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“Now you’re an expert?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Here. You take her.”
Before Mya could protest, her mother dumped the baby into her arms. Mya had no choice but to hold her.
“Relax,” her mother said. “You’re stiff as a board. Babies are like dogs. They sense when you’re nervous.”
Mya glanced at Elle. “You don’t mind that comparison?”
Shrugging, Elle said, “It looks like Kaylie thinks you’re doing okay.”
Miraculously, it was true. Pink cheeked, her eyelashes matted from her tears, the baby stared solemnly up at Mya as if trying to figure out something important. But she didn’t look particularly worried. Mya was nervous enough for both of them. “You know, kid,” she said, “you’re heavier than you look.”
“How much did she weigh at birth?” Millicent asked.
“Six-and-a-half pounds. It seemed like a lot at the time. How much did I weigh?”
Millicent looked to Mya to answer.
In a quiet voice, Mya said, “You weighed six pounds, fourteen ounces.” There was absolutely no reason for her throat to close up, and yet it did.
The room was silent. While everyone was trying to decide where to look, Kaylie figured out what it was she’d been pondering, and tried to stick her finger up Mya’s nose.
She was quick. But Mya was quicker.
“Good dodge,” Elle said. “She’s had a thing for noses lately.”
“When Mya was two, I had to take her to the emergency room because she put a button up her nose,” Millicent said, very matter-of-fact. “I guess it’s not surprising she’s marrying a doctor. Isn’t he as close to perfect as a man can get?”
Mya’s diamond ring glinted beneath the lamplight. Another brittle silence ensued while she told herself there was nothing wrong with her diamond ring or with Jeffrey. Maybe that was the problem. Or maybe the flaw lay within her. Struggling with her uncertainty, she began to walk slowly around the room, the way she’d seen her mother do earlier. With a sigh, the baby rested her head on Mya’s shoulder.
“Kaylie resembles you, Elle,” Millicent said.
“Except for her eyes,” Elle said. “They’re blue like her father’s.”
Mya found her mother watching her. Something powerful passed between their gazes. Elle’s father had blue eyes, too.
A flash of grief ripped through Mya. Part of it was guilt for depriving her mom of her only grandchild, but that was far from all of it, for her mother wasn’t the only one Mya’s decision had deprived. At the time, she’d been so certain she was doing the right thing.
“Well looky there,” Millicent said when Kaylie’s eyes fluttered. “I’ve heard it often skips a generation.” There was reverence in her mother’s voice.
“What does?” Mya asked cautiously.
“That connection. It’s instinctive. She knows you all right. You two fit.”
Mya was peering down at the baby, therefore she didn’t see Elle’s expression still and grow serious. Millicent saw it, and it brought a dull sense of foreboding. The girl was keeping secrets. And Millicent knew from experience that when girls Elle’s age kept secrets, there was usually hell to pay.
Mya knocked softly on Elle’s closed door.
A quiet “Yeah?” came from within.
Poking her head in, Mya whispered, “Is Kaylie asleep?”
Elle nodded. A dim lamp illuminated one corner of the small room. Elle had pushed the double bed against the wall. The baby slept on her tummy on the far side, a small bump beneath the blanket.
“Be prepared for my mother to arrive with a crib tomorrow. I told her to talk to you about it first. Did she?”
Elle shook her head, but didn’t seem to know where to look. And Mya found that the earlier belligerence had been easier to deal with than this reticence. She would have preferred to have this conversation later, when Elle felt more comfortable here, but Millicent was convinced that the girl was hiding something, and insisted this couldn’t wait until morning.
“Are you coming in or what?” So much for Elle’s reticence.
“Won’t Kaylie wake up?”
“Once she’s out, she stays out.” Elle sat near the head-board in baggy flannel bottoms and a stretchy tank top that bared a small tattoo of a musical note that seemed at odds with the barbed wire tattoo encircling her other arm. “I had a good mom,” she blurted. “The best.”
Perching carefully at the foot of the bed, Mya said, “Did she and your—do you have any brothers or sisters?”
Elle sat cross-legged, her elbows propped on the pillows she piled in her lap. “She said I was all she needed. Well, me and Dad.”
Kaylie hummed in her sleep.
“My mom was an attorney,” Elle said. “My dad still is, but she quit when they got me. Sometimes she helped him with wills and paperwork, but most of the time she cooked and planned trips and dinner parties and carpooled and took me to soccer practice and music lessons and friends’ houses.”
Mya could picture that. “What was she like?”
“She was very intelligent and tall and kind of ordinary. She played the piano, and she laughed a lot.”
Mya didn’t know what to respond to first, the sense that it was exactly the kind of life she’d wanted for her baby, or the puncture wound that giving her up had left in Mya’s insides. “It sounds as if she took very good care of you.”
“Too good.” The sound Elle made had a lot in common with a snort. “She spoiled my dad and me rotten. After she died, laundry piled up and the cupboards went empty. Dad and I didn’t have a clue what to do about it. He remarried a year later. I guess desperate situations call for desperate measures, huh?”
Mya studied Elle’s features, one by one. She was extremely thin, her face pale in the dim light. Her short blond hair was tousled, her brown eyes expressive. “So you have a stepmother.”
“You’d recognize her relatives from the movies. They wore pointy hats, kept flying monkeys for pets, and one of her sisters perished when a house fell on her somewhere above Kansas.”
Mya bit her lip to keep from laughing. “Not a lot of love lost there, I take it.”
“I despise my stepmother.”
“Despising people comes naturally to the Donahue women.”
They shared their first genuine smile. A moment later Elle looked away.
“She and my dad have two kids of their own now. He spends a lot of time at the office. I would, too, if I were him.”
Why, Mya thought, couldn’t life ever be easy, or at least fair? Since she knew firsthand that wishing was a worthless pastime, she prepared for the inevitable questions.
“When you and Jeffrey get married, it’ll be your first time?” Elle asked.
Mya answered cautiously, for it wasn’t the question she’d been expecting. “It will be the first marriage for both of us, yes.”
Running her finger along the edge of the pillow, Elle said, “He’s not bad-looking, if you like jocks. And he’ll probably pull in good money.”
The white cat pushed the door open with his head then sat near the wall, judiciously surveying the scene. Of the three cats, he was the friendliest. Although Elle hadn’t admitted it, she enjoyed his company. She slid one hand along the bedspread, wiggling a finger. He took the bait, jumping onto the bed as if all four feet had springs. It took only a few sniffs to make an assessment and deem her trustworthy before he curled into a ball at her knees.
“Casper likes you,” Mya said.
“Casper.” Elle snorted, but she petted the overweight cat. “Don’t you think it’s weird for a man to have three cats?”
“They were strays.” Mya couldn’t help wondering if that was how Jeffrey saw her.
“He doesn’t seem like your type.”
Tucking her dressing gown around her legs, Mya said, “You’re as bad as Claire. Jeff’s made me see reason so many times. I don’t smoke anymore. I rarely swear. I haven’t even given other drivers the finger in ages.”
“So you’re marrying him because he makes you see reason?”
“Of course that’s not why I’m marrying him.”
“Then you’re madly in love with him?”
Mya wished it was easier to nod.
Elle looked over at Kaylie. “I thought I was in love with Kaylie’s father, but he cleared out as soon as the wand turned blue. Good riddance.”
“He sounds like a fool.”
“Yeah,” Elle said. “Your mother said the Donahue women don’t make good choices when it comes to men.”
Their gazes met, held.
“Is that what my birth father was?” Elle whispered. “A bad choice?”
Outside, a branch scraped against the siding. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked. A few feet away, Kaylie made noises in her sleep. Elle didn’t move a muscle, and looked as if she could wait all night if she had to. Mya knew she’d waited long enough.
They both had.
CHAPTER 4
“H is name was Dean Laker.” His name rolled off Mya’s tongue as if it hadn’t been nineteen years since every other word had been Dean.
“Was?” Elle whispered.
“Is. His name is Dean Laker.” Time obscured many things, but it hadn’t dulled her memory of him, tall and lanky, stubborn and proud, impatient with life but not with her, cocky and arrogant, except the day he’d gone to see her when it was all over. It wasn’t the first time he’d told her to go to hell, but it was the first time she’d seen him cry.
“I met Dean when my mother and I moved to Keepers Island when I was nine. His was the first face I saw when I walked into that little classroom of strangers. He stuck his tongue out at me, and when I didn’t flinch, he sat back, studying me closer, and I knew I’d passed some secret, unspoken test.”
Elle stopped petting the cat, focusing completely on Mya. “If you knew his name, why did you leave the box blank on my birth certificate?”
Mya didn’t even have to close her eyes to relive the moment when, sitting on the edge of the bed, pen in hand, she’d hesitated over that space on the form. Her mother had gone out for a smoke and probably another good cry, so Mya was alone in her hospital room. In an effort to make things easier for her, she’d been given a room away from the other mothers. Mya felt isolated and scared and, God, she’d wished—never mind what she’d wished. She’d grasped her right hand to stop the shaking, and had wound up staring at her left hand. Her ring finger was bare by then.
Nineteen years later, she sat in a quiet bedroom searching for words that still wouldn’t come. “When I look back on my life, it’s as if the decisions I made and the events that led to them are lined up like dominoes a moment before the first one topples. So many times I’ve wondered what might have happened if I’d done one thing differently. Just one. Any one. But that day, I left the box blank because I was seventeen and I’d gone through twenty-three hours of labor, and I’d just spoken with a social worker, and my mother had done almost nothing but cry and I refused to give in and cry again, too.”
“You and Dean Laker, my birth father weren’t still together then?” Elle asked.
Of everything she’d said, Mya was surprised Elle had chosen that to question. “Dean and I broke up three weeks before you were born.”
“Does he still live around Maine somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever see him?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“The last time I saw him was eight years ago when I went back to Keepers Island to attend his father’s funeral.”
Elle seemed to be putting everything Mya said to memory. “Did you talk to him that day?”
“With the whole town looking on?” Mya made an unbecoming sound. “He took his dad’s death hard, and besides, he was surrounded by his family.”
“So he had a wife and a couple of kids by then?”
Mya shook her head.
“He isn’t married, either?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?” Elle spoke more loudly than before, then glanced at Kaylie, who slept on.
Puzzled by the question, Mya said, “I’m sure, Elle. My mother would have told me.”
“How would she know?”
“She goes back to visit friends every summer.”
“But you don’t?”
Again, Mya shook her head. Some things were just too painful.
After taking a moment to absorb that, Elle said, “What does he look like?”
She studied Elle, feature by feature. Her pupils were dilated in the semidarkness, so that only thin a ring of brown encircled them. The diamond stud in her nose looked real. Even at her young age, there was a slight furrow in her brow. Mya had been on the receiving end of the girl’s attitude, and yet it was apparent that Elle hadn’t had an easy life these past few years. The heaviness that so often lurked deep in Mya’s chest moved front and center. “A few minutes ago,” she said, “when you smiled, I caught a glimpse of him. His hair is dark, though, and his eyes are blue, like Kaylie’s. His nose has a little bump right here.” She pointed to a spot on her own nose.
