13. Charly
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Charly
“I’d like to send an arrangement to a home address, please.
White lilies. Whatever you’d put together for someone who’s lost a pregnancy.
” My voice doesn’t wobble, which is a miracle considering my hands are doing enough wobbling for my whole body.
“The name on the card is Charly. Just Charly. No message.”
The florist asks me to spell it and I do, and then she reads the address back to me and it’s Adam’s apartment and my throat closes for a second because I used to live there.
“That’s correct. Can you deliver today?” I grip the edge of the counter while I wait.
She can. I hang up and set the phone on the counter and stare at Rebecca’s name on the blocked list.
I spent weeks hating her. I mean really hating her, the kind where you lie awake at night practicing what you’d say if she ever showed up at your door.
And then my cousin called, the one I never even talk to, and said four words, Rebecca lost the baby, and just like that the whole speech was gone. I couldn’t find it anymore.
Because she’s still my sister. We shared a crib. She cried at the same dumb movies I did. And now there’s a baby that isn’t coming, a real one, a little girl, and I can hate Rebecca for everything else she did and still not be able to feel anything but sick about that one.
I don’t forgive her. I want that on the record, even if the only one keeping the record is me. But forgiving her and aching for her turn out to be two different things that can sit in my chest at the same time, and that’s news to me.
My thumb hovers.
One tap and she’s unblocked. One tap and we’re back in each other’s lives whether I’m ready for it or not.
I tap. Her name sits there in my contacts, unblocked, and I pull up the message thread and start typing.
I’m sorry about the baby. I don’t know what else to say except that I’m sorry and I mean it.
My thumb sits over send for a long time. Every word of it is true. That’s the problem. If I send it she’ll think it’s a door opening, and I don’t know yet if it is, and I’m not going to give her a thing I might take back.
Then I delete the whole thing, letter by letter.
The flowers will have to do the talking. They’re better at it than I am right now.
Clarence has been off for days and he’s doing a terrible job of hiding it.
Every morning he’s already outside when I come through for coffee, pacing the yard with his phone pressed to his ear, his free hand running through his hair over and over until it’s standing up in every direction.
He hangs up before I get close. Gives me the tight smile, the one that means don’t ask, and goes inside to make breakfast.
“Who was that?” I set my bag down and watch him.
“Just work.” He doesn’t meet my eyes.
“You pace when it’s just work? You’ve been wearing a track in your own lawn.”
“The lawn needed a path. I’m doing it a favor.” He slides my coffee across the counter without looking at me and changes the subject so fast I almost miss the redirect. “Did you eat yet?”
“Don’t deflect. What’s going on?” I push the coffee aside and lean on the counter.
He leans against the counter, arms folded, deciding how much to tell me. That’s the thing about Clarence. He doesn’t lie. He just decides how much to give you at a time.
“A couple of donors pulled back this week. Foundation stuff. One canceled a meeting, another one rescinded a pledge she’d already confirmed. Kara Whitfield, the one from the gala, the woman who couldn’t stop talking about the student gallery. She was locked in. Now she’s not returning our calls.”
“Did they say why?”
“That’s the part that’s driving me insane. Nobody’s saying why. Kara’s assistant told mine it was a scheduling issue. She pledged a lot of money and now it’s a scheduling issue.”
“That feels like an excuse.”
“Yeah, right?” He picks up his mug, puts it down without drinking. “I’ve been doing this long enough to know when people are avoiding me because they’re busy and when they’re avoiding me because there’s a problem. But no one is telling me anything.”
“You think someone got to them?”
“I think three donors pulling out in the same week isn’t a coincidence. But I can’t prove anything, and I’m not going to run around making accusations based on a gut feeling. That’s exactly the kind of behavior that makes donors nervous in the first place.”
“You think it’s Adam?” I keep my voice level.
He looks at me, and his face says everything his mouth won’t. “I’m not saying that.”
“But you’re thinking it.”
“Charly. I don’t have proof. And I’m not going to stand here and blame my brother for every bad thing that happens in my life just because he’s earned it.”
“He’s not just an easy target. He has reasons.”
“Well, until I can prove it’s him, I’ve got phone calls to make and donors to chase. That’s the job.” He straightens up, rolls his shoulders back. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve dealt with worse.”
He hasn’t, though. His jaw keeps tightening when he thinks I’m not looking, and he hasn’t touched his breakfast in three days.
My phone rings on a Tuesday and the number isn’t blocked anymore because I unblocked it days ago and never re-blocked it and I’ve been pretending I forgot.
Rebecca.
My thumb hovers the same way it did over the message. The screen buzzes in my hand, insistent, and I answer before the angry part of me can overrule the part that picked up the phone.
“Hey. It’s me.” I press the phone to my ear.
“Hey, you actually picked up.” Her voice is thin. Scraped down to almost nothing, and the sound of it hits me right in the chest. “Thank you for the flowers. You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know I didn’t.” I sink onto the arm of the couch.
“They were the only ones that made me cry. Everyone else sent pink arrangements, and I kept looking at all that pink and thinking she would’ve hated pink, because she would’ve been ours, and we hate pink, and nobody else thought about that except you.”
My hand goes tight around the phone. She would’ve been ours. A girl. Rebecca was having a girl.
“Bec, don’t.” It’s all I can get out.
“Can I see you?” she says. “Not at the apartment. I’m at the cemetery, the one out on Marrow Road.
We buried her this morning. There wasn’t any service, we wanted it done quick, just us and a guy with a shovel, and now Adam’s gone home and I’m still standing here and I can’t make myself leave.
I just need my sister. I don’t even care if you yell at me. I just need you to come.”
Every boundary I’ve set since this started says hang up. Every hard word, every door I shut, every promise I made to myself about keeping her out.
“What’s the section number?” I’m already grabbing my keys before I’ve decided to.
“I don’t know. There’s a hill. There’s a tree at the top with no leaves on it. I’m under the tree.”
“I’m coming. Don’t move.” I hang up before I can take it back.
She’s exactly where she said. Under the bare tree at the top of the hill, on her knees in the grass in front of a patch of turned dirt so small it stops the breath in my chest. No headstone yet. Just a little metal marker on a stake, the temporary kind, with a card slid into it.
The first thing that hits me isn’t anger. It’s how small she looks.
Rebecca has never been small. She’s walked into every room of her life at full volume, chin up, heels clicking, our mother’s confidence in every step.
The woman kneeling in the grass is wearing a black dress with grass stains on the knees and her hair pulled back flat and no makeup and circles under her eyes so dark they look bruised.
My face. That’s my face, hollowed out and gray, and I can’t unsee it.
I walk up the hill and lower myself down into the grass beside her. I don’t say anything for a second. There’s nothing in the etiquette books for this.
“You came.” She doesn’t look up from the dirt.
“You said don’t move. I came.” I look at the little marker, at the card, and I have to look away from it. “What was her name?”
“We didn’t pick one in time.” Her voice goes to pieces on it. “She didn’t get a name, Charly. I had eight months and I couldn’t even give her a name before they put her in the ground.”
“Bec, hey.” I put my hand on her back, between her shoulder blades, and she’s shaking so hard it travels straight up my arm.
“They tell you all kinds of things when this happens. The nurses, the pamphlets, the lady from the chapel. Nobody tells you the part that’s actually true.
” She finally looks at me, and her eyes are wrecked.
“Parents aren’t supposed to bury their children, Charly.
It’s backward. I’m supposed to go first. She was supposed to bury me in sixty years and be annoyed about the parking.
That’s the order. And it just got done in the wrong order and there’s no fixing it. ”
“I know.” My throat aches. There’s nothing else honest to say, so I don’t reach for anything bigger. “I know.”
A long quiet sits between us. Not uncomfortable. Just weighed down with a kind of sadness that doesn’t have words yet.
“The nursery’s still set up.” She wipes her face with the back of her hand.
“I wake up every morning and for about three seconds I forget. Then I remember, and my hand goes to my stomach and there’s nothing there.
Adam keeps saying it’s too soon to take the nursery down, and I keep saying I can’t take it down, because if I take it down then it’s real, and I’m not ready for it to be real. ”
“He wasn’t even there.” She says it to the dirt, not to me.
“The night it happened. He wasn’t home. I called him and he didn’t pick up.
I drove myself to the hospital, Charly. Filled out the forms by myself, sat in that waiting room by myself, and when the doctor came out and told me, I was by myself. ”
My stomach turns, because I know exactly where he was. Standing in Clarence’s driveway, drunk, throwing punches, screaming about how everyone else ruined his life. While Rebecca was alone in a hospital losing their daughter.
“Why didn’t you call me?”