Someone Like You (7 page)

“Why don’t I drop you at the front entrance,” he said, pulling over to the curb. “You go in and find your mom.”

“But you won’t know where I am.”

“I don’t think there’ll be a problem.” She was out of the car and moving up the walkway before he could get out and help her. For a woman who had spent most of her life in a town that could fit inside Madison Square Garden with room to spare, she walked like a city girl, quickly and with purpose.

He waited until she disappeared through the front doors, then circled around to the parking lot adjacent to the emergency room, where he had his pick of spots. He pulled in two over from a bright red Mercedes convertible. Top down. No LoJack or wheel lock. Didn’t the good people of Idle Point know that auto theft was big business?

He locked Cat’s car anyway. He was a New Yorker, and New Yorkers locked the car even when they were in Maine.

“Second floor, Michael.” A small woman with black hair that gleamed blue under the fluorescent lighting greeted him as he stepped into the lobby.

He stopped midstride. “Excuse me?”

“Cat said to tell you she’s on the second floor.”

“Thanks,” he said. He tried to imagine the receptionist at Columbia-Presbyterian greeting visitors by name. The mind boggled.

“The elevator’s right over there,” the woman said. “Near the water fountain.”

“Thanks,” he said again.

So she read minds, too. Un-freaking-believable. Clearly she didn’t know everything, however, because she looked like she was dying to ask what the deal was between Cat and him, and only three hundred years of strict Yankee discipline kept her tongue in check.

The place was so quiet he could hear the sound of his own breathing. It made Temple Beth-El during the High Holy Days sound like Mardi Gras. There was only one elevator, and the light was holding steady at three. He pressed the Up arrow again, waited a few seconds, then ducked into the stairwell, where he bumped into an octogenarian candy striper lugging a basket of magazines and paperbacks.

“Cat’s in surgical waiting,” the woman said as he held the door for her. “She’s trying to see Mimi before they wheel her in.”

He blinked like one of those characters in the old black-and-white cartoons.

They either had an intelligence network the government needed to know about, or he was the first outlander to come to town since Prohibition.

Surgical waiting turned out to be a line of chairs set up in the hallway outside the swinging doors that led to the operating rooms.

Cat was standing near the window looking down at the street. She turned around at the sound of his footsteps. She looked exhausted, drained of energy and joy in a way he hadn’t seen before, and it scared him.

“Hey.” He draped an arm across her shoulders. She didn’t lean into him, but then she never did. “How’s your mother doing?”

“I’m still waiting to see her . . .” She shrugged and looked down at her hands. “I’m hoping there’s a chance before they wheel her in for surgery.”

It was like looking at a marble statue, lovely and unreachable. He couldn’t read her. He thought he knew most of her moods, all of her expressions, but she was suddenly terra incognita.

“C’mon,” he said, turning her toward the row of chairs. “Sit down. I’ll go find you something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Sure you are. You’re eating for two, remember?”

“That’s not public knowledge yet, Yanovsky.”

“I know.” He bent down and kissed the top of her head. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

“I know,” she said, and she leaned against him.

She didn’t lean against him for long, not his Cat, but he liked to think it was a start.

 

“YOU’RE A GOOD friend,” Joely said as she started a pot of tea brewing. “It’s almost midnight. You should be home with your family.”

Sara broke off a piece of scone and popped it into her mouth. “So should you, darling. Your mother needs you.”

“Trust me, Sara. My mother doesn’t need me. I’m not even sure she remembers my name.”

“I’m sure there’s a story behind that, but forgive me, darling, if we postpone it for another day.” She leaned forward, her dark eyes intent upon Joely. “Have you reached William yet?”

Joely shook her head. “I phoned his cell three times, but he wasn’t answering. I asked him to call.”

“E-mail?”

“Of course.”

“And nothing?”

“Not yet.” He was in transit, so she still didn’t know the name of the hotel in Kyoto where he would be staying.

The kettle began to whistle, and Joely leaped up to silence it before the din woke Annabelle.

“So what are you going to do?” Sara asked as Joely poured boiling water into the teapot.

“I don’t know,” Joely said. “I can’t reach William. I certainly can’t leave Annabelle home alone. There’s nothing I can do but stay put.”

“Take Annabelle with you.”

“To America?”

“I hardly think you have a choice in this, darling. You have a family emergency. William will understand.”

“No,” she said firmly. “Cat will have to handle things without me.”

Sara pushed back her chair and stood up. “Then I think I’ll head back home. You’ve made up your mind, and I have to finish packing for the trip down to London.”

“If you knew my sister, you’d understand,” Joely said as she walked Sara to the door. “She’s the most capable woman on earth. She really doesn’t need me there.”

“You know best, darling,” Sara said. “But this isn’t really about your sister, is it?”

“No,” she said, feeling control slipping away from her. “It’s not about Cat at all. It’s about me.” She forced herself to meet her friend’s eyes. “It was a car accident . . . a few days before I was set to start school at MIT. I needed Mimi to sign the financial documents that dealt with my scholarships—she’d been putting it off and putting it off, and I was starting to freak out that the whole thing was slipping away from me—so I finally dragged her away from whatever it was she’d been doing, and she drove us over to the bank and got things done. Mimi seemed spacey to me, kind of out of it, although with Mimi it was hard to separate what was normal from what wasn’t. I remember telling her she shouldn’t be driving, that I’d drive us both home, but she fought me. She hated anyone telling her what to do, absolutely hated it. Finally I managed to get the keys from her. She was pissed as hell at me. She went so crazy that I remember being afraid she was going to reach over and try to grab the keys out of the ignition. I even thought maybe we should walk home or maybe I should ask her to sit in the backseat. Something. Anyway, I was trying to keep one eye on Mimi and one eye on the road, and all I could think about was how I only had to get through seventy-two more hours in that town. Seventy-two hours! It was nothing. The blink of an eye. All I had to do was get through seventy-two hours, and I’d leave, and I was never going to come back. We were about to make a left at the intersection near the post office when I saw Ty Porter’s red Camaro shoot across and—” She stopped and shook her head. “The next thing I knew I was in the emergency room having my head X-rayed, and they were saying Ty was dead.”

Sara touched her hand. “I am so sorry, love. What a terrible thing to happen.”

Ty was his parents’ favorite son, the one who was expected to take over the farm and carry on their name. Their pain, the entire town’s pain, exploded all over Joely.

“Every time I closed my eyes, the whole thing played out all over again inside my head, but I couldn’t change the way it ended,” she said as Sara listened quietly. “The cops brought me in for questioning after I was let out of the hospital, and I couldn’t stop crying. I kept thinking if only I’d taken the back way home . . . if only I’d made Mimi sit in the backseat . . . if only I hadn’t frozen right there in the intersection when I heard his Camaro coming—”

Nothing sounded quite like a ’69 Camaro. The whole town knew the sound of Ty Porter’s car. She should have moved forward or made the turn. Anything. But she didn’t. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. All she could do was wait for fate to catch up with her.

Ty had been traveling east on Main Street with his brother Zach in the passenger seat when he ran the stop sign and broadsided Mimi’s battered old van. By some miracle of the gods, neither she nor Mimi had been badly injured. However, Ty slammed full force into the steering column of his Camaro and died instantly.

“And you want to know the worst part, Sara? While this whole hideous thing was happening all around me, I could still hear this ugly little voice in the back of my head bargaining with God, promising I’d go to church every day for the rest of my life if He would just let me leave for MIT the way I planned.”

“You were young,” Sara said. If she thought less of Joely for the admission, she was too dear a friend to let it show. “We’re horribly selfish when we’re young. When you’re that young, you’re incapable of understanding mortality.”

But it was more than that. She had seen a vision of her future buried in the grave along with Idle Point’s favorite son, and that vision overshadowed everything else. The relief she had felt when the autopsy report came back with the news that Ty’s blood alcohol level had been more than twice the legal limit still shamed her today, ten years after the fact.

 

William Bishop’s mobile died somewhere between Tokyo and Kyoto when it fell out of his jacket pocket and bounced off the stainless steel sink in the lav of the Shinkansen and cracked in two.

He wasn’t a superstitious man by nature. He wasn’t one to knock wood or toss salt over his left shoulder. He would gladly walk under a ladder if that was the shortest route between points A and B, but the sight of the cracked mobile left him unsettled, as if the only thing tying him to home and hearth had been severed, and he was out there alone.

“Bad luck,” his coworker, a middle-aged man named George, said as he reclaimed his seat. “But this is Japan. You’ll pick up a new one when we get to Kyoto.”

He nodded. George’s advice sounded reasonable enough, but the sense of being cut adrift refused to go away. The world was a dangerous place. He had been in Phuket just weeks before the tsunami. He had lost friends in the World Trade Center towers. In the blink of an eye a man could lose everything he loved most, and he wouldn’t even know it was happening. He could be walking down a city street thinking about his next meeting or his next meal, not knowing that at that very moment love was slipping away.

Those nightly phone calls might not mean as much to Joely or Annabelle, but they were his lifeline. Knowing they were safe and well made the time spent apart more endurable.

Had he ever told Joely as much? He wasn’t sure. He tended to censor things like that with her. She wasn’t a sentimental sort, not at all the type of woman who grew tearyeyed over an armful of red roses or treacly greeting cards. Early on he had believed it was her scientific training that made her such a creature of the mind, and she had encouraged that belief. She was a bioengineer whose work centered around finding a way to help paraplegics regain use of their limbs through bypassing the damaged nerves and creating new synthetic pathways for the impulses to travel.

They had met when she attended a seminar on income management for foreign professionals in Glasgow, and he was instantly captivated. She sat in the back of the room, taking notes on a laptop. She was focused, clearly evaluating every word he was saying for merit, and he found himself wanting to impress her. She asked a few questions, and despite her disclaimer that finances left her dazed and confused, her questions were of a higher level than he had been prepared to address.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know the answers—he was as well-versed in his field as she was in hers—but there was something deeply exciting about the mind that had formed them. She was quietly attractive—brown hair, light eyes, pale skin—and dressed casually in dark trousers and a soft gray jumper, but to William she glittered like the brightest star.

God, how he missed those early days.

“Did you say something?” George looked at him with curious eyes.

He shook his head. “Not a word.”

“I’m thinking about a massage,” George said as the countryside raced by the window. “Some sake. I need to take the edge off.” He grinned at William. “Are you on?”

“Sorry,” William said. “I’ll order room service and try to get caught up for tomorrow’s presentation.”

True enough. He needed to bring himself up to speed, but that wasn’t the reason. George treated overseas trips as a license to cheat. George’s idea of a great night was trolling the bars of whatever city they happened to be in, sampling the women like they were pastries in a breakfast buffet.

All William wanted was a room, a phone that worked. He wanted to hear Joely’s voice drifting toward him across the miles and Annabelle’s laughter when he told her one of the terrible elephant jokes she loved. He wanted to hear stories about the solstice picnic. He wanted to know that Joely was still there. Not just for Annabelle’s sake. Not just from habit or convenience or loneliness, but because she wanted to be there.

In the beginning she had resisted his attempts to bring her together with Annabelle. He had wanted to drive her up to Loch Craig to see his house, meet his daughter, but she always had an excuse. She claimed she was a city girl and that country living was anathema to her. “If you ever bring Annabelle down to Glasgow, I’d love to have lunch,” she had said once, but beyond that it was clear she simply wasn’t interested.

Normally that would have been enough to send William packing. He had had a handful of brief flirtations since Natasha’s sudden death but nothing that amounted to anything at all. No woman had made him want to take that first step into the future until he met Joely and was overwhelmed by the desire to open up his heart, his family, his life to her.