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.
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.