For My Daughters

by Barbara Delinsky

  Annette shot her a look. “Me, too.”

  But Leah wasn’t in a rush. “I think I’ll stay. After she went to the effort of sending us tickets, I’d hate for her to arrive and find all of us gone.”

  “Good girl,” Caroline mocked. “You’ll get points for that.”

  “I happen to like it here.” At least, she had before her sisters had shown up. She wouldn’t be at all disappointed if they flew out the next morning. Hell, she’d drive them to Portland herself.

  “When we were kids,” Caroline persisted, “you were the one of us who most wanted to please her. Some things don’t change.”

  “You still look like a kid,” Annette remarked, then added a dry, “That’s a compliment.”

  At thirty-four, Leah took it as such, though compliments coming from her sisters were rare. “It’s my hair,” which, without the restraint of pins, refused to stay put behind her head. “It hasn’t grown up yet. It’s hopeless.”

  “I always wanted curly hair. I always wanted blond hair. I’d have bleached my hair and had a permanent if Mother had let me, but she couldn’t be bothered. She thought my own hair was gorgeous.”

  “It is,” Leah insisted. “It shines. It swings. You’re not held hostage to humidity.” She twisted her hair back behind her head again, but it curled right back out. “There’s nothing I can do with this. It’s a lost cause.”

  “Did Gwen know?” Caroline asked, bringing the conversation back to the subject at hand.

  Leah assumed she must have. “She makes all of Mother’s travel arrangements. She must have booked our flights.” With dawning awareness, she added, “There are bedrooms furnished and ready for the three of us. That should have tipped me off, but all I was thinking was that Gwen was incredibly efficient.”

  “Mother didn’t say anything about us in her letter to you?”

  “Nothing, Caroline. Trust me. I’m not any happier to see you here than you are to see me. If I’d known you were coming, I might have turned around and driven back to Portland first thing this morning.”

  “You drove here from Portland?” Annette asked in surprise.

  “That’s my rental car out front.”

  “But I thought you’d given up driving.”

  “I gave up a car. I don’t need one in the city. That doesn’t mean I don’t rent from time to time.”

  Annette cleared her throat. “It’s a good thing they gave you one that’s already scratched.”

  Leah was saved from saying anything by Caroline, who was looking around with a bemused expression. “There’s something about this place. I feel like I should be remembering it.”

  Annette stood. “Show us around, Leah. Let’s see what Ginny spent her money on.”

  Leah figured that showing them around was as convenient a way as any of getting to her room. She wanted to get dressed and do something with her hair. Then she wouldn’t feel so gauche.

  The afghan parted when she stood.

  Caroline caught the edge and held it aside. “A silk sarong. Pretty. So this is the latest style?”

  “I suppose,” Leah said, feeling frivolous.

  “You’re as thin as ever,” Annette remarked. “Are you eating?”

  “Yes, I’m eating. My weight is right in the middle of what it should be for my height.”

  “Why are you thinner than me?”

  “Because I haven’t had any children. You’ve had five.”

  “Four pregnancies.”

  “That’s four more than Caroline or me,” Leah said, then added, because it was the truth, “You’re not so bad, Annette.” Tugging the edge of the afghan from Caroline’s hand, she led the way into the house.

  They explored the rooms on the first floor to a quiet chorus of comments. “Pretty.” “Nice turret.” “Interesting molding.” “Great floors.”

  Upstairs, Leah excused herself at her own room and did what she could to restore her sophisticated self. When she felt reasonably put together, she met her sisters back downstairs, outside, on the front steps.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “It’s a beautiful house,” Annette admitted.

  Caroline agreed. “All it needs is a little art on the walls.”

  “Accessories here and there.”

  “The icing,” Leah said, leading the way across the drive to the lawn.

  “You must adore the flowers.”

  “I do.” She thought of the gardener and wondered where he’d gone. She didn’t mention him to her sisters. He was her secret for now.

  “What is it that feels so familiar?” Caroline asked.

  “The roses.”

  “What roses?”

  Leah led them to the bluff. The scent grew stronger as they approached, and once there, the burst of pink spoke for itself.

  “Beach roses.” Annette took one in her hand.

  “We never had roses,” Caroline argued.

  “No,” Leah said, “but smell them. Close your eyes. Say the first thing that comes to mind.”

  “Mother.”

  “Mother.”

  “This is her perfume,” Leah explained. “She’s been special ordering it for as long as I can remember. She still does.”

  “The roses must have been the selling point of the house,” Annette mused.

  “They would have been, if she’d smelled them here.” Leah told them, without revealing her source, what she’d learned from Jesse Cray.

  “She bought Star’s End sight unseen?” Annette asked.

  “Apparently.”

  “Is she starting to lose it? Senility? The first stages of Alzheimer’s?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She’s just decided to retire to a house she’s never seen?”

  “Looks it,” Leah said.

  Caroline folded her arms. “She’s nuts. That’s all there is to it. No sane individual would suddenly give up the life she’s always known to move to a strange house in the middle of nowhere.”

  “This isn’t the middle of nowhere,” Leah said, feeling an unexplainable urge to defend Star’s End.

  “It’s a strange town in a strange state.”

  “We adopted a cat once,” Annette mused aloud. “She was pretty old when we got her, but she loved us. She was always in the room where we were. If the kids annoyed her, she’d just separate herself, walk off a little ways, and plop down again. She never went far from the action, even if she wasn’t actively involved. Like Mother, in a sense, there but not.”

  “What’s the point?” Caroline asked.

  Annette met her eye. “The point is that our cat never strayed far until it came time for her to die, then she went off by herself. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that’s what Mother is doing.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Caroline scoffed. “Mother isn’t a cat. She’s a social creature. She’s been with people all her life. Besides, it’s not like she has a terminal disease.”

  “Life is a terminal disease.”

  “She’s only seventy. And she’s in great health.”

  “Not completely,” Leah put in. When her sisters turned to stare at her, she reminded them of the heart scare the fall before.

  Caroline looked stunned. “What heart scare?”

  “You know. The tests she had.”

  “She never said a word about any tests to me,” Caroline swore and turned to Annette. “Did you know about them?”

  “Never.” As stunned as Caroline, Annette turned to Leah. “What tests?”

  Leah told them.

  “Why didn’t you tell us before?”

  “That wasn’t my job. It was Mother’s, and I thought she had told you. I thought you knew.”

  Annette shook her head. “Though I don’t know why I’m surprised. She always identified with you. It’s natural that you’d be the one she told.”

  “She told me because she wanted someone to sit with her through it all.”

  “Gwen could have sat with her. Gwen does most everythin
g else.”

  “It’s not the same,” Leah insisted. “She wanted family.”

  Caroline had her arms folded again. “Did she say that?”

  “She didn’t have to. It’s common sense.”

  “Or wishful thinking.”

  “Common sense,” Leah repeated, irked now. She hated it when Caroline was imperious. This time, she refused to be put down. “You have your career, and Annette has her family. Of the three of us, I’m the only one with the free time to sit in doctors’ offices with her.”

  But Caroline was shaking her head. “It’s another power play. Ginny’s good at those. She likes giving to one of us and witholding from the others. Like when I announced that I didn’t want a coming out party, she took the two of you off to New York for a weekend of theater and left me at home to stew.”

  Annette nodded. “Like when I complained that she was never around when I came home from school, she made a point of being out of my reach for the next week straight.”

  “Like when I said I didn’t want to go to private school,” Leah put in, because she had gripes too, “she bought you guys new clothes, as though what I wore didn’t matter anymore. Okay, so that was her way of punishing us. But I’m telling you, she wasn’t thinking that last fall. She needed someone with her who was family and could talk with the doctors, and I was the most convenient one. If you think it was fun, think again. If you think she was grateful, think again.”

  Annette sighed. “So nothing’s changed.”

  “Except,” Leah was on a roll, “that we’re up here, the three of us, in a place we don’t want to be. So. Are you guys leaving in the morning or not?”

  * * *

  “She would have liked it if we’d said yes,” Caroline told Ben later that night. “She’d like to have the place all to herself. She’d like to have Ginny all to herself.” She thought about that, then, in a quieter voice, admitted, “We all would, I guess. When you come right down to it, that was the root of the rivalry between us.”

  “Was, or is?”

  “Was. We’re not competing now.”

  Ben hummed a few random notes.

  “Well, not really,” Caroline conceded. “Maybe there’s a little of it left, but that isn’t the main reason I’m staying. I want to be here when Ginny arrives.” Ginny was the major object of Caroline’s anger. “She owes us an explanation. I want to hear it.”

  “You could fly home, and then call your sisters in a day or two to find out what Ginny said.”

  “I want to hear it from her mouth. I mean, what could it be—” she asked as she had so often in the past few hours, “one more day? Maybe two? Besides, I’m already here, and I have to admit, the place is nice. Gwen made a great dinner, no doubt by way of apology for her part in the deception. I’ve been checking in with the office. Things are under control there.”

  “Well, now, that’s a relief.”

  “Don’t be smug. If something comes up, I’m on the first plane out.”

  “If something comes up with me, would you, too?”

  “In a minute.”

  “But you wont’t marry me.”

  “Ben.”

  He sighed, then grumbled. “You’re too far away.”

  “That’s silly. We wouldn’t be together tonight even if I was in Chicago.”

  “An hour away is better than twenty.”

  “You told me to come.”

  “Not really. But maybe. Do you miss me?”

  “A lot.” His voice calmed her so. It was incredible. Before the call, she had been feeling out of her element, unsure and on edge. But he grounded her, just by being on the other end of the line. “I’m going looking for art in the morning,” she told him. “The walls here are bare. I’m counting on the town being the artists’ colony you said it was. Ginny needs something fast.”

  It occurred to her to have Ben send a canvas of his, but Caroline needed something to do. She couldn’t see herself sitting by the pool talking about kids with Annette or haute couture with Leah. Shopping for several good pieces of art might do the trick.

  “We had a lovely dinner,” Jean-Paul insisted when, worried, Annette asked a second time. “The casserole you left was perfect.”

  “Nat sounded down.”

  “You caught him minutes after he lost an argument with Thomas about who would be holding the remote control tonight. Don’t worry. He’ll be fine. He’ll have his turn tomorrow.”

  “Nicole sounded in a rush to get off the phone.”

  “She and Devon are already out the door. Didn’t they tell you that they were going to the movies?”

  “Yes, but I imagine all kinds of things when I hear that tone of voice.”

  “She was in a rush to leave. That’s all.”

  “I should be there,” Annette said, agonizing over it still. “But Ginny hasn’t come. I want to wait and see her, even if only for a little while. Leah’s staying, and since she’s staying, Caroline won’t leave. How can I leave, if they’re both staying?”

  There was a pause, then a gentle, “You can’t.”

  “I heard that smile, Jean-Paul, and it isn’t a competitive thing. It’s this business with her heart. Leah says it’s nothing. She says the doctor was the top heart man in Philadelphia, and that even then they got a second opinion. Can you check on it? Ask around? See if this man really is the best? At least, then, I’ll feel like I’m doing something—although, Ginny was right. The house needs warmth. I thought I’d shop around and see what little local things I can buy to put here and there for effect. There isn’t much else I can do while I wait for her to get here.”

  “How are your sisters?”

  Annette sighed. “Caroline’s just the same. Arrogant as ever. Convinced that she is the embodiment of the modern woman.”

  “What about Leah?”

  “Gorgeous. I almost didn’t recognize her at first. She looked entirely different.”

  “How so?”

  “Relaxed. Unsophisticated. Very unsocietylike. Her hair was wild and loose—just beautiful. She was wrapped in an afghan, out by the pool.”

  “Was she polite?”

  “For the most part. But that’s her forte. Light social chatter. She talked about flowers through most of dinner, which was just as well. I’m not sure what I’d have had to say if she hadn’t kept the conversation going.” When Jean-Paul didn’t say anything, she asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that you’re good with people. You can hold your own in any social group. I don’t understand why you would have trouble making talk with your sisters.”

  “Because they’re my sisters. They’re not like other people. I know that sounds bizarre, but you’d understand, if you had any siblings. Your relationship with a sibling is different.”

  “You’re not friends.”

  “Exactly. You don’t choose them.”

  “But is there something that says you can’t be friends? Even for a short time? For two weeks?”

  Yes, there is, the threatened part of her wanted to cry. The family-oriented part of her simply sighed. “After years of distance, I don’t know. We’re three entirely different people. It’s not just me, Jean-Paul. They feel the same way.”

  “Did they say so?”

  “No. But I can tell. They’re as uncomfortable with me as I am with them. I’ll wait until Mother gets here. Then, unless she offers some compelling reason why I should stay, I’m gone.”

  Leah wanted Star’s End to herself. She kept remembering how delightful she had been feeling until her sisters showed up. They brought tension with them—Caroline taking everything seriously and Annette always with an opinion. Each of them thought her way was the only way. And Leah? She thought her way was just fine.

  Try again.

  Not bad.

  Once more.

  Empty. Next to her sisters, she had little direction in life, which might well explain why she felt so at home at Star’s End. It was a world in itself, a world of sights and sm
ells and sounds, so rich in sensation as to guarantee contentment. The concept of a direction in life was irrelevant here. This was the end of the world, a direction in and of itself.

  That was why she’d come back downstairs. Caroline and Annette were in their rooms and assumed she was in hers, so she had taken off on a secret mission to recapture contentment.

  She huddled in an Adirondack chair in a corner of the porch. A long white nightgown covered her, neck to ankle, and was in turn covered by the afghan, but she was sheltered enough from the breeze to leave it loose. She inhaled, closed her eyes, and listened to the surf.

  Her muscles relaxed and went soft. She didn’t think of Caroline, Annette, or Virginia. She didn’t think of having to tell the agency about the scratch in the side of the rental car. She didn’t think of Washington.

  She fancied that the beach roses emitted a sedative, and an addictive one at that. Without the sun’s light, the scent was more subtle, but richer, somehow, even seductive.

  When she heard a splash that broke the rhythm of the tide, she opened her eyes. It was a minute before she realized that someone was in the pool and another before she ruled out someone having come from the house. She would have heard the French door opening. She would have heard footsteps on the deck. Besides, she couldn’t imagine either of her sisters—much less Gwen—taking a midnight swim.

  It was the gardener, Jesse Cray, who lived in a cottage by the woods. His wet arms glistened as they cut through the water. His dark head turned for air on alternate strokes. Between the rush of the waves against the rocks beneath the bluff, she could hear the rhythmic beat of his breath and his stroke.

  She felt a flutter inside. He was a remarkably attractive man—rough compared to those she knew at home, but with magic hands and soulful brown eyes.

  She wondered if he swam every night. She wondered how long he did it. She wondered what he was wearing.

  He continued for fifteen minutes or so, back and forth in steady laps, then swam to the far side of the pool and propped his elbows on the deck. He stayed there for several more minutes, his dark head bent, before hauling himself out.

  She wasn’t prepared for that swift movement. It was smooth and strong. He reached for a towel and ran it over his head. She looked lower. He was wearing something that was dark and clung wetly to the contours of his hips.