See You at Harry's (13 page)

Sara starts to cry again.

“He and Doll were playing! I was just doing my homework!” I yell louder because Sara won’t look at me, and I know that must mean she blames me. “Mom should’ve taken him to the hospital! He should’ve had X-rays! Charlie never complains when he’s hurt. Mom should have known!” I choke on the unforgivable words.

“Shut up!” Sara screams, finally facing me. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“Stop it!” Holden yells. “It’s no one’s fault!” He pulls at his hair, then looks up at the ceiling. Up where my parents’ room is. Where my mom is.

My dad reaches out and takes Holden’s hand. Sara hides her face against his shoulder again. And I still sit alone.

“Come here, Fern,” my dad says quietly. “It’s no one’s fault.”

But I just shake my head and pull my knees to my chest so I can hide my own face.
No,
I keep thinking.
No.

A
FTER A WHILE
, my dad gets up and goes to the kitchen. I imagine him coming back with a huge smile on his face saying he called the hospital and it was all just a big mistake. But instead, he comes back carrying the anniversary tray. It has a glass of water, a plate with toast, and a bottle of pills.

“I need to bring this up to your mom, but I’ll be back,” he says. As we watch him slowly climb the stairs, I remember all the anniversaries the three of us — and then Charlie, too — quietly climbed the stairs with that same tray, stacked with special treats for my parents. We’d knock on the door and say in our exaggerated lovey-dovey voices, “Room service!” and then giggle as we’d run down the hall and back downstairs to watch hours of bad TV that we normally weren’t allowed to watch.

When Charlie was born, as a joke we left him in his bouncy seat asleep next to the tray of food in the hall. It was Holden’s idea to remind my parents to be a bit more careful celebrating their anniversary that time around so we wouldn’t have
another
unexpected surprise. Sara thought that was crude, but I thought it was pretty funny, once Holden explained the joke to me. Unfortunately, Charlie woke up before my parents retrieved their tray, so we had to go get him. Holden wanted to leave a dirty diaper in the baby seat instead, but Sara put her foot down.

While my dad’s upstairs, we sit and stare. We don’t look at each other. We just wait and wait. I imagine my dad giving my mom those pills. I guess they must make her sleep. I wish we could all take them.

When my dad finally comes back downstairs with the empty tray, his eyes are red and his cheeks are shiny with tears. It seems to take all his effort to walk down the final steps and sit on the couch between Holden and Sara. He pulls them to him on either side and sobs. They bury their faces in his chest and cry, too.

“Fern,” he whispers. “Come here.”

I look into my dad’s watery, bloodshot eyes and stay where I am. I know I’m supposed to be crying. But I won’t. I won’t if it means what they’ve already accepted.

Holden gets up and walks over to me. He pries my hand from the armrest and pulls me up. I try to pull back.

“No!” I yell.

But now my dad is at my side, too. His strong arms pull me up and hold me close around his huge, soft belly. As he presses me into him, I feel like I could disappear.

I feel like I am breaking.

T
HAT NIGHT
, Holden and Sara both go to their rooms to sleep, but I stay in the chair. My dad tries to carry me upstairs after I fall asleep, but I wake up and make him put me down. After he leaves me, I curl up in the chair and wait. But Charlie doesn’t come back.

In the morning, my dad makes us a breakfast we don’t eat, then goes upstairs to check on my mom. We still haven’t seen her since she came home. I don’t understand why she doesn’t come down and hold us. I don’t understand why we can’t go up and crawl into bed with her. My dad says we need to give her some time. But I need her now.

“I have to get out of here,” Holden tells Sara and me.

“Where will you go?” Sara asks.

“I just need some fresh air.” But as he turns to go, the phone rings. We all look at each other.

“What do we do?” Sara asks.

“Take it off the hook,” Holden says.

Before anyone can get to the phone in the kitchen, though, we hear the machine pick up, and Charlie’s voice echoes through the quiet house. “Hel-lo. Mom-my, Dad-dy, Sa-wuh, Hold-en, Fern, and Chah-lie ah not at home to take yo-uh call. Please leave a mes-sage, and we will call you back as soon as poss-ih-bull. Thank you. And see you at Hawee’s!”

No one moves.

Beeeeeep.

“Hello? Is anyone there? It’s Mona. Oh, God, we just heard. Um. Oh. Um. Please call when you can. We’re all here. Um. OK. We’ll try to call again later.”

Beeeeep.

“I’ll turn it off,” Holden says quietly.

I pull my knees to my chest again as he walks away.

“Fern,” Sara says. “Fern, you have to stop doing that. It’s OK to cry.”

I shake my head and tuck my face between my knees again.

“Fern,” Sara says. She touches the top of my head.

“Stop!” I yell at her. “Stop! I don’t want to . . . to . . . Just stop!”

“Stop what?” she asks quietly.

“Stop acting like he’s . . . like he’s not coming back.”

Sara kneels in front of me and wraps her arms around my legs, squeezing.

“Fern,” she says again, crying, hiding her face against me.

“I should have paid more attention to him,” I say. “I should have played with him. Then I wouldn’t have been the Big Bad Wolf. And then —”

“It’s not your fault,” she says quietly.

“He was so lonely,” I say.

“No, he wasn’t. He was just bored.”

“But if I had stopped doing my homework, maybe he wouldn’t have run away from me.”

“And maybe if the waitress service had been better, Mr. Seymore would have left the restaurant earlier and Charlie wouldn’t have run behind him. Maybe if Mom and I had come out to help sooner . . .” She trails off and looks away. And then she starts to cry uncontrollably. Shaking. This time I put my hand on her back, but she shrugs it off. When she finally stops, she takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “No,” she says quietly. “No.” She turns back to me. “It was an accident. Do you understand? It wasn’t your fault. It was —” But she stops and turns away again, as if she can’t lie to my face. As if it’s too hard to convince me.

“I’ll be home in a little while,” Holden says, coming from the kitchen. “I took the phone off the hook.” He pauses in front of the door, a guilty look on his face. “I just need to get out of this house,” he says. I can tell from the way he says it that he knows he shouldn’t. But he leaves anyway.

Sara pulls herself up and motions for me to move over. I slide over to make room, and she sits snug against me.

“Cry, Fern,” she says. “Cry right here.” She pats her chest, and I rest my head against her. She puts her arms around me so tightly, I know I won’t slip away. I feel my heart untwisting just a little, as if it is uncurling enough to call out for Charlie. But it doesn’t find him.

“Cry,” she says, and rubs my back the way my mom used to. “Please.”

I unclench my hands and reach for hers. I hold on to her as tightly as I can.

If I cry, he won’t come back.

I squeeze tighter.

I feel my body start to shake.

He won’t come back.

“Cry,” she says again, as if she needs me to.

I’m holding her so tightly, I feel my fingernails dig into her skin. The place in my chest where my heart must be hurts so badly, I know now that my grandfather probably did die from a broken heart. And I feel like I will, too.

He isn’t coming back.

“I have you, Fern.”

And then a sound comes out of me. And my chest opens up again, and I am holding on to Sara as I sob so hard, I think I will turn inside out. I sob and sob, and she does, too. I soak her shirt with my tears, and she soaks my hair with hers. And she holds me and holds me and doesn’t get up. And eventually we tire ourselves out so much we fall asleep.

The doorbell wakes us up.

We’re slightly stuck to each other, and by the time we get up, my dad is coming down the stairs. We hear him open the door and step outside. After a few minutes, he comes back in.

“That was Mona,” he says. “She said she tried to call.”

Sara nods. “We let the machine pick it up.”

“Where’s Holden?”

“He went for a walk,” I say.

“If I make lunch, will anyone eat it?”

We shake our heads. He nods. And we sit there in silence. No one seems to know what we’re supposed to do now. How can we do anything?

Sticking out from under the coffee table, I see a tiny plastic firefighter lying on his back, smiling up at us. I start to picture all the pieces of Charlie in the house. The half-drunk cup of milk from Charlie’s dinner the night before, still waiting for him in the refrigerator. Who would throw it out? By the front door, Charlie’s tiny sneakers are still lined up next to mine. His coat is on the coat hook. There’s nowhere in the house that you can’t see a trace of him. He is with us forever and gone forever all at once.

When Holden gets back, my dad decides to make us lunch after all, but we barely eat. We clean up, then sit on the couch again. Every so often, my dad goes upstairs to check on my mom or answer the doorbell to receive condolences from friends. But he doesn’t invite anyone in.

I wish my mom would come down and check on us. My dad keeps saying she’ll be down soon. But when?

I know it doesn’t make sense, but it feels like she disappeared with Charlie. And the more she stays up there, the more it feels like she isn’t coming back, either.

That night, Holden and Sara try to get me to come upstairs to go to sleep, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to feel the empty corner where Charlie used to lull me to sleep with his steady breathing.

My dad comes over and puts his hand on my head. “Come on up, honey. You shouldn’t stay alone down here again.”

“I’ll be OK,” I say quietly, staring at the firefighter.

He sighs in a worried way. “Just for tonight, then.”

“I’ll bring you a blanket and pillow,” Sara says.

Later, wrapped in the blanket in the big chair, I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. I reach down and pick up the firefighter and hold him close. I trace his plastic body with my finger. There are dried bits of something on his stomach, as if he had a messy meal. I imagine it was soggy Cheerios from Charlie’s fingers. But instead of disgusting me, I hold it against my heart and close my eyes so I can see Charlie. Charlie singing in the bathtub. Charlie banging his legs in his too-small high chair. Charlie pushing Doll in my face, insisting I give her a good-night kiss. Charlie.

Charlie.

Charlie.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I wake up to the sound of coffee beans grinding. Sara, Holden, and my dad are already in the kitchen. My dad pours a tiny bit in a mug for me and fills the rest with milk, then lots of sugar. My mom doesn’t like it when I drink coffee, but my dad says it will grow hair on my chest. Charlie always thought that was so funny.

I put my cup down and glance over at the refrigerator. It’s covered with Charlie’s magnetic letters.