Francine pushed her way through the crowd and finally got to Bruno.
“Hey,” he said. “I went to your house but—”
“I can’t find Charlie.”
As she said the words out loud, the black dread filled her completely. The nightmare was real. Ellie and Pete had left Francine with their only child, and she had lost him.
“Okay,” Bruno said. “No problem. We’ll find him.” He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Charlie? Charlie?”
Laura Jean noticed their distress and abandoned the podium. “Francine? What’s wrong?”
The cloud of panic in Francine’s mind thickened, making it hard to think and form words. She just needed Charlie back. To see him. To hug him and keep him safe. All her other problems would be nothing if she could just hold him again.
“I can’t find him!” she said. “I can’t find him.”
The crowd around them began to quiet.
“Mark!” Laura Jean flagged down her husband who arrived at the same time as Chief Durham.
“What’s wrong?” Mark asked.
“Everything okay?” Chief Durham put a hand on Francine’s shoulder, but she brushed it away, reaching for Laura Jean’s instead.
Laura Jean was Ellie’s best friend. She would know where Charlie was. She would know what to do.
“Who’s missing, Francine?” Laura Jean asked clearly.
“Charlie.”
Laura Jean looked at the others, then back at Francine.
“Who’s Charlie?”
Chapter 41
When I am with people I am bothered by hearing very strange things.
[ x ] TRUE [ ] FALSE
“My nephew, Charlie,” Francine said impatiently.
Why was Laura Jean staring at her? Why was everyone else’s face just as blank?
“Charlie!” she screamed, as if they hadn’t heard her.
Laura Jean looked to Chief Durham for help. “I don’t…”
He crouched down. “Francine, look at me. Breathe for a second. I want you to very slowly tell me what’s wrong.”
“I can’t find Charlie,” she enunciated. “My nephew, Charlie.” The name got heavier every time she said it.
Chief Durham turned to Laura Jean. “Pete and Ellie have a child?”
“No,” Laura Jean said.
Then Francine saw Diana, a burned-out sparkler hanging from one hand as she watched the scene.
“Diana! You know Charlie,” Francine said. “He told me he brought you batteries.”
Diana cowered behind her brother’s legs.
“Did a boy bring you batteries?” Eric asked her.
Diana’s voice came out in a squeak as she pointed at Francine. “She did.”
Francine’s head felt like a balloon someone had let go of.
The next thing she knew, she was being carried into the police station, through a tunnel of staring faces and melting popsicles, until the world itself began to melt, and everything went away.
Chapter 42
There is something wrong with my mind.
[ x ] TRUE [ ] FALSE
Her eyes opened to the porous white grid of a dropped
ceiling.
She was on a couch in Chief Durham’s office.
Her head was cold.
Something had happened…something with Charlie. He was missing.
She sat up, spilling an ice pack from her forehead.
“Leave it on, honey. You were burning up.” Laura Jean, her eyes red from crying, eased Francine back down onto the couch.
“Did you find him?” Francine asked.
Laura Jean bit her lip. “Do you and Ellie have another sibling?”
Francine shook her head.
“Is Charlie a relative of Ben’s, or someone back in San Francisco?”
Francine shook her head again. “He’s my nephew. Ellie and Pete’s son.”
Laura Jean winced. “Francine, I’ve lived next to Ellie and Pete for years. They don’t have a son. I’m sorry, but they don’t. I promise you.”
Francine tried to make sense out of the impossible idea that she’d created a person out of thin air. A person with brown hair, blue eyes, and freckles…just like her, who lived a life free from the tortures of adulthood…just like she wanted. Then she thought about imaginary friends who’d lingered a little too long, and fuzzy identities, and becoming a whole other person for one night in San Francisco. Maybe the idea wasn’t so impossible after all.
She sat up again, reassuring Laura Jean with a steady hand. “I’m all right. I…I haven’t gotten much sleep lately. I got confused.”
“Well, that’s all right,” Laura Jean said, with a pained smile. “We all have our moments.”
Francine stood shakily and opened the door to find Bruno, Mark, and Chief Durham—each face rife with sympathy. Sympathy for someone who had gone mad.
“I’m going home,” she told them.
“Francine, you should rest here,” Chief Durham said. “While we figure out—”
“Did I do anything illegal?”
“What? No.”
“Then I’m going.”
“Hon, the storm’s gonna be bad,” Laura Jean tried. “I think if we stay here together, we’ll be safer. We can figure all this out.”
“I know, I’m sorry, I just…I have to go.” She pushed through their concerned looks and left the station, stepping into an afternoon dark with storm clouds.
In the parking lot, Lori barked orders at arriving families.
“Check in here for cot assignment. No unauthorized guests will be permitted in the storm shelter. No exceptions.”
Francine fled Lori’s magnified voice and the staring faces of the Hens, keeping a brisk pace all the way to Ellie and Pete’s back door as the rain began to fall.
She stepped inside and closed her eyes. Her hand gripped the doorframe, finding the divot she’d dug with her thumbnail the first night. At least that much was real.
Then she called out, not knowing what she dreaded more, silence or a response.
“Charlie?”
Under the din of heavy rain, all was quiet and still.
Francine threw open cabinet doors, looking for a juice box, a sippy cup, an old baby bottle.
Nothing.
An infant’s picture in the dining room, a little pair of shoes by the front door, a trove of Disney movies downstairs?
Nothing.
No sign of Charlie in the master bedroom or the guest bedroom. No sign in Charlie’s bedroom either, because it didn’t exist.
Dizzy, Francine sat on her bed, and noticed the papers peeking out by her feet. She grabbed the MMPI packet and flipped through the questionnaire she loved to hate, all the way to the final page with the scoring chart she’d never quite looked at before.
D, Hy, Pd, Pa, Pt, Sc.
Astrological signs? Cutesy personality types? No. Only now did she see the definitions below: depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviate, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia. It wasn’t a personality quiz. It was a mental health assessment.
How had she never noticed? How had she never realized any of this?
The answer was simple.
Because she didn’t want to.
It had been Francine who didn’t invite people over to the house, and only mentioned Charlie to those who wouldn’t know him. Francine, who, yearning for the purity of a child in summer, had spent night after night exploring Hawthorn Woods with its easy joys and alluring secrets. The batteries on Diana’s windowsill, the eavesdropping on Bruno, the secret in Eric’s shed. All of Charlie’s memories unlocked and shuffled, one by one, into Francine’s mind like a second deck of cards.
Still holding the stack of papers loosely in one hand, she walked numbly out of the room, not knowing where to go. The tub in the bathroom still held water from the day before. An incredible day, an incredible lie, all invented by her broken machine of a brain.
Her toes pierced the soap film on the water’s surface, sending it
into swirling eddies as she climbed in, submerging her daisy dress and the troublesome papers alike, the questions bolding, then fading as they sank.
Most of the time I feel b l u e
My sleep is fitful and d i s t u r b e d
I often feel as if things are not r e a l
I am afraid of losing my m i n d
Francine looked closely at her thumb, slightly swollen by the nail at the spot where Charlie had pulled out the sliver. She dug into the healed-over skin with her teeth, drawing blood until she bit down on the needle of wood. Charlie hadn’t pulled it out. He hadn’t done anything, because he’d never existed in the first place.
She spit the sliver into the blood-pinked bathwater, eyelids sagging as the questions continued to disintegrate around her. The lights flickered once, then died, as a dropped-mountain boom of thunder shook the house.
The approaching storm was opening wide to swallow Hawthorn Woods, but Francine couldn’t find a way to care.
Chapter 43
There is something wrong with my mind.
[ ] TRUE [ x ] FALSE
Francine’s eyes opened as someone knocked on the door downstairs.
The sky outside the bathroom window was pitch black. The whole block must have lost power.
Between overlaps of thunder, she heard the front door creak open.
Footsteps wandered around the house, eventually climbing the stairs to the creaky landing and the door to the bathroom.
“Francine!”
Bruno ran in and dropped to his knees, setting a camping lantern on the rim of the tub. He pulled her arms from the pink water and felt at her wrists, exhaling with relief when he found the blood had come from her thumb alone.
“Hey, Bruno,” she said dreamily.
“The storm’s getting worse. I tried to give you as much space as possible, but it’s time to go. Let’s get you out of the tub.”
She pushed her fingers into his chest. Solid. Real.
“Your name is Michael Bruno.”
“Yes.”
“I’m Francine Haddix.”
“Yes.”
“Is Roland Gerber real?”
“Yes.”
“And the investigation?”
“Yes.”
She sighed. “I was kinda hoping that part was made up.”
“Francine, we called Ellie and…it’s only Charlie. Everything else is real. You live in San Francisco, Ben is real, your divorce, all of it. Ellie’s never heard of Charlie. You must have made him up when you came to Hawthorn Woods.”
“When Magdalena threw that drink, I think I realized Hawthorn Woods wasn’t going to be some magic oasis,” she said without enthusiasm. “It’s just California without the mountains. But it’s different for Charlie. He doesn’t have problems. Or fear. Or hatred. Or regret.”
She winced and put a hand over her mouth, knowing if she started crying, she’d never stop. “I got all his memories. Except they’re different. I see myself doing everything I thought he did.”
“I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now, but we have to get to the barn. Then we can talk about everything. Or nothing, if that’s what you want.”
She looked Bruno in the face. “There’s something I didn’t want to tell you. Something I told Roland after the microphone went out. I’ve had confusion like this before. Little things here and there, but it’s never been this bad. I’m moving farther and farther away from reality, inventing entire people.” Her voice was paper thin, the words barely holding together. “I’m fucking crazy, Bruno.”
“You’re not crazy.”
“I am.”
“You’re not crazy. You just need to get out of that water.”
“No,” she said. “I think I should stay. In Hawthorn Woods. In Charlie’s world.”
“Francine.”
“Yesterday I had one of the greatest days of my life, just playing with him. He wears capes and builds pillow forts and just wants to run and be free. I’d forgotten this, but if you go really high on a swing, there’s a moment at the top of the arc where gravity forgets you. The chains go slack and you’re just floating. That’s how his world feels, all the time.”
“But he isn’t real.”
“I know. But his joy is. We all try to fall back asleep after a really good dream. Try to fool ourselves a little longer. So what’s the harm if I stay? I can live here as Ellie’s harmless and happy sister that walks around barefoot and pretends she’s a kid.”
Bruno shook his head. “But there’s no weight to that.” He thudded his fist on the tub. “This has push and pull. Ups and downs. That’s how you know one from the other. The dream world you’re talking about, Charlie’s world…you’ll go hungry there.”
“You don’t have to feel bad about leaving me, Bruno. It’s happened before. I’ll be fine. I promise.”
He huddled closer to the tub. “You used fantasy to get through trauma. That’s not unreasonable. It’s not even uncommon. Everyone endures stress and deals with it in different ways. Some people drink, or hurt themselves or others. You imagined a happy person in a happy place. You can come back from this.”
“How?”
“We’ll get you help. Real, professional help. It won’t be perfect or easy, but I’ll be with you every step of the way. You don’t need all the answers right now, you just need to be willing to look for them.”
He held her hand and waited in silence as the storm roiled outside.
After a very long time, Francine stepped out of the water.
Bruno helped her out of the cold sundress and into a sweatshirt and some jeans. Once she’d warmed up, he lit her a cigarette, and they sat by the guest room window in the light of the camping lantern, watching the wind push curtains of rain down the street.
After a very long time, she spoke. “I want to go to New York. With you. Would that be okay?”
“Yes.”
A knock sounded on the front door.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
“Wait here.”
Bruno took the lantern and left Francine sitting by the window.
She heard him creak across the landing and down the stairs. The front door opened. Voices. A woman’s, maybe, though it was hard to tell under the snarls of thunder.
The phone rang. Francine had forgotten they still worked without power.
She felt her way to the handset in the dark.
“Hello?”
“Francine. Hey.”
“Hi, Ben.”
She didn’t stutter or lapse into an involuntary silence, just waited for him to speak, lightly curious.
“Sounds like a storm there.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Well listen, I didn’t call to dig up the past again. I was wrong to do that last time.”
“I was upset,” she said. “But I’m getting better. And I’m actually kinda glad you called.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I learned a little more about myself recently. I’ve always looked back at our time together in a certain way. And knowing what I know now, I might have misread, or even misremembered, a few things.”
“That’s great. Look, I uh, well, there was something I wanted to ask you last time I called, but you hung up so fast I didn’t get the chance.”
Was this an apology years in the making? Proof she’d misjudged him for years?
“Go ahead.”
“I want everything to be right the second time around, you know? With the new wedding, the kid, all that. But right now, I’m still not technically married. So I was thinking, if you want to sleep together one last time, I could do that. For you.”
Francine smiled to herself. She’d been wrong about Charlie, but very right about Ben.
“Francine?”
“That’s very sweet of you to ask, but I’m not interested.”
Apparently she’d failed to keep the amusement out of her answer, because Ben’s voice rose a little. “Hey, listen, I went through all the trouble to find you and call.
Do you think it was easy to find the time to do that? I didn’t have to make this offer.”
“I’m not upset anymore,” she said, and meant it. “It’s just that one of us is incurable, and I used to think it was me. Goodbye, Ben.”
He started to say something not nice, but Francine calmly hung up. She felt at her wedding ring, a bandage covering a now-healed wound. She took it off and immediately felt lighter, in every way possible.
Then she realized the voices at the front door had stopped.
And Bruno hadn’t come back.
Chapter 44
At times my thoughts have raced ahead faster than I could speak them.
[ x ] TRUE [ ] FALSE
Francine edged slowly down the stairs and found a woman standing in a small pool of water. Bruno’s camping lantern lit her face as she dried herself with a dishtowel.
“Thank you,” Magdalena said, handing the towel to Bruno.
“What’s going on?” Francine stepped uncertainly from the stairs.
“I was just about to come get you,” Bruno said. “She wants to tell you something.”
Magdalena looked shyly at Francine. “I don’t know exactly how to say so much, but I will try. Hollis has told me about himself. About who he is attracted to. He has told me this, because you have asked him to. Because you understand how I was feeling.”
“Oh.”
“I always believed Hollis loves me, in his heart. But when he was not attracted physically, I thought this meant his love was gone. I was sad and angry. I thought I had done something wrong.” She stepped toward Francine. “I am far away from my old home. Hollis is all I know here. And then you come, and you are so beautiful, and I am scared you have come to make everything worse. To take Hollis from me. Now I understand he does love me, in his own way. And though this does not fix everything, I am no longer angry, because he no longer lies.” She hung her head. “I was cruel to you, many times. I have come to tell you I am sorry for this, and to see if you can forgive me.”
It took Francine just a moment to process the new Magdalena. “Of course.”
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