by Cath Crowley
“Did Mrs. Butler ring?”
He nods, and I’m waiting for him to say he’s proud. When he does that, I’ll tell him how much I miss him. I’ll bring him back from wherever it is he’s been. “She’s worried about Rose, Charlotte. If you know anything, you have to tell me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Rose’s parents know about the scholarship. They know she’s been planning to leave at the end of the summer. Has she mentioned anything to you about running away?”
“No,” I say, and I finally hear the chord that’s been missing from our friendship. C-sharp. Cats cry in that note, lonely late-at-night calls, hungry for company. “Of course,” I say, more to myself than him.
“Of course what, Charlotte?”
“She didn’t tell me.” I want him to understand why this is so terrible, but he can’t because he doesn’t know me. He sits there looking through those tiny square glasses, and I feel my anger rising like blood from a cut deep as bone. It’s taken seven years to get to the surface, but now it’s spreading out, over Rose, over him. “Don’t you get it, Dad? She was using me so she could move to the city. Hang out with Charlie Dorkin, be nice to her, and she’ll ask her dad if you can go with them at the end of the summer.”
“Charlotte, calm down. You don’t need friends like that.”
The song we’ve been singing switches from acoustic to electric. I write loud, angry chords on the spot and send them out to him. “How would you know what I need? You never ask me. Did you know Dahlia doesn’t talk to me anymore? She got sick of me because I sit at the edges and I don’t do anything.”
“What are you talking about? Dahlia’s your best friend.”
“She hasn’t rung me once since I’ve been here. Haven’t you noticed? I don’t blame her, either. I let people walk over me. I lie rather than sing at a school concert, when I could blow those guys away.”
“Of course you could blow them away.”
“How would you know? Gus knows more about me than you.”
“Is that why you stole the cigarettes? To get my attention?”
I think back to Dad watching me cry, to needing his help and not getting it. Unbelievable. Fucking unbelievable. “Why didn’t you stop me? Dave’s dad would have grounded him for a week.”
“You want me to be like Mr. Robbie?”
“I want you to be someone.”
He doesn’t speak, so I yell. “What’s the point of anything if all you do is think about Mum? You might as well be dead, too.”
We’re on opposite sides of the table waiting for the next thing to happen. Neither of us knows what that is. Dad gets up and walks out like he always does. “What, no money?” I ask. He keeps moving to his room.
That’s okay. Dad and I have always been the quiet ones. Mum was the talker. She’s dead, and she talks more than we do. I walk into my room. I stare at all the things Dad hasn’t said to me over the years. CD after CD after CD. I open a bag and put in as many as I can fit.
I walk down the hallway to his room. I stare at him through the open door. I put the bag down and pick up the first CD. I make sure he’s looking at me and then I take the disc out of the case and snap it. It sounds clean and sharp. I like it. I pick up the next one. Snap. I like that even more. I like the next and the next and the next even better. “Still nothing to say, Dad?” I ask. He’s sitting on the bed looking confused as music cracks in my hands. “Why are you so sad?” He doesn’t answer.
Some things take time. I walk to my room and click the clasps on my guitar case. I peel back the lid and take my voice out and walk down the hallway. Dad’s still sitting on his bed, staring at the things broken around him. “What’s wrong with you?” I ask. “What couldn’t you have known?”
“Charlotte, you need to calm down.” But that’s not what I need. I raise my guitar high over my head. I hold it there, and it feels good to be doing something. I let go. I smash it toward the floor. I don’t see Dad move. I feel the weight of him on the end, catching the body before it hits the ground. I let go and he sits on the bed, holding my guitar. Holding it tight. Rocking a little. And I’m not mad at him for not talking anymore. Some things are better than words. “I’ll be back soon,” I say. “There’s something I have to do.” He keeps holding my guitar and nods.
I’m not angry at all anymore really. I’m not sad. I’m certain. I take the road that leads to the river. Sunset sounds hard tonight, like heavy chords coming from the sky. Heavy chords that say the player’s in control of the song.
“Charlie!” Rose calls as I walk toward her. The rain’s been gathering in the air all day, and its arms are heavy with water. Any second it’ll throw them open and soak us. Rose is a shadow in the half dark.
“You were lying all along.” My disappointment feels like salty ocean in my veins, but I can swim.
“I’m sorry, Charlie.”
“I told you things about Dave, about me.”
“Dave doesn’t know.”
“I know Dave doesn’t know. This is all you. How long were you going to keep lying? Until you found someone in the city better than me who’d let you stay with them?”
“No. I wanted to stay with you.” Her hands beat at the air, getting faster as she talks. “The scholarship’s not the reason I wanted to be friends.”
“Even if that’s true, it’s too late now.”
“I don’t care anymore. Tell me how to fix things.”
“I don’t want to fix things with you. You’re not coming with us,” I tell her, and it feels good to walk away.
“I only lied at the beginning,” she calls. I take a last look back. The sky opens its arms and throws out the storm like old soapy water it’s used and finished with. She’s soaked and alone. I leave her huddled there. Some people aren’t worth crying over.
Charlie’s eyes aren’t hollow anymore. They’re rough and wide. “I don’t want to fix things with you,” she says, and I’m a hundred meters in the air with nothing below me. Rain hammers. She goes so fast she could be flying. My legs are stuck in mud, caught by all the dirt and dust in this place that’s been gathering for ages, set free by the storm. “Fuck this town!” I yell to no one and the sky cracks again and the water pours so hard I can’t see.
I climb into the old tree at the river. I hear Luke and Antony before I see them. I move as far as I can up the branches, and they hunker down beneath me where it’s dry. Every muscle in my body works to hold me steady.
“It’s pissing down,” Luke says. “We should make a run for it.”
“It’ll ease in a bit,” Antony answers.
They talk for ages without knowing I’m here. Luke says stuff like “Did you see Ferro hit that six on the weekend?”
And Antony answers, “Who do you reckon will win the next match?” It’s not the most exciting conversation in the world, but even if I could leave, I wouldn’t.
I want to fall down on Antony and push him to the side. I want to turn to Luke and tell him he really needs to get his hair cut a bit shorter at the back because it’s sticking up. I want to tell him important things, too, like I can remember stealing bricks from the place next to mine because I wanted to build a fence around the bottom of our tree house.
Mum caught us and I told her it was all my idea so Dave wouldn’t get into trouble. She didn’t believe us, though, and she must have been real mad because she called Mrs. Robbie and Mrs. Holly. Dave’s dad came and hauled him into the car and I could tell Mum felt guilty because she let Luke and me go to the river. We sat together under this tree and I made all these big plans to run away and Luke didn’t say it was my fault that Dave was in trouble. He let me talk and then took me to his house and his mum made us hamburgers.
“You and Rose getting back together?” Antony asks as the rain eases and settles into a mist. Drops from me hit Luke, but he doesn’t notice. “Not if you paid me,” he says, and the two of them leave. I slide out of the tree and scratch my legs on the way down. I run home. I need to
get inside and close that door.
Mum and Dad are sitting on the couch, looking at a book. I want to say, I remember that. I remember how we read together about places far away.
“It’s the land of the midnight sun.” Mum’d point at the picture. It sounded so romantic, like impossible things could happen to people there. She made me feel like things could happen to me. I want to say, I remember other things, too. How Dad kept a chart on the fridge with all my assignments on it, big crosses marked out when I handed something in. He always put my grade next to it, even when it wasn’t good. “That’s my girl, Rosie,” he’d say. I want to ask them why they stopped. Why everything fun seemed to stop. I stand in front of them, dripping. They look up, and I get the feeling I could run my hands through both of them.
I go into my room and close the door. I imagine Dave’s face when Charlie tells him what I did. I hear Luke’s voice. Not if you paid me. I look at the protistans and play Charlie’s music. That voice spins out again, and I think of those silkworms in their cocoons and how sad I felt when Mum said I wouldn’t see inside. I never told her how one day I took one and boiled it. I cried so hard after it was done. I didn’t know I’d feel like that. I just wanted so bad to touch the silk.
I run home, arms open, face up to catch the rain. I shake the water off on the porch and go take a shower to heat my freezing skin. I call Dahlia. “It’s Charlie.”
“I know who it is. What do you want?”
A whole lot of things. “I’m calling to see how your summer’s going.”
“Good.”
If a person hadn’t been there all the time when I was lying and treating Dahlia like she belonged to me, they might think she was being harsh. But I was there. I couldn’t lose her like I lost everything else, so without a word I made her feel bad for spending time with Louise. I planned sleepovers on nights when I knew there’d be parties, and I made her choose between new friends and me. I made her stand up for me instead of standing up for myself. She ignored me that day at Jeremy’s party because I wouldn’t say something to Louise and she was sick of me acting that way.
I keep talking and hope that sometime in the conversation we shift into who we were before things became like that. “So my summer’s good, too. Kind of good. Strange, actually. I gave Dave Robbie mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after a snake bit him.”
“Shit.” She thinks about that for a second more. “Shit.”
“I know.”
“That’s practically a kiss. You’ve practically kissed him.”
“I almost kissed him for real. At night when we were walking by the river. We danced to some songs on my iPod. He didn’t know it, but one of them was mine, the song I wrote, that time you stayed over.”
“The one about sex?”
“It was never about sex, Dahlia; I told you that at the time.”
“It was definitely about sex.” Her voice is muffled, and I know she’s pulled the phone into the hall closet to talk where her parents can’t hear. “I kissed Jack Baker last week,” she says. “It was bad. I kept thinking, Is it this bad because I’m bad or is he bad or are we both bad together?”
“Maybe you have to practice.”
She thinks about that. “Better than practicing the piano, I guess. What else is going on? Is Rose still a bitch?”
“No more than Louise.”
She doesn’t answer for a second or two. “You should have told her she was a bitch at the party.”
I stare out the window at the tangled garden. “I know. I think I’ll spend less time with her next year. Maybe more time with Andrew Moshdon and some kids from music.”
“Maybe audition for the final concert?”
“Maybe. I might try to get a band together. I’m singing at the local talent quest this Saturday.” Until that second I hadn’t decided.
“That’s so cool.”
I hear her walking out of the closet and into the kitchen. “What are you eating?” I ask.
“It’s hard to say. Mum’s been baking. I need your dad here to cook for me.” She chews some more. “Or does hanging with Louise less mean you’re cutting me, too?”
“We’ll work it out. We’re in Year Eleven. The in-crowd shouldn’t matter so much.”
“I don’t like Louise because she’s the in-crowd. I like her because I like her. I wasn’t mad at you because you weren’t part of the in-crowd.”
“I know.”
“Do you know?” she asks, and I can see her standing there like she did that day when those guys called us losers.
“I do.” Some things take a while to know, that’s all. “You want to hear my song about Dave and me?”
“Yeah. Just hold on a sec. Mum’s asking when you’re coming home.”
“Tell her soon.” And I play the first chord.
* * *
In my dreams tonight, the breeze is Mum’s hair tickling my skin. But when I open my eyes, Dad’s sitting on the chair near my window. “Is it morning?” I ask, blinking sleep away.
“Not quite, Charlotte.”
The blue and silver light and the softness of his voice make me feel like I might still be asleep. “I dreamed of Mum,” I say, and wonder if I’m talking about a dream in a dream.
“I do that all the time,” he says. “Especially here.” He looks at my guitar. “She says, ‘Can you believe we made a daughter who sings like that?’ I have to say that I never heard.”
I get up, and my feet wobble on the way over like feet do when you walk after sleeping. I take the guitar and sit next to him in the blue light. There’s honey on the air, set free from the jasmine by the storm. I play one of my songs. He taps his foot while I strum, and I feel like things might be changing, so I add an extra verse.
“So beautiful, Charlotte,” he says.
“What’s the bag for?” I ask.
“I’m going camping one last time.”
“I’m singing at the talent quest on Saturday.”
He looks at me, at my guitar. “I’ll be there, Charlotte,” he says, and walks out, leaving the door open. He comes back after five minutes. “Charlotte, if Dave Robbie visits again, leave the door like that.”
“Sure thing, Dad.”
Close to How
You’re a ghost now
Falling
Through the dark
Trapped in rocks and dirt and water
You’re a ghost now
And when I ask you why
You say sometimes death don’t let us die
Sometimes life won’t turn out like we want it
Sometimes life won’t turn out like we want
He’s a ghost now
Living
In the dark
Trapped by rocks and dirt and water
He’s a ghost now
And when I ask you why
You say sometimes death don’t let us by
Sometimes life won’t turn out like we want it
Sometimes life won’t turn out like we want
But sometimes in the honey night
Blue voice sweet and circling high
You forget the rocks and dirt and water
While you sing softly to the sky
Sometimes life turns out close to how we want it
Sometimes life turns out close to how we want
Luke and I sit at separate tables outside the shop. He turned up for lunch a couple of hours ago and never left. He’s turned up most days this week and sat staring at the hills. “What are you writing?” he asks today.
“Some lyrics for a song about this place.” It’s not the one I’m singing for the show; it’s about him and Rose, but I don’t say that.
“Must be a pretty quick song,” he says. “About this place.”
I give him a laugh because he looks like he needs it. “Have you seen Dave today?”
“This morning. That scary nurse with the mustache kicked me out.”
“I’m visiting this afternoon if you want to go together. Two against one scary nur
se with a mustache.”
“Yeah, okay. Not sure two’ll be enough. It’s a big mustache.” He keeps staring at the hills. “Dave’ll be unbearable when you leave. He goes on and on about you. It’s like being hit by a cricket bat. No offense.”
“None taken.”
His eyes stay on those hills, even though he can’t see Rose from here. “You’re not taking her with you?”
I shake my head. “She’s staying.”
“She’s not staying,” he says, kicking at the dirt. “Even if she stays, she’s not staying. Her mum and dad did it in the back of a car, you know? Had her when they were young.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“A Holden. Good car. I think maybe that’s why she wouldn’t do it with me. Didn’t want that to happen to her. I wouldn’t care about not doing it with her, if she’d get back together with me,” he says.
A yellow car drives past the shop, and I watch it go. The day’s a hazy blue. “That’s where Rose used to sit,” Luke says. “Right where you’re sitting.” A fly lands on the table and doesn’t move. “I know,” I say, staring at it. I imagine day after day of sitting here.
“I’m bored to death,” Luke says, and I nod. Like Gus told me, you don’t always understand people, so you gotta understand yourself. Then maybe you take what you worked out about yourself and use it to figure out other people.
“I want things, too,” Luke says.
“Like what?” I ask, even though I get the feeling he’s not talking to me.
“I don’t know what. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want them.”
Antony rides over and stands in front of us. “Shit, things must be quiet.”
“Shut up, Antony,” Luke says. “I’m talking to Charlie.”
There is something kind of likable about him. “You want some free chips?”
He grins. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“What about me?” Antony asks.
“She doesn’t give everyone their chips for free,” Luke says.
I ride on Luke’s handlebars to get to the hospital. “You should bring your bike down next Christmas,” he says.
