by Lou Berney
“I’m sorry about yesterday. I should have known better.”
“I should have told them already, the girls. That we’re not going back to Oklahoma.”
“Why haven’t you?” he said.
“I don’t know why, exactly. I feel guilty, I suppose.”
“For what?”
He lit her cigarette. Even the smoke she exhaled, drifting away, had its own shadow.
“For everything,” she said. “Leaving him. Taking the girls. I feel guilty for telling myself that I’m doing it for the girls, to make their lives better. I am doing it for them. But also for myself, of course. I feel guilty for not feeling more guilty, as silly as that sounds.”
“Well,” Guidry said, “my philosophy—”
And then he stopped himself. He’d almost forgotten for a moment that he was supposed to be Frank Wainwright, insurance salesman, not Frank Guidry, former fixer extraordinaire for the Marcello organization.
“Yes?” she said. “I’m all ears.”
But maybe it was safest, Guidry decided, to speak his true mind. He didn’t want to give a woman as sharp as Charlotte any extra opportunities to spot a fake.
“My philosophy is that guilt is an unhealthy habit,” he said. “It’s what other people try to make you feel so you’ll do what they want. But one life is all we ever get, as far as I know. Why give it away?”
“My husband, when I called him from Santa Maria,” she said, “he told me I was selfish.”
“Of course he did. He doesn’t want you to leave. And of course you are. Because you know what matters to you and you’re not going to … What’s the title of that song again? ‘Don’t Think Twice.’”
She smoked, thoughtful. “This has been an interesting conversation,” she said.
“I concur,” Guidry said.
Upstairs, ten minutes later, he was packing his suitcase and listening to the radio when a fist drummed on his door. He didn’t panic. Paul Barone wouldn’t knock first.
Paul Barone. It was the first time that Guidry had allowed himself to think the name. He said a short prayer. To God or to Carlos? A distinction without a difference right now. Please, God or Carlos, don’t send Paul Barone. Send somebody, anybody, else.
He opened the door. It was Charlotte. He knew right away that something was wrong.
“Frank,” she said, her voice low and hoarse. “Joan’s gone.”
“What?” he said.
“I got back to the room and …” She was trying to stay calm. “Rosemary doesn’t know where she went. She was asleep when Joan left. Joan’s been upset about California, I think. I was only downstairs for half an hour, Frank.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find her. She can’t have gone too far.”
Joan must have slipped out the back way while they were having coffee in front of the hotel. Guidry and Charlotte split up. He went left down the alley behind the hotel, she went right. Guidry checked the doorways, behind the empty beer kegs. A man dumping potato peels and eggshells into a trash can said no, sorry, he hadn’t seen any little blond girl.
Guidry poked his head into every shop and restaurant that was open. You’re a kid, you’re in a strange land, you want to go home. What do you do?
Well, of course. You go home. There was a bus depot two blocks over—they’d driven past it last night. Guidry beelined over, and sure enough there sat Joan—on a bench by the ticket window, so tiny, her coat buttoned up and a little purse in her lap. Not one jerk in the place stopping to see if she needed any help.
He sat down next to her. “Hello there, Joan. Where are you headed?”
“Home,” she said. Solemn and inscrutable, like the stone Buddhas that Guidry had seen in the wrecked temples on Leyte.
“I thought you might be. Have you bought your ticket yet?”
She looked up at him.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it for you.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re a very polite young lady.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t know any children, so if it’s all right with you, I’m just going to talk to you like I’d talk to anybody else.”
Joan nodded.
“You think that if you go home,” Guidry said, “to Oklahoma, everything will flip back to the way it was before. That’s all you want, isn’t it? You’re not asking for much, just everything back the way it was before.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I understand that. Boy, do I. I had to leave my home, too, you know.”
“Why?”
“Same as you. Circumstances beyond my control. And I’ll tell you the truth that neither one of us wants to hear: The world turns. Time marches on. Life won’t ever be the same. Even if you get on that bus and go back to Oklahoma. How old are you?”
“Eight,” she said.
“Rosemary’s younger, but she thinks she’s the boss,” he said.
“Yes.”
“It’d be a shame if you two split up and she didn’t have you to boss around. She wouldn’t know what to do, would she?”
“No.”
“It’s all going to be new for you and me,” Guidry said. “From here on out, wherever we go. Who knows? Maybe the new will be even better than the old. We won’t know till we find out.”
She started to cry. Guidry didn’t know what to do. Put an arm around her or not? Pat her little blond head? He put an arm around her. She pressed her face against his chest. A spot spread across his shirt, hot and damp.
“Go ahead,” he said. “I don’t blame you.”
Next to his chair was a spinning wire rack filled with tourist brochures. He reached out with his free hand and turned it. Famous Arizona Ranches Welcome You. Saguaro National Monument. Grand Canyon and the Indian Empire.
“Don’t you want to see the Grand Canyon first?” he said. “Before you go back?”
Joan shook her head.
“Seems like a shame. To come all this way and miss it. The Grand Canyon, where once upon a time the mighty dinosaurs roamed.”
Charlotte entered the depot. When she spotted Joan, Charlotte almost buckled with relief. Guidry thought for a moment that it might kill her.
“Joan,” she said. “Oh, Joan.”
He passed Joan over to Charlotte. “I believe this belongs to you, madam.”
Joan had stopped crying, more or less. Charlotte kissed every inch of her wet, snotty face.
“We’re going to see the Grand Canyon,” Joan said.
Charlotte looked at Guidry. “We are?”
He’d stooped to pick up the little red vinyl purse, which had dropped to the floor. Oh, Joan, one day she’d learn never to take a man like Guidry at his word. But he couldn’t afford to upset the applecart. He would need his new family in Vegas, better late than never.
“Of course we are,” Guidry said. “Frank Wainwright never welches on a promise.”
The Grand Canyon was ninety miles up, ninety miles back, so Guidry told the clerk at the hotel to hold their rooms for another night. They set off at just before noon. Unlike the Unpainted Desert and the Barely Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon was truly grand. Guidry, who thought he’d seen it all, had seen nothing like it. Dusted with snow, impossible depths. Standing here on the brink, you felt smaller than small, a speck. You were forced to face the uncomfortable truth of your own existence: You did not, in the scheme of things, matter at all.
Charlotte kept the girls back a few feet from the edge, but it still made Guidry nervous, how they bounced and darted.
“Look, Joan!” Rosemary said. “I can see a river way down there!”
“So can I!” Joan said.
For a few hours, Guidry almost forgot about Carlos and Seraphine and Big Ed Zingel. About the unforeseeable fate that awaited him in Vegas. But then, driving back to Flagstaff, they heard a radio announcer report that President Johnson had created a special commission, headed by Earl Warren, to investigate the Kennedy assassination.
Here it was. The full weight of the federal government brought to bear. On Airline Highway in Metairie, Louisiana, Carlos Marcello paced and paced and paced while Seraphine tried her best to appear unruffled. Guidry could see it as if he were right there in the room with them.
Guidry had harbored a secret fantasy ever since Houston. A few weeks would pass, the FBI would pin everything on Oswald, they’d shut down the case. Carlos would breathe easy and decide that Guidry posed no real threat.
So much for that. Earl Warren was the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. He wasn’t in anybody’s pocket, as far as Guidry knew. How much influence would Bobby Kennedy have? It didn’t matter. Carlos wouldn’t stop pacing until Guidry was dead.
“Is everything all right?” Charlotte asked.
Guidry turned to smile at her. “Of course. How about some music?”
At the hotel Charlotte tucked the girls in for the night and then she stepped back into the hallway to say good night to Guidry. She closed the door softly behind her.
“Thank you for your help this morning,” she said. “With Joan.”
“I think she’ll be just fine,” Guidry said.
“You’re very good with children, you know.”
“Am I? Listen, why don’t you come downstairs and have a drink with me?”
“No.” She reached up and brushed her thumb lightly against his cheek. The spot next to his right eye, where the bone curved. “Do you know you have a little scar here?”
“I do,” he said. A waxy nick, the size and shape of a fingernail paring. Guidry couldn’t remember exactly how he’d acquired it. The buckle of his father’s belt, maybe? He remembered the general circumstances. “I was climbing a tree when I was a little boy. The bough broke, and down came baby, cradle and all.”
“I’d like to take a photo of it sometime,” she said, “if you don’t mind.”
“Of my scar?” he said.
She was standing close. Her hand still on his cheek, her other hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go to your room,” she said.
“You want to take a picture right now?” he said.
She kissed him. Sure of herself, sure of the kiss. Her thumb pressing lightly against his scar as she kissed him.
“No,” she said. “Not right now.”
21
He felt familiar in Charlotte’s hand. A man was a man was a man, she supposed. Everything else, all the other parts of him—his fingers and his mouth and the rhythm of his breathing, the foreign flavor of his skin—that was what made it seem as if she’d fallen asleep and blundered into some other woman’s dream.
Oops! Sorry! I’ll show myself out.
Well, ahem, not just yet, not right away, if you don’t mind.
Because it was a very nice dream. Charlotte kept her eyes open as Frank pushed against, into, and through her. She watched his face, his eyes. At the moment of connection, she felt the muscles in his stomach tighten. And then he smiled. She thought for a second that he might wink at her, but he didn’t.
Who are you?
But that wasn’t really what she was thinking, it wasn’t really the question she wanted to have answered.
Who am I?
She was terrified and exhilarated and most of all curious. Who am I? Sunday dinner with Dooley’s family had taken place five days ago. It seemed five centuries. That time and place were gone, “Charlotte Roy” gone, too, buried in lava and lost to posterity. The here and now was a room in an old hotel, a brass-and-cowhide light fixture overhead, a man she barely knew holding the lobe of her ear between his teeth.
He rose and fell. She arched her back and shifted to her left. More memories: her first few times with her first boyfriend, her first few times with Dooley. That period of tentative discovery and polite adaptation, of walking through the steps instead of dancing them. Pardon me, madam. Allow me, sir. The scrape of hair against a tender inner thigh, the unexpected clank of bone against bone. Charlotte had been with Dooley for so long that the sex between them had become effortless, a lazy glide through the motions. They could practically do it without even touching.
Frank smiled at her again. “You’re thinking too much.”
She knew she was. But still. “It’s rather presumptuous of you to say so, isn’t it?”
“Stop thinking so much,” he said.
“Make me.”
He eased himself out of her until almost nothing connected them, and then he eased himself even more slowly back in. She locked her legs around his waist and tried to catch her breath, but he refused to let her. Her head banged against the headboard—she heard it, didn’t feel it—and now they were dancing, not thinking. She pushed him over and climbed on top. He lifted her up and threw her down. She forgot Dooley. She forgot Oklahoma. She forgot everything and concentrated on her own pleasure only. When she came, she grabbed for the cast-iron scrolls of the headboard, to keep from spinning into outer space, and accidentally punched Frank in the nose.
“I’m so sorry,” she said after she’d had a minute (or was it five?) to loll like the dead on the cool sheets, to gather the various slivers of herself and reassemble them.
He laughed. “I’ll get my gloves up next time.”
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“No I’m not.” He checked, two fingers. “Yes I am.”
While he was in the bathroom, Charlotte returned to her room. The girls didn’t stir. The dog padded after her and spread out on the tile, to supervise her shower.
“I’ll thank you,” she said, “to keep your opinion to yourself.”
But the dog had already fallen back asleep. She laughed. Because he didn’t give a damn about what she did or with whom she did it, and now Charlotte no longer had to give a damn either. The realization filled her with helium and sunlight. She stood in the shower for as long as she could bear it, letting the scalding water spill luxuriantly over her scalp and down the groove between her shoulders.
As she brushed her teeth, she inspected her reflection in the mirror. Who am I? She saw the same familiar eyes (too large, if you asked her, and set just a bit too wide apart), the same familiar mole on her neck (mortifying when she was a teenager, though she didn’t mind it now), the same familiar nose and lips and chin.
But appearances could deceive. The woman who’d walked into that grimy garage back in Santa Maria was not the same woman who walked out of it. The decision Charlotte made that day—to leave Dooley and Oklahoma behind once and for all, to stop doubting herself—had caused the beginning of a shift inside her. She’d felt it, like the branches of a tree stirring as the wind picked up.
When Frank offered to drive them to Las Vegas, Charlotte should have tossed and turned all night, she should have dithered and wavered. Well, there had been a fair bit of that, it was true. Because she wasn’t naïve. She’d known that Frank was attracted to her, that his generosity was not entirely virtuous. And there was something about him that Charlotte still couldn’t quite put her finger on, a certain intricacy of character that was at odds with what he’d told her of himself.
Deep down, though, she’d had a good feeling about him. And she’d trusted that feeling, she’d trusted herself to make the right decision.
If Charlotte was going to make the most of her one and only life, if she was going to help Rosemary and Joan do the same, she’d need to seize every opportunity, don’t think twice.
Saturday morning she woke the girls early so that they could walk the dog with her. They grumbled, but Charlotte persisted. She’d already waited too long to tell them the truth.
A bakery a few blocks over sold sugared elephant ears. Charlotte bought one for them to share, and they found a place to sit on the sunny courthouse steps. Rosemary explained to Joan that an elephant ear was not really an elephant’s ear, don’t worry, it was just called that, because nobody would ever really eat a real elephant’s ear.
Charlotte wondered when Rosemary would finally drive her sister up the wall.
Joan had the patience of Job, but sooner or later—in junior high or high school or on Joan’s wedding day, when Rosemary insisted on this piece of music, not that one—Joan would turn to Rosemary and say, For God’s sake, just be quiet for one … minute … please. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe Rosemary was exactly the sister that Joan wanted and needed. It made Charlotte happy to think so.
“Girls,” Charlotte said. “I know how much you miss Daddy.”
“He’s going to meet us in California,” Rosemary said, “at Aunt Marguerite’s house on the beach, when he’s done at work. He’s going to fly on an airplane to meet us there. Isn’t that right, Mommy? We’re going to stay two weeks in California, and we’ll go to Disneyland.”
Charlotte marveled at the conclusions to which Rosemary steered herself, always so detailed and convincing.
“No,” Charlotte said. “Daddy isn’t going to meet us in California. He’s going to live in Oklahoma and we’re going to live in California.”
“But …” Rosemary said.
“Sometimes it’s best for grown-ups, for parents, to live in different places. It’s best for everyone. You’ll still get to talk to Daddy on the telephone. And you’ll still see him. He’ll come visit. You’ll go visit him.”
“But …” Rosemary searched desperately for a loophole, a chink of light, the secret passage leading through castle walls that only appeared to be solid. What if … maybe … ?
When the truth finally pierced her defenses, when Rosemary’s face crumpled, Charlotte felt the pain just as sharply as she did. “Come here, sweetie,” she said.
Rosemary shook her head and staggered away, sobbing and hiccupping. She made it a few feet before she tripped and skinned her knee on the concrete step.
Joan reached her before Charlotte did. She sat down next to Rosemary and put her arms around her. Rosemary tried to escape, but Joan calmly, stubbornly refused to let go. She whispered something in Rosemary’s ear that Charlotte couldn’t hear until, finally, Rosemary caught her breath and stopped crying.
Charlotte dabbed at Rosemary’s skinned knee with her handkerchief, but she knew enough to say nothing.
When they got back to hotel, Frank was in the lobby, standing by the fireplace and drinking coffee. He frowned when he saw Rosemary’s knee.
