Chapter Thirteen Caroline
Thirteen
Caroline
Arrowhead
Caroline Lash didn’t have any friends. Without Van in her day-to-day life, she realized just how alone she was.
Of course, she had Nina. She had her college friends auditioning for shows in LA and singing on a cruise ship somewhere in the Mediterranean.
She had her publishing circle, a lively group text that she still followed closely.
But she didn’t have anyone to meet for a coffee or invite over to watch Netflix.
As much as she liked some of Van’s friends, it would be weird for her to call up Fran or Eben to hang out.
She was a conditional member of the group, the side salad that came with the meal.
She thought about packing up the cottage and slinking back to New York with her tail between her legs, but her fellowship wasn’t finished, she had to “demonstrate meaningful progress” on a novel.
Ned Clark had been the one to send her to Greenhead in the first place, and she couldn’t let Van Whittaker be the one to send her back.
In a moment of weakness, she called her mother to tell her Van had dumped her.
“Caroline?” her father answered in a whisper.
“Hi, Dad, what’s going on?” she whispered back.
“I’ve taken your mother’s phone. She’s in an authorial voice blackout.”
“A what? A blackout?”
“For her authorial voice. You know how she finds that bad writing can infect her style, can screw up her entire lexicon. Well, last night her editor strong-armed her into attending an event for another one of her writers and, honey, it was horrendous. I could see your mother sponging it up like fine linen in a pool of Kool-Aid.”
“Oh.” Caroline suppressed a laugh. “Well, I was just calling to catch up a little.”
“She’s trying to do a hard reset right now, rereading her own work and not taking any calls or even listening to NPR. She doesn’t want to hear my voice either, that’s why I’m whispering.”
“Okay, well, call me back when you guys are through the crisis,” Caroline said sarcastically.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” he replied earnestly. “I’m sure you understand. Language can be so contagious.”
They hung up and Caroline tossed her phone on her kitchen counter, annoyed.
Her mother was in a rut. Well, she wasn’t the only one.
In the weeks since she and Van had broken up, Caroline had been struggling with her work too.
She had been trying to write about Greenhead, a novel about the Crane family in their castle, but the entire thing felt fake and stupid.
She felt like she was holding little marionettes and dragging them around on a stage, the strings getting tangled, the mouths clacking open and shut.
She had spent long days down in the basement archives of the Greenhead Public Library looking at old photos and reading about the Chicago industrialists.
She had taken copious notes from her tours of the castle, had stomped around the gardens to breathe the same air the Crane family had so long ago, but the story just wasn’t alive.
The secret Caroline was ashamed to admit was that even though she called herself a fiction writer, her work had never really been pure fiction.
Her New Yorker story had been based on a real mugging she’d experienced, and everything else had hewn fairly close to the truth as well.
She’d written a story in college about two counselors at a music camp who concealed their addictions under the cover of their wholesome veneer—a secret she had discovered one summer and sworn to keep.
She’d written a story about a high school friend whose father went to jail for insider trading.
Unbeknownst to Nina, Caroline had written about her as well, about her decision to lose her virginity to a boy she’d only known online.
Caroline had shared the story with her workshop, had included it in her senior thesis, but never published it, not even in the campus literary journal, for fear of betraying her friend.
That was the crux of it. Caroline could only write about people she knew firsthand, and as she sat at her desk, moving the Crane family marionettes around in their castle, she felt like a complete fraud.
All through February and March, between hours staring at her computer, she forced herself to go for long walks, having somehow absorbed Van’s WASPy belief that brisk walks in the cold could cure whatever ailed you, stomping around Appleton Farms, Strawberry Hill, the Audubon, and Crane Beach.
It was weird, Caroline felt like in some ways she was becoming Van, wearing the same wool sweater or fleece vest for days at a time, pulling invasive weeds when she noticed them on the path, collecting litter as she walked.
One day she found herself standing still and staring at a bird for twenty minutes and worried she might actually be mentally ill. Birdwatching!
She hadn’t spoken to anyone but the barista at the coffee shop in days when she ran into Fran out on Strawberry Hill.
It was low tide, and the river was out, leaving a rocky peninsula where you could stand on the mudflats and look all across the marsh, Little Neck, and the water tower in the distance.
Hale and London were throwing rocks in the shallows as Fran used a stick to poke around the mud.
She noticed Caroline and waved hello. “Oh my God, hi! What are you doing here?”
“Just needed to get out of the house.” Caroline grinned shyly.
Fran clambered up the rocks. “I heard you and Van broke up in January. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, thanks. I’m okay.”
“I thought he might finally be over Bailey, but I guess not,” Fran said.
“Van and Bailey are together now?” Caroline was startled.
“Shit. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Fran grimaced.
“No, I’m glad you did. I’m just surprised. He told me so many times they wouldn’t ever be a couple. We had the conversation over and over.” Caroline felt woozy. Was she heartbroken? Was she furious?
“It’s the shampoo effect.” Fran shook her head. “Van never really got Bailey out of his system. He just kept hanging around her and every time she showed him the slightest interest, he’d fall headlong and fully in love with her again.”
Caroline felt a searing pain in her throat, the precursor to tears.
She could see it: Van’s whole little group had been all over each other for thirty years, they’d never taken a break, never had the chance to regard one another soberly and ask if their friendships served them.
They just had parties and got drunk and talked about each other, using one another as an excuse to never really grow up.
“Sometimes it seemed like Van had a different persona for the group,” Caroline said. “When he and I were together we talked about ideas, books, the environment. But then he’d be around the guys, and he’d suddenly have an opinion on a basketball game, or he’d start talking in movie quotes.”
“I don’t think RJ has ever talked to me about a book.” Fran frowned.
Together, they sat on a boulder and watched the boys in their bright hats and jackets crouching over to examine the stones, tossing some into the water and making small piles with others, their sorting system as mysterious to Caroline as it seemed necessary to the boys.
It was funny how kids wanted to work. They didn’t relax the way adults did, they never just flopped on a bench and stared at the sky, instead they took on enormous and futile projects as though they were jobs—to collect all the driftwood on the beach, to build a wall of sand to keep the ocean at bay, to dig a hole to the center of the Earth.
Van was a little like that too, devoting his whole career to the massive job of tending the sand dunes, preventing erosion to the beach. It was hard not to see deeper meaning there, Van’s abiding commitment to stability.
“So, did Van move into Bailey’s house?” It hurt to ask, but at the same time Caroline felt starved for information about him.
“Yeah.” Fran winced. “Kids change everything. I didn’t really understand that for a long time, but now I do.”
“They make you want to be with the kid’s mother? Or father?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. I more just mean that you can have this really clear vision of yourself, of your life philosophy, and then the reality of having children makes it all murky.
You think you’re an environmentalist and you only buy things secondhand and then suddenly you’re neck-deep in plastic toys.
You keep your maiden name and then you can’t get your kids off an airplane because your passports don’t match.
You do everything you can to be independent, to pay your own way, to live exactly as you please, but then you have children and realize you have to stay in your lane, or you’ll break their hearts. ”
Fran seemed to be getting emotional, and Caroline wanted to hug her but wasn’t sure if she should. Something was seriously wrong, and Caroline didn’t know enough to ask the right questions.
“Maybe those changes are just temporary?” suggested Caroline. “Having little kids looks really hard. Maybe once they get older you kind of get back to yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Fran said doubtfully. “I’m always having these moments where I’m about to lose my shit in the cereal aisle, and then I step back and realize that one day my kids will be in college, that I’ll look back and wish my kids were young again, and I get so guilty.
Like I’m squandering their childhood feeling annoyed at them or wishing they could brush their own teeth.
And don’t get me wrong, I love my children more than life itself, but there isn’t a day in my house where I sleep as much as I want, where I don’t cut someone else’s food, where I don’t pick up someone’s underwear off the floor.
Hale is four. So, what? I have another decade of picking up his underwear?
And then another two decades of paying for his haircuts and dental care and education and phone bill? ”