Vic Pearson dreams of his dead sister. It is the worst kind of nightmare, one where he knows what is to come but cannot wake up or change its course. And in the waking hours to follow, he will think that quite appropriate. Charlotte’s real life had gone the same way, with him as a passive but supportive observer, unable to nudge her from the track of self-destruction that had finally taken her from him. He’d loved her and hated her, but in the nightmare she terrifies him.
Charlotte died at nineteen, but in the dream she, like Vic, is in her forties. She has hair greying at the temples and a face pinched by her troubled life. Stone-cross gravestones have been tattooed onto her forearms by blunt, infected needles, and he follows her through their Boston suburb as she goes from house to house, gathering the paraphernalia of her demise from people who should know better. At one house their mother opens the door and hands Charlotte a family heirloom to sell for drugs, and as Charlotte walks away without saying thank you Vic rages at his mother, shouting. But he has no voice – she does not hear. She averts her eyes and closes the front door on the smell of baking and despair. At the next house, Charlotte’s teenaged school friend answers the door and starts nodding, agreeing with every mad thing that Charlotte says. Satisfied, she walks on to the next house, and the next, and each time Vic tries to plead with the person who answers the door to make a stand against his sister’s downward spiral.
He knows what is coming and whose the last house will be, but it is still a surprise when he spies the toys scattered across the lawn and his own car in the driveway. It’s a house that he has never lived in, but which feels more like home than the Danton Rock bungalow he has shared with Lucy since their marriage.
This is the only part of the nightmare where he actually hears the words being spoken.
Lucy answers the door when Charlotte knocks.
‘Charlotte! You’re looking well. Death becomes you.’
‘Hi, Luce. My loser brother at home?’
Loser! Vic thinks. She dares call me a loser! He hears Olivia’s sweet girly voice from inside the house, and he starts to loathe himself as his hatred grows for his sister, dead for over two decades but alive and ageing along with him right now, because of the sense of dreadful loss she’s instilled within him. When she died he felt the guilt resting squarely on his shoulders, and though he’d seen the same responsibility crushing his parents and her friends as well, he’d never been able to shake it. His unrelenting and almost painful love for his wife and daughter is fed partly by that guilt, and partly by the hopeless loss he still feels for Charlotte.
And the dream turns to nightmare.
‘Vic’s not in right now,’ Lucy says. ‘He’s at work.’
‘Right, yeah. At work.’ Charlotte leans against the wall and rubs a powder into her gums and stabs her forearm with a hypodermic that instantly vanishes. ‘He’s fucking Holly Wright, you know. Any chance they get. They’re down there for days on end sometimes, and she likes him to eat her out in her shower cubicle. She sucked him off in the canteen’s kitchen once. She doesn’t like to swallow, but she takes it over her tits.’
‘Vic’s not in right now,’ Lucy says again, apparently not hearing.
‘He says he loves her,’ Charlotte says, and her skin starts changing, hanging slack from her frame as death catches up with her. She turns and acknowledges him for the first time. ‘When we were kids he said he loved me, too.’
I did, Vic screams, but no sound emerges. And then to feed his guilt comes Charlotte’s denial of what he is trying to say. She opens her mouth and starts screeching at him, an intermittent cry that raises the hairs on the back of his arms and neck and makes his balls quiver, just as thoughts of Holly used to. They sometimes still did.
Lucy smiles uncertainly at the terrifying sound, glancing around her front lawn, not seeing Vic but carrying in her eyes a suspicion that he has spent years trying not to see for real.