The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

  I saw Caroline hesitate. We had always followed Renee on questions of significance. It wasn’t that we saw her as infallible, only less fallible than we were.

  “I know Joe better than Renee does,” I continued. “If something bad were happening, he would have told me.” Even as I said these words, I knew they weren’t true, not anymore. When had Joe and I last seen each other alone, without Sandrine? Or Noni? When had we talked about something other than his job, my job, how much money I needed to borrow?

  Caroline sighed. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and rubbed her eyes. And in that moment my sister Caroline, who wanted always to assume the best of a house or a person, began to believe me. Joe was okay. An intervention was completely unnecessary.

  “Well, you’ll have to convince Renee,” she said. “You’ll never reach her on the phone. Talk to her at the engagement party. She promised Joe she’d be there.”

  As Caroline weakened, I felt a sort of relief, that I had saved Joe and he would in time be grateful. It was also a reprieve from an understanding that had begun to sink in: That what I thought was true about Joe was not true. That I was a little sister who worshipped her big brother and would never see him clearly. I could barely admit this to myself; I would never admit it to Caroline.

  We sat in silence for three minutes, five, ten, as Caroline smoked another cigarette.

  “Caroline, the cat?” I said at last. I inclined my head toward the house.

  “Oh. Right.” She flicked a butt out the window. “Let’s go deal with the fucking cat.”

  In the kitchen Caroline pounded three oxycodone tablets with her shoe and sprinkled them over a plate of tuna.

  At first the cat ignored the plate.

  “Come on, it’s tuna. When have you eaten this well?” Caroline said.

  Some of the kittens were asleep, translucent lids covering eyeballs the color of sky, their bodies downy and plump. Others kneaded the cat’s belly as they nursed. Caroline waved the plate beneath the cat’s nose, and at last it lifted its head and sniffed the tuna. Delicately it nibbled, and then, with a handful of bites, the plate was clean.

  “Now we wait,” said Caroline.

  “How long?”

  “Well, with me maybe fifteen minutes. But that’s just one pill.” Caroline paused, considering the three. “I hope we didn’t kill it,” she said.

  It took five minutes. The cat’s eyes wavered, then closed. Its head tilted back.

  I found a cardboard box, and together we picked up the cat, its body heavy and difficult to grip, liquid concrete in a sack of fur, and dropped it inside. We loaded up the kittens, and then Caroline carried the box downstairs and slid it into the back of the car. Clouds had moved in. Across the lawn fallen leaves jumped and spun with the wind. One lodged in my hair, which was longer than it had been at Christmas, dyed a deep brownish red that was richer and darker than my natural color. Caroline plucked the leaf from my hair.

  “So are you dating?” she asked.

  “Um, yeah, you could say I’m dating,” I answered. Maybe Caroline would have understood about the blog, but I wasn’t ready to tell her. Not yet. I needed some unmistakable, tangible sign of success to put before my family. I had never played a sport or excelled academically or been popular in school; I had only ever written words into secret books, and now this, The Last Romantic.

  “Anyone special?” Caroline asked.

  “No, definitely not.”

  “You’ll meet someone soon enough,” she said in a soothing way, “don’t worry.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried,” I said. “I’m not really looking for someone special.”

  Caroline raised her eyebrows. “How did you get your cheeks to look like that?” she asked me. “Makeup?”

  “No,” I said. “Not makeup.”

  “And your eyes look different, too.”

  “I’ve lost weight, Caroline. Almost fifty pounds”

  “Oh.” Caroline gazed at me, standing in the overgrown yard of this dirty, disappointing house, and I saw on her face a jealousy so pure it took my breath away. By the time Caroline was my age, she’d already had three children and been married to Nathan for eight years.

  “Let me take the cats, Caroline,” I said. “You’ve got enough to deal with.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll take them.”

  I saw my sister struggle, the rubbing together of two versions of herself. The first was Caroline the mother, the nurturer, a woman who wanted the kittens to live, who cared for her family and bestowed emergency hugs and made pancakes from scratch, who was worried about Joe and wondered why he did the things he did, who was trying to protect him. But the other Caroline was worn out. She wanted to get rid of the kittens; she wanted Nathan to make the pancakes for once; she wanted nothing more than to sleep a full night in a hotel bed covered with sheets that someone else had washed. She wanted Joe to take care of himself. Why should she take care of everyone? When had she signed up for that? It seemed that every year her scope of concern grew wider and more unmanageable. Preschool, elementary school, home school, the new towns, the new mothers’ groups, Nathan’s new colleagues, Nathan’s new class schedule. No. Enough was enough. Caroline needed to draw a line or she might explode. She might lie down beside the mother cat and its dozen dozing kittens and never get up again.

  * * *

  After Nathan heard Caroline’s calls, after he found her lying on the grass, curled around her stomach as though it were something she was holding rather than something that was part of her, after the paramedics arrived (faster than Nathan thought possible), after the blessedly calm ER nurse told Nathan that the baby was coming now, he’s crowning now, Mr. Duffy, Caroline Skinner Duffy screamed a great loud “Fuck!” and pushed baby Louis into the world. He was messy and bloody, purple, crying his head off, with a mop of dark curly hair and a nose the size of a pencil eraser. Caroline held her son to her chest and began to cry, because she knew with absolute clarity that she had been waiting her whole life to meet this boy. Every minute had been leading her to this one now, minute falling into minute, pushing her forward, and thank goodness. Thank God (although Caroline had never before believed in God) she had done everything just as she’d done it so that she might be sitting here now in this achingly bright room, surrounded by these two miraculous women wearing yellow scrubs and rubber shoes that made the smallest, most pleasing squeaks as they moved around the bed, and in her arms holding this tiny, perfect body.

  With her thumb Caroline rubbed a bit of blood off her son’s cheek. His eyes were the darkest blue, almost black, and he gazed at her with a seriousness that seemed nearly wise. But how? Caroline thought. How could he already be wise?

  “Look at him.” Nathan’s voice at her shoulder so startled Caroline that she almost released her grip on Louis. She had forgotten that Nathan was here, too.

  “Oh, Nathan,” Caroline said. “Look at him!”

  “He’s amazing.”

  Caroline did not even nod, the statement being so self-evident. Together they watched Louis breathe.

  Then one of the miraculous women told them that she needed to take Louis away for respiratory tests and monitoring because his Apgar score was low. “You can visit him in a few hours,” the nurse said, and gently removed Louis from Caroline’s grip. As the nurse wrapped him efficiently in a yellow flannel blanket printed with small blue elephants, Caroline began to weep. Nathan took her hand, but he too was crying, and they gripped each other with a desperate strength as their son was carried from the room.

  Twenty-four hours later, Caroline opened her eyes in her hospital room that was painted the same chalky pink as calamine lotion. Baby Louis, swaddled up tight as a sausage, was asleep beside her in a rolling cot. He had been discharged already from the NICU; in two days they would both be going home.

  Sitting in a chair beside the cot was Renee.

  “Renee!” Caroline said.

  “Congratulations sleepyhead,” said Renee. “I finished my board exams
and thought I’d come see you.”

  Maybe it was the post-delivery drugs or her general state of sleepiness or the new-mother hormones, but Caroline had never before been happier to see another human being.

  “I’m so glad you came!” she said. “I’m really touched.”

  “Of course I came. Noni was worried about you.”

  “When does she get here?”

  “Oh— Well, she had to work. She’ll come down next week. Nathan told her that would give you guys a chance to settle in first.”

  Caroline wondered when this conversation had taken place and why Noni hadn’t come immediately. If a first grandchild didn’t merit a day off work, then what did? And what time was it? What day was it?

  It was then that Renee smiled and laughed. “How lucky that Louis came when he did,” she said.

  “Lucky? But he was too early,” said Caroline, confused.

  “I mean on the same day as Joe’s trouble with the college. Noni was so distracted. I don’t think I could have gotten away with it otherwise. She’d still be asking questions and wanting to talk to the coach. Now she’s buying onesies. It worked out perfectly.”

  “Oh, of course,” Caroline said; now she understood. “Joe. Perfect timing.”

  Renee peered into Louis’s cot. “He’s cute,” she said without touching him, and then she sat back down in the chair.

  They talked for a bit longer, though later Caroline would not be able to recall the details of the conversation. Undoubtedly they talked about Joe. Probably the delivery, the ER doctor, burping, diapers.

  What Caroline would remember was that after Renee left, she closed her eyes and she thought about Joe and about baby Louis. She thought about Noni, her sisters, how we were raised, who we’d all become, and Caroline decided then that everything she knew about parenting was misconceived. That she and Nathan would start fresh. The past didn’t matter, it didn’t, as long as you were aware of its reach. If you possessed that self-knowledge, you would not fall down the same holes. That day in the hospital, alone with her newborn son, Caroline promised him that she would be a better mother than the one she’d had. And it would be this imperative, flawed and guilt-ridden and imbued with Caroline’s own sense of personal history, that would propel my sister through the next fifteen years of her life. Only after Joe’s accident would she realize the futility of her mission. Better was largely irrelevant when it came to mothering because the entire enterprise relied on the presumption that one day, sooner than you thought, your child would become an entirely self-reliant, independent person who made her own decisions. That child wouldn’t necessarily remember the Halloween costumes you made from hand six years running. Or maybe she did, but she resented you for it because she’d wanted store-bought costumes just like all her friends. It didn’t matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child walked off into the world alone.

  * * *

  With the cats finally out of the way, we moved our cleaning operation upstairs. We scrubbed and wiped and swept up the cat hair, the droppings, the dust, the worst of the linoleum stains in the bathroom. We threw away the kittens’ newspaper nest. The October sun through clean windows made the bedrooms glow as though a giant candle burned somewhere within the walls.

  “I’ll sew some curtains, maybe paint a mural for the girls,” mused Caroline as we stood in a doorway surveying our work. I narrowed my eyes, and yes, I could see it, Caroline’s vision. The forever house.

  And then Caroline declared it enough, sufficient for today. She would spend the night at Noni’s, then return tomorrow to oversee the cleaning service she’d decided to hire. They’d descend in the morning with power vacuums and a team of ten. The house wouldn’t be perfect before her family arrived, but it would be clean. It would be enough.

  It was late afternoon when we emerged outside again. Sun slanting through orange leaves, a deeper chill in the air.

  “Thanks,” Caroline said. “I appreciate you coming, Fiona. And just watch Joe at the party, okay? See what you think. Talk to Renee. I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t need any help. Maybe he’s okay.” Caroline shrugged. “Wait—I haven’t even asked you about work or your poetry or anything.”

  “All fine,” I said. I smiled at my sister. “All great.”

  Caroline nodded absently. “Good,” she said without looking at me. “And do you need any, you know, money or anything?”

  “Funding for the arts?” I said, and shook my head quickly. “Nope. Thanks, Caroline.” I was a socialist at heart and took my siblings’ money as I imagined the executive director of ClimateSenseNow! accepted donations from guilt-ridden corporate CEOs. We all valued the same ideals; we just had different ways of expressing those values. But her assumption that I needed cash, her reluctance at offering it, embarrassed me. I knew that my siblings saw me as irresponsible, but wasn’t I here today, helping her? Didn’t that count for something?

  I peered into the back of the car; the cat’s body was splayed, limbs at odd angles, motionless.

  “Still out cold,” I said.

  “I can’t keep them,” Caroline replied. “You’re right, it’s too much. Let’s do a shelter.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Caroline nodded. “They won’t die. I’m sure they’ll find nice homes. They look like high-class cats. People are bound to see their potential.”

  “I think that’s the best thing,” I said. “There’s a place in Milford. We can make it there before six o’clock.”

  Caroline hesitated. “Fiona, can you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Can you take them to the shelter? I can’t. I know I won’t go through with it.”

  “How? I don’t have a car. I’d have to leave you here.”

  “No. Take them with you to the city. On the train. They’ll be knocked out for a few more hours. I’ll give you money for a cab from the station. You can go straight to a shelter. Okay?”

  What Caroline was suggesting struck me as slightly preposterous—me, on a Metro-North commuter train on a weekday afternoon, rush hour, with a box full of kittens and their fat, mean, drugged-out mom—but I didn’t want Caroline to change her mind. My sister needed someone to help her, and that someone was me.

  “Okay,” I shrugged. “I’ll do it.”

  “And one more thing,” Caroline said with a sly smile. “Will you read me the poem you wrote for Joe and Sandrine?”

  “Really?” I said. Earlier in the day, she’d been so dismissive. Plus, as far as I knew, Caroline had never read a poem in her life, let alone one of mine. “Isn’t it late? Don’t you have to get going?”

  “No, not yet,” she said. “I can’t come to Joe’s party, you know that. I want to hear it.”

  A breeze came up and blew hair around my face. I felt a tremor of self-consciousness and embarrassment, residue of my adolescence and all its awkward wishing. It seemed ridiculous that I would still yearn for my siblings’ approval, but here it was.

  “You look amazing,” Caroline said gazing up at me. “Have I told you that? So strong and beautiful. Please read the poem. Honestly. I’d love to hear it.”

  “Okay.”

  I pulled the scribbled sheet of paper from my purse and stood before Caroline. She sat unsteadily on the front steps of the house, wood creaking as she tried to find a comfortable spot. Here was her family’s new home: its sweeping wide porch, the delicate molding on the railings, the paint flaking but the exact shade of purple found on the inside lip of a seashell. The peaked roof of the tower, its shingles shaped like half-moons, pierced the blue sky.

  “Caroline, it does look like a castle,” I said. “Really.”

  She stopped her fidgeting. “I’m ready. Read to me.”

  “This is called ‘He and She,’” I began.

  While I read the poem, a crow squawked only once and the wind quieted down so that Caroline heard every word. At the end my sister clapped wildly and said, “It’s wonderful, Fiona. Joe will love it.”

 
Chapter 6

  On the night of Joe’s engagement party, Renee was working overnight in the ER. She was a fellow in transplant surgery, but Jaypa, the attending physician, was short-staffed and had asked her to take a shift. As a medical student, Renee had always loved the ER—it was quick, urgent, dirty, the opposite of transplants—so she told Jaypa, sure, but if she wasn’t out by seven for her brother’s engagement party, she would send his fiancée down to mess Jaypa up.

  “Do you promise?” Jaypa said; he’d met Sandrine before. “Sounds like fun.”

  The first ten hours of the shift were hectic—a gunshot wound, two heart attacks, three broken bones, a schizophrenic off his meds—but then Renee managed to sleep a couple hours in one of the rickety resident cots. She woke up, ate a bagel, drank some coffee, and the last hours proceeded with a snoozy calm. Now she had only ninety minutes to go. A heart monitor beeped. A nurse’s clogs squeaked. The external glass doors heaved open, and two paramedics entered, talking about the Giants and what a season. They laughed. Renee yawned.

  All week she’d convinced herself that the party would be fine, maybe even fun, but in moments like this—her defenses lowered by exhaustion, her mind unoccupied by sewing stitches or drawing blood—she could be honest with herself. No, she did not want to celebrate Joe and Sandrine’s engagement. Two hours of feigned delight at Joe’s unfortunate selection of Sandrine Cahill as a wife. Two hours of forced conversation with bankers, lawyers, and aging frat boys from Alden College. Two hours of answering questions about her marital status—nope, still single, nope, no kids!—and two hours of forgetting that Joe teetered on a ledge of his own making.

  Or did he? It was so hard to tell what was simply Joe being Joe—charming, affable, careless—and what was a problem. Renee had struggled to recognize the distinction before. In college she’d misread the signs and thought he’d be fine. Just fraternity partying, that’s how she’d described it to Caroline. But then, so quickly, Joe had spiraled out of control.