The Dream Daughter

by Diane Chamberlain

  As we waited those long two and a half years for the war to end, though, we did have a genuine shock: Myra Poole appeared at our door one evening in 1971. John Paul was asleep and Patti, Hunter, and I were watching TV. Hunter answered her knock and there she stood, sixty-eight years old and on her fifth trip—the trip she knew would be her last.

  Hunter yelped with joy, wrapping his arms around her, nearly lifting her off the floor. He brought her into the living room and she sat next to him on the couch, holding his hand in both of hers as she told us her reason for taking that final fifth trip.

  “I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do professionally,” she said. “I knew my Temporal Solutions staff could carry on without me.” She looked at Hunter with more affection than I’d ever seen in her face. “I realized I just didn’t want to live the rest of my life without my son.”

  “Here they come!” The man next to me interrupted my thoughts as he pointed toward the huge air force medevac plane taxiing toward us across the tarmac. I joined in the cheering, my heart pounding in my throat. Near me, I saw a teenaged boy twist a silver POW bracelet anxiously around and around on his wrist. I looked down at my own silver bracelet, Joe’s name engraved on the surface. I couldn’t wait to take it off. On my right wrist, I wore the bracelet of rubber bands Joanna had made for me. Reminders of two beloved people who had been lost to me for the past three years.

  Until today.

  The plane came to a stop and the roar of the crowd intensified around me as the door opened. A few men attached a long ramp to the doorway, and after a few minutes, a soldier stepped from the plane and waved to the crowd. I joined in the wild applause as he walked down the ramp. He shook hands with a couple of officers and then greeted his family—his wife and three children, who wrapped their arms around his waist and legs, nearly toppling him over.

  I pressed my lips together, my eyes already beginning to fill.

  Then a second soldier exited the door. He saluted before jogging down the ramp as if to demonstrate he was perfectly fine, not a care in the world. I didn’t see who greeted him because Joe’s name was announced next—Captain Joseph Michael Sears—and I leaned forward, trying to peer into the dark interior of the plane. He stood at the top of the ramp and for a disorienting moment, I didn’t recognize him. His dress uniform couldn’t mask his skeletal thinness. I watched him blink against the daylight, but then he smiled his wide Joey smile at the cheering crowd, holding the railing as he descended the ramp. I broke free from the other families to run across the tarmac toward the plane, my arms outstretched, tears flying from my cheeks, and I knew the moment he spotted me because his smile turned into a grin and his pace quickened on the ramp. He shook the hands of the waiting officers, then walked toward me, arms wide, his blue eyes glassy with tears.

  Hands on my shoulders, he pulled me close. “Hey, girl,” he said softly into my hair.

  I wrapped my arms around him, feeling the sharp line of his jaw against my cheek, the bones of his shoulder blades beneath my hands. He held me in a tight, breath-stealing embrace, and I knew in that moment that I’d made the right choice. I would always be there for him. I’d help him heal. No matter how difficult the story he had to tell, I’d be strong enough to listen.

  And when he was ready to hear it, I would have a story to tell him as well.

  EPILOGUE

  CARLY

  June 2022

  Nags Head

  I sweep the sand off the old wooden floor of the wraparound porch. We had a good storm last night and I think the wind blew half the beach onto the porch and steps. Today, though, is glorious. Clear Carolina blue sky. Water the color of jade. The waves are smooth as glass as they make their unhurried way toward shore, and the storm seems to have cleared the humidity from the air.

  Although it is not quite nine, a few sunbathers already dot the beach along with a handful of striped umbrellas and one of those cabana things. I don’t like the cabanas. I think they mess up the view. One of my sons put a cabana up when he and his family visited last year and I bit my tongue. I realize it’s just one more change I have to get used to. Time marches on.

  I’m nearly done sweeping when I notice a girl walking on the beach near the water’s edge. She holds the leashes of two dogs, one gold, the other brown. I stand still for a moment to watch her, a sweet wistfulness filling my chest. So long ago, I think. A lifetime ago.

  The girl turns away from the water and slowly begins crossing the sand in the direction of the house. I watch her, suddenly breathless. As she grows closer, I see that she’s more woman than girl. She’s barefoot and wears a straw hat and sunglasses. A long, gauzy white shirt covers a two-piece bathing suit. The dogs are a golden retriever and a chocolate Lab.

  For a second, my heart literally stops beating. “Oh my God,” I whisper. I lean the broom against the porch railing.

  The young woman is closer now. Close enough that I can see her hesitant smile as she stops walking. She speaks as I rush barefoot down the porch steps.

  “Carly?” she calls, a hand pressed to her mouth. “Is that really you?”

  I hurry across the sand to reach her, unable to speak myself. Poppy and Jobs snake around my legs as I pull my daughter into my arms. I feel her hesitate before her own arms lock across my back. Then I’m not sure which of us is holding the other tighter. As I finally pull away, my head knocks her hat askew and we both laugh. She takes the hat off to reveal long, platinum hair and she slips her sunglasses from her dark eyes to the top of her head. I hold her by her shoulders to study her beautiful face. For her, it’s been nine years. For me, it’s been half a century. I begin to cry.

  “Oh, Joanna,” I say. They seem to be the only words I can get out.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t still be here,” she says. “I was afraid I’d be too late.”

  I smile through my tears. “You thought I’d be dead, you mean.”

  Her expression sobers. Slowly, she reaches out to touch my cheek with a tenderness that nearly undoes me. “I just didn’t want to be too late,” she says.

  I dry my cheeks with my fingertips. Take her hand. “Come sit with me,” I say.

  We walk together toward the porch, the dogs—they must be about ten years old by now—are calm at her side. Joanna and I are the same height, despite the fact that I’ve lost an inch or so over the years. We sit down on the broad porch steps, so close our bare arms touch. Jobs immediately lies down at the foot of the steps but Poppy rests her big head on my knees.

  There’s so much I want to say to this girl. This woman. I’ve talked to her often in my mind over the years. I never thought I’d have the chance to say it all out loud.

  “Do your parents know you’re here?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. A strand of her pale blond hair catches on my bare shoulder. “I’m with some friends from school,” she says. “I go to Rutgers. My parents know I’m in the Outer Banks, but they don’t know—they have no idea—you’re here.” She picks at the rim of the straw hat on her lap. “They never really believed everything I told them about you. I wasn’t sure I believed you, either.” She offers me a small smile. “All these years, I couldn’t wait to come to Nags Head to see if you’d really be here. I’m so glad you showed me where you live.”

  I showed her where I lived? I had no memory of that, but it didn’t matter. I rest my hand on Poppy’s big head, trying to think of how to begin. How to say what I’ve long wanted to say to my daughter. “I’m so sorry, Joanna,” I tell her. “I should never have shown up in your life the way I did, with all the lies and the—”

  She raises a hand in the air to stop me. “I’m so glad you did,” she says. “And if everything you told me is true, I think I would have done the same thing.” She slips her sunglasses on again. “I’ve thought about it a lot,” she says. “You couldn’t tell us—Mom and Dad and me—the truth, so I don’t think you had a choice. And you wanted to get to know me. How else could you have done it? I’m glad you wanted to ge
t to know me.” Her voice suddenly sounds small and young. My little girl.

  I dig my hands into the thick fur of Poppy’s neck. Her muzzle is white. I can’t believe I’m touching this dog. This child. It doesn’t seem possible. Yet very little from that period of my life seems possible.

  “You’re very understanding, Joanna,” I say. How I love saying her name aloud!

  She sighs. “I admit I was mad at you at first,” she says. “Mad and confused … I’m still pretty confused, actually,” she says. “I mean … how did you do it? Travel through time? When you jumped off the tree house railing … Oh my God!” She presses her hands to the sides of her head. “I almost had a heart attack! But you didn’t end up splattered on the ground. That’s when I knew you must have been telling me the truth, as crazy as it sounded.” She looks down at our hands, mine on Poppy’s head, hers on the rim of her hat. Her hands are smooth, her nails pink. My hands are those of a seventy-nine-year-old woman who has spent too much time in the sun.

  “My parents thought I had a bad dream or was sleepwalking or something.” She digs her bare feet deep into the sand at the bottom of the steps. “We turned on the floodlights in the yard and of course you weren’t there. I looked everywhere. Behind the bushes and—everywhere—but you’d really, truly disappeared into thin air. And then I knew you had to be telling the truth. I wouldn’t shut up about it. I told my parents everything you said, about my father being in Vietnam and they said that was impossible, that Vietnam was way too long ago, and I told them how you never meant to leave me in the hospital and…” She shakes her head. “They said they were going to take me to a shrink, so I stopped talking about it. I never even told my friends because I was afraid … I knew no one would believe me. And I missed you.” She glanced at me. “I’d just found out you were my birth mother and then all of a sudden you were gone.”

  “I felt so terrible that night, putting you through that,” I say. “But I had to step off the railing at a certain time and I couldn’t help that you were right there.” I touch her bare arm. “I hated that I had to lie to you and your family so much.”

  She looks away from me toward the ocean, her sunglasses reflecting the waves and sky. “If you’d told us the truth,” she says, “my father would have had you locked up. He thought there was something really off about you from the beginning.” She smiles at me. “You came into my life just when I needed a … a friend. I was at a new school and everything. I missed you when you … disappeared. But I felt … I still feel … lucky I had the chance to know you.” She puts her arm around my shoulders, very gently, and I can tell she thinks of me as an old lady who needs to be handled with care. She should see me do the shoulder stand in my yoga class. Suddenly, I laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” she asks.

  “I remember your mother’s downward dog tattoo,” I say. “I had no idea what it was. Now I do it every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I think of your mom every single time.”

  She leans away to study my face, a smile on her lips. “You do yoga?” she asks.

  I nod. It’s the gentle class with other septuagenarians, but I don’t need to mention that.

  Joanna sobers. “It must have been hard for you, being around my mother,” she says. “Knowing I was … I guess you must have felt like I was really yours and you had to watch her … I don’t know, take your place.”

  “It was hard,” I agree, “but it was also reassuring to me to know how much you were loved.”

  Joanna seems to take this in as she looks toward the water. “You were a little strange,” she says with a smile. “Kind of out of it … like you’d been living under a rock or something.”

  I chuckle. “Everything was so different from 1970,” I say. “I was a little lost.” I look down at Poppy’s beautiful huge brown eyes. “How did you end up with Poppy?” I ask.

  “Oh, after you left, Mrs. Corman from the Sleeping Dog Inn called my mother,” she says. “She said she couldn’t manage having a dog right then and was there a chance we’d take her. Mom said yes.” Joanna bends over to hug Poppy, who licks her ear. “I was going to change her name to Stevie after you-know-who, but decided that would confuse her.” She grins, then adds, “I was such a nerdy kid.”

  “A brilliant kid,” I correct her.

  She smiles at me. It’s a radiant smile; there’s no other word for it. I feel a sort of serenity coming from her. I feel forgiveness. I feel love.

  “Thank you for finding me,” I say.

  She digs her feet even deeper into the sand and lets out a sigh. “It’s not the sort of ‘birth mother story’ I can ever tell my friends … needless to say,” she says, “but I’m glad I experienced it.” She looks down at my wrist and I watch her eyes widen when she sees the blue and green bracelet I still wear. “Is that … Did I make that?”

  I touch the bracelet. “I wear it nearly every day,” I say, “though I’m very careful with it. I started having problems with some of the bands breaking a few years after you made it for me. So I put it away and waited until that loom became popular and then I found a young girl in the middle school here to repair it for me.” I hold up my wrist to admire the bracelet. “She’s grown now, but every time a band breaks, I ship it off to her and she fixes it for me.”

  She looks at me openmouthed. “That’s incredible,” she says.

  I look toward the beach again. The jade-colored water. There is so much I still want to say to her. I want to tell her about her two brothers. Her three cousins. Her aunt Patti. And of course her late Uncle Hunter, without whom she would not even exist. Now is not the time to weigh her down with all of that, though. Instead, I get to my feet and reach for her hand.

  “Come on, sweet girl,” I say, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze as I lead her and the dogs up the stairs to the porch. “It’s time for you to meet your father.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The story of The Dream Daughter has been in my mind in one form or another for many years, but I needed the stars to align perfectly before I was ready to write it. It was unnerving to write something so different from my previous twenty-five books, yet I was confident all along that I was still writing a story that was—as my UK editor, Wayne Brookes, describes it—“vintage Diane Chamberlain.” I don’t ever recall having more fun writing a book. I loved the mind-twistiness of it. The puzzle and the challenge. Occasionally my head hurt as I juggled calendars from different eras. At other times, I laughed out loud with the sheer joy of creating a story so complex.

  I have many people to thank for their help in bringing The Dream Daughter to life. First is my partner, John Pagliuca, who helped me think through plot and structure over many months and who provided encouragement when I was afraid I might be going off the deep end with my story.

  My brainstorming friends have had to listen to some version of this book for years. For their help, I’m grateful to fellow authors Mary Kay Andrews, Katy Munger, Sarah Shaber, Alexandra Sokoloff, Brenda Witchger, and especially Margaret Maron, who read a draft of the book and spurred me on with her enthusiastic response to the story. Similarly, my sister, Joann Scanlon, read the story with her usual eye to detail. Their encouragement was just what I needed.

  Special thanks to fellow author Therese Fowler, for her careful and thoughtful reading of a late draft of the book. Therese’s input was invaluable.

  Sharon Miglarese contributed her knowledge and expertise as a NICU nurse by helping me understand what Carly and Joanna would experience during their months in the hospital. My own former career as a perinatal social worker helped in that regard as well, but so much has changed in the decades since I worked in a hospital that I could never have written those scenes without Sharon’s help.

  It’s been many years since I lived in the Northeast, so I’m grateful to David and Tricia Tait, Adele Stavis, and my agent, Susan Ginsburg, for sharing their knowledge of New York City with me. I’m also grateful to Tyler and David Farrand for inviting John and me to stay in their beautifu
l home in Summit, New Jersey, thus giving me a clear picture of Joanna’s lovely neighborhood.

  A few other people shared their thoughts, suggestions, and experiences with me as I wrote The Dream Daughter. I’m particularly indebted to my neighbor and dear friend David Samuels for sharing so much of his experience and knowledge as a Vietnam veteran. His wife, Elizabeth, was also a great support. My stepdaughter, Caitlin Campbell, contributed the name “Stir Crazy Mamas” for Carly’s online support group, and Gary Fuller and Buzzy Porter helped me think through some elements of time travel. Readers on my “Diane Chamberlain Readers Page” on Facebook helped by contributing character names, sharing memories of the various eras in the story, and best of all, sending me baby pictures so I could really imagine Baby Joanna.

  As usual, my assistant and research aide, Kathy Williamson, was a huge help throughout the writing of The Dream Daughter. Kathy’s a whiz at finding any information I need to create my story, and she willingly takes on any task I need help with, from the sophisticated to the mundane. I’m grateful for her help and expertise.

  My agent, the awesome Susan Ginsburg, not only supported the writing of The Dream Daughter but she also read an early draft and offered suggestions to make the story richer. I’m honored to call Susan both agent and friend. Thanks also to the rest of the staff at Writers House for their hard work on behalf of my books. Special thanks to Stacy Testa, Peggy Boulos Smith, Natalie Medina, and Maja Nikolic.

  Thank you to my editor, Jen Enderlin, for taking a chance on The Dream Daughter. Jen barely batted an eye when I said I wanted to write a story that contained time travel and her unbridled enthusiasm for the finished manuscript was a welcome relief. Jen can see things in my work that I’m too close to see. Her perspective and suggestions are always right on and I’m lucky I get to work with her.

  My publicist at St. Martin’s, Katie Bassel, once again deserves special thanks. Katie’s a master at setting up events and book tours and I’d be lost—quite literally—without her.