Chapter 6. Cait #5
Cait no longer had an appetite, and instead of eating a slice of the vegan pie, she poured herself a full glass of wine from a new bottle and tried to remember when her parents must have last seen Luke.
At the beach club the afternoon Daniel died?
The Larkins explicitly requested the Ryans not attend Daniel’s funeral.
On that day, the Folly was filled with a silence even nine-year-old Maggie knew not to disturb.
Cait and her sisters stayed in their respective rooms, while their father holed up in the basement with his train set, and their mother painted the lavender blooms out in the garden.
Where was Topher? Cait didn’t know. He never spoke to her about her part in the accident, and she certainly wasn’t going to say anything.
Even now, she looked back on the day with shame—how, amid the horror of Daniel’s death, she couldn’t stop thinking about losing her virginity to Luke the night before.
She knew it was the last thing that could or maybe even should happen, but she was consumed with her longing to touch Luke again.
She spent hours in bed replaying every detail of the night before, masturbating and crying, a continuous loop of desire and remorse.
Her guilt over Daniel and her ache for Luke were inextricably linked, no matter how desperate she was to separate them.
When Luke left for college a few weeks later, she waited for him to reach out, but he never did.
The twins refused to eat their dinner because the crust was cold and the cheese was burnt, and Cait gave in and let them each have a bowl of cereal and a banana, which they barely ate anyway.
When Poppy cried at how Cait cut the banana slices, Nora chimed in to say maybe they just weren’t hungry.
Then she recounted the same story she always told about how the nuns at the orphanage forced her to eat all her food, disgusting gray sludge they called porridge, bread fried in lard and topped with baked beans, and meat with the gristle.
When Poppy wouldn’t settle, Cait downed the rest of her wine and scooped the twins into both arms.
“Bedtime,” she said, grateful for an excuse to head upstairs.
The twins tried to wrestle free as she brought them into the bathroom but quieted once Cait got them into the tub.
She thought of her father returning home from work when she and Topher were young and Alice was a toddler.
Her mother was always understandably overwhelmed.
Her father would come in smelling like the outside world and take over.
He’d put Alice to bed, make boxed macaroni and cheese, plop Cait and Topher into the bath, and feed them their dinner there.
Cait dimmed the lights and read to the twins while they played in the tub with a plastic tugboat and a small rod that caught wide-mouthed fish with a magnet.
Then Augustus got upset at Poppy for taking an extra turn and smashed the rod over Poppy’s head.
As Poppy started to stand, she slipped and banged her eyebrow against the faucet.
Both stopped yelling as soon as they saw the blood, then broke into a simultaneous wail, making Cait want to cry herself, because this would delay bedtime.
“It’s just a boo-boo,” Cait said, kissing Poppy’s wet forehead, where a small egg was already blooming on her eyebrow.
She lifted them out of the bath and gave Poppy a cold wash towel to hold against her eye while she dried them off and then dabbed ointment across the gash, igniting another wail from Poppy, before applying a Band-Aid.
“All better now!” She ushered the twins across the hall to the bunk room, and when they heard James laughing downstairs, they insisted on joining their cousins.
“Everyone’s going to bed,” Cait said.
“They’re not!” Augustus said.
“I’m hungry,” Poppy said.
“Me too.”
“And I want to show Grammy my boo-boo.”
“Will you read us one more book?”
“And sleep in here? I’m scared.”
“Me too!”
Cait stuffed their limbs into their pajamas and grabbed a book from the bookcase.
She was relieved to dodge the family drama caused by her earlier announcement and figured everyone downstairs was probably talking about her.
She didn’t want to hear what they had to say anyway.
Luke was coming tomorrow. She was still pinching herself that she’d invited him, let alone that he had accepted.
She flopped onto the bottom bunk and tapped the space on either side of her. “Come,” she said, and the twins piled onto the bed.
“You’ll stay?” Poppy asked again.
“Yes, shh.”
A creak from the ceiling fan drowned out the voices from the kitchen below, and before Cait was halfway through the book, the twins’ bodies settled.
Hers followed. Even though she was upset about her broken phone, she couldn’t help but notice how present she was with the twins without it in her back pocket.
Now that she’d connected with Luke, she could allow herself to relax.
She lowered herself so that her face nestled between their faces, their sweet breath on either cheek, their wet hair dampening the pillowcases.
She kissed Poppy gently on her Band-Aid and ran her fingertips along the insides of their wrists, as they liked.
This was the only time of the day, as they were falling into sleep, when she felt capable of being the kind of mother she had imagined she would be, before she became the mother she apparently was—the kind that liked her children best when they were behaving well and didn’t need anything from her.