What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

by Leah Stewart

  She calls up the camera on her phone, turns off the flash, holds it up, smiles like she’s taking a selfie, and clicks. She checks the picture. Josie’s in profile from several feet away, and her hair looks darker than it is, so you might not recognize her if you didn’t know her. She wants to send the photo to her sister because her sister figured out that she liked girls when she was twelve and got a huge, huge crush on Josie. They had a poster of Josie on the wall in their shared bedroom. Damn, she wishes it was a better photo. Should she risk another one? Should she ask if Josie will take one with her? Now she’d like Josie to look up, because maybe she would smile and seem friendly, and then she’d ask her. Her sister would just go right up to her and ask, no sneaking around, no hesitation at all. Her sister would be so thrilled! She wishes she were here.

  Josie knows the woman is watching her. At the moment of recognition, Josie felt the other woman’s sudden still alertness and focused more intently on her phone, though she is not reading what she is supposedly reading, which is a revised script for a studio test tomorrow that she’s only just learned she has. The show is a comedy about an actress who has a meltdown and goes home to take over her small-town local theater company. The first-round audition was right before the convention, and her manager told her they weren’t interested in her, so Josie hasn’t thought about the part since. Revisions sent today for an audition in front of twenty people tomorrow: This is not a recipe for success. She’s left a message with her manager asking if she can reschedule. She doesn’t have the energy for a studio test. She doesn’t have the energy to stare back at the other woman in a way that will make her stop watching, so she is pretending not to notice because that is as close as she can come to privacy. She has an unpleasant fluttering sensation high in her chest, which feels like her heart has slipped its mooring, and she wonders if this is the precursor to an anxiety attack or a pregnancy thing. She’s never experienced either so she doesn’t know.

  Her appointment was forty-five minutes ago. The sign by the receptionist’s window reads: IF IT IS MORE THAN THIRTY MINUTES PAST YOUR APPOINTMENT TIME, PLEASE LET US KNOW. But if she gets up and goes to the window, the woman’s eyes will track her, the woman might even take the opportunity to speak to her, and, oh God, she doesn’t want to talk to an eager, fascinated stranger right after she’s peed in a cup, while she waits to put her feet in stirrups and confirm that she’s pregnant at the age of forty-one by an ex-boyfriend who won’t call her back and hasn’t been home any of the three times she’s gone by. His house has a shut-up air, as if he’s out of town. She still has a key and has thought of using it, hunting clues to his whereabouts, but what if he’s changed the alarm code and she ends up explaining herself to the police? Has Josie Lamar lost it? Alter Ego actress caught breaking into her ex’s house after photos show her canoodling with former costar. And then a link to the police report. That probably wouldn’t happen. But it might. What were the chances someone would catch her kissing Max? But someone did. And Charlie has almost certainly seen that picture. He was always a little jealous of Max. Will he believe that nothing happened? Will he doubt that the baby is his? Will they end up a sordid gossip item about custody battles and paternity tests?

  She doesn’t want to go alone into Charlie’s dark and silent house. She doesn’t want to log on to his computer—she knows his password, her name plus her birthday—and find an e-mail in which he tells his best friend, Tony, that she’s stalking him and Tony advises him not to call her back. She doesn’t want to learn that he’s changed his password. She doesn’t want to confront evidence of some new love affair, doesn’t want to bear witness to his absence, his abandoned house, his lonely things. She just wants him to appear. Please, Charlie. Just appear.

  He must be on vacation somewhere, because if he was away doing a movie, she’d be able to discover that online. Charlie, as she knows him, would be instagramming the hell out of travel, but his hiatus from social media continues. If she really wants to find him, she has to send an e-mail or make a phone call she dreads: to his mother or his father or one of his sisters or one of his friends or his agent or his manager or or or. She can’t bear the thought. Not because there aren’t some perfectly nice people on that list, but because she’s his ex-girlfriend—who broke up with him, who’s been photographed kissing someone else—and it is inherently strange to be his ex-girlfriend and contact someone to ask where he’s gone on vacation and how she can reach him there. And what will be her excuse? And what if he’s traveling with another woman? She’s been waiting for confirmation from the doctor that this is a viable pregnancy. Once she knows, then she can decide whether she can stand to wait for Charlie to resurface or whether she has to find him now.

  She doesn’t want Charlie to have seen that picture because it will have hurt him. Even if he’s stopped loving her? Yes, even then. No one wants to imagine he could be so quickly replaced. She hopes he hasn’t seen it, but alas for the information age, she knows he has. He’s seen it, his parents have seen it, his sisters have seen it, his friends have seen it, his costars have seen it. She’s exposed him to ridicule or smug faux sympathy or genuine sympathy that will catch him off guard, render him vulnerable, someone’s kind words a quick shove into emotions he’d rather not feel. Or maybe he’s not wounded but bitter and angry, and she’s given him the excuse he needed to hate her. And now he hates her. He hates her now. Though she’s never known him bitter and angry. She’s never seen him like that. One gossip site ran the photo with Sorry, Charlie scrawled across it. If he has any capacity for bitter and angry—and who doesn’t, who doesn’t—please don’t let him have seen that.

  Now fifty minutes have passed. She sighs hard and lifts her face toward the ceiling, and she shouldn’t have done that, because the other woman spots an opening. “They’re slow today,” she says.

  Shit. Josie looks at her. She’s smiling with a sweet and nervous eagerness, one hand resting on her belly the way pregnant women do. She has a soft, plump face, presumably plumper with the pregnancy.

  “They’re not usually this bad,” she continues.

  Josie nods.

  “They’ll be twenty minutes late, but not, like, forty. Are you way past your appointment? I bet they’ll call you soon. Could I take a picture with you?”

  “What?” Josie says, because this last sentence came out in an incomprehensible rush.

  The woman’s soft face pinkens. “Could I take a picture with you? For my sister. She loves you.”

  “Your sister loves me,” Josie repeats, as if she can’t understand the words, as if it’s the first time she’s been told a stranger loves her, or the friend or relative of a stranger loves her, when it’s the hundredth time or the millionth.

  “She’s a lesbian,” the woman says.

  “Oh,” Josie says, through a stifled, startled laugh. Well, in that case, she thinks but doesn’t say, because why tease this pink pregnant woman who hasn’t the least idea that she’s tormenting her and hasn’t the least intention of torment? She just wants a picture for her sister. She just wants to express her love. Here’s a photo of Josie Lamar waiting for her pelvic exam! “Sure,” Josie says.

  The woman pushes herself out of her chair and her belly comes at Josie like a ball she’s supposed to catch. Soon I’ll look like that, Josie thinks but can’t believe it. “Phew,” the woman says. “I can’t believe I’m going to keep getting bigger.”

  “Right,” Josie says.

  “You just keep growing!” the woman says. “It’s crazy. When are you due?”

  “Um,” Josie says, and is spared expanding because the woman is positioning herself now in the chair next to Josie’s. She leans in. She holds the phone up, realizes she hasn’t reversed the camera’s direction, laughs nervously, fixes that, holds the phone up again. Josie sees herself in its tiny screen, first just half her face, then, as the woman adjusts the angle, all of it. She’d like to shut her eyes. The woman’s cheek to
uches her cheek, her belly touches her arm, firm and insistent, and Josie does her best to smile.

  The woman relaxes back into her seat, looking at her phone with an unabashed grin. “I took a couple,” she says. “This one’s the best.” She shows the shot to Josie, and Josie tries not to wince. Josie watches as she texts the photo to someone named Ashleigh—her sister, Josie assumes—and then seconds later the phone chimes and a green bubble filled with OMG!!!!!!!!!!! appears. The woman shows the bubble to Josie with a gratified laugh. “She loves you,” she says, eyes on the screen, thumbs flying, and Josie says, “I’m just going . . . ,” and heads for the receptionist’s desk.

  The receptionist is sorry for the wait. She’ll let the nurse know.

  Josie turns very slowly from the desk. The woman seems involved in her texting, but then she looks up and flashes Josie an expectant smile. And Josie left her bag in the seat next to hers. Why did she do that? Because it would’ve seemed rude to pick it up. Why, oh why, does she have to care about these things?

  She’s almost at the seat when her phone starts to ring, and she snatches up her bag and extracts it with a disproportionate rush of gratitude. It’s her manager. She withdraws—politely!—to an unoccupied part of the room.

  “I can’t reschedule,” her manager tells her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Today’s just . . . really busy, and this is so last minute.”

  “I know; I’m sorry. But . . .”

  Josie guesses what that trailing off means. She tests her hypothesis. “I thought they didn’t want to see me.”

  “Oh, the role’s changed. They want to see a lot of different things.”

  “So they want to see me but they won’t reschedule.”

  “They want to see all three of you tomorrow.”

  “It’s such late notice with revised sides.”

  “I know.” Her manager sighs. “One of my other clients dropped out of the test. She booked another show.”

  “And you talked them into replacing her with me.”

  “Their instinct is that you’re not right for the part, but they know you’re talented, Josie. They’re willing to give it another shot. Otherwise they wouldn’t see you.”

  “But I come tomorrow or not at all.”

  At last, a nurse appears in the doorway of the waiting room, a folder in her hand. “Josie Lamar?” she calls.

  “You’d be great for this, Josie,” her manager says.

  “Okay.”

  “You’d really be great.”

  “Okay, sure. Sure. I’ll do my best. Right now I have to go.” Then her manager says a lot of things really fast, and Josie agrees and agrees while the nurse stands near the scale smiling a tight, impatient smile.

  Josie has gained seven pounds. Her blood pressure is a little high.

  In the examining room, the nurse tells her to take off everything below the waist and points at a paper blanket, assures her the doctor will be right in. Josie hears the thunk of her file dropping into the box on the door. She obeys the nurse, folds her jeans and underwear neatly together, and puts them on a chair with her bag. She sits on the edge of the table with the paper over her lap, tries to adjust it so the curve of her buttock isn’t visible, imagines the woman from the waiting room suddenly appearing in the doorway, phone at the ready. Flash. Flash.

  What is she thinking, saying yes to a studio test tomorrow, when they don’t even want to see her?

  Seven pounds!

  Do other women feel quite so disheartened by a seven-pound uptick? Ridiculous question. She knows that they do. She just likes to imagine that she could let go of that concern if her appearance wasn’t so important to her job. Oh, the special torture of recording a DVD commentary, attempting insights and funny anecdotes over the background drone of insecurity. Oh God, I could have done that scene so much better. Why am I making that face? Why did they use that take? Why did I let them do that to my hair? Why do I look like that? Why do I sound like that? Why is that the way I walk? Some people, given access to her mind in those moments, might accuse her of being a self-obsessed narcissist, but those same people, looking at photos of her with plumper cheeks or a belly roll, would write in the comments that she’d let herself go. The very same people. She is supposed to look perfect without seeming to care that she looks perfect; she is supposed to age gracefully while somehow not aging at all. He’s so cute and she’s a hag. You can’t win, she knows that, and sometimes she resolves to stop trying. But if it was in her nature to stop trying, she wouldn’t be an actress.

  When she walks into that studio test tomorrow, she will not be prepared, and they will all immediately notice the seven pounds.

  Where are you, Charlie?

  She closes her eyes. The paper is scratchy and uncomfortable. It wouldn’t do her any good to cry. Already she’s been crying an unaccustomed amount. Let’s blame pregnancy for that, too.

  Her phone announces a Twitter notification, and grasping at distraction, she retrieves it. Me and @josielamar at the ob’s office! And then a photo of the waiting-room woman—@katiebird—and Josie with their cheeks touching, Josie wearing a smile that to her looks strained and terrified. Josie watches as responses appear. OMG is she pregnant? Someone else tweets a link to the picture of her kissing Max, and then someone else tweets one of her at the convention with her hand on her stomach. I think so! @katiebird tweets. She said she didn’t know when she was due.

  She wonders if the woman’s last name is Bird or if her parents called her Katiebird or if it’s a cutesy moniker she gave herself. Bird tweets, get it? What Josie actually said was “um.”

  The door opens and Josie startles. The doctor comes in. She’s a compact Asian woman with close-cropped hair and a brisk, reassuring manner, and Josie must look stricken because the doctor crosses quickly to her and puts a hand on her shoulder. “So you’re pregnant,” she says.

  Josie leans over to drop her phone in her bag. All through the appointment, punctuating the doctor’s matter-of-fact descriptions of terrifying tests, the thumping whoosh of the baby’s heart, she can hear the phone faintly chiming.

  Three.

  Remember how Charlie wanted that feeling of being where no one could find him? Ha. Ha. Ha. Welcome to the edge of the world.

  The edge of the world is a beach, which makes sense, because from here there is no going forward, and because every wish Charlie makes comes true in the worst possible way. So, of course, he has been spilled out from confinement into vastness, the endless, endless ocean, bigger than anything. He knows he’s not afloat but still solidly on land, sand in every nook and cranny. But afloat is how he feels when he sits with his back to the forest and them—Adan, Thomas, and Denise—and keeps his gaze on the moving water, imagining where each wave came from, the daunting miles each droplet traveled. Darius is not with them because Darius is dead. Darius is dead because Denise shot him. What it looked like when Darius died is one of the things Charlie tries not to think about, keeping his gaze on the water.

  They want him on the beach where they can see him from the semicircle they’ve set up between beach and jungle, blocking his path. He protested that he’d get sunburned, and Adan produced a beach towel from one of the packs and gave it to him with a dampened version of his usual expectation of gratitude. Even the unnaturally cheerful Adan is finding these circumstances less than ideal. Now Charlie sits all day with the beach towel draped over his head wishing he could retract his long limbs until every part of him was under its protection. He rotates whichever part of his body is in the sun, keeping a leg out until he feels the skin tighten and warm, then switching. He’s managed to avoid a bad burn, which is better than the opposite. The towel is printed with a skull and crossbones and says LEGOLAND FLORIDA PIRATES’ COVE. How did they acquire it? Why did they bring it? He doesn’t care. He’s lost all curiosity about them. He doesn’t give a fuck what their perspective is. Denise won’t
let him move back into the shade, where they are, not even when the sun is at its most insistent. So she can see him, she says, but Charlie knows he’s the ant, she’s the kid with the magnifying glass.

  She’s the woman with the gun.

  Today, all Charlie has eaten is a package of cheese crackers. Yesterday, dried mango and trail mix and a couple of granola bars. The kidnappers are almost as hungry, Adan perhaps equally so because he snuck some of his share to Charlie when Denise wasn’t looking. Now they are waiting for Mystery to show up in a boat with supplies. And when will she? And what if she doesn’t? Add those questions to the list of things not to think about. The water is so blue. Blue as . . . what? Blue as blue. He’s losing all descriptors. If he were on a transcendental retreat, he imagines this is what he’d be doing, depriving himself on purpose, staring at the water until all that was unnecessary fell away. And left . . . what? To be stripped down to the essential self, is that a good thing or a bad?

  What is the essential self? He pictures it as something very, very small.

  Since his show of rebellion, Denise has been hell-bent on reasserting her power. The rest of the hike she stopped periodically, waited for him to catch up, jabbed him under the ribs with her gun as he passed. She’d say something to Adan—maybe it was different somethings, maybe the same something, but to Charlie, whatever she said sounded like “Let’s kill him,” and then Adan would say something back that had, to Charlie’s ear, a note of pleading remonstrance, and then Denise would laugh or fire rapid speech or say absolutely nothing, which was probably the worst. After that, she’d speed past Charlie, wait a little while to play the scene again with minor variations. He walked with tension tightening and depleting his already exhausted muscles. He flinched whenever he saw her waiting for him, his body anticipating that sharp muzzle in his side. At night, she ordered Adan or Thomas to sit awake watching him while he slept. Thomas paced and muttered beside Charlie’s hammock, so when he had guard duty, Charlie’s sleep was shallow and full of bright, restless dreams. Even when Charlie had to dig a hole and squat over it, Denise insisted that Adan or Thomas stand guard and glance over from time to time. Still here, guys! Did you think I dug the hole to China?