Authors: Brandon Shire
Her hand shot out as if she could catch me. “Don’t go,” she murmured with a flicker of mixed emotion in her voice.
I stopped and hovered before the door.
“It’s over, Charles,” she offered quietly.
“It’s not over! It will never be over! You think you’re forgiven just because I came back?”
“I can’t change the past, Charles. It’s gone.”
“Well, how very fucking convenient, Charlotte. In another week it will be nothing but tragic memories and do-you-remember-whens,” I spat, my knuckles white around the doorknob.
“Any message for granddad?” she asked.
My eyes cinched in the silence that followed her question. “You are such a bitch.”
I could see her hidden smirk but, despite myself, the threat of violence within me ebbed away with the memories of the one bright light of truth in my childhood. I leaned my brow against the door and let my hand relax and slip down to my side. My eyes closed and I settled that way as I recalled the images of the grandfather I had lost at
fourteen
.
“Can’t we set the past at rest, Charles?” she asked again. “Please.”
“Why?” I demanded; repulsed at her assumption that she could so easily pacify me by summoning my memories of Francois. “So we can forget everything that happened? So it’s not so goddamned messy, Charlotte? Are you afraid of the shit-stained walls that raised me; is that it?”
I crossed back to the window and let my ire throw its own glare out onto the dark snow. I could see Charlotte in the reflection glaring at my back.
“You won’t do this for your own dying mother?” she asked as if she had really expected it.
I turned and look at her fully. “Mother? Everything you have ever said to me was a goddamned lie, Charlotte. And when I needed you most, you let Jarrel cart me off to the nuthouse and then pretended that I never happened. Where do you find mother in that? ”
I stalked closer to the bed, “Don’t even talk to me about being a mother. You were never a mother! Just the psychotic twat I lived with for the first fourteen years.”
Tears started piling up and leaking down her face. I rolled my eyes at this patently conjured display and walked back to the window. “Charlotte, save that bullshit for someone else. I’ve got too much experience behind me for that.”
I glanced over my shoulder and watched her shrug and wipe her face on the sheets. As a child I had seen many a man cave in to those tears. I had done it a few times myself, but no more.
“Happenstance!” Charlotte bellowed suddenly. Her shout startl
ed me but I kept my eyes on the
fog outside, knowing this could only be another scheme.
Happenstance was my sister’s proper name. Like my own, the accident of Penny’s birth had been carried in her name like a second squelch of misfortune. Everyone except Charlotte called her Penny, as in shiny, new, and revoltingly insecure in her small worth. She was a typical northern girl; big-boned and raw; a leftover from the colonial stock of hardworking seafarer’s wives. She had a hard odor of the body, perpetually chapped hands and the ruddy face of a drunk. She came in with a brisk and heavy walk and immediately sought out Charlotte’s instructions. As I’m sure she had done every day of her fat and pathetic life.
“Apologize to your brother,” Charlotte commanded her.
“Charles...” Penny began.
“Go fuck yourself.”
“I’m sorry Charles, I really am,” Penny persisted.
I turned on her. “About what? Are you her fucking mouthpiece?” I demanded, pointing at Charlotte.
“Charles! That’s your sister.”
“And?” I asked Charlotte.
“She’s apologizing.”
“She doesn’t have a goddamned thing to apologize for!” I yelled, suddenly realizing that it was true.
“You want me to apologize?” Charlotte asked, astonished at the idea.
A wide crooked grin floated up to my face as hatred pushed against my chest like a sledge-hammer. “No Charlotte, I just want you to fucking die. But before you do,” I lowered my voice and leaned in closer, “I want you to know that your little note didn’t do a goddamned thing. I survived anyway.”
“What note? What are you talking about?” Charlotte asked me.
My fists clenched as I stare at her. I had no idea how I was keeping myself from rushing forward and strangling the lying bitch.
Penny, cautiously watching us two war, flinched when I brought my gaze to her. I held my finger up and motioned for her to wait while I searched myself for this long held possession.
I read Penny the letter that I had gotten about a month after Charlotte’s one and only visit to Sanctuary, the first asylum I was confined to.
“‘You will continue to live in the shadow of my cloud,
Struggling under my darkening weight,
Trembling at what I pour down on you,
Cowering when I storm.
Covet the constant hope that I might allow sunshine.
‘Charlotte.’”
I could have recited it from memory, but the malicious barbarity of it was better confirmed on paper. To Penny’s credit, she appeared truly shocked; her mouth open slightly, her eyes wide and full of empathetic pain. “Jesus,” she muttered with a quick glance at Charlotte.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I told her.
Charlotte blinked twice, and let silence pile up between us like fallen leaves. I had expected her to be busy with a hot rebuttal, but she wore a look of stunned confusion instead.
“You don’t remember it.”
She looked up at me, defiance spreading slowly across her face.” Oh, but I do,” she assured me.
“Does it make you fear death, Charlotte?”
“I fear nothing,” she replied confidently.
“Except the truth.”
Charlotte hooked her eyes on me and snorted. “Even that can’t touch me now, Charles. It’s too late. You should have come back ten years ago. You might have made something of it then.”
She turned to Penny, her eyes dismissing my anger with a suppressed twinkle of delight. “Happenstance, get some coffee.”
Penny’s glance darted between us, skimming over the virulent charge of electricity Charlotte and I generated in each other’s company. “Sure, Mom,” she said as she went out, obviously relieved at being allowed to flee.
“Mom?” I exasperated.
“
What’d you do, sew up her twat?”
Charlotte’s eyes flared. “I will not be spoken to like that, Charles. Have at least some semblance of respect, even if you don’t feel it.”
“Those gentrified Southern manners, huh?” I taunted her. She was no more Southern than I was.
Concern suddenly softened her face, immediately rousing my suspicion. I felt my eyes tighten before she even spoke a word. “I know you’re in pain, Charles. And I know you’re hurt, but ...”
“You don’t know shit, Charlotte. Just shut the fuck up and die already. Will you?”
She sighed and stared at the ceiling. “Maybe I don’t know anything, Charles. Maybe I don’t. But I tried my best, and that’s all I can tell you.”
“Your best?” I almost laughed. “Charlotte, you are so full of it.”
Penny faltered her way into the room with a tray and three cups. She filled them silently and put one on the bedside table for me.
“Take the damned coffee,” Charlotte barked.
“
Lord knows you could use it. Look at you. They say you’ve become a drunk, is that true?”
“Just a bum, thanks. Alcohol is for those purposeless wandering souls of our fair town. I have a purpose,” I answered emphatically.
“To destroy our good name, no doubt.”
“Good?” I laughed. “White trash is still white trash, Charlotte, no matter how you dress it.”
Penny smirked but said nothing. She also knew of the tight suspicion the retired Yankees of Potsham held for someone claiming to be of Southern aristocracy. And Charlotte had made that claim every single day of her existence.
Charlotte pursed her lips together in annoyance, the bevel of irritation increasing in her forehead as she scowled. “Go,” she ordered Penny.
Penny’s smirk shriveled to a stiff line of umbrage as she bustled out. I got the distinct impression that she wanted to witness Charlotte’s undoing as much as I wanted it to happen.
“Drink the coffee,” Charlotte said.
I moved to the bedside and took a sip. “She can’t make coffee,” I said.
“I know," Charlotte replied, cocking her head slightly, her nostrils aflare. “Couldn’t you have bathed at least?”
“And ruin my entrance?” I asked with a glance down at the bum’s layers of clothing I wore to keep me warm.
Charlotte conceded my point with a nod. “Will you be alright when I pass, Charles?”
I lowered myself into the French chair beside the bed, wishing I had a cigarette.
“There’s a pack under the bible in the drawer,” Charlotte said automatically. “Matches too.”
I stopped and looked at her. I hated it when she did that. “I thought you quit.”
“For what? Six months more won’t make any difference. Might as well enjoy it.”
After shuffling the contents of the drawer around, I finally lit up and inhaled. It had been quite a while since I’d had a fresh factory rolled cigarette. I put one to Charlotte’s lips and she did the same. It was a habit we both hated and enjoyed. There was nothing like a good smoke to punctuate conversation and abhorrence.
“I’ll survive, Charlotte,” I said, finally answering her question. “I always have. Through everything,” I added as I blew out a cloud of blue smoke.
“But what will you do?”
“The truth?”
She nodded hesitantly, seeming slightly afraid of the answer. “Go to the city and sell my ass.”
She closed her eyes with a wince as I smiled around the cigarette. “This family won’t know how to handle it, Charlotte.” I snickered in delight at the thought of it.
“Please Charles, I’m asking... Call it a last request.”
My face went dead. “Forget it. You used your last request years ago.”
Her body was suddenly rigid, the claw of her finger jumping off the bed and pointing at me in accusation. “You’d defile my memory like that?”
I rose from the chair slightly and leaned toward the bed. “Charlotte, I’d piss on your grave if I thought someone would care, but nobody does and nobody will.”
She looked at me for a long moment, put her hand back atop the sheet and propped a sneer on her face to hold back the pout that would keep her silent for a short time.
“I never meant for you to hate me, Charles,” she said after I got up and went back to the window.
I glanced at her irritably and shook my head at her tedium as I flicked my spent cigarette into the darkness. I could have returned the volley and told her that I didn’t, but that would only have perpetuated the inane. And if she really believed it, then she’d spoken it many years too late.
“Hate is the only thing that keeps me alive, Charlotte.”
“And what’s left?”
I held my arms out parallel to the floor. “This, Charlotte. This is it. Nothing more, nothing less.”
But she was suddenly asleep, the cigarette dangling from her mouth and a slight snore emanating from within.
I went over, took the cigarette from her lips, and took a drag as I scrutinized her and our past. Was there a time when I had loved this woman? There must have been. How else would my passion have slipped so far to the other side of love?
A car passed close to the house, illuminating the slow shadowy trickle of snowflakes in the fog. The car slowed, and as the light from its headlights grew softer, I heard the gritty sound of a plow putting sand down against the ice. The car honked thankfully before the two passed and their cadence faded into the weight of the snow. It made me wonder, who was the car here and who was the truck?
I decided to smoke in the dark and turned off the lights, wondering, as I stared out at the icy void, if I could get used to this again; to smokes, and warmth, and money.