“Go find her,” Bernice had ordered. “Don’t come back until you appreciate the family you still got left. Some of us ain’t so lucky.”
Charlotte had rarely seen Bernice so cross. A black-and-white photo of her beloved Navy sailor, Paul, was immortalized in a display case on the upstairs floor along with a vinyl record of Bing Crosby’s “Swinging on a Star.” She’d lost a husband to the sea, a baby to pneumonia, and a grown son to drug addiction. Bernice reminded Charlotte that she’d do well to remember all she had.
By the time Charlotte reached the town square, in earshot of Alex, Charlotte did well to remember her last name. Every one of her steps felt mired in clay, knee deep and sinking fast, and she’d worked herself back into the injustice of a sister who always butted her nose in where it didn’t belong.
“You had no right,” she shouted.
Alex’s gait faltered. She turned, her brows stitched together. “Charlotte, what the—?”
Jonah’s eyes went big. He took command of the stroller handle and mumbled something about how it was about time for the café regulars to pass Maddie around like a football. He drifted away, out of Charlotte’s peripheral vision.
Her eyes remained firmly on Alex.
Charlotte was determined not to cry, not again, not through the blockade of tension she held behind her face like armor so Alex couldn’t hurt her anymore, but she cried anyway. Hot, rampant tears. If pressed, she couldn’t have come up with a reason. Alex always had seen right through her.
She pulled the orange flier from her coat and tried to breathe through the betrayal.
Alex slow-blinked, looked up at the courthouse and exhaled. Loudly. “Oh.”
“Oh?” Charlotte’s voice nearly matched the civil defense siren the city council had put in the square last year. The volume, the release, felt right. Justified. Liberating. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Never.”
“Never.” On repeat, everything seemed so final to Charlotte’s ears. “I trusted you. I told you things I’ve never told another soul.”
Charlotte stormed away, Alex close at her heels, calling her Evangeline or some variation thereof. Charlotte couldn’t say where she was going but the release, possessing the upper hand her sister always had over her, was cathartic.
“He was your Camille Day,” Alex shouted when Charlotte began to outpace her.
Charlotte stopped short. Her heart was already knocking at the door of her ribcage. Alex’s words were like a forced exit outside her chest. She turned. Alex was at least ten yards away, maybe more, but she might as well have crawled up inside the hollow carved out when Daddy left, all those years ago.
“Only it wasn’t some Georgia beach at the end of a long road trip,” Alex said, her voice tight, ragged, as if her words came from the same dark place inside. “You want him to save you like she saved Daddy, but this isn’t the way. It wasn’t the way for me. And it sure as hell isn’t the way for you.”
Charlotte breathed. For a full minute, she did nothing but sink into the crest left behind by her racing pulse and feel the warm breeze wick moisture from her cheeks. Her bones felt spent. She found a painted bench nearby, a field of red poppies, and sat among them.
Alex joined her, offered a cloth diaper from her bag.
Charlotte hesitated.
“It’s clean.”
The cloth smelled like lavender, baby detergent, new beginnings, before life had a chance to detour. Charlotte dried her face.
“He was waiting at the shop when I opened up this morning.”
“What did he want?”
Alex squinted, took in the furthest reaches of the town square. “He wanted you to change your mind and go with him.”
Her heart felt ridden hard and put away wet. The mess reached all the way up to a voice that came out staggering. “It wasn’t your decision, Alex.”
“I was protecting you.”
“From him?”
“From yourself. From repeating history.” Alex shifted on the bench, slouched, legs outstretched, neck hung back to take in the shade canopy. “The first time I cheated on Michael, it wasn’t a moment of weakness. I’d considered it, the entire day running up to it. He was a client of mine a long time before, dangerously boyish and accessible, and we’d run into each other by chance at a rare bookstore in the city. He pulled a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer off the shelf and managed to work the word pussy into our conversation. My entire body weakened with that one word close to my ear, barely above a whisper, his fingers leafing through the pages. He asked me to lunch the next day, but I knew there would be no lunch. I laid beside Michael all night, watching the clock, hoping someone would stop me—a friend who needed a favor, an emergency at work, a call from home, anything I could take as a sign. But I’d isolated myself from the people who loved me, the ones who would tell me the truth.”
Charlotte pictured it: a brownstone-like shop with crumbling brick and books stacked floor to rafters, a tiny meandering path to walk; a man in a tie and rolled sleeves; the almond-vanilla of binding glue and dust in the air; Alex in her sterile Boston bedroom, nothing but clinical white and naked glass and a blue moon everywhere. She couldn’t picture anything else; perhaps she didn’t want to go there.
“Do you think it was that way with Daddy?” Charlotte said. “If we’d run downstairs, alongside his car, would he have taken it as a sign and changed his mind?”
“Yes.”
Before Charlotte could decide if guilt came packed in the baggage of her answer, Alex spoke again.
“If there’s anything I’ve learned, being here this past year, it’s that family is a return ticket from the worst trip imaginable.”
“What about Freesia?” asked Charlotte. “Is she a return ticket?”
Alex rolled her lips together and squinted out the morning rays. Measures of self-preservation. Even the delay in answering. “Let’s just say she’s a stranger whose headed in the same direction.”
For now, Charlotte accepted the same direction. “And if I never have a worst trip? Can I appreciate family again?”
Alex found humor in something. Her laugh was thin. “Go jump out of that woman’s plane in Yazoo City, Charlotte. Make that your worst trip. Don’t fuck someone else.”
The f-word splattered between them like a dropping from a passing bird. Alex knew Charlotte didn’t much care for cursing but laid it out dirty just the same. Steven Morneau would be gone by now, already miles away if he’d come to the shop before eight. She glanced at the butterfly on the flier until her vision blurred.
“What is he like?”
“Like Earl Frizeal when he still had teeth. Smelled a bit yeasty. Like a Melissa Ethridge concert.”
A surprise laugh slipped past Charlotte’s restraint. She shoulder-checked Alex. “Liar.”
Alex gave her a lopsided grin. “A little short. Dreamy, I suppose. If you’re into the whole inhibited-genius-with-wavy-hair vibe. A waste spent on insects if you ask me.”
Charlotte thought to tell Alex about Eduardo Reyes, how a life spent chasing insects could lead to an encounter with a truck grill in the Mexican countryside and a seeding of blood flowers and happily ever afters for generations to come, but her sister already believed her fanciful, naïve, dim.
“I’d be more Charlotte, with him.”
Alex gave her a rare hug. She released herself into it, felt its weight, its significance. Her throat cinched.
“Liar. You are already the most Charlotte possible.”
22
Freesia
Their last morning in New York, the girls opted to head down to a marketplace famous for buying, selling, and trading everything from old turntables and sheet music to books and art and vintage sneakers. Sprinkled among the vendors were booths designed for specialty eats—for meatballs and ramen and bagels and coffee. Quiet places amidst the noise for people to talk. But Freesia didn’t have answers for how she’d gone so wrong with Natalie and Allison.
; They had returned to their suite from the Roxy in silence, limbs crossed, noses aimed at the passing cityscape. Natalie had shed a trail of boots and flared colored fabric on her way to the hotel room’s bath, steamed it until fog slipped under the door, then curled up at the window with Allison and her headphones in place to watch the panes gather snow. Freesia had packed her suitcase, sent Yu’s dresses with the concierge for cleaning and return, then crawled into bed and tried to forget the grievances against her mother that the earlier scene had resurfaced.
By the time they sat down with paper cartons of food and more than a few shopping diversions to break through the fragile shells they had constructed the previous night, Freesia decided that honesty and a full stomach made a good match. And was more than her mother had ever given her, anyway. On both counts.
“I left home at seventeen, graduated early, had no life plan to speak of,” said Freesia. “I never intended to go overseas, but I found my way to a youth hostel in Miami.”
Natalie stopped chewing, made eye contact with Freesia for the first time since she had stormed into Oliver’s room. Allison leaned close, tightened her coat around her. The market was open at the far ends and noisy, the air chilled.
“I had never met so many people from so far away. I shared a bunk with a guy named Lucas. He was from Patmos—this Greek village on the Aegean Sea. I helped him with his English, and he helped me see a world outside that shack on the beach, made me want to travel, see everything he’d seen. He told me that if I was ever near Patmos, his family would gladly be my family. There’s a monastery there where the Book of Revelations was written and more than anything, he wanted to be part of that religious life, but he was working up the courage to tell his family he was gay.”
Steam rose from their food, but they had all stopped eating. For Freesia, taking a bite of anything while revisiting this memory seemed impossible.
“We made friends with some locals, some of them international—Central American, Ecuadorian, I think. Lucas fell in love with one of them. In Lucas’s mind, this guy was his test. If Lucas passed, if he could place mind over body, he was worthy of the religious life. Lucas arranged to meet him at an apartment in Little Haiti. I knew it was a bad idea—that Lucas was setting himself up for failure—but I couldn’t get him to change his mind so I went with him.”
The market grew louder, a few shouts. Natalie leaned closer.
Why had she started this memory? She’d come too far now…they’d think her a coward for not finishing, but she was Charlotte’s gift. Fearless. Freesia nearly choked at the irony. She slouched, wrapped herself tighter in her overcoat, as if balling herself smaller could protect her heart from what was to come. She stalled with a sip of coffee. Hot, liquid courage.
“When we got there, three men stormed out of the bathroom and locked us in a room. After twelve hours with no food and no water, Lucas convinced them to let me go, made up a story about how I had asthma and what good would I be to anyone? I wanted to tell him that I’d be back, that I’d bring help, but we weren’t alone. He said something in Greek. I learned later it meant love to my family. He was saying goodbye.”
Her voice splintered on goodbye.
Allison shivered.
“I took the advance the international agency gave me and went to Patmos. I told his mother that he’d saved my life and sat for hours at his monastery. Patmos was everything he said it was—breathtaking, peaceful, removed from the world. I could have stayed there forever, but I needed to help people, the way he helped me. So I stayed the few months until I turned eighteen, then left for an assignment in India.”
“What happened to Lucas?” asked Natalie.
Freesia recalled the room in which she and Lucas had whispered, the coppery-sour smells of others who had shared the space, how they’d tried every conceivable way to escape, together, but realized—without saying—that the room had been used on others before. She hadn’t wanted to go back there, but she needed the girls, Natalie, to understand. They were so like Charlotte, so very naïve.
“I led the police to the apartment. Couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes later, yelling and screaming the entire way to anyone who would listen, nearly hysterical, but by the time we got there, the apartment was empty, cleaned out. At the hostel, I learned that three others on H-2B visas that year had disappeared. Forced into trafficking, the police suspected. I exchange a letter with his family each year. They haven’t heard from him.”
Freesia was certain they didn’t know the extent of the life Lucas would have found himself in. Hell, at seventeen, she didn’t know that meant dark auctions, drugged victims of abductions sold to the highest bidder. They knew enough. “So now you know why I reacted the way I did.”
“I’m sorry about your friend.” Natalie looked small, her shoulders rounded, her expression bleak.
“Me too,” said Allison.
“I’m sorry for the way I handled things yesterday, but I’m not sorry for what I did,” said Freesia. “Sometimes I struggle with what family means. Your mom is as close as I’ve come since Lucas’s family.”
“And us?” Natalie added.
It occurred to Freesia that they were struggling, same as her. Maybe everyone struggled to define family. She smiled, as much as she could with Lucas fresh on her mind. “And you both. The thought of what might have happened—”
Natalie cut her off with hug, launched from her corner of the table, a messy twist of scarves and overturned paper food containers. Freesia tried the connection on like a new coat, found it fit quite nicely. She gathered Allison in, too. Somehow, this New York moment felt like the biggest success of all.
23
Alex
Alex returned home. Not her home—or rather, the home she grew up in—but back to Jonah’s house. She knew it was home by the way her borrowed key slipped into the door lock effortlessly, by the way Ibby’s new photos had replaced the entryway of folksy decorations that were Katherine’s, by the way some of the black-and-white snaps now included her and Maddie. Perhaps she had known for some time that it was home, but when she called out, received no response, then pressed her face to the sliding glass door, the sight beyond the back porch was the purest feeling of home.
At the place where grass met grove, where sunlight scattered through the spindly beginnings of a new season of red dragon maples and primary-colored toys held a blanket to the shade, Jonah lay beside Maddie while Isabel blew soap bubbles that caught the light and lifted away.
It was perfect.
Alex banged her forehead against the glass.
A soft tap at first, quiet and rhythmic, while everything built in her mind, then louder and more punishing until her skin stung and a headache stirred. She pinched her eyes closed.
It was perfect, for the taking, and she was too messed up to grab hold of it.
She couldn’t say how long she stood there, banging and suppressing tears, as long as it took to purge the self-loathing, but the glass disappeared.
Alex opened her eyes.
Jonah looked at her as if she were a house of cards and he was puzzling how to prevent a collapse. He pulled her in his arms as her knees gave way. His heart clamored through his shirt, reprimanding her forehead where the glass left off as if to mock her. Exhales skimmed her hair in bursts as if he had cleared the distance to the house faster than it took Alex to realize how broken she must have looked. He called out to Ibby to stay close to Maddie then led Alex to the sofa.
“Hey-hey-hey,” he whispered. “You going to tell me what this is about?” He frowned and skated a tender thumb across the ache at her forehead. “What brought this on?”
Alex couldn’t say. Charlotte’s intersection with infidelity resurfacing old wounds. Jonah giving Nash advice on how to love a woman. The overwhelming sense that life was moving on and Maddie would soon be walking and talking and identifying those around her and Alex wanted, more than anything, for Maddie to call Jonah Daddy.
“I still make lists,” she
said.
“What?”
“In my head. Because I swore I wouldn’t on paper, not anymore. But it’s worse now because I can’t get them out.”
“So start another journal.”
“And I thought I wanted to start my own business, but I can’t think of anything past Maddie. And you and Ibby. And the bridal shop.”
“So think only of those things.”
“And I know tomorrow isn’t a guarantee and what I want is right here, you and Ibby, but I’m terrified that I’m not enough.”
Jonah laughed. Breakdown-to-reconstruction kind of laugh. Hands at her shoulders to steady himself kind of laugh. Never had she been so effectively guillotined from her emotions. Alex didn’t know whether to knee him in the groin or kiss the grin right off his face. Ultimately, her own cautious laugh dictated.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked. But she really didn’t need his answer. He had been through losing his parents as a child, a broken back, the loss of a wife, raising a child alone. Her insecurities were a fleck.
“Because you’re the smartest person I’ve ever known and I still have to tutor you on two plus two.” He kissed her forehead, right where it warmed with blood. “I love you, Alex. You were enough when I was sixteen, and you’ll be enough when I’m sixty.”
Her body pieced together—capillaries, lungs, nerves—whole, no longer broken. She wanted to scale him, take every bit of him inside her until she had cataloged all the ways he was extraordinary, a rolled-up scroll should she ever lose her mind.
“And after sixty?” she teased.
Jonah shrugged. “Taffy’s grandson is hot. Pretty solid with wood. May start a bromance with him if he keeps his hair.”
The twitch of amusement so often at his lips reshaped to a full-on smile and brought her gaze to his lips, her return ticket. She kissed him in a way that would leave no question in his mind that he had turned her world upside down, then and now and down the road, Taffy’s grandson be damned.
The Butterfly Dream: Match Made In Devon Bridal Shop: Book Two Page 16
