Charlotte's Homecoming

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Charlotte’s dreams had become unnervingly erotic. She’d been attracted to men before, but never to the point where the attraction bled over into her sleep.

  “Eat,” he ordered her, “before you get busy again.”

  “I haven’t been busy yet today.” She did obediently unwrap her burger. “The other day was an anomaly.”

  “How goes the maze?”

  “Now, that’s popular. But mostly weekends, when parents are free to bring their kids and when Mr. Barth is over here with one of his Clydesdales and the wagon.”

  Gray nodded. He knew they were offering free wagon rides, courtesy of a kindly neighbor who was thrilled to have an excuse to show off his prized horses.

  “Faith’s first day at school is Tuesday.” Charlotte found herself looking at the hamburger in her hand as if she didn’t know what it was. “I don’t know how long I should stay, Gray. Dad won’t really be on his feet for another month. Last year Faith hung a Closed sign on Mondays, hired someone half days to help Dad Tuesday through Friday, then took care of weekends herself. Well, she and Dad did.”

  Charlotte had the impression that Dad had mostly done the physical labor—tilling fields, planting the corn and pumpkins, pruning berries, watering and hauling and making deliveries when necessary in his beat-up old truck. He was reluctant to operate the cash register at all, Faith had admitted, and wasn’t fond of chatting up customers, either.

  “I’m not sure how much I’m really needed now, except I keep worrying…”

  “About Hardesty.”

  “Yes.”

  Gray set down his half-eaten burger. “You should worry about him.” His voice was gruff. “I can’t believe he’s done.”

  “No, me neither.” She looked up unhappily. “But what if he is? I can’t put my life on hold forever.”

  A frown deepened lines on his forehead. “Is that what you think you’re doing? Treading water?”

  “What would you call it?” she shot back. “I should be job hunting.”

  “Can’t you do that from here?”

  She let out a sigh, hoping it would ease the constriction she felt in her chest. He’d taken what she said wrong, Charlotte could tell. He was wondering if she thought he was a time filler for her, a diversion while she waited to get back to her real life. She wished that’s all he was. Whatever he was doing to her, whatever her sister and her father and her home were doing to her, scared the daylights out of Charlotte. All of this felt so real to her, but was it? Wasn’t this exactly what she’d run away from? The farm, the hometown boy, her sister?

  “I am,” she said. “I’ve been looking online, that is. I just put my résumé out there. But what if somebody in the Bay Area calls suddenly and wants to interview me?”

  He didn’t look happy about the idea, but he said, “You fly down there.”

  “If I had to buy an airline ticket for a next-day flight, it would cost a fortune. And look at me!” She yanked at her hair. “I’d have to get to a salon, and I’ve got scratches on my arms and my fingernails look like I’ve been scrabbling in gravel.” For some reason, the sight of her hands horrified her, as if their state represented everything that had changed since she’d flown in from San Francisco, where she’d been living the life she’d chosen.

  Gray reached out and caught her hand in his bigger one. He lifted it and pressed his lips to her knuckles. “People garden, or remodel houses. You’ll be hired for your skill, not your manicure.”

  As quickly as she could without being obvious, Charlotte took her hand back. It curled into a fist at her side. She could still feel that gentle pressure on her knuckles.

  “Oh, I know. I just feel…unprepared.”

  He watched her, his eyes grave. “Have you considered looking for a job up here? Surely there are as many opportunities in the software industry in Washington these days as there are in Silicon Valley. And you’d be closer to your dad and sister.”

  She wasn’t ready to tell him that she had been concentrating on openings up here. She had to figure out herself what she really wanted first.

  “I’ve thought about it,” she admitted, “but I own a condo in San Francisco. I have friends. You know.” No friends, she realized, that she had actually missed or even bothered to call in the past month. Which said something about her life in recent years.

  The single shopper appeared with a couple of flats of fall-blooming perennials and Charlotte rang up her purchases. A van pulled in then and disgorged a harassed-looking woman and five boys ranging from about six years old to ten or eleven.

  Gray said, “I’d better get back to work,” kissed her cheek and left. Charlotte took the woman’s money and walked the group out to the maze. The boys were whooping and playing an aggressive game of tag that had the youngest one crying before they reached the entrance.

  As the boys plunged in ahead of her, the woman muttered, “Maybe if I let them run ahead they’ll get lost and it will take them forever to find their way out.”

  Charlotte laughed despite her distress over how she and Gray had parted. “That’s a plan.”

  The other woman sighed and raised her voice, “You wait for me!”

  One of the boys danced back into the opening. “Well, then, hurry!”

  “Speaking of getting lost…” she said.

  “I’ll give you half an hour,” Charlotte promised. She took a look at her watch. “If you haven’t reappeared, I’ll come looking for you.”

  The woman grinned. “Deal. Thanks.”

  Charlotte stood there for a minute, listening as the voices grew increasingly muffled. She wished Gray was back at the barn, waiting for her.

  Except, at the same time, she was glad he’d left, because he had too many questions for which she didn’t have answers. It was hard, losing all the certainties that had been her guideposts. Especially when she was with him, Charlotte felt as if she’d been stranded out in the open after a tornado warning, when the very air prickled with electricity and the hush was absolute and more terrifying than any sound would have been. Back when she lived in the Midwest, she’d once seen a tornado advancing against a sky too dark for midday, had felt the charged air and the danger.

  The instinct to run was powerful. But how, she wondered miserably, do I run from myself?

  FRIDAY MORNING WHEN SHE checked her e-mail on her laptop, she had a request for a job interview at a small software company in Redmond. The commute wouldn’t be more than forty-five minutes each way from West Fork. She called and set it up for Tuesday afternoon.

  Midday, demonstrating the adage that when it rains, it pours, her cell phone rang and she found herself talking to a personnel director at a company called SysPro in San Mateo, part of the Silicon Valley hub south of San Francisco.

  “Yes,” she said, feeling numb. “I’d love to come in for an interview. Tuesday would be a challenge for me, but… Yes, I can make Thursday this coming week. Yes, thank you.”

  The numbness was wearing off by the time she ended the call, although she wasn’t at all sure what she was left feeling.

  She’d have to sell her condo either way; with Bay Area traffic, she’d want to live closer to SysPro if she took a job there.

  Maybe she shouldn’t go for that interview at all. Except…she shouldn’t close doors when she was still in such turmoil. That would be foolish.

  Faith arrived home from target practice at the gun range in Everett and had one of the egg-salad sandwiches Charlotte had made for lunch. The part-time employee who helped Faith out during the school year arrived then for a walk-through to see what had changed since spring.

  On impulse, Charlotte drew her sister aside. “I’ve been thinking it would be fun to go for a swim in the river. You know it’ll be a madhouse this weekend.” It was, after all, Labor Day weekend. “Do you think Marsha would stay for a while so we could go? We haven’t had much fun lately,” she coaxed.

  Seeing the pleasure on her sister’s face made Charlotte feel guilty all over again. She’d notic
ed that Faith had become increasingly withdrawn and even grim. Why hadn’t she tried to do more to relieve her sister’s mind?

  I won’t tell her about the job interviews yet. Not today. Maybe we really can just have fun.

  Faith nodded. “I’ll ask.”

  Marsha, a round-faced, slightly plump woman not much older than they were, said, “Nobody needs me at home until dinnertime. Go! Take your time.”

  Charlotte hadn’t brought a swimsuit and had to borrow an old one of Faith’s.

  They certainly weren’t alone when they got to the river park, although it would be far more crowded tomorrow. By unspoken consent, they made their careful way over a heap of tumbled boulders upriver, under the railroad bridge. Charlotte had noticed a uniformed police officer talking to a group of teenage boys beside the tracks, presumably having intercepted them before they could scramble up the embankment and onto the bridge. Not Ben Wheeler, thank goodness. Charlotte wasn’t quite sure what had happened between Ben and Faith, but whatever it was had played a part in Faith’s obvious unhappiness.

  Rory. Ben. Me. Gee, I wonder why she’s bummed?

  “Here,” she suggested, and Faith nodded and spread her beach towel in a gravelly cove. A couple of older kids had made their way up and were taking turns jumping off a rock, but otherwise the sisters had this stretch of river to themselves.

  Both wore their flip-flops to the water’s edge, then gingerly waded in barefoot.

  Charlotte winced from the first step. “Wow, I don’t remember it being so rocky.”

  Faith snorted. “You mean, our feet weren’t so tender. We went barefoot practically all summer, remember? I always hated having to stuff my feet back into shoes when school started.”

  “I’d forgotten.” Charlotte inched farther out, until the current swirled around her knees. On the plus side, she thought, her feet were now getting numb. “I didn’t remember how cold the river was, either.”

  “Whine, whine, whine. This was your idea.”

  Charlotte splashed her.

  And got splashed back. Water flew back and forth until they were both drenched and laughing, and were able to immerse themselves with only a few muted squeals.

  They floated, and took turns with the boys doing cannonballs off the rock. Eventually, they got out and lay on their beach towels, letting the sun bake them.

  “You know,” Faith said lazily, “this is the first time I’ve been all summer.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Charlotte rolled over onto her stomach. “You work too hard, Faith.”

  She braced herself for her twin to take offense, but there was a long silence instead. Then Faith said, in a low voice, “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Do you imagine going on like this forever?”

  Faith sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. She looked out at the river rather than at her sister. “I don’t think about forever. Just…tomorrow. Next week. Getting by.”

  “Is that any way to live?”

  Faith looked at her. “Do you think about forever?”

  Now it was Charlotte’s turn to hesitate. At last she said, “I suppose lately I have been.”

  “Because of Gray?”

  Reluctantly she nodded.

  “Has he told you he’s in love with you? Or asked you to stay?”

  Charlotte huffed out a breath. “No. But…I think that’s what’s on his mind. Or maybe I’m imagining it. Maybe I’m the one who is starting to think about things like that.”

  “Are you really?” Faith’s voice was almost neutral, but hope, painfully fragile, shone on her face.

  Charlotte rolled over again and sat up, too. There would never come a better time to say this. She’d been a coward long enough. “I need to tell you how sorry I am. I don’t expect you to understand or to forgive me, but…I want you to know I missed you all the time, even when I couldn’t bear to be close to you. I think…” She swallowed. “I think I’ve been lonely for most of my life. And it was my own fault.”

  “Why?” her sister asked, in a voice that hurt to hear. “Was it me?”

  Charlotte shook her head. Tears ran down her face. She swiped at them, embarrassed. She never cried. “It was always me. But I don’t know why. I’ve never known. It was just…always there, this awful fear clawing at me. I was terrified that I’d somehow be lost if I didn’t tear myself away from you.”

  Faith was crying, too. “Maybe I almost smothered you in the womb.”

  Charlotte’s laugh came out as more like a hiccup. “Maybe.” She said tentatively, “I saw a counselor for a while, in Chicago. I didn’t get any answers.”

  Her sister scrubbed both hands over her face. “You’ve been different since you came home.”

  “I feel different. I don’t know why that is, either. Before, I always had this mindset when I was home. I’d practically cross the days off on the calendar.”

  Faith nodded. “I could tell.”

  “But this time, I looked at you one day and had no trouble at all distinguishing myself from you. The ways we’re alike aren’t much more than skin deep.”

  Faith’s breath hitched. “I’ve realized something, too.”

  “What?” Charlotte asked after a minute, when her sister didn’t go on.

  “It was when I was married, and Rory got so possessive. He didn’t want me doing things with friends. He wasn’t even happy if I was reading and he was watching TV. I had to be with him, paying attention to whatever he was doing, as if the only way I could prove I loved him was to be one hundred percent focused on him. Even if he’d never hit me, I couldn’t have gone on living that way. It was horrible. The harder he grabbed hold, the more I slipped away.”

  Charlotte nodded, puzzled.

  “I think I tried to do that to you. You wanted some space, and that was a threat to me. I was so afraid of being abandoned by you, I tried to grab hold, too.”

  Even as Charlotte shook her head, a part of her was examining the notion and thinking, maybe. If Faith had just taken dance lessons and let Charlotte play soccer instead, if she’d made other friends the way Charlotte had done, things might have been different. But it had seemed like whatever Charlotte did, Faith had to do, too. She and Faith had shared the same social group, and almost all the same classes once they entered the academic track in middle school and high school. Even when they started dating, Faith had always been hungry to hear what Charlotte thought and felt, and to share what she felt about the guy she was seeing.

  “I always thought,” Charlotte said with difficulty, “that I was the dysfunctional one. That twins were supposed to want to be inseparable. That I was failing you, I suppose.”

  Faith astonished her by taking her hand. “Well, I’ve come to believe that it wasn’t all you rejecting me. Maybe we could have been good friends and sisters, if only I hadn’t been so desperate for more.”

  “The funny thing is,” Charlotte confessed, “this last month I’ve been realizing how close we actually were. After leaving home, I mostly remembered the struggle inside me, and the way you’d look at me sometimes with such bewilderment and hurt. But lately, little stuff keeps popping into my head. Things that made us laugh, or nights we whispered together until Mom had to yell at us. Playing in the cornfield, dressing up in Grandma Peters’s clothes. And I remember what it was like having someone I could absolutely, always, count on.”

  Faith gave a tremulous smile. “Maybe that’s something that never changed. Because when I really needed you, you came.”

  Charlotte was a mess, but she didn’t care. She could blow her nose when they were done saying important things. “I wish you’d told me sooner that you needed me.”

  “You mean, when I was married.” Faith went quiet for a minute, finally whispering, “I wish I had, too.”

  “That’s bothered me more than anything,” Charlotte confessed. “That you didn’t feel you could tell me what was happening.”

  “Maybe if we hadn’t had problems I would have. But, well, that’s
what I wanted to tell you. I think going our own ways was good for both of us, not just you. I screwed up big-time with Rory, but I did leave him. Lately I’ve realized that I like who I am now a lot better than I did in high school. I used to always see myself through your eyes. Whatever I did or said, I’d sneak a look to see what you thought about it. And that wasn’t good.”

  “‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’” Charlotte said softly.

  Faith sniffed, gulped and nodded. “Exactly. I had to ask the mirror whether I was worthy. And…I always thought the answer was no.”

  “Because you weren’t me. I never should have been your mirror.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow,” Charlotte said after a minute. “We really messed up, didn’t we?” She was a little shocked to feel a laugh bubbling up through the grief. “I can’t tell you how good that felt to say. We messed up. Not just me.” She flung her arms around her sister. “Even if you made all that up…thank you.”

  Faith was laughing, too. “I didn’t. And I like ‘we’ too. It sounds way better than ‘I’.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “I think,” Faith said, “we need to jump back in the river. The cold water will do wonders for puffy eyes.”

  Charlotte jumped to her feet. “Plus, it feels fabulous.”

  “Race ya.”

  Giggling like a pair of teenage girls, they plunged back in.

  WHEN HE’D INVITED HER TO DINNER Saturday night, Gray had told Charlotte he wanted to cook for her. He had half expected her to make an excuse. Going to his house where they would be totally alone suggested a next step in their relationship he hadn’t been sure she would be willing to make, at least not yet.

  If ever.

  But she had only asked, after the tiniest of pauses, “Can you cook?”

  “When you live alone, you either subsist on take-out and microwave dinners or you learn to cook. I get enough fast food for lunch.”

  What he really wanted was to see her in his house. Find out whether she looked and felt at home there.

  The moment he opened the front door and she stepped inside, letting out a wondering sigh, he knew he’d been an idiot even to worry. Of course she belonged here.