Tonight, on this very special night, I arrive at Charlotte’s front porch, holding something that will make it hard for her to turn me away. I take in one deep breath and let the humility pour over me. The traveling passersby, there to take pictures in front of the genuine American Gothic backdrop, have long since gone, and all that’s left is the moonlight hitting the tips of cornfields and bouncing off the famous arched window. With my feet planted firmly on Charlotte’s porch, I wriggle my toes inside Mother’s worn slippers and let the weight of what I’m carrying push into the belt I’ve cinched to keep up Dad’s pair of work pants.
Charlotte answers the door, gives me a once-over. “Only brought one outfit, huh?” She gives her attention to the very large, lopsided, three-tiered chocolate cake I’m holding. When she sees there are lit candles, one for each of her birthdays I’ve missed, her mouth contorts into a shape that I’ve seen three times before. In second grade when Charlotte broke her arm after falling off the monkey bars and didn’t want anyone to see her cry. At her grandmother’s funeral when she went to the casket for her final goodbye, but didn’t want tears to ruin the makeup Happy Sr. had applied to make Charlotte’s grandmother look like her Nanna again. And finally, in tenth grade, when Joe Henning asked Jenny Whitman to the prom instead of her.
“You remembered.” Charlotte fights back eighteen years of tears.
“Happy Birthday, Char. Made it myself. Make a wish.”
For the second time in two days, Charlotte lets me in. I cup my hand around the candles, protecting each mini flame as we walk in the house and I place the cake on the kitchen table. Charlotte glances out the kitchen window, out into the darkness, then back at the candles, each a silent apology for sins too big for words. She inhales, then exhales with purpose, extinguishing what appeared to be yesterday’s flames. Eighteen mini blazes of red and orange disappear, just like that, but then in one seamless evolution, they become little apparitions of smoke, each one swaying to its silent tune.
“Well, that’s that,” Charlotte says.
I stare at Charlotte, who seems lighter, like she’s undergone her own evolution of sorts and is prepared to float away.
“We’ll save some for Connor and Janie-Janelle,” I say while grabbing some napkins and plating two pieces, “and Steve?”
“We’ll put it in the freezer.” Charlotte nods, automatic and resigned, and I begin to think midwestern deep freezers are the keepers of all untidy sins.
Charlotte glances out the kitchen window like something beyond it calls her. Then she gives me a mischievous look, one I recognize from a lifetime ago when we could finish each other’s sentences. “Wine?” she says, followed by a smile.
I nod, but before she can get the wine, I give her a hug and have a hard time letting go. Neither of us says anything for a while.
“Here’s to thirty-six,” we finally say, and we clink glasses. “God, Janie, after Joey…I didn’t know what to do. You were just…gone.”
My lip quivers, and I almost tell her. I almost tell her the thing nobody knows, the thing that put Janie Willow to rest forever. But some secrets, if you keep them long enough, become so buried, like ancient lore, that unearthing them requires the strength to chisel through layers and layers of shame and regret that has solidified into impenetrable sadness.
I slip my index finger under my bracelet, let it slide over the inscription, and then nod an apology that looks more like a simple acknowledgment. “I want you to know that what happened…my drifting away…leaving…was my fault…all of it. I know that’s not an explanation, but—”
“No.” She grabbed my hands. “Don’t say any more.”
“You still the choir director at church?” I say, before I say too much.
She nods. “Been doing more repenting than directing lately.” The faraway look returns. “People always want to tell me their sins, can you believe it, like I’m Father Larson or some kind of bartender—”
“I did something horrible” escapes me and ends my silence.
“See?” She smiles. “Come on, Janie, I forgive you for abandoning me. Let’s cut our losses, huh?”
The word abandon cuts deep, but I need to stay on my game, keep from doing any more damage than I’ve already done. “No, something else,” I say, not sure if I’ll end up in Rob Anderson’s station cell tonight. I imagine Bliss’s wrecked body, breathing in sync with her father in a hopeless, dark hospital room.
“Wanna talk about it?”
I shake my head.
“Well, all right then. I’ll pray for you.” She paused. “I’ve been doing that for years, anyway.” Charlotte poured us a second glass of wine and sighed. “You know why I go to church, Janie?” She laughs and takes a gulp. “It’s not what you think. Mostly, it’s because I like to stare at the stained-glass windows. They’re so beautiful; they make me forget so many things.” She takes another aggressive gulp. “I’m not even sure if God exists anymore.”
Whoa. What’s in this wine? Charlotte just went from God-fearing choir director to atheist in two gulps.
After a sigh, she says, “But there’s gotta be something bigger than us, right?”
Charlotte and I have somehow switched roles, and she looks at me like she’s the one who needs forgiving and I’m the absolver. “Lately, I go to church to try to forgive myself, to try to remember that when life presents us with an irreconcilable dilemma, that we can transcend, we can embrace the wreckage, we can somehow find the courage to throw up our arms, open our mouths, and say ‘hallelujah’ despite the impossibility of it all.”
Right. Love is not always a triumph. True desperation calls for Leonard Cohen, so I throw up my hands. “Hallelujah!” I yell and raise my glass. “Here’s to impossible tasks—”
“Steve wants his kidney back,” she blurts, then guzzles her whole glass of wine like the farmhouse has turned into a frat house.
A few seconds go by before I can process what she’s said. “Wait. What?”
Despite the alcohol, her face takes on a sober countenance. “We were so young. And then we had Janie when I was just twenty. And all of a sudden, it’s two decades later… He was the only boyfriend I ever had. I hurt him. He is hurting so much. He doesn’t know what to do with his anger so… He’s not hunting, Janie; he wants the kidney he gave me back.”
“He’s not serious, Char… That’s, like, totally crazy.”
She walks to a kitchen drawer and pulls out a large stack of papers. “Divorce document. Page thirteen…” She follows her finger and, voice shaking, reads, “Client asking for one left kidney donated by said client in 2004 as part of compensation for—”
“Char, he can’t be serious. He must be asking for the value of the kidney—”
“No! He wants my kidney! His kidney. Our kidney.”
The whole thing sounds like some horrific semantic joke, some sort of tragic possessive pronoun conjugation or a Robin Cook novel under piles of failed meatloaf. Wow. Hollywood is not so far away after all. Zoom in for the close-up on the face of devastation and a montage of the just plain bizarre.
When Charlotte, a very light drinker, pours a third glass of wine, I imagine her body trying to filter out the alcohol, and I begin to get concerned about the kidney in question. “My lawyer says a donated organ can’t be a marital asset, that it’s just a stalling tactic, but it’s not. I know him. That’s how betrayed he feels. His own lawyer has advised him it’s insane…it won’t stand up in court…but he won’t let it go.”
“So let me get this straight: He’d rather see you dead than just let this go?”
Charlotte, looking like a child who’d just been shamed, traces her finger around the wineglass rim. “He’s just hurt. Love makes you do crazy things.”
Suddenly, just how well I actually know Charlotte Davis comes into focus. It all falls into place. The way her eyes tonight seem empty on first glance yet hold an unexplained gleam.
She is in love with someone else. This is why she’d been somewhere else all night, looking out the window somewhere into the darkness. Guess we both have big secrets.
A drop of red wine falls from Charlotte’s lower lip and splashes onto her white napkin lying on the table. We watch it bleed into the napkin’s corrugated designs. I take a piece of leftover dinner bread, break it into two halves, one for me, one for my Catholic best friend. Together, we take a bite, giggling, no doubt thinking of how many times we’d done this together years ago, and we wash it down with the wine, letting our sins swish, swish, swish out of sight. Here we are, body and blood, laughing our way through an impromptu communion.
Lady Gaga and her poker face interrupt our redemption, and lacking her usual good judgment, Charlotte picks up in an altered state. “Charlotte’s Meatloaf Hotline,” she says, slightly slurring her own name. “What’s your meatloaf…meatloaf…”
“Emergency,” I whisper to Charlotte, who is snapping her fingers, trying to remember a line she’s spoken thousands of times.
Charlotte listens for a millisecond and then something in her—years of good, sensible, church-going behavior—breaks loose. “Just forget it, ma’am; you’re totally fucked,” she says, somewhere between desperate drunk and midwestern polite. “That meatloaf is fu-ucked up… Time to call Pizza Hut, darlin’.”
The darlin’ on the other line must be expressing dissatisfaction, because Charlotte says “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” then begins to drunk-whisper, which isn’t a whisper at all, and speak in an exaggerated annunciation: “My. Husband. Gave. Me. His. Kidney. And. Now. He. Wants. It. Back.”
Charlotte listens for a second, then switches to speakerphone and makes the universal sign for crazy while the woman with the fucked-up meatloaf says, “What, honey? Your husband’s name is Sidney?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Charlotte yells. “‘Kidney’! I said ‘kidney’!” And then after one deep, regretful breath, she begins to cry. “One in 700,000. He was a one in 700,000 match. He saved my life. He gave me his kidney…and I broke his heart.”
I turn off speakerphone and grab the handset. Someone needs to end this meatloaf hotline train wreck.
“You’re gonna get me fired, Janie!” a pouting Charlotte says about the most humiliating job on the planet and wrestles to get the phone back.
“You’re welcome,” I tell Charlotte. “Ma’am?” I say into the phone, unearthing long-ago midwestern manners I’d forgotten about. “Look, my friend is too nice to tell you this, but I’m gonna be straight with you. Nobody likes meatloaf.”
“Nobody?” she says, deflated.
“Nobody. It’s like the Christmas fruit cake of weeknight dinner.” I pretend Cinegirl is a food critic and wind up. “A gelatinous hunk of dry bread crumbs and low-quality beef glued together with ketchup, which we Californians call ghetto salsa.”
“California!” she says like it’s a curse word. “But my daughter says—”
“She’s lying,” I tell her. “People lie, ma’am. For lots of reasons. Sometimes for the noblest of reasons.” This liar needs support, so I sit down.
“Thank you,” the meatloaf-maker says, “for telling me the hard truth.”
“It’s what I do,” I say, trying to remember the last time I told the truth. “Now go give your beautiful daughter a big hug and order out. And, ma’am?” I pause, unsure why I care about this woman and wonder if I’m coming down with something. “Enjoy your family. It’s not about the meatloaf. It’s never, ever about the meatloaf.”
Right when I end the call, Janie-Janelle bursts through the front door with Connor trailing behind. “Mom!” she yells, not waiting for a response. “Mom! You’re not gonna believe this. Mitch Blackman is such a jerk!” When she sees Charlotte and me and the empty bottles of wine, she stops. “So Bliss’s boyfriend has totally been cheating on her with that skank Scarlet. What kind of poser only wears red just to match her name anyway? Whoa, are you drunk, Mom? And what’s she doing here?”
I am now used to Janie-Janelle scowling at me, but a little surprised when Janie-Janelle explodes into a hormone-induced, teenage meltdown. “So Bliss is dying, and you’re here getting drunk with someone who hasn’t bothered to talk to you for, like, forty years!”
I correct her lack of accuracy. “Um, we’re not that old—”
“No wonder Daddy left. You don’t care about anybody.”
Connor runs out of the kitchen and upstairs. I am single, lonely, recently orphaned, and probably going to jail in the near future, but looking at Charlotte—drunk, kidney-stealing, meatloaf-peddling Charlotte—slumped over the kitchen table right now, I suddenly don’t feel so bad.
When Charlotte says “I’m sorry, honey; I’m so sorry” and goes to give her daughter a hug, Janie-Janelle softens for a moment. Her fiery-red hair seems to get demoted to a mere smolder.
“I’m sorry too, Mom,” she whispers, midhug.
I feel like I’m interrupting some teen-edition Lifetime episode, so I start to make Charlotte some coffee—it’s still exactly where Mrs. Davis used to keep it. “How’s Bliss?” I ask, afraid of the answer.
Janie-Janelle whips around. “Why do you care?”
I can’t answer that question, not here, not now, so I say it’s tragic and sad and unfair and lots of other true things. “I’ve been reading, Janelle,” I say, taking the risk of getting something thrown at me, “and even though it may seem hopeless, it’s not. It’s really not.”
Wait for it. Wait for it. But instead of contempt, I get a warm “Thanks,” and when she says this, she looks just like Charlotte. “Mr. Anderson told me that’s what this lady—some sort of therapist or something—said too, that she thinks Bliss will wake up.” Tears fill her eyes. “He says he wants to believe her.”
My mouth goes dry and my lips stick together. Worlds…colliding… How am I gonna pull this off? But when I think of Rob Anderson wanting to believe me, a warmth comes over me.
I am reminded how young Janelle is by her T-shirt featuring a BeDazzled green-and-blue peacock with satin feathers. Just sixteen. Bliss is probably the older sister she never had.
I hand Charlotte a cup of coffee, and when Janelle leaves to go upstairs, Charlotte hollers after her, “I’ll be up in a minute, Peacock, to tuck you in…and no, I don’t care if you think you’re too old. Tell your brother he’s not too old either.”
Peacock? I ask with my eyes.
“Steve’s nickname for her. Once, when they were stargazing, she asked if the stars were eyes, watching over everybody at night to keep them safe.” She sighs. “Well, peacocks’ feathers are called the eyes of the stars…so…” She drifts away for a moment and then says, “Speaking of stars, when I come back downstairs, can I show you something?”
• • •
After giving Charlotte another cup of coffee, we put on Carhartt jackets from the breezeway hall tree and walk together, guided by starlight, past the faceless and now spotlit American Gothic cutout, then past the barn. My slippered feet step alongside Charlotte, who is walking with a curious purpose. We make our way halfway down the lane, turn left, and take the path that leads toward the Simpsons’ farm. “Char, where are we…”
“Shh.” Charlotte touches my shoulder, and her eyes widen when she sees light glowing through the cracks of the four-story barn. “Wasn’t sure she’d be flying tonight.”
“Flying?” Now I’m really confused.
“Shh.”
“Yeah. You already said that,” I whisper. “Tell me we’re not going to visit Heather Simpson. That bitch has hated me since first grade.”
Charlotte’s voice is quiet but sure. “Not the Simpsons’ farm anymore. They moved three years ago.”
The sky seems clearer than usual. The absence of clouds gives Charlotte and I, two clandestine women on a mission, the special privilege of watching the stars awaken for the eveni
ng. Thousands of flickers announce their presence as if they are preparing for something grand.
When the light from a tall lamppost shines on Charlotte’s face, her breath accelerates in anticipation of something. She turns away from me and toward the barn. Light seeps from all corners like some sort of celestial homing beacon amid the monotonous cornfields.
I let Charlotte take my hand and lead the way. What could possibly be in a barn in the middle of the heartland that has Charlotte so out of her mind? Charlotte’s grip intensifies with each step, and by the time we reach the barn’s side door, I feel Charlotte’s pulse quicken.
I scour my brain for something, anything that could generate this kind of excitement from Charlotte, but I have no idea. I probably have walked a quarter of a mile, in my slippers, to see a prized heifer, maybe a mare, or worse yet, someone’s new tractor.
But Charlotte had mentioned flying.
Oh God. It’s probably an owl. Charlotte loves owls. My desperate friend has made a pet out of a wild animal that is probably a carrier of the Avian flu, and I’ll die before I can save Bliss.
I crane my neck to look up at the largest, oldest barn in Crocker County—it really is majestic—and when I glance up at the topmost window, I notice intermittent shadows appearing in a rhythmic pattern. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand. The shadows dance with the unexpected grace of a nighttime ballet four stories above the most fertile soil on Earth.
“Char, are you sure we should…”
Charlotte doesn’t answer. After a deep breath, she nudges the small side door and leads me inside. We stay huddled next to the barn’s interior wall, hidden in the dark. Six giant beams of light land on what we’ve come to see.
A woman who flies without wings.
Tendrils of shimmering, ebony hair trail behind her, undulating in slow motion as she glides through the air. A silky, white bodysuit showcases the woman’s olive-skinned body, a perfect marriage of delicate curves and strong muscles. She sits perched atop a silver trapeze bar and holds on to hefty nylon ropes. I look upward, follow the lines to their origin—enormous rafter beams, the backbone of the barn—and then my gaze falls back upon the raven-haired flyer.
The Lost Queen of Crocker County: A Novel Page 15
