9. On a Thursday #5
"Say hi to Frank for me." Charlie's eyes flooded with tears.
Helen turned her head to the side and regarded Charlie, tears rolling down her cheeks.
She raised the hand Charlie held and placed it against Charlie's cheek.
Charlie placed her hand over it, pressing into the warmth of her hand like she did when she was younger.
"I will, Charlie."
Charlie let that settle in her heart as she looked into this woman's eyes, the woman who taught her she didn't have to settle for what someone else told her she was. She pulled Helen's hand back and kissed it, pressing her forehead there for a long moment. Then she stood.
"I love you, Mom."
"I love you, too, Charlie. More than anything." Charlie smiled and nodded. She looked over at Katie, then, and saw she was crying, too. She smiled at her sister.
"I'll give you two a minute," Charlie said, her voice barely holding.
Katie stared up at her, and something passed between them, an understanding that didn't need words.
Katie was always closer to Helen, the way Charlie was closer to Frank.
Charlie didn't have the opportunity to say goodbye to Frank.
She wasn't going to be the reason Katie didn't get her chance. This was Katie's time.
Charlie stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her.
She leaned against it, pressing the back of her head to the wood, and listened.
She could hear the muffled sound of both their voices through the door, low and steady, saying things that were just for Helen and just for Katie. Then, after a while, silence.
A few minutes passed. The house was so quiet Charlie could hear the clock in the hallway.
Then she heard Katie crying. Not the controlled kind. The kind that comes when something has changed and can't be changed back.
Charlie turned around and opened the door.
Katie was lying across Helen's frame, her arms wrapped around her, her face buried against Helen's shoulder. Helen's eyes were closed. Her face was peaceful. And she was smiling.
"She's gone," Katie whispered without lifting her head.
Tears fell down Charlie's cheeks as she crossed the room and pulled her sister into her arms. Katie held on, and Charlie held on, and the two of them looked down at the most extraordinary woman they had ever known.
There was so much to do. Phone calls to make and arrangements to handle and a life to wrap up in paperwork and deadlines and nonsense that didn't matter in this moment.
Right now, was for them. For Charlie and her sister and their mom, and even Frank, too.
So, they did what they always did.
They stayed.
Helen passed on the Thursday after Thanksgiving with the curtains open and her girls beside her. She went the way Frank had gone, quietly, without fuss, as though leaving the world was just another thing to be handled with grace.
Charlie made the calls. Katie handled the arrangements. They moved through the days after Helen's death together, in tandem, two people who had practiced grief before and knew the choreography.
The funeral was small with a few neighbors and the pastor. Helen had wanted it that way. The hospice nurse was also there, who had loved Helen in the way people love someone they only knew at the end but can tell was extraordinary before.
Charlie did not speak at the funeral. Katie did, and it was beautiful.
Then Charlie sat in the first row with Katie and held the brown box of letters in her lap. She kept her hand on Katie's the entire time.
After the service, they went back to Helen's house and sat at the yellow table for the last time.
"I don't want to think about this but, soon, I'm going to need to go back," Charlie said.
Katie nodded. "I know."
"The house, the estate; there's just so much to handle."
"I know," Katie said again. "I'll stay."
Charlie looked at her. "Kit, you've already been gone long. I know how much your program means to you, your research. Maybe we could hire—"
"I talked to my advisor last week," Katie said.
"The day before Mom passed. I asked to take a leave of absence for the spring semester.
I told them my Mom was dying, and my advisor said that it was not going to be a problem.
UCLA approved it yesterday. My position in my cohort will be there when I go back, and my research will be there, too. "
Charlie stared at her sister, twenty-three years old and already handling things Charlie hadn't thought of yet. "You planned this?"
"I planned this," Katie said. "Someone has to take care of things here.
And you have a new job... your dream job.
You can't lose that, Charlie. Especially not after what Helen said to you before she died.
" Katie's eyes were steady, and Charlie knew the truth in her words.
"Let me do this, Charlie. I know I can."
Charlie wanted to argue. She wanted to say she'd find a way, that she'd talk to her boss, that she could handle it from California.
But Katie's face held the same thing she'd been seeing for twenty-three years; the quiet, stubborn certainty of a person who had already decided.
It was the same face Charlie made. It was the same face Helen had made.
"Okay," Charlie said.
"Okay," Katie said.
Charlie bought a plane ticket that would fly her back to California the next day. She packed the brown box of letters in her carry-on, wrapped up in one of Helen's dish towels. She couldn't leave them in Shelbyville, even if Charlie couldn't bring herself to open them yet.
When Katie dropped her off at the Indianapolis Airport, they held one another for a long time.
"You call me, okay? If anything goes wrong, I'll help or I'll jump on a plane to come out and we can fix it together." Charlie held her sister even while she huffed.
"I promise it'll be okay, Charlie."
"Humor me then, at least." They broke apart and Katie smiled at her.
"Okay. I promise to call you if anything goes wrong and I need my superhero sister to fly in and save the day." Charlie raised an eyebrow. "Does that suffice for you?" Katie smirked.
"It'll do."
Katie laughed and Charlie grinned. But she went in for another hug, and felt her heart constrict in her chest. Katie must have felt Charlie's change because she pulled Charlie tighter. "I'm going to be okay."
"I know," Charlie said, a tilt to her words at her adopting Katie's line. Katie laughed lightly against her.
"Call me when you get home?" Katie asked as they parted for the last time.
"Promise."
"I love you."
"I love you, too, Kit-Kat."
"More than anything?"
"More than the moon and the stars and the planets combined.
" Katie smiled at that as Charlie grabbed her bags and began to walk away.
She blew Katie a kiss and then turned around to finish the walk to her gate, hiding tears before Katie could see them.
This time, she didn't want her sister to see how much she was going to miss her.
Katie needed to stay, and Charlie wasn't going to do anything to stand in her way.
? PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES?
December was the coldest month of Charlie's life, and California doesn't get cold.
She went to work. She came home. She called Katie every night.
She played all the mixtapes, and she played Rumours on the turntable, but "Songbird" sounded different now.
Emptier, like the piano was playing in a room where someone had just left.
She played it anyway, because the alternative was silence, and silence was worse.
A few days before Christmas, a package arrived from Shelbyville. Inside was a cassette tape in a hand-decorated case. This time there were drawings of rovers, satellites, and the moon's surface, similar to the doodles Katie had been drawing on them since she was twelve years old. Their tradition.
Every year since Charlie left for Caltech, Katie had made her a mixtape for Christmas of their "best of" collection of the songs they'd loved that year.
It always had the ones they'd played in the apartment and the car and the kitchen while cooking.
Eleven tapes over eleven years, and Katie had never missed one.
Not even this year, with Helen gone and an estate to manage and two thousand miles between them.
She'd mailed it early so it would arrive before Christmas.
Charlie held the tape gently in her hands, smiling at the drawings and the songs picked for this year's roundup. Then she put it in the Walkman and pressed play.
She spent Christmas Eve alone in the apartment. She made chicken piccata from Helen's recipe and ate it at the table by herself. She opened a bottle of wine and drank one glass before she poured the rest down the sink.
Later on, Katie called her that night, and they talked for two hours about nothing, laughing and goofing off and just enjoying each other's company when they were both feeling lonely across such a vast distance. It was one of the best conversations Charlie ever had with Katie.
That Christmas Eve night, after they hung up, Charlie pulled the brown box of letters out of the closet by the front door.
She'd stored it there to keep safe, but also so she could look for it when she was ready.
She wasn't sure if she was ready yet, but she sat on the floor of the living room anyway and opened the box.
She ended up not reading them. Not yet. Turns out, she wasn't ready.
But she did look through them. She touched Frank's careful handwriting on some envelopes, traced Helen's elegant script on others.
All of them were yellowed with age and soft at the edges from decades in the box.
She held up one of Frank's to her nose and tried to see if she could still smell pipe tobacco.
Instead, all the letters smelled of their home.