18. First Light II
Caroline gets to Cru at midnight. Dylan meets her at the podium, looking smoking hot in a navy button-down, a navy blazer, and jeans. He leads her to a seat at the front bar and asks if champagne is okay.
“Obviously,” she says.
A coupe glass of Pol Roger appears, and as Caroline sips it, she wishes Isaac could see her. She considers taking a selfie and texting it to him, but that feels childish and predictable. She considers taking a selfie and posting it to her Instagram stories—Isaac pretends not to have time for social media, though Caroline knows he creeps on her account occasionally—but does she want to be that girl, taking selfies and posting them? She does not. She tries to channel Gigi Ling. She will be present: Sip her champagne, admire the deft handiwork of the oyster shucker on the other side of the bar, listen to the music (“Kids” by MGMT). She assumes Sofia is back at the clubs and Isaac is in the loft alone, maybe waiting for his DoorDash from Momoya, maybe working, maybe watching My Octopus Teacher for the umpteenth time (he says he finds something new to admire about the film with every viewing).
Should Caroline step outside and call him?
She should not. Dylan appears; he’s ready to go. He asks the barback for “wine on wheels,” and the barback hands him a fresh bottle of Pol Roger and two plastic cups. He and Caroline head down Straight Wharf to the parking lot. “Your chariot awaits,” Dylan says, and he opens the passenger door of his monster truck.
They drive to Monomoy Beach, which is dark, quiet, and empty. Dylan pulls a blanket out of the back seat (he came prepared, Caroline thinks at first, but then he shakes it free of Cheez-Its crumbs and she realizes it must be Orion’s playground blanket). They sit in the sand and Dylan pours them champagne. It’s the most romantic setting Caroline can imagine; the crescent moon shows off like a diva in the spotlight. She tries not to think of Isaac.
She tries not to think about not-thinking about Isaac.
Dylan says, “So how were things at the house?”
“They did shots of tequila, talked about orgasms, and slow-danced together.”
Dylan chokes on his champagne. “That sounds like cinematic gold.”
“It was a start,” Caroline says. The night went pretty much as Caroline had expected, though she realizes there’s stuff going on below the surface.
How does she mine it? Maybe she should divide and conquer. Talk to the women individually.
“It seems like your parents are still really in love,” Caroline says. “You’re lucky.”
“They are,” he says. “It’s disgusting.” He laughs, then says, “Were your parents happy before your father died?”
“They were happy enough that I never had any reason to wonder if they were happy,” Caroline says. “I’m not sure they were as happy as your parents.” Caroline shivers—the off-the-shoulder blouse and flirty skirt she’s wearing aren’t enough for the breeze coming off the water. Dylan gallantly removes his blazer and drapes it over her. “Do you remember the night we met?” she asks. She reminds him of the Whalers sweatshirt and then Aubrey appearing out of nowhere. “This is a sweet reprisal. Minus Aubrey.”
“She’s like Voldemort,” Dylan says. “One should never speak her name.”
Caroline has questions about Aubrey: What is their deal? Was Aubrey getting pregnant the reason Dylan left Syracuse? How did that feel? Why did they break up? Dylan seemed pretty tickled by how jealous Aubrey was when she saw Caroline. Does he still have feelings for her?
But Caroline can take a hint. She tosses the topic away like a pebble into the water.
The champagne is gone, and Caroline has to pee. Caroline asks Dylan if he minds driving her back to the parking lot so she can get her Jeep, and he says, “Do you want to go to my house? You can use the bathroom and we can have one more drink.”
She considers saying no. She woke up at four o’clock that morning in New York, a moment that feels like it happened three days earlier, and she’s supposed to start filming the next morning at eight because her mother has arranged for a yoga instructor to come lead a practice at the house. Caroline will capture shots of the five stars in child’s pose or warrior three.
Besides this, she misses Isaac. But Isaac is with Sofia. Please, no trouble,
Sofia said. Why hadn’t Caroline listened? Sofia might have been predicting what would happen: Caroline obsessed with someone who isn’t hers.
Caroline in agony.
“Sure,” she says.
When they get to Dylan’s house on Hooper Farm Road, he opens a couple of beers and they settle on the sofa.
“What was it like when your father died?” he says.
“What was it like?” Caroline asks.
“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Dylan says. He spins his beer in his hands, then sets it down without drinking. “It just seems like a big deal.”
Is Dylan McKenzie interested in her as a person? she wonders. Is she interested in him as a person?
“He was in a car crash.” Caroline takes a breath. “It was a week or two before Christmas, my father was driving to Logan in a snowstorm. He was flying to Germany to speak at a conference; he was running late; the place he spun out was a road near our house—a couple of deer ran in front of his car.”
Caroline pauses. She wonders about the seconds right before the crash, after Matthew lost control of the car. Was he scared? Did he know he would die?
Did he have time to cry out? Did he think about Hollis and Caroline? “I was at college in my World Cultures final; my mother texted me saying there was an urgent situation and please call. My mother is really prone to hyperbole. I thought urgent meant that she needed more gift ideas for me or my dad. I finished my test and went to Sweetgreen for lunch, and then my mother called again, and honestly, I almost sent her to voice mail. But at the last minute I answered and she told me.”
Dylan sucks in his breath and Caroline hears her mother’s voice.
Caroline, are you in a safe place to talk? This had been such a strange question, and Caroline thought, Where is safer than Sweetgreen? But she heard something unusual in her mother’s voice—this call was not about Christmas presents—so Caroline fit the plastic top over her crispy rice bowl and stepped out onto the Bowery. She said, Okay, Mom, tell me. What is it?
What’s wrong? And her mother said, There was an accident. Your father… Caroline’s crispy rice bowl had hit the sidewalk, splattering everywhere.
Caroline ran, blinded with tears, back to her apartment. She called her best friend from high school, Cygnet, who went to Columbia. Cygnet rode the subway downtown and somehow got Caroline to JFK and then onto a plane to Boston, though Caroline doesn’t remember much of this.
What was it like? Caroline thinks. It was like being suspended over a deep, dark endless hole knowing you were going to fall in and never get out.
She would never see her father again.
Suddenly, Caroline is crying and shaking. Dylan is holding his head in his hands and saying, “Shit, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
Caroline nearly tells him it’s fine, he was sweet to ask—but does she really need to make Dylan McKenzie feel better about himself right now?
After a minute or two, Caroline regroups. “That’s how it is these days,” she says. “Most of the time I’m fine, and then… I just lose it.” She wipes under her eyes. “I should probably get home.”
Dylan scoots closer to her on the couch and kisses her. The kiss is nice; he lingers and kisses her again and slips his tongue between Caroline’s lips, and just as Caroline is asking herself if she wants to do this (she should want to do it; this is super-hot Dylan McKenzie, her teenage crush, and Isaac is probably making love to Sofia at that very moment, and Caroline desperately needs a rebound), Dylan pulls away.
He shakes his head. “I don’t ever bring girls home,” he says. “Because of Orion. It just feels… wrong.”
“I get it,” Caroline says. She doesn’t get it, she’s not a mother, but she finds she’s relieved that things aren’t going any further.
“Why don’t you just sleep here on the couch?” Dylan says. “We’ve both been drinking and after that story…”
Caroline sinks into the sofa cushions. Going to town, then having to drive all the way back to Squam seems impossible. Dylan drapes a blanket over her shoulders, then kisses her forehead like she’s four years old. But it feels nice, and Caroline closes her eyes.
When she wakes up, she has no idea where she is at first. She’s on a couch that smells vaguely of cigarettes; she’s fully clothed and covered by a green chenille blanket. On the coffee table is a glass of water and two cans of Bud Light.
Dylan’s house, she thinks. Shit. Her neck is stiff, so she moves her eyes only—there’s a kitchen to the right and a staircase over by the front door.
There’s no sign of Dylan or anyone else. She takes note of the huge train set dominating the living room—Thomas the Tank Engine—and the play workshop against one wall. The toys make her uncomfortable. She has to get out of here, but how? Dylan is most likely upstairs in his bedroom asleep.
Should Caroline text him? He works so hard, he deserves to rest; she can order a Lyft. She puts on her sandals, folds the chenille blanket, carefully steps around the train tracks, and opens the front door.
Outside, the air is cool and heavy with mist. When Caroline goes to order a Lyft, it says, No cars available. It’s a quarter to seven in the morning; how can there be no cars available? Don’t people have to get to the ferry, the airport? She checks the street in both directions. Hooper Farm is nothing like Squam Road. This is a mid-island neighborhood, where locals live. Across the street is a small ranch house. The paint of the white trim is peeling; there’s a surfboard leaning against the front steps and a couple of beater cars in the driveway. It’s probably a rental for kids who are here working for the summer. She wonders if anyone works an early shift, if she can bum a ride to town.
She’s about to go knock when she hears the screen door closing behind her. She turns around as a man steps out of Dylan’s house. It’s that guy Jack, the one from the car yesterday, the one her mother was so entranced with.
Ugh, she thinks. Is he staying here?
“Hey,” he says in a hushed voice. He’s wearing a T-shirt advertising something called Finigan’s Bar and Grill. “You’re… Hollis’s daughter? I saw you yesterday, but we weren’t introduced, I’m sorry.” He holds out a hand.
“Jack Finigan.”
Caroline has no choice but to shake Jack’s hand, look him in the eye, and say, “Caroline Shaw-Madden.”
The corners of Jack’s mouth lift and a dimple appears in one cheek, but Caroline won’t let herself be charmed. He nods back at the house. “You trying to make a quick getaway?”
Lyft of Shame, she thinks. Except there are no Lyfts, and in the end, there was just the one kiss, no reason for shame. “Yes, I need to get home to film.
My mom and her friends have yoga at eight.”
“Is someone coming to get you?”
“I tried ordering a Lyft but they don’t have any cars right now.” She looks longingly down the street. “My car is in town. I could walk, but it’s pretty far.”
“I’ll take you,” Jack says. “I’m sure Kyle left his keys in the van.”
“You don’t have to,” Caroline says. She doesn’t want to drive anywhere with Jack Finigan—although he seems perfectly nice, and how else will she get to town? Her mother has proved unreliable in the ride department.
Jack opens the passenger door to a black panel van that says McKENZIE HEATING AND COOLING on the side and Caroline climbs in. The floor of the van is littered with white paper bags from Henry’s Jr. and coffee cups and discarded Powerball tickets. The back is filled with tools and equipment, lengths of PVC pipe, and insulation sleeves that look like big foil snakes. The van smells of gasoline or oil, not unpleasant but not familiar, and Caroline nearly laughs. She can’t believe her day is starting by riding in a van with a complete stranger. This is how people end up on Dateline.
When Jack turns the key in the ignition, the radio blares, and he reaches to turn it down. “We were listening to Rush last night, sorry.”
That’s what the olds do, Caroline thinks. They sing and dance to old music.
“And I apologize for the mess, though I’ll blame that on Kyle. Kid has always been a slob.” He notices Caroline checking out a Powerball ticket and says, “He’s been trying to win the lottery since we were in high school.”
Caroline dreads getting into a whole “those were the good old days” conversation, but how will she avoid it? “You grew up on Nantucket with my mom?” she says.
“I moved here in seventh grade,” Jack says. “My father took a foreman’s job with a big construction company.”
They go around the small rotary and head into town on Pleasant Street. In five minutes, maybe six, she’ll be safely in her car.
“The good thing was I played football and we started practicing at the Boys and Girls Club the second week of school, and Kyle was the quarterback of my team. We became friends and he was dating Tatum—”
“They were dating in seventh grade?” Caroline thinks about Tatum saying, I taught him what I liked back when we were both young, and rolls down her window. She needs air.
“It was innocent stuff; they held hands at the movies and passed notes.
Tatum was best friends with Hollis, and Kyle and Tatum decided that Hollis and I should be boyfriend and girlfriend.”
Caroline laughs. “They decided?”
“They set us up on a date at the Sweet Shoppe, which was the ice cream parlor downtown back then. Tatum brought your mom, and Kyle brought me.
I knew Hollis was too pretty and too popular for me. She had this thick blond ponytail and a smile that lit up her face, she and Tatum were the best girl athletes in our class, plus Hollis was smart—she was in my language arts class and she was always raising her hand. I tried to pay for her ice cream, but she said she had a job opening scallops down on the docks and she would pay for herself. But we called that our first date because by the time we walked out of the Sweet Shoppe, we were somehow ‘going out.’”
Caroline should just let it drop but she feels herself getting sucked in. Her mother’s memories about growing up on Nantucket were pretty selective, and Caroline has never heard about this “date.” She has never heard about Jack Finigan at all. It wasn’t as though Caroline thought her mother was a nun when she met Matthew—but yes, she did kind of think that.
“How long did that last?” Caroline asks.
“We dated all through high school, right up until your mom left for North Carolina,” Jack says. “So a little more than five years.”
Five years! Caroline thinks. Hollis and this dude were together for five years and Caroline is only now hearing about this?
Jack turns onto Summer Street and they wend their way down through the fish lots to Union Street. Caroline has two, maybe three, minutes left. “What was my mom like in high school? I figured she was smart and I know she played sports—”
“Hollis and Tatum were softball stars. They won the state championship junior year and lost in the finals senior year. That game was a heartbreaker.”
Jack pauses. “Did you ever know your grandfather?”
“He died when I was little,” Caroline says.
“Well, that’s too bad, but also not surprising because Tom Shaw smoked two packs of Camels a day. Great guy, very well respected, and he raised your mom by himself. He taught her to hunt and to fish, and every Friday night he took her to the Anglers Club. He never once invited me along.”
Fishing? Caroline thinks. Hunting—like, with a gun? Caroline can’t
imagine this, and she doesn’t even know where the Anglers Club is.
“The first day of scalloping season every year, Tom would pull Hollis out of school. She’d put on her waders and grab her rake, and the two of them went to their secret spot up in Pocomo.” He laughs. “They never invited me scalloping either.”
“Sounds like my grandfather didn’t like you very much,” Caroline says.
Jack says, “He loved me. I was the son he never had. But…” He shrugs.
“Things didn’t work out the way I thought they might.”
He pulls into the parking lot and Caroline points out her Jeep. “I can’t believe my mom knows how to hunt and scallop,” she says. “It sounds like she used to be a completely different person.”
Jack chuckles. “You can be more than one kind of person in your life,” he says. “But I’ve always been a person who loves Hollis Shaw.”
Caroline rears back. “Ohhhh-kay?”
“That just slipped out, sorry,” Jack says. “I know you lost your dad recently. You didn’t need to hear that.”
Caroline reaches for the door handle; she can’t get out of the van fast enough. “Thanks for the ride,” she says.
