The Education of Sebastian & the Education of Caroline (44 page)

“You’ve said that enough times now, buddy,” Mitch interrupted with a warning tone. “No need to say it again. And you reel it in, too, Seb.”

“Butt out,
Sergeant
!” snarled Donald. “This has fuck-all to do with you. It’s hanging around with your loser family that started all this in the first place. He’s
my
son and what I say goes. So listen good,
boy
: if you go anywhere near that bitch, I’ll call the police and she’ll be finished.”

Sebastian tried to throw himself at Donald but Mitch and Ches held his wrists and Shirley wrapped her arms around his waist trying to calm him down.

Donna gasped. “Donald, no! Think of the scandal!”

Donald smiled and turned to me.

“If you contact
my son
in any way: email, text, phone, letter, flying fucking carrier pigeon, we’ll prosecute. It’s a felony—you’ll go to prison. At the very least, you’ll be on the sex offender’s register for the rest of your fucking life—you’ll never work again. And the same goes for that fucking asshole of a son of mine if he tries to contact you.” He turned his eyes back to Sebastian. “Ever.”

Sebastian was yelling obscenities, trying to get to his father; Mitch, Shirley and Ches were desperately holding him back.

“And as for you,
son
,” Donald continued, “you can kiss goodbye to any idea about going to college; I’m not wasting another penny on you. But I’ll tell you what you will do—as soon as you turn 18 you’ll be enlisting. Do it, or your bitch will be facing jail time.”

I was still sitting on the couch, white-faced and shocked, body trembling, barely able to take it in.

Donna spoke in a shaky voice.

“Donald, really! There’s no need for this. Surely if Caroline promises to leave quietly, we need say no more about it. Sebastian will be 18 in a few months and…”

“You’re such a fucking hypocrite, Donna. You’d really do anything for the reputation of this shit-hole of a Base, wouldn’t you?”

Donna’s mouth opened and closed several times but she seemed unable to speak again.

“And another thing, you fucking whore,” said Donald, glaring at me again. “The statute of limitations is three years:
three years
. You come anywhere near my son in that time and you know what will happen to you. Same goes if he contacts you.
I’ll know!
If you’re so much as in the same
state
I’ll make sure you get what’s coming to you.”

Three years. Oh, God.

I turned to Sebastian, love and loss filling me as my eyes started to blur with tears.

“Don’t listen to him, Caro!” gasped Sebastian, desperately. “He won’t do it, he won’t! He doesn’t care enough about me to bother. Don’t listen to him!”

“You’re right, you little shit,” smirked Donald, rubbing his ribs again. “I don’t give a damn about you, but believe me, it would give me a great deal of pleasure to send your little bitch to jail, if only to wipe that smug look off your fucking face.”

Shirley gasped and Donna looked disgusted.

David was lost and shattered, his gaze drifting around the room as if he couldn’t recognize anyone.

But it was Sebastian’s face that I couldn’t take my eyes off. All the fight had gone out of him and he sagged in Mitch’s arms.

I did this. I did this to him.
All my rehearsed excuses flew away: I despised myself. And it was time to let him go.

“No, Caro!” breathed Sebastian as he read the decision on my face. “Don’t let him win.”

Like a sleepwalker rising to Judgment Day, I stood.

Mitch dropped his hands, releasing him, and Sebastian was in my arms for one last time. He held onto me so tightly I could hardly breathe, burying his face in my hair.

“I have to go now, tesoro,” I said softly, stroking his neck.

His grip tightened around me. “No!” he gasped as if he was in great pain.

“Yes. Sebastian, listen to me. I want you to have a good life, tesoro, a big life. I want you to be happy, to fall in love…”

“No, God, no, Caro! Don’t say that!”

“Yes! Do it for me.”

“I’ll always love you, Caro. Don’t give up on us. Please don’t give up. I’ll wait for you. It’s only three years. I love you!”

But it wasn’t just three years, was it? I knew that now.

“I love you, too,” I whispered so softly I didn’t know if he’d heard me. “
Ti amo tanto, Sebastian, sempre e per sempre.”

I tried to peel his hands away from my body but he wouldn’t let go.

“No!” he cried over and over again. “No!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” snarled Donald in disgust.

Somehow Mitch and Ches managed to pull Sebastian off; he tried to fight them but his spirit was broken.

I turned to Shirley and Donna, their faces filled with pity.

“Look after him,” I said softly. “Ches, I … just be his friend.”

Ches nodded, unable to speak.

“Oh my dear, dear child,” said Donna, tears in her eyes.

I looked at my husband, whose silence was more eloquent than a thousand words.

“Goodbye, David,” I whispered. “I’m sorry…”

He stared at me blankly, then dropped his head into his hands.

I turned to go, my eyes sweeping over Estelle’s malice, David’s bewilderment, Donald’s triumph, the sadness in the expressions of Donna and Shirley, and the anger darkening the faces of Ches and Mitch.

Then my eyes rested on the man I loved; the man I vowed I would never see again because he’d been hurt enough—by me.

“Caro, no!” he cried again, tears falling down his face, mingling with the blood.

“I love you, Sebastian. So much, tesoro.”

And then I walked away, leaving behind all the goodness and beauty that I’d ever known in my life.

Despite what happened that day, despite what happened later, I can’t bring myself to regret the events of that summer, because Sebastian taught me how to love.

END OF PART ONE

PART TWO

tHE EDUCATION OF CAROLINE

prologue

When a woman turns forty she is no longer young, but not yet old.

At least, that’s what I was told by friends who had reached that milestone some years ahead of me. I wasn’t concerned, although perhaps I should have been: my work as a freelance journalist was always uncertain, my mortgage large, my pension minute, with the future unwritten. So, yes, turning forty should have bothered me, or at least sparked my interest a little, but you can’t force yourself to feel, can you?

I never dreamed that my past would catch up with me, and that I’d be drawn back into the erotic madness of a decade ago.

But then again, perhaps life is what happens when you least expect it.

CHAPTER 1

I gazed around the table at the faces of my friends, bathing in the warmth of their love.

Nicole smiled back at me and raised her glass.

“Well, today’s the day,” she said, winking at me. “The big 4-0! Not that you look it: beotch! Happy Birthday!”

Jenna and Alice lifted their cocktail glasses and clinked across the table.

I smiled wryly.

“Well, some days I certainly feel forty. But not today—it’s so great that all you guys made it.”

“Are you kidding?” said Nicole. “Of course we made it—and I
never
go to Brooklyn, so you should feel really honored, Venzi!”

“Here we go,” muttered Alice, “the ‘I never leave Manhattan even to see how the peasants live’ speech.”

“Up yours, Alice,” snorted Nicole.

I laughed, happy to hear their bickering, which was as familiar and innocent as air.

These were my friends, but I thought of them as family. And they had all come to my favorite Italian restaurant in Brooklyn to celebrate with me.

“So, you’re leaving us again,” sighed Alice. “Up, up and away on your travels.”

“It’s not exactly a vacation,” retorted Nicole.

She would have raised her eyebrows except she’d been for her monthly Botox treatment, and the upper part of her face was currently immobile.

It was true: it wasn’t a vacation—I was going away for work. And I was living my dream.

I’d come a long way since arriving in New York ten years ago, penniless and unhappy, fleeing a failed marriage and a doomed affair.

It hadn’t been easy, although I doubt that moving to the Big Apple is easy for anyone. But for me, it meant living by myself, by my own efforts, for the first time in my life. I was scared and adrift in a city I didn’t understand, where I knew no one.

At first, I’d lived in a horrible, low-rent hostel, before finding a tiny apartment in Brooklyn’s Little Italy—a place that became my home for the next eight years. I cleaned people’s apartments to earn money for food and rent, while saving what I could to go back to school to study journalism and photography.

I’d been in New York for less than two months when 9/11 happened. The world changed on that day: everyone’s lives were different, as if we’d lost our innocence. The smoke and ash had hung in the air for days after; the feeling of shock and despair lasted much longer. And then came the anger: it was so strong, it was like a nightmarish creature that haunted your waking dreams. You couldn’t see it, but you could feel it, glimpsed in the faces of people around you—those expressions you caught out of the corner of your eye, that showed the rage was still there.

But there was also a sense of togetherness, maybe of shared experience. It was as if the whole city came together to care for each other. We mourned together, we tried to pick up the pieces together. It was as if we were one big family, living through a crisis together. It was just a different atmosphere. Everyone wanted to help out, everyone had some sort of connection to those buildings.

Somehow, selfishly, it fit in with my own sense of loss: not just the life I’d left behind in California, but also because I’d lost who I was.

A year passed before I opened my eyes, shook myself from my torpor and found a way to live again.

An old acquaintance from San Diego had helped get me some ad hoc work on local newspapers and, from there, I’d managed to begin my freelance writing career. At first it was just small features: a food festival in Brooklyn; a music festival in Queens; but gradually the scope of my writing became more wide-reaching, adventurous even.

It was shortly after that, when a piece I wrote called ‘The New Immigrants’ about asylum seekers, had caught the eye of a national newspaper editor and, suddenly and unexpectedly, I was on my way. For the past six years I’d been lucky enough to earn my livelihood as a foreign correspondent, working freelance for several major newspapers.

Two years ago, I’d even saved enough to put down a deposit on a tiny, 1920s bungalow in Long Beach. My mortgage was scarily large, but I wanted somewhere of my own: somewhere I could come home to as driver of my own destiny, and queen of my own castle.

I’d loved living in Brooklyn and was sorry to say goodbye to my favorite coffee shops and restaurants.
There was a real sense of community in the neighborhood, and the area thrummed with the vibrancy of the constantly changing wave of people that passed through.

By this time, I was working mostly from home—‘home’ being wherever my laptop was—so the commute into the city didn’t bother me, and I was ready for another change. For much of my life I’d lived near the ocean, certainly during the most significant parts, and I loved that sense of space and peace that living by water gave me. Above all things, I loved to walk down to the shoreline when a big swell came in, and watch the surfers: like so many seals, clad in black neoprene, bobbing behind the line-up, then charging down the barreling green waves. Sometimes, in the summer, I’d take my surfboard out and join them. It brought back happy memories and I felt carefree for an hour or so.

My new home in Long Beach was a fascinating and diverse community. I loved the mix of people, and spent many happy hours just watching the world go by, often finding inspiration for new stories. My neighbors included an elderly Jewish lady, Mrs. Levenson, who used to walk side by side with her close friend, Doris, a Hispanic mother of three small children. Then there were the teenage beach bums, quietly smoking pot all day, hanging out on the boardwalk or by the mall, quiet and inoffensive. They all had their presence in the town, all part of the diverse culture, color and life.

In recent years, it had become popular with Manhattanites to come for the weekend, no doubt finding it friendlier and considerably cheaper than a few days in the Hamptons. Long Beach’s renewed popularity might have had something to do with the recession, of course, but I liked to think it was for its unique identity and sense of freedom.

My new home was surrounded by delis, bagel shops, and diners. Brunch was my favorite meal of the day, and on weekends, the colorful variety of eateries was packed with people placing orders to go, or waiting for a table to get breakfast. Even on weekdays it could be busy, but I was more likely to be able to get a table to myself and spend an hour or so staring out the window or working on my laptop. An Italian coffee shop on the boardwalk was—for all intents and purposes—my second home, the older members of the family chatting to me in strongly-accented Italian, the younger ones in English, of course.

One of the main commuter rail branches went directly from Long Beach to Manhattan, so it was handy for when I had meetings in the city, which seemed to happen with increasing frequency once I’d quit Brooklyn. Of course.

But the weekends were all about the beach. Even in the winter, when it definitely wasn’t lay-out-in-the-sun weather, people still liked to parade. The boardwalk spanned the entire town and every type of person seemed to take a Sunday stroll, although perhaps I was the only one who still enjoyed walking in the rain.

On a nice day, families mingled with the athletic-types taking a break from the overcrowded and sweaty gyms, to go for a run or bike ride in the open air. Elderly couples would sit at one the many benches, gazing out toward the water. I liked to fantasize that they were contemplating their youth and memories of earlier days, when running and jumping came as naturally as breathing, but perhaps they were just planning what to eat for lunch.

Perhaps they were thinking about their families: children who lived in different states or different countries; long-lost friends; dear, departed parents.

I had been close to my father, but my darling papa had died more than 12 years ago. I was not close to my mother. She did not like her daughter.

I didn’t like to look back that often.

My most precious memories were closely guarded secrets and I only looked at them
occasionally, taking them out of my Pandora’s Box of the past, to treasure and enjoy, then carefully replace and lock away. As the years passed, I looked less and less; because, perhaps, I felt there was more to look forward to. And this was new.

As far as my friends were concerned, I barely had a past. They recognized that I preferred not to talk about it, and they respected my wishes; or else they knew better than to ask.

I’d dropped my married name the moment I’d left my husband, and I’d even hacked my Christian name into small pieces, choosing just one short syllable: a new identity for my new life. Instead of Mrs. Caroline Wilson, I was now Carolina Venzi—pronounced the Italian way—but known to my new friends as ‘Lee’.

And funnily enough, it turned out to be very handy: people often made the assumption that ‘Lee Venzi’ was a man. There was one editor who had bought my freelance features for five months before he’d discovered that it was a woman writing articles about crime in the city. I’m not sure I’d have gotten the commission if he’d known the truth, but by then it was too late and, he had to admit, he’d liked the job I’d done—which was all that mattered, in my opinion.

It amused me, but it suited me very well, too. I was eager to retain a level of anonymity in my work; more particularly, some distance from my past.

And now I was forty. More confident than ever before in my life, believing in my abilities, and comfortable in my skin, I had a career that I enjoyed.
True, it was an itinerant lifestyle that could take me away from home for weeks or even months, but it was one that suited me. I’d spent the first thirty years of my life dormant and static: now I liked to be on the move. Besides, there wasn’t much to go home to other than a shelf of books, and a closet full of clothes from my old life that I no longer wore.

A few men, very few, had drifted in and out over the years, but there was no significant other; there was no significant anything at all—and I was quite happy to keep it that way. I had the company of my friends, and that was more than enough.

Nicole, in particular, found my casual celibacy hard to understand. She was forever trying to set me up with ‘cute guys’ that she knew. It became something of a game between us: her vowing that one day I’d meet someone who’d sweep me off my feet, and me promising it would never happen.

What I didn’t tell her, what I had no plans for her to know, was that I
had
been swept off my feet once before, and that the trail of devastation I’d left behind me after that event was still too painful to examine. The memories stayed carefully locked away.

My current assignment would take me away for an unknown number of weeks—perhaps as long as two months. I’d been hired by
The New York Times
to write about US servicemen and women being deployed to Afghanistan.

My friends were supportive, but they didn’t really understand why I wished to take the risk. It was hard to explain. Perhaps it was about being master of my own destiny and being able to do what the hell I wanted for the first time in my life. Perhaps it was something to do with having arrived in New York with no more than a few hundred dollars, and an ancient and worn out Ford Pinto that died shortly after crossing Verrazano Bridge. Perhaps it was a need to empathize with people who took risks. I couldn’t say.

It had taken me years to afford a way of living that many women my age were able to take for granted. Maybe those were the reasons that I seemed drawn to document the lives of those who had significantly less.

My first foreign assignment came about because my agent knew a little of my background—eleven years of living on military bases had certainly given me an insight. I was sent to several camps near Mosul and Baghdad to report on the living quarters of military personnel—and, for once, a woman’s point of view was wanted.

So my latest assignment wasn’t the first time I’d been paid to go somewhere dangerous, but it was certainly going to be one of the most challenging.

“I’m going to miss you, Lee,” said Nicole, sadly. “Who am I going to hang with on the weekends?”

“You’ll cope,” I smiled, “and I’ll be back long before the summer. “Besides, you’ve got the keys to my place, so you can all go and do what you usually do—check out the cute surfer guys.”

“Yeah, but it’s not the same without you,” complained Alice, “even though you never notice any of them.”

“Maybe you’ll meet a hunky soldier,” said Nicole, with a leer. “God, I love men in uniform.”

“They’re not in them very long around you,” snarked Jenna.

Nicole just winked and threw me a challenging look.

I shuddered. My ex-husband had been in the military—I definitely wasn’t going down
that
particular route again.

My flight had been booked for the following morning, even though the newspaper was still fighting the bureaucrats in DC to get my visa and travel documents approved. An additional set of hurdles had been erected by the Department of Defense, in the form of requiring me to attend a ‘hostile environment’ training program for journalists, specially put on by the military, in Geneva, before traveling on to the Middle East—or South Asia, depending on your point of view or political affiliation.

I’d never been to Switzerland before, although I’d flown over it a number of times. It was something new.

Before dawn, I was ready and waiting at the front of the bungalow for the lights that would announce my taxi. I’d tucked my passport into my back pocket, packed up my small travel bag, tugged and pushed and pulled at my heavy, wheeled suitcase, and slammed shut the door to my home.