Don’t be sorry, Caroline thought, feeling her knees about to give way. It was the truth, after all. He’d just said the same thing she’d been telling herself for the past fifteen years.
Which was when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it.” Steve excused himself, running for the front door as if he’d literally been saved by the bell. He returned as Michelle was helping Caroline into one of the chairs grouped around the kitchen table. “There’s someone named Lili here to see you,” he told his sister. “She says you’ve been expecting her.”
The phone was ringing.
Caroline reached toward the nightstand beside her bed and lifted it to her ear, noting it was barely 6:30 A.M. Was it Arthur? Calling so early because he wanted to check in on her before she left for work, to tell her how much he missed her, even though it had been less than twenty-four hours since they’d been together?
But instead of Arthur’s soothing baritone, it was Peggy’s husky alto she heard. “Have you seen the morning paper?” she asked before Caroline could say hello.
“No. Why?”
“I’m coming over,” Peggy told her. “Don’t look at the paper. Don’t answer your phone. Don’t check your computer until I get there.”
“What are you talking about? What’s going on?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Wait…what…?” The phone went dead in her hand. Caroline sat there staring at it for the next several minutes. “What just happened?” she whispered, heading for the bathroom as the phone rang again.
Don’t answer your phone, she heard Peggy say. Don’t check your computer. Don’t look at the paper.
“Why not?” she asked out loud, ignoring the phone’s persistent ring as she washed her face and brushed her teeth, then pulled on a bathrobe and headed down the hall.
Michelle sat up in bed as Caroline passed her room. She rubbed her eyes and stared accusingly at her mother. “Who keeps calling?”
“Just some idiot making crank calls. Go back to sleep. You don’t have to be up for another half hour.”
“As if I’ll be able to sleep,” Michelle whined, pulling a pillow over her head as Caroline closed the door to her room.
Don’t look at the paper, Peggy admonished in Caroline’s head as she ran down the stairs to the front door, throwing it open and lifting the morning paper into her hands.
EVERYTHING, MY FAULT, read the headlines in bold black letters, and beneath it, a picture of her smiling face. Caroline had never seen the picture before, although she knew exactly when it had been taken because she recognized the Starbucks logo in the window behind her head.
“No. Please, no.”
She carried the paper into the kitchen and spread the front section across the table, the phone resuming its awful ring as her eyes flitted from one terrible paragraph to the next, from one damning statement to another. It was all there. Every indiscreet word she’d uttered; every heartfelt confession she’d made. Her deepest secrets laid bare in black and white for all the world to read: her guilt at having left her children alone, her continuing despair at the loss of her younger child, her complaints about her narcissistic mother and difficult older daughter, Hunter’s upcoming nuptials to a “considerably” younger woman that left her feeling “pissed,” even the details of her last night with her former husband, when he’d told her he was leaving and she’d abandoned all reason and pride and begged him to stay. I pleaded with him not to leave me.
She flipped to page ten, where the story continued, covering her return to teaching and the subsequent suicide of one of her students. I feel so guilty, she was quoted as saying beneath another candid photo of her laughing. Everything that’s happened. It’s all my fault. Everything, my fault.
“This can’t be happening,” she said, watching the printed words blur and disintegrate, only to regroup and return in larger, bolder type than before. “Please just let this be an awful dream.”
Ten minutes later Peggy was on her doorstep. She took one look at Caroline’s ashen complexion and gathered her into her arms. “Tell me everything.”
—
“Everything all right at home?” he’d asked as she returned to the bedroom, cell phone in hand.
“Everything’s fine.” She’d turned her phone off and tossed it onto the pile of clothes lying on the floor. Then she’d climbed into bed beside him, burrowing into his side, allowing his strong arms to surround her. It had been a long time since she’d been in bed with a man, even longer since she’d felt safe. “Well, as fine as it can be where my daughter is concerned,” she continued. “Like I said, she can be difficult.”
“I guess it’s hard being an only child.”
Caroline’s eyes filled with tears and she tried to look away. Arthur’s hand, gentle on her chin, stopped her, forcing her eyes to his.
“What’s the matter?”
Caroline hesitated. “She wasn’t always an only child.”
“I’m not following.”
“I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
He waited, said nothing.