They had rented the only 4-wheel drive the rental company had on hand—a Mercedes SUV. A fun ride if Destiny weren’t so convinced that their car would skid off a bridge and plunge into a river.
How ironic that Luke drove cars off bridges and cliffs for a living! All illusion, of course. Perfectly timed, safety harnesses everywhere, green-screened whenever possible. He said driving stunts were finely honed performance art. His mind divided time into split seconds: accelerate, jerk the wheel, slam the brakes—all in perfect timing.
The adrenaline rush came after, when they cut him out of the safety harnesses and proclaimed we got the shot, man.
“Call her again,” Julia said.
Destiny scrolled to Chloe, pressed Talk. It went straight to voice mail. “Hey, sibling,” she said. “Don’t mean to play stalker, but the skies are dumping white hell on us, and Julia and I want to make sure you’re warm and cozy somewhere. So please, call back.”
Julia’s phone rang. “Maybe that’s her.” She took her good hand off the steering wheel.
“No, drive,” Destiny said. “I’ll get it.” The screen read unknown caller. Must be Chloe, calling from a different phone. “Hello.”
“Is this Mrs. Whittaker?”
She recognized Luke’s voice immediately. “What are you doing, calling this number? And how did you get it?”
“Not Chloe?” Julia’s hand clutched the steering wheel.
“No,” Destiny said. “Give me a minute.”
“Melanie told me Mrs. Whittaker’s name,” Luke said. “And the name of her business. I called that number, got her husband and, after explaining who I was, he gave me this number.”
“Why would you do such a creepy thing?”
“Because you’re ignoring my calls.”
“I’m keeping the line open.”
“I saw something about a blizzard coming into New England. Did you fly out of there yet?”
Destiny could lie and be done with the interrogation. But she liked hearing his voice, even on someone else’s phone. “No.”
“Are you safe? They’re talking power outages, record high tides, natural disaster.”
“I’m cozy. You don’t have to worry.”
Julia glanced over at her. “Who is that?”
Destiny mouthed Luke. “I have to go. I didn’t answer my phone because we’re keeping both these lines open.”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
You’re not here. That’s what’s wrong in all of this. Steering through Tom and Julia and Chloe would have been so much easier with Luke along. Instead, he took off down a path without her.
“Dez. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“My new sister. Chloe. She’s driving out in the storm somewhere, and we just want to know she’s all right.”
“You’re inside somewhere.”
“Yes,” Destiny said. It was warm and comfortable in the Mercedes. As long as Julia could hold on to the road. One-handed. What kind of fools were they? “We just want to hear from her, make sure she’s okay.”
“Okay. I’ll pray that she’s safe and she’ll call soon. Is that okay, Dez?”
“Go for it,” she said.
“I love you. You know that, right?”
Destiny squeezed the phone as if she could strangle the truth out of it. “I have to go, dude.”
“I’m praying, babe. I’m praying.”
She clicked off the phone, stared into the snow.
“So, Luke,” Julia said. “Do you want to talk about him?”
“No,” Destiny said, but she did want to talk about him, so desperately that words came without her willing them. “He’s a bear of a guy. Lovable and tough, almost a cliché except that everything about him is so real. You meet him one minute, next thing you know he’s helping you change out your radiator because you can’t afford to take your car to the garage. Or you’ve been dumped by some loser, and he’s there with a six-pack and a Crock-Pot of stew, and he listens and makes you laugh, and by the time the sun is back up, a new day is there. Or you’re sliding over the line on the blow because Los Angeles is supposed to be golden but it’s turned to rust so you need a little something to get you going each morning and to reassure you when night comes that everything’s going to be all right. You know that nothing’s all right, you know you’re killing yourself one high at a time, and so Luke is there and he’s walking you through each moment while you sweat and curse, and he’s got his arms around you and you know he amps you up better than the cocaine, and you put your arms around him and squeeze the demons out of him until somehow, you’re both different people and you’re going forward together, and life is crystal clear, and you’re clean and this love is solid and works because Luke makes it work, and you’re now in a place where you can make it work too.”
Destiny stopped, couldn’t breathe. She focused on the ruff, ruff, ruff sound of tires on beaten-down snow and the whoosh, whoosh of the windshield wipers.
“Is that what happened to you?” Julia’s voice was soft.
“Maybe. Sure. We both sailed tough seas for a while and we walked out of some tough places together. Everything was going good—we were solid in our careers, we share tight friends. No fakes or wannabes, real people. We ride and hike and he sings and I sometimes draw pictures. We have some charity things that are important to us, especially projects that support wounded veterans. Even my parents, who have never gotten me, got Luke. We had a solid life. And then he walked away.”
“To what?”
Destiny slapped the dashboard. “What do you think? He decides I’m not enough—that we have become not enough—to answer the great why of life. He starts reading the Bible and talking to people and suddenly he’s got this hunger, this light in his eyes, and I’m imagining him being taken down by the people I grew up among who frowned every time I wore a ring in my nose or my jeans were too tight or I got busted at school. And they would pray, as if I was so bad and so sinful that no one in this world could manage what I was, so some nosy fool or concerned youth pastor would make sure I was on a prayer list, and the list would get passed around, and more people would look at my piercings or my spiked hair and give me hugs and smiles and all the time pray, God, she needs to change.
“And Luke begins attending these rocking prayer services. And that was okay because we don’t crowd each other. It was when he took quiet times without me. We used to do quiet time together. Suddenly, he’s got to talk to God and I know he’s praying, God, she needs to change because I’m better now and she’s not. And now he can’t even bear to touch me.”
“Is that what he said?”
“Isn’t that what you’re telling your son? That making love outside marriage is dirty and evil and an abomination?”
“I’m telling my son to hold on,” Julia said. “I don’t have room for much else.”
Destiny pressed her face against the glass. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Did Luke say sex was evil in God’s eyes?”
“We don’t have sex. Not like you did.” The glass fogged up with each word she spoke. “We make love.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I can tell by the way you talk about him,” Julia said. “I know love when I hear it.”
“So speaks the expert in popping out love children.”
“You were blessings. You just had to be someone else’s blessings because we weren’t ready to be the kind of parents that you deserved. I’ve messed up enough to learn that God redeems our past when we trust Him with our future. And I had no other choice but to trust Him with your future as well.”
“Nice words. Luke tried to clothe his removal from our bed with nice words about loving me so much he had to make sure he honored me by not loving me so much. It made no sense, so I told him to shut up. And when I couldn’t bear him so close and yet a promised land away, I decided he needed to get out.
“If he loved me, he would have fought harder for me. Told me what an idiot I was,
and how things really wouldn’t change. You were there, eavesdropping on the whole thing. You saw how meekly he went away.”
“Love sometimes means stepping back. And letting God work.”
“That’s how you people explain anything that goes bad. God is working. Well, I am sorry, Mother, but God just doesn’t work for me.”
Destiny’s phone buzzed. She fumbled to answer it, adrenaline making her clumsy. “Chloe? Where are you?”
“And that’s the question, isn’t it?” the man on the phone said.
“Who is this?” Destiny said.
“This is Jack Deschene. Where is my wife?”
Gloucester
Tuesday, 6:10 p.m.
“We’re easy together,” Rob Jones said. His deep baritone made it impossible to stop smiling. “Are you glad you came, Hope?”
“To Gloucester in a snowstorm? Oh, for sure.”
They’d been chatting for over an hour, talking about school and Julia and what the latest forecast had been—let it snow, let it snow. Rob had made a beeline for her because, as he said it, his eyes found the most beautiful girl in the place. They’d fallen into an easy companionship, driven more by his good humor than her ability to make conversation while her tongue felt tied around her molars.
Rob slid his arm around her shoulders and whispered, “You want to get us thrown out of here?”
“Why?” She jerked back. “What did I do?”
“You said Glou-ches-ter, instead of Glahster. People will know you’re not a townie because you talk wrong.”
“You mean the whole Harvahd Yahd thing?”
“It goes deeper than that, baby. Way deeper. Hold on.” Rob flipped open his phone, typed in WOBURN. “Say that.”
“Woe-burn,” Chloe said.
He laughed. “In this state, we say woo-bun. You can always tell a news anchor from somewhere else because they say the names of towns wrong. Try this one.” He typed in LEOMINISTER.
“Leo-minister. I mean, Leo-ministah. Right?”
“Lem-ins-tah.” Rob wore a green T-shirt, tight enough to show muscled arms and a hint of softness around the belly. His hair was chocolate brown with streaks of gray behind his ears. He was attractive in all the rugged ways she had imagined.
He had ordered Chloe a White Russian—contents unknown but so sweet and creamy she was already on her third. He had ordered himself a Blue Sapphire martini.
“Try this one.” He typed BEDFORD. She leaned closer, felt the heat radiating off his chest.
“Based on the algorithm, I would say Bedfahd.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Because it’s Bedford. You say it like you see it.”
“So there’re no rules.”
“Absolutely no rules.” Rob brushed her cheek with his fingers. “We like it that way.”
A shiver worked up from Chloe’s toes and into her arms. Was she really so hungry for touch that a wisp of tenderness turned her to syrup? “Give me another one.”
“I’ll give you whatever you want.” Rob’s eyes were a pale blue, fixed on her. “Just ask.”
“Give me another one,” she said. “I’ll get it right this time.”
Rob grinned, typed MEDFORD.
“Deductive reasoning implies it’s Medford.” She laughed, the alcohol going straight to her head. It felt good to laugh and not worry about anyone hushing her for being silly.
“Don’t depend on deductive reasoning.” Rob tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, then trailed his thumb along her earlobe. “It’s Mef-fahd.”
“You’re making that up.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Now lay some Carolina on me. See if I get it right.”
Chloe took Rob’s phone and pecked at the keys. “Try this one,” she said.
KISSME.
Tuesday Night
Two hours later Rob Jones was still kissing Hope McCord—between buying her drinks and nachos and listening to the account of her birth mother and newly discovered sister. He had mumbled something like is she as stunning as you and Hope had mumbled something back like one at a time, sailor and they both bellowed with laughter.
At some point in the evening, the bartender flicked the lights on and off. A tribal signal, Chloe decided, like clinking glassware at a wedding reception.
“Hey, folks,” he said. “Everyone’s gone. I gotta close.”
“I thought I’d have time for coffee or something,” Chloe mumbled, panic inching around her haze. “I can’t drive home like this.”
“You can’t drive home in that.” Rob wiped the fog off the window. Chloe couldn’t see anything except the lights on the pier, swinging in the wind.
“We’re in a snow globe,” Chloe said.
“You’re not afraid, are you?”
Was she afraid of betraying the people she had left behind? Or afraid that Rob Jones with his strong hands and sunny laughter would find her as insufficient as her family did?
She pulled away from him and pressed her face to the window. The snowflakes looked like large moths. With each gust, the snow drove sideways.
“Chloe.”
“What? What did you call me?”
“I said Hope. That’s your name, isn’t it?”
The Chloe must have been a product of her guilt. A click of the familiar shackles that bound her to virtues that had more in common with the mounds of freezing snow than the burning in her belly.
Such melodrama, Destiny might say. So what—sometimes it felt good to go with emotion.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to zone out.”
“There’s a motel around the corner,” Rob said.
“I can’t,” she said even as the image of wrapping in a down quilt with him dampened her qualms. “Not tonight. I’m sorry if I led you—”
“Hey, I know, baby. And we won’t. Not tonight. You can’t possibly drive home in this. I’ll get you a room.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll stay with a buddy. I got a couple within walking distance.”
“You can’t walk in this.”
“Honey, I can dance on a boat tossing in thirty-foot swells. A little snow doesn’t faze me. Come on, they need to close up.”
Chloe squeezed her eyes shut and tried to stop the room from spinning as Rob helped her into her coat. Jesus, calm this storm.
“Stay warm,” the bartender said. Rob opened the door and the frigid air hit Chloe like glass shattering across her face.
She slipped and fell. Rob helped her up and held her as she stumbled through the snow. She gasped and breathed in crystal air, then breathed it back to the storm as alcohol.
After a minute, she found herself in a dim motel lobby that smelled like burnt coffee, watching Rob Jones hand her credit card to a man hunched over a Sudoku book.
“Ms. Deschene, could you sign this?” The clerk waved his pen at her.
She wanted to say no but couldn’t. Her tongue felt swollen. Her mind was slow in reminding her why she should object—especially as her body said yes, certainly.
“Chloe,” Rob said. Clearly—but she couldn’t figure out why that suddenly mattered. And why did he slip her credit card into his pocket?
Chloe tried to add one plus one, each time getting Jack and remembering that she had told her sister that Jack didn’t get her. Back into a storm that swallowed her and spit her out onto a brown bedspread that smelled like old cigarettes and she heard a man who wasn’t her lawful husband saying I got you some orange juice.
She was so thirsty that she gulped it down, and then she said I’m hungry and heard the man say I hope so.
And he leaned over her, his eyes suddenly as black as the night beyond the snow. Let’s dance, Chloe. Time for you to dance.
Tuesday Night
Julia couldn’t remember the last time she drove in weather like this. They had left the city in rain and now were in the middle of a near whiteout.
She clutched the steering wheel, thoughts torn between Chloe and steer into a
skid, not against it. The jam outside Boston finally relented and they had made winding progress on Route 128. She stayed in the right lane, tried to follow the tracks of the few idiots still on the roads.
Two Brothers Café in Gloucester was still four miles away. Destiny had used the Reverse Phone Book to find the name that matched the address. By the time they called the place, no one answered. If only they had thought of that before they left the city.
The governor had already declared a statewide snow emergency, something Jack reported when he called. Destiny rolled out the phone-in-the-room story and said Chloe was off with her science friends, “thinking great thoughts.”
“Maybe Gloucester means nothing,” Destiny said.
“Then why did she search for the directions?”
“Why not? We’re making too much of this. She probably just left her phone in her room. We should have ripped the place apart before we got in a car and headed into Snowmageddon.”
“You talked to her. That’s what you said.”
“While Tom was making lunch. That was, like, a million years ago. And stop biting your lip,” Destiny said. “You’re leaving teeth marks. She’s okay.”
“Is that what you really think—that she’s okay?”
“Wrong question,” Destiny said. “What you should be asking is: do you have the right to nose into her business?”
“Hey,” Julia said. “You came along for the ride. So you answer.”
“I asked you first.” Destiny poked her arm. “Mummy.”
“You have more . . . rights isn’t the correct word. You have more responsibility than I do because you’ve got the beginnings of a relationship. I really have none.”
“Nice dodge, considering you’re asking her for a piece of her liver.”
“Asking isn’t the same thing as requiring. I can’t take it from her. I can’t beg her or browbeat her or sweet-talk her.” Julia leaned over the steering wheel, trying to see the guardrail. Her speed topped off at fifteen miles per hour. She flicked the headlights to low beams, cutting some of the reflection off the curtain of snow. The only sign that they were even on a road was from the car tracks, but those were filling in too rapidly. “I’m not asking either of you to do this for me. I’m asking you to do this for your half-brother.”
To Know You (9781401688684) Page 17
