Page 134 of Nobody's Fool

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I say. “Whatever happened, it stays between us. That’s a promise. But I need to know. And more than that, Caroline, you need to tell me. I don’t want to say the truth shall set you free, but—”

“You’re right.” The tears start flowing down her face. “It’s my fault.”

I sit back and wait.

“That night. It changed everything. I wanted to face it, tell the truth right away, but my mother… she told me never to speak of it. Insisted, really. So I jammed it inside of me. My mother even sent me away. Like now. Like whenever I have a problem—or should I say, when Iama problem. We Burketts don’t face up to our problems. We hide them here instead.”

I don’t say anything. Life and cop lesson: Don’t derail someone when they are on the right track.

“What happened to Victoria that night,” Caroline continues, “was my fault.”

I fight to stay still. I give Caroline Burkett my most open, trusting face. “I am with you,” this face says. “I get it. I will listen and respectyou and not judge.” These are the things I am trying to manifest on my face. It has worked for me in the past. I’m hoping it will work again.

“This was 1999,” Caroline says. “Today, no big deal. But 1999…”

I still say nothing.

“Victoria and I were more than friends.”

She looks up to meet my eye. I hold it and try to encourage her to continue.

“That wouldn’t have played well in our high school. I was dating the varsity quarterback, like some stupid cliché. Buff Danelo. He was there that night. He didn’t know about me and Victoria, of course. No one did. Buff just thought I wanted to save myself. But he was my, I don’t know, I guess you’d call it a beard?” She looks off, over my shoulder, her head tilting to the left. “Victoria was my first love and when I think about it, when I think back on my entire life, maybe the only one I’ve ever had. Because I never got over losing her. We didn’t break up. We didn’t grow tired of one another or outgrow one another or fade away. None of that. One moment we were inseparable, hopelessly in love, hiding it behind the façade of being best friends. And the next moment, just when our relationship seemed to be at its best, Victoria was just—” Caroline stops, shrugs. “Gone.”

I still say nothing.

“I had too much to drink that night. That’s the excuse I use. But really, it was about that time in our lives. New year, new millennium, new me. And I just loved Victoria so much. It had been exciting keeping it a secret, but now it felt suffocating. Like I’d lose her if we didn’t take the next step. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do,” I say.

“I wanted to tell the whole world about us. I didn’t care. And Buff, ugh, he was all over me. Started grabbing my ass and slobbering in my ear about how we would start the new year off with a bang, ha ha, gross, and I look across the room and there’s Victoria, leaning againstthe bar. She’s talking on her phone, and she has that look on her face, this one she gets when she’s reallyreallyfocused, and she’s so adorable wearing this white dress and she just looks so damn beautiful I thought my heart would burst out of my chest.” Caroline rubs her hands in her lap. “I don’t know why I did it. I should have known better. But I couldn’t stop myself. I just pushed Buff off me and I stormed over to Victoria and I grabbed her face and I told her that I loved her and then I kissed her. Just like that. I kissed her so hard and with such hunger, and do you want to know something?”

I keep my voice gentle. “Tell me.”

“She kissed me back.” Caroline’s smile is wistful. “It was the best kiss of my life.”

An old-school grandfather clock strikes the hour. It echoes off the solarium glass. In the distance I hear Kate Boyd’s heel-clacks again. I worry that she might interrupt our flow.

“That must have been a nice moment,” I say, just to keep things moving.

“It was.”

I still try to go with my most gentle voice. I feel as though my voice is trying to carry a bubble without making it pop. “So what happened after the kiss?”

“Buff. Buff happened.”

“Your boyfriend?”

“He runs over and he pushes me. Pushes me really hard. Right in the middle of the kiss. With my eyes closed. I stumble into her, and we both fell to the floor. Hard. And it was like reality hit when we hit the floor. You know? Our eyes opened. I looked up. Most people were wrapped up in their own stuff, but others were staring down at us now, and it was like we both knew nothing would ever be the same. One of Buff’s meathead friends started laughing at us. Another called us dykes and then I heard ‘lesbo’ and ‘lez be friends’ and what I really remember is the Goo Goo Dolls are on the boombox, that song‘Slide,’ and they’re singing, ‘I wanna wake up where you are, I won’t say anything at all,’ and suddenly Victoria is up and she’s running toward the stairs. It’s like the jeers are chasing her, you know. She runs down the stairs to the first floor, where another party is happening, of course. Everyone is partying everywhere. There’s so much noise and everyone is drunk. She’s stumbling. I’m stumbling. I called her name. But she couldn’t hear it over all the noise. The Goo Goo Dolls were on downstairs too. I guess it was all one big music system, and now the singer, John something, I can never remember his last name, he’s panicked in the song and he’s asking this girl if she loves the life she killed and the priest is on the phone, your father hit the wall, your mother disowned you, and it’s like he’s singing to me, to us, and I’m swimming through people to try to find Victoria, to tell her it’s okay, that I’ll just tell our friends I was so drunk I thought she was Buff. That I’d protect her. But I couldn’t find her. And then, finally, I saw her by the door. So I tried to get there. Some guy grabbed me on the way, ‘Hey, what’s the rush, sweetcheeks.’ You’d get that all the time back in those days, and when I pushed him, he said, ‘Come on, be friendly, how about an end-of-the-year kiss’ and I pushed him harder and shouted, ‘Get off me,’ but by the time I broke free, Victoria was gone.”

Her eyes are closed as she tells me all this. Her hands mime pushing away the man who grabbed her. I’ve seen this before. Caroline is not just remembering—she is “there,” if you will, more reliving it than recalling it. It’s almost self-hypnosis.

Caroline’s face reddens from something akin to exertion. She takes a few deep breaths. They don’t seem to calm her. Her eyes stay closed.

“Caroline?”

Damn. It’s Kate Boyd.

Caroline’s eyes flutter open.

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