The Good Daughter

  Charlie said, “He promised me he would look handsome.”

  Sam wrapped her arm around Charlie’s waist.

  “When we talked about it, I told him I didn’t want an open casket, and he promised me that he would look handsome. That I would want to see how good he looked.” She told Sam, “He doesn’t look good.”

  “No,” Sam said. “He doesn’t look like himself.”

  They stared down at their father. Sam could not remember a time that she had not seen Rusty in motion. Lighting a cigarette. Throwing out a dramatic hand. Tapping his toes. Snapping his fingers. Nodding his head as he hummed or clicked his tongue or whistled a tune that she did not recognize, yet could not get out of her brain.

  Charlie said, “I don’t want anyone to see him like this.” She reached up to close the lid.

  Sam gave a hushed, “Charlie!”

  She pulled on the lid. The lid did not move. “Help me close it.”

  “We can get—”

  “I don’t want that creepy asshole back in here.” Charlie pulled with both hands. The lid moved perhaps five degrees before it stopped. “Help me.”

  “I’m not going to help you.”

  “What was your list? You can’t see, you can’t run, you can’t process? I don’t recall you saying your useless body couldn’t help close the fucking lid on your own father’s coffin.”

  “It’s a casket. Coffins are tapered at the head and foot.”

  “For fucksake.” Charlie dropped her purse on the floor. She kicked off her shoes. She used both hands to pull down on the lid, practically hanging from it.

  There was a creak of protest, but the casket remained open.

  Sam said, “It won’t simply close. That would be a safety hazard.”

  “You mean, it could kill him if the lid slammed shut?”

  “I mean it could hit you in the head or break your fingers.” She leaned over Rusty to examine the brass barrel hinges. A cloth-covered strap and loop assembly kept the lid from over-opening, but no apparent mechanism controlled the closing. “There must be some kind of release.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Charlie hung from the lid again. “Can’t you just help me?”

  “I am trying—”

  “I’ll do it myself.” Charlie walked around to the back of the casket. She pushed from behind. The table moved. One of the front wheels was unlocked. Charlie pushed harder. The table moved again.

  “Hold on.” Sam checked the exterior of the casket for some kind of lever or button. “You’re going to—”

  Charlie jumped up, pushing down on the lid with all of her weight.

  Sam said, “You’re going to knock it off the table.”

  “Good.” Charlie pushed again. Nothing moved. She banged her palm against the lid. “Fuck!” She banged it again, this time with her closed fist. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  Sam ran her fingers inside the edge of the silk liner. She found a button.

  There was a loud click.

  The pneumatic pump hissed as the lid slowly closed.

  “Shit.” Charlie was breathless. She leaned her hands on the closed casket. She closed her eyes. She shook her head. “He leaves us with a metaphor.”

  Sam sat down in the chair.

  “You’re not going to say anything?”

  “I’m reflecting.”

  Charlie’s laugh was cut off by a sob. Her shoulders trembled as she cried. Her tears fell onto the top of the casket. Sam watched them roll down the side, bend around the stainless steel table, then drop onto the floor.

  “Shit,” Charlie said, using the back of her hand to wipe her nose. She found a box of tissues behind the handle display. She blew her nose. She dried her eyes. She sat down heavily in the chair beside Sam.

  They both looked at the casket. The gaudy, gold handles and filigree corner guards. The bright white paint had a sparkling finish, as if glitter had been mixed into the clear-coat.

  Charlie said, “I can’t believe how ugly that thing is.” She threw away the used tissue. She snagged another from the box. “It looks like something Elvis was buried in.”

  “Do you remember when we went to Graceland?”

  “That white Cadillac.”

  Rusty had charmed the attendant into letting him sit behind the wheel. The paint on the Fleetwood had been the same bright white as the casket. Diamond dust had brought out the sparkle.

  “Dad could talk anybody into letting him do anything.” Charlie wiped her nose again. She sat back in the chair. Her arms were crossed.

  Sam could hear a clock ticking somewhere, a kind of metronome that synched with the beating of her heart. Her fingers still held the memory of the tap-tap-tap of Rusty’s blood rushing through his veins. She had spent two days begging Charlie to unburden herself, but her own sins weighed far heavier.

  Sam said, “I couldn’t let him die. My husband. I couldn’t let him go.”

  Charlie silently worked the tissue in her fingers.

  “He had a DNR, but I didn’t give it to the hospital.” Sam tried to take a deep breath. She felt the weight of Anton’s death restricting her chest. “He couldn’t speak for himself. He couldn’t move. He could only see and hear, and what he saw and heard was his wife refusing to let the doctors turn off the machines that were extending his suffering.” Sam felt the shame boiling in her stomach like oil. “The tumors had spread to his brain. There’s only so much volume inside the skull. The pressure was pushing his brain down into his spine. The pain was excruciating. They had him on morphine, then Fentanyl, and I would sit there by his bed and watch the tears roll from his eyes and I could not let him go.”

  Charlie kept working the tissue, wrapping it around her finger.

  “I would’ve done the same thing here. I could’ve told you that from New York. I was the wrong person to ask. I couldn’t put my own needs, my desperation, aside for the only man I have ever loved. I certainly could not have done the right thing by Dad.”

  Charlie started to pull apart the layers of tissue.

  The clock kept ticking.

  Time kept moving forward.

  Charlie said, “I wanted you here because I wanted you here.”

  Sam had not meant to stir up Charlie’s guilt. “Please don’t try to make me feel better.”

  “I’m not,” Charlie said. “I hate that I made you come here. That I’ve put you through this.”

  “You didn’t force me to do anything.”

  “I knew that you would come if I asked. I’ve known that for the last twenty years, and I used Dad as an excuse because I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Couldn’t take what?”

  Charlie wadded the tissue into a ball. She held it tight in her hands. “I had a miscarriage in college.”

  Sam remembered the hostile phone call from all those years ago, Charlie’s angry demand for money.

  Charlie said, “I was so relieved when it happened. You don’t realize when you’re that young that you’re going to get older. That there’s going to come a time when you’re not relieved.”

  Sam felt her eyes start to water at the piercing undertone of anguish in her sister’s words.

  Charlie said, “The second miscarriage was worse. Ben thinks it was the first, but it was the second.” She shrugged off the deception. “I was at the end of my first trimester. I was in court, and I felt this pain, like cramps. I had to wait another hour for the judge to call a recess. I ran to the bathroom, and I sat down, and I had this feeling of blood rushing out of my body.” She stopped to swallow. “I looked in the toilet and it was—it was nothing. It didn’t look like anything. A really bad period, a glob of something. But it didn’t feel right to flush it. I couldn’t leave it. I crawled out from under the stall so I could leave the door locked. I called Ben. I was crying so hard he couldn’t understand what I was saying.”

  “Charlie,” Sam whispered.

  Charlie shook her head, because there was more. “The third time, which Ben thinks was the second time, was worse
. I was at eighteen weeks. We were outside, raking leaves in the yard. We had already started to put together the nursery, you know? Painted the walls. Looked at cribs. I felt the same kind of cramping. I told Ben I was going to get some water, but I barely made it to the bathroom. It just came out of me, like my body couldn’t wait to get rid of it.” She used the tips of her fingers to brush away tears. “I told myself it was never going to happen again, that I wasn’t going to risk it, but then it happened again.”

  Sam reached over. She held tight to her sister’s hand.

  “This was three years ago. I stopped taking my birth control. It was stupid. I didn’t tell Ben, which made it worse because I was tricking him. I was pregnant in a month. And then another month passed, and then I hit the three-month mark, and then it was six months, seven, and we were so fucking excited. Dad was walking on air. Lenore kept giving hints about names.”

  Charlie pressed her fingers to her eyelids. Tears streamed down. “There’s this thing called Dandy-Walker syndrome. It sounds so stupid, like an old timey dance, but basically, it’s a group of congenital brain malformations.”

  Sam felt an ache inside her heart.

  “They told us late on a Friday. Ben and I spent the whole weekend reading about it on the Internet. There’d be this one great story about a kid who was smiling, living his life, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, and we’d say, ‘Okay, well, that’s—that’s fantastic, that’s a gift, we can do that,’ and then there’d be another story about a baby who was blind and deaf and had open-heart surgery and brain surgery and died before his first birthday, and we’d just hold each other and cry.”

  Sam squeezed Charlie’s hand.

  “We decided that we couldn’t give up. It’s our baby, right? So we went to see a specialist at Vanderbilt. He did some scans, and then he took us into this room. There weren’t any pictures on the wall. That’s what I remember. The rest of the place had babies everywhere. Photos of families. But not in this room.”

  Charlie stopped to dry her eyes again.

  Sam waited.

  Charlie said, “The doctor told us that there was nothing we could do. The cerebrospinal fluid was leaking. The baby didn’t have … organs.” She took a shaky breath. “My blood pressure was high. They were worried about sepsis. The doctor gave us five days, maybe a week, before the baby died, or I died, and I just—I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t go to work and eat dinner and watch TV knowing that—” She clasped Sam’s hand. “So we decided to go to Colorado. That’s the only place we could find where it’s legal.”

  Sam knew she was talking about abortion.

  “It’s twenty-five grand. Plus flights. Plus the hotel room. Plus taking off work. We didn’t have time to take out a loan, and we didn’t want anyone to know what we were using it for. We sold Ben’s car. Dad and Lenore gave us money. We put the rest on credit cards.”

  Sam felt a crushing sense of shame. She should have been there. She could have given them the money, flown with Charlie on the plane.

  “The night before we were supposed to leave, I took a sleeping pill, because what did it matter, right? But I woke up with this burning pain. It wasn’t like before with the cramps. I felt like I was being ripped apart. I went downstairs so I wouldn’t wake up Ben. I started throwing up. I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. There was so much blood. It looked like a crime scene. There were pieces I could see. Pieces of—” Charlie shook her head, unable to say the rest. “Ben called an ambulance. I’ve got a scar, like a C-section, but no baby to show for it. And when I finally came home, the rug was gone. Ben had cleaned up everything. It was like it had never happened.”

  Sam thought about the bare floor in Charlie’s living room. They had not replaced the rug in three years. She asked, “Did you talk to Ben about it?”

  “Yeah. We talked about it. We went to therapy. We got past it.”

  Sam could not believe that was true.

  Charlie said, “It was my fault. I never told Ben, but every time, it was my fault.”

  “You can’t believe that.”

  She used the back of her hand to rub her eyes. “I saw Dad do this closing argument once. He talked about how people always obsess about lies. Damn lies. But no one really understands that the real danger is the truth.” She looked up at the white casket. “The truth can rot you from the inside. It doesn’t leave room for anything else.”

  Sam tried, “There’s no truth in blaming yourself. Nature has its own design.”

  “That’s not the truth I’m talking about.”

  “Then tell me, Charlie. What’s the truth?”

  Charlie leaned over. She put her head in her hands.

  “Please,” Sam pleaded. She couldn’t stand her own uselessness. “Tell me.”

  Charlie inhaled deeply, drawing air between the gap in her hands. “Everybody thinks I blame myself for running away.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No,” she said. “I blame myself for not running faster.”

  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO CHARLIE

  “Run!” Sam shoved her away. “Charlie, go!”

  Charlie fell back onto the ground. She saw the bright flash of the gun firing, heard the sudden explosion of the bullet leaving the barrel.

  Sam spun through the air, almost somersaulting into the gaping mouth of the grave.

  “Shit,” Daniel said. “Christ. Jesus Christ.”

  Charlie scrambled away, crab-like, on her hands and heels, until her back hit a tree. She pushed herself up. Her knees shook. Her hands shook. Her whole body was shaking.

  “It’s okay, sweetpea,” Zach told Charlie. “Stay right there for me.”

  Charlie stared at the grave. Maybe Sam was hiding, waiting to spring up and run. But she wasn’t springing up. She wasn’t moving, or talking, or shouting, or bossing everybody around.

  Zach told Daniel, “You cover this bitch up. Lemme take the little one off for a minute.”

  If Sam could talk right now, she would be yelling, furious at Charlie for just standing there, for blowing this chance, for not doing what Sam always told her to do.

  Don’t look back … trust me to be there … keep your head down and–

  Charlie ran.

  Her arms flailed. Her bare feet struggled for purchase. Tree limbs slashed at her face. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs felt like needles were stabbing into her chest.

  She heard Sam’s voice—

  Breathe through it. Slow and steady. Wait for the pain to pass.

  “Get back here!” Zach yelled. The air shook with a steady thud-thud-thud that started to vibrate inside of Charlie’s chest.

  Zachariah Culpepper was coming after her.

  She tucked her arms into her sides. She forced the tension from her shoulders. She imagined her legs were pistons in a machine. She tuned out the pine cones and sharp rocks gouging into her bare feet. She thought about the muscles that were helping her move—

  Calves, quads, hamstrings, tighten your core, protect your back.

  Zach was getting closer. She could hear him like a steam engine bearing down.

  Charlie vaulted over a fallen tree. She scanned left, then right, knowing she shouldn’t run in a straight line. She needed to locate the weather tower, to make sure she was heading in the right direction, but she knew if she looked back she would see Zach, and that seeing him would make her panic even more, and if she panicked even more, she would stumble, and if she stumbled, she would fall.

  And then he would rape her.

  Charlie veered right, her toes gripping the dirt as she altered direction. At the last minute, she saw another fallen tree. She flung herself over it, landing awkwardly. Her foot twisted. She felt her anklebone touch earth. Pain sliced up her leg.

  She kept running.

  Her feet were sticky with blood. Sweat dripped down her body. She scanned ahead for light, any indication of safety.

  How much longer could he keep running? How much farther could she go?

  Sam’
s voice came back to her—

  Picture the finish line in your head. You have to want it more than the person behind you.

  Zachariah wanted something. Charlie wanted something more—to get away, to get help for her sister, to find Rusty so he could figure out a way to make it all better.

  Suddenly, Charlie’s head jerked back.

  Her feet flew out in front of her.

  Her back slammed into the ground.

  She saw her breath huff out of her mouth like it was a real thing.

  Zach was on top of her. His hands were everywhere. Grabbing her breasts. Pulling her shorts. His teeth clashed against her closed mouth. Charlie scratched at his eyes. She tried to bring up her knee into his crotch but she couldn’t bend her leg.

  Zachariah sat up, straddling her. He worked his belt back through the buckle. His weight was too much. He was pushing the air out of her.

  Charlie’s mouth opened. She had no breath left to scream. She was dizzy. Vomit burned up her throat.

  Her shorts were wrenched down. He flipped her over like she was nothing. She tried again to scream, but he shoved her face into the ground. Dirt filled her mouth. He grabbed her hair in his fist. She felt a tearing deep inside her body as he ripped into her. His teeth bit down on her shoulder. He grunted like a pig as he raped her behind. She smelled rot from the earth, from his mouth, from what he was pushing inside of her.

  Charlie squeezed her eyes shut.

  I am not here. I am not here. I am not here.

  Every time she convinced herself that this wasn’t happening, that she was in the kitchen at the red-brick house doing her homework, that she was running the track at school, that she was hiding in Sam’s closet listening to her talk on the phone to Peter Alexander, Zachariah did something new and the pain wrenched her back into reality.

  He was not finished.

  Charlotte’s arms flopped uselessly as he turned her over. He shoved inside of her from the front. She was finally numb. Her mind went blank. She was aware of things, but as if from a remove: Her body shifting up and down as he started to thrust. Her mouth hanging open. His tongue jamming down her throat. His fingers digging into her breasts like he was trying to rip them away from her body.