Saving Charlotte

by Pia de Jong

  Finally my father and mother come strolling along. They shuffle over the stones, my father slowly, my mother quicker but staying back because of him. A garbage man, a sleeveless shirt over his naked chest, throws a bag over their heads into the container. My mother ducks. They are old, older than I imagined them earlier today when in my mind I traveled with them. I pictured them boarding the train, showing the tickets to the conductor, with a bag of wrapped presents for the grandchildren at their feet.

  I feel grossly inadequate. I’d like to give them more. More of myself, of my time, my concern, and above all my love, but I can’t. I have a hard enough time dealing with my own needs.

  The boys rush to them, going immediately for their presents, which they dig from the bottom of the bag. My parents and I hug. Moments later my father takes Charlotte from me. He cries when he holds her close to his heart.

  “Her skin is getting cleaner every time,” says the oncologist. His remark makes me weak with joy. Each blue spot that is gone is one less to drown in. Healing is still too large a word to grasp, but the future becomes slightly less bleak.

  Robbert and I wonder if it might be possible that she will get better soon. She looks less pale, is not exhausted all the time. Gone is the girl who always seemed to be on the verge of disappearing into her own faraway world.

  Carefully we make preliminary plans for the summer. Not too enthusiastically, out of self-protection. But we dare to think beyond today, beyond the next visit to the hospital. Recklessly we measure her, look at her growth curve, and predict her height and weight. She will be taller than her mother, perhaps as tall as her father. What will she become? Later, when she is all grown up?

  We still live in dense fog, but occasionally a light shimmers through.

  “Just for a minute,” says Hans, “I need to talk to you.” Once again he is waiting on the sidewalk in front of my house. He has not shaved for at least a week. I have never before seen him so scruffy. It is quiet in the house. The boys are watching a cartoon while Charlotte lies on her quilt on the floor. I don’t want to make him wait this time. I have missed him.

  “Come in,” I say. “Good timing. I just made some tea.”

  He sits quietly opposite me, now and then taking a sip. I think about the glasses of beer we used to drink after work. In little cafés, hotel bars, conference rooms. It all seems so long ago now.

  “You will not come back to your job, right?” he suddenly blurts out.

  “Right,” I say. “I do not know where all of this ends, but I won’t go back.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he says. “You have changed so much.” Since his last visit, his hair has turned a steely gray. “You know why I keep coming back?” he asks after a pause. “Even though you pretended not to hear me and made me wait forever? I wanted to remind you of your work. I thought that despite your sick child, you needed to focus on the future. Be ready at all times. We always told that to our customers, remember? Fortune favors the prepared mind.”

  The edges of his fingernails are red. He was never able to stop picking at them.

  “Everything always was an investment for the future,” he says. “And then I came to realize that the future is already here.” He gets up and stands in front of my window. “I quit my job,” he says. “I finally listened to all the things we taught our clients. Dare to step into the unknown. Think outside the box.”

  “If you see a fork in the road, take it,” I say.

  “Exactly,” he says. “This is my fork. And I will take it.” There is a peace about him that I never saw before.

  “What are you going to do?” I ask.

  “I booked a trip around the world,” he says. “I will start in Indonesia. Since I was a kid I’ve wanted to see Asia. I will travel with a backpack. No stuff I don’t need.”

  He stands up and puts his arms around me. I am reassured by his warmth. It reconciles me with the woman I once was. Maybe she and I are not so different after all. Just two sides of the same person. After he says goodbye, I close my eyes and imagine him walking away from me. Farther and farther he goes, dust gathering in his gray hair, until I see just a speck of his backpack. I have no idea where he is heading, but I hope he will find what he needs.

  At night a sultry voice pours through the wall and swells through the bedroom. A voice that seems to come straight from the heart, singing about unfulfilled love and never-ending pain. Of lust and passion that breaks hearts, never to be mended. My opera-loving neighbor is awake next door. He told me once that he sleeps with a large cushion that he holds in his arms as if it were a woman. Loneliness strikes hardest at night.

  Cars drive slowly down the alley, braking, accelerating. It does not matter what time it is; when girls are about, men will find them.

  Across the canal sleeps Rutger, my increasingly sick friend. I imagine his mother standing next to his bed. Once he showed me her picture. A tall, neatly dressed lady with a proud face. She pushes her son forward, a handsome six-year-old kid in shorts and a knitted jacket. His wet hair is parted. Her hand rests on his shoulder. There is a glint of fear in his eyes.

  “Every night before she went to bed, she came to my room,” he once told me. “She pressed a kiss on my cheek. Then she made a cross on my forehead with her thumb.”

  My mother used to do the same every night with me and my brothers.

  Before Charlotte, I lived my life believing that later, when I was older, I could return to unfinished business. Catch up with people, make things right.

  Later, for my grandmother, turned out to be too late. “Where are they?” she often exclaimed. “They promised that they would wait for me.” She frantically searched for those whom she had always kept dear to her. Her mother, who died giving birth to her. The aunt who raised her. Her favorite uncle, who one summer took her to the countryside, where she drank tea in a fancy restaurant. The dachshund Tommie, whom she got when she was six and whose name she remembered long after she had forgotten mine.

  That evening I am startled awake by the familiar noise of a bouncing ball. When I look up, I see a skinny arm and frail shoulder.

  “Sammy!” I exclaim. “You came to see me once again.”

  Oh, how I have missed him. He has become so dear to me in such a short time. I stretch my arms out—I want to touch him, feel his skin. But his soccer ball already bounces down the stairs, and I know that he will follow soon. But this time I will not let him go so easily. I run down after him, two steps at a time, and grab him by his shirt.

  “Got you,” I say, “and I won’t let you go.”

  “All right,” he says, his eyes brighter than ever before. “Let’s go together then.”

  He offers me a warm, sticky hand, which I grab eagerly. I let myself be pulled into the street. He runs fast on his boy’s legs, making it hard to keep up with him. We go toward the park around the corner, past the street full of shops, all closed now. He lets go of my hand and skips ahead of me. His legs are covered with bruises. The hems of his shorts are frayed, and his shirt is worn thin. His grandmother must have washed it hundreds of times.

  At the outskirts of the city, my feet are tired, but Sammy still walks lightly. Finally he sits down on the grass next to a pond. He folds his legs under him and straightens his back. I do the same. Together we look at the water, which reflects the pale clouds gliding slowly above us. Little children splash each other and throw balls while their parents watch from a distance. Across the street a couple kisses on the grass. An older woman watches them lovingly from under an umbrella.

  After we sit there for a while, the air starts to growl. Lightning bolts crackle. People scramble from the water, quickly pack up their bags, and hurry away. Rain pours down, completely soaking me. Sammy is unperturbed. His curls shine, and he smiles beatifically.

  “Look, over there,” he says in his high, boyish voice. “On the grass next to that big oak.”

  Behind the pond there is a spot where no rain is pouring down from the heavens. Instead there is a m
eadow that glows peacefully in the sunshine. It is far away, but I see it very clearly. The colors are more vivid than I have ever seen before. The sunflowers are so bright I can taste their yellowness. Their tangy flavor tingles my tongue. And there are poppies too, my favorites of all flowers. Over it all, like a dome, is the shelter of magnificent blue sky. I want to get up, but Sammy holds me back. “Wait,” he says. “You cannot go there yet. For now you can only look.”

  In the distance, among all the splendid colors, I see myself sitting on the grass with my legs crossed. I am barefoot, wearing a crisp white dress. I am an old lady now; my skin is wrinkled. Behind me, kneeling, is Charlotte. She is older than today, and at the same time she is ageless. Softly she sings to me in her sweet voice while she slowly braids my hair.

  I am walking home one evening when Rutger, standing in front of his stately house, beckons me to come in. How can I refuse him? I follow him into his marble hallway. By now I know my way around his house. In the living room, he settles himself with a sigh on the red loveseat. He is gaunt, his skin gray. His once-strong arms look bony. He is slowly vanishing, like a drawing erased by a diligent girl. Only a vague outline remains of the robust man he used to be. He picks little balls of fluff from his sweater. “Stay with me for a while,” he says. “Just sit here close.”

  I slide over beside him on the couch. We are silent. The refrigerator hums. A distant vacuum cleaner murmurs. It’s hot inside, and I become sleepy.

  “You never gave me an answer,” he says after a while.

  “Answer to what?”

  “When I asked you about your dreams for the future.”

  “I remember when we talked about that,” I say. “The first time I came, to bring you the keys.”

  He nods. “Don’t forget to think about it,” he says. “It’s such a great privilege to still have a future in front of you.”

  He gets a coughing fit. After that there is a long silence.

  Sadness fills the room like cigar smoke. I’m looking for something to break the mood, cheer him on. On the dresser I see a bottle of Burgundy.

  “Shall I pour you a glass of red wine?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “The taste does not appeal to me anymore,” he says.

  He shuffles in his seat. I realize he wants to tell me something.

  “I tried to practice for this,” he finally says.

  “Practice for what?” I ask.

  “Our parting. I have thought about it, but I didn’t know it would be this hard.” He rubs his eyes. “I don’t have much more time left,” he says, wiping a tear from his cheek with his frayed sleeve. “I have finally reconciled myself to that. Let me tell you how it will go. Something will happen—it always does. A broken blood vessel, pneumonia, or a fall that will send me to the hospital. They will do all kinds of tests, move me around from one place to the other. But whatever they do, I will not get better and I will never leave the hospital.” He wheezes so heavily that I wonder whether I should call an ambulance right now.

  “It will be busy,” he says. “My children, their mothers, my friends, they will all come over to say their goodbyes. They will want to hear my last words for them. The days shall be filled with all kinds of things, and there will be no opportunity to see you ever again.” His hands tremble. “This is our farewell.”

  I breathe deeply, as if I am taking in air for him as well. Still, he sits here, among his journals with his favorite quotes, his stacks of mail, the breakfast plate with the cheese crust on the counter. He leans back in the couch with his narrow back.

  “How do we do this, Rutger?” I ask. “How do we say goodbye?”

  “Like this,” he says, taking both of my hands. He closes his eyes in the late-afternoon sun. Tears drip down his cheeks.

  After a while I pull my hands out of his and I leave him on the loveseat. Slowly I walk home. It seems to take longer than ever before I reach my house. Somewhere along the canal I halt. I look at the water. It is the color of dried hyacinths.

  When I was eleven years old, I wrote an essay called “My Dream in Blue.” Those days I rarely remembered my dreams, except when they were blue. Blue dreams were different. Wonderful and terrifying, mysterious and unfathomable at the same time. Chilly as a cave on the beach at nightfall, tingling like cold seawater on my skin at the beginning of spring. I tried to write down this dream that had made such a big impression on me. I desperately searched for words that described that exact hue of blue. I read the story aloud to Robbert from the handwritten sheet of paper full of erasures and underlines, just after we met.

  On the day we had been together for one year, Robbert gave me a lapis lazuli. A stone in the brightest blue, sprinkled with white specks. The stone had exactly the color I had so desperately tried to describe in the essay. For years I carried the stone with me, until I put it away and forgot where.

  When I get home, I look for the lapis lazuli. I’m convinced I did not lose it; it must be here somewhere in the house. I look in the drawers of my desk, my jewelry box. It’s not there. I want to find it. Where is it?

  When everyone is asleep, I open the drawer where I keep my lingerie. Almost a year has gone by since I last opened it. A whiff of my favorite perfume floats toward me. A strong, intoxicating, woody scent. Suddenly I long for the days of uninhibited sensuality, filled with unconcerned sweetness. Since the birth of Charlotte, I have not felt silk against my body. I have not even once admired myself in the mirror or let myself be admired. But now I want to crawl into this drawer, sink into the fragrant silks, and drown myself in desire.

  As I withdraw my hand, I feel something cold. There it is, my lapis lazuli, the little stone of the deepest blue, cool to my touch. It has not lost its luster at all. It is alive, soaking up all the blues in the universe. The sky blues, the river blues, the blues of the smallest lakes and the largest ocean. And above all the baby-blue secret in Charlotte’s skin. I decide never again to put the stone away. I will carry it with me always.

  “You have forgotten the time,” I tell Robbert as I stand behind him in the middle of the night. He is still working. I’d rather not disturb him, but it’s past three o’clock. Recently he has been working even longer than usual. When he comes home he cooks, plays with the children, and cleans up. After I go to sleep, he settles down with his notebooks.

  I put my hands around his neck. It scares me how cold he feels. “You need your sleep,” I say.

  “I’m working on a new project,” he says.

  “What’s it about?’ I ask.

  “About how particles can escape from a black hole,” he says. “Just one more moment, and then I will go to bed.”

  While I wait for him, I imagine myself alone in the universe. It is black around me and chilly. Everything, even the smallest star, is light-years away. There is no limit to its vastness; it goes on and on.

  That night I sniff the floury smell of a crumbling plaster cast. Is this what I hope it is? Immediately I reach out in the dark until I find a damp hand. “Oh, dear, dear Sammy,” I whisper. “So glad you’re here.”

  He clasps his hands tightly around mine. How is it possible that he searches for my strength while I need his?

  “I just came to say hello,” he says. “Because I’m in a hurry.”

  “Tell me,” I say. “I want to know everything.”

  “This is an important day,” he says solemnly. “Today I’m going to the hospital with my grandmother. The plaster will be cut off.”

  “Finally,” I say. “It’s about time.” I am as delighted as when my own arm was being freed from the cast.

  “One moment,” he says, and he crawls next to Charlotte. He leans on his elbows and bends over her. Carefully he kisses her forehead while her eyes light up in the dark. “She’s so soft,” he says. “And so very sweet.”

  His black skin contrasts beautifully with Charlotte’s pale face.

  “What is the first thing you will do when the plaster is gone?” I ask.

  “Play socce
r, of course,” he says. “What else?”

  “Well, I am so glad you came,” I say. “Please come again soon. I will expect you anytime.”

  Charlotte is better every day. She’s livelier, has more energy, and wants to roughhouse with the boys.

  “She is tough,” says Matthijs’s kindergarten teacher.

  Our Charlotte? Tough?

  Her skin clears up. The lakes with the midnight-blue water dry up, one by one. The birds that have spent a year on their banks fly away, as if someone clapped his hands.

  Mackie rushes out only when men in the street are too loud and too close to our house. More often than not, he keeps a low profile. He senses that something important is going on, that we need rest for the final stretch. He does not ask how Charlotte is doing. He knows I will not dare to talk about it.

  The weeks go by, in fits and starts, like the black carriage that is pulled along the canal by a balky horse.

  “Her skin is clean,” the oncologist says after the examination. He sounds surprised as well as relieved. Charlotte lies on the exam table, her feet paddling in the air. I have been making a game out of it by trying to grab her toes.

  “Clean?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Meaning what?” I ask.

  “That she’s in remission,” he says.

  What is he talking about? Charlotte has leukemia, which is the reason I’m here. She is a child with a life-threatening illness. It is his task to examine her.

  “The tumors are gone,” he says. “What we hardly dared to hope for has happened.”

  I study his face. Like me, he seems to find it hard to believe.

  “For good?” I ask.

  “In my profession, this is as close as I can give you to certainty,” he says.

  “What does this mean?” I ask. “There must be some guideline.”

  “For adults we have five years,” he says. “If after five years the leukemia has not returned, we consider the patients cured. By then they statistically have the same chance of getting leukemia as someone who has never had it before.”