This was her dream. A big old house bursting at the seams with friends and family and music and laughter. Now if she could just figure out a way to make it last, she would have it made.
Why hadn’t she realized before how gifted Deirdre was? Ellen had seen her perform quite a few times over the years, and her smoky, bluesy voice had never failed to delight even though it never made her a star. She had listened to her play the piano, the tenor sax, and the glockenspiel, and she still hadn’t suspected her sister could weave this kind of magic spell.
But this was different. It was as if everything Deirdre had done up until that moment had all been preparation. The lessons. The cabarets. The down-on-their-luck lounges. All of Deirdre’s experience, her heartbreaks, her longing—every single morsel of it spilled out into her songs, into her music, and drew her listeners closer.
The children were enchanted. Hall’s two girls sat at Deirdre’s feet, watching her with a kind of awe that put a lump in Ellen’s throat. Even Susan’s son had stopped fidgeting and tapped his foot to the jig Deirdre was playing. The girls from the youth club swayed gently, arms wrapped across taut middles, dreaming to the music. Susan’s eyes were glossy with tears, and even Sweeney, queen of hard rock, looked as if she might be crying. Scott from Jack’s garage had appeared at the front door a few minutes ago, and he stood there now, transfixed by the music. Pete from the hardware store, Fred, the two Arties, there wasn’t a soul in the room untouched by the beauty of the harp’s vibrant sound.
She met Hall’s eyes across the room. God, how she had missed him today. The quickly shared observations. The laughter. Knowing that there was one person who cared for the women who walked into their office as much as she did, who was ready to fight as hard to keep them well, who would do anything to help them safely deliver a brand-new life into a very tired old world.
Was she going to sacrifice the deep joy of his friendship because she had been unable to capture his complete attention in the bedroom? Today she had had a glimpse of what life would be like without that friendship, and she wasn’t willing to let that happen again. He was too important. His opinions, his ideas, his bad jokes, his tender heart.
As long as they were careful, one day the gossip would fade. Susan would quit shooting her that curious look. Ceil would stop whispering behind her hand over there near the nachos. The men would lose interest in nudging each other every time Hall glanced her way. The town would move on to other issues, like the new road proposed for south of town or maybe the Labor Day fair, and she and Hall would find their way back to friendship.
And it would be enough for her. Like it or not, it would have to be.
Chapter Nine
Deirdre finished playing the last notes of “MacAllistrum’s March.” She always added a gliss right there at the end, one of those quintessential harp flourishes that audiences loved. The room burst into stomps and cheers, and for a second she felt the way she used to feel when she played a great set. Powerful! Invincible! Like all of her dreams were about to come true. Of course, that was back when she believed she was on the first rung of the giant ladder of success and all she had to do was keep on climbing until she reached the top.
Nobody tells you when you’re starting out that the giant ladder of success only has two rungs. The first rung is easy enough to climb. A little guts, a little talent, some persistence, and you can manage to hold on. It was that second rung that was the real bitch. So far up there, so damn hard to reach, that most people spent their whole lives struggling to make it and forgot to enjoy the view while they were climbing.
That was Deirdre for most of her life. Struggling to make it to that second rung while everything else went to hell at her feet. She was a bottom-rung artist, and nothing short of a Saturn 5 would ever put her in position to land at the top. Like father, like daughter. Billy was a bottom-rung performer, too. Great looks, great voice, great performer. But the magic, that indefinable something that sets stars apart from mere mortals, just wasn’t there.
Yet nobody in that room seemed to know that. They were looking at her as if she was one of the Chieftains and her harp a direct descendant of Turlough O’Carolan himself, and she was the only one who knew what a fraud she really was.
Ellen’s eyes were wet with tears. The sight of her sister’s face transformed by emotion was almost Deirdre’s undoing. Come to think of it, they all seemed a little teary-eyed and emotional. She wouldn’t have minded a little sobbing, maybe a few of those “bravas” that the two little girls were given, but tears were good. She could handle tears. She glanced toward the front door, hoping to see Scott the Mechanic’s handsome mug streaked with a few manly tears shed over the beauty of her music.
He was gone. She glanced around the room, poking into the corners, peering back toward the kitchen. Not a sign of him. He must have sneaked out while she was playing. How rude was that? She had wanted to impress the hell out of him with her musical talent, and he hadn’t even hung around to listen. He probably heard those first few girly notes from her harp and ran back to his truck as if a squad of Mary Kay ladies were hot on his heels.
Wimp.
* * *
They were used to Scott by now up on Captain’s Lookout. They nodded in his direction as he reached the top, then went back to looking at the stars. He set up near the western edge of the Lookout, not a prime spot but not bad for somebody who had only joined them eight months ago. Stargazers were a funny group, people who came alive when the sky went dark. They were loners, most of them, whose lives were bounded by the rings of Saturn and the arms of Orion.
Nobody asked any questions. Nobody wanted to know your life story. They just shoved over a little and shared a piece of the sky.
He cleared away some small rocks with the side of his foot and set the tripod down, making sure it was balanced and secure, then screwed the telescope into the armature. The moon was full tonight and he never tired of losing himself in her voluptuous beauty. He had been fifteen the first time he peered at her through a telescope, and the impact on him had been right up there with his first sight of a naked woman. The sense of wonder had never fully left him.
He needed some of her magic tonight, some of that healing wonder, because the memories had come roaring back at him like an angry sea.
Who the hell knew she was going to put on a damn harp concert right there in the middle of Dr. Ellen’s living room? He had driven back to the big house on the hill to give her back her wallet. That should have taken what—two minutes? But she was doing something with the strings of her harp, and there were lots of people milling about, so he figured he would hang around while she played some of that watery music harps were famous for, then hand her the wallet before the last note faded away.
Except it didn’t work out that way. He had hesitated too long. Too late to hand her the wallet. Too late to leave without looking as if he was making a statement. Music didn’t do it for him. It never had. It didn’t matter if it was a Beethoven symphony or a little Brubeck, it was nothing more than background noise to him.
But just when he was ready to tune out for the duration, she placed her hands on the strings and broke his heart. Simple as that. The first notes hung in the air for a second—he could swear he had been able to see them—then zeroed in on him. There was nothing he could do. It was deer season and he was Bambi’s big brother.
Megan would have loved that. She used to laugh about his tin ear for music. The sound of an air wrench gave him as much pleasure as a concerto gave his wife. Sometimes, just to see her amber eyes dance with laughter, he would throw back his head and sing the first song that came into his head. An old Sinatra number. Maybe a little Elvis. Some Bon Jovi. Anything to make her laugh, to make her look at him as if he were the sun and the moon.
Fuck it. He popped the lens cap off the telescope and slipped it into his pocket. Megan was gone. Colin was gone. Memories were a waste of time. All they did was break what was left of your heart.
You learned to deal wi
th pain, to compartmentalize it, to accept it as the new normal, and you were doing pretty good at it until a woman with long red hair breezes into town with a bad car, a big dog, and a goddamn harp of all things and you lose it right there in the doctor’s doorway.
He knew he should have tossed her wallet to someone before he split, but when the pain hit all he could think of was getting out of there. At least he made it to the truck before the dry heaves caught him. It didn’t take much these days to make him grateful.
He bent at the knees and pressed his right eye against the viewer. Ah, Jesus, there she was. Luna rising overhead, glowing and female. He never understood it when people called the moon barren. The moon he saw through his telescope was ripe and fertile.
“She’s bright tonight,” one of the regulars said, his voice lifting softly in the warm air.
He swung around away from the light, focusing in on a web of stars near Cassiopeia. A small grouping of mag 3s called the Cradle. Legend had it that was where the children of the gods slept sweetly in a cradle of stars, warm beneath a blanket of clouds.
He liked to believe that was where they were right now, his wife and his son watching him, watching them.
* * *
“You really need some furniture,” Deirdre said as they finished up the last of the dishes. “I mean, a kitchen table might be a nice touch.”
“I didn’t need a kitchen table in my old place,” Ellen said, hanging the dish towel on the rack beneath the sink.
“You ate on the floor?”
“I had one of those built-in breakfast nooks.”
“How about some radios?”
“They’re on my list.”
“And what about a television?”
“I have a television. It’s up in my bedroom.”
Deirdre made a face. “That little thing? You could only see half of Pamela Anderson on that tiny screen.”
“Half of Pamela Anderson is twice as much as I need to see.”
“I thought you liked television.”
“I do,” Ellen said, “but it’s not high priority. I’m not around that much to enjoy it.”
“Population explosion in Shelter Rock Cove?”
“You’re laughing,” Ellen said, “but you’d be surprised. I’m beginning to think this is the new Fertile Crescent.”
“Let’s hear it for celibacy,” Deirdre said with a self-mocking laugh. “At least that’s one problem I won’t have.”
Ellen wasn’t about to touch that statement. “How does sitting out on the back porch sound to you?”
“If you throw in some of the leftover pizza and a bottle of Sam, I’d say it sounds great.”
Stanley pushed up against Ellen’s leg, and she reached down and stroked him behind his silky ears. “You really are just a giant baby, aren’t you?”
“He likes you,” Deirdre said.
“He seems to like everyone. I can’t believe somebody gave him up for adoption.”
Deirdre crouched down and cradled the dog’s massive head between her hands. “They loved him at the shelter. He would let the little dogs climb all over him like he was a hiking trail.”
“And still they were going to—”
“Simple economics,” Deirdre said with a shake of her head. “Stanley took up a lot of space and ate a lot of food. If I hadn’t come along—”
“But you did.” She kissed the top of Stanley’s head, then laughed as he looked up at her with adoring brown eyes. “So when are you going to ask me, Dee?”
“Ask you what?” Deirdre did an admirable job of feigning ignorance.
“To dog-sit Stanley.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“Oh, come on,” she said, laughing. “You know you were counting on me to come through. That’s why you stopped by.”
Deirdre looked a little bit sheepish but not terribly embarrassed. “I was hoping,” she said, “but I wasn’t counting on it.”
“What if I hadn’t been here? Please don’t tell me you were going to show up at that posh place in Bar Harbor with Stanley in tow.”
Deirdre shrugged her shoulders. The movement made her entire ensemble ripple and flow like her music. “I figured I’d worry about that if it happened.”
There were times Ellen found it hard to believe they shared a gene pool.
“Remember the time Billy piled us all into that rented car and drove us out to see his friends in the Hamptons?”
“Eight hours trapped in that Chevy with Mary Pat moaning about her boyfriend, and when we got there we found the house had been rented for the summer to some movie people.”
“At least they let us use their bathroom,” Ellen said.
Deirdre started to laugh. “And that gave Billy time to try to hit them up for a job.”
“I was so embarrassed I wanted to say I was a hitchhiker and not related to Billy at all.”
“How about now?” Deirdre asked as they carried pizza and beer out to the back porch. “Still feel that way?”
Ellen settled herself down in one of the cushioned chairs and put her feet up on the railing. “I don’t really know how I feel about Billy,” she said after a bit. “Being fourteen is bad enough, but imagine being told that your father wasn’t the kindly Jewish doctor you had known all your life—the one you even thought you looked like, the one you wanted to be like—but a charming Irish Catholic musician with a roving eye.... Let’s just say it’s not my favorite memory.” Twenty years had gone by since the night her world was turned inside out, and she still hadn’t found a way to accept the fact that the people she loved most in the world had deceived her.
“That was a long time ago,” Deirdre pointed out. “You’re not fourteen any longer.”
“A part of me is,” Ellen said. “I think a part of me is always going to be that fourteen-year-old girl who had the rug pulled out from under her.”
“Don’t forget that same rug was pulled out from under Mary Pat and me.” Deirdre took a long pull of Sam. “It’s not much fun to realize your father screwed around on your mother for most of their married life. Doesn’t exactly give a girl a lot of faith in the sanctity of marriage.”
Ellen didn’t know her sister well enough to read her tone of voice, and it was too dark out there on the back porch to see her face. “Your mother stayed with him.”
“Longer than she should have,” Deirdre said. “I’m glad for every one of the five years she had with Tommy.”
“I don’t think Mary Pat would agree with you.”
“Mary Pat sees what she wants to see. I think she still blames you for everything that went wrong between Billy and Ma.”
“Me? My mother I could understand, but why me?”
“Because your existence changed everything. After your mother died and Cy told you he wasn’t your biological father, that gave Billy the right to do what he had wanted to do from the day you were born: claim you as his own.”
“Give me a break.” Ellen took a sip of iced tea. “This is Billy O’Brien we’re talking about. He only wants what he can’t have. As soon as I landed on his doorstep that first summer, he was ready to send me back to Cy on the next train.”
“You were a bitch,” Deirdre said, laughing softly. “A flaming, first-class bitch on wheels.”
Ellen grinned into the darkness. “I was, wasn’t I?”
“You walked in the door, threw your bags on the floor, and said you hated all of us.”
“Please tell me I wasn’t that bad.”
“You were that bad. I thought you were the most exciting thing to happen to this family in years.”
“Right,” said Ellen. “I’m sure you were thrilled to meet me.”
“No,” said Deirdre. “I pretty much hated you as much as Mary Pat did at first, but you were from New York, you had great clothes, and you knew all the latest dances. I caved before that first week was over.”
In some ways it was inevitable that they ended up bonding together the way they had. They were only six months
apart in age and both shared a burden of responsibility neither one deserved. Ellen’s mother had used her pregnancy to try to force Billy into divorcing his wife while Deirdre’s mother had used her pregnancy as a means to keep him from leaving. Two weeks after Ellen was born, Billy told Sharon Cooper that he couldn’t leave his wife alone with two children.
Six weeks later Sharon married Cy Markowitz, and it wasn’t until Sharon’s death the year Ellen turned fourteen that the name Billy O’Brien was mentioned in their house.
“We did have fun for a while there, didn’t we?” Ellen said as the sweet smell of roses and sea air enveloped her.
“We had some great summers,” Deirdre agreed. “Right up until you started med school.”
“Things changed, Dee. If you want to make it through med school, you have to commit to it totally.”
“Unlike music.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You should have. I’ve never committed totally to anything in my life except looking for a good time.”
“I’ve always envied that.”
“Yeah,” Deirdre said. “Sure you did.”
“I’m serious, Dee. I wish I had some of your ability to say to hell with everything and follow my heart.”
“I could give you Antonio’s number.”
Ellen tried to make a joke, but the words wouldn’t come. Sitting there with her sister in the moonlight on the back porch of her new house in a town she had grown to love, she was so filled with emotion that she couldn’t speak.
They were quiet for a few minutes. Stanley, who lay at their feet, grumbled softly in his sleep.
“You slept with your Dr. Talbot, didn’t you?”
“Last night,” Ellen said.
“That’s what you were fighting about in the side yard.”
“We weren’t fighting.”
“It sounded like fighting to me.”
“You eavesdropped?”
“It’s an O’Brien family trait. I’m surprised you don’t recognize it.”
Girls of Summer (Shelter Rock Cove - Book #2) Page 11
