Whiskey & Charlie

by Annabel Smith

  They all went and washed their hands together in the little basin in the handicap bathroom, and then Charlie took them back to the room.

  “Thank god, Charlie,” Rosa said through her paper mask. “I thought you never would come.” She patted the girls’ heads absently. “Don’t kiss me. I have got a sore throat, a headache. The aspirin they give me did not help. I don’t want Whiskey to catch this from me.”

  Charlie hugged her. “You go home then. Get into bed. Call Juliet if you need anything—leave a message on her phone, and she can pop in on the way home from the library.”

  “Sit down then,” Charlie said to the girls when she had gone, motioning to two chairs pushed against the wall. He sat down in the chair everyone thought of as Rosa’s chair, next to the bed.

  “Can we sit next to you, Uncle Charlie?” Holly whispered.

  Charlie looked at his brother. What difference does it make? he thought. He helped them pull their chairs closer to the bed, and they all sat in silence for a while, taking it in.

  “Why does he have those tubes in his nose?” Holly asked eventually, in a dramatic stage whisper. “And in his hand too?”

  Charlie took a breath. It was natural for them to have questions. He had asked the exact same questions himself the first time he had gone to the hospital. Usually, they explained all the machines to visitors before they went into the room, looking through the window—it was a trick one of the nurses had told them to lessen the shock. But there hadn’t been time to do that for Chloe and Holly. He explained all the tubes and machines as simply as he could, omitting the more gruesome details wherever possible, trying to make it sound less frightening than it was.

  “When is he going to wake up?” Chloe asked then.

  “We don’t know.”

  The girls looked at him expectantly, as though there must be more to be said.

  “We don’t know,” he said again, “but we hope it will be soon.”

  “Maybe he’ll wake up today,” Holly said thoughtfully.

  Chloe gasped at this, as though Whiskey were some zombie threatening to rise from the grave. That must be how Whiskey appeared to them, Charlie thought, like some creature from a horror movie.

  “Don’t worry,” Charlie said. “It probably won’t be today.” But he could see them watching Whiskey as though he might take them by surprise at any moment.

  “Uncle Charlie?” Holly whispered after a time.

  Charlie still wasn’t used to them calling him uncle. He didn’t think of them as his nieces. They were his half nieces, he supposed, if such a term existed.

  “What?” he asked wearily. They had been there for only ten minutes, and he already felt drained.

  “Daddy told us you were identical twins, like me and Chloe.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But he doesn’t look like you.”

  Charlie looked at Whiskey, tried to see him as Holly might see him, as if he were seeing him for the first time.

  “Well, the older you get, the less alike you become,” Charlie said, thinking. “But we did look pretty much the same, I suppose, apart from different haircuts and things. Whiskey looks very different now because of the accident.”

  Holly and Chloe were listening intently, waiting for more.

  “He’s very pale because he hasn’t been outside for a few weeks—and he can’t eat normal food, so he’s gotten a bit skinny…and they had to shave his head to have a look at the cuts and things…and his face got bruised, you know, when the car…”

  “So when he wakes up, will you look the same again? Will you still be identical twins?”

  “We’ll always be identical twins,” Charlie started. And then he stopped. He waited until the feeling that he was going to cry had passed.

  “I don’t know,” he said eventually. He could not believe he had not considered this eventuality, that even if Whiskey recovered, the damage might profoundly change his physical appearance, so that though, genetically speaking, Charlie and Whiskey would still be identical, on the outside they would no longer be exactly the same, or even similar, that a stranger might not even pick them as brothers.

  The girls were quiet for a while, and then Holly spoke again. “Why aren’t you talking to him?” Holly asked cautiously.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re supposed to talk to people in a coma, and it helps them wake up. In Quebec, we saw a film where they did that. Didn’t we, Chloe?”

  Chloe nodded. “The boy’s dad came back to life,” she added.

  Charlie knew about this theory of course. But he hadn’t tried it himself. He hadn’t talked directly to Whiskey once since the accident. There was too much to say, and it seemed too late. He would have liked to believe Whiskey could hear him, but he didn’t. He couldn’t say that to Holly and Chloe.

  “Well, Whiskey already knows all about me,” he said. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to listen to me talking. But you can talk to him if you want to. I bet he’d like to hear all about you.”

  “But what would we say?”

  Charlie thought for a moment. “Introduce yourselves. Tell him what you’re doing here.”

  Chloe looked excited and terrified at the same time, but Holly was already standing up out of her chair, moving closer to the bed.

  “Hello, Uncle Whiskey,” she said solemnly. “I’m Holly, and this is my sister Chloe.”

  “Tell him we’re twins too,” Chloe whispered.

  Holly shushed her. “We live in Quebec. I don’t know if you know geography, but that’s in Canada. Our daddy is your brother,” she said, as if still trying to understand this herself. “Our grandma died, and Daddy wanted to spend her money on a holiday to meet you. We don’t have any more grandmas or aunties or cousins or anything now.” She stood for a moment more without speaking and then sat back in her chair.

  “Very nice,” Charlie said, unsure of whether this little episode was perfectly acceptable or entirely inappropriate. There were no books written on how to behave when one member of your family was in a coma and your long-lost brother came to visit with his children. Briefly, Charlie imagined such a book. Death and Adoption: When Worlds Collide. Anything that made the situation more tolerable for anyone involved must be okay, he decided.

  “Do you want to say something, Chloe?” Charlie asked.

  Chloe shook her head and didn’t move, but after a moment she began to speak, very softly, as though she was saying a prayer.

  “Dear Uncle Whiskey,” she began, in the manner of the Lord’s Prayer. “Thank you for letting us stay at your house. Auntie Rosa bought us a bunk bed. We like Auntie Rosa and Auntie Juliet too, and we love Chester. When we get back to Quebec, Daddy says we might get a dog, and it might even be a Dalmatian. Maybe when you’re feeling better, you can come over to Quebec and see our dog.”

  Charlie closed his eyes. “Amen,” he said under his breath. He wished he could say such a prayer.

  * * *

  New Year’s Eve. Whiskey has been in a coma for five weeks. Charlie has never felt less like celebrating, dreads the thought of being at a party or in a bar surrounded by people getting drunk. But Rosa says Charlie and Juliet should go out, that Whiskey has always liked New Year’s Eve, that they should have a drink for him. So Charlie and Juliet catch the tram down to Carlisle Street to have dinner at their favorite wine bar. They order a drink on Whiskey’s behalf, an overpriced French champagne that Charlie says should satisfy Whiskey’s expensive taste. But when they raise their glasses to make a toast, Charlie can’t find the right words to say. What he thinks he wants, most of the time, is for Whiskey to be returned to them, exactly as he was before the accident. But it feels ridiculous to say this out loud, when he has spent so many years wishing for Whiskey to be a completely different person. Charlie struggles for a phrase that won’t come out sounding trite or fraudulent, can’t sum
mon a single thing.

  Juliet reaches across the table for his hand. “To Whiskey,” she says simply, touching her glass to his.

  Over dinner, Charlie tells Juliet about the only New Year’s Eve he’d spent with Whiskey, other than the millennium party where he and Juliet met. It was not long after Whiskey started in his first copywriting position and had just moved out of their home. He was living with roommates in Fitzroy and had organized a cocktail party for New Year’s Eve, hoping to impress his new advertising friends, Charlie supposed. Unfortunately, one of Whiskey’s guests had baked a batch of hash cookies that turned out to be slightly more potent than anticipated. At midnight, when they should have been clinking martini glasses and kissing each other, at least half the guests were in the bathrooms or the courtyard or out on the grass verge in front of the house, puking their guts up. Within an hour, anyone who hadn’t vomited or passed out had staggered home, and the party was most definitely over. Charlie had woken up on Whiskey’s bed, still stoned and already hungover, with dried vomit on his shirt. Whiskey, the young sophisticate, was lying beside him, his face scratched and smeared with dried blood from where he had fallen down the front steps and landed headfirst in a rosebush.

  x x x

  Charlie has never felt guilty about Juliet leaving Whiskey for him. He has always justified it by saying that Juliet would have broken up with Whiskey anyway, whether she had met Charlie or not. Juliet had admitted as much herself. Over time, Charlie has come to think of Whiskey’s losing Juliet to him as a kind of payback for Charlie’s losing Anneliese Spellman when they were still at school; a rebalancing of the scales that had tipped out of Charlie’s favor in the weeks leading up to the eleventh-grade ball and remained out of kilter for years afterward.

  Since Whiskey’s accident though, Charlie has begun to feel guilty about a whole host of things that never bothered him before, Juliet being one of them. Whether or not Juliet would have eventually broken up with Whiskey anyway, whether or not it was Juliet who had asked for his number, Juliet who had phoned and asked him to go out—if he had been a better person, a better brother, wouldn’t he have said no to her? Charlie has always been adamant that the way Whiskey behaved after finding out about Charlie and Juliet’s relationship was absolutely inexcusable. Now he wonders if his anger had perhaps been warranted.

  And was it really Whiskey who had unbalanced the scales with Anneliese? After all, she too had been Whiskey’s girl first. And in the long run, they had both lost her. Maybe it was Charlie who had unbalanced the scales from the start.

  x x x

  Charlie and Juliet are in bed long before the old year gives way to the new. When Rosa’s call wakes them, Charlie has forgotten all about New Year’s Eve.

  “Happy New Year!” Rosa says breathlessly. “Whiskey has opened his eyes!”

  Charlie looks at the alarm clock. It is only just after midnight. He wonders if he is dreaming. “Are you sure?” he asks.

  “Of course I am sure! I am looking at him right now, and they are open. Come down and see for yourself.”

  Charlie is wide-awake then, pulling his jeans on one-handed while he holds the phone with the other. “When did this happen?” he asks.

  “About ten minutes ago,” Rosa says excitedly. “I fell to sleep a little, and then when I heard the fireworks, I woke up, and Whiskey was looking at me.”

  x x x

  Charlie is almost afraid to let himself believe what Rosa has told him, what it might mean. But when Charlie and Juliet arrive at the hospital, Whiskey’s eyes are still open. Charlie hugs Rosa, picks her up off the floor. He hugs Juliet, laughing, and then sits down abruptly, overwhelmed with relief. When their mother arrives with Audrey, there is more hugging and kissing. Usually, if there are more than two of them at the hospital at once, at least one person will wait in the corridor. But tonight no one wants to wait outside. No one wants to run the risk of missing something. They bring in extra chairs and arrange them on either side of Whiskey’s bed. They watch him expectantly, waiting for him to blink, or perhaps turn his head, to squeeze Rosa’s hand, wondering what the next sign of arousal might be.

  At around three o’clock, Charlie gets up to go to the bathroom. As he passes the nurses’ station, he gives the nurse on duty, Magdalena, the thumbs-up signal. She frowns a little, makes a gesture that Charlie can’t interpret, somewhere between nodding her head and shaking it.

  “You know Whiskey’s opened his eyes, don’t you?”

  Magdalena nods. “Rosa called me in when it happened,” she says, looking at Charlie with concern.

  “What’s wrong?” Charlie asks.

  “Nothing’s wrong.” She hesitates. “It’s just that after a period of prolonged unresponsiveness, it’s not uncommon for a patient to open their eyes, but it might not be accompanied by any other changes to their condition.”

  “But surely someone opening their eyes is a sign that they’re waking up. Isn’t it?”

  Magdalena shakes her head. “Not always. I’m sorry, Charlie. I know it’s difficult. But it’s better if you don’t get your hopes up too much at this stage.”

  “Does Rosa know this?”

  “I told her, as soon as it happened. Your mother too when she arrived.”

  “They didn’t say anything.”

  “It’s hard for people to take in,” Magdalena says kindly.

  Charlie looks at Magdalena, at her plain and honest face. There is no possible reason for her to lie to him. In the last few weeks, Charlie has learned she is one of the best people to go to when he wants the simple facts; he has appreciated her frankness and honesty. But now he doesn’t believe her. He can’t, because he needs, more than anything, to believe Whiskey is waking up.

  Romeo

  It was Whiskey, of course, who had first suggested Marco might be gay. They were in twelfth grade then, and Marco, who was the first friend Charlie made in Australia, had become one of his closest friends.

  “You know Marco’s a faggot, don’t you?” Whiskey had said, coming into Charlie’s room one night after Marco had left.

  “What?”

  “You know, a shirt lifter, a pillow biter.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Whiskey, I know what faggot means.”

  “Calm down, Charlie. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”

  “Heard from who?”

  “No one in particular. It’s a known thing.”

  “Based on what evidence?”

  “Jesus, we’re not in court, are we? Do you want me to show you a gay porn mag I stole from his schoolbag or something? There’s no evidence. It’s a vibe you get. I can tell.”

  “Well, you seem to know a lot about it, Whiskey. Maybe you’re the one who’s gay.”

  Whiskey smirked. “How come I’ve had sex with so many girls then?”

  “Says you.”

  “Ask them yourself if you don’t believe me.”

  “Why would I bother?” Charlie said, irritated that the conversation had swung around so easily to Whiskey’s sexual exploits. “I couldn’t care less who you’ve had sex with. Now could you get lost? I have to hand this essay in tomorrow.”

  Whiskey didn’t move. “You’ve got to admit though,” he said, “Marco’s a real faggot’s name.”

  “You’re such a moron, Whiskey. Marco’s an Italian name. Because guess what? His parents are Italian.”

  “Why can’t he just call himself Mark?”

  “Why can’t you call yourself William? Now could you please piss off?”

  “Easy boy,” Whiskey said. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m telling you for your own good. What kind of a brother would I be if I didn’t tell you? You’d carry on hanging out with him, and pretty soon everyone would start saying you were a faggot too. You should be thanking me for this information.”

  “I see. I get it now. Thank you, Whiskey. Thank you so
much for telling me this. What a terrible mistake I might have made if you hadn’t let me know. What would I do without you? How can I ever express my undying gratitude?”

  Whiskey got up. “Have it your way, little brother. It’s your funeral.”

  “Shut the door behind you,” Charlie said, turning back to his essay.

  “As you wish, sir.” Whiskey bowed extravagantly and closed the door.

  x x x

  It had taken him a while, but Charlie had eventually had to admit Whiskey was probably right about Marco. It wasn’t just that Marco had never had a girlfriend—after all, Charlie hadn’t exactly had a lot of luck in that department himself at that time. It was more that Marco hadn’t shown any interest in girls whatsoever. When you were sixteen and seventeen, girls were what you talked about, even—or perhaps, especially—the ones you didn’t have a chance in hell with. You said this one was cute or that one had great legs, or if you wanted to be cruder, you said this one had a nice ass or that one would go off like a firecracker in the sack. But Marco never said those kinds of things. Once he had become alert to it, Charlie had realized Marco never talked about girls at all. He wouldn’t bring it up, and when the conversation swung that way—as it inevitably always did—he went quiet. He neither agreed nor disagreed with his friends’ assessments of the girls they knew or wished they knew. If asked directly, he would be noncommittal. “She’s okay,” he might say or, “She’s not my type.” Charlie had wondered if Marco’s other friends suspected him of being gay. He had tried to think of a way he might bring it up sometime. But he had known he never would. It would have made him too uncomfortable to talk about it.

  Once he had allowed himself to believe Marco might be gay, Charlie’s first reaction had been of anger. He had been angry with Marco for being different, angry with himself for choosing as a best friend the one guy in their grade who didn’t like girls, angry to think he might be tarred with the same brush. He had, of course, also been angry with Whiskey for pointing it out to him and angrier still that he hadn’t worked it out for himself. Then he had become afraid. He had been afraid that he himself was gay and he didn’t know it yet, afraid that spending too much time with Marco had turned him, afraid that Marco might be interested in him. Years later, he had admitted this to Marco.