Saving Charlotte

by Pia de Jong

  Charlotte makes people hold their breath. She confronts them with impermanence. She reminds us that the people we love can leave us without warning. It is a pain we tend to avoid, to turn our heads from. A child is supposed to hold the promise of a future, making up for the fact that we do not live forever.

  “Your tire is flat,” says Mackie as I am about to ride away with my sons in the back seats of the bike and Charlotte in front of me. “Too dangerous. Where were you going, anyway?”

  With a sigh, I get off my bike. I’m unable to make a stand against Mackie. He is as concerned as a father and as possessive as a lover. Unsolicited, he grabs his bike pump and puts it on the valve.

  It does not amaze me anymore that he is always around when I step out of my house, that he wants to know all the details of my life and interferes with everything I do. I’m beyond irritation. He is my gatekeeper.

  At the other end of my universe, at the old playground by the West India House, is my other loyal guard, Louis. I am constantly aware of them both. They are the protective rooks on my chessboard, my paladins at either end of the moat that surrounds me.

  With my tires fully inflated, I bike with my children through the alley. When I turn to go over the arched bridge, the handlebar of the bike shakes in my hands. I almost lose my balance. “Hold on!” Mackie’s voice thunders over the water. “You can do it. Don’t give up.”

  “I cannot go any farther,” says my brother, who is being dragged up the mountain by my mother’s hand. He is six; I’m seven and a half.

  “Just keep moving,” says my father.

  We are in a valley under the Swiss mountain called Pilatus. Its peak is 2128 meters high. I know that number by heart. I know even more. Such as where the trees end and where the snowline begins. How many kilometers we have to walk before we reach the top.

  But we are not there yet; we have just begun. It is six o’clock in the morning. My father woke us up at five. Stonily, we each ate a bowl of oatmeal. Not that we were hungry, but because he made us. Oatmeal is the best fuel for mountaineers, he told us.

  I am often sick, shaky, and nauseated. Most nights my legs hurt, which my mother calls growing pains, but I am afraid it is something worse. I do not like sports with fast running and things like rackets and sticks, but I love ballet. In the morning, alone in my bedroom, I leave the curtains closed as long as possible to maintain the dreaminess of the night.

  But according to my father, that is not good at all. He is convinced that the bracing outdoor air will strengthen me, make my aches disappear, and teach me to put up with minor discomforts.

  In recent weeks we prepared for this trip. First, a series of short walks, then increasingly longer hikes. We had to break in our boots, build up our muscles. On one of these hikes we met a Swiss gentleman wearing a hat with a feather, who walked with a cane. He taught us how to breathe correctly while walking. Three steps inhaling and three steps exhaling. Make sure I lift my feet, so I don’t trip. Walk on my heels going downhill. And always, always look down to see where I’m putting my feet.

  My father makes sure that I do exactly what the Swiss man taught me. My father knows that dreaming will not get you very far, and that you can practice endurance. That’s why we walk here. That’s why we are about to climb this mountain from the valley to the top and then make our way back down again.

  Now, at dawn, our family is walking on mossy forest paths. Occasionally a lizard crosses the trail. Birds shriek in the treetops. We walk in single file, one after another, except for my mother and my little brother, who hold hands.

  After nine o’clock the sun is higher in the sky and it gets warmer. My sweaty clothes stick to my body. I tell my father that I am thirsty and tired. I hope he is tired too, or at least as hot as I am, and will decide that we can go back. “Already?” says my father with a sigh. “We have just begun. Come on, hurry up.”

  From that moment on he counts my breathing. One, two, three in; one, two, three out. Occasionally he allows us a break. But we cannot sit down; that would tighten up our muscles. So we rest while standing up.

  At 10:30 we leave the forest behind. No more branches to obstruct the view—or the sun. We walk in a mountain meadow without shade. Now we can look farther, as far as the peak of the mountain rising above the green meadow. It is still so far away.

  With my father up front, we press on in the full sun. Above us, in cable cars, people float by. Every ten minutes another car. I can see the tourists in their summer clothes. They nudge each other, point to us, take pictures. Look at that family down there! Ashamed, I try to avoid their gazes. It must be a ridiculous sight, a family with small children climbing over rocks on a steep mountain trail.

  By eleven o’clock I’m completely exhausted and my body hurts all over. I tell my father to go ahead. I’ll stop and wait here until everyone comes back.

  “No,” he replies. “You’re coming with us.”

  I have little choice. My father now watches me even more closely, while glaring up disapprovingly at the cable cars. He has deep contempt for those who choose the easy way. “If you can do this now,” he says to me as he almost slips while stepping over a stone, “‘you will be able to do anything later in life.”

  Around noon we arrive at the top. This is not at all as I expected. None of the alpine serenity my father had talked about. Instead it is crowded with people enjoying the view from the restaurant. They sip wine from crystal glasses and eat lunches brought by waiters in immaculate white aprons. Our family reclines on the grass next to the terrace, eating lunch from our backpacks: rancid cheese sandwiches packed in plastic bags. For drinks we have lukewarm lemonade that we carried from the grocery store at the campground, now far below us.

  My father is proud but does not allow us much rest. “Time to move on,” he says. “Let’s go. Back down to base camp.”

  I point to a sign by the cable car: RETURN TRIP FREE. For a second I am hopeful. But I can tell from my father’s face that that will not happen. “We will finish this expedition, from beginning to end,” he says.

  With these words we head back to the trail.

  Halfway through the descent, my body just gives up. I cannot put one leg before the other anymore. I cannot get enough air; everything around me turns black.

  “You can do it,” my father says when I lay myself down on the ground.

  “No,” I say, “I can’t. This is it. I am finished.”

  My father stays with me while my mother and my brothers continue. Standing near me, he closely watches me. Time goes by. Dusk falls, making me feel cold. The mountain scenery turns a menacing dark purple. My father keeps waiting at my side, without saying a word.

  Shivering and shaking, I imagine that this is the end of my life. That there are no days beyond this very day. Never have I been this exhausted. Black birds soar above my head, some of them shrieking. I stare at them so long that my eyes tear up and I have to close them. I now become one of the blackbirds. Flying higher and higher, spiraling until I cannot go any farther. In this thin air I hang motionless and look down. Far beneath me I see the Pilatus, as on the map we studied so thoroughly in advance. The rocky peak, the trail with zigzag switchbacks, the meadows and woods. I see myself lying on my back on the path, a seven-and-a-half-year-old girl, with her father beside her. I see all of this in fine detail, down to the smallest twig.

  Then, abruptly, something changes. Suddenly I can see the entire distance below me not as a series of arduous treks but as space that in my mind can be conquered in a single leap. I see myself walking to the campground, meeting my brothers and my mother. They are waiting for me, happy to see me. My mother embraces me.

  “Come on, Dad, let’s go,” I say as I jump up and start walking.

  “Whoa,” my father says, smiling. “Not that fast.”

  But I want to go even faster. He is right. I can do more than I ever thought possible. I walk without stopping down to the valley floor, while my father can barely keep up with me.


  “Look, all those pretty colors!” says Jurriaan, tugging at my sleeve. His eyes glow feverishly. Matthijs, whom I carry, clasps his arms tightly around me. All five of us are standing in the bedroom looking out the window at the sky bursting with sparks from thousands of fireworks. The boys’ cheeks are flushed with excitement. Robbert holds Charlotte against his shoulder. It’s the last night of the year. The year in which Jurriaan turned four and Matthijs two. The year in which Charlotte was born.

  A cork hits our window with a thud. On the street below us, a boy and a girl are passing a champagne bottle back and forth, taking sips. Holding hands, they walk along the canal. A cyclist screams at the top of his lungs, “Happy New Year!” to no one in particular.

  “Charlotte made it into the new year,” I say to Robbert. He kisses her forehead and strokes her hair until it is shiny smooth.

  I look over at the blond girl behind the window, and she meets my eyes. She stands like a forlorn mannequin. Wrapped in a tight leather skirt, she sways her hips to music only she hears. I wonder if she has any plans for New Year’s. I would give her dreams as colorful and sparkling as the fireworks outside. Dreams of a future in which men do not desire her for her body only.

  I wave at her through our window. How can a girl so petite be so strong? How can she put up with this way of life?

  She plants a kiss on her fingers and blows it like a dandelion fluff toward me. It floats in the air like a prayer.

  “Happy New Year,” says my mother. She speaks over a crackly telephone wire, far away, in the city where I was born. In the house where I know every hiding place, where she sits in the cozy chair in the living room, staring out the window without seeing anything. Her thoughts are with me, her daughter, and my heavy sadness, which she can do nothing about.

  I do not know what the word happy means anymore. The word has been emptied of feeling. There is no safe place in my mind where it can rest.

  “Happy New Year,” my father says when he takes the phone from my mother.

  I struggle to recognize his familiar voice. Sound waves pass through my hands. I search for him, the father of my past, who lifted me on his shoulders and carried me to the park. In my clammy fists I clutch a bag of breadcrumbs. “Dad, look, the ducks are already there.”

  “Of course they are, sweetheart. They knew you were coming.”

  The exploding fireworks outside snap me out of my daydreams. “What are you up to, Dad?” I ask him.

  “Lately I have started to talk a lot to God,” he says solemnly. “One on one. About Charlotte.”

  My boys dance around the room, overexcited. There’s something in the air—something is about to happen.

  Then we see flames. The roof of a house diagonally across from us on the canal is on fire. Fire trucks drive back and forth. Charlotte cries desperately.

  “Look! Over there,” Jurriaan says, pointing. “See that old man across the canal? He is waving at you.” Amid the chaos outside, the many people, the ambulances and the fire trucks, I see Rutger in his favorite green sweater. The streetlight gives his face an angelic shine. He too has made it into the new year. When I wave back, our arms seem to reach each other, as through a wormhole in time and space. I suddenly wish I could walk on the blue water that shimmers between us.

  That night I dream that I am trying to go home on streets made of quicksand. Deeper and deeper I sink into it, running faster and faster. I drag my three children with me, holding them as close as I can. Just in time I reach my house.

  And then it happens. When I think I am safe, after I close the door behind me and slide the iron latch sideways, my house turns out to be built on quicksand as well. I clasp my children even closer to me, but we sink to an unfathomable depth while birds stare at us from the shore with knowing eyes. Then the house loses its cohesion, falls apart, and dissolves. No, I scream, no, no, but there is no one to give me a hand. Everything around me disappears, and there is nothing I can do to save my kids.

  Startled awake, I press my hands against the cool wall. I reassure myself that the stone walls of my house are upright and will protect me. I check whether my children sleep safely around me.

  But the birds with their strange eyes still haunt me. I have known them since I was a child. They visited me at my bed, mostly when I felt I was safe. When I had my nightgown on and my bed was made up with sheets, which my mother had dried all day outside in the clean-smelling breeze. The birds had all kinds of bright plumage. They looked at me from every angle, cocking their heads. Some let themselves in, uninvited, and sat down on the windowsill. One was even bolder and sat on the edge of my bed. Once it stretched out its wings wider than my mattress. I fell out of my bed. In a panic, I called out for my mother, who swore that I imagined all this. There’s no bird, she said over and over. It is all in your mind. When I refused to believe her, she took everything off my bed. The blankets, sheets, and pillow that she had so carefully put on that day all wound up in a heap. I sat on the floor watching, all the while hugging my nightgown tightly to keep my trembling knees in place.

  It’s 3 a.m. in the first morning of the new year. The light of the streetlamp glowing through the half-open curtains turns my bedroom yellow. I sit up and look around at a place that seems strangely familiar.

  I realize that this room is exactly like the bedroom in my parents’ house, similar even in the smallest details. How is it possible that I realize this only now? While preparing for the arrival of my children, I must have reimagined the bedroom I slept in when I was a little girl. I sewed curtains made from the same soft material, in exactly the same sunflower-yellow color. I put woodchip wallpaper on the wall. I even placed the bed in the same corner, so now, as then, I can look straight out the window.

  Once again I am six years old, sitting upright on my bed. My mother is strolling through the garden in her green rubber boots. She carries a bowl of potato peels in both hands. On top lie the wilted asters that stood in a vase on the living room table. She now arrives at the end of the tiled path, where the compost pile is, and dumps the container. Turning around, she wipes her hands on her apron and briskly walks back. Behind her, the withered flowers lie like pick-up sticks tossed on the potato peels.

  Beyond the small garden gate lives the most beautiful girl in my school class. Anne arrived the previous summer, seemingly out of nowhere. She is different from any other girl I know. Everything about her is special. She wears sweaters knit by her grandmother and white knee socks from a department store in the city, where her mother buys five pairs at a time. I prefer to see her in the red pinafore that was a hand-me-down from her cousin. There’s a tiny hole in the armpit, though nobody but me notices that. Anne has asthma, and her mother often makes her stay home from school. Those days she sits at the kitchen table and draws with a freshly sharpened pencil in her sketchbook.

  Anne differs from my brothers, who are wild and play dangerous games. She is a girl’s girl. We love to sit together in her room, listening to the rain beating down on the window. Sometimes she braids my hair. Very precisely, with the tip of her tongue against her upper lip, she folds my strands of hair one over another. Meanwhile I tell her stories filled with princesses and dragons, the kind she likes.

  Every morning I walk to Anne’s house, where she waits for me at the door. The two of us walk to school together. On our way in the fresh morning air, we pluck leaves from the hedges and catch butterflies that we release in the schoolyard.

  “Anne!” I call from across the street, as loudly as I can. She waves back at me. Anne is a girl like me, and yet completely different.

  I often dream about having a sister. She would look like Anne and be just as pretty. She would also have asthma and often be allowed to stay home from school.

  “I want a baby sister,” I tell my mother.

  “I’m sorry, but I cannot have any more children,” she softly replies.

  “Then I will go find a sister,” I say, and I put on my coat.

  “Where?” asks my mother b
efore I open the door.

  “Outside,” I say, “in the garden. If I pray very hard, one day she will just fall out of the air. But I will have to catch her. Otherwise she will fall and break in a thousand pieces.”

  The new year brings little change in Charlotte’s condition. She still seems to be made of porcelain, and her feet are speckled with tumors. We can only guess at what is happening under her skin. We study every article we can find about her illness. There is nothing we have not read. But when it comes to understanding the most crucial thing in our lives, her disease, we grope in the dark. Every day can be a step toward her future or bring her closer to the end. The same alternatives we had in the very beginning. Every day we can still hold her is another day with Charlotte; that is the only gain.

  Occasionally my parents come over and take care of the boys. Then Robbert and I walk with Charlotte and visit all our familiar places. We drink coffee in our neighborhood bar; we buy croissants from the bakery around the corner and sit down on a bench near the water. This way we hope to anchor her in the little piece of earth we call ours.

  Robbert works even harder than before. Some evenings while I am falling asleep he is working next to me in bed. His pen incessantly scratches on his notebook, filling page after page. He draws enigmatic formulas that allow him to travel through time and space.

  Meanwhile our lives go on. We operate as a family. There is always food in the house, bills are paid, and tax forms are filled out.

  I am the consoler-in-chief. I put Band-Aids on skinned knees, pull quarreling children apart, and help find missing pieces of puzzles. I also take care of the washing and cleaning.

  By now we have found a new equilibrium. This is not the situation that we had in mind when we planned our future with children. We agreed that we would fairly divide work and care, and neither of us would become financially dependent on the other. But since we walk on ice, the thinnest layer of hope, we cannot do otherwise. We rely on the security of our embrace. We are a set of Russian nesting dolls: Robbert the public face, me on the inside, and inside me, in ever-smaller figures, the boys. In the innermost sanctum, surrounded by all of us, is the smallest particle. Charlotte.