Charley's Web

by Joy Fielding

  “Are you a gangster?” Charley asked seconds later, curious in spite of herself.

  “Off the record? Promise I’m not going to read about this conversation in next week’s paper?”

  “I thought you never read my columns.”

  Glen smiled. “I’m not a gangster.” He looked toward her sleeping brother. “He do this kind of thing often?”

  “That’s really none of your business.”

  “No, but it’s my sofa. You could at least try to make nice until he wakes up.”

  “Sorry. I’ve never been very good at making nice.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “Because you’re a man of great intelligence and perception. How’s that for making nice?”

  “A little heavy-handed.”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “Oh, I’ll take it. Does this mean you’ll reconsider sleeping with me?”

  “Not a chance.”

  Another bolt of lightning. Another crash of thunder.

  “Storm’s getting closer,” Glen observed.

  “Great,” Charley said sarcastically. “I always loved driving I-95 in the pouring rain.”

  “I don’t think you’re going anywhere for at least a little while.”

  Charley looked from the window to her brother, now snoring contentedly beside her. “Great,” she said again.

  “How about reconsidering that cup of coffee?”

  “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  “You have a problem with people being nice to you?”

  Charley lifted her hands into the air, in a gesture of surrender remarkably similar to that of the faceless bronze statues in the other room. “Sure, let’s have coffee,” she said. “Why not?”

  “Why not indeed?” Glen echoed, going to the door. “How do you take it?”

  “Black.”

  “Thought you’d say that. Back in a flash,” he said, as another bolt of lightning shot through the sky. It was immediately followed by a spectacular crack of thunder.

  “You’re missing quite a display,” Charley said to her sleeping brother, as she pushed herself to her feet and walked to the window. She opened the blinds with a flick of her fingers and stared at the ferocious downpour. The rain in Florida was like nowhere else in the world, she was thinking, watching huge drops, like angry fists, pound against the panes of glass. It came at you relentlessly, obliterating almost everything in its path, blinding you. If she’d been driving, she’d have been forced to pull over and wait it out.

  Could that be any more uncomfortable than waiting it out in the office of the man she’d disparaged in print as a “hoodlum wannabe,” while her brother slept off a drunken stupor on that same man’s red velvet couch? “Why do you do these things to me?” she asked him, as another bolt of lightning lit up the sky, illuminating her dented, silver Camry in the parking lot next to Bram’s ancient, impeccably maintained, dark green MG. “You always loved that car more than anything else on earth,” she muttered as another clap of thunder rattled the palm trees and shook the premises. “God, Bram. What’s the matter with you? Why do you keep screwing up?” She returned to the sofa, sank down beside him. “Bram, wake up. Come on. Enough of this crap. Time to grow up and go home. Come on, Bram,” she said again. “Enough is enough.”

  Bram said nothing, although his long, dark lashes fluttered provocatively, as if he might be persuaded, with a few well-chosen words, to open his eyes.

  “Bram,” Charley said, impatiently poking at his arm. “Bram, can you hear me?”

  Still nothing.

  “You can’t keep doing this, Bram,” Charley lectured. “You can’t keep fucking up and expecting people to rescue you. It’s getting old. And you’re not getting any younger,” she added, although at twenty-four, he was hardly a candidate for a retirement community. “It’s time to get a life.” She sighed. Her brother had pretty much given up on life a long time ago. “Our mother called this morning,” she continued, recalling that of the four children, her brother had seemed to adapt to their mother’s desertion the best. Maybe because he was only two at the time she’d left, and too young to realize what exactly was happening. He’d cried for his mommy for several days, then blithely crawled into the arms of the woman their father had hired to take her place. A needy child, he’d basically stayed there until the woman quit two years later in a salary dispute with their father. She, too, had left without saying good-bye. After that, there’d been a succession of housekeepers, as plentiful and as faceless as the bronze statues beyond Glen’s office door. No one ever stayed very long. Their father’s unyielding coldness saw to that. “She’s worried about you,” Charley told her brother now, thinking of her own children, and wondering, as she always did when she thought too long about her mother, how the woman could have walked out and left them the way she did.

  “I wanted to take you with me,” her mother had tried to explain when she’d reentered Charley’s life two years earlier. “But I knew your father would never let me take you out of the country. And I had to leave. If I’d stayed in that house any longer, I would have died.”

  “So you left us to die instead,” Charley told her, refusing to let her off the hook so easily.

  “Oh, but look at you,” came her mother’s instant response. “You’ve done so well. All my girls have done so amazingly well.”

  “And Bram? What about him?”

  To that question, Elizabeth Webb had no answer.

  “Bram,” Charley said now. “Bram, wake up. It’s time to go home.”

  She smelled the coffee even before she turned around to see Glen standing there. “Making any progress?” he asked from the doorway, his arm extended toward her.

  She shook her head. “That smells wonderful,” she acknowledged, taking the mug from his outstretched hand as the steam climbed toward her nose.

  “You got lucky. Paul just made a fresh pot.”

  Charley took a long, slow sip. “It’s very good. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” He resumed his seat on the other sofa.

  “You’re not having any?”

  “I’m not much of a coffee drinker.”

  “Really? Why is that?”

  “I find it interferes with all the cocaine in my system,” he said with a straight face, and for an instant, Charley wasn’t sure whether or not he was serious. “That was a joke,” he qualified quickly. “Although, obviously not a very funny one. Especially under the circumstances.” He looked toward her brother.

  “You think he’s doing coke?”

  “I think he’s going to have one hell of a headache when he wakes up,” Glen said, without answering the question. “What’s his problem anyway?”

  Charley took another sip of coffee as another flash of lightning streaked across the sky. “You really think I’m going to discuss my brother’s problems with you?”

  “Problems?” Glen repeated, stressing the final s.

  “Figure of speech.”

  “Or a slip of the tongue.”

  “My brother’s a bit of a lost soul,” Charley admitted, another clap of thunder serving to underline her words.

  “How long has he been wandering?”

  Charley almost smiled. It appeared the “hoodlum wannabe” had a bit of a poet’s soul. “I’d really rather not talk about it,” she said, although the truth was she was suddenly desperate to talk about it. He’s been screwed up as long as I can remember, she wanted to shout. He’s been drinking since he was fourteen, and doing drugs at least that long. As a teenager, he was kicked out of every private school in Connecticut. Then he flunked out of Brown in his first year, and headed south to join me in Florida, where he enrolled in night school at the University of Miami, and where he’s been languishing ever since, taking one aimless course after another, rarely even bothering to write the final exams. He lives in a furnished apartment in a nasty part of town, works as little as possible, and only then when he needs to supplement the small inher
itance our paternal grandmother left us, and which our beloved father, as trustee of her estate, elected to dole out in meager monthly increments. “Probably one of the few smart decisions he ever made,” she muttered out loud.

  “Sorry?” Glen asked.

  “Smart decision, to have coffee,” Charley amended, wondering if she was fooling him. If she was fooling anyone.

  “Anytime.” The phone rang. Glen pushed himself off the sofa and walked to his desk in three easy strides. “McLaren here,” he said into the receiver. “Well, how are you?” he asked, his voice dropping, becoming instantly soft and seductive. He held one hand over the mouthpiece, whispered to Charley, “I’ll just be a minute.”

  “Would you like me to leave?”

  He shook his head. “Not necessary.” He sat down behind his desk and swiveled around in his high-backed, black leather chair to face the window. “Of course I’m glad you called. No, you’re not interrupting a thing.”

  Charley frowned. Outside the storm was growing a little less fierce. She could now actually make out the tops of a row of giant palm trees bending in the wind. “Wake up, Bram,” she whispered between clenched teeth. She returned to the sofa, trying not to eavesdrop on Glen’s conversation.

  “No, I have no plans for tonight after work,” she heard him say.

  A nice clap of thunder would be good right about now, she thought, hearing him laugh, and wondering if there was anything she could do to blot out the sound of his voice. She reached across the floor for her purse, thinking she could call Emily in New York, since Emily was the only sibling she hadn’t seen or spoken to today. And certainly Emily would be as delighted as Anne to hear from her.

  “Of course I’d love to see your new apartment,” Glen was practically purring.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Charley said out loud, forcing a smile onto her lips as Glen’s head poked around the side of his chair to see what was the matter. “Just looking for something,” she whispered, pulling a white envelope out of her purse. “Found it,” she exclaimed, although the truth was she barely remembered stuffing the letter into her purse before fleeing her office.

  You’ve got mail, she heard Monica say.

  Charley turned the envelope over in her hand, studied the return address. Pembroke Correctional.

  Looks like you have a fan.

  Blocking out the sound of Glen’s suggestive banter, Charley tore open the letter, pulled out the lined white paper filled with girlish script, and started reading.

  CHAPTER 4

  January 17, 2007

  Dear Charley,

  Hi. I hope you don’t mind my writing to you. I know how busy you must be, and that you probably get tons of mail, although maybe not too many from prisons. Gee, I still can’t believe I’m really here, even though it’s been over a year now. I was really afraid of coming to this place—have you seen all those scary movies about life in women’s prisons?—but I have to admit, it hasn’t been all that bad. After all the death threats I received from supposedly law-abiding citizens on the outside, it’s actually been something of a relief, to tell you the truth, and so far, nobody’s tried to rape me with a broom handle or anything awful like that. It’s been fairly quiet, to be honest, and I’m happy to say, relatively clean, since I’m a bit of a neat freak.

  The other prisoners have all turned out to be pretty nice—most of the women are here on drug-related issues—although for a long time, nobody would speak to me. But I’ve tried to be on my best behavior and put my best foot forward, always being pleasant and helpful, and now almost everyone has more or less come around.

  One woman, in here because she stabbed her best friend with a pair of scissors over an argument about which TV show to watch—even told me she thinks I have a pretty smile. I think she might have a crush on me, although I’ve done nothing to encourage her in that regard. There are still a few women, mothers of small children mostly, who won’t have anything to do with me, but I’m working on them, and I feel their resistance beginning to wane.

  This might sound strange, and I hope you won’t take it the wrong way, but you’ve always been kind of a role model for me. I want you to know how very much I admire you. Before I was sent to prison, I used to read your column every week. My favorite columns were the ones you wrote about the time an ex-boyfriend talked you into going bungee jumping—I could really relate, having been talked into a few ill-advised outings myself—and about the problems you had deciding what to wear when your daughter’s father got married and you didn’t want to upstage the bride. I thought that was so funny. But touching, too, the way you took everyone’s feelings into account.

  I even wrote several letters to your website, and you were kind enough to respond. You probably don’t remember. And there’s no reason you should. I wrote them about three years ago, just after you started doing your column. This was way before anything bad happened, and I didn’t sign my real name, so you wouldn’t have had any reason to connect me to that monster you wrote about later. The Beastly Baby-Sitter, you called me. I felt really awful about that—still do—since I hate that you have such negative feelings about me. I want you to like me. Your opinion is very important to me.

  Anyway, the first time I wrote you, it was about my older sister, Pamela, who’s always been a real pain in the you-know-where. I’d borrowed an old blouse of hers—I swear I didn’t know it was her favorite—and my boyfriend accidentally spilled some red wine on it. This boyfriend’s name was Gary. (You may remember him—he testified against me in court.) When we tried to get the stain out with water, we only made it worse. (I didn’t realize the blouse was silk, and that it had to be dry-cleaned.) Anyway, Pam has this really bad temper—so does my whole family—and I was afraid to tell her I’d ruined her blouse, so, coward that I am, I threw it in the garbage. But then I felt so guilty, ’cause she was crying and tearing up the house looking for it. So, I wrote to you, asking for your advice. You told me that you weren’t an advice columnist, but in your opinion, I should tell her the truth and offer to reimburse her for the blouse. I thought that was very good advice, and I often wish I’d taken it. But I just couldn’t. I was too afraid of her temper. (Plus I didn’t have the money.)

  The second time I wrote you I was having problems with Gary. I told you he was very controlling, and trying to get me to do things I was real uncomfortable about doing, but that I was afraid of losing him if I didn’t go along. Again, you made it very clear you weren’t an advice columnist, but that, in your opinion, I shouldn’t do anything that made me uncomfortable, and that I should worry less about losing him and more about losing myself. Those words touched me very deeply, even if I didn’t heed them.

  Please don’t think there was anything wrong with your advice just because I wasn’t strong or wise enough to take it. You were absolutely right. I did end up losing myself. That’s how I found myself in this awful mess.

  I want you to know I never planned for any of this to happen. I never intended to hurt anyone. I still can’t believe I played any part in the horrible things they say I did. It doesn’t seem possible that I could have been involved in any way. I’m really a very good person at heart. I hope you believe me. I even hope one day we might be friends.

  Which brings me to the reason for this letter.

  In the past year, I’ve had a lot of time to think. About all sorts of things. Not just the terrible things that landed me here, although obviously they’re very important, but about how a person with my background and upbringing—my parents have been together for almost thirty-four years, and are regular churchgoers, plus I have an older brother and sister who’ve never been in any trouble with the police. Not to mention, I’ve always been very considerate of others. I wouldn’t even step on an ant. I swear, if I saw one inside the house, I’d pick it up in a tissue and carry it gently outside. So, how could I possibly be guilty of doing such horrible things to actual human beings? It doesn’t make sense.

  Of course, at first everyone thought that G
ary was to blame, that he was the true mastermind behind what happened. That was so not true. Gary couldn’t mastermind his way out of a paper bag, as my mother used to say. And though I hate to admit it, she was right. (Don’t tell her I said so.) Besides, even though Gary was technically my boyfriend at the time of the murders, I’d already moved on. Some people still think he had something to do with what went down. They can’t believe a girl could commit the heinous crimes I’ve been accused of all on her own.

  Maybe they’re right.

  Am I whetting your interest?

  I’m facing a lot of issues these days, and I’m starting to question everything. Trouble is, I don’t always know the right questions to ask. Which is, hopefully, where you come in. Even though I don’t get to read your columns as frequently as I used to, and they’re usually old by the time I get to see them, I still enjoy them, and think you’re a wonderful writer. You have a way of getting to the truth, and expressing it clearly and without pretension. You’re sensitive and caring, but you don’t take crap from anyone. You stand up for what you believe, and you aren’t afraid to take an unpopular stance. Even when you were writing all those unflattering things about me, I still admired you. That’s an amazing talent for someone to have.

  And I have an amazing story to tell.

  Which is what I’m getting at.

  I think it’s time to tell my story—all of it—and I think you’re the only person who can do it justice. Actually, it’d be more of a collaboration, since it would involve you and me spending a lot of time together. I don’t think that would be all that unpleasant for you. I’m really not the way the media—yourself included—portrayed me. I’m not the beast you wrote about. Despite those awful tapes they played at my trial, I’m not a monster.