She and Ned found a coffee shop, nearly empty at this time of day. They ordered coffees, then sat at a table away from the few other customers.
Ned spoke first. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Abby burst out. “You didn’t ask for whatever you have. And I’m just as guilty, because it looks to me like you’d been getting along just fine with whatever-it-is, until I showed up and stirred up trouble.”
“Well, that wasn’t exactly your fault, either. And during the house tour I could have handed you that cup of tea, waited until I thought you were steady enough to go home, and forgotten all about you. I was the one who prodded you to look further.”
“And here I thought it was because of my big blue eyes, not my visions of dead people.”
Ned smiled into his coffee. “Well, that was part of it. But I knew there was something else. Look, if I’d thought you and Brad were happy and well matched, I would have stayed out of the whole thing.”
“But you listened to me for like fifteen minutes, and took one look at Brad and me together, and you decided it wasn’t going to work. I would be a lot angrier if I didn’t think you were right. Although I really did have to wonder then why some woman hadn’t already snapped you up. You looked like a good catch. Did you deliberately avoid close relationships, after Leslie?”
“Maybe. Look, I’m not comfortable talking about all this”—he held up his hand before Abby could protest—“but I know we have to, for Ellie’s sake.”
At least they agreed on that. “How do you think Leslie will take it?”
“I don’t know. But we need to be clear about what we think is happening with each of us.”
“But we don’t want to sound like this is rehearsed, because like I said, I’m worried that it will look like we’re ganging up on Leslie. It’s not like we have to get our stories to sync up—all we can do is tell her what we think is happening.” Abby hesitated before going on, “If what we believe is true, does that mean you’ll have to be more involved in Ellie’s life? You haven’t been up ’til now, right?”
“That was the agreement that Leslie and I reached, and I accepted that. In case you’re wondering, I haven’t spent time lurking around Ellie’s school or her home, hoping to catch a glimpse of the child, or Peter either. I agreed that I would play no role in her life or Peter’s. Whenever Leslie tells Ellie the truth, then Ellie can decide what she wants to do.”
“Well, it looks like that moment will be here pretty quickly. I almost wonder if Ellie has an old soul parked inside her—she knows and sees more than a child her age should. You might want to be prepared: she may take one look at you and throw herself into your arms, crying ‘Daddy!’”
Abby took a sip of her coffee, mainly to give herself time to gather her thoughts. “What’s Leslie’s husband like?”
“George? Good guy, works hard, loves the kids. It’s not like we discuss him a lot.”
“How is he going to take this news about Ellie?”
Ned shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve only met the guy once or twice and that was a while ago. We don’t exactly socialize, given the situation. How does anybody take this kind of thing? Disbelief? Denial? Anger?”
“All of the above. At first, at least. We’re not going to settle anything tonight. We’re just going to explain how we got to this point. Right?”
“Right,” Ned said, looking unconvinced.
Abby checked her watch: still too soon to leave. “How did you do in school?” she asked Ned.
“Huh? You mean grades, or how I got along with the other kids?”
“Both. And don’t forget teachers.”
“I did well, but wasn’t pushy about it. I got good grades, and teachers loved me, but I didn’t volunteer to answer every question, because that would have been obnoxious and all the other kids would have hated me.”
“Did you have many friends?”
“A few. Never a lot. I mean, I didn’t like clubs or group activities. I wasn’t into sports, at least not competitively. What can I say? I liked to read. I watched television. I did my homework. If I was a kid now, I’d probably spend a lot of time playing high-end video games.”
“Or designing them,” Abby added. “You noticed that in Ellie’s story, the protagonist—the star—seemed pretty much like Ellie, except Ellie called her Annie, but she was part of a group of girls. When she saw the man, she tried to share that with the other girls, but it didn’t take her long to realize nobody else was seeing him, so she clammed up. But she—the character—took it in stride, didn’t make a big thing about it. And then this Annie got her parents to take her back to where she’d seen the man, to make sure she’d really seen him, and to check if her parents saw him too, which was pretty smart and pretty subtle for a child. But she didn’t tell them that’s what she was doing. And she learned that they didn’t see anything, and she accepted that. If Annie is a proxy for Ellie, then Ellie’s probably more well-adjusted and smarter than I am.”
“Which is why she needs someone in her life who understands what’s going on.”
“Agreed,” Abby said. “You don’t want to imagine what’s going to happen when her hormones kick in a few years from now.”
Ned held up both hands. “Please, can we not go there right now? I hope we’ll all have a better handle on things by then.” Now it was his turn to look at his watch. “We’d better go. It would be a bad start to this whole thing if we showed up late.”
The ride to Littleton was brief, as Abby knew. They parked in front of a well-maintained contemporary house in a tidy development that looked like it had been built in the 1950s. “Are you ready?” Ned asked.
“Do I have a choice? I’m not going to wimp out and hide in the car.”
“Then let’s do this.” They both climbed out of the car, but Leslie had opened the door before they were halfway up the front walk. She didn’t say anything, just stared at them as they approached, then stepped back to let them into the house and closed the door behind them. “In there,” she said tersely, pointing toward the dining end of the living area. So she was treating this like a business meeting. They sat around the table, with Leslie at the head.
“George and the kids are out for maybe three hours,” Leslie began, “if they get ice cream after the movie. I have a feeling that this little talk may take longer than that, but we have to start somewhere.” Leslie’s voice was tight, and Abby guessed she was trying hard to remain calm and reasonable.
“What does George know?” Ned asked.
“Right now, nothing. I haven’t decided what I’m going to tell him. Or Ellie. But right now, I want to know what the hell is going on.” A brief flash of anger. Leslie turned to Abby. “How did you end up in the middle of this? Was that story that Ned fed me when I hired you true? Any part of it?”
Abby cleared her throat. “Leslie, I think we have to start at the beginning. When Ned suggested me for the job, neither of us had a clue about what was going on. He was doing me a favor. He’d only known me a couple of weeks by then. Hear us out, will you? Because we don’t have many answers, but we’ll tell you all that we know.”
Abby started off, once again explaining how she had ended up in Massachusetts, and her tour of the Oakes mansion in Waltham, and Brad—all things that Leslie had heard at one time or another. Leslie sat stone-faced, but at least she was listening.
Then Ned picked up the thread, explaining how he had directed Abby to sites he knew about where ancestors might be lurking, and what had happened to Abby there. Which of course prompted Leslie to ask, how had he known about them, which in turn led to a whole discussion of Ned’s odd ability to see dead people, and how he had ignored it for so long, and how Abby had somehow ripped the bandage off and precipitated a whole new series of events. And how they had discovered that mainly they were seeing the same ancestral family, so there might be some genetic component. When they had run out of words, the three of them sat in silence for a time.
Finally Leslie spoke.
“Ned, you’re telling me that you believed you had this, uh, thing, but you never mentioned it when we were together?”
“I thought I had erased it. If it was ever real.”
“And when we were talking about—”
“I told Abby about your request that I help you … make Ellie. I had to, because she’d already sensed something about Ellie.”
That didn’t make Leslie look any happier. “Something about my child, who I’ve raised since her birth, and Abby noticed this in about fifteen minutes?”
“But only because she shares it!” Ned protested. “Most people would never notice anything unusual.”
“Right. Anyway, you never thought to tell me about this ability of yours when we were making Ellie?”
“Leslie, I’m sorry. I thought it was gone. And I had no idea then that it could be passed on. It’s only recently that we’ve figured out that Abby and I share common ancestors. And my mother has it too, but she never told anyone, not even my dad. Certainly not me. She and I didn’t talk about any of this until last week. When Abby insisted.”
“And do you have any idea about what I’m supposed to do now?” Leslie demanded. “Now that you’ve told me all this crap that I’m supposed to swallow? Sorry—is that disrespectful to you psychic types, calling your talent ‘crap’?”
“Leslie,” Abby began quietly, “I wouldn’t have believed any of it either, except it’s happened to me. I can’t undo it. But from what little I’ve seen, I think Ellie is already way past where I am. I think she can handle it, but she’s going to need help.”
Leslie stood up abruptly. “You really have the nerve to sit there and tell me how to raise my child?” There was a red flush creeping up her neck. “Get out. Both of you. Abby, I don’t know what to do in the long run, but I don’t want to see you for the next few days. Stay away from the museum. Ned, I can’t begin to tell you how angry I am with you. I thought you were a friend, and you come to my house and dump this on me. It’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to Ellie. So get out. Stay out of my way. I don’t want to hear from you or talk to you. Go, now.”
Ned and Abby exchanged glances, but there seemed to be nothing to say. “I’m sorry, Leslie,” Ned said softly. He took Abby’s arm and walked her to the front door. Leslie still hadn’t moved from the table.
22
After Abby and Ned had reached the car and settled inside, they couldn’t seem to move.
“Well, I suppose that went about as well as it could have, all things considered,” Abby said dully. “And Leslie acted about the way I expected. I can’t say that I blame her. What happens now?”
Ned stared straight ahead, through the windshield, into the dark. “I don’t know.”
“How long will it take her to cool down?”
“Maybe a year or two? Seriously, you’ve seen more of her recently than I have. What do you think?”
Abby pondered. “I think it’s a good thing that she threw us out so she could think this through. At least she didn’t say anything irretrievable. Or fire me. Exactly.”
“Yet. She still might.” Ned rubbed his face, then turned to face her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. She’s a fair woman, and once she calms down she’ll know she can’t take this out on you. But she might not want to see your face for a while.”
“I know. I can understand that.” Abby tried to remember what the balance in her checking account was, and how long it might last in this rather pricey area. Or maybe she should clear out of town, find someplace cheaper to live and a new job to pay the rent, and not even try to deal with Ned or Leslie or Ellie. But that would be the coward’s way out.
“You’re not thinking of bailing out, are you?” Ned asked anxiously.
Once again he seemed to be reading her mind. “How do you do that? Know what I’m thinking? It’s spooky.”
“It’s a logical question. You have every right to pack up your bags and go.”
She turned to face him. “Go where? I don’t have a home. I may not have a job. I guess I could crawl back to Maine and live with Mom and Dad for a while—that’d be real fun. I don’t think there are many jobs available up there, but at least they don’t know about this seeing spirits stuff. My mother lives entirely in the present, or the near future, like when to buy new curtains for the living room or what to fix for dinner. In a way that’s reassuring, but at the same time, I couldn’t begin to explain to her what’s happened and why I ended up back on their doorstep. Remember, she liked Brad.”
“And your father?” Ned asked.
Abby paused to figure out the best way to describe him. “He’s quiet. Thoughtful. Surprisingly observant, particularly when you think he wasn’t paying attention. He loves my mother, and still thinks she’s wonderful after all these years. They have a good balance between them. And of course they both love me, but like I said, I don’t think they’d understand this psychic stuff.”
“Maybe you underestimate them.”
“You haven’t met them,” Abby said. Abby had gone to Maine for Christmas, but Ned hadn’t gone with her. She hadn’t seen her parents since. “With Mom, what you see is what you get. She’s a good person—warm, practical, supportive, kind—but she has no patience for things she can’t see—and fix. Dad, on the other hand …”
She stopped, wondering why she had never given much thought to her father’s family tree. She knew he came from old New England roots, as did her mother, but Abby had come upon her mother’s ancestors first, and had only begun taking genealogy seriously a few months ago. Her father’s lines were still blank, but maybe she should check them out too. She might just have the time to do that now, at least until her money ran out. She refused to contemplate what it would mean if everybody in the family proved to have this peculiar ability.
But if she’d inherited this from her mother’s side of the family, which looked likely, it had clearly skipped her mother. Maybe it was a recessive trait? Maybe it was erratic? Maybe there was no scientific logic to any of this?
It was only then that Ned said softly, “Are you bailing out on me?”
Abby was slammed with a wave of guilt. How—or why?—had she put anyone, everyone, ahead of Ned? She loved him, didn’t she? She needed him, especially now, if they were ever going to sort out this maybe-hereditary, maybe-paranormal thing she had fallen into. “Oh, Ned, no! Of course not. I’m being selfish, worrying only about what affects me. But we’re in this together.”
Ned didn’t look at her. “It seems to me that all I’ve done from the beginning is complicate your life.”
Abby rushed to reassure him. “You can’t say that. Maybe it was a huge coincidence that I started seeing my relatives at the same time I first met you, but it could have happened any time. And I would have been scared and confused, and I wouldn’t have known what to do, and you know Brad wouldn’t have been any help … Ned, I can’t do this without you. Face it, we’re linked forever. It sounds sappy, but we’re connected in ways most people can’t even imagine. Please don’t think I’m pushing you away.”
She reached out a hand to him, and he took it, and Abby felt the tingle of connection immediately. Ellie had said holding Abby’s hand tickled, and maybe that was the best way for a child to describe it. But it could be so much more! And Ellie would have to come to understand that, somehow, going forward. “Okay?”
Finally Ned smiled, relief in his eyes. “Yes. Abby, we should eat. It’s getting late.”
Reluctantly Abby released his hand. “I don’t think I can face a restaurant. I can probably throw together something at home.” Home—that was laughable. She was a passing visitor in someone else’s house, where she kept her clothes and some food, period. Not hers. She didn’t belong anywhere.
“Then let’s do that. I’ll stop at the museum so you can pick up your car.”
“Oh, right. Thank you.” She was so upset she’d forgotten that they’d arrived together and her car was still waiting in the parking lot.
Ned pulled up at the mu
seum a few minutes later and let Abby out next to her car, promising to meet her at “her” house. She stood for a moment, watching him pull away, then looking at the museum, all its windows dark. She enjoyed working here. She liked teaching kids, especially when she was talking about history—and she certainly had some rather unique perspectives about colonial history to offer, only she couldn’t talk about those. But if Leslie was angry with her, a state that might go on for a while, it would be difficult to work with her. Abby was sure that Leslie would be fair and would go by the book, but there would be a tension between them that might interfere with Abby’s effectiveness. She should volunteer to quit, to save everyone the trouble, even though she really liked the place. She’d have to make up a good excuse to give to the people she knew best. Maybe a sick mother would do. Something to think about.
Abby started her car, pulled out of the driveway, and followed Ned’s path to her temporary home. He was already there, leaning against his parked car, waiting for her. She parked alongside his car, got out, and walked into his arms.
“Don’t worry, Abby. We’ll figure something out,” he murmured into her hair.
“Yeah, we probably will. I just wish I knew what. Come on, I’m getting cold.” She pulled away from him and walked to the door and slid the key in. Opening it, she disarmed the alarm, then let Ned in and turned on some lights. “I think I’ve got eggs and bacon and bread, unless you can find inspiration in my cupboards.” How lame was she? Apparently she could barely feed herself.
“Let me take a look.” Ned started rummaging in the few cabinets that held foodstuffs and came up with several cans Abby couldn’t remember buying. Maybe they’d come with the place. Leaving Ned to his search, Abby pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge, found a pair of glasses, and poured. Then she sat at the small table in the kitchen and watched Ned move competently around the kitchen.
This was not the life she had planned. Camping out in a stranger’s house, afraid to stray beyond her own arbitrary, self-imposed boundaries. Feeling like an intruder. She was past twenty-five; she’d always assumed she’d have a “real” job and a home, or at least a place with her name on the lease, and a guy somewhere in the picture. Maybe not marriage, but commitment to someone steady. Love.
Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead Page 17