“What happened to you,” Rusty said, sounding strident. “It’s not your fault, but we can’t tell anybody else, okay?”
Charlotte could only stare. You didn’t have to lie if something wasn’t your fault.
Rusty said, “It’s a private thing, and we’re not going to tell anybody, okay?” He looked up at Judith Heller again. “I know what lawyers do to girls who are raped. I’m not going to put my daughter through that hell. I won’t let people treat her like she’s damaged.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. His voice became stronger. “They’ll hang for this. Those two boys are murderers, and they’ll die for it, but please don’t let them take my daughter with them. Please. It’s too much. It’s just too much.”
He waited, his eyes on Miss Heller. Charlie turned around. Miss Heller looked down at her. She nodded.
“Thank you. Thank you.” Rusty rested his hand on Charlotte’s shoulder. He looked at her face again, saw the blood and bone and sticks and leaves that had become glued to her body. He touched the ripped seam of her shorts. His tears started to flow again. He was thinking about what had been done to her, what had been done to Sam, to Gamma. He dropped his face into his hands. His sobs turned into howls. He fell against the wall, racked by grief.
Charlotte tried to swallow. Her throat was too dry. She could not clear the taste of sour milk. She was torn up inside. She could still feel the steady flow of blood sliding down the inside of her leg.
“Daddy,” Charlotte said. “I’m sorry.”
“No.” He grabbed her, shook her. “Don’t ever apologize, Charlotte. Do you hear me?”
He seemed so angry that Charlotte dared not speak.
“I’m sorry,” Rusty stuttered out. He got up on his knees. He wrapped his hand around the back of her head, pressed his face to her face, their noses touching. She could smell cigarette smoke and his musky cologne. “You listen to me, Charlie Bear. Are you listening?”
Charlotte stared into his eyes. Red lines spoked out from the blue irises.
He said, “It’s not your fault. I am your daddy, and I am telling you that none of this is your fault.” He waited. “Okay?”
Charlotte nodded. “Okay.”
Rusty whimpered out another breath. He swallowed hard. He was still openly weeping. “Now, do you remember all those boxes your mama brought home from the thrift store?”
Charlotte had forgotten about the boxes. No one would be around to unpack them now. It was just Charlotte and Rusty. There would never be anyone else.
“Listen to me, baby.” Rusty cupped his hands to her face. “I want you to take what that nasty man did to you, and I want you to put it in one of those boxes, okay?”
He waited, clearly desperate for her to agree.
Charlotte let herself nod.
“All right,” he said. “All right. Well, then your daddy’s gonna get some tape, and we’re gonna tape up that box together, sweetheart.” His voice warbled again. His eyes desperately searched hers. “Do you hear me? We’re gonna close up that box and tape it shut.”
Again, she nodded.
“Then we’re gonna put that mean ol’ box on a shelf. And we’re gonna leave it there. And we’re not gonna think about it or look at it until we’re good and God damn ready, okay?”
Charlotte kept nodding, because that’s what he wanted.
“Good girl.” Rusty kissed her cheek. He pulled her close to his chest. Charlotte’s ear folded against his shirt. She could feel his heart thumping beneath the skin and bone. He had sounded so frantic, so afraid.
He asked, “We’re gonna be okay, aren’t we?”
He held her so tight that she couldn’t nod, but Charlotte understood what her father wanted. He needed her to flip on her logical switch, but for real this time. Gamma was gone. Sam was gone. Charlotte had to be strong. She had to be the good daughter who took care of her father.
“Okay, Charlie Bear?” Rusty kissed the top of her head. “Can we do that?”
Charlotte imagined the empty closet in the bachelor farmer’s bedroom. The door hung open. She saw the box on the floor. Brown cardboard. Packing tape sealed it closed. She saw the label. TOP SECRET. She watched Rusty hefting the box onto his shoulder, sliding it onto the top shelf, pushing it back until shadows placed it in darkness.
“Can we do that, baby?” He begged, “Can we just close that box?”
Charlie imagined herself shutting the closet door.
She said, “Yes, Daddy.”
She would never open the box again.
16
Charlie could not look at Sam. She kept her head buried in her hands. She stayed bent over in the chair. She had not thought about her promise to Rusty in decades. She had been the good daughter, the obedient daughter, putting her secret on a shelf, letting the dark shadows of time obscure the memories. Their Devil’s Pact had never felt like the part of the story that mattered, but she could see now that it mattered almost more than anything else.
She told Sam, “I guess the moral of the story is that bad things happen to me in hallways.”
Charlie felt Sam’s hand on her back. All that she wanted in the world right now was to lean into her sister, to put her head in Sam’s lap, and let Sam hold her while she cried.
Instead, she stood up. She found her shoes. She rested her hip against Rusty’s casket as she put them on. “It was Mary-Lynne. I thought Lynne was her last name. Not Huckabee.” She felt nauseated when she recalled Huck’s cold reaction when he learned that Charlie was Rusty Quinn’s daughter. “Do you remember the pictures of her in the barn?”
Sam nodded.
“Her neck was stretched at least a foot; that’s what I remember. That she looked like a giraffe, almost. And the expression on her face—” Charlie wondered if she’d had the same agonized expression when Rusty had found her in the hallway. “We thought you were dead, we knew Mama was dead. He didn’t say, but I know that he was afraid that I would hang myself, or find some way to kill myself, like Mary-Lynne.” Charlie shrugged. “He was probably right. It was just too much.”
Sam kept silent for a moment. She had never been given to fidgeting, but she smoothed out the leg of her pants. “Did the doctors believe that was the cause of your miscarriages?”
Charlie almost laughed. Sam always wanted the scientific explanation.
She told her sister, “After the second one, which was really the third, I went to a fertility expert in Atlanta. Ben thought I was at a conference. I told the doctor what happened—what really happened. I laid it out for her, things that even Dad didn’t know. That he’d used his hands. His fists. His knife.”
Sam cleared her throat. Her expression, as always, was obscured by her dark glasses. “And?”