Someone Like You (28 page)

“A touch of whimsy wouldn’t kill me,” Joely went on. “I can be too literal-minded.”

“You? I don’t know how you can say such a thing.”

Joely flicked some cold iced tea in her sister’s general direction, but Cat ducked before the droplets reached her.

“What do you think she would think about all the attention she’s getting?” Joely asked.

“She’d love it,” Cat said as she emptied the picnic baskets and arranged the containers on the countertop. “She’d be standing out there on the front step giving press conferences every hour on the hour.”

“And impromptu concerts,” Joely said, and they both laughed. “Remember how we used to cringe whenever she burst into spontaneous song at the supermarket?”

“You cringed,” Cat reminded her. “By that time, it had become nothing more than background noise to me.”

Joely glanced down at her watch. “When do all those entertainment shows come on? It might not be a bad idea to know what’s being said about us.”

They dashed into the living room. Cat clicked on the television and did some fast channel surfing.
Entertainment Tonight
,
Access Hollywood
, and
The Insider
were all in commercial.

“Call Karen,” Joely suggested. “Maybe she’d monitor one of them for us.”

“Great idea!”

Cat grabbed for her cell phone while Joely bounced between the three channels.

“Here comes Mary Hart!” she announced. “I’m beginning to feel like she’s our long-lost sister.”

“Bite your tongue!” Cat looked horrified. “We have enough skeletons in our closet as it is.”

“Brad Pitt . . . Charlize Theron . . . ohmigod, that’s you, Cat!”

Cat shrieked and dropped the cell phone as a shot of her, frazzled and tired-looking, blossomed on the screen. “Michael warned me. They got me going into the hospital,” she said. “I’m too old for direct sunlight.”

“Shh!” Joely picked up the remote and raised the volume.

“Get well wishes go out to Mimi Doyle, half of the legendary duo The Doyles, as she recovers from a stroke in Idle Point, Maine. Mimi’s daughters, Catherine—a costume designer for the HBO hit
Pink Slip
—and Joely—a research scientist—issued a statement thanking the public for its outpouring of sympathy to reporters earlier this afternoon, which was delivered by William Bishop, a family friend. Greensleeves Records said in a phone interview that the renewed interest in the groundbreaking singers has them considering a long-awaited ‘Best Of’ CD. For those of you too young to remember them, this brief clip from the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 will show you what you missed . . .”

There was no way to prepare themselves for the sight of their parents, young and filled with dreams, looking back at them from the screen of Cat’s Sony. It had been years since Joely had seen them on screen and the powerful images pierced her heart. Mimi was in a madras granny dress that fell to her bare feet. Her rich brown hair tumbled over her shoulders, gleaming with auburn highlights in the afternoon sun. Her hands were clasped in front of her as she leaned into Mark, her face aglow with the kind of happiness most people never know this side of heaven.

“She’s beautiful,” Joely whispered. “I’d forgotten how beautiful she was.”

But it was Mark who captured them both.

Joely felt like she was seeing him for the first time.

“Look at him,” Cat said so softly Joely might have imagined it. “That’s our father.”

He looked like one of those gods of legend. His tall, lean frame was made for the faded jeans and T-shirt that had been his trademark. The phrase “bad boy” had been invented for him, and he wore it well. He looked down at Mimi and smiled, and for a second the earth stopped spinning on its axis.

The sound was scratchy, and their voices were all but drowned out by the cheering crowd, but the magic—oh, the magic was unmistakable. While The Doyles were singing, you believed you could change the world.

“Look at his hand,” Cat said, moving closer to the screen. “He’s wearing his wedding band. Do you think it might be the same one?”

Joely’s arms were wrapped tightly across her chest. She felt like she was a half step away from breaking apart from the sheer weight of emotion building up inside her heart.

The picture faded, and the show went to commercial.

Joely stood there motionless while Cat scrambled for her cell phone and spoke briefly to Karen. Cat’s words didn’t register on Joely. Nothing did. She was a few hundred miles and a million years away, watching something close to genius at work.

“I never understood what it was all about,” she said after Cat said good-bye to Karen. “I think I get it now.”

“They really were something, weren’t they,” Cat said, running a quick hand across her eyes.

“You could feel the chemistry right through the screen.” She looked at her sister. “Was that real? Was that how you remember them?”

“I wish I knew,” Cat said. “Remember, all of my memories are filtered through a child’s eyes. I know there was a lot of fighting—Mimi’s mood swings were already pretty scary—but when they weren’t fighting, it was downright magical.”

“So where did it go wrong?”

Cat shrugged. “I asked Mimi that a thousand times, but she wasn’t talking.”

“Where do you think he is?” Joely asked.

Cat’s expression softened. “Dead,” she said. “It’s the only explanation I can come up with. He wouldn’t have left us like that. I know he wouldn’t. Sure, he and Mimi probably would have ended up divorced at some point, but he wasn’t the kind of man who would walk out on his family.”

“Or his meal ticket,” Joely said with more than a hint of acid in her tone.

“The meal ticket was long gone,” Cat reminded her. “We had already moved from down on our luck to poor and were skidding our way to dirt poor when he left.”

“So where did he go? If he was the great guy you say he was, then where the hell has he been for the last twenty-seven years? Can you answer that one for me?”

“I think he needed a break, and he decided to go off on one of those trips of his.”

“So he lied to you about the guitar string.”

“Probably,” Cat said. “He used to walk over to the interstate and hitch a ride south with any trucker who slowed down long enough for him to climb in. Sooner or later his luck was bound to run out. He picked the wrong guy and that, as they say, was that.”

“And that’s what you think happened?”

“It’s as good a guess as any other,” she said. “Nobody else has ever come up with anything that makes better sense.”

“People don’t disappear without a trace, Cat. Not in the real world.”

“Then what do you think happened?”

“Maybe he was living a double life,” she said. “Maybe he had another family someplace, and he liked them better than he liked us.”

Cat shook her head. “I don’t buy that. Mimi was the only woman in the world for him.”

“Then why weren’t they happy?” Joely demanded. “If they loved each other so much, if they were so much ‘in love,’ then why did it all fall apart?”

“Knowing why wouldn’t change things,” Cat said. “We’d still be standing here wondering what to do next.”

You’re wrong
, Joely thought.
It does matter
. The only thing that surprised her was just how much it still hurt.

WILLIAM PROVED TO be a godsend.

By nine p.m. both Cat and Joely were coming unglued from the endless stream of journalists pounding on the front door, begging for five minutes of their time.

William’s cool, very British manner proved a very effective antidote to the circuslike atmosphere growing all around them. Cat quickly learned to pay attention to his suggestions and when he recommended that she hire someone to sit with Mimi at the hospital overnight to protect her mother from photographers, she didn’t waste a second and hired one of Laquita’s younger sisters.

“I’d worry about that woman in the next bed,” Joely said. “What’s to stop her from whipping out a digital and selling the files to
People
?”

“Basic human decency,” Cat said, “but that seems to be in short supply lately.”

There was just so much they could do to protect Mimi and to maintain their privacy without a large expenditure of time and money they didn’t have. Zach had stopped by on his way back to Karen’s after a business dinner, and he volunteered to sleep at Mimi’s house to protect it from trespassers, an offer that made both sisters burst into grateful tears.

“You look exhausted,” Joely said after Zach left. “Why don’t you call it a night?”

“I was thinking maybe you and William would like to share my room. Morning sickness will have me up at the crack of dawn, so I might as well sleep on the sofa.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Joely said, clearly uncomfortable with the suggestion. “Go phone your boyfriend.”

Cat yawned behind her hand. “How did you know I was going to call Michael?”

“He’s been texting you all night. The least you can do is pick up the phone.”

“He’s taking the red-eye back to New York tonight. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“You should invite him up for the weekend,” Joely said. “The more the merrier.”

“Did he put you up to that?”

“I haven’t spoken word one to the man.”

“Good,” Cat said with a wink. “I intend to keep it that way a while longer.”

She went into the office to say good night to William. He had walked unwittingly into a crazy situation that was as foreign to him as lobster shacks and double-wides, but somehow he had managed to step right in and take charge when they really needed a helping hand.

“I just wanted to say good night,” she said after he hung up the phone. “I don’t know what we would have done without you today.”

His eyes lit up when he smiled, making him even more handsome than he already was, which was considerable. Joely had never once mentioned the fact that her William was downright gorgeous.

“I did very little, Catherine, but I’m glad I could help.”

He looked so tired, so lonely, that she couldn’t help herself. She stepped forward and gave him a swift, impulsive hug that took both of them by surprise.

“I wish the circumstances had been different,” he said.

“So do I. It would be wonderful to introduce you and Annabelle to the coast of Maine.”

He looked at her curiously, and she realized that he hadn’t been talking about Mimi’s accident at all, but about himself and Joely.

She said good night and beat a hasty retreat to her bedroom.

“The ultimate faux pas,” she said to Michael a few minutes later. “I embarrassed both of us.”

“You’ll live,” Michael said, “and so will he.”

“That’s a little cold, don’t you think?”

“Has he said why he showed up uninvited?”

“Michael! What’s wrong with you? You don’t sound like yourself.”

“Maybe I don’t like being three thousand miles away while you’re being harassed by reporters.”

“I’m fine. Joely and I are both capable of taking care of ourselves. Besides, William’s here with us.”

“I’d still like to know why he showed up.”

“So would I,” she admitted, “but it’s not the type of thing you can walk up and ask your sister’s boyfriend without sounding rude.”

“
Is
he her boyfriend? I thought that was over.”

“I think it is, but I can’t keep calling him ‘Annabelle’s father,’ can I?”

“So where is he?”

“He and Joely are in the living room.”

“Where are you?”

“In bed.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad. Morning sickness limited itself to morning today. I could get used to that.”

A short silence. “Where did you say you were?”

“You know where I am.”

“Feel like some company?”

“Michael—”

“One day you’ll say yes,” he said. “I just hope it’s before you go into labor.”

 

JOELY TRIED TO busy herself sorting through the paperwork Cat had brought home from the hospital. Endless reams of paper about assisted living, facilitated living, nursing homes, extended care facilities—an endless number of options that all meant one thing: Mimi needed professional help on a permanent basis.

She and Cat were going to have to sit down together in the next day or so and figure out the gap between what Mimi’s various insurances would cover and what her care would actually cost. The trick then would be coming up with the money on a monthly basis to bridge that gap.

She hadn’t expected to feel this connection to their mother, this unsettling mix of compassion and pity and love. There. She’d allowed herself to think the word. Despite everything, she loved Mimi. Maybe not the way most daughters loved their mothers. Certainly not close to the way she should. Definitely not the way Cat loved her. But to her surprise the connection between them was there, unbreakable despite her best efforts across the years.

She wasn’t going to walk away from the situation this time and leave it all on Cat’s shoulders. She had some money in a few different investment accounts—William had made sure she was diligent about building her savings—and if that job in Surrey really was a go, her income would take a giant leap forward.

Just in time,
she thought as she slid the papers back into the manila envelope marked Mimi. Her life was about to change in every way she could imagine and the extra money would make it possible for her to contribute her share and more to her mother’s care. One small compensation for all that she would lose when she left Loch Craig.

She uncurled herself from the corner of Cat’s sofa and stretched. Maybe her sister had the right idea. Cutting the night short suddenly sounded very inviting. Of course there was still the problem of sleeping arrangements, but she and William should be able to work that out without too much trouble.