Carolina Isle (2 page)

Sara's grandfather had disowned his daughter after she eloped. She died in a car wreck when Sara was three, and her father finally drank enough to kill his body when she was seventeen.

Sara looked back down at the letter.

She was just finishing her freshman year of college when she met Ariel for the first time. Sara had been in the study room of her coed dorm, up all night cramming for finals. She hadn't showered in three days and her hair was hanging in greasy strings around her face. She was in her usual uniform of sweatpants and a stained sweatshirt, and her feet were encased in worn-out running shoes. Not that Sara ever ran. Or did any exercise. Like most college students, she lived on pizza and Coke.

At first Sara felt, rather than saw, Ariel. It was like when people say they feel a ghost. When Sara looked up from her book, the room was silent, and everyone was staring at a young woman standing in the doorway. She was pretty in her simple dress, a dress Sara was willing to bet cost more than she'd spent on all the clothes in her closet. To Sara's astonishment, the young woman walked straight toward her. “Could we talk?” she asked.

Feeling clumsy and dirty, Sara mumbled, “Yeah, sure,” and followed the elegant young woman outside. Sara wondered if she wanted her to cut her lawn. Growing up, Sara had been the
kid who cut the lawns and pruned the boxwoods. She was the kid who baby-sat.

The perfect young woman sat down carefully on a stone bench under a flowering dogwood. She stared at Sara for a few moments, then told her they were cousins. “I was told we looked alike,” Ariel said.

Sara smiled at that.
Never
had she looked like this woman did.

“I didn't call first because I didn't know your number. I hope it was all right to just show up. I really wanted to meet you.”

“Yes, it's okay,” Sara said, her eyes wide from looking at her cousin so hard. Could she really be related to this beautiful creature with her perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect everything?

“Do you think we could correspond?” Ariel asked.

“Write letters?” Sara asked. “Sure, why not?” She was thinking that she'd have nothing to say to a woman whose life was so obviously different from her own. Ariel reeked of money, education, and manners. Sara had a flash of memory of her own father sprawled on the couch, snoring in a drunken stupor.

For a moment the two young women sat in silence, then Ariel looked at her watch—a tiny thing of gold and diamonds. “I wish I could have gone to college,” she said, sighing.

Something about the way she sighed made Sara decide that there was more to Ariel than she saw on the surface. Yes, she sat perfectly straight, and yes, she wore clothes that had probably been on a runway, but maybe, just maybe, there was a person inside. “College isn't that great,” Sara said.

Smiling, Ariel said, “I have thirty minutes before I have to leave. Tell me everything about your life. Please.”

“Only if you tell me about your … I mean, our relatives.”

“I'd love to,” Ariel said, then they started talking in a surprisingly easy way, almost comfortable with each other. Ariel was a good listener and a good storyteller.

While they talked, Sara studied Ariel as though she were a specimen under a microscope. Sara wasn't sure Ariel knew it or not, but she was as regal as a princess. Her gestures—the way she sat on the bench with her back straight and her
ankles crossed—was something out of a 1950s charm school.

Sara, her legs folded on the concrete seat, often pushed the hair out of her eyes, but Ariel sat straight and still, and her perfect pageboy haircut never so much as moved in the breeze.

Sara looked at the way people on campus stopped and stared at Ariel. A group of rowdy boys, obviously laughing over something dirty, saw Ariel and instantly became young gentlemen.

Suddenly, Ariel got up. “I have to go. You won't lose my address, will you? Actually, it's the address of a friend of mine. Just whatever you do, don't call my house or send anything there.”

Sara stood up too and they were eye-to-eye, both five feet three. “I understand,” Sara said, her teeth clamped together. “You don't want people to know that you're related to someone of my class.”

Ariel looked at her blankly, obviously not understanding. “You're my first cousin. How can you be a different class than I am? No, it's my mother. She'd be quite unpleasant if she knew I had any outside contact with the world. She'd make me marry David tomorrow.”

Inside, Sara was smiling. Me the same class as this perfectly dressed young woman? What a ridiculous concept; what a divine thought. “Who is David?”

Reaching into her exquisite little handbag, Ariel pulled out a photo of a young man in a football uniform. She handed it to Sara, who looked in astonishment at a truly gorgeous man. In college she was surrounded by masses of good-looking people, but this man was in a class all his own. “You do
not
want to marry this guy?”

Ariel looked at her watch again, and said, “I'd explain, but I
must
go.” The next second she was hurrying down the sidewalk. To her waiting limo? Sara wondered. Ariel waved her hand over her shoulder, then was out of sight.

Sara stood there for a while, staring into space. Her cynicism made her wonder what it was that Ariel
really
wanted. But as hard as Sara tried, she couldn't come up with anything she had that Ariel might want. The photo of the unwanted David was still in her hand. He really was the best-looking male she'd ever seen. She slipped the picture into her pocket, then headed back toward the dorm, but when she got to the door, she stopped.

Her state university didn't have a good football team. Actually, it wasn't all that good in any sport, but what it did have was a great drama department. In fact, there were several well-known actors who'd started at her university. Sara had toyed with trying her hand at acting—after all, hadn't she been acting when she'd smiled and told people that things were great at home? But the head of the drama department was known as a real bastard. To get into his department you had to prove to him that you were worthy. He didn't let you read a part that someone else had written, but made you perform a character of your own creation. You had to do this in front of him and all his students, and Sara was told that his criticism was brutal, meant to humiliate. More than one student had left the university after just five minutes with him.

Sara had thought about performing a character like her father, but that would have been telling too much about herself, so she didn't try out. But as she had her hand on the door into the dorm, on impulse, she turned away and started toward the drama department. Sara knew that at the moment she looked her worse, but that was
good. If she could imitate Ariel while looking as bad as she did, then she knew she could get into that department.

She kept Ariel in her head as she walked into Dr. Peterson's classroom. And because she was Princess Ariel, she didn't knock. Sara gave a wildly exaggerated performance, a caricature actually, of Ariel. The truth was that Sara created a character who looked like Ariel but who acted like the people her father had described. She felt a little bad doing it, but when she saw the eyes of her audience, she knew she had them. At one point, Sara haughtily asked Dr. Peterson if he was gay since everyone knew that only gay men were on the stage. Dr. Peterson was a notorious womanizer, so that got a lot of repressed snickers from the class. Sara kept it up for about ten minutes, then pretended that she was in the wrong classroom and had actually wanted fourth-year calculus. Once outside, she leaned back against the cool concrete-block walls and breathed again. Her heart was pounding. All her life she'd tried to take the attention away from herself; she'd never wanted anyone to know how bad it was at home for fear that she'd be put somewhere worse. But
today Sara'd made a true spectacle of herself—and found that she'd enjoyed herself.

When Dr. Peterson opened the classroom door, Sara stood upright. He looked her up and down and she could tell that he didn't like what he saw. Now that Sara was herself again, she felt overweight and timid. “You're in,” he said, but he was shaking his head as though he couldn't figure out how she'd been able to transform her dirty self into a princess for even ten minutes.

So it turned out that meeting Ariel changed Sara's life. That summer she started in the drama department, and since she was a whole year behind the other kids, she had to take more hours. She never got a summer vacation, but Sara loved every minute of it. When she graduated, she went to New York with a nearly empty bank account, but with the conviction that she was going to set Broadway on fire.

Two years later, she was broke and had to get a job as an undersecretary in a big office. Sara could act, but she couldn't sing or dance, and in New York she was competing against people who were great at all three. She would have gone to L.A. to try her luck, but she'd been brainwashed
that the only real theater was in New York. And she always felt that she was right on the edge of making it big.

Through all those years, Sara exchanged letters with Ariel. No e-mail, no faxes, nothing new or modern, just old-fashioned letters. Ariel wrote three or more letters to each of Sara's because Ariel had more time. With each of the letters Sara came to enjoy them more. I can't wait to tell Ariel! became a constant thought. When Sara went to New York, where she knew no one, and where she failed at one audition after another, it was Ariel's ever-cheerful letters that kept her going. Ariel was Sara's anchor, the one who was always there, the one person in the world who knew where Sara was and what she was doing.

Then, when Sara turned twenty-three and was beginning to realize that she just might never make it on the New York stage, she had another one of those life-changing events. The CEO of the company Sara worked for, R. J. Brompton, pointed at her and said, “That one. I want
her.
” That's all he had to say. He was so revered, and his word was such law, that Sara could believe
that she'd been chosen to test out a new guillotine.

It was worse. He'd chosen her to be his personal assistant. Not his secretary—he had two of those. His PA. Sara soon learned what the duties of a personal assistant were. She did anything her boss asked of her. She was a wife without the sex—not that Sara wanted the sex or that R. J. Brompton had a wife. No, she thought, humans have wives and families. And after eighteen months of working for R.J., Sara was sure he wasn't human. No human could work as much as he did. He was a robot who gave her more money every time she told him she wanted a life and that she was leaving his employment.

By the time Ariel's letter saying she wanted to exchange lives reached her, Sara knew exactly how she felt. She hated herself for having no spine and not being able to tell R.J. what he could do with his job. She hated herself for not having enough talent to make it on Broadway. She had come to hate everything about her life, and more than anything, Sara wanted to do something besides work for R. J. Brompton.

It was because Sara was so tired and so fed up
with R.J.'s 3:00
A.M.
phone calls that she was going to agree to try Ariel's impossible scheme.

The idea of having Ariel's life of leisure, with nothing to deal with but a mother who sounded rather lonely, was the best idea she'd heard in years. Of course the idea of exchanging lives would never work, but it sounded nice. Three sirens went by and Sara thought of the quiet of a small Southern town. She had to haul a big basket of laundry down to the basement tonight and she dreamed of dropping her dirties in a hamper and having them reappear, clean and pressed.

She grabbed a Post-it note, wrote “Love to!,” then put it in an envelope and addressed it. She'd mail it on the way to the laundry.

“Leave everything to me,” Ariel wrote back, and Sara did. But then, she was too tired to do anything else.

A
RIEL FELT BAD THAT SHE'D LIED TO
her cousin, but she knew it was necessary. If she'd told Sara the truth, she would never have considered exchanging places. And wasn't it true that all was fair in love and war? Ariel just hoped that her cousin would forgive her when she found out that she had done everything for love.

It had started over a year ago when Ariel was in New York with her mother on one of their twice-yearly clothes-buying trips. Ariel had to attend some boring fund-raiser with her mother
and a lot of other old people who wanted to show off how much money they had.

For the first hour Ariel made small talk and listened to people tell her how quaint they found Arundel. Their tone said that they couldn't imagine living in a place that had no food delivery, but still, it was an adorable little town. “So clean,” they said.

When her mother's eagle eye was turned away, Ariel tipped a waiter a twenty to replace her mother-approved ginger ale with champagne. It was while she was slowly sipping her champagne (to make it last) that she saw him.
Him.
For Ariel, it was one of those moments when the earth stood still. Maybe the other party guests kept moving and talking, but for her, the world stopped revolving. When she saw the man walk into the room, she knew she was seeing her future. She was seeing the only man she would ever love.

R. J. Brompton. Of course she knew who he was. Sara had sent photos and newspaper clippings. But photos didn't show what he was really like. You could feel him. Sense him. He had a presence about him, an aura, a charisma such as
Ariel had never experienced. In all her trips with her mother, she had never seen anyone like R. J. Brompton.

Sara had described him in only bad terms. She said he worked her half to death, and that he had no idea that she should have a life of her own. He called her during the night and asked her where the papers on a land sale were. She would tell him she had put them in his briefcase, then he'd ask where his briefcase was. More than once, she'd had to pull on jeans and a T-shirt and go to his apartment in the middle of the night to find something or to write a letter for him. She said that as far as she could tell, he never slept.