He touched her softly on the fabric of her underwear, knowing she was the one who usually pulled them down. It turned her on more that she couldn’t; and, immediately, she pleaded with him to take them off her. He was going so slowly it hurt. With her arms over her head, she lurched into a half sit-up, and said forcefully, “Now, fuck, do it, take them off.” He finally did, and spread her legs with his elbows, almost forcing them apart. The struggle, part real, part pretend, put her in a state she’d never felt, the waves inside so ferocious she ached hard. She’d begged him. “Don’t stop, please God, don’t you stop.”
But he did.
And then, he didn’t.
And when it was over, she realized her body was entirely constricted and unleashed at the same time.
Several minutes later, he laughed and said, “Maybe you need a shower?”
In the dark, her skin smelled clean now, like soap, though she’d only half rinsed her hair. Her black tresses were still sticky from the sweat and the sex, not to mention knotty in the back from being mashed up against pillows and walls and carpets.
Caroline yanked an ottoman closer to her with the heels of her feet and stretched out. Maybe she’d just sleep out here. It was a night of new adventures after all. She’d learned things this summer, from trying new things, thinking in different ways, and from Ryan. Maybe she’d make a decision by the mid-month deadline she’d set for herself.
Move out here and do a trial separation?
She grabbed a wilting geranium out of a window box next to her and plucked at the leaves. Parts of her life were better than ever, if she chose to see it that way. Each day, Gigi and Theo gained the confidence and know-how to do more on their own. Just this morning, through her own design work, she had tapped into reserves of creativity that she hadn’t explored for a long time. She, herself, needed to be pushed. She threw the denuded stem into the unruly bushes and vowed to trim the shrubs in the morning.
It was time to go check on the kids, to wrap the blanket tighter around that darling Francis. It was nearing one in the morning, and the lavender bath salts were calling out to her before bed. Soon, inside her own safe walls, she’d reclaim her role as mother and wife.
Chapter 46
A Whispering Warning
As Caroline approached her front porch, she noticed something on the far right of the door that hadn’t been there when she left that afternoon. At first, she thought it was a deflated soccer ball, but as she knelt beside it, she understood: it was an old conch shell.
It wasn’t the same shell that Joey had in his father’s cottage, but it was similar enough for Caroline to get the message. The summer he disappeared, walking down the beach with Caroline, Joey had casually offered, “If I die, spread my ashes in the ocean, right here at Two Mile Hollow Beach.”
“But this isn’t even our regular beach. We walked farther west today,” Caroline had said.
“Well, I wouldn’t want you to feel sad every time you went to our beach, so just do it here,” he’d said.
“Fine, then, but that’ll be when you’re ninety-eight.”
“Well, let’s say this: I hope so, but if you outlast me, I’ll talk to you through a conch shell,” he’d told her. “I’ll send a special one to you with the waves. You’ll put it up to your ear and hear me kissing you.”
Caroline remembered telling him that his idea was silly and corny. Besides, there were large clam shells in Long Island, nothing as big as a Caribbean conch shell.
But here was a large conch shell, whispering to her, startlingly out of place in East Hampton. She picked it up and looked inside, wondering for the briefest second if Francis had bought it to paint as a crafts project.
No way.
Joey had put it there.
And now, in her hands, it didn’t feel silly; it felt serious and substantial. She cradled it in the crook of her arm and stepped into her house.
Caroline set her purse and keys on the kitchen counter. The lights were dim throughout the halls. For a moment, her heart tightened because Eddie always dimmed them at this level. But it was Tuesday, and he wouldn’t ever come without telling her.
Caroline walked into the library to check on the blinking blue television light; some cable news was on. She expected to find Francis there asleep, curled up in her soft, pale-green blanket, but instead, she heard her husband’s bellowing voice: “And where the fuck were you all night?”
Chapter 47
Inside the Marriage Tomb
“And,” he yelled even louder, “what the fuck kind of bad joke is this?”
Caroline stood before her husband in the entrance to the library. She recognized that telling Eddie about Ryan here and now might be the healthiest approach, and part of her was willing. What was he going to say: that he had never strayed?
She walked into the library, the sound of her footsteps echoing in the quiet night, and she placed the conch shell on the coffee table. Eddie looked at it for a moment, failing to understand its significance. He swirled his Pinhook bourbon around the ice cubes.
“Where is Francis, anyway?” Caroline asked.
“I sent her home in a taxi an hour ago,” Eddie said, his voice battle-ready, playing with the lines that went up his favorite crystal Baccarat glass. He wasn’t ready to look at his wife.
“Why are you out here on a Tuesday?” she asked. “You haven’t done that once in twelve years.” She walked over to him and tried to kiss him hello, but he pulled back like a prizefighter eluding a right hook.
“Okay,” she said, stepping back, understanding this was going to be painful. She plunked her weary body into a side chair. “And why on earth would you not tell me you were coming?” She shook her head, justifying the prior events of the evening to herself, or trying to.
“I didn’t warn you, you mean? Just fuckin’ because . . .” Eddie started to drum on his knees with his fingers.
“It’s after midnight. Why are you so hyperactive?”
“I’m very upset, let’s put it that way.” Eddie cocked his head sideways and squinted. “And confused.”
She clasped and unclasped her hands, studying them. She couldn’t help but think where her hands had been an hour before. She stood and grabbed the conch shell, just to have something to fiddle with on her lap. She massaged it like a crystal ball.
Silence lingered in the air like the fog that had rolled in outside. She looked at the built-in bookcases, painted maroon, each lit with a small, clamshell sconce. She’d found the lights at a garage sale in a set of six. The right side of the room was stuffed with art books, the middle with the fiction she’d read since college, and the left mostly with art supplies and children’s books. A table where the kids drew and had afternoon snacks was in front of the bay window.
It was a true family room, and yet her family was disintegrating.
Where she’d been tonight, what she’d done, wasn’t designed to wound Eddie—she never wanted him to know. Honesty had limited benefits. Girls’ night was plausible; she complained about missing old friends out here all the time. Only, she’d have to tell those women that she lied to her husband and then they would wonder. Her lies would multiply, and she’d tumble into a hole she couldn’t climb out of.
This is why she told Annabelle you got caught no matter what.
Eddie stared at her.
“What is it, Eddie? What is going on with you?”
From behind a cushion, he pulled out a new Frisbee and placed it on the glass coffee table. He pointed to words that had been scrawled on top of it in black marker, in handwriting she instantly recognized as Joey’s: She’s still mine.
Caroline blanched.
Eddie nodded and said, “Yep.”
“You mean . . .”
“Yeah, I mean Joey fuckin’ Whitten’s Frisbee story coming back to haunt the fuck out of me. Last time, twenty or so years ago, after I beat him up at an Ultimate Frisbee game, Joey left the Frisbee from the game in my car the next day. Remember what he wrote on it? Sh
e’s mine. Don’t you remember?”
“I do, of course, I do. But what are you talking about now?” The conch shell, now this . . . Caroline knew. “I don’t get it.”
Eddie grabbed the Frisbee, stood up, and dropped it on her lap. “It’s brand new. It arrived at my office this morning.” He flipped it over so she could see the underside. On it, in Joey’s handwriting: She’s still mine. “This is a new Frisbee, not the one from the game. But very fuckin’ weird it’s the same handwriting, I remember, because I wanted to pummel him again after I read his stupid message back then.”
“Stop with the macho violence, I don’t like it,” Caroline said. “Maybe it’s the same Frisbee, just somehow . . .”
“It’s a fuckin’ Jonathan Nethercutt Ultimate Frisbee MVP Frisbee. I Googled it. Says 2018! Nethercutt is the MVP of the best team out there, the Raleigh Flyers. Nethercutt was probably two years old last time I got a Frisbee like this. What the fuck? ‘She’s still mine’?!”
“I . . . I don’t know what to tell you. I had nothing to do with this.”
“Here’s the thing,” Eddie said. “Only three people get that comment, She’s mine. Me, you, and, you know, dead lover boy.”
“Eddie. Stop. He’s a lovely man. Was.”
“I couldn’t be with a girl I loved. And he was rubbing it in. That’s just not fair game, every guy knows that’s not shit you tease about,” Eddie said.
“You didn’t need to try to strangle Joey in front of everyone on the field,” Caroline said. “It made people hate you, and then when he died, they all remembered that game.” She was thinking of how Ryan had mentioned it at the barn party.
Caroline stood and started to clean up the markers and papers on the kids’ table. “You can go play housewife over there to avoid me, but, thing is, I threw the old Frisbee in the trash compactor back then, and no one saw it. And what the fuck does the writing mean? Unless one of his friends maybe knew about that back then and this is some weird anniversary or . . . is it his fuckin’ drowning anniversary?”
“No, it isn’t, by, uh, like two weeks or something.” Caroline started jamming the tops onto the markers. Turning back to Eddie, she added, “And, well, I wasn’t your girl then. I was your math and homework buddy. I mean, c’mon, you won. You married me, Eddie, and he died.”
She worried Eddie might know more than he was letting on. Had he seen Joey too?
“Yeah, I know he died doing what he did best, which was fuckin’ swimming,” Eddie said. Caroline knelt down beside a cupboard and took out Tupperware bins filled with colored paper for the kids’ art projects. Then she went back to the table to shuffle the unused paper into a pile, stalling. He slammed the table. “Come back and sit down, for God’s sake. Focus.”
Caroline walked back to her chair and sat down, cradling a pillow and leaning forward to give the moment the attention it demanded. The conch shell now stood heavy on the table, almost radiating: Joey was sending signs, inciting the beast. “I’ve been listening to you while I was neatening up,” Caroline said.
Eddie continued, “I’m just saying, like everyone has always said, that that day didn’t make sense. Either he’s come back, or Joey’s got a ghost, or you are one sick wife trying to play with me, because, yes, I know I haven’t . . . I’m sorry if I . . . you know . . . but fuck Caroline.” He looked at her plaintively. “I mean, c’mon! That’s just sick, creepy shit. It’s not funny.”
She threw the pillow on the floor, frustrated he didn’t believe her, and replied softly, “I did not send it to you. I wouldn’t pretend I was Joey trying to get back at you. It’s just . . . that’s awful.”
Eddie stood, walked over to the bookshelf, and slapped a bunch of heavy art books so hard that they fell along the shelf like dominoes. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “How’s that?”
“Why don’t you believe me?”
“Because you’re lying.”
“I’m not lying. What do you mean by that?” Caroline said. He didn’t answer; he wanted her to suffer while she guessed what he was leading up to. Now it was her turn to stand and pace while Eddie went back and sat on the couch. She leaned her arms straight against the windowsill and stared out at the night. A few lantern candles she’d made out of thick black wire and mason jars hung from the elm tree and swayed in the wind. As they tapped against branches, they pinged a resonant tone into the blackness.
Eddie hit his hand on the table. “Turn around, Caroline. At least have the balls to face me.”
Looking at him, she said, “I have all the balls I need to face you. I’m not lying.”
Eddie placed his elbows on his knees and looked up at her. Then, he said, “I mean, for starters, you’re lying because you’re fucking somebody. Probably fucked him an hour ago.”
Chapter 48
Confessional
Caroline rubbed the itchy sting out of her eye and considered the merits of denial versus admission. She couldn’t decide what mattered more at this moment: why Joey had sent this Frisbee or how Eddie knew about Ryan. “For your information, Eddie, I’m not into lying,” Caroline said.
“Really? That’s interesting.”
“Please. Don’t mock the respect I believe we do have for each other. For starters, how do you even know what I might or might not be doing?”
Had he called Verizon and got access to her deleted text messages? Or hired a private eye to follow her? The other possibility was that he only suspected something and was playing tough guy. “Honestly, Eddie, are you testing me? Threatening me with innuendo?”
“Look at your fuckin’ hair and face! What the fuck else could you have been doing besides getting plowed!”
“Shhh!” She walked to the entry and looked up the stairs to make sure Gigi and Theo were asleep. “Be careful. Don’t yell crazy things at me now, for the kids’ sake. Just . . . please be thoughtful here. I’m trying to do the same. It’s not easy. On either of us.”
She sat back in her chair, studying his face, his massive shoulders made even bulkier as his arms crossed behind his head on the sofa. He was wearing thin sweatpants, and he’d set his thick, brawny legs on the couch, one resting on a pillow, the other flung over the back. It was strange how, even with all that was going on, Caroline felt close to him, familiar with his moods and how he looked when he was resting, legs splayed out. The kids loved that position, like a big old lion laying in the sun on his back. They often ran and jumped on him, his powerful, welcoming arms embracing them when they did.
Fiery sparks of tension rose inside her, mixed with grief over their decaying marriage. Caroline respected Eddie for detecting something, and it made her feel sad for him, and for them.
She recalled Eddie tumbling down the stairs in that armor. Normal men wouldn’t go that far, or put themselves out as he had. Eddie’s need to grab life by the neck and shake it for all it was worth wasn’t easy to live with, but she did love him for it, or that part of him. The laughter and tears of that marriage proposal flooded back to her; she heard the clanking metal, saw the image of the gallant knight facedown, crawling for the lost ring among the spilled ice. She knew now—as she did then—that this man’s love for her had been entirely monogamous since he was fourteen. She blinked tears away.
Neither she nor Annabelle would have predicted that a summer affair would make them feel such intimacy with their husbands.
“No, it isn’t easy,” he said softly, and in a tone she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard.
“So, we’re on the same page then,” she said, hoping that he would agree it was all too painful to face this minute, so late at night.
No luck. Eddie raged on. “There’s this Joey Whitten Frisbee mindfuck, but I gotta also deal with the fact that you’re screwing some local guy we grew up with? Really? Is that really necessary? Right where we lived? I’m just . . . I looked him up, and I know his business now. And his wife, Suzy Miller—who, by the way, is known in these parts as an extremely hot piece of ass. I mean, you do know,” he said. �
�Of course you know! Because, well, we had champagne with her. At my favorite restaurant. All of us, on the same Duryea’s dock! What the hell, you let me buy that fucking architect champs?”
Caroline laid her head back, thinking about how easy it was to be found out, even without technology. She waited a few minutes before saying anything, looking at the wooden beams in the ceiling, soothing her mind with the observation that brown against the white made the house feel more authentic, more beach-y, and that Eddie had wanted everything all white and stark like his office. Her mundane thoughts, a brief respite, were now ruptured by the memory of Suzy’s hand on her shoulder, her sweet voice saying, “It’s fine, we’ll sit for a moment and have a glass.” That girlfriend-to-girlfriend tone, wife-to-wife, sensitive to Eddie’s bulldog generosity—there was no stopping him, so why try?
“What, you hired an investigator? You paid someone to watch me on Tuesdays? Because, though I’m sure you only know this given how much you’ve been watching me, it was only on Tuesdays.”
From his supine position, Eddie thrust his arms up in the air and said, “You want a fuckin’ medal because it was only on Tuesdays, when I’m never ever out here, so you can get laid by some local dude we knew?”
“We didn’t know him, Eddie, not that that matters. He just grew up out here same time as we did,” Caroline stated softly. “And no, I’m not looking for an award. I was just saying it happened on Tuesdays. The ‘only’ wasn’t some kind of excuse. I just meant, I don’t know . . . what’d you do? Hire someone on that day to check up on us?”
“I didn’t hire anyone. I didn’t have to, Caroline,” Eddie answered, in a defeated tone. He sat up and grabbed his knees. “I just heard about it from another contractor I know who works with him sometimes. I won’t name him, but he saw you and Ryan together at some project another vendor had worked on. He went late to pick something up, and looked in the window.”
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