Tides of the Heart (2 page)

Flicking off the machine, she examined the stitches: amazingly, they were fine. She smoothed the lush fabric and moved to the steam table, pressing the edges.

Finally, she finished. She slid the drapes onto hangers
and sleeved them with plastic. Then she grabbed her coat with a quick prayer that the traffic would have thinned and it wouldn’t start snowing.

As she pulled the blinds to lock up for the night, Jess spotted the stack of mail on her desk—four days’ worth of bills, checks, and God-only-knew-what that she’d not had time to open. She buttoned her coat, slung the draperies over her arm, and gathered up the mail with a sigh. It would never get read if she did not bring it home.

Walking over to the alarm by the back door, she juggled the draperies to peek at the envelopes. A long blue envelope caught Jess’s eye. Her name and address had been carefully hand-printed; in the lower left corner neat block letters underlined in red spelled out: PERSONAL. No return address appeared on the front or the back. But the postmark was clear: “Vineyard Haven, MA.”

Vineyard Haven? She had no idea where that was. Was it on Martha’s Vineyard, the island off Cape Cod? Jess knew no one there, knew little about it, aside from the fact that the president favored it for summer vacations and that Barbra Streisand, it was rumored, had once wanted to be married there.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the red flashing light of the alarm.

Celia Boynton
, she quickly remembered.
Damn.

She finished setting the alarm and hurried out of the shop.

The note was from neither Clinton nor Streisand, or, at least, neither one was admitting to it.

Driven by curiosity, Jess had opened the envelope at the first red light on Route 1. It had been a mistake.

Now she sat frozen, staring at the sharply written words meant for her
personal
attention, meant, surely, to make her palms sweat, her pulse race, and her thoughts whir out of control.

Jessica Bates Randall
, it read at the top of a sheet of blue paper that matched the envelope postmarked from the place called Vineyard Haven. The words that followed were few, but their impact was powerful.

No name, no signature, nothing else. And no reference to the fact that Jess already knew that her baby was dead.

Behind her a horn blasted. Jess pulled her eyes from the letter: the traffic light was green. She shoved the paper in her purse. Then she stepped on the gas, and her car moved forward, steered by this woman who could no longer breathe or see past the pain in her heart and the mist in her eyes.

She had no idea how she managed to hang the draperies with Celia Boynton hovering behind her and the blue-paper letter hovering in her thoughts. As she deftly maneuvered pleats and traverse cords, she wondered what kind of sick prankster would do such a thing. There was a knot in her stomach the size of the Boyntons’ dining room table—not unlike the knot that had been there almost five years ago, when she’d been brave enough to try to meet the baby she’d given up, when she’d driven to the neighboring town of Stamford and walked on trembling legs up to a Georgian brick mansion, a mansion marked
Hawthorne.

She’d rung the bell at the white wood door. And she’d waited, determined to find her daughter.

It had been twenty-five years since the adoption … twenty-five years since these people named Hawthorne had taken the infant she had never seen, never held, but always, always loved.

It was part of her plan for a reunion. With the help of Miss Taylor, their old housemother, Jess had already located
the children of the others: P.J., Susan, and Ginny—“birth mothers,” the world called them today—the girls who had shared their lives and their pain together back in 1968 at the home called Larchwood Hall. Twenty-five years later, Jess hoped that they would reunite and meet the children they had never known. Until the reunion, none of them would know who would have the courage to attend: not the children, not the mothers. It was a choice that had once seemed so important.

She had saved her own child for last, deciding to find the girl’s parents first, to let them tell their daughter about the reunion. Then, like the others, Jess would not know until the designated day if her own baby would show up. If her own daughter would want to meet her.

The plan had seemed foolproof. She had not expected the result.

“May I help you?” The words were spoken by a gray-haired, pleasant woman named Beverly Hawthorne.

“I’ve come about Amy,” Jess had stammered out. “I am her birth mother.”

Mrs. Hawthorne put her hands to her face. “Oh, dear,” she said, then began to weep. “Oh, my dear.”

And then the woman told Jess that Amy was dead. That she had been killed while riding her bike. That she’d only been eleven and the driver had been drunk.

Jess jammed another pin into the last rose-colored pleat and bit back her tears. It had taken her these past five years to come to terms with her grief, to mourn the daughter she had never known; it had taken every ounce of strength she could find to walk through the anguish, to heal the heartache. And now, some sick prankster was trying to unearth it again.

She could not let it happen. She would not let it happen.

If only she did not want so badly to believe that her baby might still be alive. And was trying to reach out to her.

“Finished,” she announced, climbing down from the stool. It was 7:23, and Celia Boynton was pleased.

After accepting the check without examining the amount and repeating several “You’re welcomes” to Celia’s many “Thank-yous,” Jess at last returned to her car.

There was only one place where she could go next.

“Jess,” the elderly woman said with a warm smile of surprise. Though Jess always remembered to phone them at Christmas and on the anniversary of Amy’s death, she had not seen the Hawthornes since they’d first met. “Come in, dear. Come in. It’s so nice to see you.”

Jess stepped past the woman and into the foyer of the Georgian brick mansion. “Mrs. Hawthorne,” she said, “I wasn’t sure you’d be home.” She took off her gloves and nervously twisted the emerald and diamond ring on her finger—the ring that had once been her mother’s, when her mother had lived and laughed and loved her no matter what. Mrs. Hawthorne, Jess guessed, was nearly as old as her mother would have been. She tried to picture her beautiful mother with white hair and a slight bend to her spine, with eyes from which the color had faded and lips that had grown thin.

“We got home from Florida last week,” Mrs. Hawthorne was saying. “Please take off your coat. Come and sit down. And tell me what brings you here on such a cold night.”

Jess followed the woman into a cozy sitting room, with soft easy chairs beside a glowing fireplace and walls lined with books. She remembered that Mrs. Hawthorne had been a history professor, her husband an attorney; she remembered she had been pleased to think her daughter had been raised by intelligent, educated people—people who would not have lied about Amy being dead. Of course they hadn’t lied, Jess scolded herself. Jess had been to the cemetery, she had seen Amy’s grave.…

She touched a hand to the pulse at her temple.

“Forgive me for not calling first,” Jess said, settling into a chair across from Mrs. Hawthorne’s. She noticed a young
girl’s picture framed in silver that sat on an end table.
Amy
, she thought,
sweet little Amy.
An ache of sorrow gnawed at her heart, and she forced her gaze away from the image of the smiling blond child. Clearing her throat, Jess pulled the blue envelope from her purse. “I received this in the mail.” She handed the letter to Mrs. Hawthorne. “I don’t know what to make of it, other than that it’s very upsetting.”

While the woman was reading, Jess’s eyes drifted back to the picture, to the little girl she’d been told had been hers. She glanced around the room: Amy may have played here; she may have sat in this very chair.

“Oh, my,” Mrs. Hawthorne said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Her gray eyes clouded as her gaze moved from the paper to some faraway place perhaps filled with memories of the little girl in the silver frame, the child she’d raised as her own.

Jess leaned forward. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hawthorne. It seems as if all I ever do is intrude on your grief.”

The woman wiped away a tear and attempted a smile. She shook her head. “It’s all right, dear. Amy has been gone a long time now. But I don’t see what I can do to help you.”

“Well, I’d like to figure out who sent me that letter. And why.”

“Do you think your baby was someone else? Not Amy?”

Yes
, Jess thought. That was the answer.

Wasn’t it?

“When you adopted Amy, you went through Larchwood Hall, is that right?”

“Oh, my, yes. Larchwood was private, you know. We never would have gone through one of those state agencies …”

“Did you deal directly with Miss Taylor?” It was Miss Taylor, the housemother, who had given Jess the Hawthornes’ name.

Mrs. Hawthorne frowned. “I don’t remember. I know we
had to talk with a social worker … someone who came out to the house.”

“Would your husband remember?”

“Oh, my. Jonathan’s worse at these things than I am.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Would you like a cup of tea, dear? I made some delightful lemon cookies today.…”

“No,” Jess said, shaking her head. “No, thank you. I’m afraid I’m too upset for anything.”

“Well, dear, I don’t know what else to tell you. I never had any idea who Amy’s birth mother was until you came to our door. You’re the one who told me. Perhaps there was a mix-up with your records.”

A mix-up?
“I suppose it’s possible.” But somehow Jess doubted it. She was not the kind of person who came out on the good side of mix-ups; she was not the kind of person to whom miracles happened.

“In which case,” Mrs. Hawthorne added with a whisper of envy, “your baby might still be alive.”

“Yes,” Jess replied, “maybe she is.” She took back the letter from Mrs. Hawthorne. “Or maybe it’s someone’s idea of a very sick joke.”

Once home, Jess sat on the sofa of her vaulted-ceilinged, marble-fireplaced, “executive-style” condo overlooking Long Island Sound where she’d moved with the children after the divorce and tried to think of everyone who had known she’d had a baby back then, back when she was not much more than a child herself.

She tried to think of who would do this. And why.

She wrote on a white sheet of paper:
Father.
But Father had wanted nothing to do with Jess, nothing to do with the fact she had been pregnant, unmarried, and only fifteen. He had not wanted even to see her until “the ordeal was over.” And of course, Father was dead now—had been dead several years. And Jess had no other family who could
have found out about her shame, could have learned she’d become a disgrace to Gerald Bates’s good name.

She thought about Larchwood Hall. She wrote down the name of Miss Taylor, the housemother, and beneath that added
P.J.
,
Susan, Ginny:
the other girls who had been at the home the same time as Jess and who had given up their babies, too.

Then she wrote,
Dr. Larribee
, the doctor, and
Bud Wilson
, who was both the sheriff and the postmaster of the small town of Westwood where Larchwood Hall was. They had all known Jess Bates was there. They had all known Jess Bates was pregnant.

Staring at the paper, Jess let out a long sigh. It was ridiculous to think that any of them would have sent her the letter. They would have no reason to pretend to be the baby she’d given away. They would have nothing to lose.

Nothing to lose?
She chewed on the end of her pen while another thought crept uneasily into her mind. There was someone else who knew. Someone who had lost a great deal already on account of her baby: his home and his family and his access to Jess’s abundant trust fund. That someone was Charles, her ex-husband. Charles had known, and though he had been only too eager to leave when she’d opened the door, and he had quickly remarried a not surprisingly much younger woman, Jess often wondered how he managed to maintain his facade of grand wealth: she knew he was not the most brilliant investment banker ever born despite what he thought. Or let others think.

Charles
, she wrote on the paper. Without thinking, she added
Chuck, Maura
, and
Travis.
She’d had to tell the children; she’d wanted them to know the truth. But surely her children would have had nothing to do with this.

She studied the list that had grown on the paper. But her eyes kept going back to one name, and only one name:
Charles.
She had no idea why he would do this, but it suddenly seemed obvious that it had to be him.

She balled her hands into fists. A sputter of curses flicked
through her mind. Then she picked up the phone beside the sofa and dialed the number at his townhouse in Manhattan.

After two rings, the machine kicked in. “We’re unavailable at present,” his pompous voice said. “We won’t be returning to the city until the tenth of March.”

Beep.

Jess hung up. He wouldn’t be home until March tenth? Where could he have gone? Then a sick feeling crawled through her stomach as she wondered if he and his new wife might be winter vacationing on an island—Martha’s Vineyard, for instance.

Quickly, she picked up the receiver again and called Chuck’s cell phone. If anyone would know the whereabouts of Charles, it would be his favorite son.

“Hello, honey,” she said, after he’d answered.

“Mom? Hey, how’s it going?”

“Fine. Are you keeping busy?”

Her son laughed. “Life was easier before I became an adult.”

“I know the feeling.”

“You want anything special, Mom?”

She winced at the reminder that she did not speak to him often, and that she never, ever called just to say hi. He had, after all, made it quite clear years ago that he did not want his mother keeping tabs on him. He was so much like Charles; he was so much like her own father had been. It all made her quite sad. “Actually,” she said now, “I was trying to reach your father. I need to speak with him about some tax information.” It was not true, of course, but Chuck would not know that.