“And she ran tests and did scans and then she said something about the thinness of this wall or scarring on that tube and she drew this diagram on a sheet of paper but I said, ‘Give it to me straight.’ And she did. I have an inhospitable womb.” Charlie laughed bitterly at the phrase, which sounded like something you’d read on a travel review site. “My uterine environment is not suitable for hosting a fetus. The doctor was amazed I’d managed to get so far into my second trimester.”
Sam asked, “Did she say it was because of what happened?”
Charlie shrugged. “She said it could be, but there was no way to know for sure. I dunno, a guy jams the handle of a knife up your twat, it makes sense that you can’t have babies.”
“The last time,” Sam said, always zeroing in on the deductive fallacy. “You said Dandy-Walker is a syndrome, not resultant of a uterine malformation. Is there a genetic component?”
Charlie couldn’t go down this road again. “You’re right. That was my last time. I’m too old now. Any pregnancy would be considered too high risk. The clock has ticked down.”
Sam took off her glasses. She rubbed her eyes. “I should have been here for you.”
“And I should have never asked you to come.” She smiled, remembering something Rusty had said two days ago. “Our familiar impasse.”
“You need to tell Ben.”
“There’s that you need again.” Charlie blew her nose. She had not missed Sam’s bossy older sisterness over the years. “I think it’s too late for me and Ben.” The words sounded flippant, but after her disastrous attempts at seduction, she had to stop denying the possibility that her husband would not come back. Charlie couldn’t even work up the courage to ask him to stay last night because she was too afraid he would tell her no again.
She said, “Ben was a saint when it happened. Every time. I really mean that. I just don’t understand where all that goodness comes from. Not his mother. Not his sisters. God, they were all awful. They wanted to know every detail, like it was gossip. They practically set up their own hotline. And you don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant, and buying baby furniture, and planning your maternity leave, and being big as a Mack Truck, then a week later you go to the grocery store and everybody who was smiling at you before can’t even look you in the eye.” Charlie asked, “I’m assuming you don’t know what that’s like?”
Sam shook her head.
Charlie was not surprised. She could not see her sister risking the physical toll a child would take on her body.
Charlie said, “I turned into such a bitch. I would hear myself—I can hear myself now, ten minutes ago, yesterday, every fucking day before that—and think, Shut up. Let it go. But I don’t. I can’t.”
“And adoption?”
Charlie tried not to bristle at the question. Her baby had died. It wasn’t like a dog, where you could get a new one a few months later to take away the loss. “I kept waiting for Ben to bring it up, but he kept saying he was happy with me, that we were a team, that he loved the idea of the two of us growing old together.” She shrugged. “Maybe he was waiting for me to bring it up. Like the Gift of the Magi, but with a toxic uterus.”
Sam put on her glasses. “You say that it’s already over with Ben. What do you lose if you tell him what happened?”
“It’s what I gain,” Charlie said. “I don’t want his pity. I don’t want him to stay with me because he feels an obligation.” She leaned her hand on the closed casket. She was talking to Rusty as much as Sam. “Ben would be happier with someone else.”
“Utter bullshit,” Sam said, her tone clipped. “You have no right to decide on his behalf.”
Charlie felt like Ben had already decided. She could not blame him. She was hard-pressed to believe any forty-one-year-old man would be unhappy with a limber twenty-six-year-old. “He’s so great with kids. He loves them so much.”
“So do you.”
“But he’s not the one keeping me from having children.”
“What if he was?”
Charlie shook her head. It didn’t work like that. “Do you want a minute alone?” She indicated the casket. “To say goodbye?”
Sam frowned. “To whom would I be speaking?”
Charlie crossed her arms. “Can I have a minute?”
Sam’s eyebrow arched up, but she managed for once to withhold her opinion. “I’ll be outside.”
Charlie watched her sister leave the room. Sam wasn’t limping as much today. That, at least, was a relief. Charlie could not stand seeing her back in Pikeville, so out of her element, so unprotected. Sam could not turn a corner, she could not walk down the street, without everyone knowing exactly what had happened.
Except for Judge Stanley Lyman.
If there had been a way for Charlie to run up to the bench and slap the bastard across the face for humiliating her sister, Charlie would have risked being arrested.
Sam had always worked so hard to hide the things that were wrong with her, but you did not have to do more than study her for a few minutes to notice the peculiarities. Her posture, always too stiff. The way she walked with her arms tight to her sides rather than letting them swing freely. The way she held her head at an angle, always wary of her blindside. Then there was her precise, maddeningly didactic way of speaking. Sam’s tone had always been sharp, but after being shot, it was as if every word was folded around the corner of a straight edge. Sometimes, you could hear a hesitation as she searched for the correct word. More rarely, you heard the sound of her breath as she pushed out sound, using her diaphragm the way the speech pathologist had trained her.
The doctors. The pathologists. The therapists. There had been a whole team surrounding Sam. They all had opinions, recommendations, warnings, and none of them understood that Sam would defy them all. She was not a normal person. She had not been that way before being shot, and she certainly was not that way during her recovery.
Charlie could remember one of the doctors telling Rusty that the damage to Sam’s brain could shave off as many as ten IQ points. Charlie had almost laughed. Ten points would be devastating for any normal human being. For Sam, it meant that she went from being a genius-level prodigy to just really, really fucking smart.
Sam was seventeen years old, two years on from the gunshot, when she was offered a full scholarship to Stanford.
Was she happy?
Charlie could hear Rusty’s question echoing in her head.
She turned around to face her father’s hideous casket. She rested her hand on the lid. The paint had chipped in the corner, which she supposed was what happened when you hung on it like a demented, foul-mouthed monkey.
Sam did not seem happy, but she seemed content.
In retrospect, Charlie should have told her father that contentedness was the more laudable goal. Sam was thriving in her legal practice. Her temper, once a roiling tempest, finally seemed to be under control. The anger she had carried around like a brick in her chest was clearly gone. Of course, she was still pedantic and annoying, but that came with being their mother’s child.
Charlie tapped her fingers on the casket.