Seeking Carolina (20 page)

Charlie walked Gina to the front door

“Looks like our son might have his first girlfriend,” she said. “He spent most of the time on the phone. My phone. Maybe we ought to reconsider the cell phone thing. It’s kind of a necessity these days.”

“You’re probably right. I’ll take him over to Torrington this weekend.”

Gina cocked her head, smiled sheepishly. “I was hoping you’d say that.” She dug into her bag and pulled out a box. “I got this for him, but I didn’t tell him. I swear. I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

Charlie took the phone. Thin, sleek, the newest and the best. Gina did not make much money. He wasn’t even sure where she was working these days. “I’ll pay for the plan.”

“I got it,” she said. “I put him in on mine.”

“What would you have done with it if I wouldn’t let up?”

Again the sheepish grin. “I had a pretty good feeling you would.” Her hand came up to rub at his hairy chin. “You’re a good dad, Charlie. A good man. I always did like you.”

“We’ve always been good friends,” he said.

“I hope we can be again.”

“Aren’t we?”

“Not yet.” She smiled. “But we will be.”

Gina trotted down the steps. Charlie closed the door against the cold coming in, but stopped when he heard, “Oh, hey, Johanna.”

Caught between pulling the door open and closing it firmly against eavesdropping, he did neither.

“Hi, Gina. How was your time with the kids?”

“Really great. Thanks. I hate leaving them.”

“It must be hard. You okay?”

“I will be, once I get home. Tonight’s going to be a little rough, but I’ll live.” She continued down the steps. “Have fun baking cupcakes.”

“Thanks.”

Charlie opened the door as Johanna came the rest of the way up the steps. She handed him the bag of ingredients. “Everything okay here?”

“It’s fine. Will and Charlotte will be back later, but Tony and Millie are looking forward to baking cupcakes. Caleb’s just looking forward to eating them.”

He carried the groceries to the kitchen. Johanna followed. “Hey!” She held up the tea-stained mug he had set into the sink. “You really do have a mug.”

“I told you I did.”

She inspected it. “I don’t see most of the insults you hurled.”

“I might have studied a little, when I found out about it.”

“You learned it all in two days?”

“Well, I already knew a few on my own.” He took her into his arms. “I wanted to impress you. Did it work?”

“Maybe a little.”

Charlie kissed her softly, quickly. They were both on edge, and the kids were home. Anything more than an affectionate peck might have proved too much for him. He let her go. “How’s Julietta?”

“Not good.” Johanna put the mug back into the sink and started taking groceries from the bag. “We moved her to a smaller hospital at the academy where Efan works. Her doctor wants to interview me in the morning…”

* * * *

Nina told Dr. Sam, as he preferred to Chowdary, about living in New Hampshire, the abandoned farmhouse they called home, being left alone to fend for themselves as toddlers, and the fire that landed them in Bitterly. What she recalled of life with her parents was being loved, if not well cared-for. Kooky and well intentioned, they did their best. She held nothing against them.

Emma’s interview went much differently. She had been frightened of her father most of the time, frightened of the people he insisted were in every hallway, around every corner, waiting to snatch her away. But there were times he was the best of playmates, telling stories in his accented voice, making them puppets and dolls out of things he found. She learned how to tell which Daddy he was, day by day, and when to avoid the one who scared her. What Emma remembered of Carolina were the bouts of depression, followed by bursts of crazed energy Emma had learned to fear almost as much as her father’s shadowy government men. Carolina did whatever her husband told her to, without question, not out of fear but for absolute faith. Of the accident, Emma remembered nothing.

“My interview went much the same as Nina’s,” Johanna told her sisters as they shared stories over lunch. “Our Carolina and Johan were not the same people as yours, Emma.”

“Lucky you.” She sipped her iced tea. “I loved them. I loved them so much, but I was afraid all the time. I hate to say it, but if all that didn’t happen, if I’d been left with them to reach adulthood, I would have been a goner.”

“We all would have been,” Nina muttered. She raised her glass. “To Adelina and Giovanni Coco, our saviors.”

Johanna raised her glass to toast their grandparents, even if she was suddenly nauseous. For the first time in her life, she had to acknowledge her life had been better for losing her parents. Had they lived—she shuddered, and that shuddering made her feel even worse, because what she did not share with her sisters, what she had never shared with them, was her own role in her parents’ descent into the madness.

“You cannot possibly blame yourself,” Dr. Sam had said when she confessed her accidental arson to him. “You were a baby, Johanna. You’d been left unattended but for your sister who was barely older than you.”

“I knew better than to play with the fire,” she said.

“That is what you told yourself as you got older, as you remembered it. I can assure you, absolutely, a child of three has no real sense of such dire consequence. You must let all such notions go.”

“But all that happened to them after, being separated from one another, from their kids, committed into whatever psychiatric wards the state put them in had to have tipped their already unbalanced minds beyond the breaking point. It must have, don’t you think?”

Dr. Sam had tapped his pen to his teeth, his intense eyes on her. “I would need access to the records to know for certain,” he said, “But mental illness, left untreated, usually gets worse with age, Johanna. I don’t know their experiences in the hospitals they went to, but given their ages, and the apparent severity of their illnesses, I can say with confidence that, with or without events transpiring as they did, they would indeed have become more and more unstable as time went on. ” He had leaned forward then, touched her hand. “You cannot carry the blame for their actions. It was their job to protect you, to guide you, to take care of you. Perhaps they were incapable, but that does not make them inculpable. You were a baby. It was not your fault.”

“He asked if I knew what happened to her.” Emma swiped a potato chip off Johanna’s tray. “To Mom.”

“Me too,” Nina said.

“And me.” Johanna bit into her turkey sandwich, swallowed her prior thoughts along with it. “He thought it was odd we didn’t know. That we hadn’t heard from her at all.”

“I got the feeling he believes Gram and Pop did,” Nina said. “I’ve always thought so myself, actually.”

“You think they’d have kept her from us?” Emma asked. “Even as adults?”

“I wish I knew.”

“What? If they knew? Or where Mom is…was…whatever.”

“Both,” Nina answered, her eyes suddenly downcast. “I gave Dr. Sam permission to get whatever records are still available. It’s been a really long time. The records for the accident, and anything that might have happened after could well have been destroyed by now, or impossible to locate.” She looked to Emma. “You don’t have to read them, if you don’t want to. I know all this is way more painful to you than to me and Jo.”

“I still want to know what happened to her.” Emma closed her eyes, inhaled deeply. “It’s my wish. The one I always told myself I would make when I got the locket.” She opened her eyes to wag a finger at Nina. “And don’t you start on me about believing in wishes. It’s not like it would have hurt any.”

“I didn’t say anything, Emma.” She reached across the table. “It’s my wish too.”

Johanna’s heart pounded so hard she could barely hear for the rush in her ears. All the silly wishes through her life had always been eclipsed by the same one. The wish she feared making. Feared being granted. The one her sisters shared.

She took another bite of her sandwich—
I wish, I wish
—and swallowed down more thoughts she could not put into words.

* * * *

Johanna lived the next days in a sort of limbo. Julietta did not come successfully back to them. Moments of true awareness turned almost instantly to agitation. Dr. Sam treated her acute anxiety with medication, and rest. One time, he assured them, she would awaken and be more herself. It was only a matter of time.

Still they visited her daily, taking turns sitting at her bedside. Efan was there all hours of the day and night, and vowed he would be until the academy was back in session. Emma’s kids and Charlie’s went back to school. Gunner returned to New York to complete the sale of the gallery.

Charlotte had already pulled out of SUNY, New Paltz and applied to the Culinary Institute of America. Financial aid forms were being filled out, she resumed her position at the coffeehouse in town, and in another week, she would head out to New Paltz to collect her belongings and say good-bye to friends. It astounded Johanna, her ability to transition between such huge changes in her life so seamlessly. And yet seamless was an act Charlotte played almost as well as Johanna did herself.

When they were not running back and forth to the hospital, Emma and Nina spent most of their time with Johanna at the house on County Line Road. They went through Gram’s things to donate, to save. They found boxes of Poppy’s clothes Gram had been unable to part with. Photo albums, old tax returns, bank statements, boxes of canceled checks—the accumulation of a life lived united, and then apart. They carefully considered every item. Except the locket. It, as well as all talk of what they would do with the house, was firmly, and most defiantly, avoided.

The sisters cooked together and ate together. Mike only joined them once, when Charlie and his kids did as well. Even then he took the kids home early. Emma stayed overnight, left when it was time to get her boys ready for school in the morning only to show up at the door at nine the next night, a bottle of wine and a deck of tarot cards in hand.

Nina had given Johanna her arched-brow look and popped open the bottle. And when Emma went to her old room to sleep the night, Nina stopped Johanna at her door.

“You have to talk to her.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Tell her to knock it the hell off, she has three beautiful boys and needs to get over it.”

“That’s not what it’s about, Nina. He betrayed her trust.”

“Well, she betrayed his first when she got pregnant with Gio, so she has nothing to say about it.”

“What?” Johanna hauled her sister into the bedroom and closed the door. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“If you think I’m saying Mike didn’t want to have another baby and she lied to him about her birth control to get pregnant, yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Oh, wow.” Johanna pressed cool hands to her burning cheeks. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. She told me herself. Mike doesn’t say anything about it now. He adores his little guy. But he was furious at the time.”

“So he can’t be angry about that without seeming like an asshole,” Johanna said. “And Emma gets to be all self-righteous.”

“Yup.”

“This is way out of my league.”

“No it’s not. Just talk to her. I’ll end up screaming at her.”

She didn’t. Not that night or the next morning. Johanna could not swear to it, but she was close to certain Nina chose to head up to the hospital at the precise moment Johanna could not accompany her, which happened to coincide with Emma’s arrival after getting Gio off to afternoon kindergarten. Having lunch with her younger sister, Johanna fumbled with the right way to open the subject, and ended up blurting, “If I don’t talk to you about Mike, Nina is going to do awful things to me.”

Emma paused mid-chew. “It’s none of your business, and Nina’s bark is way worse than her bite.”

“Come on, Emma. Your marriage is in the crapper. Do you really want a baby this bad?”

“He had no right to take the choice from me.”

“And you have no right making it for him.”

Emma narrowed her eyes. “What has Nina told you? That I got pregnant with Gio on purpose?”

“Well…”

“Damn it all
—
that’s not how it was. I legitimately forgot to take my pill, but then later, I forgot and…things happen. Mike is…anyway. I didn’t even think about it until I skipped a period.”

“It seems highly unlikely skipping one pill would—”

“Exactly! That’s what the doc said too. Sometimes, for whatever reason, birth control fails. My husband doesn’t believe me, or the doctor. Getting a vasectomy was retaliation, plain and simple.”

“Emma.” Johanna shook her head. “That doesn’t sound like Mike at all.”

“I would have thought so too, once.”

“He adores his little boy. You can’t think…”

If dad were given the choice of going back and starting over, he’d do it all again. My mom wouldn’t.

Charlotte’s tearful words on Christmas day hit Johanna full in the face. She couldn’t imagine a parent feeling that way, but neither could she presume to know what Gina truly felt. Still…

“Do you think,” she asked Emma, “if Mike could go back and make it so you never got pregnant with Giovanni, he would?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how can you believe he did what he did to somehow get back at you for giving him a son he adores. You said it yourself—your birth control failed. He just doesn’t want another child he has to feel guilty for not actually wanting at the outset. “

Emma was silent a moment. “You know nothing Jon Snow.”

“What?”

“Sorry. Game of Thrones reference. Don’t you read? Or watch television?”

“Whatever. Emmaline, talk to your husband. He’s a good guy. He loves you and your boys. Don’t fuck it up.”

Emma smiled. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“I would if I could.” Johanna laughed, but it fell short, and the two fell deeply silent.

“Just sort of hits every now and then, doesn’t it?” Emma let go a deep breath. “First Gram dying, now all this with Julietta, is really hitting me hard, bringing up the past and things I haven’t thought about, haven’t wanted to think about in forever.”