The Education of Caraline by Jane Harvey-Berrick
Prologue
When a woman turns 40 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 40 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.