Sisters

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 1

Skye

Most people aren’t doing anything special when bad news barges in. It’s usually just a regular day.

The call comes on an ordinary Monday. The kids are at school. My husband, Cameron, is at work. I’m bringing in groceries from the SUV, hurrying because it’s going to rain. I can smell the showers moving in, that loamy-earth scent of decay and renewal, wafting from the back burner of summer’s last days.

I set the plastic bags on the granite-topped island in the kitchen and turn to go back out for the rest when the phone rings. I almost don’t pick up. But something—I’d call it a sixth sense, if I believed in such hooey—compels me to answer.

“Hello?”

“May I talk to Skye Woods?”

It’s a man’s voice I don’t recognize. Traces of a Spanish accent. I’m guessing he’s a solicitor and I get ready to tell him that we’re on the State of Florida’s Do Not Call list, that his company could receive a hefty fine.

“Who is calling, please?”

“Skye, it is Raul Martinez.”

My breath catches. Raul is Mama’s personal assistant. He’s a jack-of-all-trades, keeping her appointments for the foundation she’s set up to help the needy and making sure her life runs in order.

His voice is tight and low, and it raises gooseflesh on my arms. The spaces between his words hint at something ominous, like the angry clouds rolling in across the flat afternoon sky. I walk over to the sink and stare out the window.

It’s getting darker outside. The interior light of my vehicle glows like a beacon reminding me I left the lift gate open.

“There was an accident. Your mama, she is not doing so well.”

My hand flutters to my cheek and a strange tingling erupts inside me as if his words cut the vein of decades of bad blood built up between Mama and me. In an instant the poison rushes out of me like watershed, and I hear myself stammering. “Oh my—is she okay? Raul, is she alive?”

As I grip the edge of the sink, beads of rain on the window come into sharp focus. It makes patterns that shape-shift each time a drop breaks free. I get the strangest sensation that each time it changes, another minute of Mama’s life has slipped away…if she’s not already dead.

“It’s too early to tell,” Raul says. “She is in a coma. So you should get here pretty fast.”

I can’t believe this. Mama. In a coma? Ginny, hippie mother earth—the eternal free spirit who collected love children like genetic souvenirs. But in all fairness, Summer and I are twins. So technically, Mama only got pregnant twice. Still, no matter how you slice it, there’s nothing normal about having two different men father your children when you have no idea of one man’s identity. Last time I asked, she had it narrowed down to a list of about ten or fifteen candidates.

“After all, the sixties was the era of free love,” she always said. “At least I gave you life.”

But that’s not the issue right now. All of that and the upheaval it’s caused seem so insignificant in the face of…this.

I realize Raul just said something and is waiting for me to answer.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Can you telephone your sisters? I cannot find their numbers. The doctor said the next twenty-four hours are critical. So if you are coming, you should get here as fast as possible.”

Summer

I haven’t been back to Dahlia Springs in twenty-two years. Frankly, I haven’t had the time, money or the inclination. But when my sister, Skye, calls to inform me that our mother’s in a coma… Oh God.

What choice do I have? And it couldn’t come at a worse time.

I suppose if I were completely honest, I’d admit I don’t want to go home. Because Dahlia Springs isn’t home. Never was.

My home is here in New York. My job is here, my friends are here.

Who was it that said friends are the family you choose?

Whoever it was hit it dead on. I wouldn’t choose my family if I had the choice. But for some masochistic reason, I can’t cast them off, either. Despite the fact that my sister and I don’t see eye-to-eye on most issues. And our mother, Ginny, has had long-standing differences with Skye and me over the years.

Still, she’s my mother. That’s why I decide to purchase a plane ticket I can’t afford and travel to a place I don’t care to visit. Because the woman with whom relations have been strained at the best times and worse on other occasions is lying in a hospital bed in a coma.

“It might be a couple of days before I can get there. I may have to work a couple of days to give Gerard time to make arrangements. He’s behind schedule with the spring collection and—”

“Summer, I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation.” Skye’s pitch veers into a sharp upper register and she’s slipped into that drawl she uses when she’s irritated, which is more often than not when we talk. “Mama may not last a couple of days.”

My stomach clenches, and I take a deep breath.