Chapter 19
CHAPTER 19
Charlie
I ’ve never felt more out of place in a home. Maybe if I’d visited my grandparents when I was a kid, this place might be nostalgic. But I didn’t, so it feels oppressive. Cozy might be another word for it, but I’m not the type to snuggle up on a couch, especially not the one I’m seated on.
I look at its floral surface and can almost feel the gummy grime and dust clinging to its threads, accumulated over decades. I keep my face schooled. I can’t afford to insult the valuable woman busying herself in the kitchen. She’ll be back any second.
Or any minute.
She’s slow-moving and refused my help when I offered.
Since I have a day off, just one rare chance earned by the nonstop work over the past month, I decided to go sniffing around in Lillian’s past. No better place to start than the woman who took her in after the accident that claimed her father’s life. A fire like that easily made the news the next day since it left two poor girls without parents. Tommy found out that a neighbor offered her perspective in an interview, a kind woman who took in the girls temporarily.
I’m at her house now, watching dust mites dance in the afternoon sunlight filtering through the aged lace curtains. I take in the brown carpet, the low wooden coffee table, and the porcelain knickknacks stuffed into glass and wood cabinets. Old pictures of kids and young adults crowd the walls, capturing various lives through the years. And there are some of the same young woman, posing next to cars or on the beach, in a field, at some kind of fair.
She seems like a riot.
I take a deep, bored breath and almost choke. There’s a thickness to the air, perhaps a comforting familiarity to her, but it’s a suffocating blanket of uninteresting memories to me.
Better take smaller breaths from now on.
With nothing to do but wait for the woman to return, I take out my phone and start browsing the news. It’s all I’ve been doing lately, all I have time to do. I attend events with Lillian, and on my way home to sleep and prepare for the next event, I check what polls are saying, what the media is saying about my last event.
And it’s all good. Lillian was the exact balm I needed to smooth things over. They don’t talk shit about how I might be too young to relate to families or that I need a wife. They praise Lillian and speculate about our future instead.
It doesn’t take long to find a photo of us pictured together, the two of us smiling out at a rally crowd, our hands extended in a wave. We look good together, sharing the same bright smile.
We look promising, like hope.
We look perfect together.
Anytime I spot a photo of us, it transfixes me for a while. I like to look at us. I didn’t know I had a Lillian-sized hole in my life until Anne found her for me, and now I can’t picture realizing my ambitions without her. That’s due in part to how well she’s adapted to me, what’s expected of her. She just turns it on, informed by something inside of her about what’s needed in any situation. Well, not every situation. But when she’s caught off guard, she’s so fucking cute.
I wonder what Sherrie would say about her.
No doubt, she’d be the one poking holes into our love story, saying what everyone else has the sense to avoid thinking about.
Is there any proof you’ve had a girlfriend all along? If you had a gem like Lillian tucked away this whole time, wouldn’t you have shown her off earlier?
I can hear the questions without trying.
I’m glad to be rid of Sherrie.
People are willing to overlook the truth happily if they can be entertained instead. She didn’t understand that.
And that’s why I’m here.
Nobody wants to hear the truth of Lillian’s past, no matter what it is. They want her to be my perfect doll, and I’ll keep her that way.
So is that truth-seeker Sherrie?—
“Cherry pie?”
The old woman’s offer interrupts my thoughts as she bustles into the living room, holding out a slice of pie on a little plate.
“You can’t say no to an afternoon snack, can you? I have some coffee for you, too!”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I say, rising to take the plate from her. “I’d love some homemade pie.”
“I bought it at the store.” She chuckles and swats at the air, already turning around to head back to the kitchen.
I look down at the pie. There’s a little fork resting by its side, and before I can finish considering whether I could stealthily throw it out the window, she’s back with two steaming mugs of coffee.
“Black with a couple of sugars. You don’t need cream, right?”
“No, ma’am, that’s perfect.”
“Me, I need it with lots of sugar and cream!” She beams at me, and I notice a couple of missing teeth. The woman has her own kind of charm. “Sit, sit!” she presses me, shuffling over to the couch opposite me.
I set my pie and coffee on the table and sit, ready to hear her out.
“You’ve been busy, Charlie! It’s so sweet of you to drop by to talk about Lillian,” she coos once she’s settled.
“You won’t be having any pie?” I can’t help but ask. “Did you leave it?—”
“Ohh no, no, no. I had some earlier. Please, eat! Relax!” She looks like she’s been naughty. I chuckle and settle back in, then grab my plate. She’s the kind of grandma who won’t let me leave until I finish every last bite.
“I have a little time to spare,” I continue, addressing her statement and diving into the slice with my fork. “I want Lillian to be comfortable in my home and with my family. She doesn’t seem to like to talk about her childhood. I don’t want to press her, but I’m hoping I can soothe some of the pain there.”
“Yes, yes,” the grandma says, nodding knowingly. “There’s quite some pain there, I’m afraid.”
“Joy, too, though, right?” I prompt. Can’t cut directly to the chase. I’ll make her bring it up.
“A little of that.” She’s not very convincing. “The girls were with me when there was strife in the home, that’s the feeling I had.”
I encourage her with a look, my mouth full of the pie that doesn’t taste like anything.
“I lived down the street from the family. Cat used to bring the girls over in afternoons and sometimes evenings. She’d do her best to hide her distress, but she carried it with her. The girls knew. They’d sit with me, wouldn’t say a word at first. Took some time for them to loosen up, and all the little one would do is scribble in a book or fiddle with some project or another.”
“Amber would?”
“Mmhm. Lillian stopped coming around. Older girls have more to do around the neighborhood. She didn’t get into trouble, so I let her be.”
“In the afternoons?”
“Oh yes. Some evenings, they’d come to spend the night. Lillian would just sit quietly, then, watching over her sister. They’d help me clean up after dinner, really quiet little things, especially after Cat passed. Tragic, really tragic.”
“What happened?” I ask gently, to be polite.
“Terrible accident.” She shakes her head, looking down at the floor. She has some coffee before continuing. “Amber was the one to tell me, not their father. He never came by. The little one said Cat was in the pool for too long.” She falters, screwing up her lips regretfully. “She must have drowned on her own there. I think it was the wine. She drank in the afternoons, I could smell it on her. But I didn’t blame her. It was really just tragic, a bad situation with the father,” she finishes with a whisper.
I nod slowly, thinking back to what Lillian told me about her father. If he was hitting the girls, he must have been hitting their mom, too. She must have drank to cope and stashed the girls with the neighbor when things got bad.
“I think he got what was coming to him,” she continues, just as quietly. “I’m just thankful the girls were with me at the time. Losing both parents back-to-back like that must have been stressful, but it was for the best, I’m sure.”
“Losing their father?”
“Yes. I know it’s bad to say, but you could see the stress wearing them down, especially Lillian. After Cat died, they seemed further away, even when they were right here in the living room with me.”
I can imagine the kind of stress they were under clearly. The grandma continues, steering me off my own path to the past.
“That day, Amber was lying on my floor like usual, playing with some clay. Lillian showed up a while later, and the two of them played around. Lillian was a good girl. I knew I could trust her, but I didn’t like her roaming around. I felt better when the two of them were here. It was a nice afternoon. For once, the two girls were playing together, getting lost in their own little world.” She nods to herself and clasps and unclasps her hands.
I wait patiently. The mood is tense, and I know she doesn’t want to go on.
“Amber smelled the smoke,” she finally says, closing her eyes. “We called 911, and the firefighters caught it before it could spread, but…”
“The girls…” I start.
“Amber was a wreck, screaming and crying for her daddy, everything they’d lost. Lillian held her, frozen in shock. The poor thing. She didn’t speak for a little while after that. Didn’t start talking again until their aunt came to take them away. She’s a good girl,” she says again.
“I know she is.”
“It couldn’t have been anything other than an accident. He drank and smoked, the whole neighborhood knew. Didn’t take long to put that together. He must have fallen asleep with a cigarette, drunk as a skunk. No one hated the family. With the mother dying the year before, it was nothing but a tragedy.”
I nod my head gravely, considering what she’s said. I’ve got a more detailed picture, but it’s not telling me anything I didn’t know. I sigh with frustration and run my hand over my face.
Looks like this was a waste of my time.
“Don’t take it so hard, Charlie,” she consoles me pityingly. “Lillian is in a much better place. She’s got you, now. She’s looking so much better, so much happier. This was a healthy thing for her, you know, in the long run. The worst thing she got into was cigarettes. I think the fire scared her straight. I didn’t smell them on her anymore after that.”
“Lillian smoked as a teen?”
“Oh, they all get into some thing or another. But she stopped, straightened right up. Worked hard for little Amber, caring for her, looking after her. I think it was the stress that made her smoke. When the stress was gone, that nastiness stopped.”
I try to picture Lillian smoking and just can’t do it. But then again, I couldn’t picture her standing up to a big guy like Lou, either. Guess she always had that protective streak in her?—
It happened to me a lot. Me and Amber. After my mom died, it started happening more often. She wasn’t around to…
It hits me like a bolt of lightning.
I leap out of my seat, realization dawning as the grandma looks at me with surprise.
Maybe her father fell asleep. But was he really smoking at the time?
Where was Lillian before she came over to play that afternoon?
“Is everything alright?” the grandma asks with concern.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I forgot, I had a meeting scheduled. I’m sorry it’s so abrupt, but I should get going.”
“Not to worry, I understand. You’re fighting a good fight, after all!” She stands up cheerfully. My erratic behavior must have snapped her out of the gloom that settled over her. “Take care of that girl, won’t you?” she says, moving to escort me out. I look around, making sure I have everything, then head to the door.
“Of course. I have a better idea of how I can make my house more of a home for her. Thank you for talking with me this afternoon, ma’am.”
“Oh not a problem at all, Charlie. You’re a sweetheart. I’m voting for you, you know?” She chuckles and pats me on the back.
“Thank you. I’ll do my best. I found a special girl.”
“You did, you did. Aah, I never like thinking about those days. Hopefully this is the last time I’ll speak about it.”
“I didn’t mean to bother you too much, ma’am?—”
“No, no, it’s not just you. There was another young lady asking about Lillian a couple of months ago.”
Sherrie?
I freeze, my hand on the doorknob.
“A journalist?” I ask kindly, giving her a warm smile.
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t remember what she said she was. Maybe a friend of Lillian’s? Maybe you know her. She had these big glasses, green eyes, a lot of black hair. Tall, too, taller than me!”
“Ohh, yes, I think I do know her!” We share a laugh, and I can taste fire on my tongue.
Fucking Lottie.