My Very Best Friend (24 page)

She had six magic paintbrushes and she decided to paint art in the sky. She drew a purple line, then blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. With her bare hands she took the line and made a half circle, then threw it into the air. The rainbow grew and grew, until it covered the land from mountain to mountain.

When Irene “The Loving” Mackintosh was gone, all her children had to do was look up, during a rainy, sunny day, and they would see her love for them. “That’s where rainbows come from,” my father said. “From love.”

When I see rainbows, I think of my father. I still feel his love.

My mother called. I told her about her garden, how I was following her design. I knew it made her cry. The connection was poor. We decided to keep writing letters back and forth. I heard her last comment, though. “I love you, Charlotte. Forever and away, I love you.”

April 24, 1972

Dear Charlotte,

He is after me. All the time.

I can’t tell anyone. He says I can’t. He says he’ll kill Toran if I tell anyone.

Who would believe me anyhow?

I hurt.

I wish you still lived here.

What picture should I draw today?

Pain. I could draw pain. Or fear. What does pain and fear look like on paper? How do you draw it in miniature when it’s huge and feels like it’s suffocating you? How do you draw shame? How do you draw that I am dirty now and used?

He is after me.

Love,

Bridget

May 16, 1972

Dear Charlotte,

Father Cruickshank is coming to dinner tonight. My father has already told me to be good for him.

Be good.

For the rapist.

Love,

Bridget

May 17, 1972

Dear Charlotte,

Father Cruickshank told my father when I was in my room that he was concerned because I sometimes sneak out of the school to see boys in the village.

I don’t do that.

My father hit me in the face, twice. My mother did nothing. I had to spend all Saturday in my room, on my knees. My father called me a whore. I can’t leave home except to go to school. Slut. Dirty. No man will want you now. Used.

Love,

Bridget

June 4, 1972

Dear Charlotte,

Help me. Help me. Can you help me?

I think I want to die.

Bridget

I closed my eyes. Nausea, dizzying and sickening, hit like a spinning steamroller. I swayed, held on to my chair, put my hand to my mouth, and tried to breathe.

I wanted to kill Angus Cruickshank.
Kill him.

Briefly, before I curled up in a ball, I wondered who else wanted to kill him.

Toran walked in.

Yes. Toran would. He would have every reason to kill Cruickshank.

I handed him the letters I’d read. He’d seen them already, but the rage on that man’s face . . . like thunder meeting lightning in the sky. He slammed out and was gone for two hours. When he came back, he hugged me.

That kind of rage can kill you if you’re not careful, take life away from you until you’re dead inside.

Had Toran been dead enough inside that he risked jail to kill Angus Cruickshank when he finally found out through Bridget what had happened?

Maybe. I wouldn’t have blamed him at all.

Bridget, where are you? Please come home.

Every morning I went to my office in the yellow building. I had met the rest of Toran’s staff, all genial, interesting people. They seemed to adore Toran, not hard to do. I was pleased to see he had people, old and young, working for him. His secretary was seventy-two, named Norma. Toran had bought her land, she told me. “Grateful to him I am, as I did not need it after me Harvey died, and Toran says I can stay until I croak off. He didn’t say ‘croak off,’ I did. Free house and a job working for Toran. I go on two cruises a year. Never did that with me Harvey. Harvey didn’t like to travel. Norma does!” She leaned in closer. “I had a shipboard romance last time, too. Tickled my fancy. Lucky me.”

Within a short period, Norma was giving me calls to take from people who needed to talk money. I took them and at first had to ask Toran questions, but then I started answering the questions myself based on what Toran had said. I also started taking calls about equipment, shipping, clients’ concerns, orders, and general business.

I couldn’t stand to sit around and think about my writer’s block anymore. Working for Toran kept me busy and kept me working with numbers, awesome numbers. Geek me.

I had only initial calculations, but Toran was running a profitable farm.

Extraordinarily profitable. Blueberries, apples, and potatoes were needed products.

I was impressed, and I told him so.

“Ah, Char . . . thank you.” He tried to hide it, but I think he was proud.

He should be.

The next morning I took a quick shower. I washed my hair and brushed it out. I don’t like washing my hair. It takes so long—what an irritant. I put the clip on top of my head to keep my hair out of my eyes, then wrapped the rest of it in a bun. I put on my glasses; the left side wobbled. I pulled on my light brown skirt with the ruffle and my comfortable brown sturdy shoes. I buttoned up my gray blouse to the neck, then added a knitted gray vest with white teacups. I stared at myself in the mirror.

It was the same self that had stared back at me my whole life.

But this time . . . I tilted my head to the left.

I tilted it to the right. My glasses almost fell off.

I peered down at my shoes. Five years old. Still going strong for daily shoes. Or were they? I turned my left foot to the side. There was a small hole. I turned my right foot to the side. Two small holes. The heels were worn. I would have them reheeled. It would be the third time.

They were comfy. Fit to my wide feet. My flipper feet, as my mother called them. “
You should have become a swimmer. You would have won all the metals with feet like that.”

I studied my gray blouse. It had been a favorite for three years. Bought this one at Goodwill, too. Had a designer label. I paid four dollars.

I studied my skirt. The hem was out in the back. Not more than a couple of inches. Frayed on the edges. Who would notice?

Comfy, too.

But maybe . . . frumpy?

I peered at my face again, my glasses askew to the left. The tape was rough.

I should do something about my hair. It was way too long.

I remembered what my mother had said to me once:
“Please. Get a haircut. It is not necessary to look as if you are wearing a long brown mop on your head in order to be a feminist. Being a feminist is all about women power, it’s a sisterhood, that’s what it is, and it can be done with a fashionable haircut. Do you have that? No.”

I wouldn’t have to do anything to my teeth. I am religious about the dentist. Twice a year. And he put something on my teeth last time to make them whiter and get rid of coffee stains. I had to pay extra for that, but I felt it well worth the cost.

I brushed my eyebrows down. Thick. Not touching in the middle. But . . . thick.

Did other women have eyebrows this thick? I would check.

I could hear my mother’s voice in my head again:
“Get a supportive bra with lace. That’s important. Especially for you, Charlotte, with you being on the chesty side. Get those guns pushed up and together and unbutton another button so you don’t appear to be an Americanized, scientific, brainy Mary Poppins.”
Now, there was a feminist for you, magic umbrella to boot.

I stared at the mirror again.

The Stanleys, and their crew, continued to work on my house. The electrical and plumbing, all new, was done, including canned lighting throughout the house to brighten things up.

Toran bought me a white bedspread with purple irises, because he knows those are my favorite flowers, and a lamp in the shape of a black cat. He said, “I thought, to help you write again, if you had your favorite flowers around you and a cat . . .” I burst into tears at his thoughtfulness and had to blow my nose in a noisy way. It was embarrassing.

The chimney was repaired and cleaned out. The Stanleys had found a dead raccoon in it.

Toran and I sat out on his deck and watched the sun go down over the hills while we drank wine and ate cheese and crackers. We played Scrabble. “I thought playing a word game might inspire your words.” I started to sniffle. “Are you going to cry again, Charlotte? It’s okay if you do. But let me get the tissues.... One moment, luv. . . .”

The kitchen and family room walls were painted a light yellow, my parents’ bedroom light blue, and the other bedrooms and the loft white. All the ceilings were painted white, too.

Toran and I made pancakes for dinner. He cut the pancakes into letters. “To make writing edible.” My chin wobbled. My lower lip shook. “There, there,” he said. “Here’s a tissue. I’m keeping them in two places downstairs now, luv. . . .”

A new, white claw-foot tub went in upstairs in my bathroom, as did a pedestal sink. I lay down in the tub. Toran and I could fit together. It would be tight. I liked tight.

Toran treated me to an Italian lunch one day, then a Japanese dinner another day, in the village.

“I’ve heard that it’s important to put food in your manuscripts. So people can taste it with you. . . . Didn’t mean to do this again, luv, more tears . . . Here, would a napkin do?”

I had saved my mother’s chandelier that had still been hanging over the kitchen table and cleaned it off. It sparkled, though I’d had to buy a number of new crystals. The Stanleys hung it with appropriate ceremony and reverence. “This is where your grandma often made her Scottish Second Sight predictions, according to my mother,” Stanley I said. “Always right, she was, though it was a wee jumbled up.”

Toran and I played chess until two in the morning. He won twice, I won once. I am a satisfactory chess player. I have two pen pals with whom I communicate about chess and chess moves, but he is more victorious sixty-six percent of the time.

“Chess is a brain activator, isn’t it, Charlotte? Thought it might take your mind off the writing worries, luv. . . .”

He is an incredible member of the male species. Total man.

My house was days away from being done.

I would be able to move in soon.

I didn’t want to move. That was the truth. I liked Toran’s.

Sadness, like liquid loneliness, crept in. I was familiar with liquid loneliness. I liked it less now than before.

I fell in love with Toran when I was a teenager. It hit all of a sudden.

I had grown up with him. He was the older brother of my best friend. He and I, Bridget and Pherson, were Clan TorBridgePherLotte. Secret handshakes, chants. Battling invading alien armies and marauding giants united us.

As we grew older we didn’t play our imaginary games anymore, but we were still together, running through the meadows, into the sea, laughing, talking. My father called us The Gang of Four. We hung out at my house and Pherson’s, sneakily getting Pherson and Bridget together to avoid Carney’s wrath.

Toran and I talked all the time. I told him everything. I told him anything. I told him about the stories I wrote in my journals. I told him how I loved butterflies. I told him that I loved science, and we talked about space, geology, the history of the earth, time travel, black holes, and biology. Endlessly. I told him I was scared of his father. I told him I felt sorry for his mother because she seemed scared.

I listened to him. His fury at his father. How he felt after Carney hit him one day, and he hit his father back so hard, his dad crashed against the wall. His father screamed at Toran to kneel on the floor and pray, then he took off his belt. Toran refused. His father came after him again, swinging the belt, and Toran knocked him out cold. His father didn’t hit him again.

I listened to Toran talk about his anger at his mother for not protecting him or Bridget, for her constant, life-numbing drinking.