What Was Mine: & Other Stories (13 page)

Nicholas gave her a cashmere scarf and light-blue leather gloves. She gave him subscriptions to
Granta
and
Manhattan, inc.
, a heavy sweater with a hood, and a hundred-dollar check to get whatever else he wanted. His father gave him a paperweight that had belonged to his grandfather, and a wristwatch that would apparently function even when launched from a rocket pad. When Nicholas went into the kitchen to boil up more water, she slid over on the couch and glanced at the gift card. It said, “Love, Dad,” in Edward’s nearly illegible script. Nicholas returned and opened his last present, which was from Melissa, his stepsister. It was a cheap ballpoint pen with a picture of a woman inside. When you turned the pen upside down her clothes disappeared.

“How old is Melissa?” Charlotte asked.

“Twelve or thirteen,” he said.

“Does she look like her mother?”

“Not much,” Nicholas said. “But she’s really her sister’s kid, and I never saw her sister.”

“Her sister’s child?” Charlotte took a sip of her tea, which was laced with bourbon. She held it in her mouth a second before swallowing.

“Melissa’s mother killed herself when Melissa was just a baby. I guess her father didn’t want her. Anyway, he gave her up.”

“Her sister killed herself?” Charlotte said. She could feel her eyes widening. Suddenly she remembered the night before, the open window in the bathroom, the black sky, wind smacking her in the face.

“Awful, huh?” Nicholas said, lifting the tea bag out of the mug and lowering it to the saucer. “Hey, did I shock you? How come you didn’t know that? I thought you were the one with a sense for disaster.”

“What do you mean? I don’t expect disaster. I don’t know anything at all about Melissa. Naturally—”

“I know you don’t know anything about her,” he said, cutting her off. “Look—don’t get mad at me, but I’m going to say this, because I think you aren’t aware of what you do. You don’t ask anything, because you’re afraid of what every answer might be. It makes people reluctant to talk to you. Nobody wants to tell you things.”

She took another sip of tea, which had gone tepid. Specks of loose tea leaves had floated to the top. “People talk to me,” she said.

“I know they do,” he said. “I’m not criticizing you. I’m just telling you that if you give off those vibes people are going to back off.”

“Who backs off?” she said.

“Charlotte, I don’t know everything about your life. I’m just telling you that you’ve never asked one thing about Dad’s family in—what is it? Eleven years. You don’t even mention my stepmother by name, ever. Her name is Joan. You don’t want to know things, that’s all.”

He kicked a ball of wrapping paper away from his foot. “Let’s drop it,” he said. “What I’m saying is that you’re always worried. You always think something’s going to happen.”

She started to speak, but took another drink instead. Maybe all mothers seemed oppressive when their children were teenagers. Didn’t everyone say that parents could hardly do anything right during those years? That was what Father Curnan said—that although we may always try to do our best, we can’t always expect to succeed. She wished Father Curnan were here right now. The whole evening would be different.

“Don’t start sulking,” Nicholas said. “You’ve been pissed off at me since last night, because I wouldn’t go over and glad-hand Father Curnan. I hardly know him. I went to the party with you because you wanted me to. I don’t practice anymore. I’m not a Catholic anymore. I don’t believe what Father Curnan believes. Just because twenty years ago he had some doubt in his life and sorted it out, you think he’s a hero. I don’t think he’s a hero. I don’t care what he decided. That’s fine for him, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“I never mention your loss of faith,” she said. “Never. We don’t discuss it.”

“You don’t have to say anything. What’s awful is that you let me know that I’ve scared you. It’s like I deliberately did something to you.”

“What would you have me do?” she said. “How good an actress do you think I can be? I
do
worry. You don’t give me credit for trying.”

“You don’t give
me
credit,” he said. “I don’t get credit for putting up with Dad’s crap because I came to Virginia to be with you instead of going to his house. If I go to a stupid party for some priest who condescends to me by letter and says he’ll pray for my soul, I don’t get credit from you for going because you wanted me there. It never occurs to you. Instead I get told that I didn’t shake his hand on the way out. If I had told you that the car was driving funny before I got it fixed, you would have bitten your nails some more and refused to ride in it. I wish you’d stop being scared. I wish you’d just stop.”

She put the mug on the table and looked at him. He’s a grown man, she thought. Taller than his father. Nicholas shook his head and walked out of the room. She heard him stomp upstairs. In a few minutes, the music began. He was playing rock, not Christmas music, and her heart seemed to pick up the relentless beat of the bass. Nicholas had scored his point. She was just sitting there, scared to death.

The sound jolted through her dream: once, twice, again. And then it awakened her. When she opened her eyes, it took her a minute to realize that she was in the living room in a chair, not in bed, and that she had been dreaming. The loud music had become part of her dream. She was squinting. Light flooded part of the living room—a painful brightness as constant as the noise. Out of the area of light she saw the shapes of crumpled gift wrappings by the tree. She passed one hand over her forehead, attempting to soothe the pain. The dog looked up from across the room. He yawned and walked over to the footstool beside her, wagging his tail.

The noise continued. It was from outside. A high-pitched squeal resonated in her chest. It had been snowing earlier. It must have gone on snowing. Someone’s car was stuck out there.

The dog padded with her to the front window. Beyond the huge oak tree in the front yard, there was a car at an odd angle, with its headlights aimed toward the house. A front and back wheel were up on the hill. Whoever was driving had missed the turn and skidded onto her property. There was a man bending over by the side of the car. Somebody else, in the driver’s seat, gunned the engine and wheels spun again. “Wait for me to move! Wait till I’m out of the way, for Christ’s sake,” the man outside the car hollered. The wheels screamed again, drowning out the rest of what he said.

Charlotte got her coat from the hall closet and snapped on the outside light. She nudged the dog back inside, and went carefully down the front walkway. Snow seeped into one shoe.

“What’s going on?” she called, clasping her hands across her chest.

“Nothin’,” the man said, as if all this were the most normal thing in the world. “I’m trying to give us something to roll back on, so’s we can get some traction.”

She looked down and saw a large piece of flagstone from her wall jammed under one back wheel. Again the man raced the engine.

“He’s gonna get it,” the man said.

“Do you want me to call a tow truck?” she said, shivering.

There were no lights in any nearby windows. She could not believe that she was alone in this, that half the neighborhood was not awake.

“We got it! We got it!” the man said, crouching as the driver raced the engine again. The tire screamed on the flagstone, but the car did not move. Suddenly she smelled something sweet—liquor on the man’s breath. The man sprang up and banged on the car window. “Ease up, ease up, God damn it,” he said. “Don’t you know how to drive?”

The driver rolled down the window and began to curse. The other man hit his hand on the roof of the car. Again, the driver gassed it and tires spun and screamed.

For the first time, she felt frightened. The man began to tug at the door on the driver’s side, and Charlotte turned away and walked quickly toward the house. This has got to stop, she thought.
It has got to stop
. She opened the door. Horatio was looking at her. It was as though he had been waiting and now he simply wanted an answer.

Above the screeching of tires, she heard her voice, speaking into the telephone, giving the police the information and her address. Then she stepped farther back into the dark kitchen, over on the left side, where she could not be seen through the front windows or through the glass panels that stretched to each side of the front door. She could hear both men yelling. Where was Nicholas? How could he still be asleep? She hoped that the dog wouldn’t bark and wake him, now that he’d managed to sleep through so much. She took a glass out of the cabinet and started toward the shelf where she kept the bourbon, but then stopped, realizing that she might be seen. She pulled open the refrigerator door and found an opened bottle of wine. She pulled the cork out and filled the glass half full and took a long drink.

Someone knocked on the door. Could it be the police—so soon? How could they have come so quickly and silently? She wasn’t sure until, long after the knocking stopped, she peered down the hallway and saw, through the narrow rectangle of glass, a police car with its revolving red and blue lights.

At almost the same instant, she touched something on her lapel and looked down, surprised. It was Santa: a small pin, in the shape of Santa’s head, complete with a little red hat, pudgy cheeks, and a ripply white plastic beard. A tiny cord with a bell at the bottom dangled from it. Nicholas must have gone back to the store where they had seen it on his first day home. She had pointed it out on a tray of Christmas pins and ornaments. She told him she’d had the exact same pin—the Santa’s head, with a bell—back when she was a girl. He must have gone back to the store later to buy it.

She tiptoed upstairs in the dark, and the dog followed. Nicholas was snoring in his bedroom. She went down the hall to her room, at the front of the house, and, without turning on the light, sat on her bed to look out the nearest window at the scene below. The man she had spoken to was emptying his pockets onto the hood of the police car. She saw the beam of the policeman’s flashlight sweep up and down his body, watched while he unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open wide in response to something the policeman said. The other man was being led to the police car. She could hear his words—“my car,
it’s my car, I tell you
”—but she couldn’t make out whole sentences, couldn’t figure out what the driver was objecting to so strongly. When both men were in the car, one of the policemen turned and began to walk toward the house. She got up quickly and went downstairs, one hand sliding along the slick banister; the dog came padding down behind her.

She opened the door just before the policeman knocked. Cold flooded the hallway. She saw steam coming out of the car’s exhaust pipe. There was steam from her own breath, and the policeman’s.

“Could I come in, ma’am?” he asked, and she stood back and then shut the door behind him, closing out the cold. The dog was on the landing.

“He’s real good, or else he’s not a guard dog to begin with,” the policeman said. His cheeks were red. He was younger than she had thought at first.

“They were going to keep that racket up all night,” she said.

“You did the right thing,” he said. His head bent, he began to fill out a form on his clipboard. “I put down about fifty dollars of damage to your wall,” he said.

She said nothing.

“It didn’t do too much damage,” the policeman said. “You can call in the morning and get a copy of this report if you need it.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He touched his cap. “Less fun than digging out Santa and his reindeer,” he said, looking back at the car, tilted onto the lawn. “Have a good Christmas, ma’am,” he said.

He turned and left, and she closed the door. With the click, she remembered everything. Earlier in the evening she had gone upstairs to tell Nicholas that she was sorry they had ended up in a quarrel on Christmas Eve. She had said she wanted him to come back downstairs. She had said it through the closed door, pleading with him, with her mouth close to the blank white panel of wood. When the door opened at last, and she saw Nicholas standing there in his pajamas, she had braced herself by touching her fingers to the doorframe, shocked to realize that he was real, and that he was there. He was looking into her eyes—a person she had helped to create—and yet, when he wasn’t present, seeing him in her mind would have been as strange as visualizing a Christmas ornament out of season.

Nicholas’s hair was rumpled, and he looked at her with a tired, exasperated frown. “Charlotte,” he said, “why didn’t you come up hours ago? I went down and let the dog in. You’ve been out like a light half the night. Nobody’s supposed to say that you drink. Nobody’s supposed to see you. If you don’t ask any questions, we’re supposed to stop noticing you. Nobody’s supposed to put you on the spot, are they? You only talk to Father Curnan, and he prays for you.”

Downstairs in the dark hallway now, she shuddered, remembering how she had felt when he said that. She had gone back downstairs and huddled in the chair—all right, she had had too much to drink—but it was she who had woken up and been alert to squealing tires and people screaming, and Nicholas who had slept. Also, she thought, relief suddenly sweeping through her, he couldn’t have been as angry as he seemed. He must have put the pin on her coat after the party—after their words in the car—or even when he had come downstairs to let Horatio in and had seen her asleep or passed out in the chair. He must have pinned it onto her lapel when the coat still hung in the closet, so she would find it there the next day. She had found it early, inadvertently, when she went out to investigate the car and the noise.

She looked at the dog. He was watching her, as usual.

“Are you real good, or not a guard dog to begin with?” she whispered. Then she pulled the cord. Santa’s face lit up. She pulled the cord again, several times, smiling as the dog watched. Over her shoulder, she looked at the kitchen clock. It was three-fifty Christmas morning.

“Come on,” she whispered, pulling the cord another time. “I’ve done my trick. Now you do yours.”