She didn’t understand then what he really meant—that he believed that if he’d found Violet in the first place, Maribel would still be alive. She wouldn’t understand that until it was too late. And so what she said next was not what she would later wish she’d told him when she replayed the conversation with the benefit of hindsight. But on that day, it was from the heart.
“You can and you should, because she isn’t Maribel. She has nothing to do with Maribel. She’s a fresh start. She’s a second chance. She’s someone you bothered to search for in the first place, years ago. And so what if you’ve found her now by accident? Doesn’t that still count for something? Doesn’t that count for everything?”
They didn’t discuss it again. But a few weeks later, he brought Violet by for the first time. And that was the first sign Caitlin saw that maybe Finn would be okay. He wasn’t the old fun-loving Finn, but nor was he the new grief-stricken one. He was someone else. Not someone in between, but someone off to the side, maybe. Someone who at a glance looked like the Finn she knew but upon close examination wasn’t exactly. Still, George didn’t seem to notice, and Finn acted as natural as this version of Finn could, and Violet didn’t know the difference, so Caitlin decided that this was probably fine too. Good, even. This was probably what moving on had to look like. Not backward, and not forward, at least not yet—just an almost imperceptible step to the side.
For her part, she wasn’t going to let him disappear into the relationship this time, the way he had with Maribel, the way some people did with everyone they dated. This time, she’d stay close. Finn wasn’t the only one who’d had a fragile year. In the long stretches of George’s absence, she’d found herself pining for a baby more strongly than ever before, curling up into herself with every unsuccessful attempt, envisioning with something close to panic the periodic loneliness of this life stretching out for all the years before her. Failure was unfamiliar to Caitlin. At the moment, George’s otherwise good grace only infuriated her. It was sallow Finn whom she instead found to be some kind of a comfort. And so this time she would not sacrifice him so readily to another woman. It would be much easier to keep hold of him now that he was right next door. She would learn to love Violet, she would embrace her into their circle as if she’d been there all along, she would support Finn in whatever ways he needed her. She would not lose him, nor would she allow him to lose himself.
The best realization of all was that Violet reminded her of the person Finn used to be, the person Caitlin had been drawn to in part because he was so very different from her, in ways that she couldn’t help but admire and, if she was being honest, maybe even envy a little. Violet wasn’t much of a planner. Violet wasn’t much of a worrier. Violet had lost her parents even younger than Finn had, but the role had been filled so well by her grandmother that any damaging effects were hidden from view. She seemed to like her job, was good at it, but not so much that she lived it. She was close enough to Gram to appear grounded and stable, but not so much that she came across as dependent. She seemed content on her own but drawn almost irresistibly to Finn. Anyone could see she adored him. And the way he looked at her, as if she had just fallen out of the sky and landed in front of him, to his astonishment and often amusement—it gave Caitlin hope that Finn could be truly happy again.
And Finn had a right, she thought, to this fresh start. Even though she had reservations when the weeks and then months went by and it was occasionally obvious from something Violet said or didn’t say that Finn still hadn’t told her about Maribel, Caitlin didn’t press him. She asked him about it exactly once, and when he brushed her off, she didn’t argue. Nor did she take it upon herself to tell Violet what Finn wasn’t yet ready to. Long before Violet had come into the picture, Caitlin and George had arrived at a sort of truce with Finn, an unspoken agreement that he was the only one who would speak Maribel’s name first in any conversation. It put him in control of when he wanted to be reminded of what had happened, or to discuss it. And he almost never did—which was fine with Caitlin. She didn’t like to be reminded of it either, of the way Finn had slipped into shock as if it were a new skin, of the way he’d looked at her when she told him George’s family would help to quietly extricate him from the wreckage of the crash. His look had not been one of gratitude, but rather … what? Resentment? Disgust?
It nagged at her at first, the idea of Violet not knowing something that was such a big part of who Finn had become, but as Violet and Finn quickly became one of those inseparable couples who hardly did anything apart, and as all four of them found themselves miraculously pregnant and due around the same time, Caitlin gave herself over to the promise of finally becoming a mother and worried about Finn less and less. So he really had started over. He’d left that tragedy behind. If he’d had to do that on his own terms, then so be it. Why be the one to mess that up for him by rocking the boat?
23
AUGUST 2016
Finn wasn’t Catholic, but he still felt a little as if he’d been instructed to recite Hail Marys until he had repented his sins.
The Hail Mary did seem an apt metaphor—in sports terms, anyway. He’d sensed Caitlin’s desperation as she had instructed him, in that half-kidding tone that really wasn’t joking at all, to leave the syrupy breakfast dishes and sugared-up boys to her, and instead go down to the dock and focus on “one happy memory with Violet.”
“What are you, my therapist?” he’d grumbled. But Caitlin only raised an eyebrow as if to indicate that some therapy might have come in handy. It was easy enough to go along with her request, or at least pretend to, if only to get her off his back. Obviously, she had no way of knowing what the hell he was really thinking about down here. He could see her through the cabin’s large picture windows, moving around the kitchen. Once in a while he caught a flash of a giggling child running by the sliding glass doors. He’d eaten his share of the banana pancakes standing up, evading the awkward silence still between him and Caitlin from the evening before. Upon waking, they’d wordlessly agreed to a cease-fire, but he knew better than anyone that pretending everything was fine was a temporary solution, and an ineffective one at best.
The truth was, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was halfway glad she was here. It was ridiculous. Her being here was a disaster. It couldn’t end well for any of them. And yet … Finn needed a friend. He couldn’t help it. And though it was complicated in this case for that friend to be Caitlin, it was also fitting. They’d been through the worst together before. But of course that had been before Violet, and long before Bear and the twins.