by Joe Humphrey
At one point a chaplain came to the room, offering a sympathetic ear if Charlie needed to talk. She ignored him too. When he refused to take no for an answer, Charlie told him that both he and Almighty God could get fucked and never speak to her again. The chaplain nodded and left.
The second week saw the removal of her bandages and she was able to stop wearing the oversized sanitary pads. She was done bleeding. Done forever for that matter. There was a long scar running across the bottom of her stomach between her hips, clouded with hideous green and purple and yellow bruises and the orange stain of antiseptic soap. There was no mirror in the room, but she’d seen it well enough in the shower to know it wasn’t pretty. It shouldn’t be pretty. It was the hole where her hopes and dreams were ripped out of her and discarded.
The doctors thought she was depressed, and perhaps she was, but she didn’t feel depressed. There was absolutely nothing inside her. Not sadness or regret or anger or even confusion. She was an empty vessel. A ghost ship, drifting aimlessly in circles on an indifferent ocean. Nurses and doctors and therapists spoke down to her as if from the mouth of a well that she was at the bottom of, and she had no interest in climbing out.
During her third week in the hospital, her mother dropped by and left a suitcase for her. She didn’t come into the room. Later that night Charlie opened the case. Inside was her two pairs of jeans, three tops, and the dress she’d altered. A single folded piece of Rose’s stationery was tucked into the front pocket of the suitcase. Charlie laughed and shook her head as she read it.
'Charlotte. I’ve gone back to Tennessee. There’s nothing for me in Utah. You can come find me if you like. Or not. I don’t care anymore’
And that was it. No goodbye. No love. Nothing. It was perfect. She didn’t even sign it, as though even acknowledging that she was Charlie’s mother was too much to ask. Charlie laughed louder and dropped the note into the trashcan by the bed. A nurse poked her head into the room and asked if she was okay. Charlie waved her off, her hand over her mouth as she tried to contain the peals of laughter that were coming out of her.
“Do you smoke?” Charlie managed to get out through the laughter.
“No, I don’t. I don’t believe in it,” the nurse said, standing up straighter and fixing a wrinkle in her dress. Charlie smiled and pointed at her and laughed even harder.
“Of course you don’t! You’re Mormon! Everyone in this hospital is Mormon! There isn’t a single person in this building who can give me a cigarette!” Charlie was almost yelling. The nurse gave her a confused but disapproving look.
“You shouldn’t smoke. It’s disgusting,” she said as she ducked out of the room. Charlie followed her into the hallway. Laughing felt good, even though it hurt her belly. She didn’t understand why she was laughing exactly, but it was better than the nothing she was feeling.
“Oh, I’m gonna smoke alright. I’m going to smoke and I’m going to drink and I’m going to pump heroin into my arms and I’m going to steal a car and drive it right into your living room and set the whole fucking world on fire. That’s what I’m going to do.”
The nurse, who looked barely older than 20, backed into the square of desks that made up the nurse’s station, where an older, broader woman with a bad red dye-job was watching this unfold.
“You need to get back into bed Miss Lukin,” the older nurse said over the counter. “You’re not feeling well and you’re upsetting the staff.”
Charlie laughed again and turned around and went back into her room. The older nurse got up and followed her into the room.
“You need to get into bed and rest,” she said, sternly but not unkindly. Charlie looked up at her and shook her head.
“No. I’m leaving. I’m done.”
She dropped her hospital robe to the floor and shimmied out of her underwear. The older nurse stared at her, open-mouthed. With a wince at the pain in her belly, Charlie pulled the dress out of the suitcase and held it up. It was wrinkled but she didn’t care. It felt clean and blessedly normal against her skin. It was like a ladder out of the well and into the real world. Or, at the very least, out of the hospital. She was fed up with it.
“You aren’t ready to leave. You aren’t nearly healthy enough. And your mother isn’t here to get you,” the nurse pleaded with Charlie.
“She ain't coming. She’s never coming. She’s gone. Back to Tennessee!” Charlie blurted, nearly hysterical. The nurse narrowed her eyes, processing. “And good riddance. That old bitch gave up on me a long time ago,” Charlie spat, with more anger than she expected.
“But you can’t leave! There’s nowhere for you to go!” the nurse cried out as Charlie pushed past her, dragging the suitcase. She wasn’t even wearing shoes.
“I can do whatever I want,” Charlie said without looking back. The older nurse followed behind her and the first younger nurse caught up.
“You can’t just leave! That’s not how it works! You have to be discharged. Someone has to be here to claim you. You’re a minor!”
Charlie stopped walking and clenched her jaw. She suppressed the urge to turn around and leap on the woman, to punch and bite and rip at her face with her fingernails. Instead, she turned and looked at her with as much hatred and anger as she could muster, which was a staggering amount.
“Stop me then. Fucking try it,” Charlie hissed at her through gritted teeth, eyes bulging. Both nurses stepped back.
“That’s what I thought,” Charlie muttered as she turned and marched to the exit. It occurred to her that she had no idea what time it was. She knew it was night because it was dark out and the tiny hospital was practically empty. Regardless, she dragged her suitcase through the double doors that led out into the world. The nurses huddled and watched her go, unsure of what to do next.
- 16 -
There it was. Somehow she knew it would be there and it was, parked directly in front of the hospital, the engine idling in a smooth, reserved grumble like a sleeping lion. The street lamp it was parked under gave the white Cadillac a fiery gleam that made it look alive and dangerous. She could see the red of the seats inside. The car from her dreams. The car she’d woken up in that night on the train tracks. She was going to officially meet the mysterious stranger. Her guardian angel.
As she walked to the car, the trunk popped open. The inside was empty and pristine. She lifted her suitcase in and felt her tender stomach scream in protest. The trunk lid was heavy but she managed to pull it down and slam it closed. When she approached the passenger door, the window slid down with a smooth electric coolness.
“Well get in,” the voice inside said impatiently. “Let’s have a look at ya!”
Charlie closed her eyes. For a moment, she was positive that she was dreaming, floating through some kind of crazy vision where she screamed at nurses and her mother moved to Tennessee and left her all alone in a hospital with a carved out, mangled cavity where her uterus used to be. She would get into this car and it would take her to her bedroom where she would wake up in the morning and go to school and none of this ever would have happened.
The smell of vanilla wafted up from the window. Charlie smiled and opened the door.
CHAPTER THREE
- 1 -
The silence in the secret room was dense and heavy, like a fog that presses on your sinuses and makes your head hurt. She could feel the weight of Caroline's arm around her waist, but not her temperature or pulse. As sleep curled around her head, she tried to feel guilty about killing the old man, but just couldn't get there. Some cursory part of her pressed and prodded at her heart and insisted that she should feel guilty, yet she didn't. The last few days were a blur, and the old man's death was just one of many strange experiences that made absolutely no sense. Everything was different. As she lay there in the dark, drifting off to sleep, she tried to think of one thing about herself that she knew for certain, and came up empty.
Charlie's life, as she understood it only a few days earlier, was gone. Obliterated. Her mother, her
home, the baby, her entire life was just gone. There was nothing left. She was a new person in a new life and she had no idea of what the future of that life looked like, and that was exhilarating. For whatever reason, Caroline decided to pluck her up out of the muck and wiped her scorecard clean. How many people get that kind of chance? To drop everything and simply start again? It was amazing. Especially considering how little she had to live for in her old life.
In the darkness of the windowless room behind the wardrobe, Charlie couldn't tell if her eyes were open or closed, or whether she was awake or dreaming. She pulled Caroline's arm up and held her hand. It was strange having a person take care of her again.
As she finally drifted off into the mist of sleep, she remembered riding in the Cadillac and looking at Caroline, amazed that she actually existed. This mysterious woman was like a fairy godmother to her over the ten months since her attack. Who appeared in her dreams and whispered sweet comforts to her, sitting on her bed and stroking her hair. The lone voice of support as she struggled through the pregnancy and the bleakness of what she thought was her future. Some ethereal protector she wasn't even sure was real, sitting right next to her. Charlie could have reached out and touched her if she wasn't so intimidated.
“I thought you might want to stop by your house and pick up a few things,” Caroline said. Her voice was just as musical and lovely as it was in her dreams. Charlie nodded, still not even sure if she was actually awake and this was happening. She did feel the need to go back to the house. Not because there was anything there she wanted, but because she wanted to see for herself that her mother was actually gone. In the note Rose left for her, she wrote that she was leaving, headed back to Tennessee. Charlie believed her mother was capable of that, but there was still a tiny part of her that desperately wanted it to not be true.
Caroline drove Charlie back to the house. It was mostly empty, except for Charlie’s bedroom, which was still full of her belongings. One room of an empty house, furnished with the remains of a teenage girl’s entire existence. Only a few odds and ends deemed unworthy of the trip to Tennessee were left in the rest of the house, sad and alone in the corners. Charlie stepped into her bedroom and stood there a moment. Caroline waited in the doorway, watching with her hands folded at her waist and a sympathetic, almost sad expression on her face. She waited while Charlie decided what she wanted to do.
Standing at the edge of the room, Charlie couldn’t stop staring at the massive black blood stain on the floor next to her twin bed. The bed she’d slept in nearly every night of her life, which was also dark with old blood. In the empty house, it looked smaller, like a child’s bed. She had to remind herself that she was a child still, and this was a child’s bedroom. It looked like a child’s bedroom. Stuffed animals on shelves and her jewelry box with its homemade beaded and fabric bracelets and necklaces, the odd bit of costume jewelry. Charlie opened her closet and looked at her clothes. The jeans, the blouses, the dresses. She couldn’t get a sense that any of it actually belonged to her. It was like digging through the belongings of a dead person.
Scattered around her room were empty packages and bits of plastic tubing and other debris from the impromptu cesarean section performed only a week earlier. The stain on the floor looked like someone was murdered in her bedroom that night. In a sense, perhaps someone was.
Charlie pulled up a quilt from the bottom of the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. It was the quilt that had been left for her by the mysterious woman she now knew as Caroline. It had become something of a talisman to Charlie and was the one thing in the room she was attached to at that point.
Pain shot through her stomach as she leaned on the bed with one knee and felt along the side against the wall. Caroline stepped forward to help and Charlie shook her head. She came up with a red and white package of Marlboro cigarettes, a book of matches between the cardboard and cellophane. Caroline held her hand up in a polite 'no' and smiled when Charlie held the pack out to her. Charlie placed a cigarette between her lips and looked around the room.
Reaching along the other side of the bed, she slid her hand between the mattress and box-spring and pulled out a tattered issue of Rolling Stone magazine. The angry, steely eyes of Charles Manson stared up at her. Looking into those eyes rang a bell somewhere deep in her subconscious and she wanted to turn away. It was uncomfortable, taking in that picture of him with his clenched jaw and shaggy Jesus hair and beard. She forced herself through the rising anxiety — then something inside her shifted and she felt stronger, more aware, and grounded. Ever since her attack, she’d been irrationally afraid of Manson, yet at the same time fascinated with him and the trial. She watched as much of the coverage on television as she could get away with. Her mother disapproved, but Charlie suspected she was as curious about the spectacle and scandal of it as everyone else.
While he never struck her as Christ-like or even particularly crazy, she did have a picture of him in her head as a methodical and brilliant manipulator, like a hobo politician or rock star. A psychotic Bob Dylan, gathering an army of the discarded and rejected youth with nothing but a guitar and raw charisma. There wasn’t anything sexy or attractive about him, but there was something absolutely fascinating in discovering just how deep the Manson Family’s idolization of him went. That they would murder innocent people — hell, murder poor pregnant Sharon Tate, whose only crime was appearing in cheesy movies. Those strange women with their shaved heads and X marks cut into their foreheads. It was seductive seeing that level of devotion to a person.
When she saw the footage of him on TV, staring into the camera with so much hate on his face, her heart sped up and her breath went shallow. It was an unsettling combination of anxiety and intrigue. Something about seeing his face with those wild, animalistic eyes darting around, looking for something soft and innocent to land on and suck the life out of gave her shivers. She would wake up shaking from nightmares of riding in the passenger seat of an old Volkswagen Bug with Charles Manson at the wheel, his head shaved and black bile sputtering from his lips and crooked teeth as he barked dark secrets to her that she’d forget upon waking.
Often as she lay in bed, she would stare at the photos in that Rolling Stone article and try to understand why he stirred up such uncomfortable, conflicting feelings. Was it just because he was the monster of her generation? She didn’t think so. There were plenty of monsters already, both public and personal. The Zodiac killer, with his taunting letters to the press and cryptic codes, while endlessly fascinating, wasn’t particularly scary. He was too weird, like a comic book villain. Richard Speck raped and murdered an entire dorm full of nursing students only five years earlier. No, there were plenty of other monsters. Manson was different. Something about his face and his eyes triggered a primal feeling of panic that left her unsettled and shaken up.
That is, it used to. Standing on the bloodstain next to her bed, staring at the magazine cover, she felt nothing. Nothing significant. Whatever strange hold the image of this sad, grubby, white trash derelict had on her, it was gone. She saw him for what he actually was, a charismatic but misguided fool. A failed musician who was pissed at the world and funneled all his impotent, self-righteous anger into the heads of a bunch of lonely, doomed kids looking for meaning in a world where their classmates were being killed in a war that made no sense. This man who had held a place in her heart like some sort of criminal mastermind with a nearly metaphysical, devil-like understanding of how people functioned had become nothing to her. A half-assed amateur boogie man, mugging for the cameras.
Charlie popped a match and lit her cigarette. After watching the flame burn for a moment, she held the match to the edge of the magazine and let it catch.
“What are you doing, doll?” Caroline asked, taking a step back towards the door. Charlie heard the slightest hint of fear in her voice and it caught her off guard.
“I’m walking away,” Charlie said, barely more than a whisper. Caroline nodded and watched as Charlie dropped the
magazine on the bed. The top sheet, which was crispy and black with flaking, dried blood, caught almost immediately, burning out in a circle of smoldering flame. The fact that her mother hadn't even removed the sheets from her bed in the weeks she was in the hospital told her it really was over. Her mother was gone.
“We should leave,” Caroline said, backing up. Charlie nodded and walked out of her bedroom, her shadow long and dancing on the wall in the light of the flames.
Standing in front of the house, watching the light flicker and climb up the window of her bedroom, Caroline took her hand. It was a simple gesture, but it sent a shudder through her body. It occurred to her that it had been months since someone touched her intending to give comfort. Her mother held her and cried in the hospital at one point, but Charlie believed that was more to comfort herself than for Charlie's benefit. Caroline’s hand was cold and hard in her gloves, but that was okay. She squeezed Charlie’s hand and Charlie squeezed back. The curtains caught and the flames were visible through the window.
“Will you come with me?” Caroline asked. She was at least five inches taller and Charlie had to look up to meet her eyes. They were intense but kind, framed under immaculately manicured eyebrows, with thick (probably false, Charlie thought) eyelashes that made her eyes look cartoonishly big. They flickered orange in the light of the fire. The smell of burning wood and melting plastic mixed with that vanilla scent Charlie associated with her guardian angel. It was strange to finally be standing there, holding her hand and looking into her beautiful eyes. Everything about her was beautiful.
It occurred to her then to wonder what exactly it was that Caroline wanted from her. That night was the first time she’d been in a position to actually speak to her in any sort of coherent, lucid headspace, and she was so wrapped up in needing to be saved that she never asked where they were going or what they were doing.
