Kindred Spirits (28 page)

Beth nodded in sympathy. After all, she’d just buried someone dear to her heart, herself. Clutching the purse that held Lynne’s precious letter, she bustled to the doorway, Mary Kay and Carol on her heels muttering apologies.

This had been their one opportunity to find Julia. After all that work and perseverance, after driving over hundreds of miles to locate Julia’s adopted parents, in the end they had blown it.

They had failed Lynne. They had let her down.

And now they were out of hope.

‟H
ow could I have been so dumb? Dumb.Dumb.Dumb.”

Mary Kay gripped the steering wheel as she negotiated a winding uphill road in a downpour with zero visibility.

“It’s not your fault, MK,” Beth said. “You saw him. He was besotted with grief.”

But Mary Kay was inconsolable. If only she’d handled Miller with more tact, if she hadn’t made that ignorant comment about Grace’s funeral, if she’d simply held her cursed tongue for once instead of blabbing. It might have worked out OK.

There were so many ifs.

If
Lynne had been alive.
If
she hadn’t killed herself,
if
she had held on a few weeks longer, and
if
she’d asked them to help search for Julia while she was alive, she and Alice could have been reunited.

If
.

Mary Kay was so bloody sick of ifs.

Now, exhausted, they headed to a hotel near Wilkes-Barre to recoup. This was no night for more travel, not with the pelting rain and darkness and the disheartening realization that their mission had come to an abrupt, useless end.

Beth in the backseat put on her headphones and listened to classical music and tried to sleep—anything to drown out her own thoughts.
“I have become comfortably numb,”
Pink Floyd once sang. She longed to be comfortably numb.

Mary Kay squinted, trying to see through the fog. “Put yourself in Miller’s shoes,” she said to Carol, who was searching for hotels on her iPhone. “Less than one week after your wife dies, three strange women show up on your doorstep looking for the only child you have. You’d be irrational too.”

“He wasn’t that irrational,” Carol said as the car swerved. Mary Kay must have been exhausted from hauling ass across the state. “Mary Kay, you’ve done more than your share of driving. Let me take over the wheel.”

“Don’t be silly. You haven’t driven in years.”

It was true. After two years of living car-free in New York, Carol’s skills were probably a little rusty, to say the least.

“Bullshit. I still know how to drive. Look, you’re weaving and distracted. You’re going to get us all killed.”

Carol had a point. They pulled over and switched seats. Carol clicked her seat belt, adjusted the seat and mirrors, flicked on her blinker, and got back on the two-lane road. It wasn’t so bad, driving again. Piece of cake.

“The question is, what do we do now?” Mary Kay reclined her seat and closed her eyes. “What the heck do we do now?”

“Go home, I guess. Put the letter in safekeeping in case we ever make contact with Alice. Otherwise, it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.” The wheels slipped a bit and she gasped.

Mary Kay sat up. “You OK?”

“Some hydroplaning. I have to get used to driving in the rain again. That’s all.”

“It’s no big deal for me to. . .”

“No. I’ll just slow down.” She pumped the brakes and took a turn down the wooded serpentine road in what, according to her GPS, promised to be a shortcut to I-84 that would bypass the hassle of going through Wilkes-Barre. “We did what we could, Mary Kay. It was an impossible mission from the get-go, especially with Lynne already dead.”

“I wish she hadn’t done it,” Mary Kay said.

Carol was temporarily blinded. A car coming around the bend sent a wave of water onto their windshield, coating it with invisibility. “Damn him,” she cursed, her heart beating fast as she fiddled with the wipers, accidentally turning them off. “What did you say?” she asked when they were back on track.

“I was saying I wish Lynne had held on a little longer instead of throwing in the towel. I understand why she did what she did. I wouldn’t have wanted to live with that pain, either.”

“Ditto.”

“But she might have had a few good weeks, even a few good months, left in her. There’s no telling what might have happened in that—” She gripped the door handle and closed her eyes. “Oh, God. Is there any way you can drive straighter?”

Carol chuckled. “Sorry, MK. I’ll do what I can, but this road is switchback, first this way then that, up and down.”

Mary Kay covered her mouth.

“Are you all right?” A flash of oncoming headlights revealed her friend’s complexion, white and waxy. “Oh my God. You’re
not
all right. You’re sick.”

“Shh.” Mary Kay gestured to Beth, dozing in the backseat. “It’s nothing.” She lowered the window for some fresh air. “Nothing more than the combination of car sickness and stress.”

“Stress from this trip?”

“That and”—Mary Kay took another calming breath—“this marriage proposal.”

“That’s not the way most women in love react to a marriage proposal.” Carol kept one eye on the road, and one eye on her seatmate. “I have to say, this thing with you and Drake has us all confused. If you’re getting sick over this decision, then you need to talk about it.”

Mary Kay stuck her head out the window. “There’s nothing to talk about. I just need to get out of this car.”

“I don’t think the car’s the problem. Is there something wrong with Drake we don’t know about? Is he a closet control freak? A closet abuser? A closet. . . anything?”

“No. He’s perfect. He’s the most perfect man, ever. He’s funny and warm and just great to be around. I love him. Next to you guys, he’s my best friend.”

Carol threw up her hands and slapped the wheel. “Then what is it?”

“He wants a family.” Mary Kay lowered the window more and inhaled. “And I can’t give him one.”

“What do you mean you can’t have a family? How do you know?”

Mary Kay told her the saga, starting with her two infections and the laparoscopy that confirmed her fears.

Carol pieced the timeline together. “So Lynne knew?”

“She was the only one and I swore her to secrecy.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Carol couldn’t help but be slightly hurt. She’d always thought of them as a tight circle of four friends, the Society.

“I’m not completely sure why I didn’t tell you.” Mary Kay took another breath. “In retrospect, there might have been a fair amount of denial. And I didn’t know you guys that well back then. The only reason I ended up calling Lynne that night was because it was a blizzard and she had four-wheel drive.”

“You do realize, this is what I do for a living, right?” Carol said. “Reproduction law is my thing. Every day I help infertile couples find the right surrogates.”

“I can’t see myself using a surrogate mother.”

“I doubt you’ll have to. Blocked fallopian tubes are fairly common and easily treatable. In vitro fertilization is the first option, of course. But you know that already. What does Drake have to say about this?”

Mary Kay turned toward her. “That’s just it. He doesn’t know.”

“He doesn’t . . . what?”

“He doesn’t know what I just told you.” Another breath of fresh air. “He’s fully convinced I’ll have no problem getting pregnant. When we first started dating, he came across an old packet of birth-control pills and made a comment. You might say I didn’t exactly leap to correct him.”

“You were taking the Pill to avoid an ectopic pregnancy?” Carol asked.

“Right. I stopped them a few years ago when I turned forty, since they put you at an increased risk of stroke after thirty-five. I’m glad I did, too, because I lost about ten pounds.”

“But why didn’t you tell him the truth?”

“So he wouldn’t leave me for a younger, more fertile woman. I know, it’s bad.” She studied her hands in her lap, ashamed. “I’m like the teenage girl who agrees to sex so she doesn’t lose her boyfriend, except, in our case, the stakes were higher.”

“I’ll say.” Carol tapped the brakes. “That would explain your tummy ache. I bet you have an ulcer.” Though the symptoms were exactly like Lynne’s in the beginning—and they’d passed those off as the flu or stress, too.

“It’s gotten worse since Drake found my birth-control pills this weekend and knows I haven’t been taking them.” Another wave of car sickness. “The kicker is, now that I know what a stand-up guy he is, I’m pretty sure he would have stuck with me if I’d been honest about all this in the beginning. But now I’ve messed up everything. Who wants to marry a colossal liar?”

And with that, she wiggled off the engagement ring. Carol hit a pothole and the ring went flying out of Mary Kay’s hand. “Oh, crap.”

Mary Kay bent down to find it.

Beth, rousing in the backseat, sat up and, over Mary Kay’s bent back, spied the oncoming disaster. “Look out!” she screamed, gesturing to the deer lumbering toward them.

Mary Kay threw her arm across Carol as Carol slammed so hard on the brakes she lurched forward and seized up the safety belt, but it was too late. The front end of the car hit the galloping brown body, its hooves flying in the headlights, big black eyes wide in panic. The thwack was so hard, the car shook.

“Shit!” Beth exhaled as the deer limped off. “Did you kill it?”

Carol, her hand over her wildly beating heart, was too breathless from shock to answer. “Is it dead?” she whispered hoarsely.

Mary Kay rolled down the window and peered into the night. They could hear it thrashing in the underbrush, struggling, getting up, and falling down. Injured.

“No, honey. It’s worse. It’s alive.”

The state trooper crested the hill and, spying the Highlander with its Connecticut tags, lights on and idling by the side of the road, did a U-turn, angling his cruiser behind Beth, who nervously waited in the driver’s seat while Mary Kay and Carol were in the woods seeing if they could find the deer.

He dawdled for what seemed like an unnecessarily long time to run her plates before getting out and approaching the Highlander. He swept his flashlight over the backseat, illuminating the suitcases, Carol’s laptop, and the Igloo full of martini mixings. The beam lingered there, curious.

“Were you the one who called about the deer?” He appeared at her window, stocky and short, a brass D. EVANSTON name tag pinned to his left pocket. Beth found it interesting that he wore wire frames, like her husband, and decided he couldn’t be all bad.

“Yup.”