But Charles always yearned for wide open spaces. When he was six he’d announced he wanted to be a farmer. His parents were appalled. They hadn’t left Barbados only to have their son turn around and work his way back down into the dirt. No one understood it; his older brother and their friends laughed about it for years.
He hadn’t really known that black people in America could live outside a city, could grow in wilderness, until he found Laurel. When they first met she still smelled like fresh pine sap. It was subtle, most noticeable right behind her ears and under her chin. He’d told her and she’d been mortified and then insisted he must be joking. But he wasn’t. She had always smelled like wide-open country to him. He made her tell him everything about her home: the tree farm, the hills. Once, she mentioned picking fiddleheads from the weeds in the woods behind her house, brushing off their paper veils and secretly biting the fresh curls till they burst into green in her mouth. “My mother said they’d make me sick, but they never did.” She did not find that wondrous at all, thought him odd for thinking so. “It was just stuff you eat as a kid on your way to school, like chewing on hay,” she said, as if chewing hay were normal, too.
The farm was gone by the time they met. Her parents mortgaged it to send her to college and then her father died of pneumonia shortly before her graduation, followed by her mother a few months later. In the wilds of their early love, Charles promised Laurel he would buy it back for her, and she’d said, “Don’t bother.” She told him about the oblivion of Maine, the cotton balls in her ears, the breath suspended. But that didn’t put him off. It made him want it more. Even the racism up there in the country seemed bucolic to him. Much better than the squawks and loud calls of the college students in Central Square who liked to mark their territory by catcalling insults at him from the doorways of bars he’d walked past for years. He considered it the major failure of his and Laurel’s life together: that at the end of their first decade of marriage, he still hadn’t made enough money to get them to the green.
Laurel knew that, of course. She’d used it to her advantage, when she’d started the long, slow haggle of convincing him to move to the Toneybee. She mentioned the money, and the teaching gig at the high school already lined up for him, but they both knew the real selling point was the woods and the trees and the streams. The selling point was the green. The rest of it: the monkey and the book and the stories, those awful stories about the place, didn’t matter.
Charles erased the ashy chalkboard of all the equations he’d written that day. He turned to his desk and began to pack up his things. He would like to have driven home with Charlotte, but she was doing her best to pretend she didn’t know him, a fact Charles found funny and sad. “We’re the only two black people in this place with the last name Freeman,” he’d told her gently. “They know you belong to me.” Charlotte was tricky. Maybe she would laugh at that, maybe she would be mortally offended. He’d caught her on a day when she was mortally offended—she’d rolled her eyes at him in a panic of embarrassment.
He walked out of the office toward the parking lot and the Toneybee’s Volvo. He could never think of it as his. He did not like to drive it, though he knew it made Laurel proud. Lyle, Charles’s brother, called Laurel a snob, said she would ruin him. And Charles knew what Lyle saw—Laurel had a desperation on her, a desire for better that sparked off her like sharp gleams of light. If you didn’t know her, you’d mistake it for base ambition. But it wasn’t, Charles knew that.
When they were first dating, Laurel worked at a city hospital. Her boss put her in charge of a patient named Ned. Ned was seven but the same size as a two-year-old. He’d been found tied to a metal post in a barn in Vermont. His teeth were rotten, nearly mush. He had never tasted solid food. “His family fed him on one carton of whole milk, tossed into the barn at sunrise every morning,” Laurel told Charles, her eyes shining.
Ned had a birth defect: a soft opening at the back of his skull that never closed, only opened wider as he grew. Ned’s parents weren’t bad people. They kept him in the barn for his protection, they claimed, and tried to overlook the problem of a hole in the head. As for feeding him only milk: they were worried the strain of chewing might upset the gap. By the time the proper authorities got ahold of him, it was too late for Ned to learn to speak and Laurel was supposed to teach him to sign.
Laurel told Charles that every night Ned was in her care, they lay together side by side, his back against her front so that he wouldn’t roll over in sleep and crush his gap and die in the spoils of his own brain. She held Ned tight, careful not to brush his head. She clasped his hands, muffled in hospital mittens, between her own, to keep him from scratching. While he slept she studied the hollow in his head. “I forced myself to do it,” she told him, and Charles knew then that he loved her.
“It used to scare me,” she told him. “It was so open.” She could see, under the whisper of Ned’s bright blond hair, the mysterious whorls and lines of his brain. “I could look at it all day,” she told him. She thought she could see Ned’s brain pulse.
“It’s like, it’s like,” she’d sputtered, searching for the right words.
“It’s like love,” he’d supplied her, and she’d smiled, grateful. That’s when he knew they would make it together. “Yes, it’s exactly like love,” she replied. And then she’d thought a moment, corrected them both. “No, it is love.”
She finger-spelled into Ned’s palm and told Charles excitedly about seeing flashes of recognition in his eyes. She bathed him twice a day, attempting to rid his skin of the dried mushroom musk of the barn, but it never completely went away.
“I just want him to survive in this world,” she’d said.
And Charles had understood. He wanted Ned to live, too. The world would prove to be a kinder place, a bigger place than the circuit of Chalk Street and Maine’s blinding whiteness, if something like Ned and his hollow lived in it. Charles wanted him to prove how boundless the world could be, and when Ned choked to death trying to swallow his own shoelaces, they both cried for what was lost.
Charles started the car now and began the drive back to the Toneybee. He rolled down the window and breathed in deep, slow, swallows. The world was bigger. Ned had died, but the world was bigger and Laurel had found that for them.
“You don’t love Charlie yet,” Laurel accused him the other day, and he had not been able to deny it.
“I don’t know if I would use that word for him,” he’d said diplomatically. But she was angry, oh she was mad, and she’d seemed to miss the point entirely. He’d said, “That monkey doesn’t love me, either,” and he’d gotten her to laugh at that, at least, because it was true. Charlie understood him as a rival for Laurel’s affections, which Charles found funny, and he could only laugh when Charlie would tilt his chin up and stare, glassy eyed, just over Charles’s shoulder.
Up ahead, Charles could see the gates of the Toneybee. He had never imagined, back in his bedroom on Chalk Street, that he would end up here, with a woman like Laurel. She made things magic for him. It was a weird kind of magic: it did not bring him anything recognizable, any sort of understood glory. It brought something deeper, something that he did not know he needed until it was in front of him. He didn’t particularly care for Charlie—he’d never liked animals much—but he did care for this, for the drive rolling out before him and the large house in front of him that was definitely not Chalk Street. He cared for what was beyond the limits of his understanding. He’d broken through, somehow, gone past his block and reached a different country. It was strange, it was new, he could not say yet whether or not it was good. But it was something he could never have imagined, and for that, he was grateful.
Charlotte
I was the one who found my mother and Charlie together.
I still couldn’t sleep in Courtland County. Instead, I would go to the living room, lie across our borrowed, bumpy couch, and look through my father’s record collection, imagining myself on the album covers: ins
ide Pink Floyd’s floating prism; bathed in the same blue electric lights as a chubby Donny Hathaway; getting tangled up in the swirling ribbons of color on the front of Bitches Brew.
It was during one of these nights on that couch, staring at the cover of a Labelle record, that I heard the tiniest gasp. I wouldn’t have caught it anywhere outside of the overbearing hush of Courtland County. The gasp was so content, so satisfied it was almost smug. I stood up. I saw a dim gray light coming from under Charlie’s door. I got up and put my hand on the knob and was surprised when it turned easily: his door was usually locked.
Charlie’s room was different at night. The space was filled with a dirty, watery glow, the diffuse glare from the overhead fluorescent light placed on the dimmest setting. I squinted and then I saw them. In the corner farthest from the door, my mother sat cross-legged, Charlie laid out across her knees. I would like to say I didn’t know what they were doing at first. I would like to say I didn’t understand. But I understood instantly. Something in the way she held herself was sickeningly familiar. I’d seen her back curve like that before. Some part of me remembered from when Callie was a baby.
This was the worst part. My mother heard the door open, but she made no move to cover up or turn away. When I could bring myself to look at her face, her chin was slightly raised. Something threatened to break in my throat, something small and muffled, too embarrassed to be a full outcry. At that sound, Charlie lolled his head away from my mother’s chest, his lips coming off her nipple with a pop. Now Charlie, my mother, and my mother’s nipple were all staring at me.
“Mom,” was all I could say. Again and again, “Mom.”
She had the strangest look on her face: proud, then, as she realized my unhappiness, apologetic and frightened. She pushed back her hair with her free hand, made a slight face, and I could see she was a little bit annoyed at being interrupted. She scooped Charlie up and struggled to stand. When she’d managed to get both of them upright, she came to me. “Calm down, Charlotte.” She brushed my arm. “I’m going to ask you to calm down now.”
“No,” I protested. I should have been yelling, but I wasn’t. For my mother, I kept whispering. “I will not calm down.”
“It’s really okay, Charlotte. He needs it.”
She tried to smile. Charlie rested his head on her shoulder and closed his eyes, content to listen to the rise of her voice. “You remember what he sounded like that first night? You remember how badly he cried?”
“Yeah,” I said reluctantly.
“You remember how heartbreaking that was?”
“Yeah.”
“Imagine if we had to go through that every night, Charlotte. Imagine if we all had to get that upset every single night.” She paused.
“Yeah.”
“So you see why I have to do it?”
“Yeah.”
“And you see why we can’t tell anyone about it? Not yet? You’re still uncomfortable. Imagine how everyone else will feel. It will just make everything so hard.”
“Yeah.”
“So, it would be best not to tell anyone else. Not yet, anyway. I want to get Dr. Paulsen used to the idea. And I want to talk to your father about it, too. I should really talk to him first.”
“Yeah.”
“He has a right to know, everyone does, but it’s a sensitive subject.”
“Okay,” I said, to get her to stop. Charlie opened his eyes and raised his hand to her cheek.
I backed toward the door.
“Charlotte,” she said, stopping me, “I was surprised when you walked in on us. I will say that. But I think this could be a good thing. I think it could be good to have a secret with each other.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Charlie plucked drowsily at the front of my mother’s nightshirt, held up his hands, cupped his fingertips together, brought them into a kiss. The sign for more. She gazed down at him. She didn’t even care if I saw what passed between them. She began to unbutton the front of her nightgown again. I turned and opened the door, left before I could see any more.
THERE WAS A squall at the back of my throat when I woke up in the morning, something snarled and contrary, rising up from my stomach. I told myself I was being stupid and that I didn’t care. But I did care. I wanted someone else to know.
I nearly told Callie in the morning, but she was too open and bright, smiling at Charlie and my mother, and I couldn’t do it. I was too scared to tell my father. I thought of Max, but telling him would make it mean something else, would take it away from me and my mother and Charlie and I knew that was wrong. I didn’t think of Adia until I actually saw her.
I sought her out at lunch. I’d been avoiding her since she insulted me on the first day of school. She sat at the farthest table. She didn’t even have the pretense of a lunch tray in front of her. She was drawing again. When I put down my tray, she didn’t look up. I followed her lead, knowing she was waiting to talk to me. We sat that way for the next twenty-five minutes, me eating, her drawing.
The five-minute warning bell rang. I drank the last of my milk and felt the scratch at the back of my throat again. I had to say something. I reached across the table, put my two hands in front of her face and signed more.
“What was that?” She still wouldn’t look up from the paper.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re somebody who wants a lot of attention.”
I sat back down and waited. Adia drew some more and then she gusted out a loud sigh, as if getting past the heaviest pain in the world. “All right. Just tell me. What was it?”
I signed, I have a monkey for a brother. He talks.
“What’s that?” Adia said.
It was coming out all wrong.
Adia tried and failed to feign disinterest. “What’s that, with your hands?”
“It’s,” I said, “It’s . . .” And then I told her about the Toneybee. Not about my mother. Not yet. Because as I talked, Adia got more and more excited until she cut me off.
“We have to tell Marie.”
MARIE, ADIA’S MOTHER, was a fine-arts professor who taught pottery classes at Courtland County Community College. “The four Cs,” Adia called it, as we walked to her house. It was after school, and Adia had insisted I follow her home. I still hadn’t figured out how to tell her the rest. The rest of it, all of it, sat hard and cold in my neck, and I only wanted it out. Going home, seeing my mother with Charlie wrapped around her, would only make it worse, would make me choke and drown. I was sure of it.
Adia and her mother lived on Courtland County’s tiny, preserved Main Street. Everything downtown was brightly painted and porticoed and kept as close to the early twentieth century as possible. The Breitlings had taken over an old general store. The facade was painted a deep, shining cherry red with white trim, and there were old murals for Coca-Cola and Alka-Seltzer fading on the side of the building.
We entered through a screen door at the back and stepped into a long, narrow, gutted room. A battered countertop with three cast-iron taps stood at the far end. It was an old soda fountain. The rest of the space was taken up by pottery wheels and wire baking racks tottering with blocks of clay. Near the soda fountain was a small, gruff kiln. Everything was powdered with brown and white dust. The floor itself was wooden and deeply scarred and all around us were precariously balanced towers of books and papers and magazines. Crumbling New York Timeses, a tide of New Yorkers, a pile of old Crisis magazines and a slick, sliding deck of Essences and Vogues. There were even a few Final Calls, but it seemed like someone had been using those for an art project: the fronts were nicked with holes where an Xacto knife pruned the typography. There was a stack of NME magazines, almost completely torn apart, as if they had been snatched and delivered to the Breitlings by smugglers.
But the centerpiece of the room was the enormous stereo system: two felted speakers with a complicated rig between them, crowned with a turntable and a cassette deck. And in front of all that sat the most bea
utiful woman I had ever seen, more beautiful than Adia, legs parted, bent over a running wheel.
She had a gold front tooth and a nose ring. She wore her hair in a complicated wrap, a swath of ragged cotton dyed bloodred. She had Adia’s features, of course, but they were different. Adia was beautiful, but there was something stubborn in the set of her face, as if she dared you to admire her. Her mother wasn’t ashamed of her beauty. She wore it plainly, without apologies, and this made her even more hypnotic than her daughter.
“This is Charlotte,” Adia announced, with the open pride of a cat bringing a bird to its master.
Marie held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. Adia began to talk excitedly at Marie, something about consciousness raising and shelter and the Toneybee, and Marie only lifted her eyebrows, her lips slightly parted to flash her gold tooth at us.
I thought she would send us away or roll her eyes, but it was clear that she took Adia just as seriously as Adia took her. They were equals. She believed every word Adia said, and when I realized this, I felt my stomach tilt with unease.
Marie got up from her seat and moved to the window to light a cigarette.
“You have to tell her where you live,” Adia prodded.
I did, shyly. Marie listened, smoke streaming from her nostrils.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 11