and good friends before Mara’s aneurysm, but Joelle quickly became his main source of support afterward. She shared his grief. She could get inside it with him because she loved Mara, too. She understood the reality of what was happening. She knew what the future held for Mara, as well as for him, and she let him talk about it, opening the door to his fury, and sometimes his tears. Not like Sheila, who never, not once during the past fourteen months, acknowledged Liam’s dilemma of having a wife, yet having no wife.
“Because she’s Mara’s mom, Liam,” Joelle had said to him. “She’s too busy seeing what’s happening to her daughter. She can’t see how it’s affecting you. Give her time.”
But he feared Sheila would never understand, no matter how much time passed. She had cared for her cancer-ridden husband for five years at home before his death, sacrificing her needs to take care of his, and Liam knew Sheila expected nothing less of him.
Liam and Joelle had never directly addressed what was happening to their relationship, but they grew closer over the months, stopping in each other’s offices at work for a bit of conversation and talking on the phone every night. Most of the time, he would call her. Other times, it would be the reverse. Either way, those calls became a routine, and if for some reason he wasn’t able to talk to her before going to bed, he would lie awake for hours before he could fall asleep.
They taught each other to smile and laugh again. To a grieving person, nothing was more seductive than laughter. Then there were the hugs, of course, the comforting embraces between good friends. At some point, though, those hugs became longer, tighter, followed by lingering touches. Her fingers would slide over his shoulder or wrist, his hand would brush an eyelash from her cheek.
He missed her. He missed talking to her every night. There was a vacuum around him at night now, after Sam fell asleep and he was alone with his thoughts.
He looked over at the phone on the night table, then shook his head. If only he hadn’t allowed things to get out of hand, he could still have that friendship with her, that wonderful relief of confiding in someone and being heard. But there was no going back. He knew better than that. Just eating lunch across the table from her in the cafeteria set up a guilty longing in him. He loved Mara deeply, but sometimes what he felt for Joelle went even deeper, and that scared him.
Reaching behind him to the bookshelf, his fingers found the book of meditations she’d given him. He leafed through it, Sam still asleep on his chest, looking not for a particular meditation, but for the picture he kept tucked between the pages. The photograph made him smile when he found it. He and Joelle had taken Sam to the Dennis the Menace Playground, more for their entertainment than Sam’s, because he was far too young to make good use of the park. Most of the photos from that day were of Joelle and Sam together, but in this one, Joelle was alone. She sat cross-legged on the ground near the playground’s giant black locomotive, grinning, her chin raised in a way that gave her a teasing, insolent look. Like Mara, she was dark-haired and dark-eyed, but that was where the comparison ended. Joelle looked like a kid. She’d worn her thick dark hair in braids that day, and her grin in the picture was wide and uninhibited. She was not a kid, though, but a flesh-and-blood woman, with a woman’s body and a woman’s heart.
Liam glanced at the phone again. What would it hurt if he called her to thank her for coming to the E.R.?
No, no, no.
Lifting Sam into his arms, he headed toward the nursery. He would have to take something to help him sleep tonight. Otherwise, chances were good he would do something else he’d regret.
9
Cypress Point, 1946
CARLYNN KLING HAD A GIFT, THERE WAS NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. By the time she was fifteen, nearly everyone on the Monterey Peninsula had heard of her. Some believed in her unique abilities; some didn’t. But believers or not, everyone knew that Carlynn Kling was not your average fifteen-year-old girl. In addition to her gift of healing, she was a stunning beauty, slender and very blond, who turned the heads of everyone who saw her.
Lisbeth Kling, on the other hand, seemed nearly invisible in her averageness. By fifteen, she was old enough to pick her own style of dress and hairdo. She chose to wear her hair exactly as Carlynn did—in the style of Veronica Lake, parted on the side, with long, flowing blond waves that partially blocked the vision of one eye. But Lisbeth had gained weight since becoming a teenager, and although she emulated Carlynn’s style of dress and hair, she did not project the same attractive and confident image. She envied Carlynn, a jealousy that might have turned ugly and set sister against sister, had the love between them not been so strong.
Every weekend, Delora drove Carlynn to the Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco, where the teenager made her “rounds.” They visited the patients, some of whom had lost limbs, some of whom were dying, and some who would make a full recovery in time. Carlynn touched them and talked to them, amazing even her mother with her composure and poise in the midst of such a horrific setting. Often, Carlynn eased the men’s pain, and sometimes she caused their wounds to heal faster. She seemed fascinated by the medical history of each man, and she questioned any nurse willing to talk with her to glean more information about the soldiers. She’d want to know the extent of their injuries and what sort of treatment they’d been given, and she’d listen closely, asking intelligent and appropriate questions. Soon, she had the nurses, themselves, requesting that she see specific patients.
Of course, none of the physicians had any faith in Carlynn’s gift, and she made her rounds not in any formal capacity, but merely as a visitor. The soldiers knew that when she touched them, though, something happened. There was magic in her touch, they said, and in her words. Her voice was soft and even, and occasionally it rang out with laughter. The anguish that the soldiers’ war experiences had left inside them seemed to dissipate during Carlynn’s visits. The doctors, though, joked that any girl as beautiful as Carlynn was sure to have a healing effect on young men deprived of women’s company for so long.
Lisbeth knew, probably better than anyone, that it was truly Carlynn’s touch that made the difference to those men. She possessed the same voice as her sister, and except for her weight, a very similar beauty, yet she knew that if she were to walk through the VA hospital, enter those rooms, touch those men, she would not have the same impact on them. She would be useless. That was how she felt much of the time. Useless. Invisible. At least, in everyone’s eyes save her father’s.
Franklin did not like Delora drawing so much public attention to Carlynn’s gift. He knew his daughter’s healing ability was real; he had seen too many examples of it to deny it. She had once cured an excruciating case of shingles that had cropped up on his back. He would never allow her to heal his colds or headaches because it seemed wrong to him to accept the gift from his own daughter. But the shingles had made him desperate, unable to sleep or even sit in a chair without gritting his teeth against the pain, and he would have done anything to end that anguish.
But Franklin worried the outside world would see Carlynn as mentally ill or, worse, as a charlatan, and he was also concerned that Lisbeth suffered from spending so much time in her sister’s shadow. The girls still attended separate schools with qualitatively different activities and benefits, and he sometimes worried that the way he and Delora were raising them was akin to an experiment: take two identical twins and treat them differently, giving them different life experiences and different schooling, to see what would happen. What had happened was that Carlynn was confident, outgoing, and an outstanding student, while Lisbeth was quiet, unsure of herself and barely scraping by in school. She was not fat, exactly, but pudgy in all the wrong places, and he knew that she ate when she was sad, which was much of the time. It tortured Franklin that he had allowed this to happen to the daughter who had been the one he had named, bottle-fed, bathed and cuddled.
