Authors: Brandon Shire
Penny came bustling in and pulled herself up short as she looked at us warily. She appeared to have forgotten why she came in.
“What has she done since I’ve been gone Penny?” I asked to her surprise.
“Huh?”
“What has she done? To you.” I asked again. “Don’t look at her!” I screamed as Penny licked her upper lip nervously.”She’s going to be dead in less than a week, let’s get all this out in the open right now.”
“Nothing,” Penny stuttered. “She hasn’t done anything.”
“Liar!”
Charlotte chuckled. “Yes, Happenstance, tell him what a bad mother I’ve been.” Charlotte said, a rigid grin stretched across her face. Here was a person she had total control over.
“Better yet, tell him how your uncle used to drive you passed Sanctuary on the way to Robert’s grave so you could put flowers down. Tell him how he fucked you in the car afterwards,” Charlotte spat.
Penny became completely still, staring out at the icy fog behind me.
“I’ll kill him.”
“For what?” Charlotte asked. “The little whore seduced him. Then she started fucking some nigger up in Barnesville. You were in the Birch Building then.” Charlotte said as she sharpened her gaze on Penny. “Stupid whore,” Charlotte added as she shifted her eyes back to me. “She thought she could beat me, Charles. Me!” she said with scorn. “But we took care of that little problem, didn’t we Happenstance?”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “What’d she do, Penny?”
She didn’t move; she didn’t even shift her eyes from the window. “She had them give me a hysterectomy,” Penny said flatly.
“You let them?” I asked her.
She glanced at me. “She told me I was going in to see if I was pregnant.” She looked back to the empty window, a dry humorless laugh coming from somewhere within her. “I didn’t know any better. I believed her.”
“No abominations and no nigger kids,” Charlotte said, voicing her satisfaction with her actions.
“Everything changed after you left,” Penny continued in a dazed voice. “The whole house was this big empty space you left behind. And me in it.”She added quietly. Her face whispered a sign of resignation, but her eyes remained glued to the window. “She told me you left because I was stupid and fat,” Penny added.
She looked at me directly. “Jarrel was the one that finally told me the truth.”
“Did he tell you he put me there?” I asked her.
“No, not at first,” she said as she wandered over to the window and closed it, busying her idle hands. “He didn’t tell me that until about a year after you got out.”
She splayed her hand against the window and leaned her head on its frame as she stared outside. “You never wrote,” she said.
“I… I,” I hadn’t. In truth, I hadn’t even thought of it. Even though the letters would surely have been intercepted, it was not an excuse. I had doted on Penny, played with her and filled in all the holes Charlotte had dug in our lives. She was just a child when they put me away, but I hadn’t thought of it. I… I had no excuse.
“It doesn’t matter though,” Penny said as she turned around.”You’re right. She’ll be dead within the week, and none of this will mean shit anymore.”
“I’m sorry Penny.” I said suddenly.
She smiled vacantly. “Don’t be. I was just collateral damage.” She paused and chuckled lightly. “I used to have this hope that we’d celebrate her death by opening a public outhouse over her remains. But now, I don’t even care.”
She unwound herself from the window and made her way back across the room, pausing at the door. “Do you remember Penelope?” she asked me.
“The doll?”
She nodded. “I’ve still got it.”
“What doll?” Charlotte asked when we were alone again.
I sat back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling. “I gave it to her for her birthday.” I told Charlotte. “I told her to treat it like she wanted to be treated, and not how you treated her.”
“I threw that away,” Charlotte said dismissively.
“Obviously not,” I answered. “Did she really put flowers on Robert’s grave?” I asked after a few moments silence.
Charlotte waved me to silence. She didn’t want to discuss it anymore. But in that silence I could feel the sturdy weight of sadness Penny had in her eyes; the heft of the cool demanding home I had left behind. Her happiness would have prostrated itself to the necessity of silence; a muffling that would be echoed, in some odd fashion, by the laughter she would never utter as a woman. She had lived in the maze of Charlotte’s thumbprint and she had not survived.
“What the fuck have you done, you psychotic twat?”
“What I had to,” Charlotte answered without even a hint of regret.
I was on her throat before she even finished, and there was no one in the room to stop me, not even myself.
Henry collected me on the first of March, six years and three days after I entered the Birch Building. Caufield stood beside me outside the entrance. My hand was knotted around the small bag containing my meager belongings, and a hot pang of trepidation burned in my gut. Caufield was enjoying the unusual warmth that had run up the coast from the south.
“They call this a blackberry winter where I’m from,” Caufield said as we waited. “Of course, that’s usually much earlier in the season, but…,” he shrugged, trying to ease my anxiety.
“He’s late,” I said, oblivious to the weather. “Maybe he’s not coming.”
“He’s coming,” Caufield replied.
“He might have changed his mind. I couldn’t blame him if he did; not really.” I looked away, troubled by the thought that his second abandonment would probably not be nearly as hard as the first.
“Look,” Caufield pointed as Henry turned into the parking lot and began threading his way through the slender slotted rows. “You have my number in case of an emergency, and I’ll be calling you at least once a week to make sure everything’s going okay. Right?” Caufield asked.
I looked at him. “But what if I am that crazy fag that he’s afraid of? Christ, I’ve spent ten years denying it and now I’m afraid it might be true. I’m mentally fucked up!”
“You’re not, Charles. And Henry is not your mother.”
“He’s… family.”
“Henry’s part of a larger world Charles. Give him a chance. Give yourself one.”
I nodded as he embraced me.
“Now go on, I’ll call you in a week,” he said.
I turned to walk to the car but stopped suddenly and looked back at him. By law, it had been a panel of three that had allowed me my freedom. Caufield had been but one on that panel. “The other two, what’d you offer them?”
“Only you,” he answered before he turned back into the building.
I sighed, whether that was true or not, there was no going back. I slipped into the car with Henry’s big grin and slight handshake and we were off.
*****
The ride was short and very quiet. Henry and I sat with the heavy weight of unfamiliarity sulking between us. Henry broke the silence first by giving me an oral tour of the points of interest as we wove through Providence. There was Brown University, the first Baptist Church, and the capital which, he said, boasted an unsupported circular marble dome beaten in size only by St Pete’s Church in Rome.
I sat with my hand in my lap and glanced about me, hoping that my lack of expression hid the clench of tension flipping around inside of me.
We pulled up to a modest brick house surrounded by bare red maples and small dunes of melting snow. It looked lonely and unadorned except for the few darkened strands of Christmas lights still woven around the roof like sagging cobwebs. I thought it seemed the perfect accompaniment to the solitary man beside me.
“It’s not much,” Henry said, “but it’s served its purpose.”
He took several minutes trying to extricate himself from the car before I realized how much of an effort the small trip had been for him. When I went around to his side of the car to help him out he looked up at me panting for breath.
“Not much time left, Charles.”
I squatted down and looked up at him, the swollen and rheumy orbs of aged despair staring back at me. “I am so sorry,” he said. He had not known about me, and there was little I could do to relieve the pain of his loneliness or his ignorance.
“That’s past,” I said. I put my arm out and we made our way up the sagging, concrete steps and into a living room thick with a lifelong bachelor’s touch. The furniture was dark and hard; chiseled wood and burnt metals. The curtains were thick, long and masculine, holding the sun on early mornings and keeping the moon at bay on lonely nights. It appeared a dim unfrequented cell lacking only cinderblocks and mortar.
At Henry’s request, I helped him into his room, removed his shoes, and hung up his jacket and tie as he lay down. He invited me to look around and help myself to lunch, or he promised, if I wanted we could eat out later. I watched him sink into a quick sleep and listened to his labored breathing before I went to the phone we passed in the living room and called Caufield.
“He’s dying,” I said as soon as Caufield picked up. “I mean like right now.”
“This instant?” Caufield asked with alarm. “Call an ambulance!”
“No, I mean he’s dying Caufield. How the hell am I supposed to handle that?” I hadn’t really considered it before I left; only my freedom had seemed important at the time.
He was quiet for a moment. “You can’t have already forgotten that Snow died alone, Charles. The most ardent passions a man finds within himself is in those moments when he realizes he’s dying. Stay with him. You owe him that at least, and you might learn something too.”
“That’s a low blow, Caufield.” I answered.
“No, it’s a reality check. Henry’s been alone his entire life. I doubt very much that he wants to die that way.”
“But what am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to care for him.”
“He’s got a caretaker and a house keeper. Both of them know who you are.”
“They know I came from the nut house? That’s an introduction!”
“No, they only know that you and your father hadn’t known of each other before now.” Caufield answered.
“So, what do I do?”
“Just be there, Charles. Open yourself up. Trust him. You might be surprised.”
I hung up and stared at the phone. “Yeah, easy to say.”
*****
We sat on the back porch, a deceiving expanse of green hidden behind his little house. The warmth of the late April was still holding, and Henry, refreshed after a few weeks of serious rest, was holding with it.
“How’d you meet Charlotte?” I asked him. Our conversations had grown cordial, the ghosts of our own reserve diminishing as the weeks passed. We had talked of many things since my arrival, but had never gotten up the nerve to talk past the mundane. My sudden question changed that.
He smiled slightly. “On a dare from one of my drinking buddies. They bet me a case of beer that I couldn’t get a date with the ‘Ice Princess’. That’s what they called her; said she was a beautiful cold bitch.”
“Was she?” I asked, mesmerized that his friends had met the same person I knew as mother all those years before my existence.
His eyes went off to the distance. “At first, no. She warmed right up to me. It only took us a few weeks before we were married.”
“She told me you were a nigger lover and a whore monger.”
His head jerked in my direction in surprise. He looked at me and blinked. “She said that?”
I nodded. “But my grandfather said you were more honest than Charlotte could tolerate. Honest enough that you knew that you would never survive at her side.”
Henry nodded. “Francois was pretty sharp. After New Orleans your mother changed. Or maybe it was her true personality that emerged, I’m not sure really. I just knew I couldn’t live like that.”