Her Mother's Shadow. Diane Chamberlain

that’s part of what drew you to me. Thinking we had that in common. I’m sorry.”

      “You’re still married?” he asked.

      “No. I’m divorced. But when I moved here—to California—eight years ago, I couldn’t bring myself to tell complete strangers the truth. It was easier to just say he’d died. I didn’t want to have to answer questions about my ex. He was dead to me, as far as I was concerned, so it wasn’t a lie that was hard for me to stick with. Until now. until you.”

      “It was a nasty divorce, then.” He was upset over her pretense of being a widow. She could hear it in his voice, and she didn’t blame him.

      “I want you to know that I’m an honest person,” she said. “I mean, basically, I’m very honest. I do have this one big lie I’ve been living, but please don’t think that it defines who I am. Because it doesn’t.”

      “Tell me,” he said.

      “My ex-husband is in prison for murder.” She had said those words to herself many times, but never, not once, had she said them out loud. They echoed in the huge room.

      “God,” he said. “What happened?”

      She rolled away from him to turn on the Tiffany lamp on the night table. The old, nauseating images were filling her head and whenever that happened, she couldn’t tolerate being in the dark.

      “Are you okay?” he asked.

      She rested her head on his shoulder, swallowing hard against the nausea.

      “Could that be enough for now?” she asked. “Enough of the truth? I still get nightmares about it sometimes and don’t really want to have any tonight.” How could she tell him she had lived in a cramped little North Carolina trailer—and spent time in a battered women’s shelter—when here she was, lying in a $3000 carved cherry bed in La Jolla, trying to fit in with the sort of people she hadn’t even known existed back then?

      “Just tell me one thing,” Jim said. “He didn’t kill your child, did he?”

      “No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”

      “Is it a boy or a girl?”

      “A boy.” A man by now. “His name is Freddy. Fred. We’re estranged. He blamed me for what happened with his father. He thought I somehow drove him to kill someone. After it happened, Freddy and I left North Carolina and moved to L.A., where I had an old girlfriend from nursing school. We moved in with her and I got my master’s degree there. My son was very hard to manage, though. He wasn’t a bad kid. Just … so terribly angry with me. The day he turned eighteen, he moved out. I went to a counselor who said I should practice tough love. You know, let him go, let him make it on his own. So that’s what I did.” She recited the situation with little emotion. She couldn’t let herself feel the pain behind the words or she might fall apart, and she wasn’t ready to do that with Jim. With anyone.

      “And you haven’t been in touch with him since?”

      “I don’t know where he is, and he’s never tried to find me.”

      Jim sighed, rubbing her shoulder again. “I actually had a similar problem with my daughters,” he said.

      “You did?” She had not yet met his adult twin daughters, but she’d seen pictures of them just that night during the house tour. Photographs of the blue-eyed blondes at various ages were on the bookshelf in the den. There were a few photographs of Alice on that bookshelf, too, and she looked just as Faye had expected: well-coifed, well-dressed and glittering with gold. The woman was her opposite, at least on the surface.

      “They didn’t talk to me for a year after Alice died,” he said.

      “Why?”

      It was his turn to hesitate. “They blamed me for their mother’s death,” he said. “I talked Alice into enrolling in an experimental treatment program. I didn’t see that she had much of a chance otherwise, and I think—I hope—she understood that. The girls were furious with me, though. They said I turned Alice into a guinea pig, et cetera, et cetera.” He sighed, and she knew he’d been through quite a battle with his girls. She could only imagine what it had been like for him to endure the loss of his wife and his daughters’ antipathy at the same time.

      “I think they were cruel to turn their backs on you,” she said.

      “They were in a lot of pain,” he said, “but eventually, they realized that I’d truly had Alice’s best interest in mind. So maybe, someday Fred will come around, too.”

      “God, I wish,” she said, struggling not to feel the sorrow welling up inside her. “Every time I see a young man come into the pain clinic, I think of him. Even when they don’t look a thing like him.” Gunshot victims, especially, tugged at her emotions. If it hadn’t been for Annie O’Neill, Freddy might have been one of them himself. She waved her hand in front of her face as if trying to bat away the thought. “I can’t talk about it anymore,” she said.

      She lifted her head to study his face. In the light from the Tiffany lamp, she could see the arc of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the deep crevices that ran from his nose to his chin, and she knew he must be seeing similar flaws on her own face. She should turn off the light. But before she could roll over, he touched her cheek with his fingertip, tracing whatever lines he might be finding there, and smiled. “When you’re ready to tell me more,” he said, “I’ll be here for you.”

       10

      THE KEEPER’S HOUSE WAS QUIET AND CALM AS Lacey and Rick sat at the kitchen table, sipping iced tea and wrapping gifts for Jessica. Sasha slept by the screen door, occasionally opening his eyes to see if Clay or Gina or Rani might be walking through the sand toward the house. It was Clay’s long day at work, and Gina had taken Rani to her toddler swim lessons.

      “Isn’t she a little young for swimming lessons?” Rick had asked when Lacey told him where they were.

      “It’s mostly to get her used to the water,” Lacey said. “She was afraid of it when she first got here. She couldn’t even look at a full bathtub or the toilet without crying.” For reasons they were never to understand, Rani would scream even when approached with a damp washcloth. Gina’s best guess was that her little daughter had been subjected to rough shampooing with harsh soaps, necessary to kill the lice and nits that every child in the orphanage seemed to have. But Rani’s phobia was improving. She let Gina or Clay bathe her now in a large basin, and the previous week, Gina had finally coaxed her into the pool.

      It was at moments like these, when the only sounds in the house were from the ocean and the cicadas, that Lacey realized how much chatter and energy Rani produced. Just a few months ago, Gina had worried there was a problem with her development, because Rani never spoke. One morning, though, the child simply woke up a chatterbox. Not only did she seem to know the right words for nearly every object she encountered, but she also strung those words together in sentences. She may not have been speaking, but she’d certainly been listening. She ran into the kitchen that morning, looked up at Clay, and said, “Daddy, I want you play with me, now!” Gina and Lacey had looked at each other and laughed, but Clay had cried. He had changed so much since Rani came into his life. There was a softness to him Lacey had never expected to see.

      “Should I wrap each of these separately?” Rick held up the three gel pens they had bought for Jessica.

      “Sure,” Lacey said. “It will be more fun for her to have a bunch of things to open, don’t you think?”

      She and Rick had shopped most of the afternoon, picking up small gifts to send to Jessica. Little things like pens and magazines, tiny jigsaw puzzles and one of Lacey’s kaleidoscopes, gifts that could help her while away her time in the hospital. Lacey planned to put all the wrapped gifts into one big box and ship it to her. It had been kind of Rick to go shopping with her, and he’d seemed to get into it, picking up things on his own that he thought someone like Jessica might