6. Charly
— ? —
Charly
The knock comes at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and I should have known just from the sound of it. Normal people knock like they’re asking a question. Whoever this is knocks like they’ve already decided I’m going to open the door.
So I open it.
And there she is. My mother, in the good coat she saves for church and funerals, mouth set in the flat line that means she has come to fix me.
“Charlotte.” She walks straight past me into the house without being asked. “This has gone on long enough.”
“Hi, Mom. Sure, come on in.” I shut the door behind her and lean on it.
She doesn’t even hear the sarcasm. She never has. She just looks around the place the way she looks at a restaurant she’s about to complain about.
“You can’t hide out here forever.”
“I’m not hiding. I’m recovering. They’re different things.” I cross my arms.
“Recovering.” She says the word like it tastes bad. “Recovering from what, exactly? A change of plans?”
I actually laugh. “A change of plans. Is that what we’re calling it?”
“What would you like me to call it?” She sets her purse on the counter like she’s staying.
“How about a betrayal? How about my fiancé standing up in front of everyone we know to tell me he’s in love with my twin sister? How about her being pregnant with his baby? Pick any of those.”
“Lower your voice.”
“There’s nobody here, Mom. Who exactly am I bothering?” I spread my hands at the empty house.
“That is not the point.” She clicks across the floor toward the kitchen in her heels.
“The point is that this family has a reputation, and people talk. The point is that your father had an episode in front of everyone he knows and he does not need more stress. The point is that this needs to be cleaned up.”
“Cleaned up?” I follow her in. “And how do you want me to clean it up? Should I go back and not fall in love with the man who was sleeping with my sister? Should I have been a better fiancée so he didn’t have to?”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“I’m not being dramatic. I’m asking you what you want from me.” I stop on the other side of the counter.
She stops at the counter and turns around and gives me the look. The one I’ve gotten my whole life. The one that says I am being difficult, I am being too much, I am the problem in the room.
“I want you to come home. I want you to make peace with your sister. And I want this family to move on, together.”
I just stare at her.
“Make peace with her.”
“Yes. Make peace with her.” She says it like I’m slow. “She is your twin, Charlotte. She is your blood. Whatever happened between her and Adam...”
“Say it. Whatever happened. Go ahead and finish that sentence, Mom, I want to hear how you make it small.”
“I am not going to sit here and have you put words in my mouth.”
“I’m not putting anything in your mouth. I’m asking you to actually name it, out loud, in this kitchen. Because you keep saying whatever happened like it was weather. Like it just rolled in.”
“Whatever happened. She slept with my fiancé. For months. While I was planning a wedding. While I was tasting cakes and picking flowers and telling everyone how lucky I was. She was in his bed the whole time.” My voice climbs and I let it.
“These things happen in families.”
“No. They don’t. This is not a normal thing that we can just brush off and laugh about. This is a betrayal they made, over and over, knowing exactly what it would do to me.”
She sighs. It’s the sigh of a woman who has been so patient for so long. “You’re being selfish.”
“I’m being selfish?” I almost choke on it.
“Yes. You’re thinking about you, you, you, and there is a whole family standing behind you that you are not thinking about at all.”
“Say one of their names, then. One person in this family who’s worried about me instead of the photos. Go ahead.”
She doesn’t. She just presses her lips together, and that silence is its own answer, the same answer I’ve been getting my whole life.
“Your father’s heart is not strong. Your grandmother is asking questions I don’t know how to answer. Everyone we know was in that church, and you are sitting out here in some man’s house like some kind of...”
“Like some kind of what, Mom?” I wait for her to finish it. She doesn’t.
She flaps a hand. “This is not productive. I didn’t come here to fight.”
“Then why did you come?”
“To talk sense into you.” She pulls out a kitchen chair and sits, crossing her ankles like we’re at the club having tea. “Charlotte. I know you’re hurt. I know this is not what you wanted. But you need to think about the bigger picture here.”
“The bigger picture?” I stay standing.
“Thank God you and Rebecca are twins.” She says it like it’s a gift. Like I should be relieved. “Can you imagine if you didn’t look alike? Can you imagine what people would say if they could actually tell, in the photos, that he changed brides at the altar?”
The room goes a little sideways.
“What did you just say?” My hand finds the edge of the counter.
“The phones, Charlotte. Everyone had a phone out. Half of those pictures are already going around. But nobody can tell. That’s the only mercy in this whole mess.
The story everyone’s settled on is that there was a small change of plans, a little confusion at the front, nothing worth talking about.
” She shakes her head. “But if you two looked different, if anyone could see in those pictures that he swapped one of you for the other...”
“That’s the mercy. That’s the part you’re grateful for. Not that I’m okay. That the pictures came out clean.”
“I’m being practical. One of us has to be.”
“Practical, sure.” I hear my own voice go thin. “You sat down somewhere and you actually thought, well, at least they’re identical, at least it won’t show. That was a comfort to you.”
“It is a comfort to me. Do you have any idea what it would do to your father if this turned into a story people whispered about for years?”
“So the problem isn’t what he did to me. The problem is that it almost showed.” I say it slow, just to be sure I’m hearing it right.
“The problem is that you are making this so much harder than it has to be.”
I look at her. This is the woman who raised me. Who braided my hair and packed my lunches and told me I could be anything. And she is sitting in my borrowed kitchen telling me the real disaster here is how it looks to the neighbors.
“Get out.”
“Excuse me?” Her eyebrows go up.
“Get out of this house. Before I forget you’re my mother.” I point at the door.
“Charlotte, you are not thinking straight.” She doesn’t move.
“I’m not making peace with Rebecca. I’m not coming home to play happy family so Dad’s blood pressure stays down, I love him and he knows I need time, and Grandma doesn’t get awkward questions at bridge.
I’m not going to stand here and call the worst day of my life a small change of plans.
” I count it all off, steady, and watch it not land on her at all.
She stands. Her face goes hard, the way it always does the second she stops getting her way. “You’re acting like a child.”
“And you’re being cruel. The scary part is I don’t think you even know it.” I hold my ground on the other side of the counter.
“Everything I have ever done has been for this family.” She presses a hand flat to her chest, wounded, like I’m the one drawing blood here.
“For the family. Never once for me. Not one time in twenty-nine years has it been just for me, and you don’t even hear it when you say things like that.” My voice doesn’t shake, and I’m almost proud of it.
“I am your mother.” She lifts her chin.
“Then act like it.” I hold her eyes and don’t back down.
The slap comes out of nowhere. Her hand cracks across my cheek and my head snaps to the side and for a second everything is white and ringing.
I don’t flinch. I don’t cry.
I turn my face back, slow, and I look her dead in the eye. My cheek is on fire. My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my teeth. But my voice comes out flat and even.
“That’s the last time you ever put your hands on me.”
“Charlotte, that is enough.” Her voice wobbles for the first time all afternoon.
“I said get out.” I don’t raise my voice this time.
“You cannot just...” She trails off, hunting for the rest of it.
“I can. I am.” I walk to the door and open it wide. The afternoon sun pours in, way too bright and cheerful for what’s happening in here. “You picked your side the second you walked in asking me to forgive them. So go be with Rebecca. That’s where you’ve always wanted to be anyway.”
Her mouth opens, then closes. For maybe the first time in her life my mother has nothing to say.
She walks to the door and stops right in front of me, and I can see her hunting for the words that will put me back in my place, turn me back into the daughter who does what she’s told.
“Your sister is pregnant and frightened and she needs her family right now,” she says. “And you’re making all of it about you. The way you always do.”
And there it is. Out loud, finally, after twenty-nine years of me pretending I imagined it.
“Goodbye, Mom.” I hold the door and wait for her to walk through it.
She leaves. Her heels crunch down the gravel. A car door slams, an engine turns over, and then she’s gone.
I close the door.
My legs go somewhere between the kitchen and the couch. I slide down the wall and sit on the floor with my knees pulled up and I wait for it. The tears. The breakdown. The thing that’s supposed to crack open and pour out.
Nothing comes.
I just sit there while the sun moves across the floor and the light goes orange and my cheek stops burning and starts to ache instead.
It’s almost dark when I make myself go outside. The sky’s gone that deep blue right before black, and the air has a cold bite to it now.
The porch step is hard under me. I pull my arms in around myself and stare out at the dark and try to feel anything that isn’t this big empty hole in my chest.
My hands are shaking. I can see them doing it and I can’t make them stop, and honestly it doesn’t even feel like they’re mine.
The door opens behind me. I don’t turn around.
Clarence sits down on the step next to me, not too close, and here’s the thing, he doesn’t ask me anything. Not what happened, not if I’m okay, none of it. He doesn’t make me talk. He just sits there with me in the dark, and somehow that’s the only thing I could have stood right then.
We sit like that for a long time. The stars come out one by one and I just look at them because looking at them is easier than thinking about what my life has turned out to be.
My hands won’t stop shaking.
I try to hide it. I press them flat on my legs, I tuck them under my arms, but the shaking just climbs up into the rest of me until my whole body is doing it.
Clarence puts his hand over both of mine on the cold step. His fingers fold around mine and just stay there, and I feel his warmth spread everywhere.
I should pull away and tell him I don’t need this, I don’t want to be taken care of, I don’t trust anybody named Carrington to touch me without wanting something for it.
I don’t pull away.
His thumb moves over my knuckles, slow, back and forth, not asking me for anything.
“She hit me.” It comes out wrecked. “She drove all the way out here to tell me to forgive them and move on for the good of the family, and when I said no, she slapped me across the face.”
His hand tightens on mine. Just enough that I know he heard.
“She thanked God we’re twins.” I have to stop and get my voice back. “So the photos wouldn’t embarrass anybody. That’s what she’s worried about. Not me. Just whether anyone can tell it was supposed to be my wedding.”
“Charly. Look at me.” He says it soft, but it isn’t a request I can ignore.
I do. And he’s closer than I thought, close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him, and his eyes have gone dark and serious and fixed on mine like there is nothing else out here in the whole night.
“Your mother is wrong about you,” he says, low. “Every single thing she said in there. Wrong.”
And I don’t know if it’s the way he says it or how close his mouth is or the fact that he is the first person in six days to look at me like I’m not the one who did something.
But the air between us changes. Goes tight and warm and full.
His eyes drop to my mouth, just for a second, and mine do the same, and neither of us moves back, and we are close enough now that one inch would do it.
His phone goes off in his pocket.
It cuts through everything. He doesn’t move for a second, jaw tight, eyes still on me. Then he pulls it out, and I see the screen before he tilts it away.
Adam.
“Don’t,” I say, my hand coming up between us. “Don’t answer it. I don’t want to hear his voice coming out of you.”
But Clarence is looking at the screen, and whatever he sees there has changed his face completely, and the warm thing from a second ago is gone like it was never there.
“It’s not a call,” he says slowly. “He sent me something.”
“Sent you what?” I lean in to look.
He turns the phone so I can see it. It’s a photo, the kind you take without anyone knowing, slightly crooked. It’s the two of us. Right now. On this porch, his hand over mine.
Under it, three words from Adam.
Does she know?