Die Before I Wake (2 page)

I patted his arm in a gesture of comfort. “She could be wandering around the airport, lost. Maybe you should try having her paged.”

Some of the frustration left his eyes. “Right,” he said. “Good idea, Jules.”

Nobody in my entire thirty years had ever gotten away with calling me Jules. Until now. A lot of firsts going on here.

“You stay with the bags,” he said, and began moving in the direction of the American Airlines ticket counter. He’d taken just a couple of steps when a male voice separated itself from the babble and hum of the crowd.

“Tommy! Yo, Tommy-boy!”

We both swung around. The face that belonged to the voice wasn’t hard to pick out, since most of the crowd was moving in the opposite direction. Even with the aviator glasses covering his eyes, the family resemblance was unmistakable. He was a slightly younger, slightly watered-down version of my husband. Not quite as tall. Not quite as dark. Not quite as smooth.

Just plain not quite as.

“What the hell are you doing here?” There was an edge to Tom’s voice, one he smoothed over so quickly I would have missed it if it hadn’t been so uncharacteristic of the man I’d married. He shot me a brief glance before continuing. “I thought you were in Presque Isle.”

“Finished the job early. Heard you needed a ride, so—voilà! Here I am.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed, and something passed between them, some kind of animosity that they weren’t quite verbalizing. They rubbed each other the wrong way. Even I, a virtual stranger, could see it. “Lucky us,” he said.

Instead of rising to the bait, the guy laughed. He turned his attention to me, all trace of hostility gone.

His smile was genuine, warm and welcoming. “And this must be Julie.” He pulled off the glasses and held out his hand. “I’m Riley. Tom’s black-sheep brother.” Tom hadn’t mentioned that he had a brother.

Judging by the sour expression on my husband’s face, he must have had good reason for that omission.

I shook Riley’s outstretched hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Where’s Mom?” Tom asked.

“She didn’t come.”

The two brothers exchanged a look that was layered with meaning. I tried to decipher one or two of those layers, but it was impossible.

In an attempt to inject some levity into the atmo-sphere, I said, “Maybe we could just settle here instead of going all the way to Maine. I hear Boston’s nice in the fall.”

Tom’s frigid demeanor instantly thawed. “Christ, Jules,” he said, “I’m sorry. Don’t worry about it, honey. Mom’s just being Mom. She’ll come around.”

“Tommy’s right,” Riley said. “It’s nothing personal. It’s just that—” he slid the aviator glasses back on his face “—nobody’s ever been quite good enough for our boy here.”

The look Tom gave him could easily have frozen water. “Just cool it,” Tom said. “Okay?”

“Whatever you say,” Riley said easily, bending and picking up my suitcases. “After all, you’re the boss. I’m just a lowly chauffeur.” In the rear seat of the Ford pickup, Tom rode in silence. I sat up front with Riley, who spent most of the two-hour drive regaling me with family stories and childhood memories. I half listened to him, made appropriate responses at the appropriate times, but for the most part, as we drove steadily northward through a drizzling rain, I simply stared out the window at the passing foliage. Was northern New England made up of nothing but trees? This had to be the most godforsaken, isolated place on the planet.

What the hell was I thinking? Was it too late for me to change my mind, hop back on a plane and fly home to California?

Not that I would have left Tom behind, not for an instant. But I had myself halfway convinced that we’d gotten it backwards, that I wasn’t supposed to uproot myself and move to the end of the earth. That instead, it was Tom who was supposed to be moving his medical practice to some thriving metropolis nestled snugly in the heart of the sunbelt.

Then, finally, we left the highway. And all my doubts vanished in an instant. Because Newmarket, Maine was enchanting.

I grew up in Los Angeles. But not in the glamorous part of town where the movie stars hang out. We lived in one of the seedier neighborhoods, the kind of place where hookers plied their trade on the sidewalk two stories below my bedroom window. A zillion years ago, my dad used to be Somebody. But when the mighty Dave Hanrahan tumbled with the momentum of a California landslide, nobody even noticed. My dad’s life was one cliché after another.

The bigger they come, the harder they fall.
When he fell, it wasn’t pretty. Not that it was his fault. Life just goes that way sometimes. It’s that old story about the windshield and the bug. When you get up each morning, you never know which one you’re going to be that day. Here’s another cliché.
Nothing
lasts forever.
Take that one apart and analyze it. Does losing it all hurt worse than never having possessed it in the first place?

I don’t know the answer to that question. I just know that, growing up the way I did, I used to dream about getting out of there, about leaving it behind for something better. Just like Audrey in that movie,
Little Shop of Horrors,
I wanted to leave skid row and move someplace that was green. Newmarket, Maine, was that green place I’d spent my childhood fantasizing about.

It was like a postcard from Currier & Ives, or a painting by Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light. The village green, shaded by elms and flanked by white-steepled churches. The picturesque little downtown shops with their mullioned windows and wooden signs. The old-style faux-gas lampposts that lined the brick sidewalks. All of it softened by raindrops on the windshield and the blurred reflections of brake lights on wet pavement.

“This place is lovely,” I said.

“It’s home,” Tom said, the first words he’d uttered in a half hour.

I turned around. Behind me, Tom met my gaze and shot me a wink. I relaxed. Whatever it was that had sent him into a snit, he was over it now. Obviously, there was some kind of long-standing sibling rivalry going on between my husband and his brother, but over the course of the drive, Tom’s customary good nature had been restored.

We left the downtown area and drove down a side street of manicured lawns and dignified Victorian homes. Just as Riley turned the car into the circular drive of a massive white house, the sky opened up, and the drizzle became a pounding downpour. There were several cars parked in the drive, including a silver Land Rover and a powder-blue Caddy of indeterminate vintage. Riley pulled up behind the Land Rover and parked opposite the front steps.

A movement at a second-story window caught my eye. The curtain was drawn aside and for just an instant, a face peered out, pale and chalky against the storm’s dark backdrop. Then the curtain dropped back into place, leaving me to wonder if I’d imagined it.

“This is it,” Tom said. “Home, sweet home.” The house was exquisite. Even through the driving rain, I could appreciate its beauty. I’d taken a course at UCLA in the history of art and architecture, so I recognized the spindles, the balconies, the stained glass and the graceful turret as classic Queen Anne–style architecture. Set back from the street behind a wide swath of green lawn and embraced by a broad veranda, the house was flanked by ancient elms and one enormous pine tree. Hung at precise intervals from the ceiling of the veranda, baskets of pink and purple fuchsias danced madly in the wind kicked up by the storm.

“Damn crazy weather,” Riley muttered. “When I left a few hours ago, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”

“You know what they say about Maine.” Tom fumbled on the floor by his feet and came up with a black umbrella. “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.”

He opened his door, popped open the umbrella, and stepped out of the car. The wind immediately caught the flimsy nylon and aluminum device and did battle with it. Tom danced and ducked like a champion fencer, the umbrella twisting this way and that, before he won the battle. He opened my door and reached in a hand. “Hurry,” he said, rain streaming off his shoulders. “This can’t last long. We’ll get the luggage after it stops.”

Together, we sprinted around the nose of the pickup, skirting the broken pine branches that littered the driveway, and pounded up the steps to the veranda with Riley close behind us. As the rain hammered down on the roof above our heads, Tom closed what was left of the umbrella while I took quick inventory. My feet were drenched, my simple canvas flats probably not salvageable, but the rest of me was relatively unscathed. Except for my hair, which was famous for behaving perfectly fine until the first sign of humidity, at which point I could have been mistaken for Don King’s slightly paler twin sister. I’d hoped to meet my new mother-in-law under more favorable conditions, but there was little I could do at this point.

Besides, it could have been worse. I could’ve looked like Riley. In the twenty-five feet between the car and the porch, Tom’s brother had taken on more water than Lake Michigan during spring runoff. His hair was plastered to his head. Rivulets of water trickled down his cheeks and his neck. He swiped at his wet face with a coat sleeve that only made it worse. Then he shrugged, pulled off the aviator glasses, and shook himself dry like a golden retriever who’d just returned from a dip in the duck pond.

Behind us, the front door creaked open. “Better get inside,” said the woman who stood there, “before the wind blows you away.”

Either I’d misunderstood, or Tom had greatly exaggerated his mother’s imperfections. It wasn’t possible that the graying, matronly woman who greeted us could be the dragon lady he’d described. Nothing about her—from the tightly permed salt-and-pepper hair to the pink pantsuit adorned with rhinestone kittens—fit with the image of the she-devil that I’d been carrying around inside my head. This was Tom’s mother, the terror of the town? The woman who was so hardheaded and difficult? The one who’d blown me off by sending Riley to meet us in her place?

No way.

Over her shoulder, I shot Tom an inquiring glance. He just shrugged. Jeannette Larkin stepped back to study me, and I tried to imagine what she saw when she looked at me: a young woman nearly a decade younger than her son, a little too tall, a little too thin, with dark, frizzy hair and bony knuckles.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I fell far short of Jeannette’s expectations of a daughter-in-law.

Still, I boldly returned her assessment, hoping she’d find me acceptable. For Tom’s sake, if nothing else.

“How was your flight?” she asked.

Relief coursed through me. I’d apparently passed the initial inspection. “Rough,” I admitted. “Very rough.”

“Jules doesn’t like to fly,” Tom said, moving smoothly to my side, “and this storm didn’t help her nerves any. Here, honey, let me take your coat.”

“I’m a bona fide phobic,” I clarified, shrugging off the jacket and surrendering it. “Flying’s at the top of my phobia list, followed closely by anything that slithers.”

Footsteps sounded overhead, and two little girls in matching white sundresses thundered down the stairs. Amid cries of “Daddy! Daddy!” they flung themselves at Tom.

He scooped up the youngest and tossed her over his shoulder. She squealed in protest. The older girl buried her face against his side and clung to him with both arms, as though fearful he’d disappear if she loosened her grip.

Tom lowered the little one to a more comfortable position against his hip and said, “Did you really miss me that much?”

“You were gone forever, Daddy. Did you bring us any presents?”

The older girl pulled her face away from her father’s side just far enough to peer up hopefully at him.

“Presents?” he said, wrinkling his brow as if in puzzlement. “Well, gee, I don’t know. We’ll have to check my luggage. Maybe somebody dropped something in there while I wasn’t looking.” The younger girl giggled, but the elder daughter narrowed solemn eyes and said, “Oh, Daddy, stop being silly.”

“Guess I can’t put anything over on you two, can I?” He adjusted the little girl against his hip, placed an affectionate hand atop the older girl’s head, and turned to me with a grin. “Jules,” he said, “I’d like you to meet my daughters, Taylor and Sadie. Girls, this is Julie.”

I’d thought meeting Tom’s mother was nerve-racking, but this was ten times worse. So much was riding on it. I’d already heard a great deal about his daughters. Like any proud father, Tom had talked nonstop about his girls. Whenever he mentioned their names, his eyes lit up and his voice softened.

A blind and deaf person could have seen that these two little girls were his life. If we were going to have any kind of successful marriage, Taylor and Sadie needed to accept me.

“Hi, girls,” I said. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

Taylor just stared at me, clear challenge in her eyes. Seven years old, she was the spitting image of her father. She had Tom’s dark hair, his narrow face, and his blue eyes, which right now were studying me with a wariness I understood better than most people would. It was the same wariness I’d shown toward the various women my father had brought home over the years. Not quite welcoming, not quite trusting.

The word
stepmother
had such negative connota-tions, and Taylor was no fool. She’d adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude that I found totally understandable.

Four-year-old Sadie, on the other hand, was as guileless and open as a six-week-old pup. There was no trepidation in her eyes, just avid curiosity and a willingness to accept me for what I was, her dad’s new wife. The two girls couldn’t have been more different if they’d come from different parents. Not just in attitude, but in looks. Although I searched Sadie’s face for any trace of resemblance to Tom, I didn’t find it.

Taylor might have inherited her father’s dark good looks, but Sadie, with her peaches-and-cream complexion and her blond curls, must have taken after Tom’s late wife.

She smiled shyly and buried her face against her father’s shoulder. “Hi,” she said.