8. Tom Cobalt
TOM COBALT
The only light on—a reading lamp—illuminates Charlie in an ethereal glow. He rotates a pen absentmindedly between his fingers and flips a page in a paperback. It’s late, but not so late that the room should look like the inside of a sarcophagus.
“Let there be light.” I tug the cord of the nearest lamp.
Charlie’s golden-brown hair is disheveled, and he wears an emerald silk robe, the ties undone. Only black boxer-briefs underneath. He doesn’t even break his attention off his book.
Which is fine. I’m used to Charlie ignoring me. What I’m not used to is his consistent presence this week.
“What are you doing here?” I ask him.
He flips a page, and his eyes remain on the book. “I live here.”
“Yeah, but you’ve been here four nights in a row. That has to be some sort of Charlie Cobalt world record.” I lean my guitar against the wall and sit on the arm of the couch, facing him while he’s on a midnight-blue chair. “Don’t you have places to be? People to aggrieve?”
He looks up at me at this. Getting his attention is a full-on art form. I grin.
“What are you doing here?” he shoots back. “Don’t you have a new bandmate to piss off until they quit?”
“Straight to the heart, Charlie Keating.” I’m not at all wounded.
Charlie’s digs don’t really hurt me since I’m well-equipped to launch them back.
It makes Charlie one of my favorite people to be around.
Bantering with him is like a master class in verbal warfare.
“And I’m so glad you asked about my new bandmate. ” I slide down to the couch cushion.
“I didn’t ask.”
“He’s arguing with me over the font of the band name. Can you believe that?”
Charlie folds his paperback over his thumb. “Yeah, I can. Now, why don’t you go tell Eliot?”
“He’s at auditions.” Eliot had been cast in a huge production of The Mousetrap, but its run on Broadway ended, so now he’s trying to book a new role in another play.
Charlie checks his watch. “Unless he’s fucking the casting director, he’s not at auditions this late.”
I check the time on my phone.
It’s already midnight?
My brain has been so mentally wrapped around Phoenix that the time snuck past me. “Then he’s with Rachel…or Regina…No, I think her name is Rachel.” I nod a couple times, going with my first guess.
Charlie looks like he wishes he didn’t entertain the subject. “So go talk to Ben.”
“He’s either doing college stuff or doing his girlfriend. I’m trying not to bother him.”
“So you decided to bother me instead.”
“It’s your lucky night.” I kick my legs up on the coffee table. “You have me all to yourself.”
Charlie exhales a sharp breath through his nose. He puts two fingers to his temple. “You aren’t going to annoy Ben so badly that he books a one-way ticket back to Alaska.”
Am I afraid of that? My eyes burn, and I push a tense hand through my hair. “I didn’t say I was scared of that happening.”
“You didn’t have to.” Charlie stares through me like I’m cling wrap. I do think my presence can suffocate like cellophane, and maybe I just naturally run people away. Maybe I’m too much to handle.
I cross my arms and shift against the uncomfortable couch cushion. I think about my former bandmates who quit on me. Then RJ who never sticks around.
I can’t add Ben to this list.
Charlie abuses this precious moment of me pondering his statement by kicking my bare feet off the glass coffee table.
So I swipe his worn paperback. “You dog-ear the page. So nihilistic.”
Charlie isn’t fun to purposefully mix up words around. Our dad would’ve corrected me and said, “You mean annihilatory. Nihilistic is the belief that nothing has meaning.” I would’ve waved a hand and said, And both pertain to Charlie.
Charlie just glares like I’m crunching aluminum in his ear. Then he steals his book back. He’s reading Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind.
“Petit frérot,” he sneers. Little brother. He’s trying to aggravate me. For the record, it’s not working. “You need to clean that.” His eyes drop to the smudges on the glass table.
I just now realize I left two footprints behind.
Fuck.
Without Charlie, I’m not sure I’d be cognizant of every little thing that’d set off Beckett’s OCD. Beckett was diagnosed at an early age and it’s a different type than Ben’s obsessive compulsive disorder, so it’s more familiar to me.
Still, living with Beckett is a challenge.
I don’t move right away. “You think Neil Armstrong swept away his boot prints on the moon?”
“Tu n’es pas si important que ca.” You’re not that important.
I tsk, then rise to go grab cleaner. “Je suis suffisamment important pour te divertir.” I’m important enough to entertain you.
“You’re doing a terrible fucking job.”
“I disagree.” When I return with a squirt bottle of Clorox and a paper towel, I wipe down the coffee table. “It looks like I’m not bugging you into taking a midnight flight to Prague, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin—”
“There’s still time.”
“I sense an empty threat, Charlie Keating. You know why?” I’m knelt on one knee at the table, the dirtied paper towel crumpled in my hand.
“You’re not exercising your passport because you’re sticking around for Ben too.
And I know you and Ben don’t get along, but that doesn’t change one very real fact. ”
Charlie looks absolutely done with this conversation. Which makes my grin stretch wider. “I’m sure you’ll try to enlighten me,” Charlie says dryly.
“You love our little brother.”
Charlie blinks into the hardest eye roll of the century.
He says he loves infrequently and sparingly, but it’s hard to believe his love doesn’t extend to me and our brothers and sisters.
At the very least, I’m positive he would spend eternity in a tormented hell for Beckett.
That’s enough to put Charlie’s shrunken-heart Grinch status into question.
Because if Charlie would do anything for Beckett, then he’d try to love us for him too. It might be love by osmosis, but I see it as love nonetheless.
“You’re worried about Ben,” I add, my smile fading at another realization. “It must’ve really shaken you when you found him alone out there.” Charlie was the one who brought Ben home from Alaska.
“All it did was remind me that I am nothing like him,” he says while trying to return to his book.
Charlie is apathy while Ben is empathy, and their dichotomy isn’t a new development. But the fact that Charlie cares about Ben’s well-being—that is.
I chuck the dirtied paper towel in the kitchen trash, and when I come back to the couch, Charlie tells me, “Beckett asked if I could stay in New York more.”
I sit down slowly. “For Ben?”
“Of course for Ben.” His tone is irritable. “I spent the end of last year trying to be scarce because I thought I’d provoke him into punching a wall.”
“Which you’ve done before,” I note, then wince as the memory floods back. “Or was it a tree? The very thing Ben likes to protect. A living thing.”
Charlie’s annoyed eyes puncture me.
I raise my hands in defense. “I’m just gathering the facts, dude. Don’t come for the fact finder.”
“It was a tree.” He glances back at his book. “If he were smarter, he should’ve just punched me in the face. Too bad he’s not the fucking genius.”
I’m glad Ben is not in the vicinity to hear that. It’s not that he takes things too literally. I’m pretty sure he can detect the bottomless sarcasm Charlie deep-sea dives into. Ben just has more sensitive skin, and he thinks we all make excuses for Charlie’s asshole behavior.
It hurts knowing Ben might feel like Eliot and I chose Charlie over him growing up. Because I want to be there for Ben. Especially when Charlie doesn’t need any of us to go to bat for him, and Ben does need us.
He has needed us.
But it’s hard to say I don’t excuse our oldest brother.
When Charlie aims for the jugular like he’s hoping to be stabbed back, the first thing I think is, his mind seems like a prison he’s trying to escape.
And I end up just thanking the gene pool lottery that I don’t have an IQ comparable to our dad’s.
Charlie flips a page. “You won’t push Ben to leave a second time around.”
“Yeah, because we’re not letting it happen.
” It’s what Eliot would say if he were here.
“I think it’s good you’re doing the opposite of what you did before.
Make yourself more present. It’s better for Ben to have us all around, especially since you were the one who found him.
That changed things for him. I think he’s viewing you differently.
” I don’t add, because you care. But he has to fucking care about Ben.
He literally could’ve let him rot away and die.
I intake a sharp breath. Don’t think about it, Tom Carraway.
Charlie is a cynic, but he’s not disagreeing right now, so that’s basically a full-fledged agreement from my vantage.
True luck befalls Charlie since my phone vibrates and claims my attention. He returns to his novel, and I check a new message from an unknown number.
MAYBE LEO VALAVANIS
This is Leo Valavanis from the ballet. Free tomorrow night? Friday? Let’s grab drinks.