1. The Exception
ONE
THE EXCEPTION
? SHELBYVILLE, INDIANA, UNITED STATES?
The hospital room was bright and chilly. It had a smell that stung, something clean and sharp that Charlie Wickett didn’t know how to describe. She was six years old, standing on her toes, and figured the reason for the burning in her nostrils could wait.
She had a new person in her life.
Behind her, voices. Her father's, low and clipped, was saying something about how he needed to get back to work.
And then her mother's, spoken in that tone of hers that masked her impatience without succeeding, asking the nurse about visiting hours so her husband could return at a time that was 'convenient to him to spend time with his family.
' The sounds reached Charlie's ears the way sounds reach you underwater, present but shapeless, coming from a room she had already left, even though her feet hadn't moved.
The bassinet was a pure, crisp white color filled with soft blankets.
The edges came up to her chin, just tall enough that she couldn't quite see over them.
She curled her fingers on the lip and tried to pull herself higher, the plastic pressing into her palms as her feet found footing on top of the bottom shelf.
The baby was small. Smaller than Charlie had expected, though she wasn't sure what to expect of a baby that was only a day old.
The little bundle was glowing with pink, smooth skin.
The face looked like it was folded, little creases everywhere, and the eyes were closed, or almost closed.
Charlie noticed the knit cap on its head had slipped slightly sideways.
And those tiny hands, ones so small they didn't look like they could grab anything bigger than a raisin.
As Charlie studied this small creature, she watched as one of those little hands began to move.
Tiny fingers opening and closing against the blanket, slow and searching for something to hold but finding nothing.
Then, the baby's fingers reached over and found Charlie's pinky where it hung over the lip of the bassinet.
And those tiny, little fingers closed tightly around Charlie's smallest finger.
Not strong, but not weak. Just... there. A warmth wrapped around her that made the whole room go fully quiet. The fluorescent lights above her, the linoleum under her shoes, the voices behind her, the cold, the smell. All of it slid behind glass, frosted and distant and no longer important.
There was only the weight of a hand she could barely feel, holding on to her.
Charlie couldn't tell who was the one not letting go.
What she did know was something behind her ribs had gone warm and still, and her breathing had slowed without her noticing, matching the baby's.
She curled her pinky around the tiny hand, holding on right back.
Charlie stood there for a long time. She watched the baby's face and the baby's fingers and the rise and fall of the blanket. She barely moved, not speaking, while the world outside the little bubble they'd created went on without them.
In a single moment, the baby opened its eyes and looked right at Charlie.
Charlie gazed back at this beautiful child and saw so many things she couldn't identify, but she knew they were important.
The grip on her finger never ceased, and Charlie didn't let go.
Before long, there was only one thing Charlie could think to do.
"Hi," she said, whispering quietly so only she and the baby could hear her words. It felt like the right thing to say at the time.
When a hand finally touched her shoulder and guided her gently away, she went.
But her pinky trailed behind as long as it could, keeping contact with that little baby.
Her hand was warm for the rest of the day.
Throughout the day, she kept looking at her finger, turning it over, studying the place where the grip had held her.
It felt as if something had been transferred, a transaction between two people who didn't know it would become a lifeline.
She'd been handed a small, invisible power she didn't yet know how to name.
But she knew, with the certainty that only six-year-olds possess, she would spend the rest of her life carrying.
Her parents named the baby Katherine. Everyone would call her Katie.
But Charlie would call her Kit.
Charlie Wickett was a fixer, but in a way that made her special. In fact, she fixed her first machine at ten years old, thank you very much. But the one thing people always got wrong about her was thinking that was the interesting part.
The toaster had been burning bread on one side for as long as anyone in the Wickett house could remember.
Her father, Ed, scraped off the black and ate it.
Her mother, Diane, threw away the bad slice and toasted another.
Katie thought the burnt pieces were great for rubbing across the table in her high chair like crayons, creating some spectacular pieces of art in Charlie's eyes on many occasions. Diane didn't agree.
But the burning bread bothered Charlie. One Saturday morning, she sat on the kitchen floor with a butter knife and her mother's sewing scissors, and opened it up.
Once inside, she found the problem. A crumb tray so packed with char it had warped the heating element off-center by a quarter inch.
Oh, buddy, she thought at the toaster. No wonder.
She bent the element back, cleaned out the tray, which was, she had to admit, legitimately disgusting, and put the whole thing back together, slipping it into its spot before anyone knew what she'd done.
The toast came out even the next morning. Ed looked at it for a long time, then at Diane, then at the toast again.
"Did you buy a new toaster?" he asked.
"No," Diane said. "Why?"
"Nothing," Ed replied. "Nothing..."
Charlie, who was already sitting at the table eating cereal, said nothing. She was more concerned with the family's lawnmower, which had been pulling left all spring, and adding it to her list of things to fix.
What people got wrong was this that they heard "fixed a toaster at ten years old" and thought the story was about how smart she was.
It wasn't. Don't misunderstand though. Charlie was smart.
But the real story here was that her entire family had been eating burnt toast, and Charlie was the only one who couldn't stand it.
But not because of the taste. For Charlie, it was because something in her world was broken, and broken things could be fixed.
The distance between those two facts was a gap Charlie would never leave alone.
After the toaster came the lawnmower, which she figured out had been pulling left because the blade was unbalanced.
She'd heard it from the driveway when the boy down the street mowed their lawns on Saturdays.
One Saturday, she waited until he was done and tipped the mower onto its side.
Alright, she told it, let's fix your limp.
Ten minutes of patience and a file, and the blade ran true.
Later that week when the boy came to collect payment, he made sure to thank Ed.
"The mower sure works great now, Mr. Wickett!" The boy called out as he ran down the path to the sidewalk to continue on his way. Ed looked at the mower over by the garbage cans, scratched his chin, and walked away confused.
Then came the vacuum (a loose drive belt, barely worth the ten minutes), the blender (a loose blade assembly Charlie found oddly charming, considering it had been flirting with catastrophe for months), and the clock radio in her parents' bedroom that lost two minutes every week.
Nobody had noticed the clock until Charlie mentioned it was slow at dinner one night.
Diane had waved her off and said, "It's fine, Charlotte.
" At her mother's dismissal, Charlie looked down at her plate.
Katie, across the table, looked at Charlie and then at Diane, her small face tightening in annoyance in a way that nobody else noticed.
Charlie fixed the radio anyway, because it wasn't fine. It was off by two minutes and that meant something was dying inside it. That night, she found the capacitor was bleeding charge. She replaced it with one from a broken radio she'd found in the neighbor's trash.
But it was Ed's electric drill that got her in trouble.
It had been overheating since he bought it, but Ed was adamant about how he never wanted the girls to touch his tools.
One night, though, he came into the garage to grab a screwdriver and found his eleven-year-old daughter sitting cross-legged on the concrete with the drill in fourteen pieces around her.
The sound that man made was not a word so much as a strangled attempt at one.
Charlie looked up at him with the motor housing in her lap and said, "The brushes are worn down unevenly.
That's why it overheats. I can fix it, but I need a flat-head screwdriver, not a Phillips.
" Ed just stared at his daughter. "Oh, and you should probably stop buying tools from the bargain bin at Sears. "
Ed grounded her for a week.
But the drill stopped overheating, and Ed never needed to ask why.
That was the way of Charlie's life growing up in the Wickett house.
She could fix a toaster but her father would ask if someone bought a new one.
She could fix a drill but get grounded for touching it.
She could fix a clock radio at midnight but her mother would never know, because her mother said it was fine, and in the Wickett house, 'fine' was the end of every conversation.
She could fix almost anything under that roof. She just couldn't make anyone notice.
Katie, however, was the exception. Katie was always the exception.