See You at Harry's(40)

“And maybe if I hadn’t been up here trying to escape — trying to — oh, God.” She makes that strange noise she made the morning she found Charlie. Then she starts to sob.

“Mom, Mom, stop,” Sara says.

I peek around the door and see them sitting on the floor. All of my mom’s meditation stuff is strewn around the room. My mom is rocking back and forth, pulling at her hair with her hands.

“Please stop,” Sara cries. “You have to stop. We need you.”

My mom stops rocking and looks at Sara. “Oh, honey,” she says, and opens her arms to her. Sara leans in, and my mom hugs her tight. She rubs her back in familiar circles, as if she’s a little kid. As if she’s Charlie.

I stand there quietly, thinking about their guilt. How all this time, they weren’t blaming me; they were blaming themselves. And I want to blame them, too. I want to hate them. But I also want to be the one in my mom’s arms. I want to be the one she says It’s not your fault to.

I open the door just a little, and it creaks.

They look up at me through their watery eyes.

“Dad sent me to come get you,” I say quietly.

My mom sees me eyeing her meditation stuff on the floor. Ripped pieces of her sign are scattered around the room like snow.

“What happened in here?” I ask.

My mom turns away and starts shaking her head.

I pick up the singing bowl Charlie used to love to play with and put it back on its shelf.

“Leave it,” my mom says. “I don’t want it anymore.”

I wait for her to say something else to me. Something to make me feel like I’m still her daughter, too. Doesn’t she know I need her? A normal mom would. She’d put my pain before hers. I want to hate her for it. But as I look at her, I realize she doesn’t have control of her pain; it controls her. It’s what’s making her disappear.

“Will you come downstairs?” I finally ask. But really I want to say, Will you hold me? Please, will you just hold me? The familiar ache in my throat grows, and I feel like I’m going to choke.

“In a minute,” she whispers. “We’ll be down in a minute.”

Sara looks up at me finally, and I see all the hurt that I feel in her eyes. But she doesn’t get up. She just stays there on the floor with my mom and all the broken pieces.

So I leave them there. Because I don’t know what else to do. And it hurts too much to stay.

Back at the table, I tell my dad they’ll be down soon. I wonder what he’ll think when he sees what my mom did to the office. I always hated it when she went off and shut herself away from us, but seeing her now, like she’s lost her inner peace forever, only makes me feel scared. Like we’ve lost her, too.

“I really loved that kid,” Patrick says, setting a casserole dish down in the middle of the table. “That was some special kid.”

“There was something about Charlie,” Mona agrees. “Remember that time when he took off all his clothes and ran around the dining room during the dinner rush?” She slaps the table and laughs so hard she starts to cough.

Dwayne reaches over and pats her on the back. “That kid was awesome,” he says.

“Remember when he begged me to let him be assistant busboy, and he just started clearing away everyone’s plates, even though they weren’t done yet?” Trevor asks.

“Oh, yeah,” says Mona. “He took away Mrs. Abbot’s bowl of soup, and the old battle-ax chased him all the way to the kitchen!”

Everyone laughs. Even my dad smiles, though it looks like it hurts.

I don’t want to hear these stories.

I dig my nails into my palms and concentrate on the heaps of unidentifiable food on the plate someone put in front of me, but it makes me feel sick, so I push it away.

“Oh, remember when he climbed out on the roof with his doll?” Gil asks. “It was during the lunch rush, and no one noticed he’d wandered off. Then Fern came charging into the dining room from outside. She said, ‘Charlie’s on the roof!’ and bolted up the stairs. Remember that, Fern? You were, like, a hero!”

“Oh, yeah. That was awesome,” Patrick says, nodding.

I remember that day. I was so mad that my mom had lost track of Charlie long enough that he’d climbed out on the roof without her even noticing. And it wasn’t during a lunch rush. She was just bussing tables, casually chatting with Mona and Gil. I remember racing past them and up the stairs. I had already crawled out on the roof through the office window before my mom leaned out to ask what I was doing, then screamed when she saw Charlie. He was sitting on the edge of the roof, dangling his feet over the side. My heart was pounding so hard, I thought I was going to be the youngest kid on record to have a heart attack.

“Them cahs don’t look like ants,” he’d said to me thoughtfully as I crawled closer to him.

“What?”

“In my show. Fum on top a building, cahs look like ants.”

I moved in behind him and hugged him to my chest. “No, Charlie. That’s from the top of a skyscraper. Not a small building like this.”

“Oh,” he said sadly.

I slipped my hands under his arms and dragged him back through the window to safety. My mom, Mona, and Gil cheered and hugged us. My mom took Charlie from me and held him close, as if he was a prize she had just won. She wouldn’t look me in the eye.