Someone Like You (6 page)

“And you’re asking.”

“I’m asking.”

That was the thing about promises. Sooner or later the person you made those promises to expected you to make good on them.

Funny how she had never really believed this day would come.

“I’ll see what I can do. William will be home in a week or two. Mrs. Macdonald’s not with us anymore and—”

“You’re not listening. I need you here now.”

“To do what? Hold her hand? Maybe I don’t want to hold her hand, Cat. Maybe I wish she’d been there to hold my hand once or twice over the years.”

Annabelle was looking up at her with a combination of puzzlement and fear that tore at her heart. This was exactly the kind of thing she would throw herself on her sword to avoid.

She took a deep breath and regrouped. “Listen, I’m sorry about the accident. I want her to be well. I don’t want you to have to deal with this on your own, but I have responsibilities here.” She laid her hand on Annabelle’s shoulder, and the little girl snuggled close. “I’ll do what I can, but I can’t give you a timetable.”

“If that’s the best you can do.”

It wasn’t. She could do better, and they both knew it.

“Call me when you know how Mom is,” she said.

No response. Cat was long gone.

“Damn,” she whispered, then pressed the disconnect button.

“Where’s Daddy?” Annabelle demanded as she tossed the phone down on the bed. “Why didn’t he talk to me?”

“Honey, I told you that wasn’t your daddy,” Joely said. “That was my sister.”

“Why are you crying?”

She touched her cheeks. “I didn’t know I was.” She wasn’t a crying kind of woman, and she sure as hell wasn’t about to shed a tear for Mimi’s self-inflicted troubles.

“Why are you sad?” Annabelle persisted.

“My mother—” She buried her face against the child’s bony shoulder. What kind of pathetic loser of a woman fell apart in front of a little girl? “My mother is in the hospital, and I have to go home.”

“Silly!” Annabelle squirmed away. “You’re home already.”

“I know, honey,” she said, holding the child tight. “I know I am.”

It was the first time she had ever lied to Annabelle, but she knew it wouldn’t be the last.

EVERYONE WHO HAD ever met Mimi Doyle agreed that she was as high-strung as a racehorse at the starting gate. She felt things more keenly than other people. Whatever it was that buffered other hearts from the slings and arrows of real life was missing in Mimi. Her behavior, which had once been labeled harmlessly eccentric, grew more erratic with the years, and by the time Grandma Fran died, Mimi’s spells of heavy drinking alternated with spells of angry abstinence and the occasional naked sprint up Main Street.

The line between normal and abnormal had been blurred out of existence. Mimi careened through life like a runaway train while Cat followed behind, minimizing the damage the best she could.

Sometimes Mimi drank. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she was lucid and agreeable. Sometimes she shed her past along with her inhibitions and tested the chaos theory of living to its limits. But there was one constant, one North Star that guided everything Mimi did: her belief that one day Mark would come back to her.

It never once occurred to Mimi that maybe this time there wouldn’t be a happy ending, that maybe this time the story would end the way all of those old folk songs they had made famous always ended: with the fair maiden pining away for love of the errant knight who would never return.

Mimi was sixty-two years old, and she was still waiting for him to show up at the front door, metaphorical hat in hand, sheepish and contrite. And Cat knew exactly what would happen if he did. Mimi would open her arms wide to him, and he would flash what remained of the wicked grin she had fallen in love with at St. Bernadette’s, and it would be like the last twenty-seven years had never happened. No anger. No recriminations. She loved him now the way she had loved him then, and not even the cold hard bite of reality would ever change that.

Cat had believed she was doing a pretty fair job of keeping things under control without sacrificing her own life or her mother’s safety until today, when reality turned around and bit her instead.

Cat and Michael crossed from New Hampshire into Maine around five thirty. She had kept up a humorous but brittle commentary on the scenery across four states, and the effort was beginning to take its toll.

“You drive like an old lady,” she said as he followed the signs to the tourist center. “I could’ve cut forty minutes off your time without even trying.”

“Assuming you didn’t fall asleep and hit a tree.”

“I’ve been wide awake the whole trip.”

“The hell you have.” He cut a quick look in her direction. “You were snoring.”

“I don’t snore.”

“You did today.”

He pulled into a parking spot beneath a stand of fragrant pine trees tall enough to remind you why you believed in God.

“What are we doing here? I don’t need a rest stop.”

“I do.” He switched off the engine and pocketed the keys.

“You’re taking my keys?”

“I don’t trust you,” he said. “You might leave me stranded here in Paul Bunyan country.”

He knew her too well. Part of her wanted to break every speed limit and get home before it was too late, while another, uglier part—the part that was her father’s daughter—wanted to grab the wheel and keep on driving until she hit Canada or a major body of water, whichever came first.

But she was a good daughter, and good daughters didn’t do that. Good daughters continued doing what they had been doing their whole lives. She flipped open her cell and pressed Redial.

“Idle Point General. How may I direct your call?”

“Terry, it’s Cat Doyle. Any news?”

“I hope you’re not driving. I hate people who talk on the phone while they’re driving.” Terry Seaborne had been answering phones at Idle Point General for as long as Cat could remember.

“Don’t worry. I’m not driving.”

“Where are you?”

“Tourist center parking lot near Kittery.”

“Good. You’re not too far.”

“Terry, please. Have they taken Mimi into surgery yet?”

“She’s prepped and ready. Laquita on women’s surgical told me they’re waiting for Green to finish in the big room, and they’ll wheel her in.”

Terry launched herself into a long story about the splenectomy Green was performing on old Mr. Dunaway from Frenchtown. Usually Cat was happy to listen until either Terry ran out of breath or Cat drifted off into a spontaneous siesta, but she didn’t have the energy today.

“Terry, I seem to be losing the signal,” she said as Michael opened the driver’s side door and climbed back in. “I’ll talk to you when I get there.” She met Michael’s curious gaze. “Don’t say a word,” she warned him.

“You were dragging your ring across the mouthpiece.”

“And I’m ashamed of myself. I’ll take her for coffee and make up for it later.”

He started the engine. “So how’s your mother doing?”

“She’s still in a holding pattern.”

“Good,” he said. “Let’s get you there in time to see her before surgery.”

She was a lousy passenger. Always had been. She only felt comfortable when it was her foot on the gas pedal, her hands on the wheel.

“Pull over,” she said, gesturing toward a grassy shoulder near the entrance to the highway.

“You need the bathroom?”

“I need to drive.”

“What about the dizziness?”

“Gone.”

“Great.”

“Are you going to pull over so I can drive?”

“Nope.”

“It’s my car.”

“I know. Mine’s better.”

“Anyone can lease a fancy car. At least I own this.”

He launched into a very funny riff on Beemers and Hummers and the women who loved the men who leased them, and she couldn’t help but laugh. He was as transparent as rain on a freshly washed window. He was talking about anything and everything except the reason why she was in the passenger seat and he was behind the wheel, and the two of them—scratch that, the three of them—were headed north to Idle Point.

“This isn’t exactly the way I had today planned out,” she said.

“Me neither.” He had a great smile, a real smile. Not that big fake ear-to-ear baring of the teeth that some men flashed like Get Out of Jail Free cards. “I was planning to take you back to bed for the afternoon.”

“I probably would have fallen asleep on you.”

“I can think of worse things than watching you sleep.”

On any other day she would have volleyed that statement back to him with a self-deprecating laugh and a well-aimed one-liner, but today she couldn’t manage to find the words to defuse the longing that suddenly made it difficult to breathe, much less think.

This shouldn’t be happening. The whole thing was wrong, about as wrong as it could possibly be. She had tried so hard to keep the two disparate parts of her life separate and distinct, and now they were on a collision course, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

When a pregnant woman keeled over in a pricey Manhattan restaurant, she couldn’t blame the father-to-be for wanting to protect both child and mother. That was why she had chosen him in the first place, wasn’t it, because he was a good man and a kind one and he had his priorities straight. And, likewise, you couldn’t blame the mother for accepting the protection even if she had spent most of her life denying she needed help of any kind.

But the rules changed when you were carrying a life deep inside your body. It was all part of nature’s insidious little plan for propagating the species. Sooner or later she knew she would have to let him into her world, but not now. Not this way.

She had planned to wait until she was into her second trimester, when she was beginning to show and could no longer blame the size of her breasts and belly on the world’s longest case of water retention. She would time it for one of Mimi’s up cycles, when her mother loved the world and the world loved her, and even her frequent lapses of judgment and good taste seemed more fey than just plain crazy.

Michael was a writer. He grew up in New York and had a high tolerance for eccentrics. With a little preparation, he might have found three hours with Mimi Doyle fascinating.

Too bad Mimi had her own plan, one that included waiting for the housekeeper to head out to the store, then setting fire to the house.

Don’t mind my mother,
she would tell Michael.
She’s crazy, but she’s not dangerous.

She didn’t want to have to explain Mimi to him. She didn’t want to see the concern in his eyes turn to pity. She didn’t want to hear that angry, defensive tone her voice took on when somebody got too close. Bad enough he had heard her side of that edgy conversation with Joely.

This was her problem, her family. She was here because she wanted to be, because somebody had to be, and she was the one with the right skill set to handle it. She didn’t have to explain the situation to anyone in Idle Point. They had been there from the start of the story, back when her parents first locked eyes across a crowded dance floor, and they would be there at the end. She wasn’t sure she could say that about Michael.

“Are we there yet?” Michael broke into her thoughts. “I think we’re heading for the Canadian border.”

She quickly got her bearings. “Next exit. You’ll make a right at the stop sign and keep going until you hit water.”

“Metaphorically speaking.”

“Of course.”

“A lot of trees up here,” he said in a conversational tone.

“It’s Maine,” she reminded him. “We’re known for our trees.”

“Looks like you’re known for shopping,” he said as they rolled past a half-dozen discount shoe stores, musty antique shops, and factory outlets that wouldn’t make the grade in Kittery or Portland.

“It gets more picturesque as we get closer to Idle Point.”

“I like it,” he said. “It reminds me of Secaucus.”

She couldn’t help it. She laughed out loud again.

Her stomach knotted when they hit the town limits and rolled past Gas-2-Go and the car wash next to Jiffy Lube. A pounding sensation began behind her eyeballs when she caught sight of Nancy Westgarten and her sister Maureen standing in front of the bank, peering in her direction. Only ninety feet into town, and they had already been spotted by the Idle Point equivalent of Page Six.

“They’re probably burning up a month’s worth of cell phone minutes,” she mumbled into the window.

“What was that?”

“A rude remark you don’t need to hear.”

He shot her a look but made no comment.

“Next left,” she said, “at the corner by Cumberland Farms. That road will take us straight to the hospital.”

He made the left and drove past First Presbyterian, Chase Memorial Middle School, and what used to be Ada’s Hairport but was now Video Haven. “So this is where you grew up.”

“Sort of. I was almost twelve when we moved here,” she said, then instantly regretted saying even that much.

“I thought you were born here.” She could almost see the questions starting to spin in his writer’s brain.

“My mother was.”

“And then she ended up coming back home?”

“Something like that.”

“I have a lot of questions,” he said.

“I’m sure you do, but you won’t ask them now, will you.”

“No,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I won’t ask them later.”

Later was good. It was right now that had her worried.

 

MICHAEL HAD SEEN veterinary hospitals that were bigger than Idle Point General.

“Parking’s in the back,” Cat said as she unfastened her seat belt. “Next to the newspaper office.”

She looked ready to bolt. His cool, unflappable Cat was coming apart at the seams.