The Last Romantics(88)
Danette’s tone was soothing, and Caroline wondered if Danette would hug her again, which she both longed for and feared. But no, Danette stayed where she was, gazing at Caroline across the crumby tablecloth with a look of frank pity. “Your mother’s told me that you’ve taken it the worst. Joe’s death.”
Caroline bristled. “Me? I think Fiona’s still a wreck.”
“You know, I don’t have any other children,” said Danette. “Laurie was it. As much as her father and I hated that—I mean, we lost everything when we lost her—I did think it was easier, in a way. Her father and I took it all. We didn’t have to worry about anybody else. Your mother, she’s got to get on without Joe, and she’s got to watch you and your sisters get on without Joe.”
Caroline had never looked at it this way before. She had always thought of us as Noni’s greatest consolation; Noni had lost her son, but at least she still had three daughters. And Caroline was taking care of Noni. Ever since Joe’s accident, Caroline had grouped Noni alongside Louis, Beatrix, and Lily, the four of them crammed into a sack that Caroline slung over her shoulder and carried around. It was heavy, but there was no safe place to put it down.
“Caroline. Listen to me. You have to decide what you love,” Danette said. “Joe wasn’t the only one. You have to decide now and hold on. Start small. Begin with the small things and work up from there.”
Noni’s soft-soled shoes entered the room with a small sucking noise. “Is Danette telling you about the place we’re staying in Paris?” Noni asked, still standing in the doorway. “It’s got a view of the island, that tiny one? Caroline, we will have to go next time. Next time I’m taking you to Europe.”
Caroline looked from Noni to Danette and then pushed herself away from the table. It was as though a deep, dark secret, the secret of her life, had been suddenly revealed to all, the curtain pulled, and Caroline stood there alone, naked and shivering. She recognized what was happening here, and she was exhausted by it. Maybe Danette was telling her the secret to overcoming one’s grief. Maybe Danette’s own acute suffering (every time Caroline began to think of that girl in the car, she shuddered and shook her head and sang a little song to clear away the image) made her wise, and she was sharing this wisdom with Caroline, the most precious gift Caroline would ever receive. Yet even if that were the case, Caroline could not muster the strength to focus. To file away Danette’s words in some empty drawer of her socked-out brain for later reference. The little things? What did that even mean? Everything was big. Everything was monumental.
Caroline left the dining room and stood, dazed, in the center of the kitchen. Dirty dishes filled the sink; her phone was ringing on the counter; someone knocked at the front door. She listened for the girls, to discern their small voices from amid the din, but no, they were quiet. The girls were okay. The girls were sleeping. Caroline could leave, and so she walked out the back door and into the yard. Eight round black metal tables filled the back lawn, looking ugly and industrial without tablecloths or chairs. A long, narrow folding table backed against the west-facing flower bed; this was where the caterer would lay out the buffet of poached salmon, Swedish potato salad, grilled asparagus, arugula salad with balsamic dressing, a cheese plate, a Meyer lemon cake that Caroline had almost baked herself, almost, but decided at the last moment to pay someone else to make.
Noni and Danette remained inside. Caroline heard the delicate sounds of silverware and dishes pinging against one another, the barely detectable suck of the refrigerator door opening and closing. They were cleaning up after the meal, Caroline realized. Good.
She noticed then heaps of new compost that dotted the flower beds, deposited there yesterday by the gardener, who said she would return this morning to finish, but where was she? The backyard, Caroline realized, was a mess. The gardener late, the caterers waiting for her to confirm final numbers, the flowers probably wilting in the back of the florist’s van.
Caroline didn’t care. Nathan’s party. It didn’t matter.
Start small.
A plastic Coke bottle lay on its side in the grass. She picked it up. A flattened buzzing noise emanated from the bottle’s open neck: inside, a furious bee bumped against the sides. The plastic interior was dotted with condensation, moist and slippery, and the bee moved urgently but ponderously, as though this were a fight it had been waging for many days, so long that it had already given itself up for dead, but instinct drove it still to make the motions of escape.
Holding it carefully, Caroline carried the bottle down the back slope to where the lawn stretched out, a bit rougher and more ragged than the area closer to the house. They hadn’t landscaped this part yet, though every spring she and Nathan talked about doing it up. In truth Caroline liked the wildness, the sparse grass stretching to a row of towering firs that darkened the property line, separating them from those horrid Littletons next door, the boy who played tuba and the anti-vaccination wife. Here dandelions poked up from the grass, fearless or just oblivious to the anti-dandelion campaign Nathan waged every spring on the upper lawn with his fork-tongued extractor.
It was here among the wayward dandelions that Caroline tipped the bottle and tapped it gently once, then again. The bee stopped its buzzing and crawled toward the neck, emerging after a brief rest at the bottle’s lip, as if saying a quick, fervent prayer for its resurrection, and then flying off in a boozy, looping route away from Caroline and the site of its imprisonment. Caroline watched it circle up toward the house in the direction of the tower. How she loved that tower! From the moment she’d first seen the house, nothing had mattered but that. The romance of its delicate spire and mysterious curved window. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. A grown woman falling for a fairy tale.