Someone Like You (8 page)

It took him two months, but she finally agreed to drive up to Loch Craig with him, ostensibly to see the house and, coincidentally, his daughter. She didn’t speak much on the drive into the Highlands. The silence was so deep and all-encompassing that he was afraid she could hear the beating of his heart above the low roar of the engine.

He had always considered Americans to be a talkative race, cheerful and big and full of funny anecdotes and endless chat. She was none of those things. She was a quiet, introspective woman with a doctorate in biomedical engineering who wore sadness the way another woman wore Chanel. He had been quite desperate to break through that wall of reserve, but his own reserve made it difficult to know where to start.

The only thing he knew with certainty was that she belonged at Loch Craig, and he found himself praying to the God who seemed to have deserted him that she would fall in love with the place the way he had fallen in love with her. Not that she had any idea how he felt. That was one of the few blessings inherent in his marrow-deep Englishness.

She was quiet for most of the drive up to the house. Rain lashed the windscreen, and he focused his attentions on the winding, hilly roads. He had warned Mrs. Macdonald, the woman who tended the house and Annabelle when he was in Glasgow, that he would be bringing someone up for the weekend. The fireplaces would be crackling merrily against the wet spring chill. The rooms would be ablaze with light. And, pray God, his little girl would charm the unwilling Yankee into their lives.

“Are we there yet?” she asked and when he looked at her for explanation, laughed. “That’s an American joke, William. It’s what little kids say when they’re on a driving vacation with their parents.”

“Two more kilometers,” he said, and he noted a tiny muscle underneath her left eye twitch in response.

“I didn’t know you lived out in the boonies.”

He forced a quick smile. “An Americanism for Highlands?”

“Something like that.”

Minutes later he guided the car up the rock-strewn drive, which was lined with overgrown privet hedges and patches of sodden wild thyme that hadn’t seen a gardener’s touch in years.

The house sat on a small rise overlooking the loch. He tried to see it through her eyes. The shutters hung slightly askew, framing windows that shivered in the punishing wind. The stones were soaked deep gray by the rain, and one glance would tell her that the roof needed repair. A pair of lopsided chimneys rose from either end of the roofline, flanking a satellite dish that always made him smile when he saw it. The front door, a deep barn red faded by time and the elements, was ajar in welcome.

He couldn’t hear his heart beating anymore. He was fairly certain it had stopped entirely.

He pulled the Martin up close to the front door. They dashed through the rain and into the warmth of the house, and he saw the moment it happened. The guarded expression in her eyes that he knew so well shifted and changed right in front of him, and for the briefest instant he saw straight through to her heart.

“Pour yourself some brandy,” he said, directing her toward the library where the double hearth crackled merrily. “I’ll fetch Annabelle.”

His daughter was playing upstairs in her room. Mrs. Macdonald had dressed her in a red jumper and blue overalls. Her tiny feet were laced into miniature pink trainers. He tried to see her through Joely’s eyes the way he had seen the house, but he couldn’t. She was his baby, and he loved her.

“Joely,” he said as he and Annabelle walked hand-in-hand into the library, “I want you to meet Annabelle.”

She turned, and her glance went from him to his daughter, and that was where it stayed. She bent down in front of his little girl. “Hi, Annabelle,” she said softly. “I’m Joely.”

Annabelle reached out a baby hand and touched Joely’s left earring. “Want,” she said, starting to tug. “Want this!”

He started to move his greedy child’s hand away, but Joely laughed and slid the earring out and handed it to Annabelle. His daughter cooed with delight and flung herself at Joely with all the force an almost-three-year-old girl could summon. She scooped his daughter up into her arms, and he felt his heart turn over inside his chest. For the first time since Natasha died, he believed he could have a future.

That was four years ago. The blink of an eye. A lifetime.

“We’ll be pulling into Kyoto in a few minutes,” George in the next seat said. “Push over. I need to have a slash.”

“I need to check for messages,” William said as he got up to let George through. “Can I use your mobile?”

George tossed it to him and headed down the narrow aisle toward the lav. “Don’t expect much, mate. You probably won’t be able to connect until we pull into the station.”

“I’ll give it a try,” he said. Somewhere in the world it was still the night of the summer solstice, and he wanted to share it with his girls.

 

 

Something was wrong. It had to be. Joely had left five messages on William’s voice mail and still hadn’t managed to connect with him.

Maybe the sixth time would be the charm.

“William Bishop here. Leave your name and contact information, and I’ll return your call.”

“William, it’s me again. Please phone me immediately. Annabelle’s fine. I’m fine. But I need to talk with you.”

It wasn’t like him to ignore her messages. For that matter, it wasn’t like him to let a day go by without phoning home. Kyoto wasn’t on another planet. Last she heard they had phones there. The Japanese were the acknowledged masters of electronic communication. There was no excuse for being out of touch unless he wanted to be out of touch.

She didn’t blame him for not wanting to speak to her. He probably didn’t enjoy their late-night telephonic silences any more than she did. But their problems had nothing to do with Annabelle. He loved his daughter with every fiber of his being, and if he hadn’t phoned it wasn’t because he didn’t want to; it was because he couldn’t.

Which didn’t automatically mean he was laid up in some foreign hospital unable to communicate with anyone in order to get a message to her. It might just mean that with all the travel and time zone changes he had lost track of things like calling home.

She had to decide whether or not she was going home to Maine, and she needed to decide soon. She wanted to call Cat back and tell her that she didn’t owe Mimi anything. Neither one of them did. Maybe Mimi hadn’t walked out on them the way their father had, but she might as well have, for all the mothering she had actually provided. Mothers were supposed to shield their children from danger, sacrifice for their children’s good. Mothers were supposed to teach their daughters how to navigate the choppy waters of adolescence. When you were trying to make the leap from girl to woman, it was your mother there on the other side of the great divide, holding out her hand to you, encouraging you to jump.

Mimi had done none of those things. Her mother had been weak when Joely needed strong. An embarrassment when she wanted someone who would make her proud.

It was Cat who had helped Joely find her way. Cat who had made the life she was living now possible.

Cat who had never asked one single thing of her in all these years until now.

Annabelle had a passport, and she was a good little traveler. Joely wasn’t entirely sure what William would think if she took the child out of the country, but she didn’t have a choice. Cat needed her now.

There was some degree of comfort in reaching a decision, and her mind shifted into planning mode. She would book the first flight out of Glasgow tomorrow morning. She would go back to Idle Point for her sister’s sake but not for her mother’s. She would do whatever she had to do, and then she and Annabelle would fly back to Loch Craig, and it would be like none of this had ever happened.

 

 

Unfortunately, George had been dead on. William wasn’t able to maintain a mobile connection long enough to either reach Joely or his voice mail messages.

“Let’s find someplace we can get a drink,” George said as they left the train. He was nothing if not persistent. “I can’t face those meetings without a beer.”

“You go,” William said. “I’m heading for the hotel.” William believed in traveling light. He slung a garment bag over one shoulder and his laptop bag over the other and set off toward the hotel, which was an easy walk from the rail station. He had only a minor command of Japanese, but that rarely proved problematic. The desk clerk’s English was flawless, albeit vaguely American in cadence, and thirty minutes after the Shinkansen pulled into the station, William was listening to the sound of his home phone ringing on the other side of the world.

Six rings and he was transferred to voice mail. His heart slammed hard into his rib cage. Where were Joely and Annabelle? Bloody hell. It had to be after midnight in Scotland. They wouldn’t still be up on the hill. He dialed again. Same result.

Something had happened. Solstice or no solstice, you didn’t keep a seven-year-old child out until midnight.
Think,
he ordered himself. There had to be a reasonable, benign explanation. One that didn’t include blood, broken bones, or worse. Maybe the phone lines were down. That was Scotland, after all. The Highlands. Winds blew hard up there. Weather turned nasty without warning, even on the official start of summer.

Or maybe she had left him.

It would explain a lot. The distance between them. The way she ducked his attempts to sit down and talk about the future. How many times had he approached her with his heart beating right there on his sleeve for the world to see, only to have her retreat behind the wall of glass that kept her just beyond reach?

And how many times had he let her go?

Just like now.

So try her mobile number, fuckwit
. Like him, she kept her mobile on 24/7 and, unlike him, she didn’t drop hers in public lavs. He pressed the numeral one, then Send, and waited.

 

 

“I know this isn’t much notice,” Joely said for at least the third time in fifteen minutes, “but it’s an emergency. I need a car to take me to Glasgow for an eight a.m. flight.”

She propped the phone between right ear and shoulder and fixed herself another cup of tea. It was well after midnight. Annabelle was asleep upstairs, blissfully unaware. Joely was trying desperately to keep her mind focused on the Byzantine network of reservations she was piecing together for the trip back to Maine.

“Hold please,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “I might be able to call in a favor from one of our drivers.”

Of course that was said with the thickest Scottish burr this side of the Spey, and she had to run a simultaneous translation in order to understand what the disembodied voice was saying.

It took another twenty minutes, but by the time she hung up she had her itinerary nailed. In four hours a car would roll up to the front door to take them to the airport in Glasgow, where she and Annabelle would board a plane for Boston. Once they landed at Logan they’d jump on a shuttle and—

She grabbed for the phone before it could ring a second time. “Please don’t tell me the driver changed his mind.”

Her words were met with silence, but not the kind of silence that meant a dead connection. This silence had some heft.

“It’s William, Joely.”

She wasn’t sure which made her happier: the fact that it was William or that it wasn’t the car service canceling out on her.

“Thank God you got my messages,” she said. “Why didn’t you call sooner?”

“I’ve been trying for thirty minutes,” he said. “I left three voice mails. You had me worried.”

“I was on the phone,” she said.

“It must be after midnight there.”

“Almost one.” They sounded like two strangers waiting for a bus. She drew in a breath and pushed forward. “I was making plane reservations.”

She had never realized William’s silences could speak louder than his words.

She drew in another breath. “I have to go home for a little while,” she said, stumbling over her words. “I shouldn’t be gone more than a few days. We’ll probably be back before you get home.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“No,” she said with a quick laugh. “We’re fine.”

“I mean, at home.”

“My sister called. There was a fire at my mother’s house, and since we own the property jointly—”

“How is your mother?” he broke in.

She tried to find a way to dodge the question, but there wasn’t one. “Hospitalized,” she said at last. “She has some broken bones . . .” She let her voice trail off, the international signal for
I don’t want to talk about this anymore
.

“I’m sorry I’m not there with you. If you’d like, I can fly home, and we’ll go together.”

“What for?” she said before she had a chance to censor herself. “What I mean is, I’ll go there, sign a few papers, and come right home. No reason to disrupt your schedule.”

“You shouldn’t have to go through this alone.”

“It’s no big deal, William. My mother specializes in catastrophes. They’re practically daily occurrences.”

“We’ve been together four years,” he reminded her, “and this is the first time you’ve had to fly back to the States because of one.”

“Cat called in an old favor,” she said. “I don’t really have a choice.”

“Why don’t you call in an old favor and ask Sara to look after Annabelle.”

“Sara and Hugh leave for London in the morning.”

Another one of those unnerving silences. When had they become part of their intimate language?

“William, please, if you’re at all uncomfortable about my taking Annabelle to Maine—”

“No,” he said quickly. “It’s not that.”

He had his reasons, and they all made perfect sense. Annabelle was a handful. Annabelle could be disruptive on a plane. Annabelle was an easy substitute for all the things they couldn’t say.