Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

“Want some wine? I can get you a glass.”

  She shook her head. The sky was thick with stars, each one more brilliant that the other. She hoped for a shooting star, so she could wish on it. She looked at the huge coleus he had growing in a pot and, beside it, an even bigger pot of basil. “Those are amazing,” she said, nodding at the plants.

  “The coleus is Fred. I grew him from seed, so I named him. The basil just grows and grows.”

  “I like Fred,” she said. She glanced around and pointed at the macramé hanging, twisting knots of blue twine. It wasn’t very pretty, but he obviously thought enough of it to hang it up. “I like that, too,” she said politely.

  He laughed. “I was at a commune and some girl tried to teach me to do macramé, and as you can see, I’m no expert. Still, I like to see it hanging up there. It’s a big mess, but I like anything imperfect. It’s got its own sort of beauty.”

  “It does at that.”

  “So tell me about your work, Charlotte Gold. Why’d you decide to be a vet?”

  “I never had pets. I always wanted one, but Iris was allergic. This way I get to baby all of them.” She told him about a snake who had a cataract operation, about a woman who came in with a baby owl with a broken wing. The animals she loved the most were the unique ones: A tortoise with orange-ringed eyes and an overgrown beak because his owner hadn’t known it had to be trimmed. A dog with mottled red fur that had the sweetest blue eyes. “Animals talk to you in ways you can’t imagine,” she said. “They just look at you and it feels like they’re reading your mind.”

  “My folks had a cat named Elvis,” he said, and Charlotte laughed, which made Patrick laugh, too. “He used to bop me on the head every morning at five because he wanted to play. He’d race around the furniture. I swear he was half-human.”

  Patrick drained his glass. “You leaving tomorrow?” he asked, and she nodded.

  “Did you find everything you were looking for?”

  “I didn’t have enough time . . .”

  He was quiet for a moment and then he glanced over at her. “Maybe you should come back,” he said.

  Chapter 21

  Patrick liked Charlotte. He had liked Lucy, too, but Charlotte was different, quieter, more thoughtful, and when she listened she gave her full attention. He had meant it when he invited her to come back, but when she actually called at the beginning of August and mentioned returning another weekend, saying she wanted to find another teacher who had worked with William, he felt nervous. What was it she really wanted?

  As soon as she got out of the car, his mouth went dry. Her hair was a little longer, her skin had a little color, and she was in a summer dress that showed off her long legs. “Hi,” she said shyly.

  That night she sat out on the porch swing, looking at the stars. When he came out with glasses of lemonade, the ice clinking, she scooted over and made room for him, but instead he took one of the chairs. She didn’t seem to mind. “You have the best stars here,” she said.

  He was happy to sit out in the dark with her. Nights could get lonely, and it was nice to have the company, to hear the gentle rock of the swing. He liked listening to Charlotte, too, the cadence of her voice, raspy like wild grasses, filling in the blanks of Lucy’s life for him, unfolding how Charlotte had brought her up, how she had watched over her. How she had failed her.

  “You didn’t fail her. You drove out here to rescue her.”

  Charlotte slid the glass of lemonade around in her hand and said nothing.

  Talking about himself was another matter. “Where did you grow up?” Charlotte asked him, and that segued into what his parents had been like, and where he’d gone to school, and it veered close to his having to talk about Vera, which he didn’t want to do. He answered her politely, telling her just the outline of his life, but she kept probing. Her hair, like a wing, spread against her cheek. He felt like an orange she was unpeeling.

  “Why didn’t you love her?” Charlotte asked quietly.

  “What?”

  “I mean really, why didn’t you? Lucy was young. She was beautiful. She loved you. Why didn’t you love her back?”

  “No one knows why anyone loves anyone,” he said. He looked at her, pained.

  “Tell me about the woman in the photograph,” she said. “Lucy wrote about her.”

  He stiffened. He had always been able to deflect Lucy when she had asked about Vera, changing the subject or having her do a chore. Lucy was a hummingbird, always off to the next thing, but Charlotte was different.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “What was her name?”

  He didn’t answer, but he felt her quietly waiting, giving him space. What did it matter if he told her? She wasn’t going to be here much longer.

  “Vera.” There was that dull ache, that pain. Well, he had said this much, he might as well say the rest. “She was my wife.”

  “What happened to her?” Charlotte asked.

  “She died.”

  Charlotte set her glass of lemonade down, tilting her head toward him. He waited for her shock, her discomfort, but she stayed still and calm.

  He told her, just to get it out, to get it over with. That they had been happy. That they had been trying to have a child. That one moment she was perfectly healthy and the next moment he was in the waiting room of the ER, the only person in there because it was the middle of the night, and a doctor had come out and hadn’t said a word, and Patrick had known. He told her how he had left school, how he had joined a commune, trying to outrun his grief. And then he had wound up here.

  As soon as he told her, he wished that he hadn’t, because he knew what would happen. She would tell him what everyone else did, that things would get better, that he should remember the good times. That things happened for a reason or, even worse, that Vera was in heaven looking down on him, making sure he was okay. When one door closes, another one opens. All that shit. He would kill to believe any of that, but he couldn’t. He shifted in his seat. “So now you know,” he said, and Charlotte reached across and took his hand, and he felt a jolt of heat before she let it go. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  She didn’t say another word, and neither did he. She simply sat there beside him, and Patrick was surprised at how soothing that felt. How less alone.

  Charlotte didn’t move until he finally got up, and then she stretched. “I’m going to sit out here a bit longer,” she said, and he nodded and went inside.

  He tried to go to sleep, but he kept thinking of her sitting out there alone on his porch. He didn’t relax until he heard her footsteps back in the house, her bedroom door opening and closing.

  He was embarrassed after that, but she didn’t bring up Vera again.

  THE NEXT MORNING he woke to find Charlotte sitting at his kitchen table, scribbling lists and then tossing them into his wastebasket. Later he dug one out. She had categories: “Find Lucy’s Friends.” “Lucy’s Work.” “Find William’s Friends.” Patrick didn’t think Lucy had friends, but he couldn’t know that for sure, and he couldn’t imagine anyone palling around with William. “Visit William’s School” was crossed out. And then he saw his own name, Patrick, with a question mark after it. Again he wondered, what did she really want from him? She never asked him for help. He thought it must be hard for her, but she never talked about where she had been or whom she had talked to.

  That night he heard her crying in her room. The sound reverberated in his bones, and he walked to her door, and the closer he got, the louder it became. He lifted his hand to knock but then hesitated and walked back into the kitchen instead. He banged the teakettle onto the stove. He ran the water as hard as he could. She’d hear him. If she needed him, she’d know he was there.

  But she didn’t come out. He went and got a bottle of wine. He always kept a spare juice glass on the table so he could pour himself a glass, and he filled this one to the rim.

  When Lucy was around, he never drank in front of her. She was a kid and no happier than he was, but he
didn’t want her to think that alcohol was the answer. And he didn’t want her to think he was an alcoholic, either. He wasn’t. No one ever found him lying on the side of a road. He didn’t sway when he walked or slur his words or otherwise act like an asshole. And he never drank anything harder than wine.

  Before Vera died, he never used to drink. He and Vera liked juice or seltzer with a squirt of lemon in it. Sometimes he’d have a glass at the commune if someone made it, but the homemade wine was always made from dandelions and it tasted like crabgrass, and he drank it just to be polite. No, his drinking habit had started at the farm, the long nights when he was tired of reading and there were no movies on TV, the darkness crowding around him, the crickets deafening. Wine muddied the edges.

  He started to pour another glass and realized he had finished the bottle. Something was knocking in his head. He tilted his head and listened. Charlotte had stopped crying. Maybe she had cried herself to sleep. Or maybe she was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing she could go backward in her life and do things differently, the same way he did. Maybe they were alike in that. He listened harder, but the house was silent.

  Chapter 22

  The next morning, the day she was supposed to go home, Charlotte’s coughing woke her. She tried to sit up, but the room began to spin, so she flopped back down. She never got sick, because she couldn’t afford to. Her entire time at Brandeis, she swallowed vitamins every morning, because missing a class would be a disaster for her and she couldn’t count on anyone else’s scribbled notes to save her. She’d never go to the student health clinic, either, because they made you wait for hours and then the strongest thing they gave you was aspirin. She ran a hand along her forehead. Hot.

  She dragged herself out of bed, and the whole room seemed to be wobbling. Make yourself well, she told herself. How many times had she been in bed feeling sick when she knew she had to get up and go to class? She had splashed cold water on her face and slid on a dress and shoes, and she had managed to hold it together until she could come back to her dorm room and sleep it off.

  She pulled on her jeans and a T-shirt, sweating. She would get juice. Coffee. She stumbled out into the kitchen, and as soon as she saw Patrick cleaning the dishes in the sink, she felt embarrassed. Who wanted someone sick in your house, spreading germs everywhere? She reached up a hand to smooth back her hair, and her legs noodled under her. She gripped the edge of the wall, and Patrick turned at the noise and saw her.

  “Hey,” Patrick said. “Hey, hey.”

  “I’m fine,” she insisted, and then she took a step toward him, and the world blurred into a white cone.

  SHE FLOATED, HALLUCINATING in fever, burning up the bed, so that the sheets were soaked in sweat. She didn’t always feel her body, which seemed to glide away from her and then return with a sickening bump.

  She felt someone sitting beside her, but she couldn’t open her eyes. She strained until she caught a voice. Patrick. He was telling her about how when he was a little boy, he had begged his father for a baseball uniform, but it was too expensive. “I need it,” he kept saying, and finally his dad bought it for him. He couldn’t wait to wear it to school, to show it off, but when the big day came, the other kids snickered at him. They made fun, and one kid deliberately kicked Patrick so he fell in the mud. He never wanted to wear the uniform after that, but he had to pretend that he did because his father had spent so much money on it.

  She wanted to laugh, to tell him how sorry she was, but she couldn’t get her mouth to move. Her eyes seemed glued shut. She struggled to speak. “What day is this? My job . . . ,” she rasped.

  “It’s Sunday. August sixteenth. You’ve been sick with the flu for two weeks. Tell me the name. I’ll call them. You’re not going anywhere.”

  She gave him the number and he called right from her bed. “That’s so kind of you,” he said, and he hung up.

  “Am I fired?” she whispered.

  “He’s a good guy. He said to take all the time you need.”

  She fell back on the pillow. “Please. Talk more,” she said.

  He told her about this guy Dylan from the commune where he had lived, and how he did nothing but crochet these god-awful ponchos in rainbow yarn, but no one wanted to hurt his feelings, so they all wore them. He told her about the first time he saw Lucy, how he had thought she might be a runaway. And then he told her more about Vera. How it had been his fault.

  Patrick, she said, it wasn’t your fault. But no sound came out of her mouth.

  “I had a friend who’s a doctor come to see you.”

  What doctor? she thought. She couldn’t remember anything.

  She felt thinner, more compact under the covers, and her hand found her ribs. She tried to get up again, and the room lost focus.

  “Lie back down,” he told her. “Sleep this thing off a few more days. Just because there’s no fever doesn’t mean you can get up.”

  When he left her room, he kept the door slightly open, which she found reassuring. She sank down under the comforter, her eyes rolling shut. Patrick. She wanted to call to him to stay beside her. Patrick.

  The whole time she was sick, she’d wake and see signs that he had been there. A tray of tomato soup and Goldfish crackers sat on the end table. There was ginger ale with ice clinking in the glass. An extra blanket put over her. Clean sheets. And most miraculously, she was always in dry, clean nightclothes—tie-dyed shirts and sweatpants—which meant he must have gotten her into them, which made her feel more relief than embarrassment. She vaguely remembered a doctor, a man hovering over her, saying something, and then she fell into a swamp of dreams again. She was a bird flying, landing on a boat in the middle of the ocean, her feathers falling from her. She was running in a field, calling for Lucy. She was at Brandeis, her hair in an Afro, her fist raised, taking over a building. Her fever blazed through her. Patrick’s voice wound around her. She remembered only bits of what he said. Something about riding a horse up a mountain, and the horse started to tumble over the edge. Something about learning to ride a motorcycle, so vivid she felt the air rushing past her. It didn’t matter what he said, really. She just liked his voice, like a life raft she could hold on to. She didn’t have to do anything or be anything but here, getting well. When she felt him leaving the room, a breeze floated past her. The air seemed to dim.

  THIS TIME WHEN she woke, her inner furnace was gone. The sheets felt cool and dry, and so did she. She was in a purple T-shirt and a pair of drawstring pajama pants—not her own clothing. Patrick must have changed her again. He must have seen her naked, and she felt suddenly strange and unmoored.

  She found she could hoop her legs out of the bed and stand, wobbling a little, like a colt. The room was clean, a window open so that the summer air came in. She could hear bees outside, and she changed into her own T-shirt and jeans, which now hung at her hips because she had lost weight. The ring she wore fell off her finger onto the floor, and she scooped it back up. Ah, the fever diet, she thought.

  She wandered into the kitchen. Patrick was shucking green beans, the light coming in through the window like a halo around his head. He looked at her and beamed, which made her suddenly shy.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For taking care of me.” She swallowed. “What day is it today?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “My job—”

  “I took care of it. I called your boss back and gave him an update. He said, don’t come back and get the animals sicker than they already are. And he laughed when he said it.”

  “He made a joke? He never makes jokes.”

  “Well, he did this time.”

  “Iris—I need to call Iris. She must be frantic.”

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I looked in your purse for an address book. I called her and told her you were getting over a flu.”

  “You called Iris?” Charlotte tried to imagine it, what Iris must have thought about her staying with a man.

  “She was happy for the update.”
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  “I’ll do a laundry. I’ll clean up. Make it up to you.”

  “Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to make up,” he said.

  “I’ll do it anyway,” she said. “Then I’ll head home.”

  She stripped the bed, but there wasn’t anything else to do. He had washed her clothes and put them in a neat pile on the chair. She picked up Lucy’s journal and leafed through it to the end, to the blank pages. Every place Lucy had mentioned, Charlotte had already visited. There was only one more place to go, and it wasn’t in these pages. It wasn’t even a place where Lucy had been, and Charlotte didn’t think she had the courage. There was nowhere else to go. Nothing more to find. At least not here.

  “Wait out the weekend,” Patrick said. “Take it easy. Your job will be there, and so will Iris.” He was looking at her strangely, and it felt different between them.

  She agreed to stay, just for a couple of days. She got used to being back on her feet. She hung out at the stand and watched Patrick work. He got down on his knees and hand-weeded with his crew, his hair held back in a ponytail, and she could hear them all laughing. Once, he gave free apples to all the little kids. Another time, a man was short five dollars, and Patrick waved his hand and said, “Oh, you can pay me next time, don’t worry about it.”

  A woman in a minidress, her red hair spilling over her shoulders, strode over to Patrick and said something to him that made him laugh. He dipped his head toward the woman. Her smile matched his, and Charlotte dropped a few of the peaches she was arranging and bent to grab them up. He had taken care of her when she was sick. It didn’t mean anything, and it was stupid of her to even imagine that it did. If she was the kind of person who took every kindness to mean something other than that someone was just being nice to her, then she was really in trouble. Besides, was she feeling this about him just because Lucy had? Did she want him because Lucy hadn’t been able to get him? She looked up again, and the woman in the minidress was scribbling something on a piece of paper and handing it to Patrick, who folded his fingers over it and smiled.