For My Daughters

by Barbara Delinsky

  “You really ought to marry him, Caroline. He loves you. I could see it way back at Dad’s funeral, and if he’s still hanging around, even with you turning him down, he must really love you.”

  “If we’re together, what difference does it make whether we’re married?”

  “It makes a difference. It’s a commitment. A legal commitment.”

  “Yeah, and I know how much of a hassle those can be.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “What is?”

  “Going out on a limb for someone you love. Mother didn’t do it. She didn’t want to give up the fine life, but look at the price she paid. Oh, she didn’t say it in as many words. She said that she came to love Daddy, and that if she hadn’t left Will, she wouldn’t have had us, but the fact is that if she’d stayed with Will, she’d have had a whole other kind of life. Who’s to say it wouldn’t have been richer?”

  Startled, Caroline studied her sister. “But you were against what they did. You believe in fidelity. At least, I thought that was what you were saying before.”

  “I do believe in it. But I also believe in love. I’m not sure I could admit it to Mother, out of loyalty to Daddy and all, but I’m sorry she missed out on something so rare as what she had with Will Cray. I wouldn’t want you to do the same.” She held up a hand. “That’s the end of my lecture. If I’ve offended you, I’m sorry, but that’s the way I see it.” Her expression softened. “We haven’t always agreed on things, you and I, but you are my sister, Caroline. I do wish you happiness.”

  Caroline was appalled when her throat knotted up. But even if she’d been able to speak, she was spared a response because Leah chose that moment to burst into the kitchen. She drew up short when she saw them.

  “Ooops. Sorry. I thought you were all asleep.”

  “Maybe we have the time wrong,” Annette cracked, narrowing a gaze on the clock. “Maybe it’s only ten, or eleven. No. It’s one-forty.” She looked back at Leah. “I know my excuse and Caroline’s excuse. What’s yours?”

  Leah shrugged. She had a brandy-colored afghan wrapped around her long nightgown and would have looked frail, had her cheeks not been so pink. Caroline guessed that she, too, had been wound up by the day’s discoveries. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said unnecessarily, then added a quick, “I thought I’d go for a walk.”

  “At this hour?” Annette asked.

  Caroline smiled at the maternalistic tone. “She’s of age,” she reminded Annette.

  “But it’s dark out there.”

  “I won’t necessarily walk,” Leah said with another shrug, an offhanded one this time. “I may just sit on the bluff. It’s not dangerous. I’ve done it before.”

  Caroline stood back to let her out the door. “Want tea to go?”

  “No, thanks,” she said with a wave and was gone.

  “Is she okay?” Annette asked.

  Caroline wasn’t sure. Through much of Ginny’s confession, Leah had looked tortured. She seemed all right now, a little bright-eyed, perhaps, but all right. Still, it struck Caroline that Ginny had been right in defending what might have looked like favoritism. “She is more fragile, I guess. Maybe even a little lost. Does she call you much at home?”

  “No. I probably should call her more. She could come visit.”

  Caroline was thinking the same thing. “She always liked Ben. Maybe he has a friend.” She sighed. “Forget the friend. Where the hell’s Ben?”

  But Annette didn’t have the answer any more than she did. She tried his number again when she went to her room, to no avail, then proceeded to toss and turn and imagine the unimaginable.

  Ben had left for three months without a goodbye.

  Ben had been killed riding his cycle.

  Ben had taken up with another woman.

  The first would dismay her, the second devastate her, the third cause the kind of pain from which she doubted she would ever recover. She could deal with her partners’ betrayal; she didn’t think she could deal with Ben’s.

  Funny. She hadn’t thought about the office in hours and hours. Something was definitely wrong with her. But then, the office didn’t deserve her thought. She’d been stabbed in the back for the sole reason that she’d dared take a vacation. And, probably, because she was a woman. Caroline doubted any of the men would have dared steal a case from another male partner. They were a bunch of two-timing hypocrites who weren’t worthy of her worry.

  Ben was another story.

  She dozed off once, then again, only to awaken each time with a start. She imagined that her anxiety was similar to what Annette felt when she worried about her family, and felt a new respect for the woman. Okay, Annette took things to the extreme, still, worry went along with caring, Caroline supposed.

  She also supposed that Ginny might have indeed worried about her daughters through the years, as she claimed. Worry came in different forms. With Annette, it was constant phoning. With Ginny, it might have been more subtle. Caroline knew from experience that the same evidence could be viewed one way by the prosecutor and another by the defense. A weekly phone call could be viewed either as dutiful, as in Mother felt she had to call, or restrained, as in Mother might have called more had she felt I would have welcomed it.

  Mother. Ben. Annette and Leah. Holten, Wills, and Duluth. So much to consider. So much to reconsider.

  Dawn found Leah curled on Jesse’s leather sofa, alternately looking from the pressed rose wreath and the old leather rings, to the loft where Jesse slept. They hadn’t talked much. They had made love—always that, when they were together—and afterward he had held her until he’d finally dozed off.

  She heard him shift in the bed, then heard a cautious, “Leah?”

  “Down here,” she called up.

  The bed creaked again. Wearing only undershorts—gray knit boxers that hugged his flanks—he appeared on the steps. His hair was messed, his jaw stubbled, his body firm. As she watched him approach, she hugged her knees to her chest.

  He hunkered down before her, pushing his fingers into her hair to draw it away from her face. “What’s wrong?”

  “I look at you and melt.”

  He brought her into his arms and shifted onto the sofa. She settled against him with her cheek to his chest and the palm of her hand before it, fingers splayed over his skin. It was warm, cushioned with a light layer of hair, and male-scented.

  Ginny had wild roses, Leah had Jesse. She sensed that wherever she went in life, she wouldn’t be able to smell that musky male smell without thinking of Jesse. She felt an ache in anticipation.

  They didn’t talk then, any more than they had earlier, just sat breathing in tempo with one another.

  “I have to go,” she finally whispered. She kissed him, then wove her arms around his neck and held him tightly. If there was an element of desperation in her grip, she refused to dwell on it. She wasn’t leaving Star’s End just yet. She had time.

  She ran across the lawn in the pale purple light of the new day, ran past the pool and across the deck. She drew open the kitchen door and quietly slipped inside, intent on disappearing into her room undiscovered.

  But the refrigerator door was ajar. Caroline stood in its light with a carton of juice in her hand and a startled look on her face, and no wonder, Leah mused in dismay. She could just imagine the picture she made. Her hair was a mess, her face was red, her breath short and shallow.

  “Good Lord, Leah, have you been outside all this time?”

  “I wasn’t tired,” Leah said without lying. “It seemed foolish to try to sleep. I may now, though. How about you? Just thirsty?”

  “Mostly restless.” She let the refrigerator door drift shut and reached for a glass. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll head up.” She smiled. “See you in a bit.” She slipped on through the room and up the stairs.

  Only when she was in her bed with the comforter pulled to her ears did she wonder why she hadn’t told Caroline about Jesse.

 
; She wasn’t ashamed of him. If anything, the reverse was true.

  But she didn’t trust what Caroline’s reaction would be—or Annette’s, for that matter—if they learned about him.

  If? When.

  But later.

  Caroline remained in the kitchen, perched on a stool, watching the sun work its way over the distant horizon and trickle across the waves. She sipped orange juice or water, whichever happened to be in her glass, and thought about all she’d done wrong.

  She had taken Ben for granted. It would serve her right if he disappeared for three months. He was a free agent. All her fault.

  She had stereotyped Annette and Leah, had judged them to be shallow, when they weren’t. Okay, so they didn’t have careers like she did, but then, she didn’t have a family like Annette or the ability to make friends like Leah, so maybe they were even. They had certainly been even yesterday. For all her professionalism, Caroline hadn’t handled Ginny’s startling revelation any better than her sisters.

  Maybe worse, in fact. Leah had been able to listen to Ginny, understand what she’d done, and cry with her for what had been lost. Same with Annette. But not Caroline. She hadn’t forgiven anything. Well, she had. At least, she thought she had. Only she hadn’t been able to express it.

  It struck her that she was like Ginny that way. But she had spent her whole life being different from Ginny. She had always detested Ginny’s aloofness. She had always prided herself on being honest.

  It struck her now that she hadn’t necessarily been so, not where her emotions were concerned. Not with regard to Annette and Leah. Not with regard to Ben. Not with regard to Ginny.

  Feeling a sudden urgency, she reached for the phone and punched out Ben’s number, then listened to ring after ring after ring. She counted to ten to see if his machine would click on. When it didn’t, she hung up, feeling frustrated and more restless than ever.

  The clock said six-twenty. Leah had been up all night and would no doubt be dead to the world. Annette, who had been in the kitchen with Caroline such a few short hours before, wouldn’t be much better.

  That left Ginny.

  Caroline remembered once, when she’d been sixteen and bratty to the point that Ginny had taken to ignoring her, wanting to apologize but not knowing how. She offered to run errands. She offered to take Annette and Leah to a movie. She offered to pick up her father at the train station. When nothing seemed to work, she finally stole into Ginny’s room one morning and sat on the bed until Ginny woke up. They didn’t speak. Ginny simply touched her hand and smiled, and it was done.

  Leaving the kitchen now, she crept quietly up the stairs. She knocked softly on Ginny’s door. When Ginny didn’t respond, she turned the knob, opened the door, and slipped inside. Ginny was asleep, looking so peaceful that for a minute Caroline stood immobile at the door. She couldn’t begin to imagine what yesterday had been like for the woman. If it had been momentous for Caroline—seeing her mother laugh and cry, raise her voice, speak of passion and romance—it must have been even more so for Ginny. Unburdening one’s soul was heavy stuff. And Ginny wasn’t young.

  She did look it, though, lying there with the worries of the world wiped from her face. She looked serene, even happy. But incredibly still.

  Feeling a twinge of unease, Caroline quietly crossed the floor. Close up, Ginny’s features were relaxed, eyelids lowered, mouth curved into a tiny smile. But she had no color, and there was a waxy sheen to her skin.

  “Mother?” she whispered. She felt a bone-deep thudding, and touched a trembling hand to her mother’s. It was cold. So was her cheek.

  Timidly, she raised that trembling hand to Ginny’s hair. Its short sweep was as neat and perfect as always, a proper cap beneath which to face one world or another. The cheekbones were pronounced, the jaw and chin sculpted. Ginny was a beautiful woman, even embalmed in this alabaster stillness.

  Caroline’s eyes filled with tears. She sank down on the edge of the bed and took that cold hand in hers. “Oh, Mother,” she cried, “how could you.” It wasn’t fair! Ginny had been theirs for the very first time! Yesterday was just a beginning.

  The urgency that had brought her upstairs returned. Engulfed in a great surge of grief, she whispered a broken, “I’m sorry. I should have said more. I was stubborn and proud. I thought I had you all figured out, but I didn’t, and that made me angry.” She wept softly, holding Ginny’s hand now in both of hers, jiggling it every so often.

  “Wake up, Mother. We have to talk.” She let out a long, ragged sigh and wiped her eyes on her shoulder, but tears welled back up. “We never talked. My fault, too. My responsibility as an adult. But I distanced myself. Like you did. Because it hurt less. Ignorance is bliss. Oh, God—” She made a large, loud, helpless keening sound as sobs worked their way up from deep inside her.

  “Caroline?” came a voice from the door, then a frightened, “What is it, Caroline?”

  She rocked on the bed, holding Ginny’s hand to her thigh. She heard a gasp from just beyond her shoulder, then a short, anguished cry. Arms enfolded her. She leaned into them, crying freely with Leah.

  “It’s not fair,” Caroline told her, wanting to scream and yell and turn back the clock.

  “I know.”

  “There was so much still to say.”

  “I know.”

  “Yesterday was just a start.”

  “Or a harbinger,” said a shaky Annette from the door. Looking ash white, she approached. Her eyes were large, their lower lids heavy with unshed tears as she stared at Ginny. “It must have been her heart.”

  “But the doctor said she was fine,” Leah protested.

  “She was, that first time. I had Jean-Paul check. There have been more recent visits and an irregular EKG.”

  Leah gasped. “She didn’t say a word. How could she have been so secretive about it?”

  “She may have denied it. She had a prescription. She may not have used it.”

  “If we’d known, we would have made her use it.”

  Caroline rubbed Leah’s back. It was easier to think clearly when someone needed you to. “No, Leah,” she murmured. “It wasn’t for us to decide. Ginny did things her way.” She caught in another sob, then laughed through her tears. “I used to think she was weak. Dumb of me. She was iron-tough. She made decisions and stuck by them. She told us she wanted to die here, so she died here. She must have planned it this way.”

  “Look at her face,” Annette whispered in awe. “So calm. So pleased.”

  “She’s with Will,” Leah said.

  Caroline wasn’t sure she believed in the after-life. But that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. She had been wrong about other things. She could be wrong about this, too. Feeling humbled and drained, she let out a shaky breath. She wiped her face with her wrist, then took Ginny’s hand again.

  “Shouldn’t we call someone?” Annette asked. “The police? A funeral home?”

  “Not yet,” Caroline said. She wasn’t ready to let Ginny go, not this new Ginny who had been so colorful. “What if we had known sooner?”

  “About Will?” Leah asked.

  “We might have talked more. Had more time to get to know her. It’s sad.”

  “Not if you take the position that she might have died last week or last month without us knowing anything,” Annette said. “She was hanging on for this. There’s something triumphant in that.”

  “Do you think she bought the house with dying in mind?” Leah asked.

  “She said she wanted to die here.”

  “Can people actually determine things like that?”

  “Jean-Paul says the mind can heal as effectively as a surgeon in some situations. It’s a powerful thing.”

  Caroline was just beginning to see that. “Kind of makes the law a crock.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Physical evidence. That’s what we convict on. But it only tells half the story. How can a jury determine the extent of guilt or innocence with only half the story
?”

  “You address the issue of motive.”

  “Yeah, sure, but what do we know? We don’t know what’s going on in someone’s mind. Not really. Take Mother. I assumed I knew what was in her mind, but I was wrong. I convicted her, I sure as hell did, on the merest of physical evidence.” She wasn’t all cried out, after all. Her tears returned.

  Leah became the comforter then, wrapping a tighter arm around her shoulder. “You weren’t the only one, Caroline. All of us did it.”

  Annette reached toward Ginny’s still face, hesitated, then touched it. “She let us. She didn’t argue. She didn’t defend herself.”

  “Damn it,” Caroline cried, “why not?”

  Her question hung in the still, silent air. She knew that outside the ocean was rolling toward shore, the gulls screaming as they soared over the bluff, the fog horn droning its timed message by the Houkabee Rocks, but here all was hushed.

  It was Annette who finally broke the stillness. “She thought she was doing the right thing. I guess we all do, in life. None of us sets out to make mistakes. They’re honestly come by. Mother thought she was doing the right thing in not telling us about Will Cray. She thought she was protecting Daddy.”

  “Maybe she was protecting herself,” Caroline accused. In the next breath she added a bewildered, “Or punishing herself.”

  “We should call someone,” Annette whispered.

  “Wait.” Not yet. Not yet. Caroline wasn’t ready. “She would be pleased that we’re all here with her. She wanted us to be close. It bothered her that we weren’t.”

  “Why weren’t we?”

  “Because we’ve taken different directions in life.”

  “That’s a pretty poor excuse.”

  “We never thought so before.”

  “We never thought before,” Caroline realized. “Not together, at least. I really don’t hate you guys.”

  “You just don’t want to spend time with us.”

  That wasn’t it at all. “You have your own lives, I have mine,” Caroline said in her own defense, then added, “which is a dumb thing to say, too. Law is only one part of my life. Granted, the biggest part. Granted, the gargantuan part. Which may be dumb, too.” She let out an uneven breath. “I think I have thinking to do.”