LITMIR.BIZ

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crazy quilt filled most of the floor space. Pink-and-white gingham curtains fluttered at the single window over her sturdy pine dresser with the rosy marble top. A narrow door beside the window opened to the screened front porch.

      It was a girl’s room, comfy yet spare. Her posters of rock stars had been replaced by paintings of palm trees, but all her old books were still here. She ran her fingers over familiar titles that had carried her through the summers for years: Nancy Drew, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, The Hobbit, Wuthering Heights, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Words that had helped form a young girl’s mind. What books did she need to add to her shelf to help her through this next phase of her life?

      She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and stopped short, surprised at the reflection. It was a surreal moment, one fragmented by time. Back here in her old room, she half expected to see the skinny, stringy-haired child that had once stared at this mirror with tear-filled eyes. That poor, pitiful girl.

      By Southern belle standards, Cara wasn’t considered the beauty her mother was. All Cara’s parts were too big. At five feet ten inches, she was too tall, her body too thin and her chest too flat. Her feet were enormous and her lips too full for her narrow face. And her coloring was all wrong. She used to curse God for His mistake of giving her her father’s tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed genes and Palmer their mother’s small-boned, blond-and-blue-eyed genes.

      Lovie, however, adored her daughter’s dark looks and used to call Cara her Little Tern because of her dark, shining eyes and her glistening, black-crested cap. And sometimes, teasingly, she called her a Laughing Gull, another black-headed bird but with a loud, cackling call.

      Cara leaned closer to the mirror and brought her hand up to smooth the flesh of her cheeks. All nicknames aside, the South of the sixties and seventies was not an easy place for a skinny, unattractive girl to grow up in. But this ugly duckling grew up to be a dark swan. Cara’s once-mocked gangling looks had matured into what colleagues now referred to as “strikingly attractive” and her previously scorned aggressive intelligence was described as “the appealing confidence of a successful career woman.”

      Tonight, however, even those descriptions felt woefully out-of-date. She was neither a child nor a young woman. In her reflection she saw the new fragility of her skin, the fine lines at the eyes and corners of her mouth and the first strands of gray at the temple. She thought with chagrin that she was no longer striking nor successful. Rather, she appeared as tired and sagging as the old beach house.

       I’ll just lie down for a minute, she told herself, turning away from the mirror and slipping from her clothes. She left them in a pile on the floor. Wearing only her undies and a T-shirt, she pulled back the covers and stretched out upon the soft mattress, yawning. Just long enough to rest my eyes.

      The old linen was crisp, and ocean breezes, balmy and moist, whisked over her bare skin. Her mind slowly drifted and her eyelids grew heavy as she felt herself letting go, bit by bit. The life she’d led mere hours ago seemed as distant from her now as the city of Chicago. As her mind stilled, the quiet deepened further. Outside her window, she listened to the ocean’s steady, rhythmic motion, lulling her to sleep, like the gentle rocking of a mother’s arms.

      Her mind floated as helplessly as a piece of driftwood through the turbulence of the past few days’ events that had sent her on this journey. It began on Tuesday morning when her office phone rang and she was invited, without warning, to Mr. David Alexander’s office. Dave was executive vice president of the chopping block. Everyone knew that an invitation to his office was the equivalent of an invitation for a long car ride in the Mafia.

      Why didn’t they just shoot her, she’d wondered wildly as she rode the elevator to the thirtieth floor. She was a workaholic mainlining hours of work and she was about to be cut off from her supply. She’d lost a major account, but that happened in the advertising business. She had a great track record. Wasn’t she already hot on the trail of another account? As she walked through the halls she was aware of an unusual, tense silence in the spread of gray cubicles and cramped offices broken only by an occasional ring of the phone followed by a muffled sob. Empty file boxes lined the halls, and most frightening of all, armed guards stood by the elevators. She swallowed hard and walk stiff-leggedly through the maze of halls and rooms. The rumors were true, after all. Heads were rolling on a mass scale.

      By the time she’d arrived in Mr. Alexander’s office, her body was moist with a fine sweat. She woodenly took a seat. Refused the offer of coffee or water. In the end, there were no surprises. He informed her in his thin, nasal voice that he was terribly sorry but as executive officer, she would bear the brunt of the loss of a major account. While listening to him drone on about the firm’s generous severance package, Cara crossed her legs, folded her hands neatly in her lap and looked out the plate glass window, numb with shock. When the humiliating session was over, she rose, politely thanked Mr. Alexander for his time, told him she would collect her personal things later, then left the building—accompanied by an armed guard.

      She’d gone straight home to her cramped, one-bedroom condominium on the lake. The somewhat shabby space represented every penny she’d saved in the past twenty years. She’d bought it because it was near the water, the last vestige of homesickness after a long exile. Yet it wasn’t the safe haven one returned to when hurt by slings and arrows. It wasn’t a home that marked milestones or greeted family members. These walls held no memories of laughter or treasured moments. With its minimalist style, the cool colors of ice-blue and gray on the walls and upholstery, and the scarcity of personal items, there wasn’t a clue to her personality or interests. Her condo was merely where she went to sleep at night. It was a place to store her meaningless possessions, every bit as stark as a bank vault.

      And it was all she had in the world.

      It was chilling to wake up at forty years of age to find she had no friends, no interests and no investments in anything unconnected to her work. She had delayed too long, put such things on hold until she had time. She had defined herself by her job and now, suddenly, everything was gone and she was back once again in her mother’s house, in the bed she’d slept in as a child, every bit as uncertain at forty as she had been at eighteen.

      Cara wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, feeling the kind of bitter cold that went straight to one’s marrow. The kind that felt very much like fear.

      Sometime later, she wasn’t sure if she was dreaming or if she really felt her mother’s touch at her temple, smoothing back the soft hairs from her face, and a tender kiss placed on her forehead.

      Female loggerheads return home to nest. Is it imprinting or genes that prompts this behavior? Smells or sounds? Perhaps magnetic fields? No one knows for sure.

      CHAPTER TWO

      The South Carolina moon can lull one to sleep with its silvery glow, but the coastal sun is as sharp and piercing as a bugle call. Cara pried open an eye to the glaring shine flowing in from the open window. It took a moment to place where she was and to register the contrast of blaring car horns to the relentless, cheery chirping of birds. The long drive, the lost job—it all came back in a blinding flash. Groaning, she plopped a pillow over her head just as the telephone began ringing down the hall.

      When it became obvious no one was going to answer it, she threw the pillow off, tugged her T-shirt down over her panties, then scuttled like a sand crab down the narrow hall to where the cottage’s single phone rested on a wooden trestle table.

      “Hello?” she answered with a froggy voice.

      There was a pause. “Olivia?” The woman’s voice on the line was high with uncertainty.

      “No, this isn’t Lovie,” she replied, stifling a yawn. “It’s her daughter.”

      “Oh.” Another pause. “I didn’t know Lovie had a daughter.”

      Cara rubbed her eyes and waited.

      “May I speak to your mother?”

      No one had asked her that question in over twenty years. Cara blinked

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