The Craigslist Murders (21 page)

Afterwards, she remembered Nanny coming in to console her. “Your hair will grow back,” she’d promised, washing away the mess of snot and tears from Charlotte’s face. And her nanny was right. It did grow back. But there had been times in the years since that morning when Charlotte, shorn of everything including hair and childhood illusions, would look into a mirror and swear that there was nothing there, no reflection.

“Charlotte? Charlotte?” The voice seemed as it were coming from the bottom of the sea.

She was gripping the edge of her chair so tightly, her knuckles had turned white.

When the doctor reached out to touch her, Charlotte shrank back into her chair.

“Charlotte, I am so sorry. But we have to stop now.”

Which is when Charlotte grinned. “We have to stop now!” she mimicked. “Is that all you can say after my breakthrough?”

“It’s a lot to process, dear. For both of us,” he replied, quietly.

She stiffened and glared at him. “Are you afraid to look at me, Doctor?”

Rummaging around his desk, the frail, elderly man picked up a prescription pad. “Of course not, Charlotte,” he said, scribbling on the pad. “But I’d like to give you something to help calm you down. Just until our next session.”

Snapping the brass fastener on her bag open and shut, open and shut, Charlotte stared vacantly out the office window. “Yeah, right,” she, finally, said, buttoning up her
cardigan and snatching the slip of paper. “Thanks for your time.”

The doctor just nodded and continued writing on his legal pad.

Like a child who sits parked in front of television for hours and then sees the screen go dark, Charlotte felt hostile, disoriented, sluggish. Using her hand to shield her eyes from the bright sunlight, she tried to get her bearings. Even the tree-lined street outside Greene’s office, a street so familiar to her she could have run its length blindfolded, felt foreign to her. She was thinking of the cartoon she’d drawn, the one her mother gave when she came to visit. There were teeth inside the mouth of the C.
Like the teeth of the shears, like C for Charlotte
, she thought.
It’s me
, she thought, feeling a pang of what might have been genuine sadness. But the howl in the cartoon had been silent. And no one had ever heard her.

Pulling a silver compact out from the depths of her purse, Charlotte hesitated. She never powdered her nose or even applied lipstick in public. Such overt displays of vanity repelled her. Turning her back to the street, she stole a furtive glance in the compact and gasped. The furrows on her forehead, the deeply etched lines between her mouth and nose. She looked a hundred years old.

Wiping her face with the back of her hand, as if to erase the last hour with Dr. Greene, she vowed:
I am not going to
lose control now. I will not indulge in weak, embarrassing fits of self-pity
.

When Charlotte’s phone began to vibrate, she was so aware of her every movement, pulling it out from her pocket, flipping it open, and placing it next to her ear, that it felt like those slow-motion split seconds before a car crash.

“Charlotte?”

She held the phone away from her ear. Her hand was shaking.

“Charlotte! Can you hear me?” The voice at the other end was braying. Shrill.

“Yes, Mother. I’m here,” Charlotte replied, robotically.

“No, Charlotte. You’re there. And I need you here. I don’t feel well.”

“I don’t feel well, either, Mother.”

“I’m dizzy, light-headed.”

Charlotte’s chest tightened. Folding the phone neatly shut, she severed the connection. When it began to vibrate, again, she gently placed it at the bottom of her bag. The slow, deliberate movements calmed her down. Charlotte thought of the nightmares she’d had of running away from her mother and of her cartoon figure, its mouth open in a silent scream. She would take care of her mother. But right now, she needed to channel her fury somewhere more constructive.

Charlotte pulled the curtains snugly shut and collapsed on her bed. Touching the glass inside the silver picture frame,
she imagined that her Aunt Dottie was there with her.
Her silence was a signal
, she thought. Proof that Dottie was listening. As she tried to explain to her aunt, this is why she had fallen so hard for Pavel. Because he was a man who could listen, too. And unlike Dr. Greene, she didn’t have to pay him for it. Just the thought of Dr. Greene was unpleasant, the way he’d poked and prodded; the way he’d cut her off today.

Lying there in the dark, Charlotte caressed the soft pilled sleeves of Vicky’s old sweater. Inserting her finger into a hole near the armpit, she began to tug. The yarn gave way and the hole became bigger. The sound of ripping comforted her. Gazing at the photo of her Aunt Dottie, she tried to imagine the day at Orchard Beach. She’d never been to an amusement park, not even Coney Island, but she wondered if her mother and aunt had shared a seat on the Ferris wheel; if they’d eaten pink cotton candy. She wondered who had taken the picture and thought that, perhaps, it might have been her grandfather. Charlotte’s only consolation that night was her newfound realization that she was no longer afraid of her dreams. She was done with running away from her mother. There would be no more sleep-curdling visions of rooftops, silent screams, and kitchen knives.

The phone rang during breakfast. Charlotte had been sitting there, hypnotized by the silvery reflections of light on the river. Like a mirror, she’d thought, thinking of her mother. After years of being tongue-tied, she wanted answers to her
questions. When she picked up the phone, the voice on the other end was breaking up.

It was Pavel.

Charlotte’s muscles relaxed. She grinned.

“Charlotte, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Pavel. The connection’s not great. But I hear you.”

“Listen, I …”

Charlotte interrupted. “I’ve been trying to get you.”

“I know. But there are some problems in Moscow, Charlotte. I’ve had to leave.”

Her grin sagged. “What kind of problems?”

“I can’t really talk over the phone. But my credit is frozen …” Like the vapor trails of airplanes, little tendrils of pain shot through her chest and disappeared. A vein throbbed in her temple.
Fuck!
Charlotte thought.
My money
.

“What does that mean, Pavel? Did you send the wire?”

“Look, I am trying to work it out …” He was shouting through a storm of static. She heard something about tax police and held her breath. “I’m going to be out of touch for a while. The family’s meeting me and …”

“I can’t hear you very well,” Charlotte said, moving closer to the window in the hopes of retrieving a signal.

She heard the word “sorry” and then he was gone.

Jesus Christ
. Even with her credit line, she was looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Eighty yards of the Scalamandre silk had come in at $50,000, and that was
with
the discount. The woman making the balloon shades was charging another $15,000. She’d already started the sewing. And what about the $400,000 order for lighting? Everything was veering out of control. Anna had warned her
about the Russians. She was disgusted at her own weakness, at the thought that this man had seen her naked. She had to get out of the house. Walk. At least there was Gina. Suddenly Charlotte was so excited at the prospect of seeing Gina she could feel tiny goose bumps on her arms.

The phone trilled as Charlotte dried herself off in the bathroom. Her stomach flip-flopped. Maybe it was Pavel calling back. Dropping the towel, she rushed into her bedroom and picked up.

“Charlotte?”

Just the sound of Vicky’s voice annoyed her.

“Welcome back, Vicky. How was the trip?”

“Incredible, absolutely incredible. You have to come over right now and I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Ummmm. I’m not sure I have time,” Charlotte replied. Listening to the details of other people’s trips was almost as boring as listening to them talk about their dreams or their sex lives.

“Then make time, Charlotte. But forget about the trip. Wait till you hear about
last night
. It was the most moving experience of my whole life, I swear.”

“Really?” Charlotte said, tuning out. “Your night with the Buddhists, right?”

“You cannot imagine. I left the house at 7:00 with no keys, no money, no phone. And everybody met me at the 72
^nd
Street IRT.”

“It hasn’t been called the IRT in thirty years, Vicky!”

“Whatever. The subway, okay? Anyway, we went down to some shelters on Avenue D and rode the trains all night just like the homeless. I even talked to some of them.”

“It sounds like some kind of new adventure vacation, Vicky.”

“You’re such a cynic, Charlotte, you know? That’s your problem. This is a Buddhist tradition. They do it every year.”

“Well, bravo for them, Vicky!”

But Vicky was still talking. “It was so cold out, I almost gave away my shahtoosh.”

Charlotte choked. “Surely you jest, Vicky. Please don’t tell me you were wearing $2,000 worth of dead Tibetan antelope hair on Avenue D? And you call yourself an f’ing Buddhist.”

There was dead silence at the other end of the phone. Vicky had hung up.

Walking into the kitchen she removed a piece of soft chamois cloth from a plastic bucket under the kitchen sink. Today’s moment with Gina would be perfect, she thought, stroking and polishing the poker until it gleamed. It had to be.

Feeling jubilantly alert, invincible even, she decided that she’d skip seeing Vicky—just not show up—and walk to Gina’s. The walk would clear her head and help her focus. Charlotte had left the bottle of Ativan untouched on her bedside table all night. She didn’t want anything to come between her and the fullness of her experience with Gina. If only others understood; if only they could see the world as she saw it, there would be no judgments. The world would applaud her courage, her
strength
.

Charlotte blinked. Was she hallucinating? It looked like Gina was clutching a large, claw-toothed hammer in her left hand. Her face was red and sweaty, too. Charlotte could hear the sounds of wailing from somewhere in the back of the loft. “What the hell?” she muttered, reluctant to step any farther in than the front hallway. “Make yourself comfortable, Kate,” said the flustered, young blonde. “I just have to finish up some private business.”

Is she kidding? Charlotte thought to herself. Had the woman hit somebody with the hammer? Her husband, maybe? Slipping out of her coat, she sat down to catch her breath. After avoiding the CCTV camera in the lobby, she’d walked up ten flights of stairs. She began to remove her fur hat, but one look in the hallway mirror changed her mind. Her hair was a wreck. She hadn’t washed it in two days.

The clamor of raised voices soon had her moving on the balls of her feet towards the back.

“Please, Mrs. Craven, I swear I didn’t know …”

Craning her neck, Charlotte watched as Gina pulled a young guy toward a bathroom. There were shards of porcelain all over the marble floor.

“You didn’t know not to use the brand-new $10,000 toilet?” Gina said, ominously. “Of course you knew. Everyone knows.”