*****
Charlotte sat alone on the beach, the sun setting behind her. There was nobody else around, just the waves lapping on the shoreline. The tide was going out. She had watched it ebb for the past half hour, the water receding farther and farther from where she had dug her feet into the sand.
“Come inside, Charlotte,” Aunt Sheena said.
The wind had masked the sound of her aunt’s approach, and Charlotte juddered with surprise at the familiar voice calling her name. For a delirious moment, she had thought it was her mother. But then she turned and saw not the tired-faced woman she known growing up, but the fresher, more authoritative permutation of her.
“We saved some dinner for you,” Aunt Sheena said, sitting down on the sand. Charlotte was surprised she was willing to get her perfectly pressed khaki pants dirty.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Sweetie, you have to eat.”
Charlotte turned away, letting the wind whip the hair against her face, obscuring her features. “I can’t eat knowing that Mr. K is leaving.”
“I know you’re sad that he’s going, darling. But it’s better for him and for you.”
“Why is it better for him?” she asked.
“It’s time he went back to Maryland. He’s been away for too long already.”
“Maryland!” she said in shock. “He’s going back east?”
Aunt Sheena clearly had thought Charlotte already knew this development. “Yes, that’s where his father and his wife live.”
Charlotte had thought Mr. Kerrigan would still be on the island, perhaps working a job somewhere other than Staley. She had not expected him to move clear across the continent.
“You’re shaking again,” Aunt Sheena said worriedly. “Maybe we should take you to see a doctor about that.”
“No,” she said, forcing herself to stay still. “I’m fine.”
Aunt Sheena removed her loafers and set them down on the sand. “Mr. Kerrigan told me what you shared with him today. About what happened to you last year. And about Annie’s addiction. Why didn’t you tell us, Charlotte? We could have gotten you help a long time ago if you’d opened up to us sooner.”
“There’s no point opening up to people. They leave anyway.”
In a conflicted voice, Aunt Sheena said, “It wasn’t entirely Mr. Kerrigan’s idea to leave. I asked him to.” She went on quickly, anticipating Charlotte’s anger. “I don’t know what happened between the two of you these past two weeks. Of course I want to believe that Will would never hurt a soul, but I can’t know that for certain. And I will sleep easier at night knowing that he’s nowhere he can hurt you.”
“He’s never hurt me!” Charlotte said fiercely.
“How can I believe you? You hide things from us!” Aunt Sheena said with more emotion than Charlotte thought she was capable of.
Charlotte stood clumsily to her feet, kicking up sand. “You can’t force Mr. Kerrigan to leave. He did nothing wrong! This is my fault!”
“Sit down, Charlotte!” Aunt Sheena said with such command, that Charlotte instantly obeyed.
Aunt Sheena drew a ragged breath. “Do you remember when you asked me why your mother has intentionally distanced herself from me all these years?”
Charlotte nodded mutely.
Aunt Sheena brought her knees closer to her chest, looking oddly like a little child. “I’m only telling you because I think it will help you understand where I’m coming from,” she said.
Charlotte waited, knowing immediately that something serious was about to be divulged.
“When we were growing up, Annie and I were looked after by our neighbors, the Janssen’s,” Aunt Sheena began. “As you know, our father died when we were very young, and our mother – your grandmother – was working full-time. We spent a lot of time in the Janssen’s care. They had two grown children themselves, and my mother trusted them wholeheartedly. And to be honest, I had very pleasant memories of the afternoons we spent in their care. Mrs. Janssen was wonderful to me. Very motherly, very kind. But Annie…” Aunt Sheena’s voice caught in her throat, and Charlotte was dumbstruck to find that tears were building in her aunt’s eyes. “Well, Annie is quite a bit younger than me. Almost eight years my junior. She was so innocent, and so beautiful – Oh God, was she a beautiful child. She looked just like you, in fact,” Aunt Sheena said, chuffing Charlotte’s cheek affectionately.
Aunt Sheena stopped abruptly, her features contorted by sadness. It took her a long time to continue, and when she spoke, it was with a resolute, determined strength.
“Charlotte, Mr. Janssen molested your mother. For years. And the worst part of it is that I knew about it at the time, and I never told a soul. I walked in on them once, and Annie even tried to explain it to me, in a confused, child-like way, but I never spoke a word of it to anyone. I felt too ashamed.” Aunt Sheena laughed bitterly. “Can you imagine what a coward I must have been? To let my sister endure that for years? It wasn’t until much later that I found the courage to speak out, when I was in college and it was far too late.”
Aunt Sheena reached out and grasped Charlotte desperately. “I can’t make that same mistake with you, Charlotte. I can’t let history repeat itself. Do you understand?”
Charlotte tugged away from her aunt’s reach. “Mr. Kerrigan isn’t like that. You’re making an even bigger mistake by forcing him to leave,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion.
She rose and went back to the house, her aunt’s words still rattling around in her thoughts like loose change.
She could hear Uncle Eddie whistling in the kitchen. She hated him in that moment. And she hated Emi, who would never know what it was like to grow up with pain and loneliness, who would never bear those lasting scars. She hated the over-the-top mansion they lived in. She hated Mr. Kerrigan for abandoning her after she had shared everything with him. She hated her mother for leading a sad, pathetic existence, and for losing the capacity to love her. Most of all, she hated her aunt for what she had knowingly done and could never possibly set right again.
Charlotte saw Aunt Sheena’s designer purse sitting on the chair by the front door. Impetuously, she plunged her hand into its depths and seized the keys to the family Lexus. Fueled by anger and frustration, she grabbed her own purse and stumbled out the front door, still in her bare feet. She clambered into the driver’s seat, fumbling to fit the key into the ignition.
The car came brightly to life, headlights blazing. She stripped off her arm sling violently, ignoring the pain, and set both hands firmly on the wheel. With a clumsy jerk, she backed the car down the driveway, jabbing at the gate opener and pulling out onto the quiet suburban road.
She didn’t know where she was going. She turned down streets blindly. Memories of her last disastrous experience behind the wheel floated to mind, filling her with an exhilarating rush of fear.
An idea came to her, and she pulled the car over to the side of the road with a shriek of the tires. She took her purse where she had dumped it on the passenger seat and rifled through its contents frantically.
“Where are you?” she mumbled to herself.
Then she found it. The scrap of paper Asher had given her at the luau with his address. Through the dark, she squinted at his handwriting and punched his Portlock Road address into the car’s GPS system.
Her mind felt anesthetized as she drove. The time passed strangely through her, images of the past two weeks flashing through mind in an empty cascade. Everything felt meaningless and dead.
She pulled up to the address that Asher had given her. Cars were lined all the way up the street. The house itself was massive, and not unlike the Kapono’s in style. The sound of voices and loud jazz could be heard coming from within, and all the lights were shining. There was evidently a party taking place.
She found street parking a few blocks down, and tumbled from her car, feeling strangely weak.
The front door was round and green, a kitschy facsimile of a Chinese moon gate. There w
as a rope pulley ringer, which Charlotte tugged at. It took almost an entire minute for someone to come to the door. From her vantage, Charlotte could barely see through the crack in the entrance. Adults were dressed gorgeously, holding glasses and speaking in low voices. A laugh rang out somewhere.
The woman who appeared before her was dressed in sequins. Charlotte looked her up and down. Thin brows, mostly drawn in with pencil, thin red lips and darkly made over eyes. It was hard to tell if she was pretty because most of her seemed fake. She reminded Charlotte of a memory she had long since forgotten from childhood, of coming home from school in late spring and seeing something strange on a neighbor’s front porch. A middle-aged, obscenely fat lady had been sitting under a pink and yellow umbrella, lounging inside an inflated kiddie-pool, surrounded by heaps of junk spread out on the porch for sale. Mostly they were old trinkets from the 1920s.
“Where did you get all these?” Charlotte had asked.
“Aunt died.”
Charlotte remembered the woman had perfectly manicured nails, like many fat women do.
Charlotte hated the thought of dying and having all her earthly possessions put on sale for 50 cents at a lawn sale. Nobody loved you when you were dead.
Charlotte had bought a jewelry box that day. Inside, there had been two people dancing, a man and a woman. The woman dancer had sported thin brows and a sequin dress with feathers.
As if that dancer had come to life before her, the woman in sequins slumped against the doorway, very drunk.
“Yes?” she drawled, inspecting Charlotte with unfocused eyes.
“Is Asher here?”
“Speak up, pumpkin, I can’t hear.”
“Asher,” Charlotte repeated, louder. “Asher.”
“Your son, you idiot,” came a male voice from somewhere within.
The sequined lady trilled with laughter. “Ohhhh. He’s with his father. Are you his friend? Pretty little thing!”
Charlotte backed away. The woman looked fragile and white in the doorway, like some translucent fish draped in gaudy surroundings. She seemed to be drowning.
A tremendous crash like broken glass cracked from inside and there was a howl of laughter.
“Never mind,” Charlotte said, moving away from the odd tableau of the house party.
She went back down the streets, feeling lonelier than ever, eventually sitting on the curb. She pulled out her cellphone. Five missed calls from Aunt Sheena. She cleared them from the screen and plugged in Liv’s number.
The phone rang ten times, never going to voicemail.
She hung up and tried again.
She tried several more times to reach Olivia before giving up. She hung her head and sat for what felt like forever, the sadness stabbing her in the stomach.
Lost and lonely, she stood, the asphalt rough against her feet. It triggered a memory. She recognized this place. This was not far from Spitting Caves.
It was not difficult to find the cliffs, though it was darker without a moon. She passed through the small chain-link entrance, slipping on the mud until she came to the wide open vista of black water. In the darkness, it felt like eternity.
She moved trance-like to the edge of the cliff and stood there, heart beating fast, body split, cursed, broken. The fear cleared away the desperation, but she never felt so alone as she did around the ocean. She knew her pain was nothing in a world of suffering, but it still felt as enormous and depthless as the sea. If she ended that pain, it would be better for everyone, she knew. Her existence benefited no one. But she was a coward. She wasn’t even strong enough to kill herself. She was too selfish and afraid.
It only takes a split second of courage, she thought to herself. Even you must have that much.
Bizarrely, she heard her mother’s voice in her head, singing, “Amazing Grace.” Mom used to sing it a lot. It always seemed pathetic coming from her mouth; she was perhaps one of the the most graceless, irredeemable people Charlotte knew
Charlotte didn’t know how long she stood like that before they came. They appeared as ghosts at first in the darkness, hallucinations of light.
“Charlotte,” they cried hollowly into the open air.
Their light beams caught her and she blinked through them, seeing nothing but their shadows.
“What the devil,” someone said.
She shielded her eyes.
“Drop the beam.”
She saw that it was everyone. Aunt Sheena. Uncle Eddie. Emi. And Mr. Kerrigan.
“Come here, Charlotte,” one of them said tentatively, as though luring a scared rabbit. “Please, come.”
She was frozen and dizzy. How had they found her? None of this made sense. She felt she was dreaming.
She turned again to the ocean. She heard voices but none of the sounds connected to words or meaning in her brain.
“You must think I’m really crazy now, huh?” she said.
“We just want you safe. Please come here.” It was Aunt Sheena’s voice, pleading.
“You’re just saying that,” Charlotte replied shrilly. “You don’t mean it. You hate me. I’m trouble.”
It was Emi who had the guts to come forward and place a hand on Charlotte’s back. Charlotte stiffened at the touch. “We’re all here, Charlotte, because we chose to be. You’re our kuleana,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”
Charlotte remained silent.
“It means responsibility. But it’s more than that. It’s privilege. You’re our responsibility, and it’s our privilege to know you and help you. We want you as part of the family. I want you as part of the family.”
Charlotte was crying now.
“I know you hurt right now. But you have to remember, there are gifts in pain, too. Sometimes the most amazing things come out of the darkest places in us,” Emi said. “I’m learning that, too.”
Then, everyone was by her. Aunt Sheena had hand in Charlotte’s. Uncle Eddie placed his lightly on her shoulders. Mr. Kerrigan was at her side. He whispered in her ear, “Save yourself, Charlotte. Believe in the importance of being human.”
It was hard, with the water reaching out forever in front of her, calling its song. But in the warmth of that moment, she did believe. And she chose life.
Epilogue
Seneca died that night, but Charlotte lived. Emi did not pretend to understand her feelings. She filed them away for later.