Then she took Charlie and the bottle back to the living room, where she gathered together her school backpack and the spoils from the kitchen. She snapped on the cape with a flourish. Then she emptied her backpack onto the floor, a scatter of balled-up notebook paper and eraser dust, and she put the magic book in the front pocket and slung the bag over her shoulders.
Before they left, the two of them spent a few companionable minutes eating from the plastic bag of spaghetti with their fingers. Callie let him have the last bite. In gratitude, he allowed himself to lie up against her, and for the first time in a while, they were quiet together. Maybe, maybe, this was all the book meant, Callie thought. Maybe her true self was two stomachs made gassy from too much starch. Maybe this was how the world was saved.
But no, that did not seem right. And anyway, she needed her familiar to help her with the task. Purification, the book said, had everything to do with nature. It also was dependent on the purity and courage of the purifier. But Callie was strong. She was stronger than everyone she knew.
So she put her arms around Charlie and hugged him closer, just for a minute. Then she slipped her arms out from underneath him and reached for the knapsack again. He got excited at the chocolate milk and began clamoring for the travel mug. He kept trying to turn her toward him, and she kept having to shrug him off. She poured one capful of cough syrup into the mug, and the chocolate milk turned a sharp purple and grew a greasy sheen. Charlie was getting annoyed now, slapping her back. He would get more forceful in a minute if she didn’t give it to him. She decided she’d better pour the whole bottle in, and she just managed to empty it before Charlie reached for the mug himself and brought it up to his mouth with his own hands.
He drank fast. She could hear every swallow. When he was finished, he let the empty mug fall aside and then slumped up against her again. He burrowed closer into her arms.
She waited a few minutes, felt his belly rise and fall. He wasn’t asleep yet, but his eyes were heavy-lidded and his breathing was deep. She sat still for a bit, and then she heaved him again, as gently as she could, onto her hip.
For once, Callie was grateful for her weight. She only staggered a little bit underneath him. If she was as skinny as Charlotte, she wouldn’t have been able to carry him so far. Once she got her balance, she had enough heft to hold on to him comfortably. She forced his legs to clasp her waist, and he held the pose, slightly confused. It was as if he had forgotten the measures of the world. This gave Callie confidence.
She stooped to pick up one of his blankets: she didn’t want him getting cold outside. She stuffed another blanket into her backpack for good measure, even though it meant she couldn’t zip the bag closed. She carried everything—the bag, the blankets, and Charlie—to the living room, where she nudged open the front door and made her way into the hall.
She passed the laboratory wing, heard her shoes hit first soft on the velvet carpet, then loud and clacking on linoleum. The heavy double doors swung open so easily, she took it as another sign. She hitched Charlie up on her hip as best she could, took a deep breath, and led them both out into the cold night.
In the security guard’s outpost, down at the front gate, a flashing light and shrill, sharp bell went off where Lester Potter sat drowsily reading his newspaper.
It was the most excitement Lester had ever had at the Toneybee Institute. He began scanning the television monitor in front of him for some kind of clue. He saw the double doors open, no sign of who had moved them.
He waited three minutes, and when he didn’t see anything more, he hauled himself up the stairs, to the apartment, where he pushed on the still-open door, stood in the living room he’d watched flicker and snow up for so many nights on his screen, and realized he was alone in the apartment.
He shouted into his walkie-talkie and then he was back down the stairs, to the double doors that had tripped the alarm and out onto the Toneybee’s grounds. The full moon was so bright, he would have instantly seen anyone walking across the grass, but he saw no one. His walkie-talkie squawked to life: it was Dr. Paulsen saying she was on her way, warning him not to call anyone else, especially not the police, at least not yet.
Lester Potter stood in his uniform short sleeves on the frostbitten lawn of the Toneybee Institute and tried to listen above the sound of his own teeth chattering. He could hear the crunch of the ice on the grass whenever he moved. It was impossible that anyone was out here.
That’s how Dr. Paulsen found him. “They can’t possibly be outside,” she scolded. “We need to make a full search of the building.”
They didn’t see Callie and Charlie on the lawn because they were lying low in a valley of frostbitten grass, just to the left of the swell of earth that Lester Potter stood on. Callie was on her back and Charlie leaned docile against her. While Lester Potter called their names, she tilted her face to the moon in the sky, watched it with wild, darting eyes. Beside her, Charlie’s pupils were glassy, his lids low.
They heard the whine of Dr. Paulsen’s voice, the distinct click of the doors swing shut and they were alone again.
They sat together, the two of them, and Callie waited for that filled-up feeling she usually had whenever Charlie allowed her to touch him. But she felt nothing. Only the cold. Only smelled starch and sugar on his breath, which seemed wrong somehow. Transcendence and purification should not smell like already-eaten dinner. She sat up, tugged on Charlie, and started them both toward the lake.
The water was beautiful in the moonlight, not the scabby brown it usually was, but silver and inviting. She could hear the waves knocking against the wooden boat on the shore, and the sound, she knew, right then, with all her heart, was the universe calling to her. She walked both of them closer to the water. Even then, Charlie didn’t protest, he just held the edges of her cape a little tighter.
She only meant to sprinkle a few drops of the Toneybee’s lake on the top of Charlie’s head, just wet his hair and maybe behind his ears, and wet her own stiff Jheri curl, and then they would head back inside, united and reborn. But, as she knelt close to the water, as the wavering, sloppy reflection of her face opened wide into a smile, Charlie broke out from under all that sleep and bit her hand, the one that was stretching out to the water’s surface, to absolution. He bit her in the palm of her hand, nipping the tough skin there.
She didn’t mean to drop him in the water. It happened so quickly and then she was in the water, too, and the two of them were wrestling and panting, Callie bringing her velvet cape over his head and trying to dunk him down, over and over again, while he resisted.
By the time Lester Potter and Charlotte and Laurel and even Max got to the shore, Charlie was under the surface, flailing in the water, and Callie had the cape’s edges bunched up in her fists. It took Max and Lester Potter both to get a good grip on her and drag her out of the water. Laurel went straight to Charlie. She took him in her arms and he bucked and gnawed furiously at the air until Dr. Paulsen came rushing across the lawn, running at an awkward, hampered pace because of all the blankets she carried. She made it to all of them, panting, and she dropped the blankets in the grass and stepped in close to Laurel, held out her arms.
“Give him to me, please.”
Laurel looked down at Callie, who was huddled now on the ground. Charlotte was beside her, trying to gather her into her arms.
Charlie held the ends of Laurel’s hair.
She opened her arms and released him.
Epilogue: Charlotte
Beside me on my desk there’s a raw chicken liver in a red velvet jewelry box. The box is just large enough to fit the meat, but a pinch of flesh is caught in one of the metal hinges, and the little gilt clasp that closes the box strains against the hump of liver.
The whole thing—box and liver—softly stinks. This morning, before I sat down at the computer, I took the box out of the refrigerator where it has nestled for the last few days between a quart of raspberry kefir and a plastic pint of alfalfa sprouts. When my wif
e, Darla, saw me put it on my desk so early, long before I was supposed to take off, she wrinkled her nose.
“Jesus, Charlotte,” Darla said, “is that really necessary?”
“I don’t want to forget it,” I told her, but she knew, of course, I would never forget.
“You could have just kept it in the fridge. I would make sure you took it.”
The velvet box is from the Christmas present Darla gave me last year. The present was a necklace made of a flat gold chain. I wear the necklace now, but when I got that present, I was most excited about that box and wished I’d gotten it a few weeks earlier. When we were cleaning up last year, I slipped that box into the plastic shopping bags we keep in the hall closet, stuffed with throwaway bows and scraps of wrapping paper and dead rolls of scotch tape, and I thought about that red velvet box all year long.
But still, I put off getting into the car until the last possible moment, until I will most certainly be late.
Instead, I sit at my desk with my present of chicken liver and answer e-mail.
Before that, I was Googling Charlie and the Toneybee. I only allow myself to do this once a year, this time of year, and every year I find a little bit more. In the years since we left the Toneybee and I have grown and graduated from college and made my small life in the world, the story has moved out of my reach. It’s all because of the Internet. Online, there are those who remember the experiment, and those who discover it, and usually those are the people I’ve learned to avoid: racial militants, animal militants, trivia buffs, fans of great apes, the relentlessly quirky. Once a year, I search and I find our family in posts with titles like “Top Ten Wackiest Sacrifices for Science” and “Fifty-Three Weirdest Childhood Pets.” I read the lists and then I will myself not to read the comments.
Sometimes someone finds my e-mail address and sends me a question. They’ve tracked down the Toneybee’s report of the experiment, or they’ve read Man or Beast? for some college seminar. They write to ask if all of it is true. I don’t write back to the cranks or the ones with a mission, but I respond to the softball questions.
“What was it like having a chimp for a brother?”
I’ve learned you can’t really answer much more than that. You have to stop the questions there, before things get weird. Things always get weird. Usually people are just ramping up, waiting to steer the conversation toward what they really want to talk about: some form of race baiting or speculation about hygiene or, inevitably, questions about sex. To stop any of that from happening, I make a crack about the smell. I write, “Having a chimp for a brother stinks.” I like imagining the groans that greet that awful pun.
“What was it like having a chimp for a brother?” they write, and I write back, “It was a wonderful experience. I would not trade it for the world. It was really something special. My sister and I are grateful.”
Twenty minutes before I should leave, I get up from my desk and take great interest in fishing a broken tea bag out of the garbage disposal. When I pass through the living room, Darla says, from the couch, “Just go already. You’re making it worse by stalling.”
Darla isn’t coming, even though it was she who bought the cut of meat, not me, and it was she who made sure it was a good one. She’s never once asked to come with me on these trips. She’s said instead, “I’ll go if you want me to,” and I love her, I love her, I love her for caring so much and doing me the kindness of pretending not to.
In the car, at the first stoplight, I take out my phone and peck out an apology that spills over into four texts, explaining why I am running late.
The reply buzzes back immediately.
A single, stoic K.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m parked at the base of the stairs to Callie’s apartment. I text her again, press send, but she does not reply. I just hear her front door slam, a few flights above me, and then I see her slowly make her way down the stone staircase.
Callie lives on the other side of the city from me, just outside of Boston, in one of those Somerville apartments built into the side of a hill. Her building is at the very top of a steep rise, with a narrow concrete staircase set deep into the earth, clambering up to the front door. Callie lives at the very top of the building, up in the clouds, far removed. She’s never invited me and Darla to her house. She’s never invited our parents, either. She doesn’t talk to any of us of friends or lovers, but it is a safe bet that she does not have any of either. As far as any of us know, in all the years she’s lived there, Callie has never had a houseguest.
She walks down the stairs sideways, rolling each hip forward and carefully making sure each foot falls fully on the step below it. As we’ve grown up, she’s only added to the weight she put on at the Toneybee, and so she is extra careful on the steep stairs. She has two shopping bags slung in the crooks of her arms. She keeps a third plastic bag close to her chest. She is wearing a purple felt overcoat and black baggy pants and a shiftless black wool sweater. Callie only wears black now. Her hair is threaded into a million microbraids that wisp around her full, pretty face and end abruptly in a severe bob, down around her chin.
When she’s finished her slow progress down the stairs, she unceremoniously dumps all of these bags into the backseat of my car before throwing herself in the front.
While she settles in beside me, I scan her for evidence of her secret life. There is a flurry of animal hairs, fine and white and bright on the black of her sweater. I see that she has on one black sock and one pink.
Your socks don’t match. I make a point of signing to her when we are together. I am hoping that if I say it with my hands, it will seem more like a gentle ribbing, not an accusation.
But it doesn’t work that way. Callie waits, allows herself a bristle. Then she says very distinctly, making her voice full and round, “I didn’t get to laundry this week.”
She has never gotten to laundry in all the weeks she’s lived alone. She hasn’t signed to me since we left the Toneybee over twenty years ago.
I start the car, make it out of the city, and pull on to the turnpike. Callie turns on the radio, loud, as soon as she can. She picks the most obnoxious channel possible: a news station, with periodic updates of traffic, the advertisements too loud. “W-I-N-S, the Winds of New England,” says the announcer with a heavy Boston accent.
I take my hand off the steering wheel. Do we have to listen to this?
“Yes,” Callie says, simply, but she’s smiling. This is rare. I always offend her. But she has decided not to be right now, which is a blessing, so I take it.
“Dad’s good,” I say, giving up on signing. Callie only nods.
Unlike Callie, I see our father every Sunday. When we left the Toneybee, we moved in with him and Uncle Lyle and Aunt Ginny in their house on Chalk Street. A humiliating time for Callie, a terrible, sad time for me, one we both prefer to forget about. When my sister and I left for college, he could finally afford to move out of Lyle’s house. Now, so many years later, he lives with his new wife, Gloria, a woman who looks eerily like our mother. She even sports a version of our mother’s old Jheri curl. But Gloria is nothing like our mother when you speak to her. She is adamantly passionless. She has no strong likes or dislikes, she does not abhor. If she has views on anything, she is very careful not to mention them in front of me or Callie or Darla. The rare times when all of us eat out together, and she catches me signing to Callie in passing, Gloria lowers her eyes and blushes.
I don’t talk about the Toneybee with our father. Any mention of it still makes him cry: it doesn’t matter when or where. I can say something about the trees around Courtland County High and his eyes cloud over.
Callie would like to believe she is the only one who still lives at the Toneybee in her heart, who goes through the experiment every day in her mind, but she is not. Still, she won’t give our father the satisfaction of sharing this grief.
He does not try to work past her reserve. He believes it is a just punishment, one that it is right he should endu
re. He accepts it meekly, but that does not mean he doesn’t rage in his heart about it. Or rather, in his heart and to me.
“How’s work?” I say, and watch Callie’s shoulders rise up, realizing instantly, that I have made a grave mistake.
“Work,” she says distinctly, “does not exist.”
I was not expecting this answer. As far as I knew, up until this moment, Callie was a massage therapist and actually quite good at it. She goes to the houses of the rich and touches the smalls of their backs with the palms of her hands. She has done this since she dropped out of college. Callie did not much care for college: she fell in with a Bible study group for a while, then a vegan collective, and finally a bunch of unaffiliated house shares on the outskirts of the city’s Blue line.
I should ask her why work does not exist, but she’s trained all of us not to ask any questions about her personal life. Even the names and numbers of her cats are off limits. And she has told me, long ago, that she does not like it when I “brag about my life,” as she puts it, so any conversation about myself is off limits as well.
I have nothing to brag about. My life is as odd and small and secretive as Callie’s. I, too, live in a very small room at the top of a very tall house, all of it outside of my price range. I am a lab technician at an eye doctor’s in downtown Boston. The difference between Callie and me is that I have Darla. Darla, who is not black but Indian; not from New England, but California; cannot sign and has never expressed the desire to learn. We met in college, and her complete otherness from me, what made me fall in love with her, has dulled, turned warm, and now I love her for what we share. She is not an animal lover, thank God. Still, it took her a while to realize I was not joking when I told her I do not want to have children because they only end up doing awful things.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel Page 25