“Right.”
Charlie hardly slept again that night. By 6 A.M., when he gave up on bed, exhaustion was sanding his eyes. His gut was roiling. The revelation of Ma’s shoplifting: all night, he had kept probing that truly shocking fact, and once the astonishment passed, he quickly lost the sweet flavor of moral superiority. What sort of a woman, Charlie was wondering, could go around stealing other peoples’ things, as if her own crazy needs mattered more than the laws of the world? What sort of a woman, presented with questions from a police officer, could allow herself to reach for such a pathetically false nostrum for her own guilt, when the truth might have led to some sort of explanation? The same sort of woman, he supposed, who decides to pull her child out of school to comfort her in her grief. The sort of woman who chooses to outsource her own suffering onto those nearest at hand.
Charlie had spent a good part of the night stewing in a noxious memory, a certain day from the first years after, which had left him so furious with his mother, whose emergence from bed he heard in the creaking plywood, that he chose not to wait for her. He deposited a note, telling his mother that he had left early for Crockett State on the Suzuki. He snarfed an English muffin and moved swiftly through the rooms of the cracked McMansion, silently latched the front door.
The sun looked bald and gentle as it rose over the distant mountains that morning, its cheery light throwing the etched shadow of Charlie’s motorbike across the asphalt expanse. But, even at top speed, the memory was still holding on there, in Charlie’s wind-lashed head.
Charlie must have been fifteen, maybe sixteen. Oliver had been gone long enough that Charlie had begun to glimpse the futility of his efforts to keep his mother sane, to engage her in any activity beyond her daily visits to Bed Four. Still, that morning he had been trying.
“A five-letter word, beginning with T, that means a dance,” Charlie had said, tapping a pencil against the book of crossword puzzles spread over his legs. On the far end of the sofa, his mother hardly flinched, apparently engaged in a staring contest with the wall. “Okay,” Charlie said, “how about a three-letter word that means family?” And when still she did not reply, Charlie scooted next to her, rested the book in her own lap. As if woken from a deep sleep, her hands startled, slapping the book away, the edge of a page slicing her finger, which she sucked at furiously.
“I don’t know why you can’t just leave me be,” she said. “Why you are always asking me these questions. Why you can’t just be quiet for a while.”
Ma pulled the wounded finger from her mouth, smacked her hand on the tired cowhide of the sofa. “That’s the difference between your brother and you,” Ma told Charlie then. “You always need all the attention in the room.” And then she stood, leaving Charlie alone in the silence he had disturbed.
This was one of his mother’s condemnations of Charlie that he had heard before, in many forms. “There are those people who can be alone together, and those people who don’t know the value of listening to their own thoughts,” ran a common variation on her theory. This was, in fact, one of a great many ways his mother had always divided the world into two types of people: the virtuous, contemplative, amenable people like Oliver and Ma herself, and the unsettled, disruptive people like Charlie and his father. In the now mostly unacknowledged prehistory of the Lovings, in the family they had been before the night of November fifteenth, Ma had come to use “like Oliver” as a shorthand to mean good and “like Charlie” to mean bad. But Charlie knew the truth: “like Oliver” just meant someone who would always be what she needed: a timid, ever attentive and agreeable boy.
And after that worst night, Charlie had still tried. He had tried and at last utterly failed to enter into the tacit agreement with Ma that had been made by his brother before him: that he would always be present and that he would consign any hard truths to silence. “There are those people who can be alone together,” Ma had said, and here was the darkest thought of all, the awareness Charlie glimpsed that day on the sofa but understood clearly now, as he ripped down the highway: a quietly receptive, forever present son was all Ma had ever wanted, and in the worst tragedy of her life, she’d had her insane prayer answered.
*
A half hour later, with the pleasing hiss of automated doors, Charlie was back in the deep time, the placeless place of Crockett State Assisted Care Facility. He waved at Peggy, who showed him the usual jazz hands.
Once more at Bed Four, he followed his familiar routine, clicking on the Bob Dylan, pulling up the plastic chair, trying and failing to avoid the panicked sight of the eyes beneath him, awake, searching as ever. The crossed tin bowie knives of the wall clock showed 6:45. Charlie had at least an hour to fill, and he knew now it had been a mistake to come early.
“Why didn’t you ever stand up for me?” Charlie heard himself say. The words opened a courage or rage, and Charlie found that he now wanted to look Oliver right in the eyes. He clutched his brother’s face by the ears, and in quick birdlike snatches, his gaze met Oliver’s. “Stand up to Ma, I mean.”
Part of Charlie felt he was being ridiculous, cruel, maudlin. The other part thought, This is why I’m here now. “Why didn’t you ever once tell her it was wrong? To treat me like your lousy shadow.” This anger was very old; it had done erosion’s slow work, carving ancient fissures to conduct that fury. It sluiced through him, bearing the rotten things he was saying now. “Why did you always let me be her big disappointment?”
There was a pack of American Spirits in the pocket of his jeans, and he jostled a smoke free, lit it, exhaled gray plumes into the room. “And then you just leave me there,” he said. “Leave us there, to rot. And you know what? I tried, I did. I’ve tried to give her another you, to let my whole life become nothing but you, you, you. Do you know what it was like? What it is still like?”
The cigarette grew a crooked finger of ash that self-amputated, falling on the pillow. Like a little streak of excrement against the starched whiteness of the linens. He brushed the ash away, unlatched the window, tossed the butt outside.
Charlie slumped back into the plastic chair, said nothing more to his brother for the half hour that followed. Bob Dylan sang and moaned his way through another spinning of Blonde on Blonde. The heat and smell of baked creosote cleaned the last tang of the cigarette from the room.
“Charlie,” Margot said, arriving at the door just shy of seven fifteen. “Always the early bird.”