“How is Jim?” she asked.
Different, I wanted to say. He doesn’t sleep. Rarely eats with me anymore. His temper – always mercurial – was completely unpredictable. The other night after waking up alone just after midnight, I actually went looking for him. Not something I ever did before. Only to find him talking to himself in the kitchen. Muttering and swearing. I left without saying a word, but lay in bed staring at the ceiling, a sick dread in my stomach.
“Fine,” I said, because I didn’t know how to talk about Jim. Not with Caroline, not with anyone.
“How are things at the foundation?”
I took a deep breath. “On hold for the moment.” My job at the foundation had been a sham, though it took me a while to realize it. I’d thought, stupidly, Jim was giving me a chance to actually do some good. But he’d taken it away as quickly as he’d given it to me.
Embarrassed, I hadn’t told Caroline that. I’d lied, pretending I still worked there.
Pride and all.
“Really?” she asked. “You had such plans.”
“After the miscarriage, we thought it best if I did less.”
“Of course,” Caroline said quickly. She didn’t like talking about my miscarriages. And she had made it clear that she was not a shoulder for me to lean on when it came to my marriage. The first time I’d gone to her house, crying and bloody, in shock from Jim’s violence, Caroline cleaned me up and told me it was my job to make it work. That I needed to make it work. For my own sake. For Zilla’s sake.
And she sent me back to Jim.
Zilla would have told her to fuck off and taken a match to Jim’s house. But, again, I was not Zilla, and I had dried my eyes and did what Caroline told me.
Somehow, making it work, meant me becoming smaller and smaller inside my body and life. I was unnoticeable and forgettable and passive and meek, all so I could survive. So my sister could survive.
“And Zilla? How is she?” Caroline asked.
“Belhaven.”
“She checked herself back in?”
I nodded and didn’t tell her about the seven days my sister had been gone. Caroline had already done so much for us, and there was nothing she could do that would change Zilla’s circumstances.
And maybe I was embarrassed. Or maybe I was just exhausted.
“Good.”
I lied and she smiled like all was well, and that too was a comfort. Pretending everything was fine was simply a way of making things fine.
I poured the boiling water into the teapot and tossed in three scoops of my special English Breakfast blend, got out some milk for the small milk pitcher, and sugar cubes. “Lemon?”
“No, thank you. Sit down.” She pulled me down onto the stool next to her.
“You’re very thin,” she said, eyeing me up and down.
“The miscarriage—”
“Was months ago. Have you seen your doctor?”
“Of course.”
“And you’re okay?”
“Who is that man?” I asked. Blurted, really. “Ronan?”
“Are you changing the subject?” Caroline asked with a smile.
“I am,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about the miscarriage.”
“Well, he’s a man I hired a few years ago. He works on sensitive issues for the family.”
“Why is he talking to Jim?”
“Just clarifying his position on the trade deal with China before the Senate vote.”
“But what—”
“Darling,” she said and began to pour us tea, “this conversation is why I hired Ronan. So I wouldn’t have to have it.”
“Of course,” I said.
Caroline’s smile was very pretty. I mean, she was a beautiful woman, who paid a lot of money to look twenty years younger than she was. I had seen her smile with her teeth and the recipients of those smiles shirked away, wondering what they’d done wrong.
But the smiles she gave me always seemed different. Softer. Kinder.
“I have something for you.” She reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope. When Dad first died there’d been lots of these envelopes filled with cash to help with Zilla, to get me an apartment after the banks took what was left of the house. To buy me clothes when the bank took my clothes. But when it was clear what Dad had really done, the envelopes stopped, and Jim was mentioned.
“I don’t need that,” I said. Though I thought a little of the envelope of my own in my underwear drawer where I’d been squirreling away cash. Not a lot. I didn’t get a lot of cash in my life. But some of the trades wanted cash, and I told Jim they asked for a couple hundred dollars more, and I pocketed the rest.
Every time I put money in that envelope my mind was blank. Like I had no real idea what I was doing or why I was doing it. But at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I sometimes counted the money and wondered how much I needed to get free when Jim went too far.
And then I wondered what was too far?
Certainly, the night of the miscarriage . . . that had been too far. And yet, I was still here.
“Look inside,” Caroline said, smiling. “You’re going to be happy.”
I slid the envelope across the granite and opened it up, only to find old photographs.
“Oh my,” I gasped. Tears sharp and hot and sudden in my eyes. “It’s Mom.”
“Her sixteenth birthday and then,” she reached forward and pulled out one from the back, “a random Halloween and our high school graduation.”
“Look at you,” I sighed. They were both so beautiful and young. Mom wore a lace mini-dress at her birthday with long belled sleeves. Her long hair was parted down the middle, and her eyeliner was thick and black. Beside her, Caroline was wearing a black and white sequined mini dress with white boots. The 1970’s in full glorious effect.
“I’d give my leg for that dress back. And those legs,” Caroline said. “That night your mother stole a bottle of champagne and snuck on the roof and took off her dress. She drank that champagne in her underwear on the roof, and I thought her father was going to kill her.”
“He sent her away,” I said. “After that, didn’t he?”
“Boarding school in Connecticut. She stole a car at Thanksgiving and came down and snuck in my room.” Caroline’s smile was nearly heartbreaking with its tenderness. “She was . . .”
Troubled. A problem. Reckless. All those words could have applied. And I’d heard them plenty over the years. But all of that recklessness and danger had another side. And I knew all this all too well after the years with my sister. The light that came off my sister was worth some of the darkness. My mom was the same way, and only Caroline, my sister, and I understood the beauty of that kind of light.
It was part of why I forgave her for sending me back to Jim that night. It was part of why I always welcomed her into my home with open arms. We’d been through fire together.
“Amazing,” I said. Looking down at my gorgeous young mother burning far too bright.
“She really was.”
There was the click of the door shutting down the hallway, and suddenly Ronan was in my kitchen. Tall and thin, tugging the sleeves of his shirt down beneath the cuff of his jacket.
“You’re done then?” Caroline said.