Chapter Twenty-Three
Tuesday, December 28th
Late afternoon
“Carson?” Caitlin asks, as her bright red lips open, but not as wide as her eyes when she pulls off her sunglasses.
“Caitlin, come home,” I say as planned, then I wait. Three years of emotions, three months of anticipation and infinite hope sweep through me as I wait for her to respond.
Caitlin takes a step toward me, but stops short of an awkward hug or answering my plea. I look like a dork in my Mountain Dew T-shirt, standing by a blonde in a short red dress.
“You’re alive,” I say, stating the obvious. “We missed you so much.”
“Maybe you, but certainly not Mom, Dad or Carol,” she says, angry as ever.
“Everybody.”
She cracks a small smile. “Then why are you standing here alone?”
“Where have you been? What happened that morning when you left home? I heard—”
“Everybody will know that story once I make it big out here. It will be part of the story of the sacrifices I made to become a celebrity,” she says.
I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.
“We were worried.” Just like saying ‘I love you’ to Gabby falls short of describing the depth of that emotion, worried doesn’t capture the abyss of anguish we felt after Caitlin left.
She stares at me, then takes a drag on the cigarette. I want her silence to mean that she has so much to say that she can’t decide what to say next. But, there’s just smoking. I notice new rose and barbed wire tattoos on her arms, a new nose piercing and plucked thin eyebrows, but behind Callie, I’m looking for Caitlin. “So, you’re eighteen, right?” is her odd response.
“Couple of weeks.”
“Well, come in the employee entrance. I’ll sneak you in.”
“I’m not here to see the show,” I say firmly.
She stares at me again, or maybe she never stopped. “Then what do you want?”
I break the stare and look at the parking lot. “Like I said, I want you to come home.”
Again, the stare, the smoke and the silence.
“Caitlin, I need you to come home.” I wonder if she notices the important word swap.
She takes a final drag on the cigarette then crushes it under her heel. “No.”
“Caitlin, how can you do this?”
“What do you know about it?” she snaps. “I’m happier here than I was at home.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say as those first images I found online haunt me like a ghost.
“You don’t know anything about my life,” she says. “I need to go to work.”
“How can you do this?” Bad music from the club oozes out of the open door.
“It’s my job,” she says, her volume up. “I see the news. Dad’s out of work, right?”
“Yes,” I mumble.
“And what career is Mom failing at now?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “Face it. Our parents are losers. I’m not going to be a loser. I’m going to be a winner. I’m going to be famous. If you don’t want to be a loser, then get away from them as soon as you can.”
“I’m not a loser,” I say. “And neither are Mom and Dad. It’s just hard times right now.”
“I bet I make more bills than Princess Carol. What’s she doing?”
I feel like I’m the middle child, not Caitlin. “She works for a big software company.”
“Figures,” she mumbles.
I want to say, While you work for a hardcore company, but I swallow it. Swallow it because it’s not funny, it’s not fair, but mostly, it’s not time.
“I wonder how it feels for her to be one in a crowd.” A smirk lights up Caitlin’s heavily made-up face, but it’s still familiar. Her life has changed, but her self looks similar.
I hold my tongue. I need to build bridges, not burn them by letting Caitlin know despite her body, her beauty and even her brains, that’s she not special at all. She’s one of the thousands of girls on computer screens and club stages. To the men who look at her, she’s less than one in a crowd, she’s not even a person. She’s pixels of flesh for their fantasies. “Caitlin, this isn’t about Carol, or even Mom and Dad. This is about you coming home.”
“Carson, what would I do in Michigan?” I have no answer. “The strip bars there are filled with middle-age losers like Dad. They don’t tip and they can’t help me get famous.”
Now I stare in silence. Had she worked as a stripper in Flint? Is she saying Dad went to strip clubs? Did Dad see her and tell her to get out of town, but didn’t tell the rest of us? How could he know she was alive and not tell? What kind of person would do that? Oh, right, me.
“I just know I need to bring you home with me.”
“Carson, that’s not happening until I become a star.” She checks her phone. “I gotta go.”
She takes a step away, but I finally touch her, grabbing her tattooed left arm. This isn’t at all how I imagined this going down. I would ask her to come home, and she’d agree. That was the scene I wrote, but she’s not sticking to the script. “Caitlin, you can’t be happy doing this.”
“What? I’m a stripper so I can’t be happy? I make a lot of people happy, so why would you assume that I’m not happy?” She pulls her left arm away, but then shows both her arms to me. “Look, no track marks. I bet you think all strippers are junkies, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Because I don’t want to know. Better not to think of them as people.
“I’m not a meth fiend or a pill head like some of these girls. This is none of your business.”
“You’re my sister. It is my business.”
“And this is my life. All of you can look down on me like you always did and—”
“Caitlin, I always looked up to you,” I say, sounding more like seven than seventeen.
Now she goes silent. The club door opens again and loud music pours out. I don’t hear any laughter, or joy, just music masking the desperation of those on stage and those watching.
“Well, maybe you’ll look up to me even more when I’m fucking famous,” she says.
“Maybe.” It clicks like a memory into place—same words, same tone, same Caitlin.
“What, you don’t believe in me? Like Mom and Dad, always putting down my dreams,” she says, angry hot. “I’m going to make it and you’ll all see. This is a detour until I make it big.”
“But being up on a stage with all those men watching—” I start.
“Listen, I was the middle child living in the shadow of a perfect person!”
“Carol isn’t perfect.” After spending two days with her, this is no lie.
“Don’t you get it, Carson?” She looks like she wants to jab her fingers into my chest, except the long, fake red nails would probably break on impact. “Carol already filled the role of overachieving daughter, so what choice did I have? She was the all-American dream girl.”
“So you took the role of bad girl?”
“Exactly! The family fuck-up,” she says, then stops to light up another smoke. She doesn’t look at her ringing phone, and she ignores the two girls, one redhead, one brunette, who walk past her. They say hello, but she waves them off.
My tone turns begging as I say, “Mom and Dad would understand. You could still—”
“They never understood me, never understood a thing about me,” she says. “They never took time—Dad always working or going to school, Mom working or taking care of Grandma. Face it, Carson. They just didn’t love me like they did you and Carol. That’s not your fault.”
“I don’t know how they felt, so let me tell you how I feel. Just three little words. I love you.”
“I know,” she says. “I always loved you, Carson. I never meant to hurt you in all this.”
“I don’t know what else to say,” I confess. “Everything you say is probably true. I don’t know. I just know this. I need you to come home. This is your second chance.”
She laughs. “I think I used up all my second chances.”
Mom’s and Dad’s words echo in my ears.
“Caitlin. Come home.” I step forward. She moves her smoke aside and lets me hug her.
“I can’t,” she whispers, and I hold her tight. “I have to go to work.”
She returns the hug, then takes a step back. She reaches into her purse, puts on more bright red lipstick, then checks her phone again. She’s leaving. I’ve flown all this way and accomplished nothing. I tried being understanding, but I can’t stand avoiding the truth.
“You do more than strip. You’re doing porn.” My voice trembles as much as my hand.
She turns around and stares at me like she did when I first saw her. It’s like we hit Replay on the machine, only this time, I’m going to tell her everything I know. No holding back, but I will hold her. I grab her left wrist and latch on, then describe to her in detail only a few of the photos and videos of her I’ve seen. I don’t let go until there are tears. My tears, not hers.
“Don’t judge me,” she says slowly, like each word was a sentence.
“I’m not judging you. I’m releasing you,” I say, even if the right word is rescue. “My plane leaves tomorrow. When Mom and Dad find out that you’re coming home, they’ll—”
“So they don’t know about you being here?” she says. “About me? About this?”
“No, nobody knows about this,” I say, looking at the gray asphalt in front of me. “I kept it a secret.”
“Thanks, but I’m not ashamed of who I am or what I do,” she says defiantly.
“But I am,” I confess. She stares at me one more time, then turns to walk away.
“I’m sorry I’m such a family embarrassment. It’s good I’m away from you,” she says. “I have to get back to work. This is my life now. There’s nothing you can say to change that.”
“Can you answer a question??” My voice trembles like a small LA earthquake.
Her hands go on her hips, hips she’ll be shaking on stage in an hour. “What?”
“What happened Christmas morning with the gun?”
A stare like fire burns a hole in my heart. Silence like ice spikes my skull. She flips her shades down. I can’t see if she’s crying. I stare at her eyes, but the sunglasses act like mirrors. I can’t see her eyes. I just see mine, filled with tears and glistening in the hot, bright California sun on the second darkest day of my life.