“Charlie?”
Sophie had said something.
Charlotte snapped herself back to reality. “Sorry.”
“I think things will be okay. Max will get better. You’ll be all right. Do you remember when we’d used to lay in my bed after school and watch Friends and talk about if we thought we’d still be friends when we were thirty?”
Charlotte half smiled. “Yeah. You were always skeptical.”
The far side of Sophie’s face curled into a smile. “Only about the living in Manhattan part. Not the rest. I’ve never really doubted it, until now.”
Charlotte met Sophie’s eyes, a grey-blue that leaned green in certain light. She knew Sophie was right.
“And it’s not you, you know,” Sophie continued. “Just…both of us. Where we are. Circumstance.”
Charlotte nodded. “I know. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you love someone.”
“And it’s not Sean,” Sophie said, saying Charlotte’s brother’s name like he was someone Sophie didn’t know, “because…I don’t even blame him that much. It was Simon and it was Deirdre and it was me.” She sighed. “If I hadn’t waved it in Simon’s face that I knew about everything—if I hadn’t thought I could get something out of it—Sean would still be here, and Max would be fine, and I would be….”
Charlotte was quiet. She didn’t blame Sophie—it hadn’t even crossed her mind. But Charlotte knew if she were in Sophie’s position, she’d blame herself too. You were always the hardest on yourself.
“My mom’s selling this house,” Sophie said finally, looking around. “She’s moving to the city, to be close to me. I’m never coming back here. I just—this is life, you know? Not our life…my life. I want to go to university and then I want to go to law school. I want to live in New York City and have a rich husband, but one who’s not quite as rich as me. Maybe I’ll write a book. Maybe I’ll open a restaurant. Point is, my life goes beyond this town.” She looked pointedly at Charlotte. “Yours should, too, CBR.”
When Charlotte stood here two months ago, she hadn’t been able to imagine them not working things out. It would be hard, sure, an uneven retreat to what they were so used to being. She never thought that working things out could end with them not together. Not friends or even enemies, but being nothing in between was worst of all.
“I might not see you for a long time.” Sophie’s voice crackled like water in the heat. “But, when we do, I hope we’re grown up and happy, and we bump into each other in a big city far away from here and we can start again.”
A promise—a far-off one. The kind of what-will-be-will-be pact that Charlotte usually hated.
“I feel like we’re breaking up,” Charlotte said. She didn’t feel the sadness she thought she would. It felt natural. Simple.
“No, no.” Sophie shook her head, her hair catching the sunlight and Charlotte glimpsing her tiny smile. “We’re on a break.”
Charlotte looked at the clock hanging above the TV. Past eleven. Sophie would have to leave soon if they were going to get to Halifax and get everything moved in by this evening. Frosh Week stuff would probably start tomorrow. Sophie would excel—she was one exemplary drinker and an even better conversationalist. On the mantle beside the TV was the card Charlotte had sent Sophie for her birthday.
“I still can’t decide if I regret coming home,” Charlotte said.
Sophie raised her eyebrows and studied her for a second. “Well, I’m glad you did. All this wouldn’t have happened, but who knows what would have. And now there’s nowhere to go but…on.”
Charlotte almost smiled. “I’ll see you around, Sophie. Soon, I hope.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Sophie propped her chin in her hand and looked at her. “Moon and tide, you know. We don’t need to see each other—it’s always there.”
epilogue
december
four months later
In River John, winter comes racing over the hills without much of a warning. It gets the air first, and then the trees, and then settles deep into the ground like it’s burrowing down to stay. One day Charlotte is clinging to the last colours of fall, and the next she’s cursing over having to scrape out her car windshield from under a shell of ice.
But once winter arrives, it lingers everywhere, filling up the cracks in houses, the nooks behind bathroom doors, and, most noticeably, a third empty bedroom in a house that once held a family.
Charlotte checks her watch—her dad’s watch, Sean’s watch. She had found it at the house after the night under the bridge. It’s just after eight in the morning.
In a lot of ways, winter is good for her. Winter hides away the sunshine that blooms freckles on Sophie’s cheeks and streaks lines of copper through her hair. It pulls grey against the sparkling water, which will too often crash against the shore a certain way and sound like Max’s even breathing, face tucked against her pillow. The snow covers the grass that reminds her of summer, reminds her of coming home, and reminds her of Sean. By the time winter blows into River John, things are very different. And the winter helps her forget where and what she used to be.
The snow is just beginning to fall as she steps away from the mailbox, six by six little community lockers outside the Quik Mart, which is, as always, open. She thinks of Leo, behind that counter almost every day all summer. He’s isn’t there now—he’s with his family in Orlando for Christmas. Of everyone who has left River John, he’s the one who checks in with her the most—and uses the most emojis. He loves university, loves being in the city. Charlotte misses Leo every day.
The walk home is slower in the snow, but it’s not cold. The snow flares up against the sides of houses and trees and filters down from the sky slowly, like it’s not even real. This version of winter seems optimistic, and makes her think of Max shaking snow from his coat and of baking shortbread with Sophie and wrestling a Christmas tree upright with Sean.
The snowflakes swirl in front of her face like tiny ballerinas as she lifts her gaze to the sky, where the snow twists down in cylinders and between breaks in the high clouds she can see more trickling down from higher still.
When they were kids, it used to be a Christmas morning tradition to walk to the Quik Mart, where their dad would buy her and Sean each a pack of scratch cards. Their dad would get himself a coffee and a copy of the Globe and they’d do the cards over breakfast, before they opened any presents. If either of you win big, their dad would say, we drop everything and we’re going straight to Disney. Been packed for a week. The destination changed year to year, and Charlotte was never sure if he really did have them all packed and ready to go. They never did win.
After their dad died, Charlotte put her foot down against their routine gambling, but she and Sean would still walk to get coffee and a copy of the Globe, even though Sean hated buying coffee when he could make it at home, and neither of them read the paper.
When she finally gets home, Charlotte is careful not to let the front door slam. A skinny tree stands in the corner of the living room, illuminated by a tangle of white string lights. It makes the house smell good, and every time Charlotte sees it she’s reminded of why she used to love Christmas so much. Out of the corner of her eye, she notices the arrangement on the table—two plates, two mugs.
She sighs and throws the mail onto the coffee table. “You aren’t supposed to be up,” she scolds, wandering toward the kitchen. She leans her shoulder against the doorway. He glances up from the stove and looks at her with an expression he’s given her a thousand times.
“I can’t stay in bed forever.” He shifts his weight onto his right leg and winces a bit as he turns back to the stove. She knows it still hurts.
Max woke up the day Charlotte went to say goodbye to Sophie, on the afternoon Sophie left for Halifax. Poetic, maybe. Charlotte can’t riddle out the metaphor there. Since the night on the bridge, the doctors had never been sure. Sai
d it could go either way. Charlotte took that to mean it was up to Max. And just like he had promised he would, he’d stayed.
“Forgive me?” he asks brightly, in a way that sways her immediately, because she still thinks about how close she came to not hearing it again.
Her eyes give her away and she grumbles some type of agreement. Max skims a hand affectionately over her cheek before he releases her, shuffling the eggs frying on the stove with a flipper.
He will go to Dalhousie in January, when the winter semester starts. He’d missed the fall, recovering from being shot and then recovering from a lot more than that. Maybe he’ll run into Sophie there. Charlotte likes to think of them seeing each other in a Halifax coffee shop, that flash of a face from home. They could share the feeling of leaving River John behind, whether that was happy or sad or maybe something in between. Charlotte hopes, if everything comes together, she’ll be there, too. Eventually. Maybe not with Sophie, but with Max.
Charlotte goes back into the living room, picking up the mail. Bills, bills, and more bills, as she had guessed.
The last item in the pile is an envelope, thin but more square than the rest. She digs her pinky under the flap and tears it open. It’s a card, generic and nondescript, with a golden Christmas tree on the front. She checks the envelope again—no return address. An old photo slides out from between the folds, and she recognizes it as that old one of the three of them from a million years ago. The one that hung on their fridge forever, until—she looks up to check—now, apparently. It would have been easy to get back at the house in all the confusion afterward, when Charlotte was spending all her time at the hospital.
On the back of the photo, merry christmas is scrawled in handwriting that looks like hers but messier, and slanted the other way. Their dad had been left-handed; Sean got that from him. The card is blank.
Sometimes you have to die first. Tear everything down and start over, just for the hope that you could build something anew. She watches the snow falling past the window and wonders if it’s snowing in Halifax or wherever else the people she loves are.
She can just barely make out the ocean beyond the snow and the grey light and she thinks of the sea hitting back against the shore no matter what, no matter the winds or the storms. Thunder could crack and lighting could flare and the waves could roll and crash and break over and over, but the only thing as certain as a storm coming was the promise that it would end.
Charlotte hears Max move into the living room, hears the sliding of a chair against the floor.
“Anything in the mail?” Max asks.
She tucks the photo and the card back inside the envelope and places it face down on the coffee table, just for now. Friendships and stories and lives ended, but so did everything else.
Charlotte finally looks at Max over her shoulder. “Nothing. Bills and stuff.”
High water would settle and still. She hears the kettle sing from the kitchen. They would make it.
acknowledgements
There were so many people involved in this book/journey and I am so thankful to all of them. Thank you to my family for encouraging me to write, and especially to my mom, who is a writer, too. Mom, thanks for putting up with me and for everything you did to help me along the way.
To the writing group—you guys made this book what it is. I am so thankful for our Thursday nights, and my writing is so much better for your company.
Thank you to Sarah for being my most trusted advisor—you basically deserve an author credit on this one; I feel like we wrote half this book together over text message.
Thank you to Olivia for your constant support, encouragement, and for rooting for this book probably even more than I did. Having you in my corner has meant so much to me.
Thank you to Patrick, Morgan, and Heather for reading this book way back when it was barely anything (and a whole lot worse). You guys are the very best.
And of course, thank you to the whole team at Nimbus Publishing for everything you do for Atlantic Canadian writers. Thank you to Whitney Moran for taking a chance on a first book by a twenty-three-year-old unpublished author. To my editor, Emily MacKinnon, you are unreal. You made this book so much stronger and I am grateful for all the laughs we had along the way. Thank you to April Hubbard for taking the time to read and review this book before it was officially published. Your invaluable insight as a wheelchair user and disability advocate has meant more to me than anything.
about the author
Alexandra Harrington is a writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she has worked as a restaurant manager, fiction editor, and server. She has a degree in journalism from the University of King’s College in Halifax. The Last Time I Saw Her is her first novel.
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