Look at me: (14 page)

“I hope Ricky comes home on time,” Ellen said. “So Charlotte doesn’t worry.”

“Charlotte never worries,” Harris said.

Grass

Okay, the land. Well, it was totally different from now. (First of all, where IS the land now?) It was mostly prairie, and prairie in those days did not mean dried-out grass up to your knees with some flowers mixed in. Prairie meant a mixture of many grasses—Indian Grass, bluestem, side oats grama—that were extremely tall, taller than a person’s head! With long tangled roots that reached way down deep into the earth. Prairie soil was incredibly rich and good for planting, but all the grass and roots were very hard to break through and turn over, which you had to do before you could plant anything. It could take a whole year to make prairie ready for farming. “Breaking the prairie” was the name for that process, and there were professional Prairie Breakers who were experts at it. But eventually the whole prairie got broken up and planted into crops, and the real original prairie hasn’t been around for many, many generations. What we call “prairie” now is just grass
.

Eight o’clock, no Ricky. Charlotte went to the window and looked at the sky, but it offered her nothing tonight: a starless darkness. In the kitchen, she slipped a mini pizza into the microwave. She went online to see if any of her three best friends were logged on, but they weren’t—out somewhere, probably together, these girls she had known since third grade, sharing sprees of candlemaking, ant farms, weaving, papier-mâché; Halloween costumes in which each was a different colored M&M. The summer after freshman year, the other three had gotten boyfriends, and a gap had fallen open between them and Charlotte. Even as her friends schemed on her behalf, begging to know which boys she desired and promising, through espionage and subterfuge, through brainwashing, hypnosis and possibly witchcraft, to make at least one reciprocate; even as they urged makeup upon her, a padded bra with the future option of implants, colored contact lenses (violet being their top choice), an alternative haircut and some more intriguing mode of dress—
The thing is, Chari, you aren’t really making an effort
—even as a machine of rehabilitation churned around Charlotte, she’d been seized by a deep new resistance in herself, an aloofness from her friends’ earnest confabs on her behalf. It was true, she wasn’t making an effort. It seemed phony—dangerous, too, as if she might lose something in the process. A last hope.

She sent an e-mail to all three: “What’s up? Hey, I miss u guys :-)”

At eight-forty-five she started watching
Murder on the Nile
—part of an ongoing project she and Ricky had undertaken to watch every Agatha Christie movie ever made. It was half over by the time she heard her brother downstairs and paused the tape. He gasped when she walked in the kitchen. “You’re stoned,” she said, looking at his boggled eyes.

He didn’t answer. He was prying open a box of Pop-Tarts.

“It’s nine-forty,” she said.

“Ding ding ding.”

“Where were you?”

“Skating. I nailed a dire trick.” He dropped a Pop-Tart into the toaster. “A Switchdance one-eighty.”

Charlotte had no idea what this meant. “Who with?”

“Seniors.” He could not suppress a grin.

“You’re kidding. From Baxter?”

“No. From Saturn.”

The Pop-Tart jumped, and Ricky caught it between two fingers, blew on it a while and took a bite. The flavor shot through his head, a crazy infusion of berries. Charlotte just stood there. At the Pit, where he’d been skating, he’d heard someone say his sister’s name but thought at first he’d imagined it; he was stoned, which made everything loop around and curlicue until he was skating through time—kings, knights on horseback waving lances, then ollying back around to the steps, where he heard it again—“Charlotte Hauser”—and was so startled he lost his balance and the board blurted away. He listened. Two seniors. It seemed to Ricky they were using Charlotte’s name as kind of a threat, like, If you fuck with me—Charlotte Hauser. Hearing his sister spoken of in this way so appalled him that he forgot it instantly, let it drop into the night and disappear. Paul Lofgren, a senior, had decided this year that he and Ricky were bros, a mysterious grace that had befallen him for reasons Ricky didn’t analyze. And so he hung with these older kids now, Smashing Pumpkins on the boom box, the very air sweet and rare. Charlotte was folded into the night. When he nailed the Switchdance 180, everyone clapped.

“Who’s the kid?” Someone to Paul Lofgren. And Paul, laughing: “Girl bait,” which occasioned a bigger laugh (everyone laughed when Paul laughed), and although Ricky wasn’t clear on how he could be girl bait when he hardly knew any girls, he liked it immeasurably better than being the kid who was sick.

Nibbling his Pop-Tart under Charlotte’s solemn gaze, he felt a jerk of impatience. She was weak, a joke—his sister—without even knowing it!
Why don’t you do something?
he wanted to shout, then wondered why he hadn’t done something himself—or said something. Said anything. Opened his fucking mouth even once. He believed Charlotte had the power to determine the outcome of certain things. Did she sense his treachery (she could read his mind, he was sure), or was she sad for some other reason?

“I rented
Murder on the Nile,”
she said.

“Subtle,” he said. “Let’s.”

“Here, I’ll make your pizza.” She’d saved half her own to eat with him. Her thin brown hair fell around her face as she took a pizza from the freezer and carried it to the microwave. And in that moment, Ricky, like the pizza, seemed to travel some distance in his sister’s hands, to arrive fully and decisively home, in this kitchen.

“I smoked pot,” he said.

He spoke with a mix of conspiracy and challenge, longing for Charlotte’s approval yet daring her to withhold it. She rarely did; Charlotte liked being Ricky’s confessor, privy to all his evil deeds.

“Ding ding,” she said.

She carried his pizza upstairs, trying to master the anxiety it gave her to picture her brother consorting with boys who despised her. It seemed possible they might turn Ricky against her, and this conjured an isolation more brutal than any Charlotte had imagined.

“I watched a little, but we can start over,” she said as they collapsed onto the couch in the TV room.

“That’s okay,” Ricky said, penitent. He relied on his sister to be cheerful; her somberness tonight unnerved him. “I can watch tomorrow.”

But Charlotte rewound the tape, as he’d known she would. They flopped together, chewing pizza, and as the movie began, Ricky felt comfort fold itself around him like a pair of wings. The skating, Paul Lofgren, it all just blew away. It was maybe even good, he considered, that the other kids didn’t like Charlotte—it meant that whenever he came home, she was likely to be here.

“You’re waiting for something to happen?” Moose asked. “Is that what you said?”

“Does it sound weird?”

He smiled. “There are those who would tell you I’m not the best judge of that.”

Charlotte laughed. The air was full of leaves. Ten fat jack-o’-lantern bags squatted on the bright lawn around Versailles. “Do you think something will happen?” she asked, hesitant.

“Yes,” Moose said. He was thoughtful now. Charlotte followed his gaze, but saw just the lawn, the jack-o’-lantern bags. What was he always looking at, this handsome, uneasy man her mother loved so much?

“Yes, I do,” he said.

And then it did. Something happened. Something strange—stranger than finding the wounded lady thief inside their house. It happened several days after her last visit to Moose, when Charlotte borrowed her mother’s Lexus and drove to Baxter to pick up her friends. She waited for them outside the school, a woodsy assemblage of A-frames built in the sixties. She waved to Mr. Childs, her old biology teacher.

“How goes it, Chas?” he asked. Mr. Childs was famous for conferring monikers upon his favorites; a nickname meant a B+ at least. “How’s East?”

“Good so far,” she said. “You dissecting yet?” Charlotte had loved dissection, especially larger animals like the baby shark and fetal pig.

“Worms, and you should hear the bellyaching. You’re in chemistry now?”

“Chem II. But the labs aren’t as nice.”

A teacher Charlotte didn’t know was crossing the lot in the canted sunlight. He looked familiar: dark eyes, an angular, expressive face that seemed just slightly to glower. “See you tomorrow,” this stranger told Mr. Childs. His eyes skimmed Charlotte, braking on her just long enough for Charlotte to recognize him: the man she had met by the river last August.

“Have a good one, Mike,” Mr. Childs said. And to Charlotte, who was staring after the stranger, “That’s Michael West, teaches math. Tracy Lapoint’s husband got a last-minute transfer to Omaha, and Mike turned up out of the blue. All the right credentials.”

“Where did he come from?”

“California, but I guess he’s lived in Europe a good while. I’ve got to run get my kids out of day care. Nice to see you, Chas.”

He crossed the parking lot to his car. Meanwhile, the man Charlotte had met by the river was backing out of a space. She bolted toward him without thought, shoes hammering the pavement. The man stopped his car and rolled down his window, squinting at her in the angled light.

“I met you last summer,” Charlotte said, breathless. “Remember?”

“I do not.”

“By the river. You said you were new in town. Remember?” But already she saw differences: this man had neatly trimmed hair, a smooth, tanned face, while the other had been scruffier. And injured, too—his arm? Charlotte stared at the man in front of her, red Lacoste shirt, tanned fingers tapping at the wheel. Both arms looked fine.

“I believe you are mistaken,” he said, with a slight accent. Had the man by the river had one?

“No,” she insisted. She wanted it to be true—to have this coincidence. “It was you.”

He laughed, his teeth a white slash against his face. “We have hit an impasse,” he said. “And I’m hurrying to go.” He waited, looking up at her, and only then did Charlotte realize that her hands were on his car, he couldn’t move. She lifted them.

“Good-bye,” the teacher said. He raised one hand to his face in a farewell gesture, and Charlotte felt a deep, prickling shock. It was the same thing he’d done before, by the river: part salute, part wave. It was the same man. The strangeness and certainty of it fell against her.

“It was you!” she called after him as the car pulled away. “Why are you saying it wasn’t?”

She stood in the lot, gazing after the car as kids shambled past her in groups. She felt stunned by the encounter, as if she’d brushed against a tiny corner of something vast and mysterious. But why? she asked herself. So he didn’t remember. Or he did, but didn’t feel like saying so.

“Chari,” her friends called, cascading toward her through the parking lot. “Sorry, babe. My lock was like totally stuck,” Roselyn said, enfolding Charlotte in her peppery embrace.

They piled into the Lexus. Charlotte had just gotten her license, and the others hadn’t seen her drive. “Look how calm she is,” said Sheila, in front. She could make the nicest thing sound mildly sarcastic.

“Chari, your brother is so egregiously cute,” came Roselyn’s gritty voice from the backseat. She had something known as “screamers” on her vocal chords, a diagnosis that had occasioned no end of hilarity among them, since Roselyn had a tendency to shout. Charlotte smelled her strawberry lip gloss.

“He’s thirteen,” she pointed out.

“Roz is stalking little boys,” Sheila said, fiddling with the radio dial. “It’s her new project.”

“Yum yum,” Roselyn said.

“What’re the guys like at East?” Laurel asked. “Like, how evolved?”

“Meaning are they into ballet,” Sheila said.

“Ha ha,” Laurel said. Freshman year, she had joined the Rockford Dance Company, and now performed in one large ballet each season. Since then she’d taken to extending her legs at odd moments, casually gripping a thigh and easing it toward her head in a disorienting spectacle of limberness. To Sheila, who slouched and was bulimic, the sight of another human so giddy in her flesh was beyond endurance.

There was a pause, and Charlotte realized they were waiting for her to speak. “I guess they’re mostly jocks,” she said, forcing herself to concentrate. Her mind swerved to the math teacher, then to the man by the river. “Some are cute,” she said. “But the girls are, too.” She had an anxious sense of covering something up—as if she weren’t actually a student at East, as if this were merely a pretext. “You should come visit.”

“Let’s,” Laurel said. “Sisterhood.”

“Rah rah,” Sheila said acidly.

“You’re not invited,” Charlotte told her, which made Sheila grin. She liked being put in her place.

“Change it! Change it!” Roz shrieked from the backseat. She meant the song—Sarah McLachlan, whom she hated. “Change it before I scream.”

“You
are
screaming,” Charlotte said. “Right in my ear while I’m driving.”

“No wonder,” Sheila muttered.

“That’s not why I have screamers,” Roz said hotly. “The doctor says there’s point zero zero connection.”