Charlie, Presumed Dead

by Anne Heltzel

  “Lena, goddammit, just book that flight right away, you hear?” My dad’s voice breaks in, drowning out my mother’s anxiety. “In fact, I’ll put you on the phone with my secretary and she’ll take care of it. She’ll book that other girl, Aubrey, on a flight too. You said she has a credit card? I’ll transfer a few hundred dollars to your bank account just in case you run into trouble. Where are Aubrey’s parents in all of this? Has she called them?”

  “She’s fine,” I tell him, avoiding the question. “Her credit card will cover the flight.” I pray it’s true; but if not, flights within Asia are cheap, and I know we can dip into my newly padded account if we have to.

  “Well, we can help with emergencies, but that’s it. We can’t foot a double bill when we’ve never even met this girl. Her parents need to step up.” My father’s voice is gruff and authoritarian. He’s picked up from his home office extension, which links to our family’s landline. I used to think it was quaint that my parents still have a landline. Now I wish I could have dialed up and been sure of talking to only one person. Both of them at once are overwhelming.

  “Dad,” I interrupt, “can you just give me your credit card information and I’ll take care of it?”

  “Absolutely not,” he replies. “If you think I’m trusting you for a second after what you’ve done—no way. I’m putting you through to my secretary.”

  “What I want to know is, where did you meet this Aubrey,” my mom goes on. “Who the hell is she, Lena?” I roll my eyes and reach for a tube of Christmas wrapping paper that’s lying in a bin near the cash register.

  “You know Lena gets into trouble just fine on her own,” my dad is saying to my mom as I hand the clerk one of the few remaining coins in my wallet and rip off a corner of the paper. It’s helpful, this one time, that their expectations for me are so low. I hold the paper up to the receiver and crumple it a few times. Aubrey raises her eyebrows at me and I give her a thumbs-up.

  “What’s that, Dad?” I ask into the phone, folding and unfolding the paper next to the receiver. It makes a satisfying crackling noise. “Dad? I think I’m about to lose you. Maybe you’d better put me through to Cara?”

  “Lena? Hello? Lena? Are you there?” My mom’s voice becomes louder, shrill.

  “Sorry, Mom,” I semi-shout, knowing she’ll find it more convincing. “Having trouble hearing you. Dad? Can you connect Cara?”

  “Switching it over, Leelee,” my dad goes. My heart clenches up at his pet name for me. I feel even worse than before.

  Then there’s a silence and the lines are switched, and Cara’s voice breaks in loud and clear. I toss the paper ball onto the counter.

  “Hi, Lena,” she says. “Got yourself into a real pickle this time, huh?” I smile. Cara’s always been more like a big sister to me than anything else. She used to babysit me as a kid. She’s been working for my dad for ten years.

  “Hey, Care Bear,” I say. “A total shitshow. The Producer’s not pleased.” Cara and I started calling my dad “the Producer” in jest a few years back because of his secret love for Broadway (he himself lacks vocal talent). But it’s all out of love. Cara swears she’d never work for anyone else, and my parents have given her a pretty cushy setup at home. “Can you book me two one-ways to Bangkok, please?” I whisper this last line, because Aubrey does not yet know we’re going to Bangkok. “You can use my dad’s card for both.” I bite my lip. Aubrey gave me her emergency card for her ticket with strict instructions to book for Chicago. But we might need it for other things once we’re in Bangkok. Since we have no money and all.

  “No way, Lena,” Cara says, her voice rising. “Your dad told me to get you straight back to Boston.”

  “Cara,” I start, keeping myself calm. “Thing is, we already have return tickets booked from Bangkok.” My eyes follow Aubrey’s progress toward the back of the store. She’s funny, like a child, eyeing all the cheap touristy stuff with huge eyes. “We were supposed to be there already,” I tell her, lying. “We booked the whole thing—flights there, then flights back to the U.S. tomorrow morning from there. But we were supposed to fly in last night, and we missed our flights when a psycho Indian guy drugged us. So can you just book us new flights? My dad knows all this. Minus the psycho Indian guy.” My heart’s hammering but I keep my cool. I pause, waiting for Cara’s response.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me . . . ?” There’s uncertainty in her question. I squeeze my eyes shut and grind my teeth once before I answer. I’ve never lied to Cara. Not until now. I never thought I would, especially when it might mean her getting in trouble with my dad.

  “No way!” I pipe up, feeling the receiver shift against my slick palms. “I’d never. Dad was just confused.” My stomach drops. I hate what I’ve just done. Worse, I don’t understand it. I don’t know why I can’t just let this mad search for Charlie go, and why I keep making ridiculous choices at the expense of everybody else.

  But after Anand’s note . . .

  He’s alive.

  The voice that tells me so won’t quit. There’s no turning back. It’s not possible.

  “Okay. Eleven fifty-five p.m. into Suvarnabhumi. It’s a redeye, but that way you’ll still make your flights tomorrow morning. You’ve been there, yes? You know how it works? Or you want me to arrange for someone at the airport to escort you two?”

  “Cara, please. I’m nineteen, not twelve.” Cara laughs, and I feel a pang. She’s always been rather protective of me.

  “Got it,” she says. “Give me a minute while I make the reservations.” I sneak peeks at Aubrey, who’s moving toward me. I can’t have Aubrey catch me before the transaction goes through. She still hasn’t called her parents, told them the whole story. She’s trusting me to get her home. But I can’t, not now, not when we’re in it so far. Surely she must know that, a little voice in my head pipes up. Surely she can’t expect anything else. A second later it’s done. “You’ve got access to email?” Cara wants to know.

  “Sure,” I say distractedly. “There’s loads of Internet cafés around.” It’s not entirely true. We’re in a third-world country, after all. But I’m sure we’ll figure something out. The phone beeps to let me know I have less than a minute left. “Cara? Thanks.” I pause and take a breath. “I really appreciate your help.”

  “Anything for my girl,” Cara says, her tone warm. “Bye, sweetie. Safe travel, ’kay? See you tomorrow night.”

  “See you,” I start to say, but the phone disconnects before both words leave my mouth.

  “Is it done?” Aubrey wants to know. She’s wearing a stick-on bindi on her forehead and carries an open pack of sparkly faux jewels.

  “We don’t have money for you to buy those,” I point out.

  “Sure we do,” she says. “I found a hundred rupees in my pants pocket. We could probably even eat something tonight if we play our cards right. I’m kidding,” she says, registering my expression, which probably reads as worried. “There’s gotta be enough left on my credit card for food, right? I mean, there was a thousand-dollar limit. How much was my ticket?”

  “Um . . .” I start. “Only about four hundred.”

  “Four hundred dollars?” Aubrey exclaims. “That’s so great. How’d you find tickets for that cheap?” When I don’t answer, she looks hard at my face. Then she tenses and begins fiddling with her cuff. I stare back, silently entreating her not to be angry. “You didn’t buy tickets back to Boston and Chicago,” she says slowly. “Because tickets back to the U.S. would be much more than that.” She waits for me to reply even though she knows the answer.

  “Nope,” I tell her. Aubrey takes a deep breath, then brings her hands to her temples and massages them, pressing in hard with her thumbs. Her short black hair looks limp, greasy. We haven’t showered in days.

  “Give me my credit card,” she demands.

  “No,” I say again. “Not until you promise to go to Bangkok with me. It’s kind of too late anyway. I took care of your flight. Your credit card limit is too low
to book a flight home. We’ll need it for Bangkok. Consider it, Aubrey. Just hear me out this time. You know I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Would Charlie really have planned to kill himself? Isn’t that a little over the top for someone who was such a coward, who talked about running away all the time? I think Anand was trying to tell us something. I think he’s alive. And I need you to consider it as a real possibility for a second.”

  “You do.” Aubrey’s voice is dull, flat.

  “Yeah,” I say in a rush. “And there’s more. I think Charlie buried a message for me in that suicide note. I’ve practically memorized it by now. I read it and reread it because something kept bugging me about the language he used. Especially the eight-eighteen and death. I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then I realized—some of the things he said were quotes from a crazy song we used to listen to. ‘Epizootics.’ By Scott Walker,” I clarify, seeing her blank look. “He said things right from the song: ‘all the people . . . pushing each other around’; ‘Sorry, I’m so clumsy’; ‘It’s dense. Tense.’ Suddenly it all started coming together. But I still couldn’t figure out why he’d do that. Then I remembered.” I pause, trying to catch my breath. “And maybe just in time. He practically spoon-fed it to me, like he knew I’d find that letter. Today is August sixteenth. In the letter, Charlie talked about death being like empty shoes at eight-eighteen. When I realized other parts of his letter were ‘Epizootics’ lyrics, I remembered the video. And the conversation we had about it.” I shudder. I can’t help it; the video was one of the most macabre I’d ever seen, full of insects crawling on skin and manic dancing and a series of bizarre images. Charlie had been fascinated by it.

  “What was the conversation?” Aubrey asks, her eyes wide.

  “Charlie thought the empty shoes meant someone died. Not just anyone. The woman in the video. The one dancing. I said it was ridiculous. The shoes appear a bunch of times, and the woman keeps appearing afterward. But Charlie kept saying, ‘No, when you see the shoes for the last time, you know she’s dead. See,’ he said, and then he flipped through the video and showed me all the times the shoes appeared. The last time was toward the end of the video. ‘Now it’s eight-eighteen and she’s gone forever,’ he told me. She was only on the road to death before. I’m almost positive it was eight-eighteen he said. I remember being creeped out, but then I figured he’d just read up on the meaning of the song on one of the music blogs he was always on—that Scott Walker had really intended it to be that way, and Charlie was just recounting his intentions.

  “Now I’m wondering why he referenced it in the letter. Maybe what Charlie had planned for August eighteenth had more to do with us—or me—than with him. I think it’s a clue. I think he wants us to find him.”

  “You’re crazy,” Aubrey says, shaking her head at me. Her blue eyes are brighter than usual. “If he meant anything at all by it—and he probably didn’t, since like you said, it seemed like he was out of his mind—I’m sure it had to do more with him than you or me.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I say, tightening my grip on the counter. “But I need to know for sure. And you still need your journal. Don’t you want to know where that address leads?”

  Aubrey lifts her head and looks me straight in the eye. She straightens her shoulders. When she speaks, her voice is clear and confident. “I’m sick of this roller-coaster ride,” she starts. “I feel all over the place, totally out of whack. But I want to know what the hell is going on. So let’s go to Bangkok,” she says. “Plus . . .” She pauses here, and her lips curve up into a wicked smile. “If Charlie is alive, I’ve got some damn good ideas for making him wish he’d never messed with us.”

  I grin back, biting my lip. I have to stop myself from leaping across the few feet that separate us and pulling her into a hug.

  18

  Aubrey

  It’s something I can never fully explain to Lena. She won’t understand, because she loved Charlie in a way I couldn’t. She hurts from the loss in a way I don’t. And, although I’m plagued by anger and confusion and sadness and guilt, she’s plagued by heartbreak. I see it all over this crazy adventure: it’s in the way she needs us to be here, searching for something as yet undefined amid the smells of saffron and turmeric in street stalls and undulating trance music in sweaty London clubs and the beautiful, polluted waters of the Arabian Sea. It’s why I say yes to Bangkok, even though I’m fairly certain the answers aren’t waiting for us there, even though I know it might be dangerous, even though I know my parents are probably already booking their flights out to bring me home. Lena needs something and I feel compelled to give it to her, or at least to be there while she searches. None of it is logical, all emotional. My heart hurts for Lena every time I see the loss on her face, even though technically the same exact person has disappeared from my life. I’m just not suffering in the same way.

  It is no secret that I was questioning things with Charlie; but I couldn’t tell anyone. None of my old friends from Liberty—the school I attended before we moved to the eastern side of the city during my junior year—kept in touch after I left. The couple of casual friends I made didn’t understand why I’d date someone who didn’t live right there, who couldn’t make out in my parents’ family room or the hub of a station wagon at the drive-in, who couldn’t split a six-pack in the dark corners of someone’s unfinished basement. My parents disapproved of the way I hopped on flights and trains, single-handedly (in their minds alone) sustaining the financial models of Amtrak and Southwest, industries designed (again, just in their minds) to capitalize on Before Sunrise moments. Industries I bought into with babysitting money alone. They called my bluff, and I couldn’t bear to admit that they were right. It was all for nothing.

  Adam was the last person I should have sought comfort from, but I did it anyway. Adam knew Charlie and didn’t completely trust him. He never said so, but it was always there. Adam liked me, however, from the beginning. He was like a salve, a trusted friend when Charlie was impossible to trust. He was comforting, while Charlie was variable and extreme and moody.

  Flash back to April: I’m sitting on the sofa waiting for Charlie to text, flipping through my parents’ Netflix until I settle on a French film, the slightly steamy tale of an uptight writer whose world is blown wide open by her publisher’s free-spirited daughter. It’s a fairly predictable, cotton-candy plot, at least for the first half—I’ve seen it before—but its easy French eroticism does nothing to distract me from the dead silence of my phone. Charlie and I scheduled a FaceTime session at one p.m. my time, seven p.m. his. It’s 1:10 and I’m starting to suspect it’s not going to happen.

  Charlie is forever promising to call, forever forgetting. Forever neglecting to respond to my text messages, the last of which read, “Hey! Thank you so much for the book recommendation, can’t wait to pick it up!” In actuality, Charlie recommended a book I had no interest in at all—a nonfiction account of the emergence of indie rock musicians in Germany. I’m not sure why he sent it in the first place. We haven’t seen each other in six weeks now, the longest we’ve ever gone, and we’re talking an average of twice per week aside from the occasional email. It’s starting not to feel like a relationship at all. I used to convince myself it was better this way; it’s my senior year of high school and I have to ace Honors Physics II in order to keep my scholarship to Georgetown. I don’t have time for a distraction. The phone rings and my heart picks up. But one quick glance at the caller ID tells me it’s not Charlie.

  Still, my heart doesn’t drop. It lifts at the sight of Adam’s name. I pick up the phone, taking a breath first to ensure that my voice remains neutral. I swallow the guilt that’s filling my chest. It’s not wrong to get excited about Adam’s calls, I assure myself; it’s the opposite of wrong. I need a friend. Ever since switching schools, I’ve had pretty much no one but my dog and Charlie for company.

  “Hey, you,” Adam says. His voice is always upbeat and warm. The time difference between Illinois and Mumbai is more ex
treme than the one between Illinois and Oxford, yet Adam manages to surprise me with phone calls fairly often. “Listen, I’m just calling for a minute because I was in Jaipur during the literary festival and I picked something up that I think you’ll like, but I need your mailing address.”

  “Have you heard of a little thing called texting?” I tease. “Or is that too Gen Y for you?” Adam and I have this joke that although we’re both technically Millennials, neither of us fits the profile by a long shot. He has a fear of electronic communication—he’s only occasionally on Facebook or Twitter—and both of us still like to read books printed on paper. Plus, he’s living in a third-world country, on his own. That changes a person, at least in the sense that gadgetry becomes less important.

  “Trust me, this surprise waits for no one. And I know how you are about responding to texts.” I laugh, but I can’t push away the pang I feel. Adam is basically saying the same exact thing I say to Charlie every time he sends me a two-line email and encourages me to be okay with it.

  “Okay,” I tell him. “You ready?”

  I rattle off my mailing address and give him a quick goodbye, and then Adam is gone and I’m smiling. He’s left me with a new wave of energy—kind of like after I drink peppermint tea in the winter or feel a breeze on my skin in the stifling heat of the summer. The energy of sharp contrast, I realize. Adam’s voice is a momentary reprieve, every time.

  A reprieve. I don’t like to think about what it’s a reprieve from.

  A second later my phone pings and there’s a message from Adam that reads, “Embracing the Y.” Underneath it is a photo of Adam with Art Spiegelman, who created the graphic novel wonder that is Maus.

  “OMFG,” I type back, grinning like a lunatic. Then Adam responds with a big winky face because he knows I’m super excited but also half joking because I hate acronyms; we had a whole conversation less than a week ago about how dumb they are eighty percent of the time, again establishing ourselves as the same kind of freak.