Page 23 of Return to Whitmore (The Whitmore #2)

Chapter Eighteen

A fter the accident, Charlotte’s life unspooled.

What had begun as an ecstatic and sun-dappled summer devolved to a series of doctor’s appointments for both Jack and Ralph, fights with everyone from Jack, to Ralph, to Kathy, to her producers and agents, and listless afternoons of wondering why, oh why, everything had gone so desperately wrong.

Sometimes, Charlotte cursed the day Jack had returned to her life.

Other times, she recognized Jack’s return as the day her life had officially begun.

Ralph’s injuries were far more life-altering than Jack’s, which meant that Charlotte mostly moved in with Ralph to take care of him, to wheel him around the house and help him in and out of the elevator.

Ralph could feed himself and take care of his bathroom needs, but he was in a great deal of pain, and he was very angry, and Charlotte often had the sense that something bad would happen if she left him alone for too long.

She didn’t want to think about what that might be.

When they’d first gotten engaged in April, they’d discussed autumn or next spring as a potential wedding date.

Now that Ralph was injured and unable to walk, they no longer discussed the wedding.

Charlotte still wore her engagement ring, but she felt silly, like a child playing dress-up.

To pass the time, they watched DVDs that Charlotte rented from the shop down the road.

Charlotte hated when Ralph requested documentaries because every one of them reminded her that she wasn’t making anything right now.

Her producers and agents were increasingly angry. She was frustrated with herself.

When her mother called to ask for more details about the wedding, Charlotte told her mother there wouldn’t be one, mostly out of annoyance.

Francesca met her annoyance head-on and said, “I don’t know why you got my hopes up.

I’ve already bought a dress.” She hung up, and the two of them didn’t talk for another three years after that. Charlotte didn’t care.

Charlotte’s hopes and dreams for her wedding, for her life, had burned to a crisp on the day of the accident.

She no longer had any fantasies about Jack abandoning the name Seth, nor about her family coming back together again.

Once, on a rainy and blustery day in October, she researched Great-aunt Genevieve’s phone number in Michigan and tried to call Nina for the first time since 1998.

Nina was seventeen years old, Charlotte knew.

She probably had a boyfriend and a pack of friends and very few worries beyond where to go to college.

When Nina and Great-aunt Genevieve didn’t answer, Charlotte hung up and resolved never to contact them again.

She was a ghost, trying to haunt. It wasn’t fair to Nina.

When Charlotte returned to Ralph’s that night with bags of takeout and another DVD, she found Ralph holed up on the sofa, sallow and weak. He picked an argument about what she ordered, saying, “I’m getting so tired of Chinese. You always get Chinese.”

The reality was that Charlotte hadn’t brought Chinese home in months. But she knew Ralph was angry and needed to pick a fight about something.

“I can go get something else, honey,” Charlotte offered. But they both knew their money was drying up.

Ralph ate quietly and flared his nostrils. When the phone rang, Charlotte nearly jumped out of her skin. She hurried to answer it, thinking it was Ralph’s mother, who called almost daily to check on them. But it was Jack.

“Are you ever coming back?” Jack asked. His voice was like a string.

Charlotte’s heart broke. She hadn’t seen Jack since last weekend, when they’d eaten eggs and lain on the sofa and watched the rain outside.

“I need you, Charlotte,” Jack said. “I know I messed up really bad. I know I’ve always been messing up since we were teenagers. And I know you’ve had to take the fall.”

Charlotte wrapped her finger with the telephone cord until she lost circulation. “I have to stay here tonight. But I can come back tomorrow?” Maybe Jack finally wanted to tell her about the past, about what had happened before the fire. Perhaps he was finally sorrowful enough to share.

“Okay. Please. Come as soon as you can,” Jack urged.

Charlotte felt pulled in two opposite directions. She wanted to sob.

When she hung up, Ralph glared at her. “Does he need you?”

Charlotte sat back down and adjusted Ralph’s blankets. “He’s fine. I’m going to see him tomorrow.”

“He can walk, can’t he? He can do everything he wants?”

“He feels awful about what happened,” Charlotte whispered. We all do , she didn’t want to say. Kathy was too busy with her job to hang out much, and Charlotte guessed she didn’t like Charlotte’s energy right now. Charlotte couldn’t blame her.

“Seth isn’t your boyfriend,” Ralph said. “I’m your boyfriend.”

“Seth is basically family.” Charlotte felt so meek.

“I was supposed to be your family,” Ralph shot back. “We were supposed to get married.”

Charlotte felt it like a smack. “I thought we were still getting married.”

Ralph was quiet, his eyes on the television. Charlotte watched the scene illuminated in rectangles on his irises and realized it was impossible to know what was on anyone’s mind.

“He was driving like crazy, Charlotte,” Ralph said, speaking of that night. “He was going thirty over the speed limit. It was like he wanted to crash.”

“I don’t believe you,” Charlotte said, surprising herself.

Ralph sniffed. “Believe what you want. You always do.”

When Charlotte went back to the apartment she shared with Jack the following afternoon, she found him with a stuffed backpack and a printed-out bus ticket to Philadelphia. His eyes were resolute. Almost nothing of the accident had scarred him. It was like he hadn’t been involved.

“You can’t leave,” she said to him, her voice shaking. “I need you here.”

“You need to focus on your next steps,” Jack said. “I was selfish to demand you back. You’re supposed to get married. You’re supposed to have children and a career and all that. I’m the messy brother who shouldn’t still be alive.”

Charlotte gasped. “Do you hear yourself? Do you understand how much I need you?”

But Jack had made up his mind. Charlotte followed him down the road, begging him to stay in the city.

She was making quite a scene. Everyone stared at them, wondering what the dynamic was.

If only you knew, Charlotte thought back at them, tears in her eyes.

When they reached the bus station, she clung to him, hoping to keep him in the city as long as she could.

She was terrified she’d never see him again.

“Listen,” Jack said, adjusting his backpack straps. “If I figure out anything about Tio Angelo, about what he was up to, about where he’s hiding, I’ll call you.”

Charlotte wanted to say she didn’t care about any of that.

“I’ve been wasting too much time here,” Jack admitted. And then he snapped his fingers and said, “If you ever need the house in Madequecham Beach, it’s yours. I left one of the keys in the little plate near the door. Go. Rest. Take Ralph, if you want to. Maybe it will be healing for you.”

Charlotte didn’t have the strength to speak. Her throat was too tight. When she couldn’t bear it another moment, she threw her arms around him and sobbed.

The bus driver honked his horn, and Jack slowly stepped onto the bus.

Charlotte loosened her arms and watched him climb up the stairs and disappear on the other side of the tinted windows.

Charlotte was filled with flashing images of their previous five years together, a joyous time of being adults together when they never should have been allowed, not after the fire.

She felt her heart shatter into a thousand pieces.

It took another few months for Ralph to relearn how to walk.

Although Charlotte was pleased with his progress, she experienced these months as some of the worst of her life.

Ralph was constantly agitated, and he made Charlotte feel like she didn’t matter to him beyond her role as nurse.

Charlotte, plagued with guilt about the accident, made sure she did everything for him. She was at his beck and call.

By spring, Ralph could walk around by himself and didn’t need Charlotte around as often.

Charlotte experienced March and April of 2005 with a floaty feeling of freedom.

With Kathy, she mentioned “the wedding” again and even let herself get excited about picking out wedding dresses.

Ralph took her on a few dates and asked her a few questions about her next documentary project.

There was a shift between them, a darkness they had to get over, but Charlotte guessed that the accident had brought them closer.

She’d helped him through that heinous winter.

They’d talk about this later, talk about how much stronger they were because of it.

Charlotte didn’t hear from Jack and decided it was for the best.

But it was early May of 2005 when Ralph confessed he’d met someone.

They were at Central Park, sharing a picnic, trying to pretend to be a normal couple. Charlotte had a sip of juice in her mouth that she nearly spat out. “Met someone?” she asked, as though she didn’t speak whatever language that was.

Ralph looked excited and handsome and electrified.

“She works at my office,” he said. “She started a couple of months back. She was there when I got back and never saw me in the wheelchair, never saw me with the bruises or the broken bones. She knows I went through something enormous, and she respects that. Oh, and she didn’t want to break us up, but she could see pretty clearly that we weren’t going anywhere fast. You and I, I mean. ”