Haunting Olivia Page 3
Brianna glared at Kayla. “It’s not a joke. The pageant is for girls from thirteen to seventeen who possess remarkable inner beauty. Girls who know that real beauty is inside, not just outside.”
Marnie nodded. “That’s right, Brianna.” She turned to Kayla. “I heard that your mother won when she was fifteen.”
Zach almost choked on his bite of garlic bread.
Tell me she didn’t just say that. Please.
Kayla stared from Marnie to Zach. “My mother?
My mother won the Inner-Beauty Pageant?”
Marnie’s cheeks reddened. “I thought you would have . . .” She trailed off. “Mmm, that garlic bread smells heavenly! Sweetie, could you pass me the basket?” she asked Kayla.
“You didn’t even know your own mother won the pageant?” Brianna said to Kayla. “How weird is that?”
Kayla threw the basket of garlic bread at Brianna, clocking her on the chest, and then ran upstairs.
Zach closed his eyes for a moment.
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“What a freak!” Brianna screamed. “I can’t believe her! This shirt is ruined.”
Her shirt was the least of what was ruined.
“Brianna Sweetser, apologize right now!” Marnie said. “To Zach and then to Kayla.”
“It’s all right,” Zach said. “It was a reasonable question, Brianna.” He could tell that Marnie was hoping he’d elaborate on the subject of Kayla’s mother, but he didn’t. He’d told Marnie a little about Olivia, that theirs had been a teenaged summer romance, that he’d been a punk kid then and Olivia, who’d won the Inner-Beauty Pageant, had somehow seen something in him.
As for Kayla, he’d prepared an answer for her when she’d first started asking in earnest about her mother.
She was very young when you came along, too young to be a mom, and she wanted you to have the very best life, so she did the responsible thing and gave you to me to take care of.
That wasn’t close to what had happened, but it was the only version of events he could bear to tell his daughter.
But weren’t you also ver y young—too young to be a dad? had been Kayla’s question. Why didn’t she ever come back? Why? How could she just walk away and never look back?
Those were questions he couldn’t answer. Not at four, when the questions started in earnest. And not now.
As Brianna headed upstairs to knock on Kayla’s bedroom door to apologize, Marnie rushed over to him and sat down on his lap. What he wouldn’t give for a half hour alone with a naked Marnie, to lose himself 30
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inside her, to forget everything, just for a little while.
But tonight was going to be about damage control.
He breathed in her sexy perfume as she trailed kisses along his neck.
“Sorry about all that,” she whispered. “They’re at such a tough age, and Kayla must have so many questions about her mom.”
He took a deep breath. “I think we’re going to have to make this a short night. I need to get up there and give her some answers.”
“You know,” she said, pressing her breasts against his chest, “when you’re ready, I’d like to have some of those answers too. There’s so much about you I don’t know, Zach Archer.”
At the sound of Brianna’s footsteps coming down the stairs, Marnie scooted off his lap, and he missed her warmth and perfume instantly.
“I said I was sorry and really sorry and double sorry, like, three times,” Brianna said, “but Kayla told me to go away and wouldn’t open the door.”
“Sweetie, why don’t we pack up two portions of this delicious dinner and eat at home,” Marnie said to Brianna. “I think Zach and Kayla need some time alone to talk.”
Score one for Marnie. He’d never appreciated her quite so much.
Chapter 3
Olivia darted up in bed, the dream already fading. The boy and girl, standing side by side, staring at her with unreadable expressions, were gone.
No matter how she tried to hold their faces in her mind, she could never fully remember them. She’d been having the dream for years, since she’d been pregnant. The boy and girl, around three or four in this dream, never spoke. The girl wore a bathing suit, pink with yellow flowers on the straps. The boy was holding a stuffed cow.
In the dream, Amanda always gently asked them if she could help them, if they wanted something, but they just continued to stare. The boy held out the cow, but just as Olivia reached for it, the dream ended, as it always did.
When she was pregnant, she thought the boy and girl represented her unborn child, since she didn’t know the sex. She’d asked, of course, but the nurse had told her she’d be better off not knowing.
Mostly Olivia agreed with that one. Knowing would have been too painful.
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I wanted you, she always said to the dream children. I wanted to keep you, I really did.
But I signed your life away to another family, a family that could take much better care of you than I could at sixteen. A family my mother and father both promised would love you as though you were their own. Olivia remembered how much that comforted her during her pregnancy and the birth.
But then the baby had been stillborn.
A skinny pigeon settled onto the snow-dusted windowsill of Olivia’s bedroom, and she forced herself to pay attention to its darting head, its tiny feet.
Anything to put her thoughts out of reach. The bird flew away, and she glanced at the clock. It was just after six in the morning. Which left three hours to wonder what she’d find in the envelope she’d pick up today from her father’s lawyer.
What would her father bequeath to her? To the daughter who “disappointed” him? Perhaps he wanted to continue punishing her for “running around like a slut with a loser kid.”
Her mother had asked her a hundred times what she thought might be in the envelope, as if Olivia could possibly know. “You might have ruined your chances with him because of getting pregnant as a teenager,” her mother had ruminated earlier that week. “But the stillbirth probably fixed everything for him. He wouldn’t have to think of some grand-kid out there who’d one day try to lay claim to his money.”
Olivia shook her head. She had some set of parents. As self-serving as two people got. You’re so much nicer than we thought you’d be, was a refrain she’d HAUNTING OLIV IA
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heard her entire life upon meeting people who knew her mother and father.
Olivia pulled the covers over her head with a sigh. Whenever she had the dream, usually every few weeks, she had a really crappy day. The last time she’d had the dream, she’d returned home from work to find a message on her answering machine from her father’s lawyer, which was how she’d been notified of her father’s death. The lawyer had assumed she knew, of course. She hadn’t known.
She’d come home that evening, pressed Play, heard the words, and the air had gone out of her lungs.
And then she’d cried.
Which meant she did care about William Sedgwick. Was affected by him. Despite how hard she’d tried over the years to pretend it didn’t matter that her father didn’t want to be a father, didn’t want to know her or her sisters.
Interestingly, before she’d gotten pregnant, he seemed to favor her over her sisters. She was the golden girl, “the beauty,” as he called her, the daughter who had preppy assholes with roman numerals after their names lined up to date her in New York and Maine. The daughter who won the Inner-Beauty Pageant as well as “belonged on the cover of a magazine.” But favoring her meant only smiling at her when they passed in the house during the two-week summer vacations she spent in Maine with her sisters. Amanda and Ivy seemed to get nods or absolutely nothing. Olivia didn’t even know why he bothered inviting them every summer from the time they were toilet trained. But he did.
I wish my sisters were around today, Olivia thought, 34
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It was just a white envelope, legal size, exactly like Amanda’s.
Olivia spent just a few moments in the lawyer’s office, signing for the envelope, and then left with it unopened in her purse. She took a taxi to the offices of Glitz magazine, then rode up in the elevator to the twenty-second floor, said hello to the recep-tionist and her coworkers, and headed into the kitchenette for some coffee, as she always did.
“Bitch Face is on the warpath,” Camilla whispered to Olivia. “Stay out of her way.”
Olivia nodded, pouring a cup of coffee for herself and a cup of decaf for her boss, Vivian. Olivia wanted to have a talk with Vivian, explain that she wasn’t angling—
“You little bitch,” Vivian screeched at Olivia as the woman suddenly appeared in the doorway of the kitchenette. “You angled for my job and now you’ve gotten it. Congratulations. I’ll send a pitchfork as a gift.” Olivia had never seen Vivian so furious.
“Vivian, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Olivia said, her heart racing. “Angled for your job?”
“Cut the goody two-shoes crap,” Vivian spit out.
“Desdemona just fired me. Don’t act like you don’t know.”
Olivia stared at Vivian. “Fired? But”—her eyes HAUNTING OLIV IA
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dropped to Vivian’s belly—“she can’t fire you—
you’re—”
Desdemona’s assistant appeared in the kitchenette.
“Ah, there you are, Olivia. Desdemona would like to see you right away.”
Vivian stalked away.
“Vivian, wait!” Olivia called, but Vivian didn’t even turn around.
“Desdemona is waiting,” clipped the assistant.
Olivia followed the tall, thin woman into Desdemona’s huge corner office, which was larger than Olivia’s entire apartment.
“Ah, congratulations, Olivia. You’re Glitz magazine’s new features editor. You’ll now be reporting directly to me. Sit. We need to discuss how you’ll handle the transition. Today is Vivian’s last day, and as her employment has been terminated, you may move into her office and adopt her Rolodex.”
So it really was true. Desdemona had fired a long-term staffer on the eve of her maternity leave. A long-term staffer who’d been very good to Olivia from day one. Vivian had never cared that Olivia’s father was William Sedgwick. She never tried to use Olivia’s supposed connections. And she treated Olivia the way she treated everyone—with respect and professionalism.
“Actually, Desdemona,” Olivia said, taking a deep breath, “if you’d taken the time to actually offer me the position, I would have declined it.”
Desdemona glanced up so sharply that her ubiq-uitous Glitz mug of tea spilled on her desk. Her assistant rushed to mop up the mess. “You may go, Eleanor,” she snarled.
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“I can’t work for someone who’d fire a wonderful person and a top-notch employee when she’s nine months pregnant,” Olivia said. “I learned everything I know from Vivian. I owe her something.”
“You’re an idiot,” Desdemona said. “You owe her nothing. You don’t owe anyone anything. Spineless bleeding hearts don’t have a place at Glitz anyway.
Good day, Olivia. Eleanor will escort you out. You have five minutes to collect your personal posses-sions under supervision.”
As a personnel assistant and Desdemona’s assistant watched with eagle eyes, Olivia took only one thing from her desk: a framed photograph of the three Sedgwick sisters taken a month ago at her sister Amanda’s wedding. Everything else she left behind.
Olivia sat on the same bench in the same playground she’d visited the day before, this time more intent on the photograph on her lap than on the children playing.
Now that she’d quit Glitz (actually, she wasn’t sure if she’d resigned or gotten fired), the two other women in the photograph felt like all she had. And she barely had them. They were her sisters, yes, her half sisters. She hadn’t grown up with them. She barely knew them. Until last month, the three Sedgwick sisters had rarely spoken. They hadn’t been raised to be close, and so in adulthood they’d been wary of each other, a trait their mothers had in-stilled in them since toddlerhood. Well, Olivia’s and Ivy’s mothers, anyway. Amanda’s mother had HAUNTING OLIV IA
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been very kind and not the least bit competitive, but she’d passed away years ago.
Olivia glanced at the photo. The three sisters had the same eyes, almond shaped and blue, like their father’s, but the similarity ended there. Olivia’s hair was blond and straight. Amanda’s hair was brown and wavy, and Ivy’s was short with an auburn cast.
As the eldest sister, Olivia felt as though she should do something to bring the sisters closer, but what? And how? Amanda now lived in Maine with her new husband and her adorable year-old son, Tommy, from a previous relationship. Ivy lived in New Jersey, almost two hours’ driving distance from Manhattan, and her job as a police officer and her wedding plans (she was engaged to be married in March) kept her very busy.
Her cell phone rang. Olivia glanced at the Caller ID. Her mother. For the fourth time this morning.
“Hi, Mom. No, I haven’t opened the envelope.”
She’d almost forgotten all about it.
“What the hell are you waiting for?” her mother yelled in her ear. “Open it!”
“I’m afraid to,” she said, surprising herself with her honesty. She rarely felt she could be honest with her mother.
“Honey, there’s nothing in there but property or a pile of money. I’m sure your father left you something of equal value to the brownstone he bequeathed to Amanda. Millions!”
“Amanda and Ethan donated the brownstone to a children’s charity,” Olivia reminded her mother.
“Maybe I’ll do that with whatever William left me.
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Do I really want to inherit anything from a man who couldn’t bother being my father?”
“He was your father when it counted, Olivia,” her mother snapped. “When you were in trouble, he stepped up.”
Her mother never said the actual words: when you got pregnant. Nor did she ever mention the home Olivia had been sent to, the lies told to distant relatives and friends and school administration. And the birth—it was as though it had never happened.
“Stepped up or took care of business?” Olivia asked. “He did what was good for himself. He was embarrassed and he ‘handled’ what he considered a problem.”
“Olivia, there’s no need to rehash the past. Your father owes you for being an absentee father. Take the money and buy yourself a beautiful apartment.
You might even have something left over for your dear mother.”
Olivia smiled. She could always count on her mother for honesty, that was for sure.
“Mom, when I open it, I’ll call you first thing, okay?”
Having extracted a promise from Olivia to open it today (which she was legally bound to, according to her father’s lawyer), her mother harrumphed and hung up. Olivia put her phone and the photograph away and took out the white envelope, turning it over in her hands.
“My ball!”
Olivia glanced up to find an adorable little girl, around four, racing toward her. With her white HAUNTING OLIV IA
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blond hair, blue eyes, and heart-shaped face, she could be Olivia’s own child.
Except that her child, had he or she lived, would now be thirteen. And he or she would have inherited some of Zach’s features and coloring. His thick sandy brown hair or his intense hazel eyes. His dimple or his cleft.
She hadn’t even had the chance to hold her own baby, see him or her. She’d never know what their baby had looked like. Tightness squeezed her chest and she shut her eyes.
“My ball! Under bench!”
Olivia opened her eyes to find the blond girl almost in tears, pointing under Olivia’s bench.
“Don’t worr y, sweetie,” Olivia told her. “I’ll get your ball.” She kicked it out with her foot and the little girl scooped it up and ran back to her mother, by the slide.
Before she could procrastinate another second, Olivia slit open the envelope. Inside was a letter, just one page, typed and signed by William Sedgwick.
Dear Olivia,
I bequeath to you my beloved summer cottage in Blueberry, Maine, where you and your sisters spent vacation each summer, albeit just a bit of each summer, as a family. In order to inherit the cottage, you must live in Blueberry for at least one month and you must go into town at least once per day and buy one item each from two different establishments.
Upon completion of the thirty-day stay—the house’s caretaker will stop by each morning at 8 A.M.
for you to sign and date a roll sheet and to collect your receipts—and a tally of your receipts by my 40
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lawyer, Edwin Harris, you will inherit the cottage and a lump sum of money to be disclosed at that time.
You may pick up keys to the house from Edwin, who has a copy of this letter. Should you not spend thirty days in Blueberr y, Maine, or buy one item each from two different town establishments (you’ll love the blueberry scones and Rocky Coast coffee at the Blueberry Eat-In Diner), you will forfeit your inheritance, including the cottage and the lump sum of money, which I assure you is generous.
You may not want to go to Blueberry, Olivia. In fact, I’m sure you won’t want to. However, if you do go, your every dream will come true. On this you can trust me.
Your father,
William Sedgwick
Olivia crumpled up the letter and tossed it in the garbage can a few feet away. And missed, of course.
She picked it up and angrily stuffed it in her pocket. Her dreams? What would William Sedgwick possibly know about her dreams? She spent two weeks a year with him—and of those two weeks, she saw him about two hours a day. During the past thirteen years, she’d rarely seen him. A handful of times, maybe.
Why in the world would he think she would ever go back to Maine, the place where all her dreams were destroyed? Where she fell in love for the first time and where her heart was broken. Where she was banished, hours up the coast on an island to live out her pregnancy alone. Where she gave birth to a baby who hadn’t drawn a breath.