Love and Other Unknown Variables (21 page)

6.0

C
harlotte hasn’t been around much this week. Becca says it’s to our benefit because I’ve had plenty of time to plan the date. Becca says I’ve got this one chance to impress Charlotte. Becca says don’t screw it up.

Becca says an awful lot these days, but not half as much as Greta has had to say.

When I called to apologize for skipping out on New Year’s Eve, I told her what’d happened.

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Chuck? I mean, this close to the end of high school, and you’ll be leaving next year, plus the whole—”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but it’s what’s happening. It’s a risk I have to take because I can’t go one more day lying to everyone about how I feel about her. She makes me happy. And most of the time I make her happy, too. Don’t you want that for me?”

She was quiet before she said, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

Greta was Team Charlie from that moment on, coaching me on what to say, how to listen, and randomly quizzing me throughout the week on dating dos and don’ts. Like we’d pass in the hall and she’d call out, “What do you do if she has something stuck in her teeth?”

Answer: You’re screwed either way, so hope she orders something without parsley.

The only reason Greta isn’t here now is because I told her the pressure would be too much. I may be strong, but no man is strong enough to deal with both Becca and Greta scheming in their love life at the same time.

Becca is studying me as I stand in the middle of her room fussing with the crease in my slacks and reviewing the details of my plans.

“After dinner, I’m taking her to the art museum’s outdoor exhibit. The museum has horse-drawn carriages for the winter festival, and I’ve made reservations for a tour of the sculpture garden. Do you think Charlotte’ll like it?”

I switch to fiddling with the cuffs of my shirt. Button. Unbutton. Roll. Unroll.

“You’ve asked me a million times. It’s going to be perfect. Just remember—”

Button. Unbutton.

“Are you paying attention?”

“I’m listening, honest.” And, I am, but I’m also listening to the crazy voices in my head shouting fifteen other things at me. Things like,
Run!
Or,
You’re not good enough!
And
geek + gorgeous girl = disaster!

I’ve got one sleeve rolled and the other unrolled. “Which is best, Bec?”

She cocks her head to the side, studying my “look,” before coming over and unrolling and buttoning the one sleeve. “Be yourself, Charlie. Promise?”

I snort.

The doorbell rings and we both freeze. We hear Mom open the door and her warm greetings to Charlotte.

“We’ve missed you this week,” she’s saying. “How’re you doing?”

Becca turns me around and shoves me hard between my shoulder blades. “Go!” She urges me out of her room. Becca says it’s important I knock and pick Charlotte up properly, and Becca’s door will have to do since Ms. Finch would flunk me if I showed up on her doorstep.

I duck into my room just as I hear Charlotte’s footsteps on the stairs.

---

“
W
ho is it?” calls Becca in a sing-songy voice.

I consider bashing her door open with my forehead. It’d render me unconscious, which might make for a more successful date. But before I do anything rash, the door opens and everything tumbling and clawing around inside of me goes still.

“Hello,” Charlotte says, a beautiful blush deepening the pink of her cheeks.

“Hello. I got you this,” I say, thrusting out a rose corsage I picked out for her. It isn’t a Harvest Moon, but it’s a soft coral color. I notice it’s the same color as her lipstick. Man, her lips look perfect.

Charlotte bites the bottom one as I’m watching her. Is she nervous? This possibility never occurred to me. It makes me like her even more, even though I’d have never thought that possible.

She lets go of her lip and motions me in. “Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

I peek in and see Becca melting into a gooey puddle beside a waist-high stack of books. She gives me a thumbs-up.

Charlotte fingers the soft petals of the rose for a moment, before slipping it on her wrist.

“Um, and Bec?” Becca looks surprised as I pull something out of my pocket for her. “It’s not perfect, but I did my best to fix it,” I say, opening my hand.

“Oh.” An exhale. It’s the storybook rose she crumpled. It’s still a little bruised looking, but it doesn’t look half bad.

“I wanted to say thanks for…” I shift from foot to foot. “…everything.” I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, watching her big doe eyes get glassy. Crap. I didn’t mean to upset her.

Charlotte is beside me, peering into Becca’s hands. “Hey, that looks just like the one you made me.”

“It was supposed to be yours, but I accidentally smashed this one.”

“I saved it,” I admit.

Charlotte smiles. “Beaten doesn’t mean the end. Not always, eh, Charlie?”

I don’t know how to respond, so I don’t.

Charlotte pins the rose to Becca’s sweater and pulls her in for a big hug. Becca wraps her arms around Charlotte, but her eyes find mine, a silent plea to take good care of her friend. I nod. One of her hands snakes out and grabs my own. She holds tightly to me with one hand and Charlotte with the other.

When I think my chest might cave in from all the pressure building there, I clear my throat. “Well, we’ve got reservations to keep, so we’d better get going.” I offer Charlotte my arm. She places her long fingers in the crook of my elbow, the lightest touch, but it tethers me.

I glance back at Becca on our way out. She’s got a funny smile on her face, a little like Dunwitty remembering her childhood, as she peers down at the rose pinned to her chest.

I lead Charlotte out to the car, opening her door as Becca had instructed me. Charlotte arches a brow, but smiles.

We pull away in silence, but it isn’t uncomfortable. This is silence filled with sound: Charlotte’s breathing, her fingers tapping the center console to the time of the music, and the hum, the beautiful humming starting at my chest and radiating outward whenever she’s around.

When I stop at an intersection downtown, I look over at her in the fading light. Her electric blue eyes are the exact shade of the dress she’s wearing. My glance travels over her long legs, to where her ankles cross. She’s wearing a familiar pair of shit-kicker boots. I chuckle and she looks over at me.

“What?” she asks.

“You’re beautiful,” I say, deviating from Becca’s script, which called for me to remark on how much I liked Charlotte’s shoes. It is supposed to show I pay attention to details. But I
don’t
like her shoes. I
do
, however, like
her
in them.

Charlotte smiles, her hand flashing up to her short curls. “You look handsome, too.”

“I’ll pass your compliments on to Becca, as tonight I was her Barbie doll.”

“Ken.”

“What?”

Charlotte laughs, the song-like notes exciting the hum in my chest. “Barbie’s boyfriend’s name is Ken. You’re a Ken doll.”

“Right. I knew that.”

Charlotte’s brow furrows, but just as quickly it goes smooth again.

“You okay?”

She smiles, giving her head a quick shake. “Yep. Too bad about the Ken thing though.”

“Why?”

“He’s neutered.” She flashes me a wicked grin and turns up the song on the radio to sing along.

I turn the song volume knob down. “What? You’re saying I’m neutered?”

“I never said that.” Charlotte’s laugh fills the space in my car to overflowing. The music is turned up again and Charlotte sings, making the artist on the radio sound like a douche.

I know I should have a witty retort or something, but my brain has overheated. I’m in nuclear meltdown.

We make it to the restaurant, me avoiding any topic easily spliced with sexual innuendos. In other words, I bore Charlotte to death talking about the Higgs Boson.

I don’t stop until we’re seated at our table with tall, leather-bound menus in our hands. I’m hiding behind mine, trying to catch my breath. When I lay it aside on the table, Charlotte is smiling at me, the tiniest half smile.

“This is a beautiful restaurant,” she says, her eyes sweeping the lush walls and upward to the hundreds of chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Candlelight is weaving rainbow patterns through the crystals.

“It’s all wrong, isn’t it? Too fancy. I thought maybe you’d like fancy.”

Charlotte’s left brow dips like the curved top of a question mark. “What about me says fancy?”

“Your T-shirts?”

Charlotte laughs. “You don’t know me that well, do you?”

“I’d like to.”

“I’d like you to as well.”

My ears feel like they’ve caught fire. The heat flashes down my cheeks and neck. The restaurant is nice, but it’s got nothing on the gorgeous girl sitting across from me with a candlelight rainbow tracing the line of her cheek as a tear slides down it. Without thinking, my hand catches hers.

“Water?” The waiter interrupts, which is good, because whatever verbal diarrhea I was about to spew would kill the mood.

Charlotte gives my hand a quick squeeze before letting it go to swipe away the tear on her cheek. The waiter pours the water and talks about specials I don’t care about. I watch Charlotte’s face, the way one brow dips low when she is listening, the explosion of joy when he says something about chocolate and soufflé, the nibble on the inside of her bottom lip as she considers her choices, and the smile she rewards me with when she catches me watching her.

“Thanks,” I sputter at the waiter.

He tries to hide a sigh. “I’ll give you a few minutes.”

I don’t want a few minutes. I want more time with Charlotte than I can possibly have. I want more time than an average lifespan, without cancer. I want infinity, even though I know I can’t reach it.

Charlotte raises her water glass to her lips, and I catch her eyes, holding them with mine, pleading for her to see what I want without having to say it. She studies me, as she sips.

“Charlotte, I—”

I break off, watching her eyes slip into a vacant stare.

“Charlotte?”

The water glass drops from her hand, spilling on her dress, the water pooling in the fabric on her lap and changing it to a deep, dark blue before clattering to the floor and bursting into pieces.

“Charlotte!” I yell, jumping from my seat and pushing the table out of my way to get to her as she slumps to the side. I hear a gasp and someone is shouting amongst the other diners as I catch Charlotte in my arms and guide her down to the ground as far from the broken glass as possible. Her blue eyes are steely gray, locked doors, hard and unmoving. Her muscles twitch erratically.

“Charley,” I choke, “What’s happening? Don’t go!”

Suddenly, a woman pulls me away, passing me to a man who reeks of cologne. He wraps his doughy arms around me and murmurs, “There, there,” and “Dr. Michaels,” and “There, there.”

I try to wrestle away, but the man’s solid and has a good hundred pounds on me.

The restaurant’s chandeliers spill off hundreds of bright red rainbows, bleeding down the walls as the air fills with sirens.

“See?” asks my hyper-scented captor. “The ambulance is here. Everything will be fine.”

I look at Charlotte, her muscles now locked into an unnatural stiffness. Her soft face composed of hard lines, her jawbone jutting out in a grimace. And, her eyes—the eyes in her face are foreign to me. Where has she gone?

6.1

I
n the olden days, people thought time was a constant. It could not be slowed or sped up. Time was time, and no man could move it.

Then Einstein said,
Bullshit.

Okay, he didn’t say that. What he said was E = mc
2
.

Simply put: time is fluid. The faster your world spins out of control, the slower time crawls. The more time you need, the less you’re sure to get. It’s all relative.

Tonight, time has slowed to an agonizing crawl, as it did in the minutes Charlotte’s seizure lasted. Dr. Michaels says those minutes totaled seven. For me, it felt like she was lost for years while we waited for her return.

Once the seizure was over, Charlotte was frantic and pissed to see she was strapped to a gurney and being led out to an ambulance. She screamed, “Get me out. Get me out, goddammit!” Time sped up then, so the EMTs could whisk her away before I could reach her.

It slowed again as Dr. Michaels and her huge, malodorous husband drove me to the university hospital. And now, it inches on as I pace between two rows of uncomfortable chairs in a waiting room, separated from Charlotte by thick metal doors with signs referring to me as
Unauthorized Persons.

When I think it can move no slower, time stops dead in its tracks. The emergency room doors open with a blast of cold air as Ms. Finch runs into the hospital. She freezes, glaring at me, her eyes, so like Charlotte’s, wild behind her thick black hair.

Here I am, frozen in time, which I want, except I’m with the wrong Finch.

---

M
s. Finch is what they call “Authorized Persons.” A nurse ushered her beyond the metal doors of my purgatory, leaving me behind. I don’t know how long they’ve been gone. It feels like forever.

I collapse in a chair and start unraveling a piece of loose thread on the seat cushion. According to my previous brain tumor research, seizures are a common thing for people living with brain cancer. They result from the tumor messing up the electrical signals in the brain, like the time James and I screwed up the wiring for our robot and we ended up going to competition with a robot that danced the tango rather than smash its opponent’s head. Greta was so pissed she wouldn’t speak to us for a week.

The thing about seizures is they can happen any time, any place, and with little to no warning. So Charlotte could be at school, in line at Krispy Kreme, or—oh, I don’t know, let’s say, on a date.

I give the string I’m messing with a good yank and hear a satisfying rip.
Rip, rip, r-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-p!

My phone rings. I pull it from my pocket and look at the screen. Becca.

“Hey—”

“Charlie, where are you? You guys were supposed to be back hours ago.”

I start pulling foam stuffing out from the hole I’ve made in the cushion. “Bec, I’m at the university hospital. It all went wrong.”

“What?”

“Charlotte had a seizure at the restaurant. When they put her in the ambulance, she was so mad at me.” I stop and try to fill my lungs, but the panic in them is taking up too much room. “What if something happens? I let her down.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Bec, no.”

The phone goes dead in my hands. Calling her back would do no good. Becca is even more stubborn than Charlotte.

Instead, I busy myself by pulling out larger and larger chunks of foam from my seat. The nurse pushes open the thick metal doors.

“Mr. Hanso—” she stops short, her brow creasing as I look up with a fistful of foam. She doesn’t get angry though, just shakes her head like
there goes another one
. “Mr. Hanson?”

I nod and shove the foam back in place.

“You can come back now.”

Standing, I ask, “I’m authorized?”

“Yes,” the nurse says with a smile.

I pocket my phone and leap over the row of chairs still between the door and me, afraid that if I move too slowly, time with mess with me again and close them before I can get through.

“Charlotte is resting now, but her sister would like to speak with you.”

“I can’t see Charlotte?”

“When she wakes.”

“But she will wake?” My heart is ramming into my ribs.

The nurse puts a warm hand on my shoulder. “Yes.”

As I enter, Ms. Finch stands up from where she was sitting on Charlotte’s bed. It’s a big hospital bed, complete with computers and wires and wheels. Charlotte looks elfin buried under all the cords and tubes and crap they’ve piled all around her, each thing beeping and whirring its own tune.

For a second, I think maybe time has frozen again. I can’t hear anything. I know Ms. Finch is here, but I can’t see her. All I can see is Charlotte. Would I take this forever? The one in which I have Charlotte, but she’s lost under medical equipment?

I shiver, and everything starts again, the humming and chirping of machines, and the rise and fall of Charlotte’s chest as she sleeps. But now, I’m holding her hand. How did I get here?

For a long time there is nothing but the sound of Charlotte breathing and the gentle hum inside of me.

I guess I start crying at some point, because Ms. Finch is standing beside me with a tissue thrust out.

“I need coffee,” Ms. Finch says, her voice this hoarse whisper like unfallen leaves. I look at her blankly. “You need coffee, too.”

I shake my head. “I hate coffee.”

“No one hates coffee,” she says, wiggling the tissue in my face. I take it and wipe my wet cheeks. “The nurses have to check her vitals anyhow. Let’s give her some privacy.”

“Okay, but coffee still sucks.”

She frowns at me. “So much to learn,” she says, leading the way.

We walk to a vast cafeteria with skylights so clean you could count the stars. There are eleven people in the huge place, scattered in small groups at tables, except a man in the corner, who sits alone. Most of them stare into paper coffee cups. None of them looks happy, which makes me feel like coffee may not be the answer Ms. Finch is looking for.

I follow her to the coffee bar and watch her fill two cups with black coffee. She tears the tops off three packets of sugar and splits the contents between the two cups.

“One and a half packets of sweetener per cup is the secret,” she says as she tosses away the wrappers. “It’s a pain when you’re making only one cup of coffee, because then you’ve got the half-full packet lying around. But the extra half a packet matters. The universe’s way of saying you should always share coffee with a friend.”

“I thought Charlotte said sugar wasn’t allowed at your house.”

Ms. Finch nods. “Yeah. We’ve been drinking crappy coffee all year.”

“Why?”

“Some cancer-free diet I read about. Last ditch effort, you know?”

She’s staring at the two cups, not moving, just staring. And since she said you should share with a friend, and I’m anything but a friend, I’m not sure whether to reach out and take the coffee. I’m also not sure how long we both stand there frozen by our complicated relationship.

Finally, her hand moves as she pours thick cream in the cups until they are nearly overflowing. The creamer jug makes a loud metallic thud when she sets it back on the counter. The couple sitting closest to the coffee jumps at the sound.

“Try it. Making coffee is about the only thing I can do correctly anymore,” Ms. Finch says. Her chin droops as she shakes her head in defeat. I can’t imagine being in her shoes, wanting to hold on to Charlotte when all Charlotte wants to do is run away. Has to suck. Ms. Finch’s eyes close while she drinks, and when she opens them again, they’re full of tears.

I grab my cup, sloshing a good bit of it on my hand and swearing under my breath.

“Rookie,” Ms. Finch mumbles and tries to blink away the moisture in her eyes.

“You have no idea,” I say as I try a sip. It’s not bad. I don’t know if it’s great, but it feels like what I need.

We sit in silence near a bank of windows overlooking a courtyard. Around one-quarter left in my coffee cup, I work up the nerve to ask an important question.

“What’s happening?”

Ms. Finch’s cup is two-thirds full. She watches the tan liquid like it may have the answers. When it doesn’t offer any, she says, “Charlotte is dying.”

Everything inside me erupts at once. My skin is the only thing holding me together. It’s not like this is a surprise, but it’s the first time anyone’s said it so plainly.

“There’s a clinical trial for tumors similar to the newest of Charlotte’s. It could help if we could get her into the trial.” Ms. Finch puts her cup on the table and stuffs her shaky hands into the pockets of her sweater. “But Charlotte says, no more.”

Help
. One word and I’m able to pull enough pieces together to talk. “Why?”

Ms. Finch’s eyes are full again. She turns her face toward the stars outside the window. “She doesn’t want to die here.”

Silence swallows us again.

Die? No. That’s not an option right now. No one’s dying here. Not when there’s a chance still out there. What about Atticus Finch? This may be a losing battle, but Charlotte’s got to try to fight it—we have to try to win.

“What should I do?” It slips out. I didn’t mean to ask it. I instantly regret it, knowing it’s a step away from what Charlotte wants—a step toward Ms. Finch.

“Tell her to do the trial.”

I shrink back from the intense look Ms. Finch is giving me. I feel like I’ve stepped in a trap.

“She won’t listen to me. But maybe you can convince her. Do this, Charlie, and I swear I’ll do whatever you want. You want me to leave Brighton? Done. You want me to pull some strings at MIT? Done. You want me to drive you and Charlotte to Atlantic City to elope? Done. I’m that desperate.”

“Elope?”

“Whatever it takes, get her to do the clinical trial.”

“Why can’t
you
make her do it?”

“She’s eighteen. She took over control of her medical decisions. I’m just here to make the coffee,” she says, lifting her cup in a toast. She doesn’t drink any, but sets it right back in its place on the bleached linoleum table.

“What are her chances if she does it?”

Ms. Finch’s whole body sags. “Slim.”

“How slim?”

Ms. Finch sighs in this breathy, frustrated way. “Like a quark-sized chance.”

That’s the smallest damn particle of hope in the universe.