Charlie could not look at Sam. She kept her head buried in her hands. She stayed bent over in the chair. She had not thought about her promise to Rusty in decades. She had been the good daughter, the obedient daughter, putting her secret on a shelf, letting the dark shadows of time obscure the memories. Their Devil’s Pact had never felt like the part of the story that mattered, but she could see now that it mattered almost more than anything else.
She told Sam, “I guess the moral of the story is that bad things happen to me in hallways.”
Charlie felt Sam’s hand on her back. All that she wanted in the world right now was to lean into her sister, to put her head in Sam’s lap, and let Sam hold her while she cried.
Instead, she stood up. She found her shoes. She rested her hip against Rusty’s casket as she put them on. “It was Mary-Lynne. I thought Lynne was her last name. Not Huckabee.” She felt nauseated when she recalled Huck’s cold reaction when he learned that Charlie was Rusty Quinn’s daughter. “Do you remember the pictures of her in the barn?”
Sam nodded.
“Her neck was stretched at least a foot; that’s what I remember. That she looked like a giraffe, almost. And the expression on her face—” Charlie wondered if she’d had the same agonized expression when Rusty had found her in the hallway. “We thought you were dead, we knew Mama was dead. He didn’t say, but I know that he was afraid that I would hang myself, or find some way to kill myself, like Mary-Lynne.” Charlie shrugged. “He was probably right. It was just too much.”
Sam kept silent for a moment. She had never been given to fidgeting, but she smoothed out the leg of her pants. “Did the doctors believe that was the cause of your miscarriages?”
Charlie almost laughed. Sam always wanted the scientific explanation.
She told her sister, “After the second one, which was really the third, I went to a fertility expert in Atlanta. Ben thought I was at a conference. I told the doctor what happened—what really happened. I laid it out for her, things that even Dad didn’t know. That he’d used his hands. His fists. His knife.”
Sam cleared her throat. Her expression, as always, was obscured by her dark glasses. “And?”
“And she ran tests and did scans and then she said something about the thinness of this wall or scarring on that tube and she drew this diagram on a sheet of paper but I said, ‘Give it to me straight.’ And she did. I have an inhospitable womb.” Charlie laughed bitterly at the phrase, which sounded like something you’d read on a travel review site. “My uterine environment is not suitable for hosting a fetus. The doctor was amazed I’d managed to get so far into my second trimester.”
Sam asked, “Did she say it was because of what happened?”
Charlie shrugged. “She said it could be, but there was no way to know for sure. I dunno, a guy jams the handle of a knife up your twat, it makes sense that you can’t have babies.”
“The last time,” Sam said, always zeroing in on the deductive fallacy. “You said Dandy-Walker is a syndrome, not resultant of a uterine malformation. Is there a genetic component?”
Charlie couldn’t go down this road again. “You’re right. That was my last time. I’m too old now. Any pregnancy would be considered too high risk. The clock has ticked down.”
Sam took off her glasses. She rubbed her eyes. “I should have been here for you.”
“And I should have never asked you to come.” She smiled, remembering something Rusty had said two days ago. “Our familiar impasse.”
“You need to tell Ben.”
“There’s that you need again.” Charlie blew her nose. She had not missed Sam’s bossy older sisterness over the years. “I think it’s too late for me and Ben.” The words sounded flippant, but after her disastrous attempts at seduction, she had to stop denying the possibility that her husband would not come back. Charlie couldn’t even work up the courage to ask him to stay last night because she was too afraid he would tell her no again.
She said, “Ben was a saint when it happened. Every time. I really mean that. I just don’t understand where all that goodness comes from. Not his mother. Not his sisters. God, they were all awful. They wanted to know every detail, like it was gossip. They practically set up their own hotline. And you don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant, and buying baby furniture, and planning your maternity leave, and being big as a Mack Truck, then a week later you go to the grocery store and everybody who was smiling at you before can’t even look you in the eye.” Charlie asked, “I’m assuming you don’t know what that’s like?”
Sam shook her head.
Charlie was not surprised. She could not see her sister risking the physical toll a child would take on her body.
Charlie said, “I turned into such a bitch. I would hear myself—I can hear myself now, ten minutes ago, yesterday, every fucking day before that—and think, Shut up. Let it go. But I don’t. I can’t.”
“And adoption?”
Charlie tried not to bristle at the question. Her baby had died. It wasn’t like a dog, where you could get a new one a few months later to take away the loss. “I kept waiting for Ben to bring it up, but he kept saying he was happy with me, that we were a team, that he loved the idea of the two of us growing old together.” She shrugged. “Maybe he was waiting for me to bring it up. Like the Gift of the Magi, but with a toxic uterus.”
Sam put on her glasses. “You say that it’s already over with Ben. What do you lose if you tell him what happened?”
“It’s what I gain,” Charlie said. “I don’t want his pity. I don’t want him to stay with me because he feels an obligation.” She leaned her hand on the closed casket. She was talking to Rusty as much as Sam. “Ben would be happier with someone else.”
“Utter bullshit,” Sam said, her tone clipped. “You have no right to decide on his behalf.”
Charlie felt like Ben had already decided. She could not blame him. She was hard-pressed to believe any forty-one-year-old man would be unhappy with a limber twenty-six-year-old. “He’s so great with kids. He loves them so much.”
“So do you.”
“But he’s not the one keeping me from having children.”
“What if he was?”
Charlie shook her head. It didn’t work like that. “Do you want a minute alone?” She indicated the casket. “To say goodbye?”
Sam frowned. “To whom would I be speaking?”
Charlie crossed her arms. “Can I have a minute?”
Sam’s eyebrow arched up, but she managed for once to withhold her opinion. “I’ll be outside.”
Charlie watched her sister leave the room. Sam wasn’t limping as much today. That, at least, was a relief. Charlie could not stand seeing her back in Pikeville, so out of her element, so unprotected. Sam could not turn a corner, she could not walk down the street, without everyone knowing exactly what had happened.
Except for Judge Stanley Lyman.
If there had been a way for Charlie to run up to the bench and slap the bastard across the face for humiliating her sister, Charlie would have risked being arrested.
Sam had always worked so hard to hide the things that were wrong with her, but you did not have to do more than study her for a few minutes to notice the peculiarities. Her posture, always too stiff. The way she walked with her arms tight to her sides rather than letting them swing freely. The way she held her head at an angle, always wary of her blindside. Then there was her precise, maddeningly didactic way of speaking. Sam’s tone had always been sharp, but after being shot, it was as if every word was folded around the corner of a straight edge. Sometimes, you could hear a hesitation as she searched for the correct word. More rarely, you heard the sound of her breath as she pushed out sound, using her diaphragm the way the speech pathologist had trained her.
The doctors. The pathologists. The therapists. There had been a whole team surrounding Sam. They all had opinions, recommendations, warnings, and none of them understood that Sam would defy them all. She was not a normal person. She had not been that way before being shot, and she certainly was not that way during her recovery.
Charlie could remember one of the doctors telling Rusty that the damage to Sam’s brain could shave off as many as ten IQ points. Charlie had almost laughed. Ten points would be devastating for any normal human being. For Sam, it meant that she went from being a genius-level prodigy to just really, really fucking smart.
Sam was seventeen years old, two years on from the gunshot, when she was offered a full scholarship to Stanford.
Was she happy?
Charlie could hear Rusty’s question echoing in her head.
She turned around to face her father’s hideous casket. She rested her hand on the lid. The paint had chipped in the corner, which she supposed was what happened when you hung on it like a demented, foul-mouthed monkey.
Sam did not seem happy, but she seemed content.
In retrospect, Charlie should have told her father that contentedness was the more laudable goal. Sam was thriving in her legal practice. Her temper, once a roiling tempest, finally seemed to be under control. The anger she had carried around like a brick in her chest was clearly gone. Of course, she was still pedantic and annoying, but that came with being their mother’s child.
Charlie tapped her fingers on the casket.
The irony was not lost on Charlie that both she and her sister had failed miserably in matters of life and death. Sam had not been able to ease her husband’s suffering. Charlie had not been able to provide a place of safety for her growing child.
“And here they come again,” Charlie mumbled as tears filled her eyes. She was sick of crying. She didn’t want to do it anymore. She didn’t want to be a bitch anymore. She didn’t want to feel sad anymore. She didn’t want to be without her husband anymore.
As hard as it was to hold onto things, it was even harder to let them go.
She pulled over one of the reflecting chairs. She yanked off the baby-blue satin cover, because this was not a teenage girl’s sweet sixteen party.
Charlie sat down on the hard plastic.
She had told Sam her secret. She had opened the box.
Why did she not feel different? Why had things not miraculously changed?
Years ago, Rusty had dragged Charlie to a therapist. She was sixteen. Sam was living in California. Charlie had started acting out in school, dating the wrong boys, screwing the wrong boys, slicing the tires on the cars that the wrong boys drove.
Rusty had probably assumed that Charlie would tell the truth about what had happened, just as Charlie had assumed that Rusty would expect her to leave that part out.
Hello, familiar impasse.
The therapist, an earnest man in a sweater vest, had tried to take Charlie back to that day, to the kitchen in the farmhouse, to that damp room where Gamma had left a pot of water on the stove to boil while she had gone down the hallway in search of Sam.
The man had told Charlie to close her eyes and picture herself at the kitchen table, her hands working the folds of the paper plate as she tried to turn it into an airplane. Instead of hearing a car in the driveway, he told her to imagine Jesus walking through the door.
He was a Christian therapist. Well-meaning, undoubtedly sincere, but he thought that Jesus was the answer to a lot of things.
“Keep your eyes closed,” he had told Charlie. “Picture Jesus lifting you up.”
Instead of Gamma grabbing the shotgun. Instead of Sam being shot. Instead of Charlie running through the woods to Miss Heller’s house.
Charlie had kept her eyes closed as instructed. She had sat on her hands to keep them still. She could remember swinging her legs, pretending to play along, but she saw Lindsay Wagner, not Jesus Christ, coming to her rescue. The Bionic Woman used her super strength to punch Daniel Culpepper in the face. She karate-kicked Zachariah in the balls. She moved in slow motion, her long hair swinging as the chuh-chuh-chuch-chuh bionic sound played in the background.
Charlie had never been particularly good at following instructions.
Though, she seethed with humiliation to think that the frumpy licensed social worker with a bad haircut that Ben had dragged her to had been right about at least one thing. Something horrible that had happened to Charlie almost three decades ago was screwing up her life now.
Had screwed it up, because her husband was gone, her sister was flying back to New York in a few hours and Charlie was going to go home to an empty house.
It wasn’t even her week to take care of the dog.
Charlie stared at her father’s casket. She didn’t want to think about Rusty lying inside the cold, metal box. She wanted to remember him smiling. Winking at her. Tapping his feet. Beating out a staccato on the nearest table. Telling one of his bullshit stories that he had told thousands of times before.
She should have taken more pictures of him.
She should have recorded his voice so she wouldn’t forget the inflections, the annoying way he would stress the wrong words.
There had been times in her life that Charlie had prayed that Rusty would just please, for the love of God, shut the fuck up, but now, all she wanted in the world was to hear his voice. To listen to one of his yarns. To recognize one of his obscure quotes. To feel that moment of clarity when she realized that the story, the odd line, the seemingly innocuous observation, was actually advice, and that the advice was usually, aggravatingly, worth taking.
Charlie reached out to her father.
She placed her palm flat to the side of the casket. She felt stupid for doing this, but she had to ask, “What do I do now, Daddy?”
Charlie waited.
For the first time in forty-one years, Rusty did not have the answer.