Kindred Spirits (17 page)

“Sure, I’m OK.” Carol sat up and blinked at the clock, trying to get her bearings. This wasn’t her apartment in New York or her house in Connecticut. Oh, right. Pennsylvania. With these heavy, rubberized hotel curtains designed for airplane pilots and nighttime travelers, you could never tell what time of day it was. Ten thirty? No, no, no. Checkout was at eleven. There had to be some mistake.

“Mother?” Amanda said again.

“Is it ten thirty?” Carol checked with Mary Kay who, blinded by her lavender silk eye mask, was fast asleep in the other queen bed, dead to the world.

“Ten thirty-five to be exact. I woke you, didn’t I?”

“Not really. I was kind of dozing.”

Amanda was doubtful. “Where are you, anyway?”

Good question. Reorienting herself, Carol said, “Pennsylvania. Someplace off I-80.”

“Oh, yeah. Dad told me last night you were on a road trip with Tiffany’s mom and Mrs. Levinson.”

Funny how Amanda refused to call Beth and Mary Kay by their first names, a holdover from when she was in grade school. Beth would probably always be Mrs. Levinson to Amanda, just as Lynne, her cherished elementary school art teacher, would forever be Mrs. Flannery. As the mother of Amanda’s favorite babysitter, Tiffany, only Mary Kay LeBlanc was spared. She was “Tiffany’s mom,” and nothing else.

Hold on. Back up. “You spoke with Dad?”

“When I got your message that you had something really important to discuss, I tried to reach you last night but you didn’t answer. So I called Dad to ask him what was up.”

Carol was positive her phone never rang the night before, and she’d positioned it on the kitchen counter so she could hear it while they were singing and dancing. Besides, if Amanda hadn’t been able to reach her, why didn’t she leave a message?

“Did Dad tell you what was up?”

“Uh-huh. Since I couldn’t reach you—since I can
never
reach you—he explained about the house. He said I needed to call you so . . . here I am, calling you.”

Pressure built under the bridge of Carol’s nose, a sure sign of a burgeoning headache. This standoff with Amanda was eating away at her soul. If they didn’t reach some sort of rapprochement soon, they were very much in jeopardy of ending up like Lynne and her mother, a cold, unyielding prospect that would leave them both miserable.

“I’m so glad you did. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about us, lately. I
miss
us.”

“Yup.” Amanda cut her off. “So Dad said you have to sell the house.”

There was a stirring in the other bed. Mary Kay was awake, eye mask on her forehead, smiling encouragingly.

“Is that OK?” Carol pressed.

“I don’t know if it’s
OK
. In an ideal existence, I’d have voted to keep you both on the same island, but it’s not really my choice, is it?”

“In a way, it is. After all, this is your house too, your childhood home.”

“I’m going to be twenty-one next spring, Mom. I’m an adult, not a child anymore.”

Her heart sank, making Carol feel like a hypocrite. All those years of slogging through young motherhood, counting the days until her time was her own and wishing she could sleep through the night undisturbed, and now she was feeling sentimental. As her own mother used to say about parenthood, the hours inch by like years and the years fly by like hours.

“But what about Christmas?” she said, clutching on to the last vestige of childhood. “You love coming home to Connecticut for Christmas.”

“Suddenly you care about Christmas?”

“Of course! Don’t you remember the fun we used to have decorating the house and trying to string lights on the pine tree in the front yard? I swear, every year your father nearly broke his neck climbing that. . .”

“My father,” Amanda said, “is no longer your husband. And our home is no longer our home. Don’t you get it, Mom? Our family doesn’t exist anymore. The Goodworthys are neither good nor worthy.”

“Don’t say that. A family is still a family even if the parents separate.”

“Some families are, but not ours. And don’t call me naïve. When Molly’s parents split, we were all for it because those two were fighting constantly. Even Molly was relieved. But you guys . . . you
never
fought.”

Carol resisted the urge to jump at the chance to tell Amanda that it was precisely because they
hadn’t
fought that their marriage fell apart. Jeff bottled up his feelings. It was like being married to a brick wall. “Sometimes not fighting is a sign of a communication breakdown.”

“Someone’s been watching too much Dr. Phil,” Amanda scoffed. “Anyway, Christmas is a nonissue. Like I told Dad, I’m going to France this year for Christmas. I met someone last semester in Paris and he asked me to come visit.”

Carol pictured a dark-haired French scam artist in an ill-fitting suit pinching a Gauloise and trailing behind Amanda in the Louvre, a swindler who would shake her down for every last dime and leave her with a broken heart and a case of the clap. Dear. God. No.

“We’ve been Facebooking and just the other day he asked me what I was doing over the holidays, if I’d like to spend them with him.”

“In Paris!” Carol didn’t mean to scream, but she couldn’t help it. “How well do you know this guy?”

“Well enough. He’s the brother of a friend of my roommate from junior year abroad.”

The headache grew. “Which is to say, not at all.”

Amanda was silent. “Actually, quite well. Even Dad knows him through Facebook.”

Naturally, Jeff would be more involved in their daughter’s life than she. Then again, it was kind of difficult to be up to speed with your daughter’s comings and goings when she didn’t give you the time of day. “How old is he?”

“Old enough.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“We’re not in court, so you can quit with the cross-examination. We’re just getting together for Christmas. It’s no big deal. Why do you make everything into such a big deal?”

Carol motioned to Mary Kay and mouthed,
Help me!
Mary Kay jumped up and went to the kitchen, returning, by some miracle of miracles, with Carol’s favorite: a Starbucks latte, soy, three shots. “We gotta go,” she whispered, pointing to the clock.

Just as well, because Carol did not have enough caffeine in her system to handle the news that her daughter would be spending Christmas with some unemployed French drifter. “Look, Amanda, they’re kicking us out of the hotel, so let’s discuss this later.”

“There’s nothing to discuss. I’ve got enough of my own money saved to buy myself a plane ticket. It’s not your decision.”

Carol inhaled a fortifying sip. “I meant the house.”

“No need to talk about that, either. If Dad says you’ve got to sell it, then you’ve got to sell it. You never asked me if it was OK if you left my father. So why do you care what I think about selling the house?” And with that dramatic sign-off, she hung up.

Carol held the phone in her hand, shaking.

“You poor thing,” Mary Kay said, sitting on the edge of the bed, her own cup of coffee between her knees. “That sounded rough.”

“You have no idea.” Carol mechanically took another sip. It had no taste. “And the kicker is, that was the longest conversation we’ve had in months, maybe years.”

Mary Kay put down her cup and, patting Carol as she passed, went to her suitcase to find clothes. “You know the only reason she’s acting out is because she loves you so much.”

“You must have me mistaken for Jeff.”

Mary Kay collected a bra and blouse. “She loves Jeff, sure, but it’s you she identifies with. You’re her hero, Carol. Remember that paper she wrote in middle school about how she wanted to be a lawyer someday? She parroted your most famous cases word for word.”

“Well, she doesn’t want to be a lawyer now. She wants to be an artist, like Lynne. It was Lynne Amanda turned to when I left Jeff. It was Lynne who, even in her sickness, stepped up to the plate and did what I couldn’t—be her mother.”

Beth appeared at the door in black pants and gray sweater, clutching her own white paper cup of coffee. “How’s that soy latte working for you?”

“It’s perfect. Thanks.” Carol did her best to look grateful.

“She just got off the phone with Amanda.” Mary Kay gave Beth a knowing look. “And now we’re talking about Amanda’s relationship with Lynne.”

Beth sat on the bed with a bounce as Mary Kay slipped off to the bathroom to take a shower and get dressed. “That still bugs you, huh?”

“It doesn’t
bug
me,” Carol answered, finding it hard not to feel slightly defensive at the insinuation that she was in any way jealous of Lynne. “But it does remind me of what a failure I’ve been.”

“Lynne didn’t see it that way.”

Carol tried the latte again. “She probably did.”

“No, she didn’t. The way she saw it, you two are so similar that you couldn’t be in the same room without setting off sparks. Lynne thought of herself as a buffer, kind of like insulation.”

“Insulation.” Such a quirky but appropriate comparison. Leave it to Lynne.

“You know, the kind you wrap around wires so they don’t touch each other and ignite.”

Carol had never thought of it that way. It used to bother her that Lynne always seemed to know things about Amanda’s life. Nothing major. Nothing bad. Usually complimentary. Like when a professor had chosen her as the only student to display her artwork in a show. Carol had resented the bond between her daughter and her friend, but it never occurred to Carol that Lynne might have been working behind the scenes to repair their relationship. And now it was too late to say thank you.

“I wish I’d known.” Carol put her cup on the bedside table. “I just took her interest for granted.”

“She wasn’t doing it for the accolades,” Beth said. “She was trying to keep you two connected because she knew how much you needed each other.”

“Or maybe . . .” Carol had a thought. “Maybe she didn’t want us to end up like her and Eunice.”

Beth considered this. “Could be.” She nodded. “After what Therese said yesterday, you’re probably right. Sounds like Lynne and her mother were close once.”

“You could say the same thing about Amanda and me.”

The bathroom door opened, releasing a puff of white steam. Mary Kay stepped out in her black lace bra and matching underwear, a white towel wrapped around her hair as she brushed her teeth. “You two still talking about Amanda?”

“Partly,” Beth said. “We just figured out that maybe one reason why Lynne was so eager to keep the lines of communication open between Carol and Amanda was because of her messed-up relationship with her own mother.”

Mary Kay spit into the sink and ran the water. “That makes sense.”

“Now that I know that, I feel like even more of a jerk,” Carol said, slipping out of her T-shirt. “I should have thanked her.”

Mary Kay unwrapped the towel from which tumbled a mass of black wet curls. “It’s not too late. Look at it this way, maybe that’s something you and Amanda can work on together—finding a way to thank Lynne.”

Carol reached into her suitcase and stopped, the answer suddenly clear. “You’re right. Lynne tried to bring us together in life. What better way to honor her memory than the two of us reuniting after her death?”

It was the sort of sweet, practical advice Lynne would have given if she’d been there. And who was to say that in some way she wasn’t?

That morning, Beth was in rare form.

Up since eight, she’d packed the kitchen, wiped down all the counters, and even managed to squeeze in the free hotel breakfast—artificially yellow eggs, stale toast, and sausages that didn’t taste quite right. For Mary Kay and Carol, she’d pilfered a green banana, a mushy apple, and a couple of light yogurts. But the coffee didn’t pass, so she got in the car and hunted down a Starbucks, thoughtfully tailoring each order to their needs before returning to the hotel and checking out to prevent them from being charged another day.

Now she had her bag in tow, ready to go. “They said the room was already paid. How did that happen?”

Carol pretended to be busy organizing her work stuff.

“Did you pay, Mary Kay?”

Mary Kay grabbed the handle of her suitcase and unlatched the door. “Not me. Must have been Carol.”

Carol shrugged as if she, too, were clueless, though she wasn’t. She’d paid the bill the night before, partly to save Beth the money and also as a way of mollifying the manager who’d called twice to report that guests had filed noise complaints.

“Hmmm. A mysterious bill payer. I must get to the bottom of this.” Beth dragged her suitcase out, limping.

“You OK?” Mary Kay asked. “You look a little sore.”

“I am sore. I made the mistake of sitting down and reading the Sunday paper. Now I can hardly move from that running we did yesterday.”

“You just need to stretch more before and afterward,” Carol said, wistfully conducting a last-minute scan of the room, boring and lifeless now that Mary Kay had packed up her candles and pillows and stuck the flowers in the lobby. They’d had such a terrific night. It was almost a shame to leave. Plus, it was raining and a Sunday, a day to be home in sweats doing laundry and lollygagging on the couch reading the comics.