The Second Sister Read online

  Just before breaking through, my lidded eyes open wide and through the ripples of troubled water I look up and see Alice.

  She has saved me again.

  But tonight is different. Tonight the dream doesn’t end there. Though my hair and clothes are still wet, suddenly I’m the one on the surface and Alice is in the water.

  I lie prostrate on the ice, arm submerged almost to my shoulder, my frozen fingers pulling frantically on Alice’s arm, straining with all I have to bring her up from the depths. She slips from my grasp. I scream, reach down into the black again, even deeper than before, but I can’t feel anything. I’ve lost her.

  I plunge forward, submerging my head and shoulders into icy waters, and see Alice’s face turned toward mine, her eyes placid and blue as she slowly sinks into the shadows, beyond my reach.

  And then it is done and I am on the surface again, lying on my back this time, shivering. Everything is like it was before. The world is cold, white, and boundless. The sky is hard blue. The crack in the ice is sealed over and smooth, as though it never existed. Alice is gone.

  But the shadow is still with me. And it speaks.

  “Where have you been?”

  I open my mouth, but can’t answer. A bell rings. The dream splinters.

  I sat up, confused and breathless, panting. The bell sounded again, rude and demanding. I reached for the phone, but there was no one there. Finally, I realized the noise was coming from the alarm clock. I leaned across to the far side of the bed, smacked the black button to silence the bell, and then collapsed back against the pillows, taking big breaths and exhaling slowly.

  I stared into the middle distance of the darkness, collecting myself, and pressed my hand on my chest to measure the gradual slowing of my pounding heart, thinking about Alice.

  I couldn’t go home for Christmas this year, I reasoned. If we won, I’d have to go to Washington to help with the transition. And if we lost—a possibility I never liked to admit, not even to myself—if we lost, I’d need to start looking for a job.

  But Alice’s voice was so pleading, so plaintive. And so persistent. She’d never let it go. Alice never let anything go.

  Even so, I couldn’t go home for Christmas, not this year. I just couldn’t. I had to make her understand. But . . . maybe next year? Yes. With some advance planning, and as long as it was just for a couple of days, I could do that. I didn’t want to, but I could. I would. For Alice’s sake.

  I sat up on the edge of the bed, yawned, and looked at the clock. It was quarter to five, too early to call Alice. I’d tell her later, the next time she called.

  Which, I calculated, would be in about twenty hours.

  Groaning, I flopped backward onto the mattress and closed my eyes. Just five more minutes.

  Chapter 3

  After five smacks of the snooze button, I finally hauled myself out of bed.

  Getting out the ironing board would have required rising after only two snooze cycles, so I pulled the least creased of my standard-issue blue suits from my still unpacked suitcase and hung it on the back of the bathroom door. Hopefully, the steam from the shower would take care of the wrinkles—the big ones. At this point, washing and drying my hair wasn’t an option either, so I took a curling iron to the top layer, fluffed it out with my fingers so it wouldn’t look quite so flat, then did a quick backcomb and spray job to cover up a recently sprouted crop of dark roots, promising myself that I’d go to the salon the minute the election was over and go back to brunette. Pretending to be blond was just too much work.

  With wardrobe and hair more or less under control, I turned to makeup and accessories. Humming “A Hard Day’s Night,” my usual predawn anthem, I slathered on a coat of tinted moisturizer, a little blush, and some mascara. I didn’t bother with lipstick. It’d be gone before I finished my first cup of coffee. I put on some earrings and a scarf, slipped my feet into a pair of blue pumps, grabbed my car keys, phone, purse, briefcase, and two cookies to tide me over until I got to the restaurant, and headed out the door.

  It was 5:42 in the morning. I was already running late.

  Whenever Joe Feeney comes to Denver on business, we meet at Syrup, the best breakfast spot in Cherry Creek, to eat eggs and catch up.

  Even with his face shielded behind newspapers, I knew the guy at the corner table was Joe. People in Denver don’t drink Bloody Marys at six A.M. on a Tuesday, and nobody else would be so engrossed in the pages of the Washington Post, with copies of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Roll Call sitting at the ready. Joe, who began as a staffer for late, legendary senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of Massachusetts in the mid-seventies, eventually leaving to open his own lobbying firm in the mid-nineties, is old school and still reads the papers in print.

  Hearing my greeting, he lowered his paper.

  “Lucy. It’s bad enough that you buy blue suits five at a time off the clearance rack. Couldn’t you at least hang them up at night? Did you sleep in that thing?”

  I plopped into a chair and nudged a second one out from the table with my foot so I could dump my purse, briefcase, and coat onto the seat.

  “I just got back from New York. Haven’t had a chance to do laundry.”

  I reached for the carafe, filled a coffee cup, and gave my order to the waiter without reading the menu. I always get the Kitchen Sink: scrambled eggs and maple-peppered bacon on an open-face biscuit, layered on hash browns, and covered in sausage gravy. Joe ordered a spinach egg-white omelet with wheat toast, dry.

  Joe folded up his paper, then unfolded his napkin and laid it over the knife-edge crease of his perfectly pressed pants. I took a muffin from the bakery basket.

  “There’s this new thing out there, Lucy—dry cleaners. Heard of them?”

  “I have,” I replied, buttering a muffin. “I also heard they charge fifteen bucks to press an outfit you can iron yourself for free.”

  “Except you never do.”

  Joe stirred his Bloody Mary before taking a bite from the celery stick.

  “Not everybody can afford to send their custom-made suits to the cleaners,” I said. “Some of us have to work for a living.”

  Washington is full of well-dressed men—lawyers, lobbyists, lawmakers—but even in DC, Joe stands out. His suits come from London and his shoes from Italy. The links in his French cuffs always match his tie, and the snowy-white handkerchief peeking from his pocket matches the thick, perfectly coiffed shock of snowy-white hair on his head. He is as dapper as I am disheveled and twenty-five years my senior. Our only common interests are politics and baseball. And yet, we are friends. In fact, Joe Feeney may be the best friend I have.

  I’ve always found it easier to relate to men than to women. Even when I was growing up, the only girl I was really close to was Alice. She always watched out for me. Now I watch out for her, which I’m glad to do. After all, I owe her. But that’s not the same thing as friendship, is it?

  Joe is a better listener, and gives better advice on everything from career and romance to nutrition and fashion, than any woman I know. Plus, he doesn’t get his feelings hurt when I choose to ignore that advice. Nor does he gossip. He can hold his liquor and his tongue and looks good escorting me to weddings and New Year’s Eve parties when I’m between boyfriends—what more could I want?

  “What’s in the news?” I asked, nodding toward his discarded newspaper. “I didn’t have time to turn on the computer before I left the apartment.”

  Joe flipped over a section of the paper and cleared his throat. “It says here that Women for a Better Tomorrow is endorsing Tom Ryland for president. Sounds like somebody had a successful trip to New York.”

  I shrugged off his praise. “Getting them to endorse a month ago would have been a success. At this point, it’s just averting disaster.”

  “Averting disaster is success,” Joe said. “But you went to New York and calmed everybody down. Disaster averted and Tom Ryland is still in the fight.”

  “In it,” I said, sh
ifting back in my seat as the waiter set a plate in front of me, “but trailing by three points.”

  Joe gave me a look over the rim of his coffee cup. “Quinnipiac says it’s five.”

  “Quinnipiac is wrong. They’re not giving enough weight to the new voter registration. Or to voters under thirty.”

  “Voters under thirty don’t show up to the polls.”

  “Which is why I’m back in Denver,” I said, cutting into my breakfast, carefully composing a perfect bite, with equal parts egg, bacon, biscuit, and hash brown, before putting my fork in my mouth, “to oversee the final get-out-the-vote push—”

  “Should have happened weeks ago,” Joe said, as he took a bite of his overly pale omelet. “But it didn’t because Miles and the rest of those ivory-tower idiots from the party don’t know a thing about retail politics. They spent two point six million on a consultant who told them they needed to buy more yard signs! Do you know how many actual yard signs they could have bought for two point six million?”

  “Half a million,” I said, dragging another perfectly composed bite through a pool of gravy, making sure it was evenly coated. “And we do need more.”

  “See? You don’t need a consultant to tell you that. If they’d have left you in charge of the ground game instead of sending you off to placate pissed-off women’s groups.... Why waste your talent with that? You don’t even like women.”

  “That’s not true. I like women.” I frowned. “I don’t dislike them. Anyway, let’s not play armchair quarterback right now, okay? I’m trying to eat.”

  Joe took another sip of his Bloody Mary and stayed silent—for two seconds.

  “I’m just saying, if Miles wasn’t such an insecure, egocentric jerk, if he’d been smart enough to keep you in a position where you could play to your strengths—”

  “It was my idea to bring Miles on board, remember? Well, maybe not him specifically, but somebody with experience running national campaigns.”

  “You’ve worked on tons of campaigns,” Joe said, gnawing on dry toast.

  “Six,” I said. “Always for the same candidate. And the first one doesn’t count. I was just a junior staffer answering phones and handing out bumper stickers.”

  “And next time you were running the show. What does that say about you?”

  “That Ryland couldn’t afford anybody better—that’s what. Listen, it was a small district in Colorado. It’s not rocket science. Shake enough hands and you win. If the sitting governor hadn’t slept with his babysitter, Tom wouldn’t have won.”

  “But he did,” Joe countered. “You were successful in four out of six races. If you were playing baseball, you’d be an all-star.”

  “In the minor leagues. Triple A. Maybe double.”

  Joe drained the bloody dregs of his glass and munched morosely on his celery stump, but kept eyeing the muffins. I thought about taking the last one, just to torture him, but decided it would be too cruel.

  “Does Ryland understand what he has in you?” he asked. “You’re the one who got him in the race to begin with. You’re the one who came up with the strategy that brought him in second in the Iowa caucuses!”

  “Strategy?” I laughed. “Please. You mean the five-point plan I scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin from that dive bar in Georgetown? We didn’t come second in Iowa because of strategy; we just worked harder. You can do that in a caucus. Again, not rocket science. And as I recall, when I first showed you my plan, you said it would never work and called me some very unflattering names.”

  “Yeah. And then I wrote a two-thousand-dollar check to the Ryland Presidential Exploratory Committee. None of this would have happened without you, Lucy. Tom Ryland might not know that, but I do.”

  I held the bakery basket out to him. “Thank you. The last muffin is yours.”

  “I’m serious, Luce. What is it you see in him?”

  “In Tom?” I asked, confused by the question and that Joe should be the one asking it. “Well, he’s a strong leader. Always on the right side of the issues that matter, puts people ahead of party. After years of political divisiveness, Americans are ready for a new kind of leadership. He’ll bring the country together again and—”

  Joe rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I don’t need to hear you spout the latest campaign commercial. What do you see in him? Are you in love with him?”

  “In love?” I let out a short, sharp laugh.

  He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Seriously, did you sleep with him? Are you sleeping with him? You can tell me.”

  “Joe!” I hissed, feeling a flush of heat on my face and neck. “No! Absolutely not! How can you even ask me a thing like that?”

  “Sorry.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t trying to insult you. I just don’t get it. Anybody else would have bailed after what they did to you post–New Hampshire.” He took the muffin, broke it in two, and put one half on my plate. “I thought maybe you had a crush on him or something.”

  “A crush? What am I? Twelve?” I gave him a pointed look and bit into my muffin half. “You still think of me as a green kid from Wisconsin.”

  “Naw.” Joe broke his muffin half into four parts and started eating them one at a time. “You’re a long way from that earnest, young legislative aide I met thirteen years ago, talking about the marvel of democracy, ordering strawberry daiquiris, and expecting people to take her seriously.” He smiled. “But in some ways, you’re still that girl. You still care. You still believe that public service is a noble calling and that it’s better to fight and lose than not to fight at all.”

  “Well, it is,” I said defensively. “Don’t you think it is?”

  “Not the way you do. Not anymore. That’s one of the things I like about you, Lucy. You remind me of my better self. You know what else you remind me of?” he asked, sliding the butter dish across the table and applying the last of it to his muffin. “One of those chicken things my sister’s kids always get at Easter. The ones nobody ever eats? And then, three weeks later, they end up in the trash?”

  “You mean Peeps? I remind you of marshmallow Peeps?”

  Joe, his mouth full of muffin, raised a finger and bobbed his head.

  “Peeps!” he exclaimed after swallowing. “That’s it! You remind me of Peeps. Take them out of the protective packaging—the sheltered girlhood in rural Wisconsin—expose them to the air and elements—the harsh reality of partisan politics—and they develop this tough, thick skin. But when you break them open . . .”

  “. . . they’re all sweet and squashy inside. I get it. That’s the dumbest analogy ever. Having ideals doesn’t mean you’re a marshmallow any more than staying on a campaign after they demote you means you’re sleeping with the candidate.”

  “Fair enough. So you’re not in love with Tom Ryland. Who are you in love with?”

  I scowled at him. I was getting really tired of this.

  “I’m seeing Terry Boyle. You know that.”

  “The media consultant. Uh-huh. And how’s that going?”

  I shrugged. “Oh, you know. He lives in Alexandria and travels. I live in Denver and travel. We don’t see each other much. Plus, he has terrible taste in movies—loves all that apocalyptic garbage. I don’t see it working out. After the campaign—”

  “You’ll end it,” Joe interrupted. “Like you always do. Every new campaign brings a new boyfriend, also a politico, just as busy as you, who, more often than not, lives out of state. You have fun for a few months, but when the campaign ends, the relationship does too. See a pattern here, Luce?”

  I let my jaw go slack. “Oh my gosh! I do! I see it now! Thank you, Dr. Phil!”

  Joe smirked at me and I smirked back.

  “So the cycle of my relationships coincides with the election cycle,” I said. “Big deal. I’m out there looking for the right guy. When I discover that the guy I’m with isn’t right, I move on. No point in wasting time. But just because my biological clock is ticking doesn’t mean I’m going to settle.�
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  “Not suggesting you should.” Joe popped the last bite of muffin into his mouth. “But who is the right guy? What would he look like?”

  I squirmed in my seat and looked at my watch. “Joe. Can we do this another time? I’ve got a conference call with the Chicago field office in forty-five minutes. In fact, I wanted to talk to you about that. I’ve been studying our polling in-house. We’ve got better support in the Southwest than people realize. If we win Texas—” Joe raised his eyebrows to make his skepticism clear. “If we win Texas, then it’s going to come down to Illinois. But we’d need to win Chicago big. So I was thinking—”

  He picked up my thought and ran with it. “You double your media buy in Cook County. Double up on phone banks. Schedule one last Chicago rally, maybe on the Northwestern campus. You rev up the college kids, solidify your under-thirty turnout, and recruit fresh volunteers all in one fell swoop. But run another poll in Texas. I’ve got doubts about your numbers.”

  “See?” I said, spreading my hands and grinning. “You know what I’m thinking almost before I do. No wonder I haven’t fallen in love. Who could measure up to Joe Feeney? Thanks, buddy.”

  I started to get up, but Joe reached across the table and grabbed my forearm.

  “Hang on. I know you’ve got to go, but I flew out here specifically to talk to you. Just give me five minutes.”

  Reluctantly, I settled back down into my seat. Of course I would listen to whatever he had to say, but I hoped we weren’t going to delve into more of his psychological theories about me. I wasn’t in the mood.

  “Lucy, I want to see you happy.”

  “I am happy.”

  He shot me the same look he’d tossed in my direction when I said we’d win Texas, but he didn’t contradict me, just kept talking.

  “When the election is over, I want you to come work for me. Ah! Hear me out! Lobbying isn’t all graft and influence peddling. People can lobby for good things. I’m adding a department focused on social issues. It’ll elevate the public image of our corporate clients. I want to put you in charge of it.”