Haunting Olivia (2 page)

Olivia’s relationship with her mother had improved in those early months, when Olivia had had something else to think about other than Zach.

Other than the pregnancy. The birth. The news that had come so cruelly.

“Why isn’t it crying?”
sixteen-year-old Olivia had asked the nurse, still unsure whether she’d had a boy or a girl.

“Because it’s dead,”
the nurse had said flatly.
“Stillborn.”

She’d fainted then and had woken up alone in a small, airless room. When the nurse’s words had come back to her, she’d gasped and dropped to her HAUNTING OLIV IA

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knees and then screamed. The same nurse had come rushing in and told her to “stop making such a racket,” that it was the middle of the night.

Her mother was all she’d had after that. Her father couldn’t stand the sight of her after that summer. Her sisters had no idea that Olivia had been pregnant and shipped off to a home for unwed mothers hours up the Maine coast. They had no idea that she’d been forced to put the baby up for adoption. Or that the baby hadn’t taken a single breath. And so Olivia had distanced herself from her sisters even more. Her mother had been an only child, so there were no aunts, no cousins to turn to. Just Olivia and her memories.

Her father’s name had gotten Olivia the job at
Glitz,
and she’d been there ever since. Five years. She’d started as an editorial assistant to Vivian and had been promoted twice. Desdemona had often hinted that Olivia could count on having Vivian’s job, too.

Tears burning her eyes, Olivia set the article aside and glanced out the window of her skyscraper apartment building; flurries blew around in the January wind. Despite the warmth of her apartment and her cozy down comforter, she shivered.

The idea of stealing her boss’s job while Vivian was on maternity leave—a weeklong maternity leave—

made her sick to her stomach. Sometimes Olivia thought about leaving
Glitz,
but crazy as it sounded, she liked her job very much; she was suited to it, and she adored Camilla. Despite the bitching and backstabbing,
Glitz
had provided Olivia with work she loved, structure, a life. And with a mother like Candace Hearn, Olivia had learned to tune out bitching. Backstabbing was another story. Her 14

Janelle Taylor

mother might have had a shrill shell, but inside she was something of a marshmallow. Desdemona Fine, on the other hand, was a shrill shell inside and out.

Out of the corner of her eye, Olivia noticed the red light blinking on her answering machine. She’d been so wrapped up in memories and work when she arrived home that she hadn’t even thought to check her messages.

She padded out of bed and pressed Play.

“Livvy, dear, it’s Mother. I ran into Buffy Carmichael.

You remember, Buffy, darling. She chairs so many charity events. Anyway, Buffy mentioned that her son, Walter, is recently separated, and of course I gave Buffy your number, so expect a call, dear. He’s very wealthy.

She showed me a photo and he’s no Orlando Bloom, but at your age you can’t afford to be picky about looks—only about income. Bye, dear. Oh—I’d really like you to consider changing your mind about tomorrow. I’d really like to be there when you find out what your father left you in his will. Ta-ta!”

Olivia rolled her eyes at the phone. She’d gotten out of bed for that? And why couldn’t her mother talk like a normal person?

At your age
. . . Please. Olivia was twenty-nine!

Young. And she couldn’t care less about a man’s looks or income. Once she’d moved back to New York and started working at
Glitz,
Olivia had numbly dated many different men—grad students, CEOs, a plumber (whose pants did not hang down), a chef, a mechanic, a shrink. The list went on and on. She dated. She had sex. And that was about it. She tried—

really tried—to fall in love with several of the men she dated; she tried to develop real relationships with them, but a piece of her—the most important piece, HAUNTING OLIV IA

15

the deepest piece—just didn’t come out of its hiding place. It had once. With Zach. Maybe you loved like that only once.

She hoped not. She’d last loved like that when she was sixteen. If that was her last hurrah—her
only
hurrah—she was in big trouble.

And no, Mommy Dearest, you can’t come with me tomorrow.
Tomorrow, Friday, January thirtieth, was the day she was to receive her father’s letter from his lawyer. An envelope with her name on it. To Be Opened No Sooner or Later Than January 30.

Olivia had no idea what the date could possibly mean. Why January 30? It was just an arbitrary day, but perhaps it meant something to her father.

Her sister Amanda had already received her inheritance letter a month ago (also on a specific day); it had stated that Amanda would inherit their father’s million-dollar brownstone on the Upper West Side—
if
she followed a bunch of ridiculous and arbitrary rules for a month, such as not looking out of certain windows or going in certain rooms. Her father had even arranged for a watchdog to ensure that Amanda followed his rules to the letter—literally. That watchdog ended up becoming Amanda’s husband. The happy couple—

who donated the brownstone to a children’s charity—was now on an extended honeymoon.

Olivia was so happy for Amanda. She was still getting to know Amanda and Ivy, her other sister, who was engaged.
Both my sisters are getting on with their
love lives, and I’m stuck getting fixed up by my mother.

She had no idea what her father had in store for her—or if she’d bother jumping through his hoops. He owned only two other properties: a cot-16

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tage in Maine and an old inn in New Jersey. He wouldn’t leave her the Maine house. Not after what happened there.

The summer she had turned seventeen, Olivia had gone back to her father’s cottage for her annual summer vacation with him and her sisters. It had taken so much out of her to agree to the trip. But Zachary hadn’t been in town. His family had moved away, she’d heard. No one knew where. She kept hoping she might hear something of what became of him, but no one knew. And no one really cared. Zach Archer, whose father was famous for falling down drunk in the middle of the street during the day, and whose mother was famous for sleeping with other women’s husbands for small favors, didn’t have much of a chance in Blueberry, Maine, a coastal town of wealthy year-rounders and summer tourists. When Olivia had known him, people liked to shake their heads and say, “That poor kid.” Zach had hated that.

Perhaps William left me the New Jersey house,
Olivia thought, heading into the bathroom. She’d never thought of her father as “Dad”; she’d always referred to him as her father, or William. She had called him dad just once, thinking it might soften him, make him see inside her, listen to her, but it hadn’t.

Anyway, she was sure the bequest would come with some silly rules about doors to open and windows not to raise. Maybe she’d accept the terms of the will and donate the house to a charity close to her heart, as Amanda had done with her inheritance. Olivia would probably have to spend a month at the house—and the idea of spending a month in her father’s world made her faintly sick—but she could always commute to Manhattan from New HAUNTING OLIV IA

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Jersey. She’d need more time to handle all her boss’s work while she was on maternity leave anyway.

Olivia headed into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and took out the jar of $100-an-ounce cucumber nighttime moisturizer that Camilla had swiped for her from the beauty department’s goodie bags (the magazine got so many expensive freebies). She breathed in the fresh scent and looked at herself in the mirror. At times like this, when her face was fresh scrubbed and her hair was down (she liked wearing chignons at work) and her elegant outfits were replaced by an old “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” T-shirt and her comfiest yoga pants, she could still see the sixteen-year-old girl she was before her life changed forever. Before she began spending a part of every day in a playground—

sometimes just a few minutes, sometimes hours—

just to imagine what her baby might have grown up to be like at every stage, every age.

Chapter 2

What Zachary Archer needed was a guidebook:
How to Deal with Your Thirteen-Year-Old Daughter without Scarring Her—or Yourself—for Life.
Until now, he’d been doing fine as a single parent. More than fine. Great. If he did say so himself. He’d gotten through Kayla’s infancy and the terrible twos and the first day of school and her first broken bone and her first crush on a boy.

He’d even gotten through her first menstrual period, through an embarrassing ten-minute analy-sis of the feminine protection aisle (what the heck were
wings?
) of a drugstore before a grandmotherly type saved him, loading up his basket with brightly colored packages and boxes.

He had no idea
how
he’d gotten through it. A few months ago, Kayla had come running out of the bathroom shrieking, crying, clapping her hands:
“I
got it! I got it! I’m not the last of my friends, after all!”
At his perplexed expression, she’d said,
“Duh, Daddy,
my period!”

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But you’re just a little girl!
he’d thought frantically, wondering how his baby had grown up so fast.

His first thought had been to call Marnie, his girlfriend, and ask her to bring over the necessary items and show Kayla how to use them, but before he could even mention Marnie’s name, Kayla had screeched,
“If you tell whatshername I’ll never tell you
anything again! Swearsies you won’t tell Marnie! It’s my
private business!”
By the time he’d returned from Rite Aid, Kayla was locked in the bathroom with a girlfriend and had half yelled, half laughed through the door that she didn’t need his help.

He’d gotten through all that. He’d get through her first cigarette.
Repeat, repeat, repeat,
he told himself as Kayla got into his SUV, a little too okay with having been suspended from school.

First cigarette. Ha. First cigarette he
knew
about.

“You can’t ground me, Dad,” Kayla said, twirling a long, blond spiral curl around her finger as she stared out her window. “I’m
already
grounded.”

At the moment she was actually
thrice
grounded.

For purposely pushing a girl at the ice-skating rink, which had resulted in a badly twisted ankle. For telling the six-year-old boy two houses over that she was sending a monster to eat him at night and soon there would be nothing left of him but his finger-nails. (Apparently, the Herman family had suffered through three sleepless nights before little Conner told them why he refused to close his eyes.) And for this tidbit to his girlfriend while he went to pay the check at a “give Marnie a chance lunch”: “My dad doesn’t love you, you know that, right? He told me it was just a sex thing—whatever that means.”

“
Do
you love me?” Marnie had asked later, which was 20

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what had driven him to ground Kayla for
two
weeks instead of the one he’d been planning. Whether or not he loved Marnie wasn’t a question he wanted—or was ready—to answer. Or that Marnie would have asked without Kayla’s dig.

Which meant that Kayla was grounded for four weeks. Of course, he’d lost track of when the punishments started and ended. And he had no clue where to fit in punishment for being suspended from school. Suspended. Even he himself, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, the kid from whom bad behavior was
expected,
had never been suspended from school. He let out a deep breath.

In the middle of an important meeting with a potential client, Zach had received a phone call from Blueberry Middle School’s assistant principal.
Your
daughter has been caught smoking on school property for
the second time. She’s therefore suspended for one week.

And so he’d postponed his meeting—good thing the client was a parent herself and assured him they’d reschedule—and driven down to the school and sat in a stuffy room with a sullen, defensive Kayla; the gym teacher who’d caught her red-handed in the second-floor girls’ bathroom; and the assistant principal, who’d reminded Zach that she’d had to call him in to discuss Kayla’s behavior six times since the school year began.

So much for the New Year’s resolutions he and Kayla had made a month ago. Getting her to sit down and think about what she wanted from the coming year was hard enough, but she’d actually gotten into it, disappearing into her room, door closed as usual, music blaring. The next morning she said she had made her list but it was private.

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“Is one of them for you to try to accept that I’m dating Marnie?” he’d asked.

“No,” she’d said, grimacing, her hazel eyes narrowed. “Definitely not.”

He’d handed her a plate of scrambled eggs and toast. “Well, share
one
of them.”

“Okay,” she had said. “I resolve to make a certain boy, who’ll go nameless, like me by spring break.”

That
he wasn’t so sure he would get through.

Now, as he pulled out of the school’s parking lot, Kayla’s triumphant smile over getting out of school for a week turned into a frown. “She thinks she’s so great,” Kayla said, staring out the window at a blond girl getting into her mother’s car. “Just because she’s popular. She’s only popular because she has big tits.”

Oh, God. Zach let out a deep breath and silently counted to ten, willing the powers that be to give him strength to get through the next—what? Five years? Ten?

“Kayla, I’d appreciate it if you’d use the proper words to describe parts of the body,” he said. “Your body is something to respect, not to put down.”

“Fine,
breasts,
” she said.

Why was Kayla so comfortable talking about
tits
with him anyway? Shouldn’t she be fidgety and uncomfortable?

He really needed that guidebook.