Charlotte’s Story

by Benedict, Laura

  And what if it really was me? What if I had done what everyone thought I had, taking Michael from his bed, putting him in Olivia’s room? It was true that I hadn’t been myself. Maybe the lost time, and the hallucinations—the fox, Olivia’s rape, even Eva—meant that I really was insane.

  “Not yet, Nonie. I’ll come soon.”

  If I had listened to her, so many things might have been different.

  I was in the nursery when I saw Press’s Eldorado come up the driveway and stop in front of the house. The passenger door started to open, but then he quickly got out and hurried around to open it himself.

  There was a bit of a fumble and laughter as he tried to help the woman in the passenger seat out of the car; once she was out, I saw that it was Shelley. I suspected that, young and inexperienced as she was, perhaps no man had ever before opened a car door for her. But the bigger question was why she was in Press’s car at all.

  She bent to take a small bag from the floor of the passenger seat. When the door was closed again, she stood looking up at the front of the house. If she saw me, she chose not to acknowledge it.

  Press took a second, much larger suitcase from the trunk and guided Shelley, again laughing, to the front door.

  I waited for him to find me to tell me what was going on.

  I stood in the nursery doorway and watched as Terrance carried Shelley’s bags to the bedroom directly across the gallery. When Shelley saw me, she smiled and waved, but looked too nervous or excited to speak. Press had followed them up the stairs, but came straight to the nursery.

  Once inside, he closed the door. Michael smiled up at him from his circle of blocks and toys.

  “I wanted to surprise you, darling. Shelley’s going to be with us until Nonie gets back so you can get some rest.” He bent down to Michael. “You like Shelley a lot, don’t you, sport?”

  Michael looked up quizzically, then he picked up a red block and held it out to Press. “Daddy, block.”

  “That’s a good man.” Press took the block and ruffled Michael’s hair. “See? Michael agrees it’s a great idea.”

  “You can’t do this.”

  He stood up. I was in my stocking feet, and because he was wearing shoes, we stood eye to eye. But he seemed larger than ever to me right then, as though his mass had somehow doubled. I felt small. Worried.

  “This is going to make everything easier. She’ll have the room opposite, but she’ll sleep in here with him at night. She’s just a girl, but you know how responsible she is.”

  “Is this because of yesterday? You know I’m not the one who put Michael in your mother’s room. You know that!”

  Hearing my panicked voice, Michael stopped playing and came to my side. He held out his arms. “Up, Mommy! Up!”

  “Do I know that? Does anybody really know that? You were here by yourself.”

  “You’re lying. You had something to do with it. You and J.C.; I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me. Do you want to be with her? Is that it?” I was almost shouting now, and Michael was increasingly frantic. “Mommy! Up! Up!” I was shaking.

  “That’s beneath you, Charlotte. You need to calm down.”

  “Or what?” I bent to pick up Michael, who threw his arms around my neck and buried his face. “Look what you’re doing to Michael.”

  “You’ll adjust.” Press’s voice was cold. He didn’t even look at Michael.

  “I’ll take him to my father’s house. I’ll take him home.”

  “I can’t let you do that. It’s not safe for Michael. Who knows what your father’s involved in? Someone tried to kill him, didn’t they?”

  “How can you even think that? He was hit by some idiot driver.” I almost laughed. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same Roman Carter?”

  “There are things in the world that you don’t necessarily understand.”

  “You’re implying that my father is some kind of criminal. And that’s why you don’t want me to take Michael to see him?” I shook my head. “That’s a bizarre fantasy, and I don’t understand why you would use my father like that.”

  He shrugged. “What would you rather hear? You need Shelley. You need rest. Rachel agrees.”

  “And I suppose Jack does, too?” Everyone in my life believed that I wasn’t capable of taking care of my own children. And perhaps they believed something worse: that I was more of a danger than ever.

  “This isn’t about Jack. This isn’t about anyone else but you, Charlotte.”

  “If I don’t agree, what happens? Is the same thing that happened to your mother going to happen to me?”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake. My suspicions about Olivia’s death had been buried so deep that I hadn’t even really acknowledged them. I knew it was absurd to think that Press had had anything to do with his mother’s death, but I wanted to wound him. From the shock on his face, I saw that I had.

  We stood facing each other in silence, our child in my arms between us.

  Then the look of shock dissolved into a mask of indifference.

  “Be careful, my love. Don’t ruin it.” He touched Michael’s hair with a gesture that was so tender, so untimely, that I could only take it as a threat.

  Chapter 26

  The Twin

  The decorators returned early the next morning. J.C. was on her way to meet them right after breakfast, but stopped me before I could leave the dining room.

  “Please, let’s talk this afternoon. It’s important.”

  Overhearing, Press had said, “It’s going to be cool today. I’ll have Terrance set up a table in the library and light a fire.”

  “Wonderful!” J.C. gave me one of her enormous smiles and hurried off to the third floor. Press followed after J.C., obviously still uninterested in talking with me directly.

  The night before, I had pleaded a headache and spent dinner and the rest of the evening in my room. It didn’t matter that Press was left all alone with J.C. He might have had sex with her on the carpet in the central hall, for all I cared about either of them. He seemed capable of it. For most of the night, I lay on my bed, wakeful, wondering why he would treat me so badly, why everything, including my son, was being taken from me. It had to be that he was simply finding more and more ways to punish me for Eva’s death. There was nothing else I’d done.

  After consulting with Marlene about the inevitable lunch, I went upstairs to Olivia’s room, and then into the morning room. The Magic Lantern sat, cold, on its table. I spoke Olivia’s name. I spoke Eva’s name.

  There was no enchantment left in either place. They felt as dead as their former residents.

  (I am loath to mention the small voice that I did hear when I was in that room. It was the spirit of my own desperation, and it sounded much like Press’s voice. What would it matter if you were dead? You’re not needed here any longer. Not wanted. Not needed. What use is it to live?)

  “They are going like gangbusters up there!” J.C. entered the library talking. “They’ll be finished in a day or two.” She pulled out the chair across from me at the table Terrance had set up. “This is so elegant, Charlotte. How kind you are. I know you don’t really want to do this.” When she surprised me by touching my hand, I withdrew it reflexively, then was embarrassed. But she didn’t react, only unfolded her napkin and laid it over her lap.

  “It seems I don’t have anything else to do.” It was a response that came as close to rudeness as I could allow myself. I had no friends in my own house, so why shouldn’t I have lunch with someone who was probably my enemy? Now that I was alone with her again, and she was being serious, I realized just how much she intimidated me. At twenty-seven, I was not quite a generation younger than she. She could have been my much older, more successful sister.

  Seated in front of a cheery fire, we genteelly dissected the two tiny braised quail that Marlene had prepared. They rested in a nest of stewed figs, and I found mine surprisingly delicious. There was also a cold salad with
radishes, fennel, and walnuts. J.C. ate without self-consciousness, slathering warm butter on the homemade rolls, drinking two glasses of wine to my single glass. How she stayed so thin, I didn’t know. There were girls at school who excused themselves to the bathroom right after meals so they could purge their stomachs. But J.C. sat, contented, when we were finished, and smoked a cigarette. I suspected that she had the vibrating metabolism of the mantis-like insect she resembled.

  She kept the conversation light with stories about her time studying design in Paris just before the war. Despite my mood, I laughed aloud when she told me about finding herself naked in a couturier’s window after a curtain fell down as she was being fitted for a gown.

  After lunch, we moved to another part of the room to drink the coffee Marlene had set up on a low table before clearing our dishes. Strangely, I found myself relaxed and wanting another glass of wine. But the wine was gone (perhaps I’d had more than one glass, after all). There was cognac in the room’s bar cabinet, but I remembered the last time I’d been drunk in the afternoon.

  No one cares if you drink, came the voice in my head. No one cares if you die.

  Distracted by my darkening thoughts, I wasn’t prepared for the direction she took our conversation.

  “Has your daughter contacted you?”

  J.C. was now sunk comfortably into one of the big leather chairs. I sat in the other, my shoes off, my feet tucked beneath me. Until that moment, I’d felt almost drowsy.

  When I didn’t answer—frankly, I was too stunned—she asked me again.

  “Your sweet Eva. Does she come and visit you?”

  “Do you think you’re being funny? Why would you ask something like that?”

  Now she leaned forward. “I’m sure she’s here. Don’t you feel it? This house is. . . .” She let the sentence die.

  “Don’t tell me you believe Bliss House is haunted. Has someone been telling you stories?” I poured two cups of coffee, my hand shaking slightly. Something to do. Something to feel. She didn’t know anything. The idea of J.C. seeing Eva, of being aware of Eva, set off a blaze of alarm inside me. Eva belonged to me.

  “I’ve been trying to tell Press for years. You can’t hide from what’s here, Charlotte.” She got up to take a cigarette from the box on the smoking table and used her dying cigarette to light it. Then she stabbed the end of the first cigarette into the ashtray and came to stand over me. Her soft, manicured fingertips found my cheek. “Don’t be afraid, dearest. Why would you be afraid of your own child? I know she was the light of your lives. Press is devastated, but he doesn’t have a mother’s sensitivity.” Before releasing my face, her fingertips brushed beneath my chin and I felt a disturbing shudder of pleasure pass through my body.

  Was it that touch, that small seduction that led me to listen to her that afternoon? I was cautious—no, that’s a lie. I wasn’t cautious. My very being felt raw and exposed and, God help me, needful of someone to hear me. Here was a stranger, and not just a stranger, but someone who lived outside the boundaries of my every idea of propriety. She might have touched my husband in the same ways I had, moaned with pleasure at his touch just as I had. Was I so lonely? So desperate? I only know that I wasn’t in my right mind.

  She moved a hassock close to my chair and sat, her endless legs angled to the floor. I’d never seen gold eyes like hers. They were fiercely animated, as though she were seeing something wondrous and strange. She was watching me, but seeing something else.

  “I had a brother. A twin brother, whose name was Jonathan Cortland. J.C., just like me. Though my mother hated that my father called us both J.C.” When she laughed, it sounded just as artificial and forced as I’d always heard it, but I kept listening. “Julianna Catherine. That’s my name, though I’ll deny it if you tell anyone, yes?”

  I nodded. Another secret. Like her tryst with Hugh (or Terrance? Dare I ask her?).

  “He was such a pretty little boy. We looked alike. ‘Girly’ is what people called him, because he looked so much like me. But he was all boy, I’ll tell you.” She smiled at the memory. “He was tough. And brave. Oh, my, was he brave. The morning it happened, we were out riding our ponies across an empty cattle pasture, and mine—well, Fancy wasn’t at all as sweet as her name—was almost dancing, as though she were trying to shake me off. The wasps were bad that summer, and I thought maybe one had crawled up under the saddle. And although I was twelve and had been riding for years, my mother had made me put on some ridiculous loose trousers and I didn’t want to change before going out to ride. I should’ve been able to calm her, or at least slide right off when I knew she was out of control, but the stupid trousers caught, you see, and Fancy was having a fit.”

  Her hands were like nervous alabaster birds. When she took a long drag from her cigarette, she blew the smoke out forcefully, as though in a terrible hurry. I’d never seen her so earnest, and it made me wonder if I knew her at all. Did Press really know her? What did he see in her? Perhaps it was her sophistication he craved. I knew, at least, that she had no hesitation about performing a certain sex act that I found tedious if not distasteful.

  “Terrified. I was terrified. We weren’t even at home, but were spending the summer at my grandparents’ farm in Arkansas. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t home, and I’m sure that’s why Fancy was so on edge. She just wouldn’t stop bucking and crying. We were both scared to death.” One of her busy hands rested gently against one ear as though she wanted to keep out the screams.

  “John jumped off of King and threw himself at us. I had no idea what he was doing, and if I had I don’t know that I could have stopped him. Hell, I didn’t even really see him until he was right there. Right there.”

  “What happened?”

  It was just a flash of a look in her eyes, but I was sure I saw cunning. How could that be? It was quickly gone, and the anxiety reasserted itself.

  “He was killed, of course.”

  I put my hand to my mouth. “He was only twelve?”

  “He didn’t die right away. Fancy swung around and kicked him in the chest, puncturing his lung. She didn’t mean it.” Her cultured voice had slowly been sliding into a drawl as she spoke. “Our daddy wanted to put Fancy down right then and there, as soon as he heard.”

  I saw the boy lying in the green grass, broken and desperate for breath. Not knowing what the pony looked like, I imagined it cream-colored and squat, with a firm belly and short legs. Not elegant, but sturdy, its black lips pulled back in terror.

  “Sometimes I remember those minutes, when I couldn’t get off and Fancy had knocked him to the ground, and it was all I could do to hold on, praying that she wouldn’t trample John.”

  “How did you stop?”

  “I couldn’t do anything. She just kept dodging, and then her legs gave out and she started to roll onto her side, which shook me loose. I hadn’t done anything. John hadn’t done anything. Fancy just ran off.”

  I waited, and J.C. took a couple more drags from her cigarette. She seemed to be thinking.

  “It took him a week to die. They wouldn’t let me see him.”

  It was hard to imagine the long-limbed, elegant woman sitting in front of me as a child. Even in her sorrow, there was nothing vulnerable about her. She stood up.

  “What I wanted to tell you wasn’t the story of John’s dying.”

  “No?”

  She bent over my chair, and as she spoke I smelled the menthol of her Salem cigarettes mixed with coffee on her breath.

  “He’s with me all the time, Charlotte. He talks to me. He tells me things. What it’s like there.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Her shoulders sagged. “Oh, honey. Of course you do. You know exactly what I mean. I can see it in your pretty, pretty eyes.” She touched my hair with the same hand in which her cigarette burned. “John can bring your baby to you. Eva is here, Charlotte, and we can bring her to you. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what any mother would want?”

  A l
og in the fireplace snapped, startling me, but J.C. didn’t move.

  Chapter 27

  The Séance

  Watching Press at the head of the dinner table, J.C. beside him, leaning conspiratorially on her elbow, her lips moving in a faint murmur, I saw how well they looked together. No one seeing them would doubt that, as lovers, they were perfectly suited.

  A crescent of black hair slipped from the rhinestone (perhaps diamond?) clip at the side of her head and hung across her cheek. They were absorbed in conversation, laughing and teasing. Press’s face was flushed with wine and his forehead wore the faintest sheen of perspiration. Once, if I had been as close to him as J.C. was, I might have touched my napkin to his head lightly, playfully, leading Jack to joke about my effect on my husband. Was it J.C.’s effect on Press, or the warmth of the fireplace behind him where a bank of not-quite-seasoned wood popped and spat, that made his ruddy face glow? He was smiling. So much smiling. I could hardly bear it. Their smiles were as sharp as knives.

  Press had insisted that all the downstairs fireplaces be lighted, though it wasn’t even quite cold enough to turn the central heating on. “Atmosphere,” he’d said with a laugh. “If only we could order up a storm to encourage the family ghosts. Wouldn’t Mother be scandalized if she knew we were going to have a séance?”

  It had been J.C. who had broached the idea with him, telling him that it would give both him and me a sense of peace about Eva’s passing over. I hated the phrase, but it did speak to me of a sense of Eva being in another, safer place.

  I had made sure Shelley knew to keep Michael in the nursery. He was probably already asleep.

  “Honey, are you absolutely, completely sure you want to do this?” Rachel covered my hand with hers. She’d insisted on sitting to my right even though a proper arrangement around the table would’ve meant that Hugh, who made up six at the table, should be there. “I know I said a long time ago that we should do a séance here, but I was joking, really. It’s just too creepy, don’t you think? I mean, Eva isn’t going to come back, Charlotte. And Olivia coming back would be an even worse idea.”