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.
17
Charlie walked around the Memory Chapel with a glass of wine in her hand. Only her father would specify that alcohol be served at his funeral. There was hard liquor at the bar, but at noon, it was too early for most, which was the first problem with Rusty’s speedy funeral plans. The second problem was one that Sam had spotted early on: the sightseers, the hypocrites.
Charlie felt bad for painting some of her former friends with this same brush. She couldn’t blame them for choosing Ben over her. She would have chosen Ben, too. In a week or a month or maybe next year, their silent presence, their kind nods and smiles, would mean something, but right now, all she could concentrate on was the assholes.
The townsfolk who had reviled Rusty for his liberal do-gooder ways were out in force. Judy Willard, who had calle
d Rusty a murderer for representing an abortion facility. Abner Coleman, who had called him a bastard for representing a murderer. Whit Fieldman, who had called him a traitor for representing a bastard. The list could go on, but Charlie was too disgusted to go through it.
The worst offender was Ken Coin. The pustulant cocksucker stood at the center of a group of minions from the district attorney’s office. Kaylee Collins was front and center. The young woman who was probably cheating with Charlie’s husband didn’t seem to get that she might not be wanted here. Then again, the entire legal community was treating this as a social occasion. Coin was obviously telling a story about Rusty, some kind of courtroom antic her father had pulled. Charlie watched Kaylee throw back her head and laugh. She tossed her long, blonde hair out of her eyes. She did that intimate thing that women do where they reach out and touch a man’s arm in a way that only the man’s wife could tell was inappropriate.
Charlie drank her wine, wishing it was acid she could throw in the woman’s face.
Her phone started to ring. She walked toward an empty corner, answering it right before voicemail picked up.
“It’s me,” Mason Huckabee said.
Charlie turned her back to the room, guilt manifesting itself in shame. “I told you not to call me.”
“I’m sorry. I had to talk to you.”
“No, you didn’t,” she told him. “Listen to me very carefully: What happened between us was the worst mistake of my life. I love my husband. I am not interested in you. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want anything to do with you, and if you call me again, I will slap you with a restraining order and make sure the state board of education knows that you’ve got a record against you for harassing a woman. Is that what you want?”
“No. Christ. Dial it back, okay? Please?” He sounded desperate. “Charlotte, I need to talk to you face to face. This is really important. Bigger than both of us. Bigger than what we did.”