His face is so gentle and sincere, I can’t bring myself to tell him I’m Fern.
“Thank you,” I say.
He hands me a folded piece of paper. “This is for you to read from time to time. It’s the poem I shared. I hope it will bring you comfort the way it does me.” He squeezes my shoulder and turns to make his way to the people and the food.
I put the paper in my skirt pocket and walk toward the door.
Outside, the air is crisp and cool, despite the sunshine. I walk slowly through the parking lot to the picnic tables and sit down. I breathe in the cold air, letting it hurt my lungs. I cross my legs, careful not to kick Charlie — and then remember again for the thousandth time.
I feel the cold air against my ankles.
Charlie.
The carvings under my arm feel rough. I search for the names we carved — was it only last week? But there are so many, I can’t find them at first. I run my finger over the area I’m sure we used and get a splinter. There.
Holden was here
Fern 2
& Charlie
I rub my aching finger on his name, knowing his fingers touched the same spot. I lean forward and put my cheek against the letters, trying to feel . . . I’m not sure what. The ache in my chest does its familiar move up my throat, but I swallow it back down. I swallow and swallow, my cheek pressed against the table, my finger bleeding over some other name.
With my head on the table, I hear car doors open and close as people begin to leave. And then the rustling of dried leaves behind me. Closer and closer.
I sit up and turn around.
It’s Mr. Seymore. He’s wearing a worn suit and clutching a light-blue envelope to his chest.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, stepping closer. But when he says it, it’s not like the others. When he says it, I know exactly what he means.
He holds out the envelope to me. It shakes in his wobbly hand.
“No,” I say. I don’t know what I mean. No, don’t be sorry? Don’t cry? Don’t come nearer?
“Please,” he says. He steps closer. “I didn’t want to go inside. Didn’t want to upset your folks. But I want your family to have this. I — I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” I say. I don’t know what’s in the envelope, but if it’s money, it’s something Mr. Seymore really shouldn’t part with.
“It’s my fault,” I say. “I should have looked after him better.”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t pull out that fast. Always take my time so I don’t get into a fender bender. I’ve done that before. But I was being real careful.”
“I know,” I say. “You didn’t hit him. You stopped in time.”
“But I scared him, poor kid. And he fell back.”
“He was running away from me. I was the Big Bad Wolf.”
He shakes his head again. “Didn’t see a thing. I looked. I was real careful.”
“He was running,” I say again. “He was running away from me. I wasn’t playing with him, so he made up this game.”
I wish he would stop shaking his head. It isn’t going to make any of it not true.
He holds out the envelope again. “Please,” he says. “It’s not much, but —”
“I can’t.” I look again at his worn clothes and remember his old beat-up car. “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”
“Fern?” Ran walks toward us through the crunchy leaves.
Mr. Seymore turns toward him, then back to me.
“Please keep that,” I say. “Please.”
His mouth trembles, but he finally nods. He puts the envelope back inside his jacket. I see a hole in the worn elbow of his suit jacket when he bends his arm. He walks away slowly, careful not to trip on something hidden in the leaves.
When Ran reaches the table, he sits next to me so that our arms are touching. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“I didn’t see you earlier.”
“I was having a hard time in there,” he says.
I nod.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know.”
He reaches over and takes my hand. I didn’t realize I’d put it back over the peace sign. Ran squints at it, then puts both our hands over the names again.
Ran’s hand on mine is warm and strong. I lean my head on his shoulder and fill my chest with cold air again. I smell his familiar Ran smell. His shampoo and his laundry detergent and the outdoor smell of his jacket.
Ran is really the only one I feel like I could tell anything to, about how I’m feeling. But I stay quiet. Somehow, I think Ran already knows exactly how I feel. And exactly what I need.
Just quiet. Just a friend. And the impossible.
RAN’S PARENTS COME and get him at the table and hug me one more time before they all leave. The parking lot is mostly empty, and I know I should go back inside.
When I go in, I see that everyone is gone except for Gray and the restaurant employees. Most of the tables and chairs are back where they belong, and people are sitting in the middle where three tables have been pushed together the way we do on Thanksgiving and sometimes for special Sunday brunches. Since we don’t really have any relatives, we always have family gatherings at the restaurant for the employees who don’t have anywhere to go.
I sit at the nearest empty seat, between Mona and Trevor. A few people are eating, but mostly everyone plays with their food. Holden absentmindedly makes a mint-green Jell-O mold jiggle back and forth.
It seems like none of us really wants to be here, but no one wants to leave, either. Beyond the group, Charlie’s photo and the flowers have been moved to his favorite booth. I wonder who did it.
“Fern,” my dad says from the other end of the table, “would you mind going up to get your mom and Sara?”
“I can go,” Gil says, starting to stand up.
“It’s OK. I’ll go,” I say.
As I climb the familiar stairs, I let my hand dangle by my side and wait for Charlie’s sticky fingers to grasp it. I walk more slowly, wishing, wishing, wishing for that familiar tug, even though I know it will never come.
When I get to the office, the door is partially closed. The first thing I notice is that my mom’s sign has been torn off the door. I know this because there’s a ripped piece of paper still under the thumbtack that held it up.
“I can’t look at him,” I hear Sara say on the other side of the door. “I can’t face him.” I can tell she’s crying.
“Being with Gil has nothing to do with what happened,” my mom says quietly.
“Yes, it does!” Sara says. “If I hadn’t been with him, I would have been in the dining room. Mr. Seymore would have left sooner. Maybe Charlie wouldn’t have even gone looking for Fern.”
“And maybe if I hadn’t been up here trying to escape — trying to — oh, God.” She makes that strange noise she made the morning she found Charlie. Then she starts to sob.
“Mom, Mom, stop,” Sara says.
I peek around the door and see them sitting on the floor. All of my mom’s meditation stuff is strewn around the room. My mom is rocking back and forth, pulling at her hair with her hands.
“Please stop,” Sara cries. “You have to stop. We need you.”
My mom stops rocking and looks at Sara. “Oh, honey,” she says, and opens her arms to her. Sara leans in, and my mom hugs her tight. She rubs her back in familiar circles, as if she’s a little kid. As if she’s Charlie.
I stand there quietly, thinking about their guilt. How all this time, they weren’t blaming me; they were blaming themselves. And I want to blame them, too. I want to hate them. But I also want to be the one in my mom’s arms. I want to be the one she says It’s not your fault to.
I open the door just a little, and it creaks.
They look up at me through their watery eyes.
“Dad sent me to come get you,” I say quietly.
My mom sees me eyeing her meditation stuff on the floor. Ripped pieces of her sign are
scattered around the room like snow.
“What happened in here?” I ask.
My mom turns away and starts shaking her head.
I pick up the singing bowl Charlie used to love to play with and put it back on its shelf.
“Leave it,” my mom says. “I don’t want it anymore.”
I wait for her to say something else to me. Something to make me feel like I’m still her daughter, too. Doesn’t she know I need her? A normal mom would. She’d put my pain before hers. I want to hate her for it. But as I look at her, I realize she doesn’t have control of her pain; it controls her. It’s what’s making her disappear.
“Will you come downstairs?” I finally ask. But really I want to say, Will you hold me? Please, will you just hold me? The familiar ache in my throat grows, and I feel like I’m going to choke.
“In a minute,” she whispers. “We’ll be down in a minute.”
Sara looks up at me finally, and I see all the hurt that I feel in her eyes. But she doesn’t get up. She just stays there on the floor with my mom and all the broken pieces.
So I leave them there. Because I don’t know what else to do. And it hurts too much to stay.
Back at the table, I tell my dad they’ll be down soon. I wonder what he’ll think when he sees what my mom did to the office. I always hated it when she went off and shut herself away from us, but seeing her now, like she’s lost her inner peace forever, only makes me feel scared. Like we’ve lost her, too.
“I really loved that kid,” Patrick says, setting a casserole dish down in the middle of the table. “That was some special kid.”
“There was something about Charlie,” Mona agrees. “Remember that time when he took off all his clothes and ran around the dining room during the dinner rush?” She slaps the table and laughs so hard she starts to cough.
Dwayne reaches over and pats her on the back. “That kid was awesome,” he says.
“Remember when he begged me to let him be assistant busboy, and he just started clearing away everyone’s plates, even though they weren’t done yet?” Trevor asks.
“Oh, yeah,” says Mona. “He took away Mrs. Abbot’s bowl of soup, and the old battle-ax chased him all the way to the kitchen!”
Everyone laughs. Even my dad smiles, though it looks like it hurts.
I don’t want to hear these stories.
I dig my nails into my palms and concentrate on the heaps of unidentifiable food on the plate someone put in front of me, but it makes me feel sick, so I push it away.
“Oh, remember when he climbed out on the roof with his doll?” Gil asks. “It was during the lunch rush, and no one noticed he’d wandered off. Then Fern came charging into the dining room from outside. She said, ‘Charlie’s on the roof!’ and bolted up the stairs. Remember that, Fern? You were, like, a hero!”
“Oh, yeah. That was awesome,” Patrick says, nodding.
I remember that day. I was so mad that my mom had lost track of Charlie long enough that he’d climbed out on the roof without her even noticing. And it wasn’t during a lunch rush. She was just bussing tables, casually chatting with Mona and Gil. I remember racing past them and up the stairs. I had already crawled out on the roof through the office window before my mom leaned out to ask what I was doing, then screamed when she saw Charlie. He was sitting on the edge of the roof, dangling his feet over the side. My heart was pounding so hard, I thought I was going to be the youngest kid on record to have a heart attack.
“Them cahs don’t look like ants,” he’d said to me thoughtfully as I crawled closer to him.
“What?”
“In my show. Fum on top a building, cahs look like ants.”
I moved in behind him and hugged him to my chest. “No, Charlie. That’s from the top of a skyscraper. Not a small building like this.”
“Oh,” he said sadly.
I slipped my hands under his arms and dragged him back through the window to safety. My mom, Mona, and Gil cheered and hugged us. My mom took Charlie from me and held him close, as if he was a prize she had just won. She wouldn’t look me in the eye.
I grit my teeth as I listen to Gil chuckling about it.
A few people get up and refill their plates with food while others continue to share stories about Charlie. I can’t tell, but it looks like Holden and Gray are holding hands under the table.
Everything feels so strange. So wrong. People keep laughing as they share Charlie stories. It’s like everyone forgot that the kid they’re talking about isn’t here anymore. That he’s never coming back. Every time someone laughs, I feel myself getting angrier.
“Oh, remember that time when he took all the pots out of the lower cabinets and made a house inside and refused to come out?” Trevor asks.
I remember that day. I had to crawl in and get him. I remember I yelled at him because I’d torn my favorite jeans on the cabinet when I crawled in after him. And everyone gave me dirty looks like I was the worst big sister ever.
They all laugh again.
“Stop it!” I yell. I wasn’t expecting to, but it just comes out. Loud. I stand up. “Stop talking about him like he isn’t dead!”
It’s the first time I’ve said the word out loud, and it hangs in the air like a terrible, terrible cloud, sucking all the laughter out of the room in an instant.
“It’s OK, Fern,” my dad says. “People need to do this.” But he looks as miserable as I feel.
“No, they don’t!” I yell. “It isn’t right!”
They look at me in shock. Offended. Like I’m some little brat spoiling their party. Like once again I’m the one being mean to Charlie.
“You shouldn’t be laughing! You shouldn’t be talking about him like . . . Charlie is gone! He is never coming back! And you’re all laughing!”
My dad gets up and starts coming toward me.
“Fern,” Holden says. “Stop it.”
“He’s dead!” I yell, ignoring him. “Charlie is dead!”
My dad is pulling me backward. His hands squeeze my arms hard as he pulls me, and I welcome the pain. Anything to make the other pain I feel go away. But I know it can’t. I struggle so he’ll squeeze harder.
“Come on,” he says calmly. “Let’s go outside.”
He drags me to the door. Holden gets up, too, but my dad motions for him to stay.
The restaurant is totally quiet except for me struggling in my dad’s arms.
“He’s dead!” I yell one more time before the door slides closed. “He’s dead.”
AS SOON AS WE GET OUTSIDE, my dad lets go of my arm. I run to the picnic table and crawl below. The underside is covered with more carvings and dried-up gum in different colors. I pull my knees to my chest and try to disappear.
My father’s footsteps crunch in the leaves and stop next to the table.
“Fern,” he says.
I pull myself into a smaller ball.
He sits down and leans under. “I don’t think I can fit in there.”
I shift my body a little so my back is to him.
“All right.” He sighs and bends down, struggling through the space between the seat and the tabletop. He finally manages to squeeze himself under. He sits cross-legged, facing me. And waits.
“Fern,” he says quietly. “Look at me.”
I shake my head, keeping my face covered with my arms.
He touches my arm, then gently pulls his hand away.
“You seemed pretty angry in there.”
“I’m not going to apologize,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to ask you to.” He shifts and bumps his head. “Not very comfortable under here, is it?”
“Charlie liked it.”
He nods.
“I know how upset you are,” he says. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t,” I say.
“Well, I want to. Will you talk to me?”
“Everyone was acting like Charlie was just some happy memory. Like they’ve already moved on. I don’t want to move on! I don??
?t want him to be just a memory. I want him back.”
“We all do,” my dad says quietly.
“And everyone knows it’s my fault, but no one will admit it. Mom and Sara blame themselves a little, but I think they also blame me. They won’t look at me. Mom won’t even . . . She hasn’t even . . . I want her to hold me. But she doesn’t. She’s like a stranger.”
My dad reaches over and touches my knee. “This is impossibly hard on everyone,” he says. “We’re all trying to cope in our own way.”
“But I need her! I need her to be my mom! Why can she hold Sara but not me?”
“I’ll hold you,” he says, and he leans forward and pulls me to him. He rubs my back the way my mom used to, but it doesn’t feel the same.
“We’re being punished,” I say into his dress shirt. “We didn’t pay enough attention to him, so he got taken away from us. We didn’t deserve him.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“No. You know that’s not true. Life doesn’t work that way.”
“There has to be a reason!”
“Stop it, Fern. Just . . . stop. Could we have paid more attention to Charlie? Sure. Heck, I know there were times when it was my turn to watch him and I’d get distracted by other things. But, honey, God doesn’t punish little kids for other people’s mistakes. It doesn’t work that way.”
I want to believe him. But I know he’s wrong. Kids suffer because of other people all the time.
“We have to stop blaming,” he says. “All of us.”
I wonder if that means him, too.
“You really don’t think it’s my fault?”
“No. I really don’t.”
“But —”
“It’s hard enough that he’s gone. Trying to blame someone, trying to find a reason why — it won’t change anything.” He gently takes hold of my arm. His hand feels warm and strong. “Look at me,” he says.