Chapter 31
Jane
Betsy showed me to her mother’s room. Caro had been on the main floor since I’d started coming here, and I wanted to tell Betsy I more than knew the way, but I figured that would sound pissy. But that was kind of how I felt.
I couldn’t help myself, but I hoped that Stick would be in the room with Caro.
He wasn’t. I should have been tipped off because his car wasn’t parked out front in the large circular drive, but I figured maybe he’d begun parking over by the garage.
Maybe now that Betsy and Joey were back he was acting more like… the help.
“Jane,” Caro said when I entered her room behind Betsy. “Thank you for coming.”
“Of course,” I said, moving to the plush upholstered chair at her side.
She didn’t look good. It had only been about ten days since I’d seen her, when we filmed the interview, but she’d declined quite a bit in that short time.
She was propped up in bed, a thick robe wrapped around her frail body, a white nightgown peeking out at her neck.
Her hair had been recently washed and was still a little damp.
An IV was hooked up to one of her arms, and multiple pill bottles and paraphernalia were on the large bedside table.
There were fresh flowers in vases all over the room, and the window was cracked slightly, allowing a light spring breeze into the room. But even with all that, the room still had a…sterile smell to it. The smell of sickness. The smell of death.
“Can I get you anything, Mom?” Betsy asked, moving to the other side of the bed from where I sat down.
“No, thank you, honey.”
“Okay, then I’ll just leave you two alone.”
Caro looked like she wanted to say something more to Betsy, but she didn’t. Her eyes followed her daughter as Betsy left the room, closing the door behind her.
Thinking I was probably reading her mind, I said, “You can’t force her to accept me, you know.”
A sad smile flitted across her face. “Am I that obvious?”
I didn’t answer that. “It’ll either happen or it won’t. You just need to let her make that choice.”
She nodded. “But, are you…open to her if she wants a relationship with her sister?”
I took a deep breath. If my breakup with Stick wasn’t enough, seeing this woman’s life slipping away from her made me realize that you should never take any relationship for granted. “Yes,” I said.
That seemed to satisfy her, and she leaned back against the headboard of the huge bed and closed her eyes.
I knew this would be the last time I saw Caroline Stratton. The last time to ask her some questions that I’d always wanted answered. “Why did you try to be a part of my life when I was younger?”
She didn’t even open her eyes when she answered, “Because I loved your father, and you were his daughter.”
“Even though he cheated on you? You still loved him?”
“Yes.”
“And you still love him.” It wasn’t a question.
Only a nod from her.
“Was it…awful being around me when I was a kid? When you’d bring Betsy and Joey to be with me? When my mother would be in the other room?”
She opened her eyes, leaned away from the headboard.
“No, not awful. Well, the situation was awful. Getting Joey and Betsy to go—and be civil—was awful. But it was important that they did, and I wouldn’t have them do it without me there.
” She reached a hand out for me, and I inched to the edge of my chair to take it.
“But you weren’t awful, Jane. You were such an interesting person, even then.
So smart, taking in the situation. Hating it, and yet… ”
“Wishing I was part of your family,” I finished.
She squeezed my hand, then let it go, leaning back.
“I’m in kind of a similar situation. I mean, the situation you were in back then. It has a lot of parallels.”
She sat back up, with more energy than I thought she had. “Stick cheated on you? That surprises me.”
“No, he didn’t cheat on me.”
“But you’re not together?”
“He hasn’t told you anything?”
She shook her head. “I could tell, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it. And then with Betsy and Joey home, and more home nursing people here, we really haven’t had a lot of chances.”
I told her the story. I felt kind of shitty doing it—it wasn’t my place to tell her Stick had knocked up somebody. But it just seemed…right that Caro know. She’d been such an instrumental part of Stick and me even being together.
“And so you’re wondering if you’ll be able to accept Stick’s baby like I tried to do with you?”
“No. I mean, it won’t come to that. He ended it. I won’t have the opportunity to even see if I could…be a part of his life with the baby.”
“Do you want to be?”
Yes. “I don’t know,” I said. “It probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway.”
She looked at me for a long time, then leaned back against the headboard and closed her eyes. “You don’t believe that. And neither do I,” she said quietly.
I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. After a moment, I realized she’d fallen asleep. I sat quietly in the chair, watching the woman whom I, at times in my life, hated and loved, admired and feared, but always respected. Even when I thought she might be manipulating me, I respected her.
Because, at the end of the day, her motives were all about doing what she thought was right for her kids and the man she loved. My father.
I looked for Stick when I left, but didn’t see him, and his car still wasn’t in the front of the house.
When I got back to the dorm room, I sat for a long time and thought about Caro and the life she led. But mostly I thought about Stick, and whether I could be as big a person as Caro had been. If I could accept his child with another woman because I loved its father.
It didn’t matter, though, because Stick wasn’t giving me the chance to try.
Lily entered the room. “How’d it go?” she asked as she dropped her backpack on her desk, not really looking at me.
“It…it…” And then I lost it. Started crying. And I mean crying. Like, ugly hiccupping shit.
She was at my side in an instant, sitting next to me on my bed, putting her arms around me, rubbing her hand up and down my back. “It’s okay. I know you thought of her…kind of like a mother. It’s okay.”
I remembered, not so long ago, that I had thought I would never cry about a boy in front of Lily like she’d done when Lucas and she had broken up. I knew Lily thought I was crying about Caro, and part of me was. But most of the tears were about Stick.
I let Lily comfort me, not even embarrassed that she saw me being so emotional.
For some odd reason, I thought about my mother. And the fact that I had one thing she never had—a best friend.
* * *
Three days later, I got the call from Grayson that Caro had passed that morning. In a weird twist of fate, I received a letter from her that afternoon that she’d sent two days earlier. She must have written it right after my visit.
It was on her monogrammed notecards; the handwriting was shaky, but definitely Caro’s. It was only two lines.
His name is Patrick Dooley.
And he loves you.