Page 51 of What He Doesn't Know
Charlie smiled, but it wavered quickly. “You definitely should.”
We were both quiet then, and Charlie cleared her throat after a moment, turning to face me. She leaned her hip against the railing just as another shiver shot through her.
“What happened in there?” she asked at the same time I said, “You should go get warm.”
We smiled.
“I’m fine,” she assured me, and she stepped a little closer, her eyes begging mine to find them. “Reese, what happened?”
For a moment, we were kids again. Charlie was my little sister’s friend finding me sulking on the back porch, smoking a cigarette I’d snuck out to inhale. She was young and innocent, an easy person to lean on, to talk to, to let in. I was the fucked-up teenager, lost and confused, and she was the one person who somehow still saw some speck of good in me.
“Nothing, I just… my parents would have been here tonight, you know. If we still lived here, if we’d never moved to New York. They went to this thing every year…” I paused. “And that song… it was what I was playing on the piano in my parents’ house in New York on that day.”
Charlie clasped her hand over mine.
“I was waiting for them to come home for dinner that night. I didn’t even know they’d been in the park, or that Mallory had been with them.” I choked out a laugh. “And I was just sitting there, smoking a cigarette and playing that song. I don’t even know why I was playing it. I was bored, it was the first thing that came to me. I think I heard it the first time at some point when I was at Juilliard, but I don’t even remember. I was just smoking and playing, waiting for them to come home.” I paused. “I was there to ask them for money.”
Charlie didn’t speak, just kept her hand over mine, letting me work through the thoughts in my head. I didn’t squeeze her hand in mine or meet her eyes. I just stared at where her fingers overlapped mine.
“I didn’t even know the shooting had happened. I was so immersed in myself, in my own selfish wants. It was three years ago. I mean, I was thirty-two. It’s not like I was a child or like I was young. I was just immature. I treated my girlfriend like a substitute for my mother, and I blew my paychecks on gambling and partying because I knew my parents would always be there. They’d always give me whatever I needed. They never even asked why.”
I blinked, and a flash of the television sparked behind my lids.
“The hospital called me. That’s how I found out. They called my cell phone, told me they believed they’d identified my sister as one of the shooting victims.” I sniffed. “I just said, ‘What shooting?’”
Charlie did squeeze my hand then, and I covered her thumb with my own, but I still couldn’t look at her.
“I was such a piece of shit,” I whispered, shaking my head. “It should have been me who died that day. Not them.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?” I challenged, looking at where our hands touched. “It’s how I feel.”
Charlie was quiet, but her fingers ran over the back of my hand in a soothing line before she squeezed gently again. “I know how it feels,” she said. “That loss, that unfillable void left behind when someone you love is inexplicably ripped from the earth.”
A burst of air swept through the veranda then, brushing her hair back as if it’d heard her.
“It never gets easier, no matter how many days or months or years pass. Some days are quieter than others, but on the loud days, on the days when everything you see and hear and do and feel reminds you of their absence…” She squeezed my hand once more before tucking her arms tight over her middle. “Those days are brutal.”
Charlie used to be the unbroken one.
She used to be the positive voice of optimism to balance out my angsty teenage depression. So many nights she had brought me some kind of hope, even if I’d laughed at it in the moment she’d given it to me. But tonight, she didn’t attempt to fix the splitting of my soul. She only crawled into the fault line with me, giving me company in the hollow loneliness of it all.
“I know you hate your stretch marks, but I’m jealous of them.”
Charlie frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“They’re a memory forever etched into your body,” I explained. “They’re proof of existence, proof that those boys lived inside you, that they were a part of you and, even if only briefly, a part of this world. A part of your life.”
She touched her stomach carefully, her hands disappearing under Cameron’s jacket as her eyes lost focus somewhere off in the distance.
“I don’t have that,” I confessed. “Sure, I’ve got pictures. And I’ve got an old house that someone else lives in now. I’ve got three small things I kept from each of them, little tokens I hoped would bring me comfort down the line. But they don’t, you know? Nothing ever does. And really, all I have is music. I have songs that bring me back to holidays spent in our living rooms and road trips in Mom’s van.” I swallowed. “And some that bring me back to that day, to that immediate emptiness that seeped into my bones like a cold flood the moment I realized they were gone.”
Charlie let out a long exhale, closing the small bit of space between us. “You have years and years of memories with your family, Reese. I only have nine days.” Her eyes glossed. “And that’s only with Jeremiah. With Derrick, I have nothing.”
I blew out a frustrated breath. “God, I’m sorry. You’re right. I should be thankful, and I am. I didn’t mean that I was jealous of your scars, I guess I just meant that I think they’re beautiful.”
“It’s okay,” she assured me quickly with a smile, her hand rubbing over her belly again. “I think I’m starting to see the beauty in them, too.”