Chapter Four Caroline #3
RJ passed around the little martini shots and they all took them quickly and handed him back the glasses. He then distributed cans of Summer Ale and High Noon for the game. He, Fran, and Colin each took a weed gummy too, but the others passed.
Caroline fiddled with her pencil and thought for a moment.
Maybe she could put down the writer Palmer Preston?
He was a famous person and a Greenhead celebrity?
No, if she put down the name of her fellowship sponsor, then everyone would know it was hers.
She wrote down the name “Timothée Chalamet” and folded the paper in half.
The game moved quickly at first, Augusta guessing that Colin was “Steve Jobs” because he had just read a biography about him, Max guessing that Eben was his childhood hero “Jane Goodall,” Fran guessing that RJ was “Tom Brady.” The couples all knew each other too well, could see the names that were bubbling around their subconscious, the magazines lying around the house, the podcasts they’d heard in the background.
When it was Caroline’s turn, she guessed that Van was “Greta Thunberg,” it seemed logical he would pick someone like that, but Van shook his head and Caroline took a big drink of her beer, disappointed in herself.
“I know who you are, Vanny,” said Bailey, turning to him with a smile. “You’re ‘Steven Tyler’ from Aerosmith.”
“Ahhh, guilty.” Van got up and shuffled chairs to join Bailey’s “family.”
“You had that CD in your car for all of high school.” Bailey scooted over to make room for him, resting her hand on her belly, and Caroline took another big sip, even though it wasn’t her turn.
Fran’s phone rang and she got up to answer it, ducking into the kitchen. Caroline could hear her giving instructions on where her mother might find a specific cord for a raccoon-shaped nightlight.
“Are your kids with your parents?” Caroline asked Augusta.
“They’re with my mother,” Augusta replied curtly, and Caroline understood that she was being tacitly reprimanded for not knowing the specifics of Augusta’s family structure.
“More accurately, they are with the horse girls,” Eben interjected. “There are these middle school girls who ride at Mom’s barn who go crazy for the chance to babysit.” Eben had seen his sister’s rudeness, and he was extending a hand to Caroline. She smiled at him gratefully.
Augusta won the first round, guessing Max was “Greta Thunberg,” and they cracked new beers and played again, this time Caroline writing down “Tiger Woods,” to throw people off her scent.
Fran won that round, and by the third everyone was too drunk to remember all the names and became distracted telling the story of some guy they’d known in tenth grade who had been sent away to military school for stealing a police car and was now teaching driver’s ed in Lynnfield.
Caroline was about to search the pantry for crackers when Colin announced that he and RJ were going to the bar. He had put on a baseball cap and button-down.
“You can’t drive.” Augusta looked upset.
“We’re riding the bikes!” RJ was hammered. “Eben? Coming?”
“Nope,” Eben declined. “I went to summer camp in Maine, and I can speak from experience that nothing good happens after midnight at a bar up here.”
Augusta was whispering to Colin, clearly displeased, but Colin just kissed her forehead and followed RJ out the door.
After they left, Caroline brushed her teeth at the kitchen sink, aware that the entire cabin shared only one bathroom.
She peed quickly and when Van came out to the sleeping porch she was nestled under a dusty old quilt with her book.
She couldn’t fall asleep without reading, but on nights like this, nights where she was drunk enough to feel the lines of text weaving on the page, she knew she would have to wake up in the morning and move her bookmark back a dozen pages, with no memory of what she’d read.
There were two single beds on opposite sides of the room, and after Van kissed her goodnight, he retreated to the other bed instead of climbing in with her.
It made sense, he was six feet tall, but she still felt a little lonely.
She turned out the light and waited for sleep to come.
She heard the bathroom door open and close, she heard footsteps in the hall, a cough, and then the human noises subsided.
She flipped her pillow and quietly rearranged her blankets.
Her pajama bottoms were making her too hot and she felt itchy from the salt water.
She tried to count out her breathing and relax, but she felt like she could hear every weird sound from the woods, mice and bats and nocturnal birds rustling around, wind and distant cars.
The harder she tried to fall asleep, the more impossible it was.
When she became aware of a different noise nearby, Caroline sat up to listen.
Someone was knocking. Was it Colin or RJ?
Were they locked out of the house? As quietly as she could, she pulled back the covers and crept to the door of the sleeping porch.
The light outside the kitchen door was still on and so she walked carefully down the hall and stopped, peeking out the window.
Nobody. She listened but heard nothing. Then the knocking again.
It was coming from inside. Caroline turned the corner and there, outside Eben’s room, was Augusta, tapping on his door.
Augusta saw her and so Caroline lifted her chin, silently asking her what to do.
Augusta shook her head once and turned away, back toward her own room.
Caroline stood there for a moment, unsure, before retreating to the sleeping porch.
All night Caroline had seen that there was something going on between Augusta and her brother.
The rhythms were off between them. Eben was so easy with everyone else.
He gently teased them, he let his shoulder bump theirs when he laughed at the table, he collected their empty cups and stacked them up after the game.
He didn’t do that with his sister and Colin. Eben seemed watchful around them.
She quietly climbed back into her bed and pulled the covers high.
It was so hard for her to figure out this group.
If she had grown up in Greenhead, would they make more sense to her?
Would they be her friends? Caroline didn’t think so.
In some ways, they actually seemed unlikely friends for Van.
They all treated him with such affection—who wouldn’t love Van?
—but it was like they thought his seriousness and his intellect was a quirk rather than a virtue.
Aw, Van understands the carbon cycle! That’s so funny!
Look! Van knows the name of the governor of California!
How random! It was like they were missing the very best parts of him. The parts she saw and loved.
As Caroline tossed and turned her thoughts tipped into the specific anxiety that comes from insomnia in a strange house.
What was she even doing here, in this remote cottage in Maine, surrounded by these people?
She had left her apartment, she had left her friends, she’d left the career she’d worked so hard to earn.
And why? Caroline had loudly offered a million excuses when she left New York.
She had said she wanted to write. She had said she needed to get out from her mother’s shadow.
She said New York had changed too much after the pandemic.
But deep down she knew it was, in part, for a much stupider reason.
Deep down, it was because of a boy named Ned Clark.
When Caroline had been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house, her boss gave her a corporate card and a mandate: Take a literary agent out to lunch every day until you find a new writer.
It was both wonderful and terrible. Every single day she ate sushi or salmon, salads with shaved fennel or hamburgers on puffy brioche.
But between each bite she had to learn to make professional lunch chat.
Most of the agents were older than she was, so she’d try to impress them, reading up on their authors ahead of time and then delivering minor dissertations on their work.
When the agent was her age, she could relax a little, even trade some light gossip, but the entire time there was still an elephant in the room: Caroline’s famous mother.
She was just too big an industry figure to be ignored.
In Caroline’s early childhood Gwendolyn Lash had been a normal, if somewhat successful, writer.
She had typed away in her home office while Caroline’s father worked long hours at a white-shoe law firm.
She had an agent, Marcy Pringle, who took her to lunch once a year, an event so exciting her mother would try on her entire closet before heading out the door.
But when one of her books was made into a major Hollywood movie, her career took off and the orbit of their household had shifted.
Caroline’s father stopped working at the firm, instead overseeing her mother’s book and film contracts.
Her agent was no longer an Oz-like figure hiding behind an annual lunch; instead, Marcy Pringle saw Gwendolyn at least once a month, sitting in on marketing meetings and orchestrating international sales.
Gwendolyn Lash had become a living legend—a household name, a Jeopardy! clue, and a very rich woman.
As Caroline wined and dined the agent community, trying to establish herself as an editor, they pumped her for information about Gwendolyn.
People wanted to know if she wrote her own books (she did), if she wrote the film scripts (she did), and if she was really as glamorous as she looked in her author photos (she was—she had a new photo taken for every book jacket, a massive production that involved lighting assistants, professional hair and makeup, and once a diamond necklace procured from the PR team at Cartier).