Chapter 9. Cait
CAIT
Cait had been awake since dawn with the twins and was desperate to sneak in a morning nap on the sofa in the sitting room, but the door to the back porch swung open and roused her.
“The raccoon got the garbage!” Augustus yelled from the doorway.
Cait sat up. “You’re not wearing snow clothes.”
Augustus looked down at his flannel pajamas and sneakers, both soaking wet, and shrugged. “Finn said Papa’s going to shoot the raccoon,” he said.
“He’ll do no such thing.”
Cait turned toward the doorway and said, “Morning, Mom,” then looked back to Augustus. “The raccoon’s not out there now, is it?”
Augustus shook his head. “James and Finn are tracking him in the woods.”
“Go tell Auntie Alice.” Cait pulled the blanket around her shoulders. “And come inside. It’s freezing out there. You can cuddle with me and take a nap.”
Augustus scrunched his face at her as though she’d lost her mind, then hopped back outside and closed the door behind him. From the window, Cait followed the top of his head as he ran to the side of the house.
“He’ll freeze,” her mother said, and headed to the kitchen.
Cait grumbled and stood. As she put on her shoes, she heard Alice coming down the back stairs—Cait considered it a talent, her ability to identify every person in the family just by the sound of their footsteps—and quickly hid.
When Alice reached the bottom step, Cait leapt out from the corner and yelled, “Boo!”
Alice screamed and tossed the handful of dish towels she was holding at Cait.
Cait couldn’t remember when she’d laughed so hard. She used to jump-scare Alice all the time when they were kids, but it was even more fun as an adult.
“You need to grow up,” Alice said, picking up the towels.
Cait bowed. “Why, thank you,” she said. “I agree that was one of my better ones.”
Outside, Cait found Augustus and his cousins standing with sticks along the edge of the woods separating the Folly from the Callahans’ property, where Cait and Topher used to hide their beer in high school.
“Hey,” she yelled. “Get away from there. Where’s Papa? You guys can’t catch the raccoon yourselves. They’re dangerous.”
The three boys skulked away from the wooded area, and Cait pointed to the garbage scattered across the driveway.
“Let’s grab some bags to clean up,” she said. Then she looked at Augustus. “And you need some snow clothes.”
The boys dragged their sticks across the snow as they made their way back into the house and changed, Augustus borrowing one of James’s old snowsuits.
Bundled and back outside, Cait monitored their cleanup from the front porch.
Finn wasn’t happy about the chore, but Augustus and James made it a competition, and even though Cait was cold and tired, she couldn’t help but smile watching them all play together.
She hadn’t necessarily worried about them getting along, but she was glad at how quickly they’d bonded, especially Augustus and James.
Augustus seemed more relaxed than he’d been in months.
He’d taken the divorce harder than Poppy and had asked Cait just last week if his father would be joining them on the trip to New York.
Cait and Bram had rarely visited the Folly, but when they did, he was always bored, and she had to entertain him as though he were a child.
She was glad they had never been there together with the twins.
Now she and the twins had a fresh slate to make their own memories.
Finn was the self-proclaimed judge of the Best Garbage Collector competition, so naturally, Augustus won. James did his best to protest, and he was right, but he let it go once Finn suggested another game.
“You guys can stay out here,” Cait said. “But if you see a raccoon, you have to come let us know. And avoid the geese. They’re not nice either.”
“We know,” Finn said, which was what he seemed to say about most things.
“I’ll shoot them with my laser.” Augustus held up a small plastic stick. “Pow, pow!”
“What is that?” Cait asked. From where she stood on the porch, it looked like a pregnancy test.
Augustus shrugged. “It was in the garbage.”
“Let me see.”
Cait glanced at it quickly—two positive lines—and tossed it into the garbage bag. “This isn’t for you to play with,” she said to Augustus.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Cait said. “Come with me to wash your hands.”
After washing Augustus’s hands and her own, she let him back outside and closed the front door.
It must be Alice’s, she figured. There was no one else.
Though why would Alice have taken the test there and not at her own house?
And was she even allowed to be pregnant after the crazy high blood pressure that had nearly killed her before James was born?
Cait thought back to her conversation with Maggie at the pizzeria last night.
Was this possibly her test? She and Isabel weren’t trying to have a baby already, were they?
Just then, Alice and their mother walked by from the kitchen.
“I’m helping Mom pick out an outfit for today,” Alice said as she headed up the stairs, dodging Cait’s eyes. She was clearly still annoyed about Luke coming for dinner.
“Fantastic,” Cait said enthusiastically, to annoy Alice. She kissed her mother on the cheek. “I’m sure you’ll look beautiful.”
From halfway up the stairs, Alice peered down at Cait and rolled her eyes, then kept on going.
Cait waved her off and headed to her father’s office to see if she could sneak in another attempt to call Luke.
She wanted to make sure he was still coming and to explain what had happened to her phone in case he tried to get in touch.
She could tell that he’d been drinking last night when he accepted the invitation and wouldn’t be surprised if he backed out now.
When there was no answer, she slumped into the leather chair and placed her feet on the desk.
Framed photos of the family covered the wall.
The last one of Topher was from a boat he worked on in Maine the winter before he died.
In the picture, he was leaning against a bunch of stacked crates and banding the claws of an enormous blue lobster, the churning sea behind him.
Nora had hated him working on the boat, fearing it was too dangerous, but Cait understood why she’d put up the picture.
Topher’s ruggedly handsome smile made him look almost wholesome, and that was the memory their mother was determined to preserve.
Cait never understood why people lionized the dead.
All their flaws vanished, and suddenly they emerged as an idealized version of themselves.
For her, though, that didn’t happen with Topher.
What she remembered most about her brother was his decline.
Maggie once asked if she ever sensed Topher’s presence, and she said no because it was true, but the idea scared the hell out of her.
She didn’t hold on to much from her Catholic upbringing, but one thing she felt sure of was that the dead do not become angels.
Above her, she could hear her mother and Alice shuffling around in her parents’ room. She should have gone upstairs with her mother instead of Alice. Maybe she was asking for too much today.
There was no sense dwelling on it now. What’s done is done. And if she and Luke were going to keep talking like they had been over the past few months, she’d eventually have to tell her family anyway.
She knew what Alice was thinking. How could you invite this person who elicits so many painful memories to dinner?
What else was new? She felt Alice’s judgment every time she returned home. There was always something. She didn’t visit enough. She’d left too soon after Topher died. Beyond writing the occasional check to keep the Folly afloat, she didn’t help out with their parents. The list went on and on.
But it wasn’t Alice’s judgment that haunted Cait the most. She could admit that. It was her own. It had always been her own.
She judged herself not only for Daniel’s accident, but for what happened years later when Topher showed up at her apartment the night before her bar exam. She’d never told anyone about their fight, and when she was in London, it was almost easy to forget it had even happened.
Here, not so much.
Cait woke to the knocking on her apartment door and listened for a groggy moment.
A drunk neighbor? The alarm clock next to the bed read two minutes after midnight.
Her bladder was full, and her throat throbbed from a cold she hoped to hold off until after her test that day.
As she calculated how much sleep she’d still manage to get, she sat up, and her monstrous BARbrI US Bar Review book slid off her chest and slammed onto the wooden floor.
There was another loud knock.
“Cait?”
Through the peephole, she could see her brother standing in the hallway, laughing. She undid the chain and opened the door.
“What the fuck?”
“Good to see you, too, kid.”
The smell of booze lingered as he walked past her and into the apartment.
He tossed his backpack, tattered and covered in patches, next to the desk and turned to her with red cheeks.
Their mother had hoped, when he dropped out of college, he would find his way and not drift aimlessly.
Cait wasn’t as confident, and every time she saw him, she’d think, without pleasure, I was right.
“How’d you get into the building?”
“A delivery guy held the door for me.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I told him not to.” He smiled. “ No creo que hablase inglés .”
“You’re drunk.” She was annoyed but also worried. He’d never just shown up like this, and she wasn’t sure what he wanted.
He chuckled as he collapsed onto the paisley upholstered chair from their grandmother’s old bedroom.
She remained standing, watching as he rubbed his swollen, cracked hands against the armrests. The only window in the apartment framed him. Rain fell lightly on Bleecker Street.