Chapter Twenty-One
Saturday, December 25th
Christmas evening
“How was your flight?” Carol asks when she meets me near the San Diego Airport baggage claim. It’s December. She’s wearing a red BU T-shirt. I have on my thick gray hoodie.
“Long,” I say, but what I’m thinking is I totally understand now why Caitlin always talked about wanting only to travel in First Class. But I don’t want to mention Caitlin, yet.
“I’ll tell Mom you’re here.” She sends a quick text. “Now, let’s get your luggage.”
“You’re looking at it,” I say, pointing to the one overstuffed book bag.
“Traveling light. That’s a good habit for college next year. Where are you going?” she asks as we walk toward the parking lot. The airport is packed with taxis, tourists and too many people.
“I don’t know yet, I applied to five schools in Michigan.”
“Let me guess, Michigan Tech, Kettering and three other places Dad suggested.”
“Sorta,” I say, feeling ashamed I didn’t take a more active role in selecting the colleges, but it seems like such a waste. Even with financial aid, there’s no way I’m going away to school. At best, I’ll stay home and go to a college in Flint, like Baker, Mott or U of M-Flint. Tim’s been accepted early to MIT. He’s going out there over spring break to check it out.
“Where else?” she asks. I shrug, but she’s not buying it. “’Fess up. I know Michigan Tech isn’t your dream school. Harvard? Yale? University of Hawaii?”
“Princeton,” I mumble, as if to hide the sheer absurdity of it.
“Princeton!” she shouts, trying not to laugh. “Whose dream school is in New Jersey?”
“My friend Tim might go there,” I lie yet again. I don’t tell her the main reason I applied. It’s where a dreamy Midwestern boy named F. Scott Fitzgerald attended for a few years.
“Why not Boston College?” She beeps the locks on a new looking Chevy coupe.
“I don’t think so,” I say, so calmly, but I understand Caitlin’s rage. Why not BC? Because that’s where you went, Carol, and there’s no way I could do better in school than you. I’m a solid B student, who could do better if I focused more on school and less on watching sports, writing stories and surfing porn. Carol got As in everything. While my parents never threw that in my face or Caitlin’s, Carol’s success, and thus our failures, weighed on us both.
“We’ll figure it out,” she says as we climb in. “Your big sister is on the case now.”
“Most applications are due in January, so I better figure it out fast,” I say. I haven’t a clue about next September, I just need to get through this coming Tuesday when I’ll see Caitlin.
“What do you want to do over the next few days?” Carol asks, but I get the feeling she’s doing so to be polite. She’s talking to me, but her phone seems to be the center of her attention.
“You’re working Monday and Tuesday, right?”
“My boss allowed me the two days off,” Carol says. “We can go to the beach or—”
“Carol, on Tuesday, I’d really just like to borrow your car and drive around.”
“The freeways in San Diego are nothing like back in Michigan.”
“I’ll be careful. I’m a good driver, no accidents,” I say, trying to sound confident.
“I just thought you’d want to spend the time together, that’s all,” she says, even while looking at her phone and not me. I think of telling her what I realized on the plane. We never spent time together. With six years between us, there wasn’t much opportunity. By the time I could’ve spent time with her, she was in high school setting records for most activities. Carol is family, and as we’re talking, I realize I don’t know her, and wonder if I should even try. It wasn’t just Carol’s actions that made Caitlin feel like a failure. It was her attitude. Whenever Caitlin failed, which she did at most things, Carol never comforted or supported her little sister.
“I’m pretty boring,” I say, trying to joke my way out as we exit the parking lot. “Maybe it’s an independence thing I don’t get at home with Mom hovering and Dad expecting failure.”
“Well, that wasn’t an issue with me, more with our sister,” Carol says. I love her, but if she’s gonna have this attitude for three days, I’m not sure I’m gonna like her. Maybe because Carol’s life always seemed so easy, she can’t understand how hard life can be for others.
“Still, it would be important for you to trust me and just let me pretend for one day that I’m actually an independent, mature person? You know, like Mom and Dad always treated you?”
“Okay, let me think about it,” she says, but I wonder when she has time to think in between phone checks. As we roar out into traffic, I know two things—she’ll cave in, and I’ll never see Caitlin because I’ll kill myself on these roads. But if I don’t, then I know where these roads will take me. Tucked away in my pocket is the MapQuest to the Excalibur Gentlemen’s Club near LAX.
* * * *
After dinner, Carol and I sit on the tiny back balcony of her apartment. It overlooks the parking lot of a strip mall. She drinks expensive looking bottled water. I slurp down Dew.
“Carol, tomorrow do you think we could drive up to LA?” I need to get the lay of the land.
“Really?” She snaps yet another photo. Carol is a clicking machine.
“Does that sound odd?” She shows me the photo in case I don’t know what I look like.
“No, it just sounds more like something your other sister would have wanted to do, rather than you, Carson,” she says. There’s no emotion in her voice whatsoever when she says that strange phrase. Other sister. “That girl always had stars in her eyes.”
“It just seemed like a fun thing to do. See the sights.”
“I was actually worried about taking this job out here because of her. Did you know that?” she asks. “Every time I’d come home from college, that’s all she would talk about. Don’t you remember? Everything with her was about Brad, Angelina, every American Idol or MTV reality show star. She was always talking about trying out for reality TV shows. Her life was a reality TV show!” Carol says. “As someone who watched it, it wasn’t a fun show. Not at all.”
“Maybe not,” I answer. I wish she’d go back to tweeting or whatever instead of this rant.
“My God, if that girl knew I lived this close to LA, she’d have been pounding on the door every day asking me to take her to clubs and parties so she could maybe run into some celebrity. She never figured out that meeting somebody famous doesn’t make you famous.”
“Do you think about Caitlin much?”
“No, but maybe because of you being here, I’m talking about her.”
“Talking about Caitlin,” I say the name she’s avoiding. “You do remember her name?”
“Carson, of course I remember her name,” she mumbles. “Do you think about her a lot?”
“Every single day.”
“Well, she didn’t hate and resent you like she did me,” she says. “And for what? For being successful? For getting good grades? For being popular? She could have had all that.”
“But you were first,” I tell her. “Don’t you know how that twisted Caitlin up inside?”
“What are you saying?” She sets the phone down on the table for the first time tonight.
“You’re the oldest, so you couldn’t know what it was like for her, even for me. Caitlin felt she never could compete with you. That no matter what she did, you’d already done it and done it better than she ever could,” I say, realizing that I share some of the same twisted rage.
“That’s not my fault. That’s her problem,” she says. “She could’ve been popular. She—”
“I’m not blaming. I’m explaining,” I interrupt.
She sighs. “How do you know this? Did she try to poison the water for me with you?”
“I heard things she said. I overheard a lot.” The audio for a Christmas three years ago clicks on in the background.
“I guess that’s easy to do when everybody’s yelling.” And the phone’s back in her hand.
“Well, Mom and Dad don’t yell that much anymore,” I say.
“That’s a relief.” I wait for her to ask me to explain that odd statement, but she doesn’t. She looks up from her phone long enough to see my pained expression. “What’s wrong?”
“You know why they don’t yell anymore, right?” I ask.
“Because my train wreck of a sister is no longer destroying their lives? That’s a guess.”
“That’s part of it, but it wasn’t all Caitlin’s fault.” I love my oldest sister, but I’m starting to think Carol isn’t only not perfect, she’s not even close to it.
“Carson Banks, you don’t believe all that drama during her high-school years, but especially senior year, was Mom and Dad’s fault?”
“No, it was my fault for distracting them with all my stupid freshman problems,” I say. “It was Grandma’s fault for getting sick. It was your fault for excelling. It was all of our faults.”
“Wow, I don’t know if I want to give you my car now,” she says, sharper still. “Why are you acting so immature? Why are you taking her side?”
“I’m not taking her side, I’m taking Caitlin’s side! Can’t you even say her name?”
“Caitlin’s dead,” Carol says without any emotion. My eyes open wide. “Not dead, dead—or maybe she is. I don’t know. I don’t care. She’s gone, out of our lives.”
“Not for me.” Carol’s words add intensity to my quest, if only to prove her wrong.
“You’re young, but a lesson you learn in life is how to deal with loss,” she says. “I accept that our sister is gone. I don’t think about her. You shouldn’t either.”
Should was once both Mom’s and Dad’s favorite word. I know that should isn’t a word, it’s a trap. “How could you not think about her? How could you not wonder?”
She takes a photo of the sunset and starts clicking away again. “Just let it go.”
“But what if? What if I knew, we knew, where she was?”
“No, Carson. It doesn’t matter if she’s dead or alive. All that matters is she’s gone.”
As the hot sun sets into the cool of the evening, I ask, “How can you be so cold?”
“That’s the thing about loss,” Carol says. “You get over it or it will get all over you.”
Carol heads back inside, eyes on her phone all the while. I stay on the balcony and try to figure out which way is north, which way is LA. So, I guess all this time I wasn’t writing an epic fantasy about a prince rescuing the damsel in distress. It turns out, according to Carol’s thinking, I’ve been writing a zombie novel. When I get to LA, I wonder… Will I be able to raise the dead?