The Last Time I Saw Her

by Alexandra Harrington

  “I’m sorry, about your parents,” Charlotte said truthfully. “And Max.”

  “It didn’t matter after you left. And after…,” Sophie gestured vaguely.

  Charlotte figured almost everyone had a moment in their life that they could point to and say, this is where everything changed. Everything divided into Before This or After This. In River John, the whole town, almost everyone Charlotte knew, had the same moment to point to. Charlotte just stood there stupidly; she knew there wasn’t anything she could say that would make Sophie hate her any less. Aside from maybe throwing herself in front of an oncoming bus.

  “Now.” Sophie pressed her pinky finger into the corner of her eye, scraping out a smudge of mascara. “I have a party to host. My life can’t stop because you’ve all of a sudden decided to turn up again. And if you’re just going to keep looking at me like that, you can leave. I’ve gotten enough pity this year. But if not, feel free to stay. I’m sure there’s some guy here who’ll buy your sob story in exchange for a hookup in the guest room.”

  Charlotte resisted the urge to roll her eyes as Sophie moved to leave the kitchen, but Charlotte realized then that she was in Sophie’s way. Even though the kitchen door was double wide, Sophie’s wheelchair couldn’t fit through with Charlotte standing there. Charlotte slid the door open and stepped aside as Sophie downed the rest of her drink and tossed the empty cup onto the counter. Her chair clattered loudly against the door frame.

  Charlotte couldn’t think of anything to say, and took Sophie’s dismissal as her cue to leave, heading directly for the front door. Embarrassment curled around the edges of her face as she felt people’s eyes following her retreat.

  “Charlotte,” Sophie called lightly, in a voice that Charlotte would have taken to be kind if she didn’t know Sophie better. Anyone listening might even have thought everything was fine and that the two best friends had made up. Charlotte looked over her shoulder. “Welcome home.”

  Sophie had positioned herself back where she had been when Charlotte first came in, as if there had been no interruption. Charlotte left the house, grabbed her suitcase from its hiding spot, and shuffled down the narrow walkway to the road. Mist twisted in the air, like rain was finally coming after all this heat. Inside, the party carried on without her, as they all had for the last year. If Charlotte was going to stop running, she would have to be ready for when things caught up to her.

  Because they would. And quickly.

  two

  Narrow streets wound in wide turns around River John, all the way out to where they would eventually meet the highway into Halifax. The small village was rooted unceremoniously on the opposite edge of Nova Scotia. The opposite edge from anything, really. A cluster of homes, summer cottages, and a few stores were lined up along the stretch of water that separated Nova Scotia from Prince Edward Island. It was a peninsula, surrounded by water on all sides but one. Charlotte had lived surrounded by the sea her entire life, and she had missed it while she was tucked away inland.

  It was so humid now that it was teetering on the edge between raining and not. Please don’t downpour, Charlotte prayed. In a town where there was nothing to do, rain just left you with even fewer options. After Sophie’s frigid reception, a post-party rainstorm was the last thing Charlotte needed. She wasn’t sure, but she had a pretty good feeling that the dress she’d picked out on sale at the mall in Halifax two days after Christmas was not waterproof. She shivered. Dying of pneumonia was not on her list of things to accomplish.

  Charlotte made her way down the uneven pavement of the main road, dragging her suitcase behind her. On the other hand, maybe dying of exposure would speed up the healing process with Sophie. That would teach her. Charlotte sidestepped a large pothole on the edge of the road. The only reason she could imagine Sophie mourning her death would be because Sophie hadn’t had the pleasure of bringing it on herself. Kind of dark, she told herself.

  Anyway.

  She continued. It wasn’t that long of a walk, but something was slowing her down. Gravity, destiny, existential dread, etc. Charlotte knew that once she got home, there was no going back. She’d be home for good. She was trying to calculate how much farther she had to go when she realized the last sounds from the party had finally faded.

  Focused on the pavement before her, she looked up just in time to see headlights illuminating her path from ahead, twisting around the bend. She paused and waited for a car to appear. A pickup truck, actually. Charlotte stepped off the asphalt, pressing herself along the treeline and out of the pickup’s way. A tiny thought tugged at her brain. The one someone she hadn’t seen at the party—and had expected to—popped into her mind. That one someone drove a truck just like this, and it looked like he could be on his way to the party now. He always did run late. Charlotte stepped farther back into the brush.

  The lights of the truck caught her face for half a second as it rolled past. She held her breath. It didn’t stop. Charlotte pushed out a sigh of relief and dragged her suitcase out of a bit of mud and leaves. She started back on the pavement just in time to hear the faintest squeal of tires; out of the corner of her eye she could see the glow of red brake lights against the trees. Shit.

  She looked over her shoulder. The truck had creaked to a stop. Please let me be wrong. Please be someone else. Anyone else.

  In a town as small as River John, people stopped to pick you up. It was just a thing that happened. Anyone walking anywhere on the side of the road was almost definitely someone you went to school with, or a family friend, or your regular server at the Chinese food place. Maybe the driver hadn’t recognized her, and was just being nice. She stuck her head back straight, sucking in a bit of the cool night air. Please don’t be him.

  The driver cut the engine. Charlotte heard the thud of feet against pavement as they jumped out to help. They didn’t say anything—no greeting, no confirmation that they weren’t a murderer. More air. She muttered something in the direction of the sky, a prayer that she was wrong, and looked over her shoulder again.

  She was right.

  When she saw his face, she felt a familiar discomfort—the same feeling you get when someone brought up something from years ago you still felt guilty about. She pulled her suitcase closer, as if it could hide her from his view.

  He was tall—way taller than her, and even taller than Sophie—all long limbs and messy hair that he was always pushing back from his face. She placed a smile on his features from memory, one that was easy and happy, and one she had known since they were kids. Charlotte tried to pinpoint the last time they had seen each other. Those three weeks had been hazy and disjointed; the two of them had sort of co-existed, orbiting Sophie carefully and avoiding collisions with each other, like satellites around their home planet. She remembered nights they spent together in Sophie’s living room after the accident, tucked together on the sofa, waiting, while Sophie slept. It was a small rekindling of their friendship, contained to their tiny cosmos, which came out of the worst thing that had ever happened to them. She figured the last time they had seen each other would have been on Sophie’s back porch, just as the sun was starting to dip behind the horizon, the air rosy and the bugs out in full force. That was where they usually saw each other, when they were swapping out. Charlotte would go home and sleep and he would stay with Sophie until Charlotte came back.

  Maxwell Hale blinked at her a few times in the semi-darkness, his silhouette outlined by the truck lights glowing behind him. Like Sophie, he looked a lot older now.

  “Hi,” Charlotte said. She thought she saw a tiny smile flicker at the corner of his lips, but it could have been a trick of the light.

  “It’s like…seeing a ghost,” Max said.

  “I haven’t been gone that long,” scoffed Charlotte. “And didn’t think I looked that bad.”

  “I knew you’d turn up here again one day. Didn’t picture it being on the side of the road.” He p
aused. “And you look good.”

  She guessed that by good he meant healthier, because they weren’t spending all their time crying and not eating and barely sleeping.

  “Uh, yeah, so do you,” she offered.

  He looked at her for a second and she couldn’t tell if he was angry at her for leaving, or surprised that she was back, or what. Max reached out, closing the space between them, and he touched her arm like he wasn’t entirely sure she was even there. He sighed. Relief or exasperation, or a mix of the two. But he moved and pulled her toward him quickly, arms coiling around her waist and holding her tight and she didn’t think that he was angry.

  “Hi, Charlie.”

  She smiled without even realizing it. No one had called her that in almost a year; it was a nickname bestowed lovingly by her brother when he was three and would fumble over the extra syllable. For her dad and her friends, it had stuck.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked into her shoulder.

  She pulled away from him. This, of course, was the simpler half of the question. The why was the tricky part.

  “Uh, I’ve actually just been hiding out in the woods. Social experiment. Watched too much Survivorman. You found me.” As the sarcastic words left her mouth Charlotte realized just how hard explaining anything about her absence was going to be.

  He raised his eyebrows but didn’t push it as he stepped away from her. “You sound like the same old Charlie.”

  “It would be a shame if I didn’t.”

  Max chuckled and looked at the ground. His face twisted like he was nervous. “Does Sophie know you’re here?”

  Charlotte swallowed. “Yes.”

  “How did she take it?”

  Ah. “I think…better than she should have.”

  Max scratched his head and looked at her again. “I don’t know what’s crazier: you being home or Sophie leaving you in one piece.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  He grinned. “Come on. Throw your bag in the back, I’ll give you a lift.”

  She hesitated, but he was already grabbing her suitcase and heaving it into the bed of the pickup. Charlotte circled around the truck as he returned to the driver’s side and slid into the seat. She caught him staring at her through the open passenger window before she got in.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You finally come back and the first place you go is Sophie’s birthday? Did you really think you were going to get out of that unscathed?”

  She folded her arms. “No, I didn’t. And how do you know I even went to the party? Maybe I just called her.”

  Max laughed, nodding to her dress. “You’re dressed for a party. And besides: it’s River John. Still only twenty kids in our graduating class. Only so many parties you could be going to. And it’s not like anyone else is going to have a party the same night as Sophie’s birthday.”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes as he unlocked the door and she climbed inside.

  “Seat belt,” he said.

  “Got it.”

  “Charlotte Tabitha Romer crashing Sophie Jane Thompson’s birthday.” He chuckled and shook his head. “That is something I am sorry to have missed.” He put a mostly disintegrated cigarette from the ashtray into his mouth and swung the truck around into a U-turn, in the direction she’d been walking.

  “My middle name is not Tabitha. Were you heading there? Sophie told me you broke up.”

  Max nodded slightly as the truck gathered speed, winding through dark trees and grey dirt roads, flying past the Chinese food restaurant and adjoining gas station. “You heard right,” he said.

  Charlotte couldn’t help herself. “What happened?”

  “Uh, it was just hard, after…” he trailed off, rolling his fingers against the steering wheel to fill the empty space. “And fixing it wasn’t important compared to everything else, so we just didn’t, and…I dunno, we both stopped bothering.” He glanced at her. “One day she just told me to leave her alone and I did.”

  “That’s…shitty.” Very articulate, Charlotte.

  Max shrugged. “I guess so.”

  In an effort to look at anything but him, Charlotte kept her eyes trained straight ahead. “So you weren’t going to the party, then?”

  “No, I figured I’d leave Sophie in peace on her birthday. Plus, it would have been rude to show up uninvited and without a gift.” He paused and looked at her pointedly. “One party-crasher is enough, I think.”

  Charlotte balanced her elbow on the window ledge and cradled her chin. “Sorry I beat you to it.”

  “Are you going to tell me how it went?”

  She glanced at him. “How what went?”

  “You turn up after being missing in action for a year and go straight to Sophie. Well, you always go straight to her, I’ll give you that.”

  “She chewed me out for all of ten minutes and then I left.”

  “I don’t know what else you were expecting. You should consider yourself lucky to be alive. I’m pretty sure Sophie has trained assassins at her beck and call.”

  Charlotte pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth and sighed. “I wouldn’t rule it out yet. She hates me.”

  “I think….” Max paused. “Yeah, probably. But she hates that you left. She doesn’t hate you. And now you’re back. After a while she just missed you. I was there. She slept and cried and waited for her best friend to come back.”

  Charlotte dragged a hand through her hair, not really in the mood for any more conversation about her fight with Sophie. But as reality began to set in, she found herself reconsidering her decision to come home. She hated herself for being a coward, for not being able to face Sophie and properly explain herself. But maybe it was a mistake to come back. To disrupt any bit of normal that Sophie had managed to scrape together since the accident. Maybe Charlotte had lost the right to try and make peace with her a year later.

  The dark yellow line waved in and out of view on the fractured pavement as the truck sped along. Charlotte’s vision blurred around the edges for a moment and she blinked away the burning that threatened tears. She’d die before she let herself get worked up in front of Max.

  “I’m scared I’m too late,” Charlotte admitted to the windshield.

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see Max shift his shoulders. “I guess there’s only one person who gets to decide that.”

  “Yeah, well, Sophie was never much into changing her mind.”

  A silence rolled between them. She realized they were stopped at a red light. They hadn’t seen another car the entire drive.

  “Hey, uh.” She felt Max’s hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. “It’s okay. It takes a lot…to show up to what you knew was waiting for you at Sophie’s.”

  Charlotte twisted to face him. “I’m fine. I probably deserved it. Er, I definitely did.”

  “Well.” Max gave a tiny shrug, the red light shining on his face switching to green. “It’s not like any of us are going anywhere. Sophie’s either going to forgive you or she’s not, so. Go figure it out. You won’t know until you know. And you guys have always worked things out before.”

  “Things aren’t really like before.”

  He didn’t answer, so he was either ignoring what she’d said or using the silence to acknowledge that she was right.

  It wasn’t a long drive from Sophie’s to Charlotte’s, but tonight the road seemed to stretch on for ages. Eventually they reached the gravel driveway that led to her house. The truck bumped its way down the lane, until Max turned the bend into the clearing where her home stood. It was small and grey, and looked exactly the same as she remembered. The faded wood siding broke the darkness along the treeline behind it, like a splash of bright in the woods. There were no lights on. Dark and quiet. She found her eyes raking the perimeter, looking for anything or anyone out of place. She was happy to be
home, she told herself. She wasn’t scared. She couldn’t be, now.

  “Does anyone else know you’re back?” Max asked, snapping her out of it and leaning forward to look out his windshield toward the porch.

  “Sean should…theoretically. If he’s been paying his phone bill and bothers to read my messages.” She sighed. “I called him about a million times because he was actually supposed to come pick me up from school, but you know Sean.”

  Max cut the ignition and looked at her. “I would’ve come to get you. You could have called me.”

  Charlotte raised her eyebrows. Max’s blatant kindness towards her was something she wasn’t familiar with. “No, it’s fine. I made friends on the bus. The lady next to me offered me Doritos for two hours.” She looked at him pointedly. “From an empty Tupperware container. I’m writing a memoir.”

  Max laughed.

  “Other than Sean, no one else knows—” she stopped herself. “Well, no one did. I forgot that all my friends were at Sophie’s party.”

  He turned his head to look at her. “Not all of them.”

  She smiled a bit at that.

  “Listen, it’s been a long year, Charlie,” Max told her. “But we’ve got way more years to go. We’re all still getting used to everything being…different.”

  Different was a nice way of saying worse, Charlotte thought, but Max was right, and she knew it. He wasn’t the same, just like Sophie wasn’t. It was the same difference she knew she would probably see if she could bear to examine herself.