Chapter Four Caroline
Four
Caroline
A Blood Meal
The first time Caroline Lash was bitten by a greenhead fly she screamed as though she had been stabbed. “That FUCKER!” She bent down and saw that her ankle was bleeding. “It’s like being assaulted by a potato peeler!”
“It’s pretty interesting, actually,” explained Van. They were down on the pebbly beach in front of Caroline’s cottage. “They have scissorlike jaws, and they basically masticate the skin to lap up the blood.”
“That’s not interesting, it’s horror! It’s like Demi Moore in The Substance!”
“Does a bug bite her in that?”
“Worse. She internalizes society’s pressure for women to conform to beauty standards!” Caroline’s ankle began to grow hot and red. “Am I going to lose a limb?”
“Not if we act fast.” Van laughed, lifting her up and carrying her toward the water.
“I feel like I’m bleeding out!” Caroline cried dramatically over his shoulder.
Van snorted and set her down gently in the shallows. “A greenhead bite means you’re now officially a local.”
If getting huge bloody welts made her a local, Caroline would just as soon stay a New Yorker. “I’m going to buy a huge can of bug spray with DEET and cover myself until I grow a third eye in the middle of my forehead. Bring on the neurotoxins.”
“Oh no.” Van gently splashed salt water over her wound. “Bug spray won’t do anything. Greenheads are BEASTS. The females need a blood meal and they hunt in broad daylight.”
“Jesus.”
“You can run, but you can’t hide.” Van swatted one on his arm.
It was true. Greenhead season was the reason they could all afford to live in this otherwise idyllic seaside village.
The flies appeared for the last two weeks of July and made the beaches and marshes a war zone.
The Trustees put up big signs at Crane Beach that read “Greenhead Season: No Refunds,” and all the locals left town.
Tourists who didn’t know better would try the beach, assuming a few bugs couldn’t be that bad, and would depart an hour later, bloody and horrified, never to return.
Van and his friends retreated to Maine for a long weekend every greenhead season, to a cabin in Boothbay where his family owned a big plot of land.
They had been going for a decade, piling into bunk beds, escaping the bloodsuckers, and drinking their faces off.
When Van invited Caroline along, she was on the fence.
Would it feel like she was crashing their party?
Would they spend the whole time reminiscing about some random dude who went to their middle school, forcing Caroline to pretend she cared about some kid named “Townie” who locked their math teacher in the supply closet?
“Everyone wants you to come,” Van promised.
“My friends want to know you better.” They didn’t—five months into her relationship with Van they still barely seemed to register her presence—but Caroline appreciated the lie.
She watched the greenheads bash their heavy bodies against the screens of her cottage, she looked down at the wound on her leg, still angry and swollen, and despite her better judgment, she agreed to go.
Is Bailey going to be there? asked Nina.
Yup. Blessed be the fruit.
God, pregnant people are the worst
That is an unpopular opinion
It’s like it’s their birthday for nine months. Pregnant people get to do anything—cry, eat like a monster, be a savage bitch—and you can’t hold it against them.
It’s like when your grandfather got senile
Nina’s grandfather had once told Caroline most men preferred blonds and that she would look better with contact lenses.
He truly lost his filter
I can’t wait to be old and unfiltered. I’m going to deliver some HARD TRUTHS and nobody will be able to stop me!
Oh, I get it now, texted Nina.
What?
All your old person shit! You’re practicing for your best era!
Shut up.
The Family Game
Everyone decided to take a half day on Friday so that they could be in Boothbay for dinner, so Van picked Caroline up at her cottage and helped her carry her bags to the car.
“When you say ‘cabin,’ how rustic are we talking?” asked Caroline.
She was clutching a six-pack of cold brew cans and a flashlight she had found in the basement.
“We have a Nespresso machine,” Van snickered.
“Also, anything is fine, I’m really just curious, but how many bedrooms are there?
” Caroline was still deeply traumatized from a trip to Southampton with her old boyfriend’s family for a wedding.
His father, seeing how expensive the lodgings were, had reserved one hotel room for everyone to share, not telling anyone until they all arrived at check-in.
Her boyfriend had flipped out and tried to get them a room of their own, but the hotel was fully booked—it was peak season—and no other accommodations could be secured.
So Caroline spent the weekend sleeping on a pull-out sofa alongside her college boyfriend, three feet away from his younger brother and his parents, all of whom snored.
To her complete horror, the father slept in some kind of nightgown, a sort of men’s dress that went down to his shins and revealed a thatch of hair on his chest. But the true zenith of discomfort came the morning of their departure, when the dad emerged from the bathroom, his lips white with toothpaste foam, and announced that he had accidentally been using Caroline’s toothbrush for two days.
“So sorry, dear, they were the same color.”
“There are four bedrooms?” Van wrinkled his forehead as he thought. “I guess five if you count the sleeping porch?” Caroline nodded agreeably. A “sleeping porch” sounded romantic, as long as it was screened.
As they drove the three hours up 95, through Portland and up to Freeport, Caroline played DJ and snooped around Van’s glove compartment.
He kept his car meticulously clean, and Caroline couldn’t decide if it was normal and grown-up or slightly pathological.
He stored glass cleaner and paper towels in the seatback pocket, he used a small vacuum to get out the sand after the beach, and before they went anywhere more than an hour away, he checked the tire pressure—something Caroline didn’t even know could be done outside an auto-body shop.
“You really love your car, hunh?” she remarked once, as he used a straw and a bottle of keyboard cleaner to blow dust out of the gearshift.
“I’ve had it since I was a freshman in college,” Van explained, like he was in a long-term relationship.
“I had mixed feelings about even buying a car—fossil fuels and everything—so I promised myself I’d take really good care of it.
” Caroline nodded, pretending that rationalized the keyboard cleaner.
She hadn’t even owned a car until she moved to Greenhead, and she still had a mild panic attack every time she had to drive through a rotary.
She barely knew how to fill it with gas, she had to take off her clogs to work the pedals, and she was always accidentally turning on the windshield wipers.
The only virtue of owning a car, from what Caroline could tell, was the fact that you were frequently in really great outdoor lighting with a mirror on hand.
The first time Caroline drove herself out to Appleton Farms to meet Van for a walk she had checked her reflection and noticed, with complete horror, a hair poking from her chin.
She had tried to grab it with her fingernails, but it had been futile, and so she’d spent the entire walk trying to hide her face from Van, marching quickly ahead of him on the paths and feigning enthusiasm for “getting her heart rate up.” After that day Caroline made a point to keep a pair of tweezers in her glove compartment, and whenever she parked in a particularly sunny spot, she did a brief check to make sure she wasn’t walking around looking like Hagrid from Harry Potter.
When they got to the cabin there were already four cars outside, sporty SUVs and a Ford truck. “Who else is here?” she asked curiously. She had been hoping they would arrive first so that she could claim a good room.
“Hmm, that one is Colin’s, the truck is RJ’s, black is Eben’s, and that’s my grandmother’s—she must be helping everyone settle in.”
Van left the bags in the trunk and headed around the side of the house to the back. Caroline flipped down the visor and checked her hair in the mirror. She practiced her best “I-am-the-girlfriend-of-your-baby’s-father” smile before climbing out of the car and following Van up the stone path.
The property was lovely, like something out of a brochure for America.
The cabin was shingled, light gray, and the back opened out on a rolling lawn that led down through a field of wildflowers to a dock and the ocean.
There was a little shack—a boat house—filled with kayaks and canoes, a garden bursting with puffy hydrangea, and a hammock was strung between two trees.
Caroline half expected a golden retriever to come up and lick her, or for Diane Keaton to come marching around the corner with a hat and watering can.
Instead, a beautiful white-haired woman came striding up from the dock.
His grandmother must have been almost ninety but moved with the wiry confidence of someone who took a multivitamin.
She was carrying an oar in one hand, a fishing rod in the other.
“Vanny! I’m just setting everyone up for a paddle.
There’s enough time to get on the water before dinner. Hurry down!”
Caroline smiled brightly and waited for the woman to acknowledge her.
She looked like Van, long-limbed and slender, her nose sharp, her jaw not even softened with age.
Van kissed his grandmother hello but before any introductions could be made, the woman swept up to the house and through the back door.
“Sorry about that. It’s cocktail hour. She’s probably annoyed they had her out there a minute past five.” Van snickered. “Come on, let’s get on the water.”