Never Have I Ever(66)

“Did what?” Char asked, and the whole scene became surreal. The colors grew brighter and sharper. Time slowed and stretched, but it still went forward, and I couldn’t stop it.

“Talked like that. Messed up words,” Roux said, releasing a practiced trill of laughter. “When I was little? I couldn’t say Angelica. I called myself ‘Leaky,’ like I was a faulty diaper, and everyone in the family picked it up. I swear to God, I was named Leaky until second grade.”

Roux gave me another long, sloe-eyed glance, sideways, and my past was just a stone in her pocket. This was not about the worst thing I’d ever done. Not anymore. Tig and I had wrecked that for her, but she’d been as busy as I had. She hadn’t taken what I’d told her at face value. She’d gone back. Done the research that she should have done the first time. Checked. This was now about the worst thing I was doing. The thing I’d been doing for almost seven years now, to Charlotte. To my dearest, sweetest Charlotte.

“That’s so funny,” Char said. She’d been expertly cued, manipulated, and her next words were unstoppable. “I was called Lottie when I was little, but I couldn’t say that either. I said it like ‘Lolly.’ My whole family and everyone, even my preschool teachers, called me Lolly. My brother, Paul, he still calls me Lolly-Pop sometimes.”

She chuckled into the ghastly silence that had filled the room. We all five stood looking at one another. Me, two babies, my blackmailer, and the woman who had once been Lolly Shipley, who was now my best friend in the world.





12




I had to let her go, down into the blue. It was where I was most wholly myself; I didn’t think of it as a bad place to leave her. I took away her struggling, her fear, and let her drift down quiet, her arms around her sleeping baby brother. She never got any older. She never rose. She spiraled down into the deeps, out of sight and thought, waiting for me, under. It was the only way that I could be her friend, once I’d realized she was Lolly Shipley.

I didn’t know at first. I swear I didn’t know.

Not for months, though in hindsight I do wonder if I didn’t recognize her on some level. Maybe I befriended her because I saw my debt limned in Lolly Shipley’s round cheeks and soft jawline, both still in evidence on Charlotte’s grown-up face. If so, it was deep in my subconscious, because when I returned to track down Tig, I never thought I’d run into any of the Shipleys. I believed they’d left Florida years ago.

I’d overheard my mother complaining to my father about having to relocate, not a year after we’d landed in Boston. It was galling, my mother told him, to think of Dad’s lateral career move, poor Connor in a new school for his senior year, her lost home and friends. All this to give the Shipleys space and peace, only to have them vacate. Then she saw me, frozen big-eyed and miserable in the doorway, and changed the subject.

She never talked about the Shipleys, or Tig, or anything relating to the accident in my presence. If I approached the topic, even crept toward it sideways in a delicate verbal crab walk, she tasked me with a chore that took me from the room. I was smarter than any of Pavlov’s dogs, so I only had to wash her car and reorganize her gift-wrap station before I stopped trying.

Once we’d moved, I didn’t even go back into therapy. My mother didn’t want me talking to anyone who might encourage me to examine, or discuss, or remember. She liked my lie, and she threw all her faith and will behind it.

It was, in some ways, a relief to have the topic so forbidden. I had no right to ask anything of the Shipleys, least of all forgiveness. In the face of their huge and permanent loss, my need to apologize was a dust mote, a speck. The best thing I could do, I believed, was leave them to mourn in peace. So I didn’t know until after my life and Char’s had intertwined that my parents had only been discussing their move out of our neighborhood.

Mr. Shipley could no longer afford to live there; his small import-export business had fallen apart with him. Char had grown up in Pensacola after all, her childhood marked by scarcity. She grew up missing a parent and also short on both money and simple time to be young, because she had to step into the gap I’d made, mothering her little brother.

When Paul was two, he walked into the neighborhood pool, sinking like a stone, and Charlotte, only five, leaped in right after him. She’d been a novice swimmer, barnacled to a baby, thrashing down in the blue. She could see the surface, but she couldn’t get them there. She kicked and churned, Paul’s panicked little hands yanking her hair. Her father, dozy from beer, was unaware that both his kids were underwater.

Someone—a lifeguard or a nearby mother, Char could not remember—had fished them out. I’d left them there, though. I’d told Roux the same lie that I told myself: There was no Lolly Shipley anymore. As for Char, nearly drowning had left her with both a fear of the water and the understanding that if she did not look out for Paul, no one would. Their father was very busy drinking.

That’s how Char came to know Davis so well, at a support group for children and spouses and parents of alcoholics.

It was so intricate, so precise, all the little turning wheels and moving pieces that brought Char to me. I marveled at it later, as I gleaned her history piecemeal from the thousand conversations we had after I’d realized who she was. It astonished me, how everything had unfolded in this perfect chain.