The Last Romantics(89)
Caroline snorted. She headed back to the house and dumped the bottle into the green recycling bin by the back door. For a moment she paused to listen, like an interloper, to the soft murmur of voices from inside: Noni and Danette, perhaps bent together over a map or compiling a list of the sights of Vienna. She should go inside to them; she should assure them that she would be fine, she was just having a bad day, temporarily overwhelmed by the myriad imperatives of sick girls and a party.
Perhaps it was Noni who first made that cake for Joe. Caroline rarely thought of what Noni had done for them, only what she hadn’t.
It came to Caroline then, the memory: One Easter, Aunt Claudia sent Noni an old Skinner family recipe. It was German, or maybe Austrian, a cake that called for a pound of butter, heaps of cinnamon, almonds, raisins, powdered sugar dusting the top. Noni doled out careful slices. Everyone ate slowly, reverently. The cake was very good. After we finished, Joe sat for a moment, agitated, a finger tapping the table, and then he pulled the cake plate toward himself. He picked up his fork and pried off an enormous piece, opened his mouth as wide as he could, and stuffed it in. “I love it,” he said, only his mouth had been full: “I wuff it” was the sound. He kept eating the cake as quickly as he could, and Noni began to laugh. Joe had powdered sugar all over his face and hands, even in his hair. She laughed and laughed, and we did, too, laughing until we cried as Joe ate the entire beautiful cake.
With the memory Caroline began again to laugh: Noni had been right after all. She bent over in hysterics. She could barely breathe. Her eyes filled with tears. And suddenly Caroline longed to see her sisters. The desire hit her with a whack to the chest, strong enough to make her stumble. She could no longer recall the details of her fight with me or why Renee had reacted so vehemently against the search for Luna.
Start small.
Caroline wandered again between the tables, to the flower beds, which were lovely and messy. Dirt gathered in her flip-flops, gnats at her neck, the trodden-down grass and discarded sprinkler hose and the long-forgotten sandbox that was now choked with weeds and smelled distinctly—even from this distance—of cat piss. All this earth and wood, the house rising from the mossed and molded foundations, spreading itself wide. All the small items dotting the lawn—old Lego blocks, paper fans, tennis balls, a bath towel, a wooden spoon, a ruler—that spilled from the doors and windows like a fat woman who’s discarded the wrappers of her eaten bonbons. All these things she should tidy up—the party, the party!—but instead Caroline admired each with a vicious ache. She loved this house, this yard, this rusting swing set and decaying apple core, her son’s teeth marks visible on the flesh. She loved this life, but did she love him? Caroline inhaled sharply. Could it be possible that she was not in love with Nathan? Maybe she did not love him at all?
Loving Nathan required so much of her. She’d never thought of it before, not exactly. The frogs, the faculty potlucks, the research trips, his eternal search for publication, for validation. And what about loving Noni, loving the kids, loving Joe—even more now that he was gone? It all required so very much of her. What would happen if she put the sack down? Maybe carrying all these people around wasn’t strictly required of her. The twins were nearly teenagers, Louis now in high school. Noni had bought hiking boots for her trip and foldout maps of each city they’d be visiting.
Caroline stopped in the shadow of the house, the neighbor children’s voices reaching her, glad shouts and then some crying, and she realized that it had never occurred to her to try another way. To try not loving Nathan. To try loving herself. What would happen? It had never before occurred to her, but now—yes, now it did.
Chapter 16
Renee first met Melanie Jacobs at a Monday-morning intake appointment, one of the first in her new office at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Renee and Jonathan had recently returned from their travels, Renee to accept a permanent position as a transplant surgeon, Jonathan to focus on private commissions for the retablo pieces he’d first developed in Chiapas. This was nearly four years after Joe’s death, during the time Renee, Caroline, and I weren’t speaking. Did Renee miss us? Later she told me no, she didn’t think about us; she was too busy to miss anyone, and that was precisely her objective.
Melanie was one of Renee’s first new patients, a twenty-seven-year-old woman with cystic fibrosis, already on the lung-transplant list. A sprite of a thing, barely five feet tall, married to a longshoreman named Carl who towered over his wife. Shoulders nearly as wide as Melanie was tall. Dark hair receding in a sharp widow’s peak. A kind, gentle smile.
As they entered Renee’s office, Carl held the door for Melanie and pulled the portable oxygen tank behind them. Clear tubes ran from the tank over Melanie’s ears and into her nostrils. Melanie held out a hand to Renee, the long fingernails painted a brilliant aqua blue. “Matches the hospital gowns,” she said. “I’ve got mascara the same color, too.”
Renee laughed.
Since Melanie’s diagnosis, her doctors had managed the disease, but her condition had worsened in the past year, and she came to Renee for a new evaluation to move her position up the transplant waitlist. Because of Melanie’s small size—105 pounds at the height of good health—her potential donors were limited: a man’s lungs, for example, would not fit inside her chest.
“My heart is so full!” Melanie told Renee. “My rib cage just doesn’t know it.”