Folly Cove (19 page)

Oddly, Elly did. She hated being lied to, even by her own mother. Maybe
especially
by her own mother.

“Hey, I know what we can do tonight,” Kennedy said, shattering Elly's concentration. “We should totally go see Aunt Anne's baby!”

Elly was about to ask Kennedy how she even knew about the baby, since her niece hadn't seen Anne. But of
course
Kennedy would know about the baby. Teenagers were like bats, seeing three times better than humans and using their big ears to echolocate sound waves bouncing off objects.

She'd learned those fun factoids from Ryder, whose last text had included a photograph of him in the outdoor shower, just his head and shoulders showing over the wooden door. Grinning over his shoulder at the camera.
Wish you were here,
he'd texted.

Elly wished she could be there, too, enjoying him. Feeling his hands on her sun-warmed skin.

Now Kennedy was grinning like a demented clown in a horror flick. She'd probably been planning to spring this outing on Elly the minute she heard Laura and Jake were going out tonight.

Elly folded her arms. “Are you actually suggesting that I take you over to see Anne while your parents are out, even though your mom would absolutely, positively hate me for doing that?”

“Mom doesn't have to know.” Kennedy widened her blue eyes in an attempt to look innocent. “Besides, how else am I going to see my new cousin? My
only
cousin! Don't you think I should meet her, even if my mom's mad at Anne for whatever stupid reason?”

“I do.” Elly grinned. What the hell. She was this kid's aunt. Who else was going to teach Kennedy that some rules were made to be broken? “But you can't tell your parents I took you.”

“No duh.”

“Okay. Get your coat.”

A few minutes later, they were parked in front of the Houseboat. Elly knocked on the door. Kennedy was hopping up and down on the porch.

“Will you please stop?” Elly grumbled as Anne opened the door.

Her sister was dressed as casually as she'd been the last time Elly was here, in jeans and a soft gray sweater. Yet she looked different. Maybe it was her hair: Anne had slicked her auburn curls back with a tortoiseshell headband, making her look younger than ever, and she wore long turquoise earrings. Somehow, Anne in jeans and a hairband still looked classier than ninety percent of all other women gowned for the red carpet.

Anne's smile was wide and warm. “Wow! Kennedy! You're here!” She hugged her niece, then stepped back. “Look at you, girl. So tall and gorgeous! Come meet Lucy!”

Kennedy practically fell over her own feet rushing through the door. Anne put a hand on Elly's arm as she followed and whispered, “Is this okay? Did you ask Laura?”

“No, but Kennedy won't say anything.” Elly hoped she was right.

She followed Anne into the living room. She could hear Kennedy in the bedroom, talking a mile a minute to Lucy: introducing herself, commenting on the seashell mobile above the portable crib, picking up various toys and jiggling them.

“I hope Lucy wasn't sleeping,” Elly said. “I'm sorry. This was an impulse thing. I should have called.”

“Don't apologize! I wanted to see Kennedy.” Anne lowered her voice. “But where's Laura? Seriously, how did you get away?”

“She and Jake went to dinner at the club and won't be back until late. You know how it goes there.” Elly rolled her eyes. “Food from the fifties and giant cocktails.”

Anne sighed. “This is so hard, having Laura hate me. I don't even know what's happening in her life anymore.”

“She doesn't hate you.”

“Well, she doesn't exactly love me,” Anne said glumly.

“Give her time.” Elly flopped down on the couch. “Anyway, I'm
staying
with Laura, and I don't know what's going on with her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let's just say that Laura's not the saint we thought she was.”

“Really?” Anne sat beside her and tugged off the headband. Her curls sprang in all directions. Elly felt a twinge of guilt. She didn't want
to betray Laura's confidence. “Look, I can't give you details. Laura really would kill me then.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice to a whisper. “But a classmate from high school contacted her out of the blue. A guy! I think Laura came this close to having an affair.” She held up her thumb and forefinger, an inch apart.

“Oh. My. God. Well, I almost wish she
would
cheat on Jake,” Anne whispered back. “He doesn't deserve her. Plus, then she'd have to stop thinking of me as a trashy skank.”

“Actually, you might want to hang on to that image.” Elly grinned. “Trashy skanks have all the fun in L.A.”

Anne laughed. “Speaking of L.A., how's the job search?”

“Nada.” Elly shrugged. “I'll probably have to go back to really network. Hollywood is all about being in the right place at the right time if you want to work. How about you?”

“I'm not making much progress, either. I have a job interview at a Catholic school in Danvers next week, but I don't know what I'll do with Lucy if I have to work full-time.”

“Hello? Day care?”

“I hate that idea. She's so little. I can barely stand having Flossie watch her.”

Elly patted Anne's knee. “Don't worry. Something will turn up, and it'll get easier to leave Lucy when she's a little older.” She knew this sounded lame, but it was a reality that she and Anne both had to work. They didn't have rich dentist husbands paying the bills.

Or who
should
be paying the bills: Elly was still trying to puzzle out why Laura and Jake were as broke as Laura said.

“What about your love life? Anything new there?” Anne asked. Elly must have reddened, because her sister laughed. “Spill!”

“I will if you will,” Elly said.

Anne rolled her eyes. “Like anybody's going to want me now.”

They were interrupted by Kennedy calling from the other room. “Hey, Aunt Anne, can I pick her up? Lucy's awake.”

Anne and Elly exchanged a grin. “I bet she is,” Anne said. “She's probably all excited about meeting you. Sure, you can hold her. Let me show you how to pick her up.” She stood up and went into the bedroom.

From where she was sitting, Elly could see Anne bend over—just her hips showing through the doorway—and then Kennedy emerged with Lucy in her arms. Wide-eyed at the sight of this new face, the baby babbled, making them all laugh.

“I think she likes me,” Kennedy said, gazing down at her cousin.

Kennedy's round face was softened by a sweep of long bangs. Elly had cut her hair in a shoulder-length blunt cut that emphasized Kennedy's high cheekbones. The girl looked pretty tonight, maybe because she was smiling. How could she not, with a baby grinning at her like she was a rock star?

Elly felt a twist of envy in her gut and had to turn away.

“Want to give her a bottle?” Anne asked. “She's probably hungry again. Lucy eats like a lumberjack.”

Kennedy started to hop up and down, then remembered the baby and stopped. “Can I?”

“Sure. Come on.”

The two of them went into the galley kitchen. Anne took a plastic bag of milk out of the refrigerator, dipped it in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes, then transferred it to a bottle while Kennedy chatted about some class she'd taken in junior high that had required them to carry eggs around.

“The teacher was showing us how much work it is to take care of a baby, so we'd be like all abstinent and stuff, but I
liked
taking care of my egg,” Kennedy said. “I even drew a face on it and made it a little bed out of a Kleenex box.”

“You'll be a great mom,” Anne said. “But you should probably wait a while to have sex. Or at least use birth control, so you don't end up like me.”

Kennedy looked shocked, then laughed. “Yeah, don't worry. The boys in my school are gross anyway. And so boring! All they talk about is farting, video games, and sports.”

“Some boys don't ever grow out of that, sadly.” Anne handed Kennedy the bottle, then glanced at Elly.

Elly had been working hard to keep her expression neutral despite the knot in her throat, but whatever Anne saw on her face caused her
to say, “Kennedy, why don't you feed Lucy in the bedroom? She'll probably fall asleep while you rock her. That would be a huge help to me.”

“Okay,” Kennedy said.

Anne got her and the baby settled, then closed the bedroom door before returning to the couch. “Tell me.”

“Tell you what?” Elly said woodenly, but of course she knew. It was time to tell someone. Besides, she'd never been able to hide anything from Anne, the little sister who had adored her and tried to copy her every move growing up.

Anne the pest. Anne the whiner.

Anne, her sister, who was touching Elly's face gently with one finger now, saying, “Sweetie, please tell me. What's wrong? Why are you crying?”

“I'm not,” Elly said, but then she touched her own face, and damn it. She was.

“Did Laura do something to upset you?”

“No.”

“Jake didn't try anything with you, did he?”

Elly wiped her face on her sleeve. “God, no. He wouldn't dare.”

“What about me? Did I say or do something that upset you?” Anne looked worried, but she kept her hand on Elly's face, her palm warming Elly's skin like a small sun.

“No!” Elly pulled away and stood up. “Do you have any wine around? I could murder for a glass of wine.”

“As it happens, I do. I had some people here for lunch today.”

“Here in the Houseboat?” Elly laughed and wiped her face on one sleeve.

“Sure. Plenty of room, if half the people don't mind standing. As in, half of eight people.” Anne went to the kitchen and poured a glass of red wine for Elly and another for herself. “Maybe if I drink a little more wine, it'll sedate the baby when I nurse her.”

Elly laughed again. This was what she needed: to laugh. Maybe then she could watch Anne holding Lucy without falling apart.

“Now talk to me.” Anne sat down beside her and handed her the wine.

“So there was this guy,” Elly said. “I wanted to forget about him, but I couldn't. Still can't.” She took a few restorative sips of wine.

In the other room, Kennedy was singing “Rockaby, Baby.” She had a sweet voice, nearly as low as Laura's rich alto, with a natural vibrato. Elly slowly started to feel at peace.

Finally she began telling Anne about Hans. “He was the reason I skipped the big Christmas party at the inn two years ago,” she said. “I wanted to spend the holidays with him. I thought I'd met the love of my life. That sounds so stupid now.”

“No, it doesn't. But why didn't you bring Hans here with you? Or at least tell us that's why you stayed?”

“Hans didn't want to come east. And I didn't tell you because I was ashamed to be choosing a man over seeing all of you,” Elly said. “God! So lame. But it's like I was under some kind of spell and couldn't bring myself to leave him. I wanted to be with Hans every second of every day.”

She closed her eyes briefly, picturing Hans so vividly that she could imagine reaching out to touch him even now, in this tiny cottage three thousand miles away.

Hans was a Swedish producer and had the square, top-heavy build of a pugilist. Elly met him on a movie they were doing together. Within a week she'd started spending most nights at his stucco ranch house in the Hollywood Hills, a place with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a canyon where they could hear the coyotes howling at night and where you had to be careful on the back patio because rattlesnakes occasionally sunned themselves around the pool.

Elly was certain she'd met the man she was meant to spend her life with, because Hans was fun and funny, dramatic and sexy, intelligent and inquisitive. Everything she did with him was exciting, whether they were skiing in Tahoe or lying on his living room floor and playing chess. She especially loved the way he placed his palm at the small of her back when they kissed.

“Kissing Hans felt like dancing,” she told Anne.

“Sounds like you were in deep,” Anne said.

“‘Insane' might be a better description,” Elly said, remembering
how sometimes she'd show up at Hans's place in the middle of the night. Even in the rain. Even during wildfire alerts, mudslides, and once during a storm that left her car pockmarked from the hail.

“Was it the sex?” Anne asked. “Was that why it was so intense?”

“Everything was intense with Hans.”

Elly told Anne about their Sunday mornings on Venice Beach and their dinners in Koreatown, and about Hans's love of good cigars and whiskey, his sandy hair, and his eyes that could be the solemn gray of a winter sky or the warm pewter of liquid metal. “I was sure I couldn't live without him,” Elly said, her tears still ridiculously, shamelessly flowing. “Sometimes I still feel that way.”

It was a relief to say this. Anne was the only person she'd ever told about Hans. Not about the beginning of her time with him—all her friends and colleagues in Los Angeles had heard about that, because Elly was so dizzy with excitement that she couldn't keep silent about the start of their affair—but about the horrible, sad, sudden, bitter end of her fairy tale.

“So what happened?” Anne asked.

“I chose to spend Christmas with him two years ago instead of coming home partly because I thought Hans might propose, or at least ask me to live with him. But then he just left.”

“He left you on
Christmas
?” Anne said.

“Christmas Eve, actually,” Elly said.

Hans had called her that morning, saying he needed to go back to Sweden. No explanation.

“Was it a visa issue or something?” Anne asked. “Was he deported?”