The Lives of Caroline

            She moved through life like the sea — a simple fluidity, but with the power to drag you under and leave you crushed against the rocky shore.  Every boy in town knew she was trouble.  Their mothers warned them and their father’s bit their lips in silent longing for their youth when she passed by.

            Yes, Caroline was the object of many’s affection.  But she never let it get to her head.  One might think she kept her mind on her studies or on altruistic efforts, but no.  She spent her days reading Hollywood magazines, listening to her records, swiping her father’s cigarettes, and sunbathing by the lake.

            There was not much in the way of entertainment in her isolated, sleepy mountain town.  The lake however, tucked deep away in the woods and opening up to a glistening stretch of cloudy water and crisp green trees, was rife with endless possibilities.  There she could lay back with her big rimmed sunglasses, pretend to read her magazines, and watch her schoolmates’ summer days unfold.  One day when they were old and gray they’d forget those days, but Caroline would remember.  She remembered everything.

            Like the sandy bottom of the lake she absorbed memories like lost things.  With a brush of her manicured fingertips against your skin, she could tell you about the day you were born, when you took your first step or said your first word.  She could recount your first kiss as if she were living in your skin, feeling the nervous swirl of wonder in your belly, head and heart.

            For a long while she ran from this gift — hid from it as if it were the Devil come to take her soul.  But Devils weren’t real.  The intense monotony of this humdrum town was, however, but her touch gave her a glimpse into a thousand and one lives she would otherwise never live.  Where she had once shied away from physical touch, she was now overtly forward.  No longer was she afraid to stroke the arm of the boy who stood beside her at the drugstore, or to twirl the golden locks of the girl who sat in front of her in algebra.  When the boys tossed the football down by the lake and it landed at her feet, she handed it back and made sure to touch their sandy fingers.  

            That single touch gave off a subtle shock of electricity that ran through her body for hours.  To the naked eye there on the shore she appeared a girl aware of her sensual charms — basking in the sun for all to admire, but in the recesses of her mind she was living the memories of everyone she touched. 

            She was a baby discovering the cool soft touch of grass, a mother giving birth, a boy who just got his first home run, an old man sleeping alone for the first time in sixty years.

            Some memories were better than others.

            She knew the pain of losing a child without ever being a mother and carried that void everywhere she went.  She knew the terror of a shadowed figure turning the doorknob and climbing between unwanting sheets.  She knew the prick of the needle, the rush, ecstasy, and the tragic fall, followed by the aching for more.  

            It was the nastier parts of people’s memories that made her hungry.  When they entered her body it left her feeling itchy in her skin — like no matter how much she scrubbed she would never be clean.  That itch, that unclean feeling made her greedy for more, for better experiences.  It was the only way to purge the muck living inside her mind and body.  

            That hunger led her down a road paved with bad decisions.  A simple touch was no longer enough.  She needed more.  The boys that were willing to give it told their friends she was wild — how she was always down for a tumble in the cold damp grass, how she’d grip them like the reins of a horse and cry out for more.  But when the boys came back to give her what she’d asked for she’d send them off without a second thought.  They’d crawl and beg and call all hours of the night, desperate for another taste, but once she had a taste she was done.  She needed something else, something new.  

            It didn’t take long before Caroline had crushed the desires of those who once dreamed of making her theirs.  When she walked alone up and down Main Street, people went out of their way to avoid her.  She received no calls, no notes in her locker, no wanting stares.  The girl who was all at once starved for and drowning in the touch of others, now found herself alone on the jagged shore.  She sat alone at the prom — pearl satin gloves stretched over her elbows — watching with an empty spirit.  Summers passed like the hands on a clock — steady, predictable, and with no one to remember them.  She went from job to job.  She served tables at the diner, bagged groceries, typed, cleaned houses, anything while she bade her time.  She knew she had to get out.  The town had washed its hands of her and she of it.  There was nothing left to do but leave.

            Caroline’s gloved hands opened the door to the black Corvette as her newly married sister prepared to drive off to her honeymoon.  “I’m leaving too, don’t know when I’ll be back,” she said, closing the door on her sister’s bewildered stare.  And just like that Caroline left.  She hopped a Greyhound, one suitcase gripped tight in her gloveless hand and a hopeful tear in her eye.  She drove and drove, walking up and down the aisle, purposefully brushing against every passenger she could and reveling in the feast of memory flashes.  She swayed as if she were in a haze and trudged to her seat as if she were wading in an endless sea.  She hadn’t fed this greedily in years.  The city was even more raucous.  Her mind was in a constant state of overflow and her body felt numb.  The warm electric shock now just a faded memory, buried deep below the millions she’d swallowed, but she still wanted more.  That is until she met him.

            He was everything she’d ever dreamed of.  He was distinguished and refined like an old Hollywood star.  She found him sitting alone at a hotel bar cloaked in golden light drinking what she later learned to be his third scotch.  In her weaker moments she still tasted the woody caramel liquor on his lips.  There was something in the way the light struck his eyes that drew her to him.  They were dark, but with a mahogany hue that brought back that warm electricity.  She removed her black gloves and sat beside him.  They shared flirtatious glances before words, but when the drinks began to flow they realized they didn’t need words. 

            They went to his room, rolling around the soft cotton sheets like she had all those years ago in the cold grass.  She had been so numb before he found her — so numb that she hadn’t realized until the morning she hadn’t felt a single thing apart from him.  In a body that had lived a million lives she had finally lived her own, in her own skin, in her own mind.  

            For the first time she knew what those boys had felt all those years ago.  This man pulled her down into a riptide.  With every second she spent in him she slipped further and further from herself.  And when she finally broke to the surface she knew why.

            He was like her.  

            Memories flowed through this man like a river but stopped abruptly when things became too messy.  He was tangled in horrors he would not — had not spoken of in years.  The years…they seemed endless.  How many lives had he lived?

            When she asked, the answer he gave buckled her knees.

            His lives were not many.  It was one.  One singularly long life.  Unnatural and impossible.  There was so much to his mind it had simply taken her time to sift through it all and once she finally had, she felt as withered and broken as him.  To live forever and to live with the memories of thousands was too much for any one person to shoulder.  She wanted to shoulder it with him.  He would have none of it.  He slipped from her as easily as she slipped into his bed.

            She wanted to tell him before he left.  When touch gave someone a conscious link to another person’s mind, it wasn’t hard for her to detect the first sparks of activity.  So Caroline put on her gloves, packed her suitcase, and boarded the Greyhound back to the one place she hoped to forget.  

            That summer she returned to the lake, this time cradling her growing belly.  She had no idea if she would ever find the man who tasted like wood and caramel again.  What she did know was his memory would forever live in her, and in the mahogany eyes of their daughter.