before Annabelle reached that part.

“Can we ring him?” Annabelle begged.

Joely did a few quick calculations. “He’s probably giving a lecture or something, honey. It’s midmorning in Japan.”

“Please try, Joely, please!”

She couldn’t come up with a good reason not to pick up the phone and place a call. She grabbed her cell phone, punched in the long string of access codes, area codes, and numbers, then waited while the impulses sped through thousands of miles of fiber optic cable lacing the oceans. The modern world was filled with small miracles every moment of the day.

The connection was crisp and clear. The operator spoke English. Even better, she understood it.

The only problem was, there was no William Bishop registered there.

 

 

The flight attendant stopped in the aisle next to him. “I spoke to the captain, Mr. Bishop, and we’re running ahead of schedule. You should make your connection to Boston with no difficulty.”

He thanked her for her trouble, then leaned back and closed his eyes. Normally he slept well on overseas flights. He had trained himself to use the time spent in transit to recharge his batteries. Unfortunately, that ability seemed to have gone suddenly missing along with the cancelled series of seminars in Hokkaido. George had opted to stay on in Japan for the weekend while William headed for the train station straightaway to begin the journey home.

He tried to phone Joely from the airport lounge in Tokyo with no luck. The phone at Cat’s house rang through, and the voice mail on Joely’s mobile was full. This ongoing game of phone tag only added to the sense of isolation that had been building between them. The only avenue he hadn’t pursued was leaving a message on their machine at home.

He glanced at the clock. They wouldn’t be boarding for another fifteen minutes. Why not give it a try? He dialed home, listened to the standard-issue far-off ring, but instead of the standard-issue outgoing message, he heard the four tones that meant he needed to delete some incoming messages before he could leave one himself.

He dialed again, pressed the star sign to access the box, chose the wrong PIN number and then the right one, and the messages—a startling nineteen of them—started to play. He deleted one from his tailor. He deleted another from the roofer apologizing for yet another delay. One from Natasha’s parents for Annabelle, reminding her to pack tights for the drive north. He was about to hit the pound sign when a plummy voice said, “Joely Doyle, this is Richard Straitharn from Clendenning. We spoke a few weeks ago about staffing for the new unit we’re putting together for our facility in Surrey. I’m impressed—very impressed—with the new ideas you presented, and it’s our consensus that you would be a natural team leader. We’re looking to open in early September, if that’s good for you, but you’re welcome to start any time. I look forward to pursuing this with you at your earliest convenience.”

He’d heard wrong. He must have. He replayed the message, but the same words spilled out. Thirty minutes later his credit card was suitably scorched, but he had a first-class ticket to Boston in his hand.

“Mr. Bishop.” He opened his eyes and smiled up at the flight attendant. “Would you like something to drink?”

“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Please don’t hesitate to ring if you need anything.”

Joely,
he thought as he turned toward the window. He needed Joely, but he was afraid it was too late.

 

“YOU CAN RELAX now,��� Joely said after she’d tucked Annabelle in for the night. “She’s asleep.”

Zach had a great grin. Funny the things you don’t notice until you’re ready for them. No wonder Cat had been dizzy with delight when they were first dating. “You’re good with her,” he said. “I wouldn’t have figured you as a natural, but you are.”

She tilted her head in Cat’s direction. “I had a good teacher.”

“You did,” he said, lifting the remains of his third glass of Merlot in the general direction of her sister. “To the next generation.”

Joely’s eyes widened, and she turned to Cat. “You told him.”

“I can’t seem to keep my mouth shut.”

“I’ve been sworn to secrecy,” Zach said.

Cat stretched out on the sofa with a glass of decaf iced tea. “I didn’t plan on telling any of you for at least another month, but apparently I’m not that good at keeping a secret.”

“Oh please,” Joely said with a Merlot-tinged snort. “You had no trouble keeping Michael Whatever-His-Name-Is a secret.”

Zach settled back at the other end of the couch and fixed Cat with an amused look. “The kid’s right,” he said. “If you hadn’t decided to procreate, we wouldn’t know anything about your secret life.”

“I operate on a strictly need-to-know basis,” Cat said, “and neither one of you needed to know what I didn’t want to tell you.”

“That’s not the way it’s supposed to be,” Joely said, her tongue loosened by wine and worry. “Don’t you people watch television up here? Happy families share everything. We should be living side-by-side in cute little Cape Cods so our kids can grow up together while their loving grandparents shower them with toys and cookies.”

“The Von Doyle Family Singers,” Cat said, “with Daddy Von Doyle there to lead us over the mountains to safety.”

“Yes!” Joely exclaimed. “That’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”

“There is no ‘supposed to be,’ ” Zach said. “There’s only the way it is.”

The two women looked at him, then each other.

“You just put three thousand self-help authors out of business,” Cat said.

“Not to mention the therapists,” Joely added.

“Nobody’s life is perfect,” Zach went on, “and sure as hell nobody’s family is either. I’m not going to say things couldn’t have gone easier for you two, but your heritage is something to be proud of.”

“Give me a break,” Joely muttered. “A pair of broken-down old folkies who flipped out when parenthood raised its ugly head. Yeah, there’s something to be proud of.”

“You’re missing the big picture.” Zach wasn’t about to be put off by either sarcasm or scorn. “Your parents have a place in the history of American music. There was nobody like them before, and there’s been nobody like them since. I don’t give a damn what they were like as parents; it doesn’t take away from what they gave to our culture.”

Joely clapped her hands together slowly. “Bravo,” she drawled. “I’ll trade you a star on the Walk of Fame for five minutes with two parents who actually knew I was alive.”

“What about you?” Zach zeroed in on Cat, who had been watching them closely. “Can you separate the bad parents from the great musicians?”

“I wish I could,” Cat said. “I know they were great—I mean, you can’t listen to their old albums and not know they were special—but it’s like listening to Elvis or The Beatles or Frank Sinatra. The music’s terrific, but it has nothing to do with my life.”

“She tried to make it your life,” Joely said. “Remember that summer she dragged us all over New England, trying to turn you into a singer?”

Cat groaned and covered her eyes with her hands. “Thanks for reminding me. I spent good money with a therapist trying to put that fiasco behind me.”

Zach laughed out loud. “You weren’t bad, Cat.”

“I threw up every time I had to go onstage!”

“Good practice for motherhood,” Joely offered, then ducked as her sister aimed a pillow at her.

“I convinced Mimi that she needed to take me along to be her roadie,” Zach said, “but I ended up babysitting the kid instead.”

“I haven’t thought about any of this in years,” Joely said, shaking her head. Quick flashes of listening to Mimi and Cat singing their way down the Mass Turnpike, lobster shack suppers in a Rhode Island shore town, playing Go Fish backstage with Zach. “It wasn’t all bad, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t,” Cat said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“But it was you she was interested in.”

“Not really,” Cat said with that easy acceptance of their mother’s flaws that had always left Joely baffled and somehow humbled. “I was just the closest she could get to Mark.”

Zach nodded. “That’s why she went out on all those gigs. She hoped he’d hear about them and show up.”

“So did I,” Cat admitted. “I’d see a tall man with dark brown hair standing in the shadows, and my heart would start beating so hard I couldn’t sing.”

“How could I not have known this?” Joely asked.

“You were a kid,” Cat said. “You were Annabelle’s age. Our life was strange enough. I wanted you to have as much of a childhood as you could. You didn’t need to be scanning a crowd for your father, too.”

“See?” She turned to Zach. “That’s the way you love a child. Mimi should have taken lessons from her own daughter.”

“She did pretty well the day of the accident.”

Everything inside Joely froze at his words. He was the one other person on earth, besides herself and Mimi, who had been there. “Not funny, Zach.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

She looked into his eyes for signs of sarcasm but saw nothing but compassion.

“I couldn’t imagine my mother doing what she did,” he said.

“I’m not following.”

Frowning, he glanced at Cat, who shrugged her shoulders.

“I’m not following either,” she said.

“After—” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. She was reminded forcefully of the fact that he had lost his brother in that accident. “It was clear—I mean, there was no doubt that Ty was . . . gone. I was pinned inside the Camaro . . . the seat belt saved my life.” He glanced at Joely, his pain clearly visible, and she looked away. “You had been thrown clear and were lying on the ground next to the van. Mimi was—” He stopped, searching for the right words to convey whatever it was he saw in his mind’s eye. “She was crazy. That’s the only way I can put it. She ran to the Camaro . . . to my side of the car . . . and kept saying, ‘It wasn’t her fault! It wasn’t her fault! I was driving!’ She kept saying it over and over when the cops came, telling them how smart you were, what a great future you had, how you were all set to go to MIT in a few days, and how proud she was.” He stopped for a moment to catch his breath. “She was terrified you would be charged for Ty’s stupidity, and your future would be lost.”

“I never heard this before,” Joely said.

“Neither have I,” Cat added.

“The cops never questioned you?” he asked Joely.

“Sure they did. Over and over. They—” She stopped as memories of that hideous time resurfaced. “Oh God. That explains it. I thought they were trying to trick me into something when they said Mimi had been driving drunk. I wondered why they were pretending not to believe me when I said I was the one who’d been behind the wheel.”