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Why all the little details of who she was were so fascinating to me.
Slowly, I lifted my head. “Tell me about it again.”
Her brow furrowed. “About what?”
“Your first visit here. Tell me about it. Why did it make you so happy?”
Charlotte sucked in a quick breath, blinking a few times.
Show me who you are,I wanted to say. I wanted her to show me why she was here, why she instinctively knew how to handle me. Why she wanted this half relationship. I wanted to know all of it.
Because I had no idea how to give her that in return.
“M-my parents had a pretty nasty divorce,” she said. “Pretty nasty marriage, actually. They fought for”—she paused, shaking her head—“a decade before my mom asked for a divorce. We moved here becausemy aunt Daphne had been in Traverse for years. They were college roommates, and my mom used to visit when I was a baby. I don’t remember it, but she said the summers at the beach were some of her best memories.”
Slowly, the tension ebbed from the muscles in my shoulders, and I was able to lower them a few inches. I could rest my head against the cabinets and listen to her without still feeling that cold, crawling sensation moving down the lengths of my arms.
“I can’t say it’s harder being an only child when your parents fight all the time,” she continued. “But I didn’t have a brother or sister who understood what it was like. My friends had no clue how bad it was. And I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. I just ... hid. I’d put on my headphones and sit in my bedroom with a book and music on, trying to pretend like everything was fine.”
“It wasn’t, though,” I said.
Slowly, she shook her head. “No. You don’t know that when you’re a kid, though. Your normal is all you know. Even if you get glimpses of other people’s lives, it’s only that ... a glimpse. Half the time, I was convinced everyone else was the exact same and they just hid it better than my parents did. After a few years of that, I didn’t want to see what other families did. Didn’t really care. Even that felt normal after a while.”
I thought about my own father. What our normal was growing up. The way he fixated on me. Tansy’s definition of the word was different from mine, but like Charlotte ... we didn’t really understand what was unhealthy about it until we were older.
“I’m not sure I know how to explain it well,” she said. Even though she was sitting on the floor with me, just inches away, Charlotte was right back in whatever that memory was. And I could see the change in her face when she got to the good part. “Moving here, it didn’t immediately feel like home. Almost like being on vacation, you know?”
I nodded.
“When my mom and Daphne dragged me to the Christmas party here, I was such a preteen asshole about it. So emo,” she said with a smile. “When we walked in the front door, Chris’s grandma was the first person I saw. She was standing next to the big tree by the stairs, welcoming everyone who came in. Telling us where we could find the hot chocolate and snacks, the best spots to look at the train, and which bedrooms had the best trees.” Then she closed her eyes, lost in that memory. I stayed quiet while she took a deep breath. “The welcome in this house was ... tangible. Like I could grab on to it with both hands, hold it against my chest, and it would be warm and heavy. And it came from them. It came from the house. They were so intertwined.
“I never wanted to leave,” she said simply. “My mom and I stayed for hours. I walked through the rooms all day, studied everything in them. Chris’s grandpa explained all the details of the house and who built it and what their story was. And it was the first time I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Give someone that same feeling. Make something vivid and real out of history.”
Her eyelids fluttered open, and the look I saw there knocked the breath from my still-aching lungs.
I’d give her anything she wanted if I could keep that look in her eyes. Do anything she needed to help her capture it again.
And for the first time, sitting on the floor, I found myself willing to admit that I wanted just a small piece of that for myself too. But only if she was there with me.
And if I thought about that for too long, I’d probably feel another panic attack looming at the edges of our moment. So I didn’t dwell on it. But I didn’t fight it either.
As I watched her pull herself from the memory, the thing that bound us together, I simply accepted it as fact.
“Where’s your mom now?” I asked.
She blinked again, her eyes filling rapidly with tears that threatened to fall. But they didn’t. “She died a few years ago. A heart attack,” she whispered. “It was quick. And I guess I’m glad for that in hindsight.”
“I’m sorry.”
Charlotte smiled. “Thanks. You would’ve liked her. Everyone did.”
We lapsed into silence for a few moments, and I closed my eyes. It would’ve been so easy to brush off what she’d witnessed, and even though she’d allowed me to shift the attention to her, I fought the urge to respond in the way that my dad would’ve told me to.
On your feet.
Back to work.
Crying about it won’t solve anyone’s problems, and it won’t help you get better.
