Chapter Text
The church is silent, except for the fidgeting and shuffling of the guests, awkwardly waiting for what happens next. Nobody is sure if they should say anything. Annie and Del exchange a look, rolled eyes met with raised eyebrows, and they’re not the only ones.
But Caroline doesn’t notice anybody else.
For one long, jarring moment, there is only Richard.
She doesn’t quite believe it, and at the back of her mind she wonders if she’s going crazy. Maybe she shouldn’t have taken the Tylenol after drinking those mimosas this morning. Maybe she’s got what her cousin Joanie got, and they’ll cart her off to a loony bin. Or she’ll end up like one of those people on the subway, talking to voices that nobody else can hear.
But she knows none of this is true.
Because she remembers Richard with every inch of her body, every fibre of her being, and right now all her senses are telling her, screaming at her, that he is here. In the flesh. Not quite close enough to touch, but touchable. Undeniable.
Their eyes meet, and Caroline feels the old familiar churning in her stomach. Love and loss and wanting and reaching and home.
‘Caroline?’ Randy speaks just as the baby begins to cry. Richard looks down, Caroline turns back to Randy, and the moment is over.
‘Should we… carry on?’ Randy has a half smile on his face, because he doesn’t realise what’s happening. He doesn’t know who this is, or what this means. He thinks there’s only a baby crying somewhere.
‘Yes,’ Caroline says, but it’s a rote answer, out of her mouth before she even decides. Because she doesn’t know what this means, either.
Her feet carry her back to Randy, because they know that’s where she’s supposed to be right now. At an altar. Getting married. To Randy.
But her heart beats so intensely she feels it in her throat. And it’s difficult to see through the tears filling her eyes. Because her feet might think she should be here, but her heart, suddenly, and emphatically, does not.
‘Do you, Caroline Duffy,’ the minister begins.
‘No!’ It’s such an effort to get the word out, it comes out too forcefully. Too loud, in the echoes of the old church.
And then everything is a blur. Randy calls her name. Her mother reaches out to her. Annie is making some kind of face at her, telegraphing something, Caroline doesn’t know what. She feels hands on her arms, and she pulls away. Everything is too much.
She’s away from them almost without realizing. Finds herself pulling at the heavy door of the church, gasping, desperate to get out. Out of this church, out of this dress, and out of this fever dream shambles of a pretense she’s been living in for the last six months.
At last, the door gives, and she stumbles out. The clear Wisconsin air hits her. So much cleaner than the city, but she can feel the tear tracks on her cheeks begin to freeze. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care if she freezes to death out here. She is not going back into that church, and she is not marrying Randy.
*
Caroline runs down the aisle, and all is chaos.
Randy starts after her, and Caroline’s mother stops him. ‘Let her go,’ she says in her homely Wisconsin accent, ‘It’s her choice.’ And despite the sweetness to her tone, there’s a steeliness beneath that dares anyone to challenge her. Randy isn’t brave enough. He acquiesces, and stands, helplessly, awkwardly, watching Caroline go.
Annie leaves her place at the side of the altar, and meets Del on the way to her.
‘You want Caroline or Richard?’ she asks quickly.
‘Richard,’ he says, glancing up at the balcony where Richard stands incongruously, a baby in hand.
Annie shakes her head, realizing even as she gave him the choice that it wouldn’t work. Sure, Caroline is her best friend, and she wants to go after her. But this is a delicate situation, and she doesn’t trust Del with Richard. Who knows what kind of crazy mess the two of them would make?
‘No. I got Richard. You go after Caroline.’
For a long time, Annie has been watching these two men, as an acquaintance, as a friend, as an outside observer. And there are things she’s clocked.
That Richard loves Caroline, was always obvious. That the two of them were going to need some help along the way – well, duh. They were ridiculous opposites; Richard too angsty to articulate a feeling, and Caroline too full of sweetness and light to say what she truly wanted. Annie had watched the evolution of their relationship with a kind of impatience. They clearly wanted to be together, but you had to let them come to it slowly, separately, on their own terms.
That Del loved Caroline, once, maybe. Or maybe he’d just enjoyed his first female friendship, ever. Del was sweet, but that sweetness was something he’d always buried, out of necessity. His parents were poisonous WASPs who had instilled in him values he clearly didn’t adhere to, but he couldn’t, sometimes, escape that conditioning.
Left alone together, Del and Richard confirmed each other’s worst assumptions about the world. Richard thought Del was some kind of caveman lady-magnet, and Del thought Richard was too intellectual to function in the world. Faced with this kind of situation, who knew what they would talk each other into.
So even as Annie forms the question, she knows the answer. She wants to go after Caroline, but Caroline’s dilemma is easy, and already solved. She didn’t truly want to marry Randy, so she left. All she needed now was somebody to listen, and confirm that impulse.
Richard is the tricky one. Richard is the one with the wife and the child and the life in Italy. He’s made it this far, but he’s going to need the kind of push that Del just doesn’t understand. Del is a child at heart, driven by id and impulse, confused by outdated values he can neither reconcile nor completely shake. Annie has been working on him for months now, and she knows his limits. She knows he won’t challenge Richard, doesn’t have the depth of vision to see what Annie herself sees so clearly.
And truth be told, Annie feels guilty. She was one to bring Randy back into Caroline’s life. This wedding is her fault. She’d seen that her friend was drowning, and thrown her a life buoy. She just hadn’t expected it to go so far.
This is her chance to fix it.
So she sends Del after Caroline, because the two of them know each other well enough to be a comfort.
And she bounds for the staircase that leads to Richard, because alone of all of them, she sees the struggle there.
*
“Please Stefano, please, stop, it’s okay,” Richard tries his best to soothe the baby, his chances of a quiet exit thoroughly dashed. It’s testament to how much he loves his son that he doesn’t hold it against him. If he’s learned nothing else in the last six months, it’s that there is no reasoning with an infant.
He sighs as Annie appears before him, blocking the only exit.
‘Been a while, Richie,’ she says in that way she has of chewing up words and spitting them out like they’re gum, ‘You don’t write. You don’t call. What’s a girl to think?’
Richard sighs inwardly, reaching for a snappy comeback. It’s = been a while, and he is out of practice in how to speak Annie. But more than that. Things are different now. He senses real menace beneath her playful tone.
‘I would have written, if I thought you could read,’ he murmurs finally, still looking at Stefano, and his heart isn’t in it.
His son is settling now. It was a disruption to his daily schedule; the madcap dash to the airport, the seven hour flight. Richard is sorry for disturbing the baby’s routine, but he thinks it will be worth it. He knows it was right to bring him. He wants the child to be a part of his life. He wants to share everything he does. Because that’s love. He sees, now, what Caroline saw all along, that it is possible to hold yourself open, and vulnerable. That you don’t have to rely only on yourself.
That love is not a gift received, but an action performed.
‘Ha ha,’ Annie says, and Richard can tell she’s grasping for the old banter, too. ‘What are you doing here, Ritchie?’ She gives up the ghost and just says what’s on her mind, what’s on everyone’s mind, probably.
And Richard’s heart contracts. What is he doing here?
He never thought about it. Charlie told him about the wedding, and suddenly Richard was at the airport with bags packed, buying a ticket. No thought in his head as to what he would say when he got there. Just an uncontrollable need to be back in New York, to walk the old familiar route to Caroline’s apartment. To see her.
Of course, he found out when he got there, New York wasn’t where Caroline was.
Of course, the wedding was in Wisconsin. The big wedding in the old church, just like she always wanted. One of the many things he’d never been able to give her.
So he was late. Another flight, from New York to Wisconsin, and then an interminable bus journey, because Peshtigo was so far away from civilization it might as well have been the first circle of hell. He wondered if they lived in Caroline’s old house, her and Randy. Why wouldn’t they. She loved that house, hadn’t been able to let go of it when her parents left.
Richard has wondered many times if that’s where it all went wrong. Long before Stefano, before Italy. Maybe they were doomed from the start, because Richard would never have moved to Peshtigo. For all the things they shared, there had always been that gulf between them. She was drawn to all that small town hokum. To family, and community, when Richard had always seen himself as something of a loner. He loved the dank anonymity of New York. The painful thrill of being a tortured artist.
But he has changed now. Stefano has taught him so much.
That it doesn’t matter where you are, when you can be with the ones you love. That loving someone is as much an art as paint on canvas, and like all good art, it can lead you to places you never suspected were in you.
And so, when he arrived at the church, he didn’t intend to interrupt anything. He almost didn’t get out of the cab. But then he saw Del’s beloved Porsche parked loudly out front, and a wave of nostalgia washed over him. He missed his New York life, even Del and Annie, painful as that was to admit.
And he loved Caroline, and he wanted her to be happy. And for her, happiness might be Randy, and Wisconsin.
So after all those days of travel and chaos, he retreated. There would be no confrontation, no big declarations. They had done all that before. It had led them here. And when Caroline walked down the aisle, it broke his heart all over again, but in a way he thought he could live with. If she was happy, then what else could he want, after all? It felt like closure, or something that might become closure, one day.
But Stefano wasn’t so calm. He was teething now, and often fussed after his morning feed. And so, he cried.
And Caroline turned.
And in that moment, Richard knew that all his thoughts of closure were nonsense. There was no accepting this.
In the old days, he might have rushed down there. He would have grabbed her, and kissed her, the only way he had ever known to truly tell her what was in his heart.
But everything was different now.
So he just looked at her, and waved Stefano’s teething ring, in a pathetic greeting that he regretted as soon as he did it. But she smiled.
She smiled, and he felt hope swelling up within him, and really, wasn’t that what had brought him here, after all? The hope of her looking at him like that again. The memory of all else falling away, and there being only the two of them in the world.
Three, now, with Stefano.
When she turned and went back to the altar, Richard thought he might die. Watching her get married was something he might have been able to do, unknown and from a distance. But to have her look at him like that, and then turn away and marry someone else in front of him – that was all the circles of hell rolled into one, and how would he recover from this?
But then she left. She didn’t look at him again, only ran, falteringly, back down the aisle, and out of the door. Even if he hadn’t known her as well as he thought he did, Richard could see that she was not running to him. She was running away. Away from her wedding, away from Randy.
Richard tried to quell the hope within him. Because it would be too hard, to have that hope dashed, again.
And now Annie is here, demanding explanations, and how is he supposed to explain all of this?
So he answers truthfully. ‘I don’t know.’
Annie snorts derisively, and he lets himself admit that he has missed her. She has a way of trivializing everything that drives him crazy, but he appreciates that she finds the humour in everything. And although he’ll never say it, he enjoys the way she calls him on his bullshit.
‘You don’t know? You interrupted a wedding for ‘I don’t know’?’
Richard sighs, his brief moment of sentimentality fading as he remembers how irritating she is. How demanding. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,’ he hisses, trying to keep his voice low so as not to disturb Stefano, ‘I didn’t want her to see me.’
‘Yeah you did,’ Annie returns instantly, as if she’s already thought of every case he could make and prepared a counter argument. She’s smarter than she pretends, beneath the ditzy, good times gal kind of act she puts on. ‘Nobody who’s trying to be inconspicuous brings a freakin’ baby.’
‘I didn’t have a babysitter,’ Richard explains through gritted teeth.
Fabiana had refused to come. Truth be told, it had been months since he’d needed a nanny, having long since learned to enjoy looking after the baby himself. But Julia’s family paid for her services, and so Fabiana showed up every day, on the clock, and did some laundry, and made some lunch, but mostly watched Italian soaps and talked on the phone to her sister in Milan.
She enjoyed the easy life, and their original enmity had settled into a comfortable, inessential kind of companionship. But she had no desire to go to New York, and however generous her salary, it apparently wasn’t enough for her to drop everything and travel halfway across the world at a moment’s notice. Richard didn’t hold it against her, but travelling alone with an infant had been hard.
Of course he’d brought the baby to the wedding. What else could he have done?
‘Yeah, well, you got one now,’ Annie holds out her arms, and Richard just looks at her blankly.
‘Come on,’ she gestures with her hands, ‘Let me get a look at this little cutie, and then you go after Caroline and do what you came here to do.’
Richard doesn’t move. He might have, in a moment of madness, missed the witty stylings of Annie Spadaro, but he has no intention of leaving his son with her. He’s seen her apartment. He knows she doesn’t water the plants.
Annie rolls her eyes. ‘What, you don’t trust me?’
‘Not even with a paper clip,’ Richard says.
But then Annie gives him a long, hard, assessing kind of look. It’s rare that she’s so serious, but he can tell by the way her lips are pressed together, her eyes slightly narrowed, that the fun times façade has fallen, and what he’s getting now is pure Annie, loyal to her friend, fierce and smart, and unwavering.
‘Richard Karinsky, you are going to hand me that baby right now. And you are going to go and fix the damage that you’ve done. Nothing else is happening here, understand?’
In a weird way, he kind of loves it. Annie has a power that’s undeniable, and if he’s honest, he’s always resented it. He’s never been able to fathom what it must be like, to have that confidence, that ability to make the world bend to your will. And he thinks, now, that Annie might actually be a good person to have in Stefano’s life. She knows things Richard doesn’t. She has a grasp on the world that is unique, and interesting, and wouldn’t Richard like for Stefano to grow up more confident than he himself ever was?
But he’s not about to let her know that. And besides, he’s been holding this baby for seventy-two hours straight, and it’s hard to let go.
‘You have no idea what’s happening here,’ he tells her, and he believes this to be true.
But once again, as always, Annie knows more than she lets on.
‘Oh, so you’re not here because you found out Caroline was getting married and you just couldn’t keep away? And you told yourself you’d just watch quietly in the background, because you just love to torture yourself?’
Richard says nothing.
‘And now you’ve stopped the wedding but you still want to play the innocent, like you didn’t come here to do exactly that?’
Richard adjusts Stefano’s blanket. He hates having his heart laid out bare by Annie. He remembers how it felt when she read his love letter to Caroline, the indignity of her sister turning it into a song. Is nothing sacred to this woman?
‘Ritchie, look at me,’ she says, and despite himself, he does.
‘You love her. She loves you. Go be with her, for god’s sake.’ Somehow, from Annie’s mouth, the words are both a balm and a threat. She understands, without being understanding.
But still, he hesitates.
She holds out her arms. ‘I’m Italian, you doofus. I have three sisters, two brothers, and fourteen nieces and nephews. You think I don’t know how to watch a baby?’
And then she steps closer, and suddenly she’s taking the baby from his arms, and he doesn’t protest.
He feels guilty, like he’s betrayed his son, but after so many days travelling, it feels good to let someone else take over. Annie rocks the baby in her arms, smiling down at him, utterly comfortable.
‘Aren’t you just a doll,’ she says, ‘I’m your auntie Annie. What’s your name?’
‘Stefano,’ Richard says, and it somehow feels strange to him that Annie doesn’t know that. That nobody in his New York life has met his son, or knows how different everything is now.
‘Nice to meet you, Stefano,’ Annie croons, and then looks back at Richard. ‘Diapers? Food?’
Richard gestures toward the bag he left by the doorway. Annie nods. ‘Okay. We’ll be good. We’re staying at the Holiday Inn just outside of town.’
‘He needs to be fed in two hours,’ Richard says. ‘There’s food in his bag. And there are flashcards there too, he likes to look at them before he sleeps.’
Annie nods.
‘And he’s teething, so if he won’t settle just give him something to chew on.’
Annie nods.
‘And he sleeps better with music. We’ve been listening to Elgar’s concertos. But he hates Schopenhauer, don’t play that.’
‘Not a problem,’ Annie murmurs, looking down at the baby, enchanted.
‘Annie,’ Richard touches her shoulder to bring her attention back to him, and meets her gaze with an honesty he’s never before indulged, ‘This is my son. I need to know he’ll be safe.’
He watches as the sarcastic responses flit across Annie’s gaze and then out of it again, as she opts for sincerity. ‘I’ll look after him,’ she promises. ‘Now go’
And with one last caress of his son’s head, one last pleading glance at Annie, Richard goes.
He heads out of the church, where the parking lot is filled with confused guests, and no sign of Caroline. But it doesn’t worry him. He’s crossed the world to find her, he’s not going to stop now.
*
In the parking lot outside the church, Caroline doesn’t know where to go. She looks around for anything she recognizes, and sees Del’s Porsche Boxter parked near the church gates. The cold of the Wisconsin winter is starting to seep into her bones, so she pulls at the door handle, recklessly, desperately, and of course it’s locked and won’t open.
Just as she’s about to break down, the car’s lights flash, and it beeps twice. She tries the handle again, and this time it opens, and she piles into the passenger seat, pulling the voluminous wedding dress skirts in around her.
Del climbs into the driver seat without saying anything, and turns on the heating.
They sit for a moment, waiting for the blasts of warm air from the heater. But then the guests start to pile out of the church. Caroline sees her parents, her cousins, her friends from highschool, all looking around, wondering where she is.
And Randy. He exits the church with a stunned look on his face, and it makes Caroline’s throat hurt. What has she done?
‘Del,’ she whispers, ‘Can you get me out of here?’
‘Not a problem,’ Del says, with that smile she’s always loved, like he’s just been waiting for something to come along and disrupt his easy life. He turns the keys in the ignition, and pulls out of the parking lot with a speed that’s probably illegal. And just like that, Caroline is free. Away from the church, away from the wedding. Away from Randy, who didn’t do anything to deserve this, but who Caroline feels such relief to leave behind.
They drive in silence, and Caroline looks out the window at the roads spilling out before them, Wisconsin in the wintertime, bare and beautiful. She welcomes the snow and the emptiness, a world away from the grime of New York. This is the world she grew up in, where she daydreamed and doodled, before the pressure of deadlines, and creativity on the clock. Before she was an adult, alone in the world. Before Richard.
Everything in her life feels divided into a time before and after Richard.
The before part was fine, she understands that. It’s the after part that’s hard. How is there even a world after that? What is she supposed to do? How is she supposed to feel? To live?
She sees now that Randy has been a crutch. Something borrowed from her old life, the before-Richard times. Highschool, Wisconsin, safety. With Randy, she just blocks out everything else and lives in a time when the world was simpler. But she’s been kidding herself. That kind of pretense just isn’t enough.
It shouldn’t have taken Richard showing up for her to realise that.
But Richard had shown up.
What did that mean?
‘You want to get something to eat? A drink?’ Del is pulling into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. She loves him for not asking her to explain anything. As a boyfriend, that would have been frustrating, but as a friend, a good friend, Del is great.
‘That sounds good,’ she says, her voice hoarse, because she hasn’t spoken in a while, and she’s been quietly crying for the entire drive. She’s not hungry, but eating seems like an easy action. She doesn’t know what she should be doing right now, so the banal mechanics of eating seem as good an option as any.
She’s sitting in the little café beside the Holiday Inn before she notices she’s still in a wedding dress. Del is at the counter, ordering for both of them, and people keep looking at her. She plays with the sugar packets on the table to distract herself. This will make a great strip, she thinks idly. The newspapers will love it.
She pictures how she’d draw the sugar packets, the café, the Porsche, the church.
She stops when she gets to Randy. How to capture the look on his face. Did she even register the look on his face? Consumed by guilt, she is face down on the table when Del returns, bearing coffee and sandwiches.
He lets her sit and stare silently at hers for a few minutes, but Del was never good at silence.
‘So… Richard, huh?’ he asks, clearly searching for the right thing to say, and landing on exactly the wrong one.
Caroline bursts into tears.
‘Oh, hey, Care,’ he rubs her back soothingly, ‘It’s okay.’
‘I didn’t think I’d ever see him again,’ she sobs out, ‘I didn’t think. At all. I mean. I thought about some stuff. I thought I’d be alone forever, I thought I’d never find true love. And then Randy came along, and I thought if I could just go back to who I used to be. If I could just go back to before all this. Before New York. And it was nice, you know?’
Del shrugs. ‘Sure. Nice.’
‘And it was so easy to just pretend. To just think about myself as that good ol’ Peshtigo girl, and not… Not…’ Del hands her a tissue, and she blows her nose loudly. ‘Not someone with a broken heart.’
She collapses into Del’s shoulder, and he lets her sob into his expensive jacket, unselfconsciously. Before she got to know him, she used to think Del was arrogant, over-confident. But she knows him better now. Del’s confidence comes from a total lack of self-consciousness. Only ever focused on whatever it was he was doing, he didn’t notice anything else. Right now he was consoling Caroline. He’d made looking after her his job for the time being, and so he didn’t even register the stares of the people around them, or hear the murmurs in the background. Caroline’s never met anybody else in the world who is always so completely themselves.
‘Only I shouldn’t have pretended. I shouldn’t have let Randy go along with it. And now… Now.. he’s going to feel just like I did, and he’s going to wish he never met me.’
People think Del is dumb, but he follows along with her muddled reasoning, he understands what she’s trying to say.
‘Caroline,’ he says, ‘Do you remember why we broke up?’
‘We weren’t in love.’
‘Right. And how long ago was that?’
‘Four years ago.’
‘Right. And in the last four years, have I ever given you any reason to think I wish I’d never met you?’
Caroline swallows. This is different. Isn’t it?
‘Caroline you are the best thing that ever happened to me. Just knowing you made me a better person. I like who I am when I’m with you. And just because we were supposed to get married, and we didn’t, doesn’t change that. I still think you’re incredible. And I’ll be your friend, and glad to have you as my friend, until we’re old and… I don’t know, living in Florida.’
‘Florida?’ She can’t help but ask.
‘Isn’t that where old people go? Whatever. The point is, sometimes things don’t work out how you thought they might. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t work out for the best.’
Caroline takes a deep breath, manages to quell the sobs that threaten to rise up again at the back of her throat. Del’s voice is soothing, and he makes a lot of sense. She wonders, not for the first time, why other people don’t see in him what she does. How wise he actually is, beneath it all.
‘So you weren’t supposed to marry Randy. It’s okay. He’ll understand.’ Del’s total conviction in what he says makes him convincing. Easy to believe. It’s why he’s such a good salesman. He’s so sincere. ‘And just like me, he’ll be happy he never married you.’
Despite herself, Caroline laughs, but she’s still on the verge of tears, so it comes out as a squeak, that Del mistakes for outrage.
‘That, uh… that part came out wrong,’ he fumbles. ‘I mean, you know, I’m not, I mean I only,’
‘Del, Del, it’s okay,’ she sits up and looks at him, floundering, and loves him for it. She puts her hand on his chest, ‘I know what you mean.’
He smiles at her, and takes her hand in both of his. It’s a move she knows well; Del did this when they were dating, and she’s seen him do it with other girls, with Annie. It looks like such a cheesy move, taking someone’s hand in both of yours, looking them deep in the eyes. And when he tries it on dates in bars, it is cheesy. But the thing about Del is that he doesn’t know that. When he looks deep in your eyes, he genuinely means it.
‘And anyway, you don’t have to face anything right now. Just chill for a while. Eat your sandwich. That’s all.’
And for all the cheesiness, it always works. She feels instantly calmer. If Del says all she has to do is eat a sandwich, then she believes him. So she dries her eyes with a napkin, and takes a sip of her coffee. She’s working up to the sandwich, not sure her stomach can handle food.
The thing about Del, is that he was never good at silence.
‘So… Richard?’ he asks, softer this time, with intent, but still the exact wrong thing to say.
Caroline feels as though the ground is reeling away from her, she can hear the high-pitched ringing of the air whizzing past as she flies backward through the ever-stretching diner.
‘Do you think you two will – ?’ Subtlety is not something Del has ever understood. Wisdom is not something he has ever been able to sustain for extended periods of time.
‘No,’ she says, feeling the tears spill hot over her eyes again. ‘I don’t want to see him.’