Chapter One Caroline #4
“I wish I wasn’t. She recently told me that the reason I’m such a bad driver is because I can’t tolerate conflict.”
“I hope you fought back on that point.” Van playfully rubbed her shoulders like a boxing trainer.
“In high school she refused to come to a single play—even when I was the lead in Our Town—because ‘watching bad theater disturbed her artistic sensibilities.’ ”
Van snorted. “I was the plant in Little Shop of Horrors in the fourth grade. They made me be a plant.”
“I feel like that’s your vibe, though,” Caroline teased. “As an environmentalist.”
“It was basically Method acting,” Van agreed happily.
It turned out that Caroline didn’t need to worry about her parents’ visit.
That despite his low-key demeanor, Van Whittaker excelled in the arts of parental charms. Before they arrived, he read several of Gwendolyn’s novels and asked her thoughtful questions about her creative process.
He took Gregory out fishing on his boat at six in the morning and they caught a striped bass almost big enough to keep.
He drove them to Gloucester to eat sushi, to Newburyport for chowder on a deck overlooking the marina, to Woodman’s in Essex for plates of fried clams served on wax paper in red plastic baskets.
If Van were a blood type, he’d be O negative, that rare universal donor, compatible with anyone he liked.
Caroline knew that Gwendolyn was more like AB positive, only able to donate to people exactly like her, and it thrilled her to watch her mother succumb to Van’s quiet appeal in spite of herself.
She stood in her little kitchen drinking coffee watching her mother, resplendent in a black Eileen Fisher sweater (her mother only wore black, believing it to be slimming and also the uniform of New York’s creative class), peering through a pair of binoculars as Van, in fleece and a ridiculous pair of Crocs, pointed out the terns and cormorants across the channel by Plum Island.
“Van seems more cosmopolitan than most New Englanders,” Gwendolyn told Caroline approvingly as they watched him drive away on the last night. “And well read too.”
Nina teased her incessantly about her perfect new boyfriend.
Are you describing the plot of a Hallmark movie where a city girl moves to a small town? Does he wear plaid shirts and drive a truck? Is he the Good Guy who’s going to remind you of the true meaning of Christmas and family?
He drives a Subaru and I’m pretty sure he’s agnostic, Caroline replied.
So the plaid shirt is a yes?
The morning Van told Caroline about the baby was a bad one. It was a Tuesday and Caroline had just woken up and was still wearing her pajamas, a pair of sweatpants, and a Katz’s Deli T-shirt that said “Send a Salami” when Van knocked on the cottage door.
“Hey.” Caroline let him in. “Are you playing hooky? Did the piping plovers give you a day off?” She kissed him hello.
“Caroline,” Van started, and she realized that he looked exhausted, that something important was about to happen. “I have to tell you some news.”
They sat down at her kitchen table and Caroline crossed her arms over her chest. She hated that she was still wearing her pajamas and felt like there should be a law against telling anyone bad news when they didn’t have on a bra.
“You know my friend Bailey?”
Caroline nodded. Bailey was one of his group, a beautiful blond who looked exactly the way she had always pictured the Wakefield twins from Sweet Valley High, or like one of the lifeguards on Baywatch.
“She’s pregnant.” He paused. “And it’s mine.” Van was wearing an expression she’d never seen before, his eyebrows pinched in pain.
“Oh.” Caroline felt her stomach drop. “I didn’t realize you were…” Her face flushed. She had just stupidly assumed that Van was hers, that everything she was feeling for him he was feeling too. But no.
“We’re not. Bailey and I slept together in January, before I met you.” It was like Van was trying to squint at something very far away.
“So, this was a couple months ago?”
“Well, it was years ago and months ago. We dated in high school and sort of hooked up off and on after that, mostly when we were drinking. It didn’t mean anything. It’s not like with you.”
Not like with you. Okay. “Is she keeping it?” Caroline asked. Maybe Van would go with Bailey to the appointment. Drive her home after. That made sense.
“We talked about it last night. I said it was her decision, whether or not to keep it, but she’s thirty-four and all her friends have kids. She’s excited.”
Excited. So, no appointment. “Are you excited?” Caroline asked slowly.
“Not yet?” Van said honestly. “But I think I can be once the surprise wears off?”
Oh. This is what people meant when they said they were “crushed.” Caroline felt like her heart was being squeezed in a vise and the pain was unbearable. This was the end of the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her. “So, you’re breaking up with me.”
“No.” Van got up from his chair and came over to hug Caroline. “Bailey is a good friend, and she is going to be a great mother, but I want to be with you. And she wants to be alone.”
“But does she?” Caroline asked, her voice muffled by Van’s shoulder. “I don’t want to be in the middle.”
“Bailey’s great, but that’s just not how it is between us. I promise.” Van was still wearing his jacket, and the zipper scratched against her cheek. It hurt, but she didn’t want to pull away.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly.
“You have every right to be angry.”
Was she angry? Caroline couldn’t tell. It was just truly terrible.
Something had been snatched out of her fingertips.
She’d only known Van for a couple of months, but the idea of breaking up made her sick with grief.
He was the nicest man she’d ever met. “I just think this is going to end in tears, Van.”
“It doesn’t have to end.” Van looked at her pleadingly.
“I need some time to think,” Caroline said, and crossed her arms across her braless chest.
See? she texted Nina. No Hallmark movie has the Good Guy knock up his ex-girlfriend from high school.
No. Nina agreed. The Good Guy definitely doesn’t do that.
Caroline spent the rest of the day in bed, not getting up to shower or eat or even change out of her Katz’s Deli T-shirt.
She flipped through photos on her phone, selfies she had taken with Van at Appleton Farms, at Woodman’s, lying in his bed laughing about how his big feet hung off the edge.
She found Bailey on Instagram and even though it felt like pushing on a bruise she scrolled through photo after photo, Bailey with her blond sisters on Christmas wearing matching tartan pajamas, Bailey somewhere tropical pretending to make a phone call on a conch shell, her bikini body angled just so, and finally Bailey with Van.
It was a group photo from a ski trip, six of them arm in arm at the top of a mountain, squinting into the sun.
Even in a neon hat and parka, Bailey’s beauty was obvious, in every sense of the word.
She was genetically blessed with a heart-shaped face, flawless skin, and a big, shiny smile, but also well groomed to a kind of Platonic ideal of babehood.
She was a body, while Caroline had always strongly identified as a brain.
The fact that Van could like both her and this entirely different kind of girl felt inconceivable, the notion of an overlap on the “Bailey” and “Caroline” Venn diagram nonexistent.
On the second day Caroline tried to put Van out of her mind.
She got out of bed and washed her hair and drank a gallon of coffee and clacked away on her laptop, but everything she wrote was garbage and the caffeine lit up her anxiety like a Christmas tree.
She put on her jacket and paced Pavilion Beach.
She cleaned the bathroom. She lay down on the small brown couch and stared at the wall.
Had other writers come to this cottage to find themselves utterly shattered and heartbroken?
Did they all stay? She called home to ask what her mother would do.
“Caroline, darling.” Her mother never said “Hello” when she answered the phone, she just plunged into the middle of a conversation.
“Hi, Mom.”
“I’m glad you called. I’m in a bit of a pique, to be honest. You know my editor and I had agreed on the title of my new book, and now marketing is saying we have to change it.”
“Oh, wow.”
“And you know Daddy won’t let me talk to the marketing director anymore because apparently she has very thin skin and got her feelings hurt by our last discussion. Honestly, how can you work in this business with such thin skin?”
“I don’t know,” Caroline said neutrally. She traced her fingers along the cracked leather of her sofa.
“It’s a disaster. Anyway, I should run. Were you just calling to check in?”