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“Hey, Lu. How are you doing?”
Lu sighed and pushed Mute. “Mom, if you want to talk to me, don’t try to be all sneaky about it.”
Charlotte sat beside her on the couch. “I have some concerns about Pete.”
“Of course you do. He’s a boy and you’re my mom and Dad left. It all makes sense.”
Charlotte shut her eyes and recalled an image of a three-year-old Lu in pigtails, twirling unselfconsciously in the living room of their old apartment.
“You’re fourteen, honey,” Charlotte said, returning unwillingly to reality. “That’s just so young to be serious with a boy.”
“Mom, please. Can’t you remember being fourteen? You were my age once, and you came out okay. So lighten up.”
Did I really come out okay? Charlotte wondered. For Lu’s sake (and for fear of legal repercussions if she were caught hiring men to take photos of a teenage boy), she tried to remember what it was like to be young. That Easter weekend, when they visited her mother in North Carolina, she dug out some old boxes and uncovered a diary from her middle school years. The first page arrested her:
Things to do before I’m 30
• Get married [check]
• Have a baby [check, check]
• Walk in high heels without wobbling [check]
• Climb Kilimanjaro [um …]
• Understand physics [check-ish]
• Help save whales or other animals in danger [check! Thank goodness for those Greenpeace donations!]
• Read Jane Austen [???]
It was strange discovering forgotten goals in her own handwriting, as if she’d woken up at a dance club wearing fishnet tights with a group of strangers who called her “Sahara.” Some of the goals made sense—who doesn’t like whales?—but, Kilimanjaro? Wasn’t that a bit much to ask? Jane Austen was doable. The only author Charlotte had read as an adult was Agatha Christie. She’d inherited a fifty-book set from her grandmother and slowly worked her way through them whenever circumstances demanded a book. She couldn’t remember why Austen had intrigued her younger self but was curious enough to take a trip to the bookstore. Jane Austen wasn’t hard to find.
The next weekend the kids went to their father’s, and Charlotte played the sick card to get out of blind dates. She was alone in the house for forty-eight hours and spent most of them with a book in her hand. She read like a woman drinks water after nearly dying of dehydration. The stories pulled out of her sensation after sensation: a fluttering in her belly, a laugh on her lips, a pounding in her heart. Austen’s books made her feel, and that was new, and intoxicating too. And so hopeful. Hope had been that thing with burnt feathers buried in her soul, but now it was waking up, stretch
ing, beating fresh wings in the ashes.
Maybe … maybe it would be all right to allow herself to feel … just a little? Not immediately, nothing rash. But fluttery hope suggested that when she was ready to open back up, perhaps all emotions wouldn’t be stones-pressing-chest horrible. She had no specific expectations. She just contemplated that bird’s heartbeat inside her and considered it was time to take a chance.
The chance came that summer.
“Take a trip, Charlotte,” her sister-in-law Shelby said over the phone. “When the kids are with James, go somewhere exotic. Meet someone.”
There was no one Charlotte wanted to meet. Except the characters in Austen’s books. Which was a ridiculous idea. Right? Wasn’t it?
“Maybe I’ll go to England,” Charlotte said.
She called Sunny, the travel agent she used for business trips.
“I have three weeks this summer and I’d like to go to the U.K. Maybe … I don’t know, do they have Jane Austen tours?”
“Oh sure,” Sunny said, sounding up to her name. “There’s some super great tours that take you through towns where she lived or places from her books. Bath is popular. It’s so effin’ quaint.”
“That sounds nice.” Maybe if she stood in the places where Austen wrote, where her characters lived, she could feel again as she had when reading her books—not like a girl who’d been wadded up and tossed aside, but like a woman with possibilities.
“Divorced nearly a year and never a vacation,” Charlotte said to fill the silence while Sunny clicked away on her computer. “I should stop feeling like I don’t deserve it and just do it. And it’s not frivolous; it’s literary, right? I mean, Sunny, have you read Austen?”
“Sure—well, not since high school.” Clickety-click.
