Again, she nodded.
“Then we’re gonna put that mean ol’ box on a shelf. And we’re gonna leave it there. And we’re not gonna think about it or look at it until we’re good and God damn ready, okay?”
Charlotte kept nodding, because that’s what he wanted.
“Good girl.” Rusty kissed her cheek. He pulled her close to his chest. Charlotte’s ear folded against his shirt. She could feel his heart thumping beneath the skin and bone. He had sounded so frantic, so afraid.
He asked, “We’re gonna be okay, aren’t we?”
He held her so tight that she couldn’t nod, but Charlotte understood what her father wanted. He needed her to flip on her logical switch, but for real this time. Gamma was gone. Sam was gone. Charlotte had to be strong. She had to be the good daughter who took care of her father.
“Okay, Charlie Bear?” Rusty kissed the top of her head. “Can we do that?”
Charlotte imagined the empty closet in the bachelor farmer’s bedroom. The door hung open. She saw the box on the floor. Brown cardboard. Packing tape sealed it closed. She saw the label. TOP SECRET. She watched Rusty hefting the box onto his shoulder, sliding it onto the top shelf, pushing it back until shadows placed it in darkness.
“Can we do that, baby?” He begged, “Can we just close that box?”
Charlie imagined herself shutting the closet door.
She said, “Yes, Daddy.”
She would never open the box again.
16
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 s
he 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.