Charlie's Key (19 page)

“By my parents,” says Clare. “They came home early from whatever they were doing and found me on the couch, nodded out.”

She bites her lip, white spreading round where her teeth are pressing.

“Friggin’ pill bottle was still in my hand.”

“Was Frankie with you?”

Clare shakes her head. “No. Frankie was off with Nick. They got something going with Gerald—buying stuff, selling stuff.
DVD
s or iPods. Stolen, probably. I don’t care. I’m outta here anyway.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Back to rehab.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. Lunchtime, I guess. Whenever my dad can drive me out there. Till then, I gotta stay with Dad.”

“Where’s he now?”

Clare nods at the bank.

“Back there—that’s his branch. That’s how I saw you just now. Dad made me come to work with him this morning, and I saw you and that guy leaving.”

“Dez.”

“Figured. Anyways, I saw you and I just wanted to talk to you for a sec. To say I’m sorry. About Nick and stuff—letting him know you were meeting me in the shed.”

“It’s okay. I don’t blame you for anything. I mean, Nick, he’s a scary guy.”

“I wasn’t scared though,” says Clare. “Not of him anyways.”

“What
were
you scared of?”

She’s quiet for a long time—both of us are just sitting, watching people walk past talking on their cell phones, stuffing some breakfast thing in their mouths, rushing along to make it somewhere on time.

“What scared you, Clare?” I ask again.

She looks at me and I can see she is crying now—tears, big ones. Sometimes when I cry my dad would wipe them off my cheeks. Not always. Sometimes he’d get mad and tell me to stop. But sometimes he’d brush them off. I want to brush off Clare’s. But I don’t.

“The feeling,” she says.

“What feeling?”

“Oh, Charlie,” she says, with a little laugh. “It’s just a feeling. It’s hard to talk about.”

She waits a good bit, sniffling.

“It’s a feeling like I’m living inside a long, long line of Wednesday afternoons in February. They stretch out forever—all those Wednesday afternoons, all the same. No leaves, no flowers, no colors, just gray. I look down that line of days and it’s…”

She shrugs.

“Empty,” I say. “A void.”

She turns to me, lifts up her eyebrows. Her eyes are wide and green and wet, likes leaves after it rains in the spring.

“A void,” she says. “Going on forever. You feel that?”

“Sometimes,” I say. “Except with me, it’s not like a tunnel. It’s a hole, with nothing at the bottom, and me right on the edge with nothing to keep me out.”

More people go past. They look happy in the sun, taking their jackets off, putting on sunglasses. It’s funny to see everybody happy just a couple of feet away, while me and Clare talk about what we’re talking about. There must be a better word for it than funny, but I don’t know what it is. But I bet there is one, just meant to describe how funny this feels, to be sad, a couple of feet away from everybody else’s happy.

“Clare,” I say after a bit. “Do those pills—do they make the feeling go away?”

She wipes her cheek.

“They used to, for a bit, but now I feel ten times worse when it comes back…”

She stops and takes a snuffle in.

“No,” she says. “They don’t make it go away.”

She sighs a big sigh.

“I just wanted to say sorry—about how things worked out with your uncle. Setting you up like that for some pills. It was wrong.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” she says. “But I did it and I’m sorry. Anyways…”

She reaches into her jean’s pocket. Her fingers move inside, feeling for something. I bet they’re warm.

“I wanted to give you this.”

She pulls out a cell phone and passes it to me.

“Just for now—while I’m inside. We’re not allowed to have them. It’s got a phone book in it”—she shows me how to scroll down—“with lots of numbers. Gerald, Frankie—Dez is in there too. I put his number in when you called the other day. Is he a nice guy?”

“Guess so. He’s getting me a chocolate croissant from over there.”

“They’re good,” says Clare. “Dad used to get them for me on Saturdays.”

She looks like she’s gonna start crying again.

“Anyway, Charlie, I gotta go. Dad’ll be calling the cops if I don’t go back inside. So you take care, okay?”

All of a sudden she scrinches over to me and gives me a kiss on the cheek. Her lips touch me just for a sec, but they’re soft and warm and make me think of the sun, yellow and hot.

“Bye,” she says, then runs back inside the bank.

I look after her for a long while. I don’t want to move in case I might forget how her lips feel on my cheek. I’m still looking when the claw creeps along my shoulder, then fastens itself round the back of my neck.

“That’s a nice girl, giving you a kiss like that,” Nick says as he sits beside me. “I means it—she really is nice. And don’t you go thinking otherwise, Charlie. Don’t you go thinking she set ya up again for a meeting with me, because she had nothing to do with me finding you here—not a thing, b’y. Did that all on my own. So don’t blame her.”

“What do you want?” I say. I look up the street for Tubby and his car, but it’s gone, empty curb where it was just a minute ago.

“You knows what I want, Charlie,” says Nick. He slips his claw down on my arm and squeezes me tight to him.

“So let’s go to the car I borrowed from a friend over here,” he pulls me to my feet and leads me into an alley beside the bank. “And ya can give it to me.”

It’s Gerald’s car, the big blue one we took out to Cape Spear. That time I sat in the backseat, but now I’m up front, where Nick shoves me when he yanks the door open.

“Stay put,” he says. “We’re off for a little drive.”

He starts heading outta town, out into all that scrub and little trees that start as soon as the traffic lights end. The road mostly goes right through all those little trees, but once in a while it swings out toward the ocean, blue and white off to the left. It looks cold and big and strong.

“Cops’ll be looking for us,” says Nick. “So I wants to put some miles between us and town.”

“But they don’t know I’m with you.”

“They’ll figure it out,” says Nick. “Quick enough too. Even the RNC can get four from two and two—soon as they figure three and four ain’t the right suspects.”

Nick gives me a smile, but I don’t smile back.

“Listen, Charlie, I ain’t out to hurt ya. It’s just that I needs ya to help me get back what’s mine by rights.”

“The letter?”

“The letter, b’y. The letter. Have ya got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Good man. Hang on to it for another bit now—there’s a gravel pit coming up just over this hill—or there was twenty years ago. We’ll get off the road and have a bit of a chat.”

A gravel pit doesn’t sound like a very private place to me—a giant hole full of trucks and dozers and guys in hard hats. But this gravel pit isn’t anything like that. It’s a little gray gash cut into all the green little trees, with a pile of gravel off to one side. And that’s it. No gate. No trucks. Nobody in a hard hat. Just a big pile of gravel, which Nick drives behind. He puts the car in Park and shuts off the engine, then turns to me and holds out the claw.

“The letter,” he says.

I set the urn down on the floor of the car, then work the envelope out from my cast and pass it over.

He holds it between his fingers—holds it for a long time.

“Jesus Christ,” he says at last. He runs his claw across the front, black fingers against black lines.

“Twenty years,” he says.

He works a fingernail under the flap and slits it open with one slice and pulls out a piece of paper. He unfolds it and sets it on his leg. Then he laughs—a chuckle at first, to himself, then more laughing, louder and faster till the sounds all string together and it’s a big belly laugh. There’s even tears on his face—I see them on his cheek, running down that long scar he’s got, till they hit his chin and hang in a salty ball.

“Ahh,” he says, giving his chin a wipe. “Ahh, Jesus.”

He turns to me and gives the paper a tap.

“Charlie, you know how many nights I lay awake, thinking of holding this in my hands?”

I take a closer look at the paper. It’s old, with lines where’s it’s been folded, and a jagged edge on one side like it got ripped out of a notebook. There’s writing at the bottom, and just above, covering half the page, is a map, in red pen, like a teacher would use.

“I dunno,” I say.

“Thousands,” he says. “Thousands of nights I lay in that cell, thinking of having my hands on this, and now here it is. Jesus.”

He lights a cigarette, rolling down the window a crack to let the smoke out.

“Ah,” he says again and gives his head a shake, smiling a smile that looks happy and sad at the same time.

“Charlie, b’y, there ain’t many moments in life like this one. Like this one. Right here.”

He takes another drag.

“Least not in my life.”

A long wisp of smoke slips between his lips, stretching into a gray line that gets sucked out the window.

“And it’s all down to you, Charlie. It were s’posed to be me and yer old man, but it couldn’t be yer old man, so it had to be you. And you done it.”

He holds out his good hand for me to shake. I do.

“Thanks,” he says. And right when he says it, I know it’s my chance.

“Now you owe me one,” I say, still holding the hand.

Nick’s smile changes a bit, turns down a bit, looks more serious a bit, but it’s still there. He works the cigarette into it, holding my hand tight, me holding tight right back. And he gives a little nod.

“You’re right, b’y. Now I owes you one.” He lets go. “So whaddaya want?”

“The truth.”

He gives a laugh. “And you think an old ex-con can give the truth about anything?”

“You can tell me the truth about that map—what it’s to and what me and my dad were doing, coming out here with that key.”

Nick flicks the smoke out the car window.

“The truth is I don’t know what that map’s to, exactly.”

I don’t take my eyes off his for a long time—long enough for his face to get blurry and start swimming. He looks away first, for a sec, then stares back.

“It’s true,” he says. “I don’t know—for certain—what the map’s to. I only know what I hope it’s to. And that’s money. Lots of it. But I don’t know. Not for sure.”

“But you know the other stuff,” I say. “About me and my dad coming out here, why we were on that highway that night…”

“Hold up a minute, Charlie,” says Nick. “I didn’t kill yer old man.”

“I didn’t say you did. But you know the other stuff—what we were doing on that road, in that car. And I don’t know the why about anything.”

I’m talking loud, shouting, pretty much.

“I’m used to not knowing stuff,” I say. “Stuff like why my mom died, or why my dad hated me sometimes. Not knowing how come we never had any cars in the driveway on Christmas and Easter when everybody else had their grammies and grampies and cousins and nieces and nephews, all in the driveway and in the backyard and on the back deck, smoking and playing and having a beer or a pop, but not me and my dad. Over at our place, it’s always just me and him. Except now it’s only me. Why is that? I don’t know. But I think maybe you do. So you owe me that.”

For the first time since I met him, Nick looks scared, and just for a sec his eyes turn from drills to holes. Just for a sec.

“Jesus, Charlie, calm yerself, b’y. It’s not just you, is it? You got yer uncle Nick now, sitting right across from ya.”

“Why is that?” I say. “Why is it that all I got now is my uncle, sitting across from me in a car that’s hiding from the police? You know the truth about that too, don’t you?”

Nick nods. “I guess I do.”

“So tell me. Tell me the truth.”

Nick’s claw scritches his chin.

“Okay,” he says. “But remember this when I tells ya.” He points the claw at me. “Remember the truth’ll make us even. And it was you what wanted to know it.”

TWENTY-ONE

Nick lights another cigarette and it all comes tumbling out with the smoke.

“I was seventeen when my parents died in a fire. Yer old man, Mikey, he were fifteen. We was out that night, down to the pool hall, when Dicky Thomas come rushing in, hollering ’bout half of Cook Street being alight, our place too. And so it was—the whole street lit up, you could see it from downtown soon as you turned up the hill for home—a glow, the clinkers falling as far down as Military Road.”

Nick’s cigarette flares red when he takes a big draw in.

“We seen that glow and started running, straight up Long’s Hill. Me mom—your nan, Doreen—she died that night. Ceiling fell in on her. Dick, the old man, he died three days later. From burns, they told us, but I always figured it were the smoke he drawed in, trying to pull the old girl out from under. He wheezed something terrible them last three days, pulling air in and out so hard his breath sounded like a saw cutting old wood. Me and Mikey took turns sittin’ with him, but he never opened his eyes. And then he were gone, just stopped breathing, and us not even able to hold his hand for all the bandages they had him wrapped in.”

“How’d it start?” I ask.

“Dunno. Started two doors down, to the Ryans, and we never knowed why. Wires. Pennies in a fuse box. Smoking. Bad chimney. Fat in a pan unminded. Dunno. If the fire boys ever figured it out, they didn’t bother telling a couple of orphans, which is what we was from that night on. Orphans, sent off to Cliffside. You heard about Cliffside, Charlie?”

“A bit.”

“So you knows it were a bad place—for the little ones specially. Me and Mikey, we was too old for the Brothers to mess with by the time we went in, but the wee ones—what they did to some of them, it was a sin. And them Brothers supposed to be doing God’s work on earth. Sure, it was the devil’s work more like. Screaming at the little ones, making them drop their drawers for beatings. And the ones they took a fancy to—the ones they thought was too scared to say a word, or was crying out for a bit of kindness—they was the ones that got the worst of it. Taken behind closed doors, pawed at, felt up, raped, some of them.”