The nausea was Alex’s this time. She slowed the motion of the chair beneath her, measured cost versus risk in Charlotte’s emotional bribe. One was in the past, beyond repair; the other was present, possible, catastrophic. The two unrelated, yet intertwined.
Alex nodded.
“He’s a doctoral candidate at Cornell who developed a technology to revolutionize the way butterflies have been tagged for eighty years, to track them in real time to prove global warming has led to the decline in monarch populations. He leads a team of volunteers each migration season, and he asked me to join them when they come through, headed north.”
Alex measured what she wanted to say—namely, are you fucking crazy?—against the yardstick of understanding that might yield the entire story.
“How does he know you?”
“We’ve exchanged emails for years. I always came up with an excuse why I couldn’t join them.”
“Like?”
“Daddy’s passing. Travel…” She fiddled with the rug again. “Clients.”
Alex’s brain snagged on travel, then forfeited that absurdity for Charlotte’s last lie. “Clients? Like two teenage girls and a son who looks like a clone of his daddy?”
“Well, now you’re just being catty.”
“No, I really want to know, Charlotte. If you’re even considering this—and I can’t believe you are—Dr. Flutter deserves the full picture here.”
“I never thought he’d need the full picture.”
“Who does he think you are?”
Again with the silence. Her words recycled in Alex’s brain: doctoral candidate—Ivy League, travel, clients. Charlotte wouldn’t have stretched far in her tale. A lie of any magnitude would have been too much for her. The realization was that first squirm of her stomach when her milk released, the motion sickness of too much rocking. Sweat erupted under Alex’s arms. She had to get Maddie to her crib, had to get to the cool hallway before she shouted something hurtful, like people such as Charlotte didn’t get to borrow her grinding years of self-actualization and sacrifice because they wanted to fuck a guy who chased butterflies.
Alex managed a smooth landing with Maddie, a hasty exit, Charlotte’s wrist in tow. She wasn’t so fortunate with her mouth. Or her boob. It still flapped out the opening of her bra like canned biscuits popped out of a refrigerated roll. She tried to fasten the hook, failed, gave the fuck up.
“You pretended to be me?” The question was a whispered shout that burned Alex’s throat in passing.
“Who else do I know who’s educated, who’s seen the world, who doesn’t have to scrape out a chicken coop by hand or shovel wet manure?”
Alex huffed the length of the hallway and down the first set of stairs, smuggling her breast into position, Charlotte hot on her heels. Why won’t this damned hook fasten?
“Trust me, this isn’t what you want, Charlotte.”
“I don’t even know what I want.”
Alex stopped short on the landing. “You’re willing to stake your entire life on a lie? An affair is an emotional bomb, with everyone around you paying the price. Just look at Mama and Daddy. They’re long gone, and we’re still the collateral damage.” She paused to catch her breath, to conserve the last of her energy, to speak at a volume that didn’t rattle inside her tired mind. “It’s time to break the cycle, Charlotte, of women who tell themselves lies just to get by, of women who seek out strangers because they can’t close the distance with those closest to them, of women who sleep around on their husbands because they can’t escape the torment of what-if.”
She waited for her words to sink in, for Charlotte to realize the fullness of what she was telling her, that she had come through on her promise. It did not come swift or whole, but in pieces as Charlotte drizzled the remainder of the way down the staircase and lowered herself to the bottom step.
“Mama?”
Alex sat beside her. “Yeah.”
“When?”
“The summer before Daddy left for Georgia.” Alex told her about sneaking out to the trailer at the far edge of the property, hiding on the shady side when the sun blazed and under the awnings when it rained, always the same sight through that open pipe—skin and sweat and the rhythm of two bodies, intertwined.
“But you only saw pieces—limbs and such. Never faces.”
“It was her. I saw her yellow sundress. The off-the-shoulder one with all the lace that she used to wear when she roamed the house at night.”
Charlotte shook her head. “Mama was always giving away her clothes to charity. It could have been anyone.”
God, her sister was naïve.
“Then tell me why Daddy left so suddenly. Why he loved us and faithfully wrote us postcards from all the places he stopped, why he pretended to work as a salesman all those years, just to turn around and leave us with no word, no goodbye. He knew.”
“How did he know?” Charlotte was bold now in her questions, reckless, no longer willing to flirt with truths. “Alex…”
The warning in her tone was significant. Alex’s relationship with Daddy had always been extra. Common knowledge.
Alex hugged her knees to her. “I told him.”
Charlotte got up, snatched her coat from the rack, tried to stab her arm through a sleeve hole, but it was a mess—inside out and twisted—so she gave up and dumped it at her feet. “You saw a yellow dress…” She rifled her bare feet into a pair of running shoes and flung the door wide. “…not her face, not his face, not a hand with a wedding ring or her birthmark behind the shoulder, you saw a dress, Alex. A dress. And you told him?”
The cold night gathered everything in the foyer, Charlotte included. She would run the fields; she always did.
Alex shivered. “Charlotte, don’t be crazy. It’s cold out there.”
“Crazy. That’s rich, Alex. I’m not the one who was given every advantage to get away from this town but still found a way to turn it all into a heapin’ mess, who has a man willing to marry her tomorrow but can’t get out of her own way enough to see it, who invented a lie to put distance between Mama and Daddy. You wanted it to be her so Daddy would turn every bit of his attention to you. As if you didn’t get it all already.”
“He went out to the trailer that night. Whatever he found drove him from here. You tell me what that might have been, to leave his girls, his home, his family. Daddy wouldn’t chase a lie. And you shouldn’t either.”
Charlotte gripped the door handle, her chest rising and falling like she’d already stormed the fields. “You’ve already chased enough of those for us all.”
She slammed the door. Hurried steps pounded the porch planks, then silence.
Alex leaned her forehead against the wall and bet the devil, promised the next time would be different, that she’d do better. Buried truths destroyed the present. She’d do well to remember that.
14
Freesia
The pie in front of them was inspired: brick-oven-kissed crust, impossibly thin but nearly as big as the table, melted puddles of fresh mozzarella, random basil leaves trenched in marinara. Freesia’s last splurge in the city, and she couldn’t bring herself to finish half a slice.
Natalie and Allison, however, had mowed through a good portion. They were yet to make the connection that a fuck off, however polite, to their benefactor meant bye, bye New York.
As plans went, Freesia’s was as thin as the pizza. Tap her meager savings to get the three of them back to Jackson on the last flight out of JFK, wait to tell Charlotte until they had landed in Mississippi. Freesia didn’t have it in her to answer Charlotte’s questions. She couldn’t even answer her own. Had she overreacted? Freesia replayed the notes in Yu’s words, dissected her mood—hurried, overwhelmed from navigating a strange city, frazzled at being responsible for two other people, freaked out by the resurgence of dark memories—and decided her principles had been the easy excuse. People put up with eccentric bosses all the time to get to the top. Play the game until you are the game. Had Ch
arlotte been there, she would have diffused the moment with humor and been best friends with Yu by now. Heck, even Charlotte’s mini-me, Allison, had handled the scene better.
“Ellis Island, Washington Square Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, all before your meeting,” said Natalie, her voice elevated above the crowd, the call-back orders, the decidedly un-pizzeria music. “There’s no way you’re not hungry.”
A scuffle under the tiny, round top ensued, followed by a sour-faced “Ouch” from Natalie and a retaliation.
“Don’t bring up the meeting,” said Allison to her sister.
“Why? Did you see his face? Auntie Freesia was amazing.” All three syllables. Ah. Ma. Zing.
“She probably just bombed her career. You could be a little more sensitive.”
The word bombed tracked eardrum to stomach and threatened a revisit of Napoli’s finest.
“So much better,” said Freesia.
Allison cringed. “Sorry.” She took a bite and chewed on her next thought before presenting it. “We feel responsible. Like if we weren’t here, he would have invited you upstairs to look at your portfolio and made you famous.”
Natalie nodded in agreement.
Freesia couldn’t help but smile at the unlikely jump from walking upstairs in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not house to being the next Monique Lhuillier. She couldn’t allow them to blame themselves.
“If it hadn’t been you two, it would have been someone else down the line. A model. A production assistant. Maybe even me. No, it’s better I find out now. I can’t go on admiring someone who has such little regard for others.”
“I could never be brave enough to do what you did,” said Natalie. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“Volunteering overseas, I guess. The program matches you with people and communities who can’t stand up for themselves for one reason or another—poverty, disability, disease, politics, fear of persecution. You realize that if someone doesn’t speak up, things for them will never change.” Freesia picked up her soda and pulled a few long gulps through the straw. The carbonated jolt of caffeine was already working out the frayed edges of her mood. Or maybe it was simply remembering the million steps she had taken to get to this moment, most of them taxing. “Plus, I’ve been told I’m a little pushy.”
“That’s what Mom likes about you. She calls you Fearless Freesia, like one of those silly wrestlers on television that Dad and Gabe watch. Mom’ll walk through the living room when it’s on and say that you could open up a can of whomp on every last one of them.”
Natalie tore into another slice, crust-first. “She won’t say ass.”
This development, a little taste of Charlotte here, too, had a smile tugging at Freesia’s lips.
“You’re a right-fighter. Like grandpa,” Allison said.
Freesia’s pulse slipped out of rhythm. A hiccup, really. She was starting to sink comfortably in the pocket of being Elias March’s daughter. She just wasn’t sure the rest of them were, or how much the girls knew.
“He did that sort of thing all the time,” said Allison. “Remember when we went down to the coast and that guy at the pancake house was being rude to the waitress?”
Natalie nodded and daubed her napkin at a glob of wayward red sauce on her chin. “Really awful. Grandpa went over and told him to leave. Paid the guy’s bill and gave the waitress a huge tip.”
“One time, he went to the bank and fought beside our neighbor to help her save her land after her husband died. Got a bunch of people in town to use her acres as an investment and some of the farmers like Grandpa Strickland to come over and teach her how to turn the land.”
“And don’t forget Miss Maggie.”
“She was the wife of one of the men he mentored who got sent back to prison,” Allison said. “He drove out every week with a box of food and left it on her porch. Sometimes we made a game of the deliveries, going at odd hours, pretending we were ninjas so she wouldn’t know.”
Freesia absorbed the stories coming at her in rapid fire. Elias March was still largely an enigma to her, a little like the neon sign at the window above them. Glimpses from the inside, from people who knew him best, but the bigger perspective she’d have to venture out into the encroaching darkness to see. And that was a place, with her mother, she’d vowed she’d never go.
“Did he know he had you?” asked Allison.
Freesia squirmed. She took a bite against her stomach’s wishes to give herself some mental space. How had this abysmal afternoon devolved into a plundering of past hurts? How much had Charlotte told them? How much would Freesia have given at their age for a straight answer?
“He did. My mother told him not to show up.”
“Why not?” Allison, in particular, seemed keyed-in to her answers.
“I guess she thought I would be confused. White man. Family of his own.”
Allison seemed to reflect on this. Maybe her stomach caught up to her taste buds. She set down her slice and brushed her hands together. “I think he was just as confused.”
Freesia could count on one hand the instances where she had spent any considerable length of time with children. There had been Jin Soo, the son of a Korean migrant farmer, who wanted to learn to count in English; the son of a religious studies professor at Durham University, home on holiday from boarding school, who taught her to ride a horse and avoid all obstacles but the direct question, “Are you having sex with my father?” and the hungry little girl wandering Kalyan Junction in Mumbai who’d shared her puffed rice and veggie bowl. All of them had the mundane gift to distill life to its essence—communication, sex, food. Charlotte’s lot were proving no different.
“You’re probably right.”
They ate in companionable silence. But something niggled at the corner of Freesia’s guilt—the prospect that children carry what they do not own. Same as she’d told Charlotte. Same as she, herself, felt.
“I don’t want what you know of him—your grandfather—about me, to change how you feel about him.”
“Mom told us how sad he became,” said Natalie. “How he went to the ocean and found your mama and that made him feel better for a while.”
Freesia might have known Charlotte would find a sweet, simplistic way of helping her children wrap their heads around adult things like infidelity and affairs.
“After all the times he made others feel better, I guess it was time for someone to stand up for him,” said Allison.
Freesia’s throat squeezed. “I guess so.”
“Think something like that will happen to us?” asked Allison. “Like maybe someday we’ll find out our parents became sad and we weren’t enough?”
Somewhere in the kitchen beyond, a loud noise—a pan dropped, something. This wasn’t the time or the place for Freesia to cast reassurances she didn’t believe. No time or place would be. She couldn’t say if Nash and Charlotte would make it; she could only speak truths from what she knew and hope that was enough.
“I think what happened to us is rare. Just like your grandpa.”
Her cell buzzed along the table beside her. A New York area code flashed on the screen. She answered.
“Hello?”
“Freesia, it’s Jon.”
Behind her, a group of guys with beers began an inebriated “Happy Birthday” song.
“Can you hold on? I need to step outside so I can hear you.”
Freesia squeezed out into the soggy street without her coat. Cool air rushed her heated cheeks. Noises of the city enveloped her in relative quiet.
“Sorry about that. Your pizza places are loud.”
“Best ones are,” said Jon. “I want you to know that I’ve never been spoken to the way you did today. It was audacious and self-righteous and totally out of line.”
Freesia stared at the manhole cover in the middle of the street, spewing steam. She thought there, beneath it, might be preferable to bringing the end of her career up for another discussion.
“But you were also right.
I’m an asshole, and I need to have people around me who remind me of that every so often. Bring your nieces and your sketches to the Gallery II show tonight at five. I’m sending dresses and credentials to the hotel so I can apologize in person.”
At the pizzeria window, Natalie and Allison joined in singing to a stranger, applauding madly at the end, and a bubble of something close to happiness burst inside Freesia’s chest. They were okay. They’d all be okay, somehow.
“I’m hanging up before you say no. And Freesia?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t make it a habit.”
Jon ended the call. Passers-by flushed around her. From her place, at this distance, the neon sign was in full view.
Luca’s Pizzeria. Fancy script that made the R look like an L, an umbrella design that brought the S to the end. E-an almost L-then I-A and S in baffling graphical alignment.
Elias.
Freesia glanced up, to where skyscrapers converged on a gray sky and saw a break in the clouds. At the window, under a serendipitous sign, Natalie and Allison laughed and drank and ate up a place far beyond home, precisely as Charlotte had wanted.
She dove back into the crowd, the noise, a table with the best Margherita pizza she had ever tasted, suddenly famished.
15
Charlotte
The road was unlike any she’d ever seen. Backroads accustomed to Mississippi red clay kicked up charcoal dust behind the van—one of those paneled jobs from the seventies that her and Alex used to say belonged to kidnappers. Twilight marked the horizon between tall, assembled pines. The van slowed to a stop near the suitcase at her feet.
From the waist down, Charlotte wasn’t wearing clothes.
Leaving her no time to lament her lack of a proper bikini line grooming, engine idling, the driver popped out of the door and rounded the bumper.
She couldn’t say who she expected. Hugh from the auto repair shop was a good bet. Was always driving some klunker. Bernice or Frances bringing her something to cover her full moon would have been nice. She would not have turned away Aquaman, either. Another familiar face came into view and flashed her a smile that upended her common sense.
The Butterfly Dream (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 2) Page 10
