Page 90 of The Family Plot
“—Andy’s ax. He was railing on this tree, back in the woods a bit. He was so worked up, I-I tried to talk him down.” He stares up at me. “I tried to help him, Dolls. I swear. It was the first time I’d talked to him about it, openly. He knew it had happened to me, too, but we’d never spoken about it. It was too awful to acknowledge. We were both so ashamed.
“I tried to tell him, though. Tried to convince him that this would end for him soon. In a couple years, he could leave and he’d see there was life on the other side of… of Dad. I told him he could be anyone he wanted to be. He could go to college, go anywhere really; he could start a family that’s nothing like ours. And he stopped then. He seemed to latch onto that. I thought I’d calmed him down, that he’d be all right. But then…”
His Adam’s apple bobs. He turns his head toward Tate, whose eyes are wide with horror—but still soft somehow. Still supportive. In her chair, Mom rocks herself back and forth.
I don’t move at all.
“Then what?” Tate whispers.
“He handed me his ax. And I took it. I thought it meant he was feeling better. But then he—oh, fuck—” He rakes his hand over his face, and my stomach lurches. I steel myself for the blow I know is to come. “He told me to kill him.”
“What?”
It’s not the blow I expected. It’s not a blow I believe in at all.
“That can’t be true,” I add.
Charlie shrugs one shoulder. “He did. He told me to kill him. ‘Before I do more damage,’ he said. And I knew that desire. Of course I did. The desire for someone to see it. To stop it. To make him… not a part of it anymore.”
He glances at Mom, lip curled back to bare his teeth.
“But I still tried to talk him down. I told him it’s Dad who does the damage, not us. But I knew that wasn’t true. Even if we never touched those women, we were culpable. And he could see that I knew it. He kept begging me to kill him. Trulybeggingme. He got down on his knees. Said he couldn’t live with what he’d done. He said, ‘I love her, Charlie, but anyone who dares to love me will only be ruined.’ And then he said I was wrong, he couldn’t have a family, could never have kids like anyone else, because all he would do is fuck them up. He had no hope anymore. That’s what he kept saying. That there was no hope for him.”
Charlie looks at me, and I’m a deer caught in the headlights of his eyes. “I didn’t get it at the time—what had triggered him that night; I knew Dad had killed Jessie Stanton the week before, but it seemed like more than that. Something fresh. But now—what is it, Dahlia, that he said to Ruby Decker, when she told him she loved him, when she brought up a future they could have together?”
My mouth moves without speaking, lips stitching together the silence. Then I swallow, throat huge, and mumble out the words: “?‘Who knows what I’d do to a kid? Who knows what’s in my blood?’?”
“In my blood,” Charlie repeats. “Fuck. When he said ‘I love her’ that night, I thought he was referring to you, Dolls. That he didn’t want to ruinyoubecause of what he’d done. But when you told me about that embroidery thing, I realized he must have meant Ruby. He lovedRuby.”
My lungs betray me, admitting no air.
“And I get how that would have undone him,” Charlie continues, “having to reject someone heloved, just to keep them safe. Of course he felt hopeless after that, like he’d always be alone. Iknowthat feeling—I’ve never lasted more than a month in a relationship. The second they get serious, I have to get out. Even when I’m crazy about them.Especiallywhen I’m crazy about them. Because how could I let anyone love me? How could I inflict my true self onto someone I care about? I swear, when someone says they love me, it only makes me hate myself more. Because I don’t deserve anyone’s love, not after what I’ve done. I don’t even deserve it from my sister.”
He looks at Tate when he says this, not me. She shakes her head, lips parted but wordless.
Charlie drops his head to stare at his hands. Tate grabs them with her own.
“And god, thismuseum,” he says. “I was standing here, Ruby’s story running through my mind, and I just couldn’t… I couldn’t do it anymore. Perform. Pretend. It’s exhausting, you know. I’m always so fucking tired.”
He locks his eyes onto mine.
“So I put the note out. Publicly. Immediately. So I couldn’t chicken out, I couldn’t go back. I knew you’d see it, and you’d know, and the whole performance would be over. Because that’s always been the problem. It wasmyperformance,myinsistence on ignoring the past, on keeping it quiet, that brought Andy to the point he wasat that night—that dark, impossible place where he begged me to kill him. He said he didn’t have the guts to do it himself because he was such a coward, he’d always been a coward, ‘We’re such cowards, Charlie!’?”
It stuns me, how clearly I hear both my brothers in the sentence. I glance at my empty, trembling hands. Andy never told me he felt like a coward, but I knew him enough to know that he fought with trees to fight his feelings. I can picture him snarling those words.
“And suddenly,” Charlie continues, “I was looking right at him, but I couldn’t even see him anymore. I just saw myself. The confused and terrified kid I’d spent years trying to distance myself from—through miles, through auditions, through every role I played on every fucking stage. And it was all there that night—all that rage and shame and self-loathing, just under the surface of my skin, still leaking out of me from sobbing it all to Tate. And I couldn’t stand to look at him. Atme. So I swung the ax. And I killed him.”
My legs collapse under me. My knees slam against the floor, palms slapping the wood. As tears soak my face, my shoulders shake with sobs and my stomach clenches like a fist.
My brother. My twin. My beautiful, unknowable Andy.
The pain sears me inside. When I open my mouth to howl, my breath scalds my tongue.
“And I buried him,” Charlie says above my sobs. Above Mom’s sobs, too. Above Tate’s. We are three broken women, at the mercy of a story from a broken man. He doesn’t cry at all.
“And I wrote the note. And the next day, I got the hell out, and I’ve never come back until now.”
I press my forehead to the floor. My chest convulses as I cry, my throat already raw. Behind my closed eyes, I’m seeing the boy in the credenza, the one who held my hand and shushed me in the dark; I’mseeing how his tongue touched his upper lip when he carved his name into wood, when he claimed a little something of his awful world for himself; I’m seeing him crash into his beanbag chair, seeing him stand by my bed, pulling me from a nightmare I didn’t know I was in; I’m seeing him smooth down his hair, seeing it spring back up, seeing both of us laugh at his untamable parts.
