Caroline

It’s strange, the things you remember about those monumental days that come to shape your life. When I think back to the interminable hours I spent beside my father’s hospital bed, I don’t see the grayish, emaciated form of the man whose hot-blooded vitality had loomed so large over me in my youth, nor do I feel the soothing wave of numbness that hit me when he’d finally stopped his wheezing. Instead, my clearest memory is of the grimy hospital floor, and how the tile closest to my feet had been installed upside down, ruining the pattern.

And when I think back to the day I married Helen, I don’t remember feeling nervous, or regretful, or like a gossamer sylph with a head of black curls lurked around every corner. Helen’s freckled face as she walked down the aisle has also been painted over in my mind’s eye, and her gown has been reduced to an indeterminate expanse of white. 

No, when I revisit my second wedding day, what I really remember is how red the bouquet of roses in Helen’s hands was. A visceral, wet sort of red. All wrong for our idyllic spring wedding, practically dripping onto our clasped hands and the altar below us.

I used to think this was a funny quirk of the human brain, that we cling to insignificant details of life-altering events because we can’t wrap our heads around anything that big. Birth, death, marriage, every milestone that reminds us of the enclosed circle that is human life, of this ever-spinning merry-go-round we’ve all been thrust on to…our brains are too delicate to take those for what they are, so the memories occur to us in strange pieces. 

But now I wonder (all too late) if this fragmentation isn’t a vestige of some evolutionary instinct that prioritizes breaks in patterns to protect us from danger. Silent woods that should be filled with the sounds of nature, a trail of footprints that ends too abruptly—recognizing the piece that didn’t fit was the difference between life and death back when we spent our days running from now-extinct beasts. This instinct is almost useless now; there was nothing in those ugly hospital tiles, or in all the other hazy slivers of memories that I see before I drift off to sleep. But there was a warning nestled in those garish rose petals. 

And I, knowing better than most that some beasts still walk among us, can’t explain why I didn’t heed it. Perhaps some self-sabotaging part of me still submerged itself at the first sound of Caroline’s siren song. Perhaps I was still consumed by all that black hair wrapped around my hand, by her fading red lips and cool swan neck. 

Life is an enclosed circle, after all—we end at the beginning.

***

It started with Helen prattling on about something inane, as she was often inclined to do. A week after we’d returned from our (painfully expensive) Parisian honeymoon, she burst into my study after dinner and launched into a high-pitched monologue without so much as a greeting.

“Well! I’ve just gotten the pictures developed and, I must say, darling, I’m rather disappointed. The man at the shop warned me that only color cameras can properly capture natural light, but I expected better than this! All those shots I had you take of me on the Champs-Elysées are quite ruined.”

She slapped a wad of photographs on my desk. I didn’t look up, keeping my eyes trained on the pile of investment papers I’d been pretending to review before she’d interrupted, hoping she might take the hint and find a maid to bother. But she went on hovering like a dog who’d dropped a toy in my lap. I flipped through the photographs, quickly enough that she’d leave me with enough time to get some of the work I’d been procrastinating done before my after-dinner scotch muddled my brain, but not so quickly that she saw my bad-faith effort for what it was. 

They all looked identical to me—Helen standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe in a dowdy plaid dress, rigidly posed and wearing a forced grin that didn’t reach her eyes. I did remember taking them, mostly because I’d been annoyed she’d made me take so many. What did she even plan to do with them? She hadn’t had any family or friends to invite to our wedding beyond a few old spinsters from her garden society.

I glanced up at her. “They look perfectly fine to me.”

“Then you weren’t really looking!” She grabbed the stack from me and pulled a photograph off the top, waving it in front of my face. “Tell me this glare doesn’t ruin the whole effect.”

I took it from her, fighting the urge to wrench her wrist in the process. Curse my father and everything he’d instilled in me about the eldest son’s responsibility to carry on the family line—I could have been a very happy bachelor. This one was exactly like the others, except for a smear over Helen’s head resembling one of those inkblots that supposedly revealed your greatest fear and what you’d had for breakfast. I shrugged and was about to hand it back when the blurry lines seemed to move before my eyes. 

Shades of gray formed themselves into a familiar face, with contemptuous dark eyes and porcelain skin offset by a soft cloud of black hair. I shook my head and willed the shape to reform into an unassuming smear (perhaps the scotch had gone to my brain?), but that face only became clearer. The picture began to shake so that I could hardly see, and I leaned in to find that her hard-set mouth was brilliantly, impossibly red.

I dropped the picture and jumped back in my chair, knocking a paperweight off the desk that narrowly missed Helen’s foot.

She laughed. “See what I mean? But it’s not your fault—you couldn’t help the glare. No need to get out of sorts about it!”

“I took this?” I asked sharply, studying her face for any sign of surprise or recognition.

Her vacant smile didn’t budge. “Who else would have?”

“I have to…” I stood up and bumped my knee on a sharp corner of the desk. “Damn! I’m…dinner didn’t agree with me. I’m going up to bed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, dear, I didn’t know you weren’t feeling well! Shall I come and check in on you later?”

“No, I’m fine.” 

I all but ran out of the study, leaving her to pick up the papers I’d scattered in my haste.

***

Sat up in bed with every lamp lit and the coverlet pulled up to my chin, I scanned the dim corners of my room for a shadow I wasn’t ready to name. I’d shut the windows, but the brocade curtains seemed to sway in an unnatural breeze, and even the normal sounds of an old house settling in for the night made me grit my teeth so hard I tasted blood. I almost went downstairs for a drink, but the thought of facing Helen’s barrage of chatter (and, if I was being honest, the thought of venturing alone into the pitch-black corridor) kept me frozen in place.

Trying to keep my thoughts confined to reality, I closed my eyes in hopes of sleeping off what was surely a trick of the eye that would be long-forgotten by morning. How could that photograph have been anything worth torturing myself over when Helen hadn’t reacted at all? I’d spent two years under this yoke without succumbing to its weight—I certainly wasn’t going to collapse now over something so flimsy as a lens flare. 

But every time I started to drift off I saw that hazy face in relief against my eyelids. The sound of summer wind in the trees outside my window took on a mournful, human quality. My mind wandered onto long-forbidden pathways, and the same pale figure lingered in every half-dream I managed to doze into, softly moaning in harmony with the wind. By the time Helen knocked on my door an uncertain amount of time later, I was almost glad for the distraction.

She swept in without waiting for a response and set a cup of tea on my bedside table. “I saw the lights on and assumed you were up reading—I’m sorry to wake you!”

“You didn’t.”

“Oh, good. And how are we feeling?” 

I bristled at her kindly, nurse-like tone. “I’m fine. It’s just a headache.”

“Well, alright, I’ll leave you be. Drink your tea, though, love. You’re probably dehydrated.” She leaned over to give me a gentle kiss on the forehead and tiptoed out of the room. 

Though the headache wasn’t real, I drank the tea obediently. It was chamomile with milk and lots of sugar, and the warm familiarity of it almost soothed me back to reality. The wind stopped its wailing. The shadows in the corners stilled. Perhaps a wife was good for something—it was nice to have someone who didn’t work for you but anticipated your needs anyways.

Actually, it was Helen’s uncanny gift for knowing what I needed before I did that drew me to her in the first place, back when she was my secretary. That and a certain wide-eyed naïveté that made the brute in me want to protect her from the leering eyes of other men, even as her every word annoyed me. As if I was in any position to protect her—she would run for the hills at the first intimation of the truth. Thank God she had the analytical skills of a brick.

Imaginary fears assuaged, I finished the tea and turned off the lamps. A pleasant heaviness overtook my limbs and I happily gave into it, those old shadows receding into the far corners of my mind.

***

Hours later, I woke from a fitful sleep to the distinct, prickly feeling that someone was watching me. Squinting in the darkness, I felt around the bedside table for a lamp, knocking my empty teacup onto the floor in the process.

When I finally found the switch and turned it on, the teacup appeared to float in midair. Instinctively, I reached out to grab it, before I saw that it was perched on a slender white hand. 

I recoiled so hard that I banged my head on the wall, and a peal of laughter sounded from the floor next to my bed.

“Careful, darling. Don’t hurt yourself,” the visitor said as she gently placed the teacup on the bedside table without revealing more than a long, pale forearm.

I didn’t need to see her to know her—I’d been listening to that low, lilting voice in a dream not five minutes ago. And even her hand was more familiar to me than my own.

I tried to speak but only a hiss of air came out. 

She stood from beside the bed, her willowy form revealing itself to me one vertebrae at a time, clad in the red silk dressing gown that she wore in all my clearest memories of her. The face that had hazily stared out at me from the photograph earlier that night (could it really still be the same night?) now appeared to be cut from cold marble in the moonlight, with wide dark eyes and wet red lips to balance out all that white stone. As she bent over me to kiss my forehead, a few of her matted black curls fell into my gaping mouth, filling it with the taste of damp earth and rotting meat. 

My stomach turned and I leaned over the bed, retching.

She reached over to rub slow circles into my back.

“Poor dear. I have to say, I thought you’d be happier to see me.”

“Caroline,” I finally managed to whisper.

“In the flesh. Well, not really, but you get the idea.”

“How…?”

She lifted her hands over her head in a stretch, and it sounded like every bone in her body popped. A shower of grayish dirt fell from her hair and onto the coverlet as she twisted from side to side.

“God, that feels good, “ she sighed, “You wouldn’t believe the tension that’s built up in my neck.”

She moved her head so that the moonlight hit her long neck just so, revealing a mottled blue-black stretch of skin that wrapped all the way around.

“I’m dreaming,” I said to myself more than to her.

“Are you?” she asked, still stroking my back, “Does it feel like you’re dreaming?”

Her touch was like ice through my shirt, and my teeth started to chatter—if this was a dream, it was the most realistic I’d ever had. I willed myself to wake up, tensing every muscle in my body to force my waking self’s eyes to open.

Caroline smiled down at me. “I’ll take that as a no. And, anyways, haven’t you missed me? That child wife of yours is all wrong, but you must know that. Did you see she’s put peonies in all your mother’s vases? It smells like a convalescent home in here.”

I stared at her mutely.

As she gesticulated with her hands, I noticed her bloody, dirt-crusted nails. “And all that chatter. God, I don’t know how you haven’t throttled her. It hardly seems fair—there’s no way I was that insufferable.”

She dragged a sharp broken nail across my lips as I laid frozen on the bed. “But I’m sure she makes you feel like a real man, right? I’m sure she’s so impressed that you sit all day pushing piles of your father’s money around as if you were some titan of industry.” She spoke faster and louder with every word. “And I’m sure she never gives you trouble for being drunk more often than not—you never did learn to hold your scotch. Oh, and she’ll give you a whole litter of strapping sons without complaint, right? That is, unless you’re still as impotent as you were with me. Does she pretend not to notice that you can’t do the one thing that makes you a man?”

Before my brain could catch up with my body, I sat up and struck her across the face in one fluid motion. She grabbed my wrist and held my hand to her cool cheek, smiling.

“There you are,” she said, “I knew you were in there somewhere. Do you think you could still do it? I’m dying to know—put your hands on my neck.”

The slap had used up what little strength I had in my body, and my hands stayed limp by my sides.

She frowned. “Hm. Alright, I won’t push you tonight. No need to rush things. Same time tomorrow?”

I stared blankly into her wild dark eyes.

“Rhetorical question, of course,” she said breezily, “Sleep well, darling.”

I blinked and the room was empty, completely still except for the rustling curtains.

***

I don’t know exactly how long I sat staring at the wall, but the room had taken on a pinkish tinge by the time I’d resolved myself to what needed to happen. After I’d stopped shaking enough to think, I’d realized that there was an easy explanation for this whole night: I was in the midst of a psychotic break. My mother was in and out of asylums during the last years of her life—madness was in my blood, and I was around the age that it took my mother.

Save for a lingering smell of rot that seemed to cling to my bedding, there was no sign that anyone (or anything) had been in the room, and I needed to hold fast to that. Obviously the photograph had me out of sorts, and my feeble mind took advantage. But I had made it this far. I was well on my way to rebuilding everything she took from me. I would not be my own undoing now.

There was only one way to quash the swirling doubts that evaded my rational mind and threatened to ruin me, and it wouldn’t be pleasant. As the first rays of morning sunlight filled my room, I crept out of my bed and along the corridor, towards Helen's room. She was a habitually early riser, but waiting wasn't an option, so I tiptoed especially carefully past her as I made my way to the staircase.

My wobbly legs threatened to fail me as I descended the three floors down to the basement, and I was clutching the railing by the end. I pulled a shovel off the rack on the back wall and crossed the cold, untouched concrete until I came upon a slightly uneven patch of floor that drew me like a magnet.

Here. Here was the certainty that would save me from myself.

Without any plan, I slammed the shovel onto the hard ground until grayish dirt was flying. Just as I had found my rhythm, I stopped and took a deep breath, filling my nose with the distinct smell of smoke.

In a trance, I ran back up the stairs and found the basement entrance locked, even though I'd just come in that way. I pulled on the door and shouted for at least a minute, to no avail, even though I heard stirring behind it.

Smoke started to fill the room quicker than I would have thought possible, but I was beyond heroic measures of self-preservation.

Instead, I sat down on the steps, thinking about the letters Caroline used to write to her sister abroad in America. Her sister whom I had never met. A sister who had a love of gardening, and had always wanted to go to Paris.

I saw a pretty, freckled face in my mind's eye. A face that, when it smiled a certain way, resembled another I'd just been studying in a photograph.

An unusually sweet cup of chamomile.

It's strange, the things you remember at the end of your life.