Charlie, Presumed Dead

by Anne Heltzel

  Lena waves me off with one hand, her eyes already dropping shut. “Don’t mention it.” I can’t help smiling at that. So cool, so casual—but all her real emotions are there, just under the surface, just behind her words. Maybe we’re not so different after all.

  My fingers are itching for a pencil—I’d love to work this room into a comic—but instead I slip into the bathroom and close the door gently behind me. I’d stick around and press her for more information about the city, or maybe strike out on my own, but Bombay is intimidating—I’ve never seen anything like it. The cars practically careen into each other, always swerving at the last second. A slum stretches for at least a mile beyond the hotel; our view from the sixth floor overlooks it and the Arabian Sea beyond. From the bathroom, I can see some children jumping among heaps of trash and others squatting to poop near the side of the road. When we were outside, peddlers hawked stacks of lychees and bananas from wooden carts. Women thrust their babies at us, motioning for pictures. This was all in the trip from the airport to the hotel; I’m exhausted just from having absorbed it. I’m not ready to brave the city alone. Plus, I’m pretty sleepy too.

  That’s what I’m thinking as I step in the shower. But all of it is a cover for what’s really occupying my mind. I’ve always been good at that—thinking loose, easy thoughts to cover up the hulking ones that lie in wait. This time, it’s about Adam. Adam, Charlie’s old roommate from Bombay. The one who met up with us once when Charlie and I connected in D.C., just eight or nine months ago. Adam took a year off after high school and stayed in Bombay to work for an NGO. He’s still here. I sent him a Facebook message before we left, and Lena and I talked about meeting up with him tomorrow. It’s the plan. If something weird was going on with Charlie in Bombay, Adam would be the one to know.

  I ignore the pounding in my heart as his face flashes through my memory. Blond hair, a rugged build—he was captain of the cricket team at the American School in Bombay—tanned skin from hours in the Indian sun. I scrub my hair harder, digging my nails into my scalp until it hurts.

  We were in D.C. because Charlie’s dad was there for work, and Charlie was on break from college for the holidays, and I was on Thanksgiving break from high school, and could drive there easily from Chicago. I told my parents I was staying with his family; but in reality, we had his uncle’s empty bachelor pad in Georgetown all to ourselves for five days . . . except for the two nights Adam stayed there too.

  Adam. Three shots of tequila. Charlie passing out early, my head on his shoulder. I was about to turn eighteen. There are wrappers all around us from the cupcakes we’ve been devouring; we each had at least three. Adam’s on the foldout couch and I’m with Charlie in the master bed, but Charlie’s snoring loudly, so I go out to the kitchen for some water.

  I scrub, I rinse. I transfer the pain of remembering into my body, my head. I turn the heat up until it’s scalding, burning all of the germs and mistakes away. Finally, when I start to feel lightheaded, I switch the nozzle off and step onto the thick, lush white area rug that partially covers the gray marble floor of the bathroom.

  I reach for a towel and notice flecks of red under my fingernails. Blood. My scalp is tender from where I scratched too hard. I know what I’m going to do even before I reach for my pants, which lie rumpled on the floor, and pull out the piece of paper that’s folded up in the back pocket. There’s an address scrawled on the back, hastily jotted down from my Facebook account just yesterday.

  Lena is sound asleep by the time I get out of the shower, so it’s no trouble to sneak off. The taxi driver tells me, in halting English, that normally it takes two hours to get from Colaba to Andheri, even with the Sea Link. That before the Sea Link, it would have taken four hours in rush hour traffic. But today we’re lucky, he says. It’s a Hindu holiday and there are no cars on the roads—only people, crowds of them, many walking hand in hand or with arms slung over one another’s shoulders. It’s an expression of affection between boys and other boys, men and other men, women and women—but never men and women mixed. Friends are showing each other the closeness they can’t show the opposite sex in this strange country where arranged marriages still happen all the time.

  But after we get off the Sea Link and pull into a neighborhood the driver calls Bandra, the atmosphere changes. The stalls along the dusty streets display a mix of old and new. The clothing gets a little more stylish, and couples cuddle up along the sea. My driver is like a tour guide. We drive along the busy Bandra streets just as the sun begins to sink. Every time we pause, women with babies or small children pound on the taxi windows for handouts. I don’t have any rupees yet, but I slip a few American coins through a cracked window, along with an apple and a bag of chips that I had in my purse, and they go nuts.

  There are bakeries and outdoor clothing stalls and men with sewing machines setting up shop on the side of the road. There’s a hair salon with a sign that reads Curl Up and Dye. There’s a tiny ice cream shop advertising something called kulfi. Cows walk in the streets and laze on the sidewalks. Horns never stop honking; and on the backs of trucks there are signs that read Horn OK Please. I can see why Adam never wants to leave: in this short drive, the sights and sounds are enough to infuse my tired body with energy that could last a decade.

  Charlie hated Bombay; that much I remember. He hated the smells, the homeless people, the pollution, the sick and deformed animals and people. He hated having to sterilize vegetables and brush his teeth with bottled water. You’d have thought Charlie would have been used to that—he moved around all his life—but he was much more of a Europe/North America kind of guy.

  I can feel my pulse racing as we turn onto a busier highway. I remember this road from our trip from the airport earlier today. Adam lives in Andheri, right by the airport, on the northern end of Bombay, where the slums stretch for miles and aren’t punctuated by the bungalows or restaurants that dot Bandra, or the British-style cafés of South Bombay.

  “Linking Road,” says the driver in his melodic, carefully syllabled way.

  I’ve seen the pictures Adam’s posted on Facebook and Instagram. Since graduation, he’s been working for an NGO set up to aid educational programs within the slums. In some of his photos, he holds little Indian babies who are screaming and reaching for their mothers standing just out of the frame. In others he beams over mountains of chicken-studded rice, mystifying sauces in simple silver tureens waiting by his elbow. My favorite photo, though, is one of a goat wearing a T-shirt next to a stall that displays Bollywood posters. There’s a cart holding piles of lychees just barely in the shot and a sign offering the services of a bonesetter in the background.

  I’ve seen Adam’s house, too: a low-lying slum house—not the worst kind, sheltered by a tin roof or a tarp, but the “nicer” cement-block kind—with the words Home Sweet Home painted next to the door. Behind the house rises the Holy Spirit Hospital. Even before I reached out to him on Facebook, I knew Adam lived in the neighborhood of Andheri. But as of yesterday, I have his whole address:

  Opposite Merwans bakery

  Near Andheri East Metro station, SV road

  Andheri East, Mumbai, Maharashtra

  “Is this how you get your mail?” I typed at him. And he answered with “Yep. ☺”

  Adam’s not expecting me and Lena until tomorrow, and by now it’s nearly seven p.m. I’m standing there in front of the salmon-colored house, having paid a total of ten dollars for my ninety-minute taxi ride, when I realize how insane I’m being. I swivel back toward the taxi, but it’s too late; it’s already halfway down the street.

  I take a step away from the house. People are everywhere; the house is so small, I could probably reach around and hug it. Instead I turn, hating myself for doing something so stupid—for coming here all by myself with no real idea where I am or how to get back.

  Then the curtain that functions as a door swishes, and I hear his voice.

  “Aubrey,” he says. It’s all it takes. I turn, moving toward him lik
e I’m on a leash. Women with baskets on their heads eye me curiously, but I ignore them, pretend there’s no heat flaming in my cheeks at all, and focus only on Adam. He steps inside the shack and I follow and he closes the curtain behind us. It’s all black and we’re the only ones inside. “Aubrey,” he says again, but he whispers it this time, like it’s a prayer.

  Then he’s on me, pushing me against the wall, his mouth on mine as I wrap my legs around his waist and he hoists me up, pinning me there, working his tongue inside my mouth and his mouth on my neck and finally, when he lets me down, his hands in my hair.

  None of this was ever about Charlie, I realize, as my hands intertwine with Adam’s and press against his back and work their way over the muscles of his chest. The minute Lena and I hopped on our first plane—the minute there was Bombay—Charlie ceased to exist. Adam fills all the emptiness inside me that Charlie created.

  It’s dark when I slide my room key into the lock and push open the door to the suite. Lena’s breathing is rhythmic; she only stirs a little as the lock clicks into place behind me. I feel an ache in my chest. She misses Charlie in a way I never will, because my heart’s with someone else. I want so badly to erase her pain. I pull the blankets over her exposed shoulders, and she turns in her sleep. Then I slip off my shoes and slide under the covers without bothering to change. It’s too risky to wash the scent of Adam’s cologne and sweat off me; Lena will wake up and want to know what I’m doing at three in the morning. She doesn’t deserve another betrayal. I’m caught off-guard by how much this secret hurts.

  9

  Charlie

  You breathe in, out, steady. You’ve got it under control, everything’s controlled. You’re fine. Your little lamb’s back in New Hampshire at her liberal arts college, just an hour from her cozy family in Boston. And Aubrey’s in her senior year of high school in whatever little Illinois town she’s from—you can never remember the name of it; it’s somewhere just outside Chicago—and you’re back in uni in Oxford, far away from both of them, which is how you like it these days.

  You laugh because it’s only been three months with Aubrey and you like it best when they’re both far, far away—but you also like to hang on to them, like that rope that connects you to them. It’s better than having some girl at uni, always buzzing around. For the first year or so with Lena, she was like that . . . buzzing, always on you, always chirping about something and needing something, and those summers away from her were the best. But you love her, you really do. She’s your lamb; Aubrey’s your loris. You love them both, and that’s the problem. Sometimes the love just seeps in and takes over and you forget who you are, and that’s when it gets overwhelming. That’s why you needed those summers away, and that’s why you’re better off with them both out of the U.K.

  It’s been just over two years with Lena. There are the talks: Can you make it through college? Can you spend the summer together? Can she visit over winter break—her parents will pay for it. And every time you have to study up. Read it over (the book) to remember the basics: her habits (twirls hair, clicks teeth when thinking); her favorites (chocolate peanut butter ice cream and shrimp tempura rolls); the memories (Burning Man last summer, fishing in the Catskills the summer before that); everything down to the colors of her fingernail polish and what she smells like. If you get one detail off, you lose the game.

  Keeping them straight is harder than you figured. Sometimes they merge into one indistinguishable personality. You have to keep it straight, and it throws you—it’s not just who they are but who you are with each of them. Everything down to the clothes and how you do your hair. Sometimes it makes you angry. Sometimes you’re so angry you feel like it’s crawling out of your insides on top of your skin, visible to everybody. But they smile, they laugh at your jokes, each one lays her head on your shoulder, and you know: you’re the only one who feels your anger.

  It was fun at first. Aubrey, irresistible Aubrey. You had no choice—you had to be with her. She’s deeper, more intense than Lena, like a dark, swirly vortex. Inscrutable. Mysterious. Addictive. A challenge. The calm before the storm, the eye of the tornado. You could be somebody different with her.

  Now it’s harder. There are phone calls or at least emails, to the extent that you can get away with it (two different girls, two different yous). There are endless details to remember. And all the time you’re not with them or texting them or talking to them or emailing them or finding excuses not to do any of those things, you’re recording it in the book. To keep it all straight.

  That was why you stopped talking to Adam, and Phil, and Henry, and Z, and Alex. You kept blending your two selves into one and they were getting confused. You were making mistakes, creating holes. You couldn’t keep your selves straight and sometimes you couldn’t decide and sometimes you were someone totally different, unrecognizable. It was a fresh start. That’s why Liam had to go, and Adam before him. It’s why you live alone now in this big, empty dorm room. Just you and your two girlfriends and your book. Your favorite pages from the book are at the beginning, when things were simple, when the lists were easy and strictly factual:

  Lena

  >> The only time Lena drinks soda is on planes

  >> Likes mint-flavored floss and cigarettes

  >> Adds butter to her coffee

  >> Wears FlowerBomb perfume

  >> Hates the color orange

  >> Hates gummy candies/anything with gelatin

  >> Had pony when little named Beans

  >> Childhood friend named Bettina, now in rehab

  >> Closer to mom

  Aubrey

  >> Pours whole milk on her ice cream

  >> Wears Vanilla Mist body spray

  >> Has neg. thoughts on “using the Lord’s name in vain,” especially around her parents

  >> Good at Ping-Pong, checkers

  >> Childhood best friend named Karen

  >> Closer to dad

  >> Says “pop” instead of “soda”

  >> Allergic to pine nuts, walnuts

  Then things got more complicated—less fact-based and more emotional. Then you stopped letting Lena visit. Now you meet somewhere off campus. Once she surprised you and you blamed all the evidence on Liam. You said, “Liam hasn’t moved out yet,” but in reality that’s not why there was a book of selected Keats poems on your desk. (Research.) You said the Van Halen CDs were Liam’s older cousin’s.

  You’ve started dreaming about it at night. Lena’s face with Aubrey’s black hair. Aubrey twirling Lena’s silver boxing glove pendant over one red-painted index finger. Lena with ballet slippers, dancing to Tchaikovsky until her movements become jerkier and jerkier and she’s on puppet strings tugged by you, and then you switch and she and Aubrey are the ones tugging the strings and you’re the one doing the dance and they’re both laughing.

  Your grades are slipping, not that it matters. They don’t flunk people out, especially not you. They need your family’s donations; everyone knows that. There’s a freaking building on campus named after your grandfather.

  Sometimes you open the book and flip back, way back to the early days, when you first started it, after the move to Bangkok after middle school. It started as a list.

  Bangkok Charlie Likes:

  banana nut bread

  hammocks

  collecting rocks

  jazz music

  curse words (in any language)

  Then a year or two later:

  London Charlie Likes:

  kangaroos

  roller coasters

  molten chocolate cake

  comic books

  Then there started to be differences. Conflicting information. You began to get confused.

  Paris Charlie Hates:

  music (all except soul)

  marsupials

  fucked-up shit

  self-help books

  It was no big deal. Your interests change all the time. That’s what happens when you travel—you see some stuff, you try a lot
of stuff. That’s what happens to everyone. “We can’t keep your interests straight, Charlie,” your parents say on the rare occasions when you’re home from boarding school and your dad’s back for a holiday or whatever. But they laugh, like it’s some big joke or quirky personality trait.

  Problem is, your interests change all the time. And Aubrey, she demands something different: she wants your interests to stay the same, when you’re with her. When you first met her, you shared strawberry milkshakes. You saw her again, and your interest in strawberry milkshakes had disappeared. They made you want to vomit. But you said it and her brow furrowed and her mouth turned down and you said, Just kidding. And you drank the goddamn strawberry milkshake. Everything had to stay the same. You’d hoped she was different, that she’d be amenable to change. She’s not.

  Lena wasn’t either. Imagine having to pretend for three years with Lena. Just imagine what it would be like, trying to pretend you like basketball for two years running, or that you’re into sports at all anymore after a couple months’ fascination. Lena never got it. You hoped she’d accept you the way you are—the you that’s changing and interested in lots of different things—but she never did. So you had to be a consistent person, to please her.

  That was why Aubrey was exciting at first. She was a change. You could be a different thing with her. Then she got stale too. It was easy when you were younger, always moving, always picking up people and later discarding them when you left, always able to slip on another cloak without anyone knowing the difference. Now it’s harder. And you’re angry.

  But you love them, you really do.

  Sometimes you love Aubrey so much you want to smother her. Really smother her. Wrap her all up in you until she can’t breathe anymore. Until she has to breathe your air, with your lungs. You love Lena so much, it’s like aliens take over your brain when you’re focused on her. Sometimes you’re thinking about it so much, missing her so much, that you forget to eat or drink anything for entire days. Your vision clouds and you get weak, and you remember.