CAROLINE
Caroline had now learned how to make a lemon tart, and that you should never actually boil an egg. She couldn’t stop reading Adrienne’s blog, TheGoldenSpoon, and refreshing the page in the hopes that more pictures would appear.
And yesterday, due to some happy accident, a series of maneuvers that she would never be able to replicate, she had found a profile that listed a hometown and even a zip code; and then, from there, after paying the ridiculous sum of $14.95, she had a telephone number. She had stared at it, stunned, for a good five minutes. She almost wished she could tell Trenton, who was always accusing her of being hopeless at computers. Trenton and Richard were amazingly alike, for people who had spent hardly any time together.
Look what I did, she wanted to say.
She told herself that she only wanted to hear the woman’s voice. Just once. She felt she would know then; she felt everything would become clear. Whether or not she was the one. Why Richard had done it. Why he’d done all the things he had done.
She picked up the phone and listened for a moment to the dial tone. How many times in her life had she reached Richard here, in this house, on that number? She always imagined their voices entangled somewhere in the wires when they spoke, caught up in a grid she didn’t fully understand, passing back and forth. Once the calls were disconnected, she imagined the echoes of old conversations would be trapped there, floating back and forth with no exit, like ghosts.
Caroline’s hands were shaking so much that she misdialed the number the first time, reached an Italian restaurant, and had to hang up and start over. The second time, she managed it.
The phone only rang once before it was snatched up. “Don’t tell me you’ve gotten on going west,” a woman said, her voice hurried, impatient, and lower than Caroline had expected from the photographs.
Caroline was seized with sudden panic. She had not expected the woman to pick up so soon—or even at all. She had not thought of what she would say. But she needed Adrienne to speak again. Was she the one? Caroline didn’t know, couldn’t decide.
Too many seconds had elapsed. “Hello?” Adrienne said—it was Adrienne, that Caroline knew—dragging out the last syllable already. “Are you still there?”
“Hello,” Caroline croaked out.
Instantly, Adrienne’s tone changed. “Who is this?” she said carefully.
Caroline didn’t answer. One second, two seconds.
“Who is this?” Adrienne repeated. “Hello?”
“Wrong number,” Caroline said and hung up. The blood was thundering in her ears, and the room was spinning. She tried to think herself down the phone line, into the kitchen—because she was sure Adrienne had answered in the kitchen, no doubt interrupted in the middle of making lemon soufflé or chicken soup from scratch—tried to imagine the mouth pressed to the phone, the hands with their neat nails, the jeans dusted with flour. Had she and Richard met in hotel rooms? Had he gone to visit her and sat with his shoes and socks off at her kitchen table, shirt unbuttoned, drinking wine, laughing, eating the food she had cooked him?
She didn’t know. Already, she could hardly remember Adrienne’s voice. She’d been too nervous.
She redialed, pressing the phone so tightly against her jaw it hurt. This time she would say nothing.
Adrienne picked up again almost immediately. “You did it again,” she said. This time, she sounded bored.
Despite her intention to say nothing, Caroline was so startled, she spoke up. “What?”
Adrienne cleared her throat. “You dialed the wrong number again. Who’re you trying to reach?”
Caroline couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She was listening so hard, she wished she could squeeze herself into the receiver and travel the line herself.
“Is this one of Bella’s friends? If this is one of Bella’s friends, I don’t care what your parents do, but in my house prank calls get you a good old-fashioned grounding.”
“It’s not . . . I don’t know Bella,” Caroline said.
There was a short pause. “Listen,” Adrienne said. Her voice had turned fearful. “Listen. Whoever you are. Don’t call back.”
Then Caroline was listening to the dial tone again.