I'll Be You(52)

My bag sat, packed, by the bedroom door.

It would be so easy to leave for Los Angeles. To resume my life there and leave the problem of Charlotte and Elli for my parents to solve. This could even be my parting salvo as I walked out the door: Goodbye, and by the way, Charlotte’s real name is Emma and she’s a missing child from Arizona. Good luck with that! How satisfying it would be to see them realize that they’d been so very wrong about me.

But I just couldn’t do it. It was too terrible a redemption. How could I put my parents in that position? It was hard enough to be in it myself, knowing that Charlotte wasn’t Charlotte, that Elli had seemingly done something terrible, and that I had some sort of moral obligation to go to the authorities. Of course I could never turn my sister in; I could never live with that. And yet, somewhere in Scottsdale, Charlotte’s real parents were quite likely crying themselves to sleep every night wondering what happened to their daughter. I couldn’t live with that, either.

The conundrum was a sharp black stone sitting at the center of my chest, pressing down until I couldn’t breathe. I knew I couldn’t make my parents carry it, too. There was no way I was going to tell them what I knew.

Your mom is fragile. She’s not as strong as you.

The unfairness of my father’s words sat with me as I lay there, fretting. Since when had I ever been strong? I was an addict, for God’s sake, and a freshly relapsed one, too. It didn’t get any weaker than that. I would go back to Los Angeles, wash my hands of this unwinnable situation, pretend I never saw the Missing poster or the GenFem compound. I’d focus on something simpler. Like staying sober. Making rent. Finding a better reason to keep trying than a kid who wasn’t even part of my family, or a sister who wasn’t talking to me.

After all, Elli had fled from the mess that she’d made—gone off to hide behind an iron gate and a double-height fence—and if she wasn’t capable of handling the situation, why should I be?

On the other side of the wall, Charlotte rustled and then let out a soft moan. I lay there listening, willing myself not to move. She went quiet, waiting for someone to retrieve her. When no one did, she cried again, letting her moan curl up into a wail, at which point something primal lurched inside me, and I found myself running, half-dressed, to soothe her unhappiness away.



* * *



—

Charlotte and I took a last walk around the neighborhood before my parents woke up, looking for ladybugs and lizards, licking the dew off of daisies. I wished I was a photographer, so that I could capture the purity of gesture every time Charlotte pointed and cried out Bird! Butterfly! Pretty! Lello! Like a deity dispensing labels on a newly formed world, each word a wonder.

When we returned to the house, my father had already left to run errands but my mother was sitting at the table, nursing her green tea. She held her arms out to Charlotte. Charlotte ran to her grandmother and climbed up into her lap. She began eating the toast off my mother’s plate, an entitled little princess.

“Your father tells me you’re going back to Los Angeles today,” my mother said. Her voice was studiously calm, pretending. “He says they need you back at the café?”

I sat down across from her, grateful to my father for giving me an excuse to hang on to, even as I hated him for kicking me out. “I’m out of vacation time,” I said.

She nodded, relieved to have an explanation that made everything feel OK. “So that’s where you were yesterday, your father says? You went home for the day?”

I got up to pour myself a cup of coffee. It tasted like cinnamon and charcoal. “I don’t want you to worry about me,” I said carefully. “But I can’t afford to lose this job.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

“Well, you could have told me that sooner, your text was so cryptic. I don’t know why you don’t just tell me the truth,” she said tartly. She glanced at the clock. “So will you be heading back early? I thought maybe I’d take Charlotte with me to my aquaballet class. She can wear floaties.”

I reached out and smoothed a red curl of my mother’s hair. The texture was coarse, frail and brittle from so many years of color. I wondered how gray my mother was underneath it all, how much she hurt. I wondered if all her spiritual seeking had made her feel any more ready for her own death, or if she still needed an explanation that would make the panic go away.

She flinched a little, surprised by my touch.

“You’ll be OK, Mom? You can handle this?”

“Oh, sure. I’ll figure it out. My hip’s a little better this week. It’ll be nice, a little bonding time with my grandbaby.” She pushed her hot tea out of Charlotte’s reach. “And I’m sure Elli will be back this weekend.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around my mother’s blindness, I really couldn’t. I dropped my cup in the sink, with a little more force than necessary. “I can come back and babysit on my days off, if you want. Just let me know if you need me.” I reached across my mother and patted Charlotte’s sticky cheek, blinked hard to push back the tears. I wondered if I would ever see her again.

Charlotte smiled up at me, her teeth full of toast.

I turned to leave but my mother reached out and grabbed my hand to stop me. Her fingers were dry and cracked from the garden, despite the balms she rubbed into them every night. She looked at me with watery eyes.