“Really?” Sam ignored the lightning strike of pain every time Charlie poked her shoulder. “I pick at you?”
“Asking me about Ben.” She jabbed again, harder. “Asking me about Rusty.” She jabbed again. “Asking me about Huck.” She jabbed again. “Asking me about—”
“Stop it!” Sam yelled, slapping away her hand. “Why are you so fucking antagonistic?”
“Why are you so fucking annoying?”
“Because you were supposed to be happy!” Sam yelled, the sound of the truth like a shock to her senses. “My body is useless! My brain is—” She threw her hands into the air. “Gone! Everything I was supposed to be is gone. I can’t see. I can’t run. I can’t move. I can’t process. I have no sense of ease. I get no comfort—ever. And I tell myself every day—every single day, Charlotte—that it doesn’t matter because you were able to get away.”
“I did get away!”
“For what?” Sam raged. “So you can antagonize the Culpeppers? So you can turn into Rusty? So you can get punched in the face? So you can destroy your marriage?” Sam swept a pile of magazines onto the floor. She gasped at the pain that sliced up her arm. Her bicep spasmed. Her shoulder seized. She leaned against the desk, breathless.
Charlie stepped forward.
“No.” Sam did not want her help. “You were supposed to have children. You were supposed to have friends who love you, and to live in your beautiful house with your wonderful husband, not throw it all away for some feckless asshole like Mason Huckabee.”
“That’s—”
“Not fair? Not right? That’s not what happened with Ben? That’s not what happened in college? That’s not what happened whenever the fuck you felt like running away because you blame yourself, Charlie, not me. I don’t blame you for running. Gamma wanted you to run. I begged you to run. What I blame you for is hiding—from your life, from me, from your own happiness. You think I’m closed off? You think I’m cold? You are consumed with self-hatred. You reek of it. And you think that putting everyone and everything in a separate compartment is the only way to pick up the pieces.”
Charlie said nothing.
“I’m off in New York. Rusty’s in his tilted windmill. Ben’s over here. Mason’s over there. Lenore’s wherever the hell she is. That’s no way to live, Charlie. You were not built for that kind of life. You’re so clever, and industrious, and you were always so annoyingly, so relentlessly happy.” Sam kneaded her shoulder. The muscle was on fire. She asked her sister, “What happened to that person, Charlie? You ran. You got away.”
Charlie stared down at the floor. Her jaw was tight. Her breathing was labored.
So was Sam’s. She could feel the rapid rise and fall of her chest. Her fingers trembled like the stuck second hand on a clock. She felt as if the world was spinning out of control. Why did Charlie keep pushing her? What was she trying to accomplish?
Lenore knocked on the open door. “Everything okay in here?”
Charlie shook her head. Blood dripped from her nose.
Lenore joked, “Should I call the cops?”
“Call a taxi.” Charlie gripped the drawer handle. She heaved it open. The wood splintered. Zachariah Culpepper’s letters scattered onto the floor. She said, “Go home, Samantha. You were right. This place makes you too mean.”
13
Sam sat across from Lenore at a booth in the otherwise empty diner. She slowly dipped her tea sachet into the hot water the waitress had brought to the table. She could feel Lenore watching her, but she did not know what to say.
“It’ll be faster if I drive you to the hospital,” Lenore offered.
Sam shook her head. She would wait for the taxi. “You don’t have to stay with me.”
Lenore held her coffee cup between her hands. Her nails were neatly trimmed and clear polished. She wore a single ring on her right index finger. She saw Sam looking and said, “Your mother gave me this.”
Sam thought the ring looked like something her mother would wear—unusual, not particularly pretty, but striking in its own way. Sam asked, “Tell me about her.”
Lenore held up her hand and studied the ring. “Lana, my sister, worked at Fermilab with her. They weren’t in the same department, or even on the same level, but single gals weren’t allowed to live on their own back then, so they were assigned housing together at the university. That was the only way my mother would let Lana work there, so long as she was kept away from the sex-mad male scientists.”
Sam waited for her to continue.
“Lana brought Harriet home over Christmas break, and I ignored her at first, but then there was a night when I couldn’t sleep, and I walked out into the backyard for some air, and there she was.” Lenore raised her eyebrows. “She was looking up at the stars. Physics was her calling, but astronomy was her passion.”
Sam felt sad that she had never known this about her mother.
“We talked all night. It was very rare for me to find someone who was that interesting. We sort of fell into dating, but there was never anything …” She shrugged off the details. “We were together for a little over a year, though it was a long-distance relationship. I was in law school with Rusty. Why that didn’t work out is another story. But one summer, I took your father up to Chicago with me, and he swept her off her feet.” She shrugged. “I bowed out. We were always more friends than lovers.”
“But she was constantly mad at you,” Sam said. “I could hear it in her voice.”
“I kept her husband out late drinking and smoking instead of spending time with his family.” Lenore shrugged again. “She always wanted a conventional life.”
Sam could not imagine her mother wanting any such thing. “She was far from conventional.”
“People always want what they can’t have,” Lenore said. “Harry never quite fit in, even at Fermi. She was too peculiar. She lacked the social graces. I suppose now they’d say she was somewhere on the spectrum, but back then, she was just considered too smart, too accomplished, too odd. Especially for a woman.”
“So what was a normal life for her?”
“Marriage. A social construct. You girls. She was never so happy as when she had you. Watching your brain develop. Studying your reactions to new stimuli. She kept pages and pages of journals.”
“You make me sound like a science project.”
“Your mother loved projects,” Lenore said. “Charlie was so different, though. So creative. So spontaneous. Harriet adored her; she adored you both, but she never understood anything about Charlie.”
“Something we share.” Sam drank her tea. The milk tasted off. She put down the mug. “Why don’t you like me?”
“You hurt Charlie.”
“Charlie seems quite capable of hurting herself.”
Lenore reached into her purse and found the USB drive that Ben had given her. “I want you to take this.”
Sam backed away, as if the thing posed a physical threat.