Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [27]
Ty’s gestures, on the other hand, felt genuine. His open smile and watchful eyes made me want to keep in touch with him even after I’d left Woodland Dunes. He wasn’t bad-looking either, the olive T-shirt barely hid a solid chest and strong arms. Then again, he lived in the Midwest, a thousand miles away from Manhattan.
I stared out at the softly lapping waves, aware that I still hadn’t absorbed the news that my parents had split up before my mother’s death. I must have known that at some point, although Della said that they had lived apart only a few weeks before my mom died. But why hadn’t my father ever mentioned this? And why had he seemed like the grieving widower if they’d broken up?
To distract myself, I got up and checked my voice mail in case there was an SOS call from McKnight Corporation or someone from my office. Nothing.
The letters, I decided. Focus on the letters for now. I went back onto the balcony. I put Caroline’s letters in chronological order, using the postmarks on the outside of the envelopes, then I opened and stacked them, so that the earliest rested on top. The first five letters were written on lined paper, the round holes and frayed edges on the left side making it clear they’d been ripped from a notebook. Tiny cursive handwriting, afraid to take up too much space, covered the pages. The words Brighton Academy were stamped on the top right corner of each sheet of paper.
One afternoon, a few days before our mom died, I had sat on the front porch swing with Caroline, and I asked her what it would be like to go to high school. At the time, she was supposed to attend the local high school in town. Caroline rubbed a hand on my back and said, “You’ll be great when you go to high school. You’re pretty and happy, just the way they like ’em. For me, it’ll be hell.”
“But you’re pretty,” I’d said. Caroline wore no makeup over her peach-toned skin and always had on loose clothes that could have been worn by a boy, but she couldn’t hide the dark eyelashes or her new breasts or the long, thin legs that seemed to have sprouted from her body over the last year.
“But I’m not happy.” Caroline pulled her hand away from my back, wrapping her arms around her knees.
“Why?”
Caroline shrugged. “I never have been. I don’t know how.”
A month later, with our mother dead, and Dan gone to college, Caroline was sent to Brighton Academy, a boarding school outside Detroit. The letter I held in my hand had been written in September 1982, Caroline’s first year there.
Dear Della, I hate it here,
the first letter started.
The other girls are assholes. I know I’m not supposed to swear, but there’s no one around to stop me anymore. The classes are fine, I guess. Algebra is my favorite, because if you learn the rules and stick by them, everything works out the way it’s supposed to. I don’t know why people think math is so hard. I hope things are good with you in Woodland Dunes. I miss you a lot.
Caroline wrote Della once or twice a year from Brighton Academy, and the majority of the letters were in a similar vein. I hate this place, she said. I hate the other girls. It seemed she hated everything—the teachers, the food, her roommate—everything except a few classes. And she was lonely.
In the spring of what I figured should have been her senior year, Caroline wrote:
Well, I’m staying here for one more go-around. I flunked three classes accidentally. It was better than the alternative.
What, I wondered, was the alternative? Graduating and moving on to college or out into the world? Why wouldn’t she have wanted that if she hated the place so much?
The next letter came in the spring of the following year, Caroline’s fifth at Brighton.
They passed me, and now I’m slated to walk the plank so I can leave. I don’t think I actually did better in class. In fact, I think they passed me to get