Charlie hopes that she and Forrest will go have lunch somewhere, but on one of her trips past the dining room, she sees that Barbara is setting the table for three, and on her next trip, Barbara tells her that lunch will be ready in five minutes. Charlie takes off her coat, hat and gloves, and goes into the bathroom to wash her hands. In the mirror her eyes are bright with tears from the cold; the skin across her cheeks is raw and chapped-looking. Her nose is as pink as a rabbit’s.
For lunch, Barbara serves salmon burgers on brioche buns and a green salad drenched in balsamic dressing. Charlie is dismayed for two reasons: first, everyone knows you have beer and pizza on moving day, and second, well, salmon burgers.
“Now tell me,” Barbara says to Charlie, as soon as they are all seated, “how is your daughter?”
Charlie glances at Forrest, who is—damn him!—giving her a look of polite interest as though Davina were her daughter, not theirs.
“She’s good,” Charlie says, and smiles a little as an image of Davina flits through her mind. Davina is thirteen but so far untouched by teenage acne or personality rot. She is perfect. “She works at a food pantry on Saturdays.”
This is a lie. Davina is almost certainly still asleep and will probably remain that way for several more hours. If Charlie suggested to Davina that she spend her Saturdays working at a food bank, Davina would be shocked and disbelieving. But Barbara doesn’t need to know that.
“And your work?” Barbara inquires politely. “Are you still an addictions counselor?”
“Oh, yes,” Charlie says.
“What type of addiction do you specialize in?” Barbara asks.
“Meth and heroin mainly,” Charlie says.
Barbara’s nostrils flare slightly. “That’s an—”
“And many of my patients are prostitutes,” Charlie adds. “All of them, actually. With hepatitis.”
This is also a lie, although at one time, when Charlie was younger and worked at a welfare detox clinic, it wouldn’t have been. But now she is the after-care coordinator at a luxury rehab center in Virginia, and the closest thing she knows to a prostitute is a woman named Aileen, who works in the massage therapy department and once got written up for failing to change the sheets between patients. But she can’t resist trying to one-up Barbara: You may have tagged a few turtles, but I’ve touched people crawling with infectious diseases.
“I know addiction is an illness,” Barbara says thoughtfully, “but it is so terribly hard on the families.”
“How is your cousin Paul?” Forrest asks.
Barbara seems surprised and vaguely disappointed. No doubt she was looking forward to implying that Charlie was somehow enabling addicts to torment their loved ones. “Paul’s doing very well,” she says. She turns to Charlie. “My cousin has been a recovering alcoholic for twenty-five years now.”
“I seem to remember Forrest talking about him,” Charlie says coolly. “Wasn’t he always taking impromptu hikes with a Thermos?”
Barbara frowns. “It was a very small Thermos—”
“I always liked Paul,” Forrest says. “Where does he live now?”
“On Long Island,” Barbara says. “Garden City. I think I have his email address if you’d like to get in touch with him.”
“He and I played golf at Deepdale once,” Forrest says to Charlie, as though she could possibly care. “It was a great course.”
Charlie doesn’t reply. Her eyes are flicking over Forrest critically, and she’s thinking that if she and Barbara really are like North and South Korea, she would just as soon they dropped this pretense and North Korea took Forrest political prisoner. Of course, there was always the worry of starvation and re-education, but maybe he’d be detained in one of the nicer camps and not for too long. Right at this moment, Charlie thinks it might be worth it.
Suddenly Barbara looks pained—that is, even more pained than usual in Charlie’s presence. “I think I’m getting a migraine,” she says. She doesn’t say that having Charlie in the house is the cause but it’s sort of implied.
She leaves the table for a moment. She returns with her purse and rummages through it for a bottle of pills. She swallows two and dons a pair of oversized sunglasses that make her look something like an insane welder. “There,” she says. “Perhaps that will hold it.”
“It’s such a shame the way you suffer,” Forrest says, shaking his head and taking another bite of his salmon burger.
But Charlie doesn’t say anything because the rattle of the pill bottle has made her throat feel closed.
Twenty years ago, the suicide crisis hotline had been called Hopeful Place, a name Charlie found deeply ironic since its headquarters were so grim, so dingy, so depressing that anyone who went there automatically felt like killing themselves. (It was a good thing they didn’t offer in-person sessions.) The call center consisted of two rooms on the third floor of a building on G Street in south-east DC. One of the rooms was an office where the administrators sat in the daytime, with filing cabinets and metal furniture, and the other room was for the volunteers, with two battle-scarred desks and squeaky roller chairs, a small refrigerator, a coffee machine and a microwave on a table. Both rooms had chipped lime-green walls and wooden floors dark with the dirt of a hundred thousand shoes. In the winter, the pipes clanked, and in the summer, an inadequate window A/C unit buzzed so loudly that it was hard to hear the phones. The volunteer room smelled predominantly of whatever the previous shift had ordered for dinner—on the hot August evening when Charlie showed up to work an overnight shift, that smell was of pepperoni-and-onion pizza.
Charlie’s usual partner on overnights was a statuesque African-American woman named Dominique. Dominique’s voice sounded like marbles rolling a snare drum and she had the demeanor of a homicide cop or waitress at a truck stop—someone who has seen a lot and risen above it. She could soothe the most troubled caller seemingly by laying her hands on the receiver. She ended every call by saying, “Now, dear one, you rest easy tonight.” (A technique Charlie had tried to imitate with deeply unsatisfying results—“Rest easy?” a caller named Georgina had said doubtfully. “With my acid reflux?”) Dominique was a real-estate agent and she’d helped Charlie find an unlisted apartment; she’d told her to carry her cash around in a sanitary-napkin wrapper so no one would steal it. To every overnight shift, she brought homemade red-velvet cupcakes with butter-cream frosting. (There were many, many fine things about Dominique but the cupcakes might have been the finest.)
That night, though, Dominique had called Charlie to say she had bronchitis and wouldn’t be in. Instead a woman of about forty sat at the other desk. She was just the right side of plump, with glossy black hair cut in a pageboy, and a nose so snub it made Charlie want to slide a ruler under it. When she smiled, she showed square white teeth, like children draw. She wore a ruby-red peasant blouse and a denim skirt. In the dingy room, she was as lush as a hibiscus, as opulent as a tropical bird.
“Hello,” the woman said. “You must be Charlie561. I’m Barbara383.” (She’d been into the numbers thing even back then.)
Charlie’s hair was a dull, dirty brown, but since high school she had bleached it a fragile ash blonde and worn it in a sleek pixie cut. She was wearing jeans and a thin white tank top with a leather vest over it. Normally her own looks pleased her well enough, but suddenly she felt tall and overly lanky, oddly spider-like.
“Hello,” she said. Her eyes flicked past Barbara to the small table next to the fridge. No cupcakes. She sighed.
Charlie and Barbara said goodnight to the outgoing shift—Mario699 and Susan302—who reported an uneventful afternoon and told them that a regular named Hilda had called to say she’d watched a Nova documentary about the Mary Celeste: and it had stirred up her annihilation anxiety, and she might call back.
Yes, well, those regular callers. Hopeful Place had a lot of them—so many that there was a whole three-ring binder with notes on them called the Regular Book. New volunteers were supposed to read through i
t and familiarize themselves with the regulars so that, for instance, they didn’t waste two hours talking to Maureen about her feelings of worthlessness only to have Maureen say at the end, “Well, I guess I’ll give you a call again next week when my husband is out at his poker game.” There was Hank with his disabling insomnia, and Clive, whose emphysema kept him house-bound, and Ruth, whose daughter never called, and Abe, with his addiction to lottery tickets, and Florence, with her crippling fear of cockroaches, and Mose, with his ailing Basset Hound, and Leon, who had paid $6,300 for a used Ford Escort in 1992 and later found it listed in the blue book for $5,900 and never got over it.
Some regulars called pretty much every day, as a sort of check-in: “Not too badly, thanks, though they were clean sold out of Grape-Nuts at the supermarket.” Some called weekly: “Well, just thought I’d let you know I’m still upright.” Sometimes they disappeared for months or even years. No one knew what had happened to them during these hiatuses, but Charlie always wondered. Did the regular get more functional, go out into the world and live life for a while? Or did they get less functional and spend time in a mental-health facility where phones were not allowed? Or did they take up with some other, more desirable, hotline and only return to Hopeful Place when the new hotline stopped taking their calls? (In nearly all respects, the regulars mirrored Charlie’s romantic life up to that point.)
Volunteers were supposed to work the assessment algorithm with the regulars. It was supposed to go like this: Are you thinking of suicide?
No.
Have you thought about suicide in the last two months?
No.
Have you ever attempted to kill yourself?
No.
Oh, well, thanks, goodbye. Click.
But it didn’t really work like that because the regulars had gotten wise to it, and if they felt like talking, they answered Yes to one of the questions and that prompted the volunteer to ask, How often do you think of killing yourself? Do you have a plan? Do you have access to pills or weapons? And then the regular would say Yes to one of those questions, which would prompt others, and the call might go on pointlessly for half an hour when, really, all the regular wanted was a little sympathy about how Rite Aid had declined their coupon for shampoo.
The good thing about working the overnight shift was that there were no pesky administrators sitting in the next room, listening to your calls, and you were free to chuck the algorithm out of the window and say, “Oh, hi, Stanley, how’s that diverticulosis?” and similarly the regular could abandon all pretense and say, “When’s 495 scheduled to work? I want to tell her about how they overcharged me for coffee at the office.” It was tons more satisfying all around.
Mario and Susan left. Charlie sat at her desk with a Diet Coke and a small packet of Cheetos; the overnight shift was all about overeating. She pulled her Visual Anatomy & Physiology textbook out of her backpack and opened it with a small sigh. Barbara took a copy of Good Housekeeping from her bag and began flipping through it. Occasionally the phones rang and they alternated answering.
By pretty much any standard, it was a slow shift. A regular named Dolly called to complain about construction on Military Road. A teenage boy called to say he was going to kill himself to get out of a biology final. A dancer called to say she’d failed an audition. A man called to say he felt suicidal about the Orioles’ performance against the Yankees. A regular named Frank called to ask if he could substitute pretzels for graham crackers in a pie crust.
Charlie put her hand over the receiver and consulted Barbara, who said, “I don’t see why not.” She turned a page in her magazine. “As long as he ups the sugar. Though I would recommend against it if he’s making a key lime pie, or any pie in the meringue family, for that matter.”
Charlie recorded every call in the logbook, as did Barbara. The date, the time, the duration of the call, the caller’s complaint, any referral given. Charlie wondered if anyone ever looked back through the log.
Around midnight, Charlie and Barbara decided to order takeout. Charlie said she was really craving chicken fried rice at the same exact moment that Barbara said Chinese food was for those with unsophisticated palates, and then the conversation was sort of like a frog that jumped off a lily pad and disappeared underwater. They couldn’t order separately because they wouldn’t meet the ten-dollar delivery minimum. They ended up getting Indian.
The food came, and while they ate, Barbara asked Charlie what she was studying, and Charlie asked Barbara where she’d been on vacation. Then they ate mostly in silence, except for Barbara saying she believed the Indian place had used too much turmeric in the chicken pasanda. Charlie looked at her thoughtfully, recalling the night that she and Dominique were high on chai tea and butter-cream frosting and Dominique had said that anal sex made her hemorrhoids flare up, and Charlie had said that she’d gotten trichomoniasis from masturbating with a dirty carrot from the farmer’s market, and Dominique had said, oh, yes, that thing about washing fruits and vegetables didn’t just apply to tossed salads. Charlie sighed and started eating her second portion of naan. Barbara truly couldn’t measure up to Dominique in any way.
The shift continued. A woman called to say she’d been evicted and Charlie referred her to a homeless shelter. A regular named Ollie called to complain about the political unrest in the Middle East. A girl called to say she was going to drink a cup of bleach and changed her mind when Charlie told her that wouldn’t be fatal. A regular named Fritz called to say that he was ninety-eight percent sure he had Mad Cow Disease. A woman with a gravelly smoker’s voice called and claimed to be seven years old. A man called to say he was going out to get an overdose of heroin just as soon as the late-late movie was over, unless he fell asleep first.
The phones went silent for a while. Charlie ate a Snickers bar and touched up her fingernails with the bottle of bronze-colored polish she kept in her purse. Barbara finished her magazine and started on the Washington Post crossword.
A call came in and Charlie took it. A man with a querulous, agitated voice said, “Who’s this?”
“Hello, Emory,” Charlie said, and sighed. Emory was perhaps her least favorite regular, and that was saying something. He was a fretful, suspicious man in his sixties who shared a drafty duplex in Brookland with a bunch of gypsies—at least, Emory said they smelled like gypsies. His page in the Regular Book dated back over a decade. He used to live with his mother and he’d called then to complain about her nagging and her dependence and her hypochondria and the way she overcooked spaghetti. His mother had died three years ago (apparently she wasn’t faking that coronary artery disease after all) and Emory’s calls to Hopeful Place had increased dramatically. Now he was lonely and sad and worried about intruders, and he’d turned all his underpants pink in the washing-machine. His one remaining pleasure in life seemed to be collecting stamps with the money his mother had left him. He liked to quiz the volunteers, and once he’d called Charlie an idiot for not knowing that Great Britain is the only member of the Universal Postal Union not required to name itself on its postage stamps. (Not like Charlie gives a fuck, but still.) Emory was always threatening to overdose on his dead mother’s Seconal.
“Who’s this?” he said again.
“You know I can’t tell you my name, Emory,” Charlie said.
“Well, I know your voice. Tell me your number.”
Technically they weren’t supposed to give out their numbers, either, but sometimes it was just easier. “My number is 561,” Charlie said.
“Oh,” Emory said, in the tone of someone who has just tried unfrosted Pop-Tarts for the first time. Apparently he and Charlie felt the same way about each other.
“How are you feeling, Emory?”
“Just terrible.”
“Would you like to talk about what’s going on?”
“That’s why I’m calling, you moron.”
Charlie forced her voice into a gentler tone, the way she’d stuff a cat into a pet carrier. “Why don’t you tell m
e about it?”
“Tell you about what?” Emory said aggressively.
“Why you’re feeling so terrible.”
“Oh.” He sounded unsure for a moment, and then he said, “Well, first of all, I can’t sleep because the gypsies next door are having a party again. Or maybe just more of them live there now. Seems like every week some swarthy person shows up on their doorstep with a suitcase and a passel of children. I’m sure the building will have cockroaches if we don’t already.” His voice rose fretfully. “And the stink! The gypsy stink.”
“I’m sorry that’s bothering you,” Charlie said. “But I really, truly believe that gypsies smell the same way as everyone else.”
Emory snorted. “What—like garlic and pickles and cabbage and chicken carcasses?”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Lots of people eat those things.”
“Like who?”
“Well,” Charlie said slowly, thinking. “Like Koreans. Isn’t that what kimchi is? Pickled cabbage?”
Barbara lifted her head from her crossword and gave Charlie a startled look. Charlie made a sort of helpless gesture and said quickly, “What else is going on, Emory?”
“Okay,” Emory said, as though he were doing Charlie a favor. “You know what eBay is?” He was not asking this politely: his voice was a challenge.
“Yes,” Charlie said.
“Well, today I was all set to buy a 1957 Argentina Railways Centenary stamp on eBay for eight dollars,” Emory said. “Normally I don’t bother with South American stamps but I have a fondness for trains.”
“I can see this means a great deal to you,” Charlie murmured. It was the sort of all-purpose answer you learned in hotline training.
“And at the very last second,” Emory said, his voice rising, “some sneaky bastard jumps in ahead of me and bids eight dollars and one cent. And gets it! And meanwhile, I’d been up all night, making space in my stamp book, only to have some lowlife run off with my possession.”
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