Charlotte nodded, and as soon as she did, I tightened my fingers in her hair, forcing her head back and pinning her to the mattress. “Sean, you’re crushing me,” she whispered, and I covered her mouth with one hand and roughly ripped aside her pajama bottoms with the other. I forced my way inside her, even as she fought against me, even as I watched her back arch with surprise and maybe pain, even as her eyes filled with tears. “Doesn’t matter what it looks like on the surface,” I whispered, her own words striking her like a whip. “You know deep down that I love you.”
I had started this wanting to make Charlotte feel like crap, but somehow, I wound up feeling like crap myself. So I rolled off her, yanking up my boxers. Charlotte turned away, curling into a ball. “You bastard,” she sobbed. “You fucking bastard.”
She was right; I was one. I had to be, or I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did next: walk out to the car and get those papers from the glove compartment. Sit in the dark in the kitchen the whole of the night, staring at them, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something more acceptable. Knock down a shot of whiskey for each of the lines where Marin Gates had placed a little yellow Post-it arrow, pointing to the space where my signature was supposed to be.
I fell asleep at the kitchen table, waking before the sun did. When I tiptoed into the bedroom, Charlotte was still sleeping. She was on her side curled like a snail, the sheet and comforter balled at the bottom of the bed. I pulled them over her gently, the way I sometimes did for you when you’d kicked your blankets loose.
I left the papers, signed in all the right places, on the pillow beside her. With a note paper-clipped to the top. I’m sorry, I had written. Forgive me.
Then I drove to work, wondering the whole time whether that message had been intended for Charlotte, for you, or for myself.
Amelia
Late August 2007
Let’s just say right off the bat that we lived in the sticks, and although my parents seemed to think this was going to be a huge benefit to me later in life (Why? Because I’d know what green grass smelled like firsthand? Because we didn’t have to lock our front door?), I for one wished I’d had a vote when it came to settling down. Do you have any idea what it’s like not to be able to get a cable modem when even Eskimos have them? Or to go shopping for school clothes at Wal-Mart because the nearest mall is an hour and a half away? Last year in social studies, when we were studying cruel and unusual punishment, I wrote a whole essay about living where the retail opportunities were somewhere between zero and nil, and although everyone in my class totally agreed with me, I only got a B, because my teacher was the kind of Birkenstock-granola hippie who thought Bankton, New Hampshire, was the best place on earth.
Today, though, all the planets must have aligned, because my mother had agreed to road-trip to Target with you and Piper and Emma.
It had been Piper’s idea-right before the school year started she occasionally decided to do a mother-daughter shopping extravaganza. My mother usually had to be persuaded to come along, because we never seemed to have enough cash. Inevitably, Piper would wind up buying things for me, and my mother would feel guilty and swear she was never going shopping with Piper again. What’s the big deal? Piper would say. I like making the girls happy. What’s the big deal indeed? If Piper wanted to pad my wardrobe, I wasn’t about to deny her that one small joy.
When Piper called this morning, though, I thought my mother would jump at the opportunity. You had once again managed to outgrow a pair of shoes without ever wearing them. Usually it was just one or the other-the left one got used while the right foot was stuck in a cast for a few months-but with the spica you’d worn this spring, both your feet had managed to grow a whole size, and the soles of your old shoes were barely even scuffed. Now-six months later, when you were officially learning to walk again-it had taken my mother a week to figure out that the reason you winced every time she made you use the walker to get to the bathroom by yourself had nothing to do with pain in your legs but actually with your feet being stuffed into too-tight sneakers.
To my surprise, my mother didn’t want to go. She had been in a really weird mood; she had practically leapt out of her skin when I came up behind her while she was drinking a cup of coffee and reading some legal papers that looked totally boring and full of words like IN RE and WHOSOEVER. And when Piper called and I handed her the phone, Mom dropped it twice. “I can’t,” I heard her tell Piper. “I’ve got some really important errands to run.”
“Please, Mom?” I said, dancing around in front of her. “I promise, I won’t even take a stick of gum from Piper. Not like last time.”
Something I said must have struck a chord, because she looked down at those papers and then up at me. “Last time,” she repeated absently, and the next thing I knew, we were on our way to Concord, to go shopping. My mother was still a little out of it, but I didn’t notice. Piper’s van had a DVD system, and you and Emma and I had wireless headphones on so that we could listen to 13 Going on 30, which is the best movie ever. The last time I’d watched it had been at our house, and Piper had done the whole “Thriller” dance along with Jennifer Garner, leading Emma to proclaim that she just wanted to die of embarrassment on the spot, even though I secretly thought it was really cool that Piper could remember all the steps.
Two hours later, Emma and I were running through the juniors’ section. Even though most of the styles seemed to have been made by Skanky Ho Enterprises, with V-necks that reached down to the belly button and pants so low-rise they could have been kneesocks, it was exciting to shop in an area that wasn’t the kids’ section. Across the aisle, Piper was pushing your wheelchair, navigating aisles that were completely not made for disabled people. Meanwhile, my mother-whose mood had deteriorated, if possible-kept kneeling down to try shoes on your feet. “Did you know those plastic thingies on the ends of the shoelaces are called aglets?” you asked.
“As a matter of fact I did,” she said, exasperated, “because you told me the last time we did this.”
I watched Emma reach up on her tiptoes to take down a blouse that would, as my mother would say, show the entire world your business. “Emma!” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding!”
“You wear it with a camisole,” she said, and I pretended I had known that all along. The truth is that Emma could probably put that on and look like she was sixteen, because she was already five-five, and tall and thin like her mother. I didn’t wear camisoles. It was just too depressing to know that the roll at my belly stuck out farther than my boobs.
I slipped my hand into the pocket of my sweatshirt. Inside was a plastic Ziploc bag. I’d been carrying them around for the past week. Twice now I’d made myself sick in places that weren’t bathrooms-once behind the gym at school, once in Emma’s kitchen, when she was upstairs looking for a CD. I’d do it when it got to the point where it was all I could think about-Would I be found out? Would it stop the ache in my belly?-and the only way to make it go away was to just give in and do it already, except after it happened, I hated myself for not holding out.
“This would look good on you,” Emma said, holding up a pair of sweatpants big enough for an elephant.
“I don’t like yellow,” I said, and I wandered across the aisle.
Piper and my mother were in the middle of a conversation. Well, that’s not really accurate. Piper was in the middle of a conversation and my mother was physically present in the same general space. She was zoned out, nodding at the right times but not really listening. She thought she could fool people, but she wasn’t that great an actress. Take you, for example. How many fights had she had with Dad about whether or not to hire a lawyer, while you were sitting in the next room? And then, when you asked why they were arguing, she’d insist they weren’t. Did she really think you were so incredibly involved in Drake & Josh episodes that you weren’t hanging on every word?