by Amity Gaige
“I wanted to live a life with you, Charlie,” she wept. “Not parallel.”
“I know,” said Charlie softly, his eyes wet. “I wanted it too.” He looked down. “But we have our babies now. And I don’t—make enough money to give you more opportunity, at the moment, for yourself.”
“You’d make more if you had a private practice. And make your own schedule. Wouldn’t you?”
Charlie leaned back. “I would. I will. I—Or I could go back and work for Gregorian. But by then, the twins would be in school—”
Alice smiled, sniffling. “Seems far away. The twins in school.”
“I know.”
“Charlie.”
He looked up.
“Did you fall in love with me because you thought I was crazy?”
“What?”
“When you first saw me, and you chased me down the street? And you wanted to know why I wouldn’t step on the cracks?”
“No. No, Alice.” Charlie smiled ruefully, leaning forward on the table. “I chased you down the street because I thought you were gorgeous.” He moved his untouched dinner plate aside, now reaching out with both hands. “If anything, you reminded me, in your solitary world, of myself.” He bent his head close to hers. “Hey. We can let it go now. We have each other. We found each other.”
Alice pressed her fingers to her eyes.
“Keep believing in me,” he said. “Please. I’m right here.”
“I’ll try.”
“What would make it easier? What would make me more believable?”
“Well,” Alice rubbed her eyes. “Could you try, could you at least try to be home when you say you will? I can’t stand the sight of cold food. It’s every woman’s nightmare.”
Charlie nodded. “Absolutely. No cold food. What else?”
“Don’t bring me flowers when you’re late. If you’re late, heaven forbid don’t stop and buy flowers.”
Charlie laughed. “Thank you. I’ve always felt stupid about the flowers.”
“One more thing,” Alice said, dabbing her mouth with her napkin. “I spoke to my mother. I asked her to come and stay with us for a while and help me take care of the twins. Give me some time off, some help.”
“Well, I think that’s a great idea,” Charlie said, slapping the table.
“You do?”
“I think that would be fine.”
“Really? You and Marlene, you don’t get along that well. Well, no one gets along with Marlene that well.”
“Not true! Your mother and I don’t know each other. I’d like to get to know her. Sure! Why doesn’t she come for a little while? What else?”
“And don’t take me to this damned hoity-toity restaurant again. I know you hate it here. We belong at a place like Snakey’s.”
Charlie laughed.
“Take me to Snakey’s instead. Where we used to go.”
Remembering, Charlie’s eyes stung. The waitress was approaching through the candlelight. He thought of how they had stood at the counter, shoulder to shoulder, eating junk yard dogs with relish.
“I love you, Charlie Shade. You know, I really do.”
“I love you too, Alice,” he said.
When it got hot and crowded in Snakey’s, the windows steamed up. Standing at the counter before the window, the city disappeared, the view disappeared, and after a moment of feeling crammed in, you realized that you didn’t care if anything else existed anyway. You had the girl next to you, that was enough. And if you made promises to her there and did not keep them, or she made promises to you and did not keep them, they were still, years later, your promises. They still belonged to the two of you.
part
three
The bus. How she loathed the bus. Outside, New England went by in a gray smear. A collection of strangers, together they were borne through tunnels of blasted rock, while an Indian lady ate an entire stinking banquet from her lap, and a child smeared her hand down the window, ridding herself of something viscous. Below, in their cars, people stared. The bus always made one feel captured and displayed—no, worse—poor, Third World; she might as well have been carrying a pineapple on her head. Beside her, a young black man wearing an enormous dress-like T-shirt and headphones large as coffee rolls feverishly genuflected to his beat. Bat du bat bat.
“Could you turn that down, please?” Marlene said.
The young man’s eyes remained shut. He bobbed his head. Bat bat du bat bat.
“Excuse me.” She prodded his arm. He jumped, surprising them both, and his eyes snapped open. He smiled handsomely, a slight space between his teeth, and lifted one of the headphones off his ear.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“Could you turn your music down, please? I can barely hear myself think.”
The young man fumbled with his Walkman, his large thick fingers spinning the tiny dials. The music sank to a dull roar. He turned and looked inquiringly at Marlene.
“Better?” he shouted.
Marlene turned back to the window. She folded her hands back over her skirt. It was not the music that bothered her, but rather the young man’s complete indifference to her company. He hadn’t even said hello when she sat down. She turned her chin this way and that in the window. Hello, she said quietly. Soon, beyond her reflection, the metropolitan horizon came into view. Whenever she saw the city, which she had often visited as a girl for parties and dances, she felt a pang in her heart. Cities always made her feel hopeful, and hope made her uncomfortable. Tall buildings stood clustered together like gossips. Amongst them, doubtless people performed their complicated modern ablutions. She remembered going into the new public toilet in the city with her father, when she was small enough to need to be dragged along, and how she had reached down for the beautiful brass drain in the middle of the urinal, before her hand was slapped away.
Against the bus driver’s orders, Marlene stood before the bus came to a complete stop and squeezed herself into the aisle. When she fell forward at the last lurch, the young man beside her had to grab her arm to keep her from tumbling forward. She looked down at his black hand on her rose-colored overcoat. Pleased, but with her resentment now directed toward the bus driver, who was whistling sadistically, Marlene gathered up her bag and her Redbook and dropped her apple core in a baggie, and stepped down the aisle. How she hated the bus. Behind her, her pal followed, now chanting out loud with his music—Goin through the emotions of gun holdin whicha whicha yao long shotguns down my pants limpin killer be who still livin—all this in the hassled and depressing silence of the bus, which she hated, the lone voice—and through all of that a nigga ain’t scared of death (and finally she thought—it’s for me, he is talking to me)—just as she was thinking this and was pleased, she stepped off the bus and was shocked to see, coming toward her with a grin, big ears aglow in the sunlight, her son-in-law.
Marlene gaped as Charlie took her purse. “I didn’t know you were coming to get me,” she marveled. “I was going to hail a cab.”
“It wasn’t any trouble,” Charlie said. “Is this your only bag?”
Marlene whirled around, pointed to her suitcase. The largeness of her suitcase beside the bus now embarrassed her. She had only been invited for two weeks.
“It’s full of second-hand baby clothes,” she said. “The girls from the library.”
Charlie slung her purse over his shoulder. A bus passed, blowing his fine-sifted, sunlit hair into his eyes. Standing there in the wet light of the bus station, untouched by the city itself, he appeared heroic to her, with his premature laugh lines and his blue parka and his Brut deodorant and the manful, secure way he held the purse, and unconsciously Marlene leaned toward him, hypnotized. As a librarian and a spinster, she was rarely around men, and she sometimes tired of it, all that sovereignty. She was tired of being feared, and would have liked just then to be told what to do by a man. Charlie put his arm around her and gave it a squeeze.
“You look tired,” he said. “I know you hate the b
us.”
She allowed herself to lean her cheek against his parka. She did hate the bus. In the distance, her young friend disappeared into the crowd. Singing. Gesturing. Promoting himself to the city. Give her a million years, she’d never be able to stride into a crowd like that.
“No,” she said, straightening. “I’m not tired. Let’s go see my grandchildren.”
They walked together toward the parking lot. They did not really know one another. Their relationship had thus far been awkward. It was difficult to know where to step, with Alice prostrate between them. Many of their interactions had involved Charlie lying to Marlene over the telephone. But in another lifetime, who knows? They felt then that they might have been friends.
“You look well,” called Marlene to Charlie’s back. “For a father of twins. What’s your secret?”
He said over his shoulder, “Your daughter.”
“She’d well say the same of you.”
“We have a blessed life,” said Charlie. “Our children are the most incredible babies in the world. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I did to deserve all of this. I think they got the wrong guy.” Dragging the suitcase across the parking lot, which was wet and rocky with melted slush, Charlie laughed at the idea, although it seemed true. “Here we are.”
They stood at opposite doors of the beat-up Toyota. Marlene gazed across the wet roof at her son-in-law’s face. She felt very generous. She wanted to say, You do deserve it. She had never been picked up at the bus station by anyone. She did not say anything. Charlie winked at her in the sunlight.
“Thanks for coming, Mom,” he said. “We could use the help.”
She was so stunned by the word—Mom, reborn extraordinarily of a man’s mouth—that he had disappeared into the car before she could reply. She stared at the shimmering space where he had stood.
But what she did not ask was, why was he home from work on a weekday? Charlie faced forward in the white winter sun, the world framed by windshield grit. He gripped the steering wheel of the Toyota, whose headlight he had still not had the time to fix. He was blessed. And to show that he knew he was blessed, he had kept his word and come home on time for a run of several weeks now, even though it was hard to just pack up and leave the office with the phone still ringing. He was blessed more than anything to see Alice laugh again, at him, trustfully, her head thrown back. Just last night, in an attempt to make dinner, he’d melted a spatula, and she had found even this charming. When he embraced her, she accepted, softening, not waiting to be let go. So he was happy and he was pleased, because he was blessed, but he had also noticed with displeasure that his happiness had a little grit in it. Was it necessary to sacrifice certain things to happiness? Every time he paused at a stoplight or stood in his undershirt before his open closet, the words of his supervisors echoed back at him. But why didn’t you alert Emergency Services right away Charlie? She says she spoke to you right beforehand. Margot easily could have paged me.
Charlie comforted himself by feeling misunderstood. The individual is always misunderstood by the group—he was beginning to believe—and is often asked to conform to the erroneous image the group has of him. When one works alone, there is no misunderstanding. A man has an unimpeachable personal morality, which is his instinct. No matter what he does within this frame, the action is, amoral or moral, right. Rules—he thought—are different, made for order, for the ordering of groups. Charlie looked steadfastly at the gritty view, sure that all this was infallible. But there were the voices anyway:
Seems like we could have headed this off somehow.
Margot easily could have paged me.
We almost lost a life, Charlie.
And himself, protesting: Don’t you think I know that?
Charlie almost laughed aloud at the realization that he was, in effect, hearing voices. It was useless to keep going over things. The matter of Opal’s suicide attempt was weeks past, ancient in his line of work. She was in good hands at Maynard. It was very common to go in and out of the hospital like that until one truly accepted the facts of one’s condition: medication, monitoring, “pleasure surveys,” slow progress, halfway house dances. As for him, the review meeting he’d had with Harriet and Bruce had seemed like a pure formality. It happened after any particularly grim event. How many interviews had Eugenia given when her client went plunging overboard a ferry? A client of Peter Carter’s slipped away into the crowd at a Red Sox game, one gleefully disappearing giant foam finger. Charlie had even convinced himself that in the course of the meeting, Harriet and Bruce weren’t so upset at him for not following the rules that fateful day, but that they were genuinely, narratively interested: Uh-huh? And then what did you do?
But after he told the story, in that shadowed conference room, they had sat there far too soberly. Harriet wouldn’t look him in the eye. It was clear to Charlie they had been talking about him. He became frightened with the possibility that Gregorian would become involved. Sitting there, holding a paper funnel of water in his hand, the evidence against him mounted in his own mind. Even the half-drugged account that Opal had given from her hospital bed did not do justice to the amount of negligence that Charlie had actually shown that evening. On the one hand, he knew it. He didn’t have to be told.
But then, on the other hand, staring down at the circle of water and the shiny veneer of the conference table, he heard himself speaking eloquently in his own defense, preempting all their suspicions: ES never would have gotten there before he did. What if he had spent the time trying to persuade ES, or to track down Harriet or Bruce instead of just driving over there himself? He’d lost his cell phone that day, right? So what if those minutes to stop and find a pay phone and make the phone call had been the difference, and what if they had really lost her then? Because they didn’t lose her. He’d gotten there in time.
But wasn’t there an opportunity to call someone once he’d arrived at Mr. Delgado’s house? Harriet wanted to know. Because they wouldn’t even be asking this, see, if it wasn’t for Opal’s comments (Harriet had gone to see her again, he noticed, without him), and look, they were just confused as to what transpired in the hour and a half after which Opal last tried to reach him and the arrival of the ambulance. Because there was a system, a whole phone chain set up in anticipation of …
He did return Opal’s call, he objected, just like he promised. But there was no answer. And then Mr. Delgado tried to escape, so Charlie had to chase him! He tried to run out onto the highway because he was mad.
Why was he mad?
He was mad because he had to wait by the pay phone while Opal was contacted, Charlie explained. His cell phone was lost—didn’t he already say that?
And suddenly, sitting in the conference room telling the story, Charlie had felt abjectly sorry for himself. Everybody wanted so much from him—George, Opal, Harriet, Bruce, Gregorian. They wanted his one hundred percent exclusive attention, and in this perhaps they unconsciously were setting him up to fail, in order to be relieved of their optimism. He covered his face with his hands, and there, in her silky Japanese robe, pulling the brush through her wet hair, was Alice. He’d chosen not to fail Alice. Why should he be made to feel bad about it?
Just then, Bruce had patted Charlie’s knee with his large slab of a hand. “Hey kid,” he whispered. “Hey. It’s all right.” With this sympathetic touch, Charlie’s eyes stung. Through a crack in his fingers he saw their faces, greasy and fatigued by this hour of rule-following, the sun completely gone down by then, both of them wanting to be home and watching Access Hollywood with their feet up. Charlie saw that they had followed him down all of his explanations: Delgado’s fault, the fault of the system, the fault of bad luck. Bruce’s trench coat was crumpled in his lap. He looked tired. Whenever they lost somebody, it was Bruce who had to explain it to the Department. Sometimes they even sent a bureaucrat over to conduct an investigation, taking hours out of everyone’s day for interviews, as if when someone was dead it truly mattered what the Depar
tment thought about it. Charlie knew that more than anything Bruce didn’t want a visit from the Department, and for him, Charlie would keep it from happening.
“Listen,” he said, pressing his eyes with his fingers. “I’m sorry. I think it’s clear that I let you both down. I wish I could explain how much I care what you think of me. That, while I’m here, I’m a credit to your team. Also,” he looked away, down at his lap, but it was the truest thing he’d said yet, “I care about her. Ludlow. It’s surprising. The gap between how much I care about her and how I handled events that day. I should have been more sensitive to where she was coming from, with the mattress guy and the hospital and all that. I really cared, but maybe I just didn’t—” Charlie shook his head, “care enough.”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Harriet. “You care enough. This isn’t about caring.”
Bruce opened his hands in a gesture of inevitability. “You haven’t been around here long enough to know how frequently I’ve met in this conference room with caseworkers less gifted than yourself,” he said. “This line of work has all sorts of traps built right into it. It’s a tremendous responsibility to take on, guarding the lives of people. I’d be an idiot to blame you for this. We all saw Opal. We all work together as a team. Hsu, Carter, you, me, Harriet. If there was evident suicidal ideation, we all should have seen it. Sure, maybe she had a special trust with you, but you never have to shoulder that responsibility all by yourself. That’s what a team is. We’re a mobile treatment team.” Bruce removed his trench coat from his lap. “Goddamn I want a drink. A nice cold Bombay gin martini with a single pearl onion.”
Charlie looked up.
“I’ll have a drink with you,” he said.
Bruce laughed. “Sure, Bud,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve heard enough on this point, and to me the case is closed. Opal’s where she belongs for now. Monday will be a new day. For us. For her. A new day, shiny as a fucking penny.”
Charlie looked over at Harriet, who was nodded absently, staring at the carpet.