Someone Like You (9 page)

She gave him her itinerary, complete with addresses and phone numbers. He gave her the name of his hotel and his room number. He hoped to be home by the end of the following week. She intended to be back long before.

Finally there was nothing—and everything—left to say.

“The car will be here in a few hours, William, and I still have to pack and dig up our passports.”

“I’ll let you get on with it then,” he said. “Kiss Annabelle for me.”

“Hurry home.”

“You, too.”

And just like that, they retreated to their separate corners of the world.

 

“WE WERE JUST about to wheel her in,” the nurse said as Cat stepped from the elevator on the second floor. “Mary and I delayed as long as we could.”

“Am I too late?” For some crazy reason they had been looking for her in the cafeteria instead of surgical waiting where she had been told to sit.

“Not if we run.”

The nurse wasn’t kidding. If Cat had been able to run this fast in high school, she would have made the track team.

“She’s out cold,” the nurse said as she elbowed her way into an anteroom outside the OR. “Once those pre-op meds take hold, they don’t know which end is up.”

Cat nodded and moved closer to the slight figure on the gurney. It looked like Mimi and it didn’t, more like one of those wax figures at Madame Tussauds. A horrible sense of foreboding washed over her.

She bent down close to Mimi’s ear, trying very hard not to notice the toll life had exacted from her once-glowing beauty. Mimi looked far older than her sixty-two years, easily a decade or more. Loneliness. Drink. Demons only she could see and hear.

“I’m here, Mom,” she whispered. “You’re not alone.”

The nurse tapped her on the shoulder. “Green is chomping at the bit. I need to get Mrs. Doyle in before Green takes my appendix out with a soup spoon.”

“How dangerous is the surgery?”

The nurse made a face as she adjusted the IV drip that fed into Mimi’s right arm. “Not very. She’ll be fine, honey.”

Mimi had never been fine. Their world had always been governed by her mood swings, her fears, her emptiness. She existed in a place only she could find, suspended between the past and some version of the future only she could see.

Cat wanted to feel the things a daughter was supposed to feel for the mother who gave her life, but she didn’t. Once, in her early twenties, she spent some time in therapy trying to unlock her heart, but even the therapist had to admit that love wasn’t always a given. She cared for Mimi because she was her mother. She believed in the bonds of family. But if you asked her if she loved her mother, if she had the feelings a daughter was supposed to have—well, that was another story.

She waited until her mother disappeared behind the swinging doors, then made her way back to surgical waiting, where she found Michael engrossed in conversation with Karen.

She walked up to where they were standing and gave Karen a quick hug.
Get used to it,
she warned herself. Her worlds were colliding, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

“I managed to see Mimi just before they wheeled her in,” she told them. “They say the repairs are nothing serious, but—” She shivered. The sight of her mother, so tiny and frail, on the gurney had unnerved her deeply. She wasn’t one who necessarily believed in omens and portents, but there was little doubt she had taken a look into the future, and what she had seen was terrifying.

She glanced from Karen to Michael. “I take it you introduced yourselves.”

“We’re very resourceful,” Karen said with a wink for Michael. She was ten years younger than Cat and at least a lifetime or two more evolved. One of those old souls who had stepped into the world fully formed and in charge.

“Yeah,” he said, draping an arm across Cat’s shoulder and giving her a comforting squeeze. “We’re old friends now.”

She had to remind herself that was a good thing as she studied Michael and Karen for signs of collusion.

Karen, of course, didn’t miss a trick. Her dark eyes took in Michael’s warmth, the comforting squeeze, her flushed cheeks, but she didn’t say a word. Not now anyway. She would save it for when they were alone and she could grill Cat like a porterhouse.

She glanced from Cat to Michael and then checked her watch. “I’ll be back,” she said, then took off at warp speed for the back staircase.

“I like her,” Michael said as the door swung shut after her.

“I like her, too,” Cat said. “How much did she tell you?”

“She didn’t tell me anything. She was too busy asking questions.”

“You didn’t tell her anything, did you?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Cat, I’m forty-three years old. I think you can trust me to let you decide who to tell and when to tell them.”

“I’m being a jerk, aren’t I?”

“Yeah,” he said, giving her another swift hug, “but you’ll grow out of it.”

“Quit being so nice to me,” she said, ducking out of his embrace. “I might get used to it.”

“Cat—”

“Shh.” She pressed her forefinger to his lips. “Not now, okay?”

His expression shifted, and she wasn’t quite sure what she saw reflected in his eyes. He grabbed a paper bag from the windowsill and handed her a cold bottle of water and a container of strawberry yogurt.

“What’s this for?”

“Hydration and calcium. I’m not going to have you passing out again.”

“You’re worse than a mother.” She gave a brittle laugh. “Not my mother, of course. Nutrition was never high up on Mimi’s to-do list.”

The same man who had stared down a mugger near Columbus Circle flinched at her bad joke, and she was instantly contrite.

“Sorry,” she said. “I should’ve prepared you for reality, but even I didn’t see this coming.”

He took a chug from his water bottle. “I’m not following.”

She cut him a look. “In case you haven’t guessed by now, my family isn’t exactly Hallmark material.”

“And mine is? I don’t think they do Hallmark in the
shtetl
.”

“I’m not joking.” She let out a loud, exasperated breath. “Okay. You want the truth? My family is royally screwed up. We wouldn’t know normal if it bit us on the ass. I’d planned to break it to you at our child’s high school graduation, but apparently the universe has other ideas.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

“No.” She must have left her internal censor in Manhattan. The truth was flying out of her like bats from a cave. “I absolutely don’t want to tell you anything at all about my screwed-up, crazy childhood, but if you stay here much longer, I’m going to have to, and I really don’t want that to happen in front of an audience.”

“So you’re saying you want me to get out of Dodge.”

She linked her fingers with his. “I’m saying I appreciate the fact that you’re here with me, but maybe we can take a rain check on the introductions.”

“Afraid I might want to sleep over?”

“I know you’re tired,” she said, “and you probably need a nap.”

“But you’d rather I picked a Motel 6 somewhere between here and Florida.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

She hated the hurt look in his eyes. “I know you have to fly out to California tomorrow night. I don’t want you to miss your meetings.”

“Cut the crap, Cat,” he said. “We know each other too well for that. You want me out of here, preferably ten minutes ago.”

“Yes,” she said, almost daring him to argue. “I told you I didn’t want you to come up here, and I meant it. This isn’t the way I wanted it to happen.”

“Tough. Life happens. You can’t put it on a time schedule.”

“I’m not trying to shut you out.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No,” she said. “I’m trying to keep you.” And the only way she could do that was to push him away.

He was a smart man and a talented screenwriter. He knew when it was time to make his exit, and less than fifteen minutes later he was on his way to the airport to catch a commuter hop down to New York. For a moment she had thought he was going to push the issue and stay right where he was, but to her intense relief he opted instead for a quick good-bye and her promise to call him on his cell as soon as she knew her mother’s prognosis.

He was angry and he was hurt, and there was nothing she could do to make it right.

He still had some kind of
Ozzie and Harriet
family fantasy going on about her relationship with Mimi, but that was okay. Up until today she had done little to dissuade him of that fact. The truth was complicated, and it was sad and ugly and all things in between. If she had trouble picking her way through the land mines that were scattered through her family history, she could only imagine how Michael would feel.

He had grown up in a classic nuclear family, and despite his veneer of native New Yorker cynicism, a streak of innocence that both charmed and puzzled her still remained. He believed adults took care of children, not the other way around. He believed parents sacrificed for their kids, celebrated their successes, put their kids’ welfare ahead of their own. A wellspring of optimism forty-three years on the planet hadn’t managed to eradicate.

He had screwed up a time or two along the way, but he loved his parents, his sisters, his lot in life, and she knew he would love his child. He wasn’t like her father. He wouldn’t walk out without saying good-bye.

She couldn’t have chosen a better father for her baby, but there was more to the equation than a positive pregnancy test and morning sickness. Sooner or later she would have to let him into her life. Her real life. Not just the one she lived a few days a month in New York City.

 

“A CAB,” MICHAEL said to the woman behind the information desk. “I need a cab to take me to the airport.”

The woman turned to her colleague next to her. “Where’s Jackie?” she asked.

“Jackie went up to Bangor for the day,” the colleague said.

“You’re going to the airport?” the woman said. “I thought you just got here.”

He felt like a wide receiver trying to field a bad pass. “Look,” he said, tamping down his New York agitation, “I have to get to the airport, and I don’t have a car, so I need a cab. Can you help me?”

“Why don’t you drive Cat’s car?” the colleague chimed in.

“That’s a good idea,” the woman said, nodding her lacquered head. “You drove it up here, so you’re familiar with it.”

No wonder they didn’t lock their cars. They were community property. He was about to try one more time when he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around to see Cat’s partner Karen looking up at him.

“Come with me,” she said.

He didn’t see where he had much choice, so he fell into step with her.

“Where are we going?”

“First, we’re getting you away from Scylla and Charybdis in there.”

He laughed out loud, very loud, and Karen grinned.

“Then what?” he asked as he followed her out the main exit into the parking lot.

“I’ll take you to Jackie’s myself.”

What was it the two women had said? “Jackie’s up in Bangor for the day,” he repeated.

“Damn.” For a tiny woman Karen Porter mustered up a mighty scowl. “Okay. Then we’ll drop down to Ogunquit. I know we can find you a cab in Ogunquit.”

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, amazed by her offhanded generosity.

“Sure I do. How else can I get you alone so I can ask nosy questions?”

He grinned at her as a late-model Toyota minivan beeped a welcome a few feet away from them. “Name, rank, and serial number, ma’am,” he said in a fake good ol’ boy accent. “That’s all you’ll get from me.”

“I have three kids,” she warned him as they climbed into the minivan and buckled up. “I know how to get answers.”

“How far away is Ogunquit anyway?” he asked, and she laughed in response.

“Far enough to get a few answers.”

“Fire away,” he said, “but don’t expect the truth.”

At least not the whole truth and definitely not all the time.

“Okay,” she said as she exited the parking lot then made a right turn at Cumberland Farms, “I’ll understand if you don’t want to answer, but I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t ask the question.” She paused for dramatic effect, and he wondered how many nice ways there were to say
Mind your own business.
“So what is Brad Pitt really like?”

 

THE GOOD THING about small towns was that you didn’t have to explain yourself.

Or your family, for that matter.

Everyone knew all they needed to know to make a judgment about you, your past, your present, and your future. No matter how crazy, dysfunctional, or downright weird your family tree might be, it was all right out there for everyone in town to see, cluck over, then file away for future reference.

She hadn’t realized how tightly wound she was until Michael left, and her shoulders dropped back down to their normal position. At least now she didn’t have to make excuses for Mimi’s behavior or try to pretty it up to make the craziness more palatable. It was what it was, and the whole town knew it. The only thing that surprised anyone in Idle Point was that Mimi hadn’t done something like this a long, long time ago.

Cat had been waiting all afternoon for the accident to actually register with her in some meaningful way, but she was still keeping the whole thing at a distance, much the same way she kept Michael. The assessment wasn’t flattering, but it was painfully true. The look on his face when she finally convinced him to go back to New York had made her feel like a rat and now, almost an hour later, she still felt like a rat.

“Sorry it took me so long,” Karen said as she exited the elevator and joined Cat in surgical waiting. “I took your boyfriend to Ogunquit.”