Once I had made some friends and had gotten settled into my graduate school life, I condescended to sit down for a meal with my parents or join them in front of the TV for a Hitchcock marathon or join my mother for a trip to Stop and Shop. And once Claire started coming by, charming my dad with her Red Sox trivia or helping my mother set the table for a Sunday night meal, I started to appreciate my parents again. They were smart, loving people, and they made Claire, and later Charlie, feel right at home. I think they sensed, long before I did, that my two best friends were craving a sense of family. I can still picture us all together in their house that is now only mine. My father on the balcony with his pipe, Charlie at his side, arguing politics, politely coughing away the smoke that drifted toward him. Claire perched on the barstool, asking my mother for advice about her next semester’s classes even though she had registered several weeks before. And me, trying to translate the space between past and present that had led to all these conversations circling me. I was happy and simultaneously embarrassed by my happiness. And then, only a year or so later, those moments became echoes.
After my parents were killed by a drunk driver on the Mass Pike, I locked myself in the attic and wouldn’t come out. My aunts came by, opening the house with their spare keys, and banged on my door, but I wouldn’t budge. My cousin Sam called to me from the other side of the door, begging me to eat some toast, take a shower, walk around the block, but I ignored her. I listened to their shuffling below me. I heard their concern and their exasperation, but I didn’t care. I wanted to disappear into my covers; I wanted my bed to swallow me up and bring me to my parents. I wanted to disappear from my life. I hadn’t spoken to anyone since the hospital, and I wasn’t even certain my voice worked anymore. I had stopped eating. I lost track of the hours, days.
Claire kicked my door open. I remember the sound of its crashing. My room was dark, but she was illuminated by the hall lights. She smelled like the outside, early winter. She sat down on the side of my bed and told me that she wasn’t leaving. Charlie was downstairs and he wasn’t leaving either. He was making some tea. Then she slowly peeled away my sour clothes and led me to the bathroom, where she filled up the tub with steaming water and lavender oil and watched me as I dunked my miserable body down under the water.
Over the next couple of months, first Claire and then Charlie moved in. Little by little, they filled up my parents’ house with conversation and bustle. While I sat, despondent, on my father’s favorite couch, looking over my course readings without registering a word, Claire busied herself in the kitchen and Charlie shouted at an op-ed article from the Globe.
These days, as I straighten up their kitchen, I think about my mother’s kitchen, which is of course mine now. I inherited my mother’s slate counters and gas stove and cast iron pots too soon, but we all eventually made a home there. To repay their kindness, I am trying to help forge a peaceful ground for them in their own house.
Claire and I had met less than a year before, in our research methods course, and Charlie I had known back in England, but he was a new arrival to Boston, just like Claire. We called my parents’ house, which had suddenly become my house, the Orphanage. It is an unassuming brownstone tucked away in Brookline, in the shadows of Boston. It is made of bricks and it is sturdy and there is a garden out back that I share with my neighbors and their gray tabby. Claire was the first to name the house, and she didn’t mean to be cruel. She has always been matter of fact and unsentimental.
I was two years into graduate school when my parents died. Claire had lost hers long before in quick succession—her mother from cancer, her father from the strain of that loss. Charlie’s parents were the only ones still living, but they were hidden away in a sleepy village in northern East Anglia. There was only one shop and one lone pub in their town. They rode their bikes to and from their little stone cottage when they did choose to venture out. I had visited them once, the year Charlie and I met, during my junior year abroad. They still remember me. They send me Christmas cards every winter. Charlie hasn’t seen them in at least five years, I think. I don’t know if he’s told them about Claire.
Claire moved in with me, into my parents’ house, when I returned to school. She was just finishing up her degree and had been hired as a freelance journalist for the AP’s Boston bureau. I changed my studies from journalism to publishing then. I found that I had lost my curiosity and my willingness to talk to most people. I got an internship working for Houghton Mifflin in their language arts section, and I still edit high school English textbooks for them, sitting at a desk next to a window that overlooks Copley Square.
Claire took possession of my parents’ bedroom, an act I was grateful for, and I moved back into my childhood room. Charlie came over on the weekends and helped us with the larger projects, stripping hardwood floors, repainting all the rooms. Forest green in the dining room. A burnt orange-red in the kitchen. The smell of paint lingered in the house for a long time. It smelled of newness to me, and that, in and of itself, was a relief. I followed Claire’s lead in her rearrangement of loss. As if by changing the shapes and patterns of things, we could carve out a present from the past. It wasn’t exactly an act of erasure, but it was close.
I let Claire help me believe that we were all a family then—Claire, Rachel, and Charlie. The orphans. I loved them both very much.
When Charlie and Claire returned from Claire’s hospital visit this afternoon, Claire seemed unsteady and Charlie was chewing on the inside of his mouth, never a good sign. Claire kissed me on the cheek and announced she was heading upstairs for a nap. Charlie collapsed on a chair and ran his fingers roughly through his hair. “I’ll wake you in a couple of hours, then?” he called out to Claire, who was already halfway up the staircase. She stopped and stretched her torso over the banister. She winked at both of us and extended two fingers. A peace sign. And then she retreated up the stairs and Charlie let out a sigh. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Rach.”
Charlie hadn’t held my gaze for more than a few seconds since their return, and now was no different. He rested his head in his hands and muttered toward the floor. “Tea?”
“All right,” I said. “Come with me to the kitchen.”
While I filled the kettle and set some crackers and cheese on a plate, Charlie sat down on the counter, his long legs dangling over the silverware drawer. The flash of him in this same position ten, maybe twelve years before, sent a pulse through me for a moment. Oh, innocent, helpless, sincere Charlie. I might not trust you this time.
“Was it a difficult day, then?” I passed Charlie the crackers. I could be patient. I’d wait for whatever information he felt like sharing with me. So far he had been pretty reticent. “Black tea or chamomile or peppermint?” I don’t know why I offered these choices. Charlie has always thought that herbal teas were criminal. I placed a bag of Darjeeling into his cup before he answered.
“Black. As if you had to ask.” Charlie picked at the plate of cheese. “And not that difficult, I suppose. But I swear, Rach. It’s like she’s testing me. I watch her and I don’t believe her. I think she’s playing with me.”
“Playing with you how?”
“I think she remembers more than she lets on. I think she’s trying to rewrite everything.”
I think about this comment of Charlie’s. This word, rewrite. I think about Claire, the way she appeared as she walked in from the garage. A bit haggard, certainly, but fierce and determined as ever. Her eyes, always enormous and searching on her otherwise small face, were almost defiant. Don’t you dare treat me like a sick person, she seemed to be warning me. And I wouldn’t ever have dared it. Claire, in a way, has always written our stories. Charlie and I have both always looked to her to tell us what comes next. I am waiting for her to show us how to go forward from here. I sense that Charlie is waiting for the same thing.
But if Charlie is right about Claire’s acts of revision, then our next step may actually be a step back into the past. Perhaps I am even m
ore eager for her to lead us in that direction. Maybe she will crack open the truth of what happened to us. I’ve been waiting all these years for her merely to explain why. I’d forgive her if she’d help me understand.
And why, exactly does Claire need to be forgiven? Charlie, of course, has his own answers. And if I’m completely honest, I probably owe Charlie an apology or two. I have to admit, it is so strange to see Claire and Charlie together again; I had grown used to visiting with Claire on her own, when she swept into Boston or invited me down to New York on one of her short stops there. I kept Charlie company through e-mails, and we had recently got ourselves caught up in a postcard-sending ritual. He sent me, first, an old card from Niagara Falls, probably printed in the 1940s or early 1950s, and it had one line of text on it that I didn’t recognize at first, until I sat with it for a while and realized it was a line from an Elizabeth Bishop poem: A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination. . . .
It was winter and the quote was from “The Moose,” and I felt a little jump in my belly, thinking that Charlie had remembered that it was one of my favorites. So I had trudged in the snow to a junk shop in Jamaica Plain and found a water-damaged, musty old card with a faded greeting on it: welcome to hyannis! have a swim! A group of young girls with arms locked like paper dolls gazed out from the postcard. They wore bathing caps and modest suits that covered the tops of their thighs. The girls looked shy, a bit ashamed even, in front of the camera, and the exclamation points in the greeting seemed to taunt them. On the back of the card I scribbled a line in return.
January jumps about
in the frying pan
trying to heat
his frozen feet
like a Canadian.
It was from a George Barker poem. Charlie had always insisted that the writers from Norfolk always got ignored by the rest of England, so he had forced me, during our time together in East Anglia, to listen to him recite lines from Barker and William Cowper and even John Clare, who wasn’t from Norfolk but was overlooked nonetheless because “he wasn’t Byron.” I hoped the lines would remind Charlie of that cold winter we had spent together in Norwich and how we had looked forward to the spring months, when Charlie had promised to take me on a trip along the Broads and to the old port towns of Southwold and Lowestoft. I liked that there were summery bathing girls on the front of the postcard, while the text reminded of the long winter ahead. As I mailed off the postcard, I had a giddy feeling in my gut—I wondered what he’d send me next.
Looking back at these cards, I am amazed at how little we’ve all changed. Charlie and I have always been better at communicating in silence or with other people’s words. Claire took over from the poets and novelists we had read aloud in those smoky Norfolk pubs. When Charlie moved in with us, he took on the habit of using Claire as his mouthpiece. “Claire,” he would say, “you know what I mean. Tell Rachel why it’s a terrible idea to replace the tiles in the upstairs bath.” Or “Claire, you’ll explain it better than me. Tell Rachel why Al Pacino’s character lost all plausibility in that scene at the diner.”
And it wasn’t only Charlie. I told Claire things that were always meant for Charlie’s ears; I told her in the hope that she might translate my indistinct feelings and make them more decipherable. And then, of course, I had told her the most important thing of all and she promised never to tell Charlie about it, but of course it was the thing he most needed to hear. But I was frightened and I wasn’t sure that he loved me, and Claire had been so protective and so very certain and she handled it all, the appointment, the counseling, but most of all, she handled the silence for us. After being our voice for so long, it was a bit of a surprise, I suppose, that there were things she would never reveal.
I thought at the time that she was being the very best kind of friend, and I still do want to believe that. I don’t think anything that was to come was planned, that Claire used this secret pact to her advantage, but of course it can look that way now, just as it looked that way then, when I watched Charlie kissing her up on that ladder, spying on them from the doorway, my own silence twisting up in knots, settling in for the long haul.
When I am completely honest with myself, I have to contend with my own memories, of how I explained things to Claire, how I erased the truth. When I had told her, she asked me, “Do you love him? Is he the man for you? Can you imagine your future together?”
I had dismissed her questions. How was I supposed to imagine a future with Charlie? We were only twenty-three years old. But there was a lot I didn’t say because I was embarrassed by my feelings. Claire and I had spent so many evenings planning our future, our careers, our future travels, that I was afraid to tell her that the idea of raising a family with Charlie filled me with comfort. I had fallen in love with him in a rowboat on the Broads, and I had been denying it ever since. Claire, it seemed to me at the time, didn’t believe in love or sentimentality or nostalgia, and I needed her to see me as an equal and an ally, so I lied. “I love Charlie as a dear friend, just like I love you, Claire,” I answered stupidly.
She had joked with me then. “Well, not entirely the same, Rach. We don’t sleep together.”
I laughed with her and exaggerated my ambivalence. I’m not sure I’m in love with Charlie, I said, when what I really meant was, I’m not sure he’s in love with me. We all have so many plans, and a baby would interrupt them, I said, when I really wondered if we could all still live in this house, Claire, Charlie, me, and a baby. Could we all raise this child together? Make new rules that didn’t follow a particular order?
When she asked, Do you want to tell him? Do you want me to tell him with you? I had answered, No. I thought I was being grown up about the whole thing, stoic even. Charlie is so dutiful, so serious, don’t you think, Claire? He would offer to marry me and make things right, but later he might start to resent the limitations, the constraints. I don’t want to be responsible for his future disappointments.
Eventually it was my own words that came out of Claire’s mouth.
It is hard for me to look back and try to figure out what in fact I had wanted from Charlie. My parents were dead and I was pregnant and Claire seemed so certain. We had our whole lives to think about, she said, just as I had said moments before. Charlie was my good friend, but hardly my boyfriend, and so on. Her words took shape in my mind, alongside my own, even though in my heart I believed we really could raise the baby together, in my parents’ house. We were already a family. I had lost my parents, but we’d all raise their grandchildren in their bright kitchen, cozy living room, book-filled attic. I didn’t care if it seemed strange to other people; we could all be a family together.
I never did explain all of this to Claire because I knew she’d think it was foolish. She’d think I was foolish, unreasonable, selfish even. She certainly wouldn’t be putting her life on hold for anyone, and I shouldn’t either, nor could I ask that of Charlie. We were so young. I heard her voice in my head. What on earth would we do with a child? What would I do with one? Because most certainly Charlie and Claire would want to leave one day, and then I would be alone with him or her, and it was this thought that made me feel panicky. I erased my fantasy and replaced it with Claire’s sensible advice, which she had translated from my own words.
The timing was excellent, she assured me. Charlie was leaving for a conference in Chicago. She would make the appointment at the clinic. She would hold my hand; I wouldn’t be alone. I’d have a full week of rest and time to think before Charlie returned, and he would never have to know. As Claire and I mapped out our plans, Charlie was most likely on the tenth floor of an old building on Comm Ave, his head cocked in attention as his professor lectured away the afternoon. Claire had held my hand between hers, and two cups of untouched tea steamed in front of us. “Oh my sweet Rae,” Claire whispered as a Syd Barrett album crackled from the living room, and then she told me not to cry, that it would all be okay. We were only twenty-three years old, and someday thi
s would all feel like a very long time ago and I would know that it had been the right thing to do.
But now I know she was wrong. I was wrong. Nothing feels like a long time ago, because Charlie started sending those postcards that I taped to the wall over my desk, and I started to anticipate them in my mailbox and I began driving to antique markets in Essex and Amherst to look for old postcards and I would send them, hoping for a quick reply. They were important to me, even though they made me feel guilty, even though I knew some of the secrets now tucked away in Claire’s boxes. I started to believe that the postcards were filled with secret messages. For Charlie, though, I think they were merely a playful distraction built on other distractions and denials that helped him manage Claire’s disappearing acts.
Besides, it was too late for an explanation now, too late for an apology for the many lies we told him, all those years ago. Perhaps if he hadn’t climbed up that ladder to kiss our best friend, perhaps then I would have felt more of an obligation, but I took that first betrayal and all that came from it as my punishment. It’s awful of me, but when I first learned about Claire’s being sick, I thought that her own punishment had finally caught up with her. But now I’m not so sure. Perhaps her good fortune has won out again and she’s going to be given a second chance with Charlie. I have become a bitter and angry person, I realize, because I’m not sure I’m willing to let that happen, for any of us.
“Where are you, Rach?” Charlie asked over his tea. “You traveled far away for a moment there,” he said.
“I’m drifting,” I answered him. “Going through boxes, looking at old photo albums, you sitting there, banging your legs on the counter like you’ve always done.”
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