21. Charly #2
I dig it out of the bag with shaking fingers and turn off the do not disturb, and they’re all there, stacked up, the calls and the texts I wouldn’t look at. The text first. On my way to you. Please just wait. All of it was real. I read it four times and each time it takes a piece out of me.
Then the voicemail. I press it before I can talk myself out of it and I hold the phone to my ear and his voice fills it, alive and whole and three hours ago.
It’s me. I’m coming to you, okay? Wherever you are, I’m coming. None of that back there was real. None of it. And I’m going to prove it to you. Just please don’t decide anything about us until you see my face. I’m on my way.
He was on his way to me. Saying it wasn’t real, that she meant nothing, coming to prove it, and I turned my phone off and ignored it because I was so sure I already knew how the story ended.
Because I decided he was going to hurt me the same way Adam did before he ever got the chance to be anything else.
I put the phone down and I take his hand in both of mine and I press it to my mouth and I finally, finally say the thing I’ve been too scared to say since the gallery.
“I love you.” It breaks apart coming out.
“Do you hear me? I love you, and I’m so sorry, and I need you to wake up.
Please. I can’t do this alone, I can’t lose somebody else, you’re…
you’re all I have left and I almost ran from the best thing in my life because I got scared.
So wake up. Wake up and yell at me, wake up and tell me I’m an idiot, just wake up. Please.”
I kiss the back of his hand and I hold it against my cheek and I beg him with everything I’ve got, the way you beg when there’s no one to beg to and you do it anyway.
And his fingers move.
Just barely. A weak, slow press around mine, there and gone, and my head snaps up and his eyes are open the tiniest sliver, glassy, finding me.
“Hey,” he breathes, so quiet I almost miss it, the corner of his mouth trying to move. “Knew it. Knew you loved me too.”
Then his eyes drift shut again and his hand goes slack in mine, and the monitor keeps its steady beat, and I’m left holding onto the first words he’s said and the terror that they might be the last.
***
Three days, and he hasn’t opened his eyes again past that one time.
The doctors keep using all the careful words on me, telling me he’s stable and responsive and they just want to give his brain some room.
I’ve said those exact same words to families on the worst day of their lives, standing right where this nurse is standing now, and I never knew until this week that they don’t actually help anybody.
They just give your hands a script to hold onto while you wait.
So I wait, holding the hand without the line in it, reading him the back of a granola bar wrapper because he reads me cereal boxes at home and it’s the only joke I’ve got left.
Priya’s been covering my shifts without me asking, and Rebecca keeps showing up with clean clothes and bad coffee to sit with me in the quiet, which she’s gotten good at.
I’m doing that, the sitting, the holding his hand, when my phone buzzes on the windowsill. Gerald Pace.
I almost let it ring. Then I think it might be about Clarence, some news he’d want me to handle, and I step into the hall so it won’t reach him.
“Gerald. Hi.”
“Charly.” A beat too long. “How is he?”
“Holding on. They’re hopeful.” I lean against the wall. “Did you need something? I can take a message for when he’s up.”
“It’s not, ah.” He clears his throat. I know that sound.
It’s the one people make right before they tell you the thing they’ve already made up their mind about, and it puts a cold weight between my shoulder blades before he’s even said it.
“Look, I’m going to be straight with you, because you seem like somebody who’d rather I was. ”
“Then be straight.”
“There’s a story going around about Clarence. About that account, the one that emptied your savings, and whose name was on it.” He pauses. “And about why he really took you in.”
The hall goes far away.
“Say the rest of it.”
“That he was never the brother who saved you. That his name’s on the theft, that he stashed you in his guest house so you’d stay quiet about it.” He gets it out fast, like ripping a dressing off. “And that the engagement’s just the neat way to keep you quiet for good.”
“And people are believing that.”
“People are eating it alive, Charly. Two people who’d have walked through fire for him last week won’t take my calls now.
Kara told me to my face she’s done.” A breath.
“I’ve known him twelve years. Twelve years, and I’m standing here listening to a room full of people I trusted decide he’s poison, and I can’t get a word in edgewise.
His name’s on the account. You’re living in his house.
You’re wearing his ring. That’s the whole story, far as anybody can see, and it’s an ugly one. ”
I press my back flat to the wall to keep my legs under me.
None of it is news to me. I’ve known about the account for months, since the night Clarence told me himself, gray-faced, his signature on the paper and no clue what his brother wanted it for. I made my peace with that a long time ago.
What turns my stomach is hearing it bent into this shape, because it’s the same thing the worst part of me has whispered since the night I saw my own empty balance on a phone screen.
Adam said it first. You’re not a person to him.
You’re a problem he’s managing. And now somebody’s turned it into a story with my name on it, and it’s going room to room through every person who matters to the man lying unconscious forty feet away.
“Who told you?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
A breath. “Kara. She said an old friend of the family reached out. Concerned. A woman.”
And there it is. I don’t even need the name.
I could fall apart right here. I can feel the old floor under me, the one I’ve been braced over my whole life, and how easy it would be to just step onto it.
To let go of his hand and decide the worst version is true, the way I did in the driveway three nights ago. The way that put him on that road.
Through the window, he’s all tubes and bruises and a machine doing his breathing. The man who wouldn’t give me a ring in a parking lot because he said I deserved better than that.
And the worst part of me goes quiet, because it finally hears how stupid it sounds.
“Gerald.” My voice comes out steadier than I’ve got any right to. “I’m going to tell you what actually happened. Not the version that travels. The real one.”
“You don’t owe me an explan...”
“I’m not explaining. I’m correcting.” I push off the wall. “And I’ve known all of it since before I ever moved into his house, so save the careful voice.”
“Okay.” A pause. “Okay. Go on.”
“Adam went to him in the spring. Told him I wanted everything in one account, that I’d asked Adam to set it up.” I start walking. “Said some flag on his own credit meant the bank wouldn’t open it under his name. So he needed Clarence’s signature, just to get it started, and he’d go on it after.”
“And Clarence believed that.”
“Clarence gave him the signature. You know why?”
“Tell me.”
“Because his brother needed him, Gerald. For once in their lives Adam actually came to him and asked, and Clarence thought he was finally being a good brother. He honestly thought he was helping me.”
The line’s quiet.
“Then Adam emptied it. A week before he left me at an altar.” I keep walking. “Clarence found out the same time I did, reading my own balance over my shoulder, going gray. He’s been trying to put it back ever since.”
“I didn’t know any of that.”
“Of course you didn’t. Nobody does.” I’m at the end of the hall now, where there’s a window and some light.
“He took me in because nobody in that whole family ever looked out for me, not once, and he couldn’t stand being one more Carrington who didn’t.
And I told him to his face I didn’t want a single thing from anyone with that last name.
He helped me anyway. Never asked me for one thing back. ”
“I hear you. I do.” His voice is careful, like he’s trying to slow me down. “But none of that changes what the room thinks it knows.”
“I’m not finished.” My voice doesn’t shake, which surprises me. “That woman who called Kara? Her name’s Celeste. She’s his ex. She flew all the way back to win him back, he threw her out of his house, and on her way out the gate she told him he’d be sorry.”
“Wait. His ex did this?”
“Three nights later he’s in a coma. Because he got in his car in the rain to come find me and swear to me none of it was real.” I let it sit. “So that’s your concerned old friend. That’s who you’re all taking the word of.”
“God.” It comes out of him low. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just hear me.” I stop at the window.
“He’s exactly the man you always thought he was.
The only liar in any of this is the woman who called you.
And everybody who’s turning on him right now, the one week he can’t even open his eyes to defend himself, they’re going to have to look him in the face when he wakes up.
” I take a breath. “So put me in front of them. All of them, wherever they are. Let me tell them what I just told you.”
The quiet stretches so long I think the call dropped.
“You’d really do that. Stand up in front of all of them, to their faces.” It isn’t a question.
“In a heartbeat.”
“A whole room of them, Charly.”
“I’ve stood up in worse rooms than that.” I let it sit. “I walked out of a church full of people clapping at the worst day of my life. I told my own sister the truth an hour before her wedding when it cost me everything I had. A room full of people in nice clothes is nothing. Get me in there.”
A pause. Then his voice changes, the careful gone out of it.
“There’s a party Thursday. Big one, half the city, the kind of night where everyone who’s anyone in his world shows up.” A breath. “They’ll all be there. In one room.”
“Then so will I.”