Page 101 of Book of Night
Charlie had a sinking feeling that this was about Rand, that Posey had said something during their daily tarot chats. “When was I in trouble?”
“I know you don’t like talking about it—”
“There’s obviously something you think you know, so go ahead and say it.” Charlie needed to stop talking. Instead of splitting her tongue into two parts, she needed to bite the whole thing off. She should be trying to avoid this conversation, not indulging it.
“I saw you take your old medical file out of the car,” she said. “And I’ll never forget how I felt when I got that call from the police. And then, when they found Rand’s body, with that dead girl in the trunk. That girl could have been you.”
That was true, but not for any of the reasons that her mother was imagining. “It wasn’t me, though. I’m fine.”
“Are you?” her mother asked. “I know you were with him that night you wound up in the hospital. If you never deal with what happened, you’ll never heal from it. You’ll stay in that hurt, angry place.”
Charlie Hall, with a furnace inside her that was always burning.
Of course she was angry.
She wanted her mother to have believed her when Travis smacked them around, to have loved her better than Alonso, who wasn’t even real.
She wanted her mother to have protected her from Rand, who was bad enough, and still so much better than he could have been.
She wanted her mother to believe her now, even though Charlie had lied before.
“I’m fine. Sound as a bell,” Charlie said. “Right as rain.”
“I wanted you and your sister to have the freedom to express yourselves, to make mistakes, to discover yourselves. I didn’t want to hold you back.” Mom was playing with one of her chunky silver rings, rolling it around her first finger. “I didn’t have that as a kid. And you had agift. I thought Rand would show you how to use it.”
Guilt came over Charlie in a swell. She had to change the subject. She couldn’t stand feeling this way anymore, torn between a desire to scream and a desire to confess. “Maybe when I stopped using it, the gift moved on to Posey.”
Her mother gave her an impatient look.
Charlie sighed. “You want me to talk to you? Okay, here’s what I want to know. Have you ever met Lionel Salt’s daughter?” They were around the same age, and the area had been even smaller back then. If her mother knew Vince’s, maybe she’d know what happened to her.
“Kiara?” Her mother looked up, blinking like she was trying to refocus her thoughts. “We didn’t run in the same circles.”
“But you know her name,” Charlie insisted. “So you must know something about her.”
Mom shrugged. “She used to buy shrooms off a friend of mine. Partied hard. Told disturbing stories about her father, but people want to believe that the rich are keeping their fingernails in jars like Howard Hughes, and she seemed like the kind of person who’d say whatever got her attention. Fell in with some ex-cons up in Boston, got knocked up. Eventually her father put her in rehab, and that’s the last I heard. She didn’t talk to any of the old crew after that. Why?”
“I heard she died, that’s all,” Charlie said.
“Sad,” said her mother.
Charlie stretched, rolling her shoulders. “I think I am going to go inside and see about the air mattress.”
“Think about what I said,” her mother told her as she stood.
As Charlie walked away, a memory came to her of when she was very little and her parents were still together. She was sitting in the back seat of the car, the window down. Wind whipped her hair. The radio was on, Charlie’s little legs swinging along with the music, and Mom and Dad were laughing together. Golden sunlight had turned the world dazzlingly bright, and it seemed as though night would never come.
As she and Posey took turns pumping up their bed, Bob and Mom moved comfortably around the room. They seemed contented. It was weird, but nice. Like there was no curse, just a casual family inheritance of bad relationships, in a cycle that no one was doomed to repeat.
Charlie and Posey lay down next to one another, trying not to bounce the mattress. Charlie remembered a whole childhood of sharing beds with Posey, whispering to one another, back when they had the same secrets.
Back when they had the same gifts.
Charlie thought of the moment when her consciousness split, when she understood how to be in two places at once. Even now when she closed her eyes, she could feel her shadow. If she concentrated hard enough, she could see herself from its vantage.
As soon as she did, though, panic sent her spiraling back to her own body.
Charlie didn’t have a goldfish or a turtle, because she worried she’d forget to feed anything that couldn’t yowl for its dinner. She forgot to take her birth control pills at least twice every month, sometimes for two days at a time. When she’d downloaded an app to help her remember to drink water, it had come with a pixelated plant you were supposed to tap when you drank a glass. She killed the plant over and over—sometimes she’d drink the water but forget to tap the plant, and sometimes she’d just forget to drink the water. How was she going to remember to give blood to a shadow every day?
