More than upset.
She looked miserable.
Sydney pulled Max short about ten feet away, and she was about to say something—though she didn't know what—when she froze, gaped, let out a gasp.
Now she understood why Caroline was on her knees, why she gripped two kitchen sponges in her hands, a bucket of soapy water positioned beside her on the pavement.
There were ugly words spray-painted over this parking space.
Big, red, jagged letters that read burn in hell dyke.
Sydney stared at the words for a long moment. Her heart was a stampede in her chest; tears welled in her eyes. From a deep, buried place inside of her, the worst moments of her stay at the Redeemer House began to surface. They were always there, always waiting, eager to spoil every good feeling by reminding her that she had been degraded, hurt, beaten, humiliated. The word “dyke” had been used so often in the House that she couldn't hear it or see it without remembering.
“You’re not a dyke, are you?”
“You don’t wanna be a dyke.”
“Tell me you’re not a dyke.”
And here was the word again, in the ugliest handwriting, spray-painted on the pavement across a parking spot that, Sydney realized, had a rusted metal marker in front of it, sticking out of the ground.
The metal marker read 718B.
Caroline’s apartment number.
This was Caroline’s parking spot.
This message had definitely been meant for Caroline.
Suddenly, Sydney felt impossibly heavy, as if she had swallowed stones.
Caroline hung her head and gestured helplessly at the spray-painted slur. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. Eventually, she dipped the sponges back into the suds and returned to scrubbing.
Her scrubbing didn't seem to fade the words at all.
Sydney didn’t know what to do. Max was dragging her toward the grass, but she tightened her grip on his leash, drew him closer to her.
“Caroline?” she whispered.
Caroline paused. Sydney could see the tension in her shoulders, the rigidity of her posture. She just sat there, staring at nothing.
Finally, she looked at Sydney.
And Sydney’s heart broke into little pieces.
Caroline's brow was furrowed, her eyes wide, limpid, her long lashes fluttering against her cheeks. There were no tears on her face, but she looked utterly…defeated. Empty. And resigned.
“Hello, Sydney,” she said quietly.
Sydney cleared her throat, stepped closer, her eyes avoiding the hideous graffiti. Max licked Caroline’s cheek helpfully, and then Caroline wiped the suds off of her left hand to reach up and scratch the dog behind his ears.
“Who did this?” Sydney's voice sounded flat.
Caroline dropped the sponges into the bucket. “Does it matter?”
“I think it does,” said Sydney, with a surprising sharpness. An emotion was climbing, growing, burning inside of her.
Anger.
No—fury.
She was furious as she stared down at Caroline—Caroline on her knees, Caroline defeated.
The older woman wiped her forearm across her eyes with a sigh, and a wisp of her blonde hair fluttered out of place.
Sydney wanted nothing more than to gather Caroline into her arms. To hold her, to promise to protect her from other people’s cruelty and ignorance. She wanted to encase Caroline in something glittering and sturdy that would deflect any and all attacks. She wanted to combat this hatred, to destroy it so that it could never touch Caroline again.
But Sydney was not a knight in shining armor, and Caroline was not her queen. They were two ordinary women looking at an ordinary display of hatred on the ordinary ground.
Sydney loathed this feeling of powerlessness.
She had felt it far too often in her life.
She wanted to fight against it.
“Caroline… I’m sorry. This is—”
“Sydney.” Caroline gazed up at her with a pained expression. “My darling girl,” she said, her voice low, level, “this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. And it probably won’t be the last.”
“But this is bullshit,” Sydney hissed, and then, all of the sudden, she was crouching beside Caroline.
“Yes,” Caroline said slowly, carefully. “It is bullshit. That’s an apt word for it.” She gave Sydney an appraising look, and then she smiled at her, a small, sad smile.
“Did you see who did it?”
“I have my suspicions.”
Sydney waited, but Caroline didn’t elaborate. After a long moment, Caroline seemed to reach a decision, and she cast her eyes toward Sydney again.
“I think it might have been Mrs. Williams.”
Sydney stared, baffled by the bizarre image this summoned in her mind: the self-important Christian woman kneeling in her expensive capris as she spray-painted a violent message of hate.
Caroline shook her head. “Maybe it wasn't actually Mrs. Williams. Maybe one of her friends did it for her. I'm not sure. This just...seems like something she would be involved in.”
Sydney was shocked, tongue-tied.
Caroline sighed, stared up at the sky, her fingers curling into her skirt and gripping it tightly. “I think she’s been stealing my mail for the past few years. The past few months, it’s gotten even worse.
“A lot of my personal mail—letters, postcards—has gone missing, and packages just never showed up. I don’t know what to do about it.” She paused, lowering her gaze. “Once, Theresa did do something about it. She talked to Mrs. Williams. I don't know what she said, but the theft—and the passive-aggressive commentary, the cruel notes tacked to the apartment door—stopped after that conversation. Theresa’s my ex,” said Caroline, biting her lower lip.
“I guess Mrs. Williams was terrified of her.” Caroline scoffed. “I scare her in a hell-bound sinner sort of way, but I don’t intimidate her like Theresa did. So.” She exhaled heavily. “I don’t know how to make it stop this time.”
Caroline's words fed Sydney's fury. “Did you call the police?” she asked, gesturing to the graffiti.
Caroline nodded, fishing the sponges out of the bucket. “They came by. Took pictures, a statement, but there are no security cameras back here, so they have little to go on. They left. Said to keep in touch if anything else happens.”
She stooped a little then, as if she bore the weight of the world on her shoulders. “I’m on my own.”
Sydney wanted to tell Caroline, “You’re not alone,” but she opened and closed her mouth without speaking. She couldn't risk overwhelming Caroline, not now, not when she was scrubbing hateful words from her parking space.
Possibly because of Sydney.
Sydney cleared her throat, rested a hand on Max’s shoulder, just to steady herself. “Caroline,” she said, and cleared her throat again; it was tight, as if invisible hands were wrapped around it, squeezing. “Did this happen because of me?”
Caroline regarded Sydney silently.
“Did this,” said Sydney, glaring at the spray-painted words, “happen because Mrs. Williams came to talk to you about me, to…accuse you of—”
“No.” Caroline sighed, shook her head, and when she met Sydney's gaze, Sydney was surprised by how certain the woman looked, even as she scrubbed the ground on her hands and knees.
Caroline looked beautiful. Frustrated but fearless. Full of this deep-seated calm that Sydney envied.
“No, darling. This isn’t because of you. This is because someone is, to put it succinctly, an asshole. Someone is full of hate, and if they hadn’t been hateful toward me, they would have been hateful toward someone else. You can never blame yourself for someone else's hate and ignorance. You blame the hater, never the victim.”
“But I wasn’t the victim.”
Caroline's blue eyes gleamed. “No. But you could have been.” And she leaned forward again, continued to scrub. “Better that it was me than you. You’re t
oo young to have something so horrid happen to you.”
Sydney stared down at the word “dyke,” unseeing.
You’re too young to have something so horrid happen to you.
Caroline didn’t know about Sydney's past, and Sydney didn’t know if she’d ever have the strength to tell her—or anyone. She wanted, for the rest of her life, to be the only one who held the knowledge of the dark things she had suffered. It gave her a sort of power. She and she alone contained the horrible memories, and no one else would ever have to think about them, or be angry about them, or pity her for them.
But right now, the pain of those memories was something that connected her and Caroline.
So she reached out, and she closed her hand over Caroline’s hand.
And Caroline stopped scrubbing.
“I know what you’re feeling,” Sydney whispered.
Caroline's brow furrowed, and her lips down-turned into a confused—though lovely—frown. Caroline stared at her for an elongated moment, and the world around them seemed to slow down, or to cease existing entirely.
Sydney realized that she had wanted to wrap Caroline in something warm and soft and safe, and this moment was it.
They sat side by side on the pavement, and their pain connected them, a delicate lacework of bad memories, broken hearts, hateful words, and loneliness.
Though they had lived very different lives and spent millions of moments apart, here and now, they were together. Entwined.
Caroline drew in a deep breath and released it slowly.
“Come to my party,” she murmured.
Sydney blinked, shook her head. “What?”
“I’m having a dinner party tonight. Some of my former students, several of my closest friends. I’ve been planning it for weeks. I’m fairly excited about the menu.” The smile that spread across her face was tinged with sorrow. “It’s…to celebrate my birthday. I even bought a new dress. Please come.”
Sydney sat motionless.
But Max was whining, tugging at his leash. She had exhausted his patience, asked more of the dog than she should. Sydney found herself standing abruptly, and Max pulled her forward, toward the patch of lawn on the other side of the parking lot.
Caroline arched a brow, but the smile hadn't left her face. She watched Sydney expectantly.
“But,” Sydney began, “what about this?” She indicated the parking spot, the words.
Caroline stood up, dropping the sponges to the bucket and straightening her skirt with damp hands. “It doesn’t seem as if my scrubbing’s doing any good.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.” Caroline angled her head to one side. “But this exercise in futility has made me realize I no longer care what Mrs. Williams thinks. If she did this, she's a bully and beneath my notice. I won't let her affect the way I live my life, not anymore.”
She simply shrugged, an elegant motion, and said again, “Come to my party, Sydney.”
The moment was ending.
Sydney knew she had to make a decision.
A decision that could change everything.
“All right,” Sydney heard herself saying. “I will.”
Caroline’s smile outshone the sun, and Sydney’s heart rose, rose, weightless with hope.
“The party starts at eight o’clock,” Caroline called as Max dragged Sydney away. “Don’t be late!”
Sydney followed Max onto the grass, and then she raced after him as he pulled her off of the lawn and down the sidewalk. Max, delighted that his owner wanted to stretch her legs, took off at a long-limbed jog, then a flat-out run.
Sydney kept pace with him, holding tightly to the leash, watching the houses go by, her breath coming faster and faster in her lungs, her heart beating as quickly as her legs pumped.
If someone had looked out of their window and watched the girl hurry by, they’d have noticed the broad, beaming smile on her face.
But no one looked out and saw her. There were no people in sight, and the world seemed empty.
But Sydney knew better: Caroline was in the world. And because of that fact, the world could never feel empty again.
Chapter 13
“Thom, I’m the worst.”
“Don’t tell me. You’re not coming.”
“I’m sorry. I'm a terrible person,” Sydney groveled, clutching her phone to her ear as she dug through the bottom drawer of her dresser, trying to find her fancy dress slacks. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn them, but she could have sworn she'd put them in the bottom drawer.
“You’d better be dying. That’s the only excuse I’ll accept.”
Sydney pulled a pair of black pants out of the drawer, but they weren’t the right ones. When she tossed them over her shoulder in frustration, they landed on Max’s head. He was trying to be helpful and kept nosing at her shoulder, possibly amused by the fact that his human enjoyed digging, too.
“I’m not dying. But… Well, I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you why I can’t come over tonight.” She opened her drawer a little wider.
“Try me.”
“Caroline invited me to come over to her place for a dinner party.”
A pause.
Then: “Wait, what? I thought things didn’t go well yesterday. At least, that’s what your ennui suggested during our last call.” He was laying on the sarcasm, and Sydney couldn’t help but chuckle.
“Yeah, it didn’t go well. But something happened after that, and... Basically, when I went up to her apartment last night, she told me to leave. To go away. Then, just a little while ago, I found her scrubbing at some homophobic words that had been spray-painted on her parking space—and she invited me to her party.”
“Huh? You lost me.”
“Someone had spray-painted ‘burn in hell, dyke’ on her parking spot. And she was trying to scrub it away.”
Thom fell silent.
“Thom? Still there?”
“Yeah.” He sighed heavily. “Yeah. But, Sydney, are you safe in that building?”
“As safe as I am anywhere, being gay and all,” Sydney said dryly, tugging out another pair of slacks. This one had a hole on the inseam that she’d been meaning to repair but had never gotten around to. She tossed these over her shoulder, too, and Max sat down on them, thumping his tail against the floor.
“Don’t worry about me, Thom. If you’re going to worry about anyone, it should be Caroline. Somebody in our building knows she’s gay and has a vendetta against her.”
“I mean, I am worried about her. But hold on. Go back. Why did she invite you to the party?”
“I don’t know.” Sydney raised a brow, feeling heady, bold. “I think she just ran out of fucks to give.” Sydney removed the last pair of pants from the drawer, and—blessedly—these were the ones she had been searching for. She laid them out on her bed and regarded them with a critical eye. They weren’t too wrinkled. “Maybe she's just being nice, since I'm new to the area and haven't met many people yet.”
“Huh,” Thom said. He sounded thoughtful. Sydney could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. “So, she didn’t invite you to the party because she’s attracted to you?”
“Thom.” Sydney raked her fingers through her hair. “I'm just glad that she isn't pissed off at me.”
She scratched Max behind the ears as she sat down on the edge of her bed. “Last night, I was afraid that she’d cut me out of her life forever. And now... Well, I guess she hasn’t—”
“Hey, Syd?”
“Yeah?”
“It just seems to me as if you kind of have it bad for this lady. Is that true?”
Sydney exhaled. “Yeah.”
“You were depressed by the possibility of never talking to her again—”
“Yes,” Sydney said simply, her mouth drawn into a thin line.
“I just...don’t want to see you get hurt. You know? I mean, I want you to be happy. I encouraged you to go after Caroline, but now...” He drew in a brea
th. “Well, don’t you want to find someone…a little closer to your age? Wouldn’t that be—I don't know—easier? We could go clubbing together—”
“Thom, that’s not what I want—”
“You’re too young to know what you want. We both are. We’ve got a lot of life ahead of us, and now’s the time to sleep around and break hearts, make mistakes.”
“But I’ve already made my mistakes.” Sydney gripped the phone so hard that she could hear its plastic case creaking in her hand. “I made a big mistake. And I’m not going to do that again. If I get my heart broken because of Caroline, Thom…” She shook her head, willing the painful memories away. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Hey, I don’t want to sound mean, Sydney. It’s just that she doesn’t seem to be into you—”
“You don’t know that,” she whispered, her heart twisting. She remembered the expression Caroline had worn last night, before she told Sydney to leave. Sydney had been convinced that Caroline was attracted to her...
“Baby girl,” sighed Thom, “life’s too short to fall head over heels in love with someone who doesn’t even notice you. Trust me on that one.”
Sydney stared into space, biting at her lower lip.
“Syd?”
“I’m here.” She released the breath she'd been holding, then patted the head of her adoring dog. “I appreciate your concern, but I don’t know if I can take your advice on this one, Thom.”
“What? Why?”
“I think I’m already in love with her. With Caroline,” she blurted out.
Silence.
After several seconds, Sydney checked her screen to make sure she hadn't lost the call.
But then Thom spoke, his voice flat, mirthless. “Sydney, you don’t even know her—”
“I know what's important,” Sydney said softly. “I know she’s a good person. I know she’s generous. I know that she’s funny. I know that she’s kind to animals. I know she’s incredibly talented. I know how she likes her coffee. Isn’t that the important stuff? Isn’t everything else just…icing?”
“I don't know.” His voice was low, begrudging. “If you love her and she doesn’t even see you, Sydney—what then?”
The Longing Page 13
