Caroline hears her phone buzzing on her nightstand but she’s in that stage of sleep where she feels like she’s underwater and can’t move. The buzzing stops and Caroline descends back into her slumber like a stone falling to the ocean floor.
Her phone buzzes again and for whatever reason, Caroline jolts awake. Okay, okay, I’m here. She grabs her phone.
Sofia.
“Hello?” Caroline says. She knows she’s supposed to lie to Sofia—or maybe she’s supposed to tell the truth; she can’t remember.
“Caroline?” Like Isaac, Sofia pronounces her name “Caro-leen.” From her, it’s annoying.
“Yes, Sofia, hi, good morning.”
“Caroline, you didn’t call me back last night.”
Caroline sits up, clears her throat. Can she take a tone with Sofia? She can, she decides. “I know, Sofia. I’m filming here on Nantucket. I’ve been too busy to call, I’m sorry. What’s up?”
“We have to talk about Isaac.”
“Is he okay?” Caroline asks with faux concern. “Did something happen?”
“He was unfaithful to me.” Sofia’s voice is so filled with conviction that fear leaps like a flame inside Caroline’s chest. Was Isaac mistaken? Does Sofia suspect Caroline?
Caroline takes a breath. She can do this. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sofia. He would never be unfaithful. He loves you.”
“Love and sex,” Sofia says, “are two different things.”
Ouch, Caroline thinks. She says nothing. To speak, she thinks, is to reveal herself.
“Who was at the loft while I was in Sweden?” Sofia asks.
“Nobody,” Caroline says.
“Nobody except you?”
“Right,” Caroline says. “Nobody except me.” Her mind races. The loft doesn’t have a doorman and they don’t have neighbors Sofia can check with who will tell her they saw Caroline leaving very late at night or sometimes not at all. Do they?
“And he gave you his camera?” Sofia says. “His tripod? His drone? Isaac doesn’t give anyone his equipment, and certainly not a puny intern.”
Puny? Caroline thinks. “He did. I needed to borrow them for the weekend.”
“Yes, he told me. You’re filming something for your mother, he said. A family reunion.”
Caroline shakes her head. Whatever. She’s not going to explain the Five-Star Weekend to Sofia, that’s for damn sure. “There was nobody in the loft the whole time you were away,” Caroline says. “I would tell you if there were.”
Caroline hears Sofia exhale; she’s smoking.
“I would suspect you and Isaac together, but…” She laughs. “That is so silly!”
Caroline bristles. It was anything but silly, Sofia. Your boyfriend and I had—have—real feelings for each other. And the sex was incandescent.
“Obviously very silly,” Caroline says.
“Yes, because I saw your post last night with the other boy. Such a smoke-show. I show it to Isaac. He agreed the two of you look beautiful together.”
Caroline and Dylan do look beautiful together in that picture on Instagram—but Instagram isn’t real life. In real life, Dylan was using Caroline to make Aubrey jealous. Caroline received a spate of texts from him after she left the Box.
Are you okay?
Aubrey is just really jealous of you, she has been since high school.
I’m going to take her home, maybe talk with her in the morning about trying again. LOL, my parents won’t like that. They hate her. But it will be better for O-Man.
It was fun hanging out this weekend. Ty!
Caroline composed several responses, which ranged from Are you kidding me right now? to This tracks, you two totally deserve each other. But in the end, the text she sent said: No prob. She doesn’t care about Dylan McKenzie in any meaningful way. It probably will be better for O-Man to have his parents back together, and if Caroline helped facilitate that, good. It gives her enormous satisfaction that she is the person Aubrey Collins is jealous of.
Sofia says, “I’m going to do a better job loving Isaac. I’m going to travel less and no more clubbing.” She inhales, exhales. “Maybe get married, have a—”
“That’s great, Sofia,” Caroline says. Sofia has speared Caroline’s heart with her stiletto; she can’t bear to hear another word. “I’ll be back Tuesday, see you then!”
“Maybe we can go to dinner, the three of us,” Sofia says. “You can tell us about your special weekend.”
Absolutely not, Caroline thinks, but she says, “Okay, ciao!” and hangs up. A second later, she’s tempted to call Sofia back and say, It was me! It was me with Isaac! But she won’t. She will let Sofia and Isaac be happy. She will let Dylan and Aubrey be happy.
She’s left with… her funny little project. And to that end, Caroline drags her ass out of bed. She wants to talk to Brooke.
42. The Drop II
Caroline finds Brooke in the kitchen making herself a cup of herbal tea. She’s still wearing her dress from the night before, the white LoveShackFancy, which is, Caroline has to admit, very pretty, though now it’s a bit rumpled and holds an odor that Caroline thinks of as classic Chicken Box—beer and sweat—and there’s an orange drip stain (it looks like pizza grease) on the front.
“You had fun last night?” Caroline asks.
She expects Brooke to say, So fun, best night of my life, those boys were so cute, can you believe they wanted to dance with me?
But Brooke just smiles and hops her teabag around in her mug as the air fills with jasmine steam.
“Do you have a few minutes to come downstairs so we can have a little one-on-one chat about your friendship with my mom?”
“Of course,” Brooke says. “Lead the way.”
Caroline shows Brooke where to sit and sets up the ring light.
“It feels like I should know this,” Caroline says once she gets the camera rolling. “But I don’t. How did you and my mom meet?”
Brooke takes a breath. “I met Hollis at Dr. Lambert’s office in Newton-Wellesley Hospital. She was pregnant with you, due three months sooner than I was, but we were the same size. There was some amazement about this on Hollis’s part—I’m sure she thought I’d way overdone it on the Oreos—until I told her I was expecting twins.”
Caroline laughs. She can’t believe how smooth and poised Brooke is in front of the camera. She’s a natural.
“Hollis introduced herself, said she and your dad had just moved to Wellesley from the city. We exchanged numbers and became friends. When you were born, I took her a platter of sandwiches from the Linden Store. When Will and Whit were born, Hollis brought over a roasted chicken with potatoes au gratin, a green salad with vinaigrette, freshly baked bread, a caramel and chocolate tart, a six-pack of Belgian ale that she’d found helped with her milk production, and two of the softest baby blankets I’d ever felt. I knew from the time and effort and thought that your mom put into dinner and the gifts that we would be friends until our children graduated from high school, and beyond.” Brooke winks. “I was right.”
“What are your fondest memories of your friendship with my mom?”
Brooke takes a moment to think.
“There was the golden age, the years our children were nine, ten, eleven. Fourth and fifth grade.” Brooke pauses. “Of course you never realize it’s the golden age until it’s over.”
It’s 2011 in Wellesley. Brooke’s twins and Hollis’s daughter attend Fiske Elementary. Brooke and Hollis are part of a larger group of mothers that include Liesl, Bets, Rhonda—and Electra Undergrove, the unspoken leader. She organizes post-drop-off coffee at Maugus on Wednesdays and a monthly “Moms Night Out” in downtown Boston where they go to dinner at places like Mistral and the Bristol Lounge, then inevitably end up singing to the dueling pianos at Howl at the Moon. (The following morning, there’s always a round-robin of texts, the moms complaining about their hangovers and how they can’t handle soccer practice so the husbands will just have to do it for once. But it felt so good to be wild and free for a night, to be a person again, not just a wife and mother.)
When the kids enter middle school, Electra invents rock and roll football. The idea is a Sunday Funday at Electra’s house, which has an open floor plan with a huge television and a basement tricked out for her kids, Carter and Layla. (Beanbag chairs, video games, pool table, and a refrigerator filled with soda.) Every Sunday of football season, parents and kids gather at the Undergroves. Electra makes the main dish—fish tacos, white chicken chili, a spiral-cut ham—and the rest of the friends bring appetizers, side dishes, dessert. Electra’s husband, Simon, is the mixologist. He turns beers into Micheladas; he creates large-format cocktails that he serves out of an enormous glass jug with a stand and a tiny spigot; he blends up margaritas and daiquiris. The parents get… pleasantly buzzed while the kids are safely downstairs.
After the football games end, when the ticking clock of 60 Minutes begins, when most normal people would pack up their kids and head home to prepare for the busy week ahead, the music starts. Simon deejays—he likes it loud—and the kids come running upstairs. Everyone dances.