Chapter 37
Madelyn
walked up the jetway, feeling unaccountably apprehensive.
All she needed was a lecture right off. Her parents would find her haggard face appalling, but her clothes worthy of further study.
Jeans were, they would announce, a pleasant change from her courtroom attire.
Her hair wouldn’t fly in academia, but it would be deemed a far sight less severe than her power chignon.
To reevaluate
would no doubt be the first verb she would be required to conjugate.
That would be followed immediately by a command that she translate eat a huge slice of humble pie into a variety of other languages where the idiomatic meaning was the same: i.e.
, she’d seen the error of her ways and was prepared to put in her application to any number of grad schools and get back on a proper course.
She clenched her jaw, swung her violin case over her shoulder, and stomped through the gate, ready to tell her parents to go to hell.
But who should be there to greet her but Sunshine Phillips herself, in crumpled linen.
Madelyn almost cried.
Sunny hugged her. “I can’t decide if you look great or like hell. Where have you been?”
“Long story.”
“I have the time. No births imminent and I farmed out my yoga classes and massage clients for a couple of days.”
“Sunny, you are a walking cliché.”
“Yeah, see how you feel after a massage and some tea.”
“It sounds like heaven.”
Sunny took the violin and put her arm around Madelyn’s shoulders. “Come on, Sis. Let’s go home.”
Two
hours and a massage later, Madelyn sat at Sunny’s kitchen table, staring out over her sister’s garden.
She sipped a cup of something good for her.
The rain that fell was typical Seattle drizzle, not really enough to warrant an umbrella, except for those really fond of their hairdos, but perfectly capable of leaving anyone brash enough to go out without one completely soaked in no time.
It was good to be home.
“All right,” Sunny said, sliding into the seat across from her, “give.”
“I hardly know where to start.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“Before or after I found out that Bentley had poached my first reservation?”
“That pig.” Sunny took a delicate sip of her tea. “Count yourself lucky you never married him. You would have wilted.” She shook her head. “No, start before that. When you landed in Scotland. Who was the first Scotsman you saw? And who’s the guy you fell in love with?”
Madelyn looked at her in shock. “What?”
“What’s his name?”
Good grief, did the woman do psychic readings now as well?
“Patrick,” Madelyn said weakly. “Patrick MacLeod.”
“And why is it you’re here and he’s there?”
“It’s a long story.”
“So you keep telling me.” Sunny sat back. “Cough up the details. I’ll feed you when you start to look weak. Well, weaker than you look already. Good heavens, Maddy, you’re skin and bones. I knew I should have given you some money before you left.”
“It just would have gotten stolen with everything else.”
“Well, I’ll feed you now instead. Now, go ahead. All the details, if you please.”
Madelyn took a deep breath. All the details? She wasn’t so sure about that. She’d have to see how Sunny reacted to a brief testing of the waters before she gave her the unvarnished truth.
And quite suddenly she understood completely Patrick’s reticence about disclosing several important facts pertaining to his past.
She took another strengthening sip of tea, set her cup down, and put her hands on the table.
“Here goes nothing,” she said.
She started from the beginning.
Her tea lasted through her encounter with Patrick at Culloden field. A second cup took her through several bouts of sightseeing. She needed cookies—and why was it Sunny never had any chocolate in her house?—to get through her trips to Moraig’s and the dinner at Jamie’s.
The time traveling took dinner—a decent dinner where the vegetables were smothered with lots of the reconstituted cheese sauce that Sunny always kept on hand just for her.
She couldn’t quite bring herself to discuss the marriage, so she left that out.
She was lingering over more tea when she finished up at the ruin of Patrick’s garage.
“This Gilbert McGhee sounds like a real winner,” Sunny remarked.
“Yeah, he’s a prince.”
Sunny reached over and took Madelyn’s hand. She looked at her finger. “Your Patrick looks to have done a decent job resetting this,” she remarked mildly.
“You would like him. He has a whole relationship with weeds that only you could appreciate.”
“I’d like to compare notes someday.” She looked up. “So, what happened once you got to the medieval MacLeod keep? The part that you’re leaving out?”
Madelyn took a deep breath. “We got married.”
Sunny blinked. “What?”
“We were married by a priest who apparently was in fact a priest, but had some issues with golf.”
“Marriage,” Sunny said, shaking her head. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe he let you go. What was he thinking?”
“Who knows?”
“Don’t think about it. It’ll all make sense in a few days. So, tell me what happened after the marriage, or should I ask?”
Madelyn sighed, then gave her, in as few words possible, a description of their time in the Middle Ages.
She’d described the trip with Ian to Inverness, which had been accomplished mostly in silence, though it hadn’t been an uncomfortable kind of silence.
It had been the kind of silence a man maintained while sitting next to Vesuvius.
Sunny had understood.
Poor Conal. Not even the consolation prize of a first-class ticket home had been enough to keep her silent on the flight from Inverness to Heathrow.
He’d listened, he’d nodded, and he’d said Patrick would come to his senses.
Madelyn hadn’t cared. She’d even been too upset to enjoy those first-class amenities on her flight home.
“Oh, that is pathetic,” Sunny said with a laugh.
“I thought so, too. But at least I don’t have jetlag.”
“It’ll catch up with you.”
“I could only hope. I would like to be unconscious for a few days. Maybe when I wake up, life will be different.”
“Maybe,” Sunny said. “So what’s it like to be married?”
“By a priest who could hardly stand up?”
“Yes. That.” Sunny looked at her. “Did Patrick know what he was saying?”
“I think so.”
“And you both agreed to this.”
“It would seem so.”
“Yet he sent you home.”
“Yep.”
Sunny shook her head. “Weird.”
“Yes,” Madelyn said with a yawn. “Very.”
“You should sleep on it. It’ll be clearer after a good night’s rest.”
“Right.”
“I’ll cancel dessert with Mom and Dad tonight.”
“Even better.”
“You don’t look like you feel well.”
Madelyn looked at her sister with something of a scowl. “I’ve had a rough month.”
“I’ll say. Go to bed, sis.”
Madelyn went.
A week later Madelyn sat at Sunny’s kitchen table, sipping tea, and feeling quite a bit more like herself.
If feeling like herself again was anything she was capable of recognizing, which she wasn’t sure she was.
Everything had changed. She’d been to a foreign country, another planet almost, and had too much time to think while there.
She couldn’t look at a cup of tea without having her eyes well up with tears of gratitude.
“How’re you doing?”
Madelyn looked up at her sister, who had come home and was setting her keys and an enormous all-purpose purse down on the counter. “Doing?”
Sunny laughed. “You look better, but you still sound like you’re sleepwalking. Come to any conclusions during all that dreaming you’ve been doing over the past week?”
“Only that I’m incredibly grateful for your couch.”
“It’s yours for as long as you want it. And I won’t put you through any linguistic tortures for the privilege.”
“No, you’ll just make me close my eyes and sniff things.
‘Whoops, wrong answer; you get the floor.’”
“Right,” Sunny said dryly. She poured herself something out of the fridge, then sat down at the table. “All right, I’ve put off the parental units as long as I can. They’re coming for dinner.”
Madelyn sighed. It had to happen sometime. “What’s that you’re drinking?”
“Wheat grass. Want some?”
Madelyn flinched. “How about something with sugar? Caffeine? Artificial color? Other harmful additives?”
“You have tea. Drink it. You’ll need your strength.”
Madelyn put her head down on the kitchen table. “If I get my strength back, then I’ll have to face real life. I think facing Mom and Dad is about all I can do today.”
“Well, buck up, little sister. Before dinner you need to know what happened while you were out of the . . . um . . . country.”
Madelyn lifted her head and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know if I can handle that yet.”
“Mom and Dad will tell you anyway.”
“Before or after they remind me of my loan balance, my lack of employment prospects, or all the ways I’ve received my just desserts the last two months?” She shivered. “Sunny, I wonder if I really have made horrible mistakes. If I’d never gone to law school—”
“If you’d practiced the violin harder in high school—”
“If I’d acquired an ear for Latin before sixth grade—”
“If you’d just done better in kindergarten,” Sunny finished with a laugh. “Good grief, Maddy, where does it end? You made the choices you made and you have to live with them.”
“But my life’s a mess,” Madelyn said.
“Everyone’s life is a mess.”
Madelyn shook her head. “I can’t look back on it that I don’t cringe.”
Sunny took another healthy swig of wheat grass without so much as a pucker of distaste.
Appalling.
“This is my theory,” Sunny said.
“I can hardly wait.”
“Mock if you will. It’s profound.”
“Then lay it on me, baby. I can take it.”
Sunny sat up straighter. It was probably some yoga thing.
“It’s like waterskiing,” she began.
“Waterskiing?” Madelyn echoed. “Who, you?”
“I didn’t say I did it. I’m saying life is like it. Reserve judgment, counselor, until I get to the end of my analogy.”
Madelyn lifted her tea in salute. “Forge on ahead.”
“Think waterskiing,” Sunny continued. “You’re looking ahead, in front of the boat—”
“You’re behind the boat when you waterski.”
Sunny threw a dishtowel at her. “Shut up and listen. This is deep.”
“Hmmm,” Madelyn said. “If you say so.”
“You’re behind the boat. You’re looking ahead. The water’s like glass. Pristine. Untouched.”
“Unmauled.”
“Exactly. It’s looking good till you get there. Then you take a look at what you’ve left behind.”
Madelyn shuddered. “I can just imagine.”
“The thing is, though,” Sunny continued, “it’s the stuff behind you that’s interesting. It makes for waves, stuff for other skiers to jump over—”
“Those are moguls and that’s snow skiing and those aren’t made by other skiers, they’re made by rocks under the snow.”
“What I’m saying,” Sunny said, looking for something else to throw at her and finding nothing, “is that everyone has a wake behind them. It’s just part of life. Expecting it to be as perfect as the water in front of you is unrealistic.”
“I don’t like my wake.”
“You can’t change it. Learn to live with it.”
“I don’t like your analogy.”
“Then let’s think of our past as a really nubby tapestry, full of flaws and interesting bits of string hanging from it—”
“I like that even less,” Madelyn said.
“Then how does the fact that our great-grandmother left you her house grab you?”
Madelyn blinked. “Huh?”
“Dewey,” Sunny said. “She left you the house.”
Madelyn would have thought she was dreaming, but she’d caught up on her sleep and was fairly certain she was fully awake. “This isn’t another analogy, is it?”
“The house is the upside. The downside is that it’s probably been stripped by Uncle Fred and his kids by now. If you have a carpet left to lie on, I’d be surprised. But it’s yours.”
“But,” Madelyn began. “But, why me?”
“Maybe she liked your wake.”
“What’d she leave you?”
“Buckets of money,” Sunny said with a grin. “Enough to start my own herb shop if I like. Or pay off this house and then never have to work another day in my life.”
“So you’ll be delivering babies for free now.”
“Maybe.”
Madelyn could hardly believe it. “What am I going to do with a house?”
“If it makes you feel any better, Uncle Fred has already been contacted by half a dozen people dying to get their hands on the property. You could sell it and get yourself out of debt. Probably take another vacation to Scotland if you wanted.”
Madelyn flinched and Sunny reached out her hand. “Sorry, Maddy. I didn’t mean it that way. He’ll come to his senses.”
“He already did.”
“No, he didn’t. If he had, he would be here.”
“His life’s a mess. He probably doesn’t want my mess adding to it. You know, Bentley and all.”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Sunny asked mildly. “Heard via the grapevine that Bentley’s back in town.”
Madelyn’s ears perked up. “How did you hear this?”
“Stella DiLoretto comes in for a massage once a week. Twice if her husband’s getting on her nerves. Apparently, Bentley’s been back at work, but not doing very well.”
“Poor Bentley.”
“He locks himself in his office. Doesn’t come out much. The rumor is, he’s writing a few pieces for The Confessor.”
Madelyn laughed. “The Confessor? That tabloid? You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. Stella says he’s working on some sort of alien-capture exposé.”
“I can’t wait to read it.”
“Well, he’d better make a ton of money on it because he’s going to lose his job if he doesn’t get back to work.”
“Cry me a river.”
Sunny smiled. “It’s bad karma to wish him ill.”
“I’m not wishing him ill. I’m wishing him what he deserves.”
“Well,” Sunny said with a smile, “that’s a different story entirely. How does vegetarian chili sound for dinner?”
“Perfect. Got any of those cheesy rolls to go with it?”
“For you, sister dear, always.”
“Real butter?”
Sunny only smiled and started pulling things out of her fridge.
Madelyn sat back. A house, the house of her childhood vacations and long summers, unexpectedly hers. Interesting news regarding Bentley and his state of mind. Cheesy rolls slathered with real butter.
Life was looking up.
The doorbell rang.
“Mom and Dad,” Sunny announced. “They’re early. They must be anxious to see you.”
All right, so life wasn’t looking up that much.
She resolutely shoved thoughts of Patrick aside. She’d need all her stamina just to endure the grilling. The only mystery that remained was how many languages she’d be bombarded with.
Hopefully not any more Latin. She’d had enough of that to last a lifetime.