The Truth About Fragile Things Page 12

  I heard Phillip give a satisfied sigh as he laid down ten feet away. Charlotte was still bouncy, pacing the campsite, looking for something to do. “Charlotte,” I tried to beckon her with my voice. “This really does feel good. Just relax for a minute.”

  “I keep thinking of the waterfall,” she replied, circling the campfire, throwing a stick into the flames. “I want to go back. We could skinny dip there.”

  Phillip’s chuckle sounded directionless in the breezy air, as if it came from everywhere and nowhere. “It’s cold and dark.”

  “So what? We just have to jump in.”

  “Could we just do one thing at a time?” I pleaded. “Sleep in a hammock is one and you won’t even lie down. Get your tushy over here and in your hammock so it counts.”

  “She said tushy,” Charlotte complained as she sat in her hammock. “I almost have to cuss just to clean out my head after hearing tushy.” But she didn’t. She laid back and I closed my eyes, enjoying the quiet sound of the growling fire.

  I think Phillip started to drift off because he was quiet for much longer than he can usually stand. “It reminds me of a boat,” I whispered to no one in particular. The hammock rocked with my movement, riding the current of my shifting body. When no one answered I whispered, “Charlotte?”

  “Hmmm?” came her lazy reply.

  “I’m really glad we’re doing this.”

  “Do you actually like it?” Phillip chimed in.

  “I really do.” When I opened my eyes the world had gotten just a fraction darker and the tangled tree branches over my head made a black web against the dim sky.

  “I honestly never thought I would see you sloppy and dirty and eating beans.” Phillip’s voice smiled.

  “I’d love to say I’ve discovered a new side of myself, but I am really worried that a bug is going to fall on me right now.” I tried to focus on the blank air in front of me to check for spiders lowering themselves on silken harnesses, but it hurt my eyes.

  “Can I put ‘eat a bug’ on your bucket list?” Charlotte asked. “That would really challenge you.”

  “The problem is that there’s no point. No one feels better about their life if they eat a bug,” I argued. “And if you did put it on my list that would mean I could put anything I wanted on your list.”

  “True that,” Charlotte relented. “Megan?”

  Her voice sounded vulnerable when she said my name and I turned away from the imaginary insects to her face.

  “You are really good on the stage. I can’t even tell it’s you.” She slid the bandanna around her neck and her bangs stuck in clumps to the side of her head. She ran her fingers through them and I watched the firelight wind around the strands of her hair.

  “Thank you, Charlotte.” I didn’t have a reply ready. I was too surprised by the generosity of her words to know what to give back.

  “You are really good, too,” Phillip answered for me. “And you are a great little hiker.”

  “I’m not little,” Charlotte snapped. “You grow up faster when one of your parents dies. I’m probably older than you are.”

  I couldn’t help but snicker. “Oh, Charlotte, preschoolers are probably older than Phillip.”

  Phillip pretended to hit a rim shot and gave me a grin before he returned his attention to Charlotte. “Was it really hard—growing up without him?”

  “I didn’t know anything else,” Charlotte said. When she twisted in her sleeping bag some of her hair fell through the ropes of the hammock, hung almost to the ground. “It was hardest in public. Do you know how many dads there are? They’re everywhere. And worse, they have this thing for putting kids on their shoulders, which makes them impossible to miss. Like they’re announcing, ‘I’m a dad and I’m ten feet tall with a kid on my head so you have to look at me.’”

  I remembered my father’s sharp shoulder bones digging into my thighs, his wide forehead under my clasped hands, his fuzzy hair itching my arms. I did that. The guilt hardened in my stomach.

  “But my mom dated some nice guys. My grandpa filled in. It worked out.” Her voice was deep and full, scratching against the night like bird wings scraping the sky.

  “Is it better to have Dave around now?” Phillip asked.

  Charlotte shuffled, blew her breath over her pink lips. “I like my mom being happy. I just can’t get over the weirdness of smelling his cologne in the kitchen or not walking around in my underwear.”

  I knew, right down to the core of me, that Phillip was about to make a crack about Charlotte in her underwear and I raised my hand in a stern warning. “Don’t even,” I threatened.

  “Okay,” Charlotte conceded without any pressure. “It’s not just the cologne and the underwear. It’s that he never died saving someone. So why should he get the house and the girl and the daughter and the other guy just gets…death? If I like him it’s like saying I’m okay with that.”

  Phillip sat up, scuffed his feet on the ground as he rocked back and forth. “He sounds hardcore—your dad. I hope I would do the same thing.” Charlotte looked away, didn’t answer. Phillip tossed a stick toward the fire but missed. There was no flame left, only the orange glow of fire hiding inside the branches. “Let’s get the fire going big so it will still be here when we get back and then we can head out. We could go to the top of the lookout tower if you both want to be even higher.”

  I shrugged, imagined a rickety, wooden platform with initials carved into the rails and floorboards. I don’t like heights. Or graffiti. “Let’s go back to the rocky hill. We could see the entire sky from there.”

  No one disagreed, so after Phil fed half of our wood pile to the fire and the yellow ribbons of heat were jumping into the sky, chasing the rising smoke. We rolled up our sleeping bags, stuffed some food into Charlotte’s backpack, and grabbed flashlights, the first aid kit and started out. After sitting by the fire my muscles complained; a deep ache ran along the arches of my feet as I stood. Phillip led us through the campsite where I could see the silhouettes of other campers inside their glowing tents and one party of rowdy adults laughing around a spit that saturated the air with the smell of ham. I sucked in a breath to stop the drool and followed Phillip down the trail.

  CHAPTER 20

  The woods made it feel like darkness rose up each night, instead of the sun going down. Black shadows puddled and huddled on the ground between tree trunks. Only when you looked up could you see the faint light of gray sky, not yet inked out by the night. The glow of the lantern wavered in a bouncing, morphing circle, wrapping around tangled shrubs and reflecting white off the undersides of leaves. There was a brief but fervent episode of screaming when Charlotte walked into a spider web and refused to calm down until Phillip searched her head, strand by strand with his flashlight, for the offender. After repeated promises from both of us that we could not see anything on her anywhere, Charlotte let us proceed to the hillside, this time brandishing sticks to clear the path. When we cleared the trees the boulders rose like white tombstones from the black ground, revealed by inches where the grass and mud had washed away under the persistent wind. I found a wide spot of short grass and unrolled my sleeping bag. Phil set his on my right side and Charlotte laid down on my left.

  “So the problem is that it’s not even ten yet,” Phil said, checking his glowing watch. “We have at least three hours. What do you want to do? It’s probably a bad idea to run around in the dark.”

  “Wanna practice our lines?” Charlotte asked as she pulled her bag around her. In the lantern’s light she reminded me of the pictures of Tiger Lily from my old Peter Pan picture books. She sat cross-legged and proud, the blanket draped regally over her shoulders.

  “Here?” Odd tufts of grass poked into my hip when I turned onto my side, propped up on my arm.

  Phillip was game. He began at the first scene we were both in, using a falsetto voice for all the other actors who weren’t with us. I refused, feeling strange without the wooden stage and the colored lights. Charlotte joined his
one-man act and it was just the two of them, their voices bouncing over me as I lay smiling. That’s when I realized that I was smiling, by myself, without anyone reminding me or looking at me.

  Phillip begged me to fill in the extra lines and we laughed our way through the entire second act while I tried to modulate my voice to be seven different people. I failed miserably. Half the time Phillip confused my drunk old man for my girl running around in lingerie. By ten o’clock we were trying harder to mess it up than to practice because the laughter felt so good.

  Phillip unzipped his sleeping bag and laid it flat like a picnic blanket so he could stretch out. There was something peculiar about him as he locked his fingers behind his head, forming a pillow as he looked up at the stars. Every day I stood next to him, talked to him, hugged him, ridiculed him, loved him, tolerated him, smacked him. But when the geometrical planes shifted, went from vertical to horizontal, when he lay three feet away from me, the air in my lungs slowed down, each inhale shallow and tight. I followed his eyes up to the sky where every star finally broke through the blackness. I’d never, in all my life, seen so many.

  “Charlotte?” I asked quietly, like my breath could blow out the littlest stars, “what did your dad do for a job?”

  She ran a finger over her bottom lip. “He was a salesman for something really technical like industrial water pumps or something.”

  “Death of a salesman?” Phillip mumbled next to me, his voice too muffled to reach Charlotte.

  “Can you tell me about him?” It was a ridiculously open-ended question, but the long night was open-ended, wrapped in hours that felt like they could never be spent.

  There was precious little she could say about a man she hadn’t seen since she was eight months old. He’d met her mother in a math class at the University of Missouri and married her the week after they graduated. Charlotte came one year later. I came less than a year after that. He was twenty-five with a graduate degree in engineering, a love of classical music, and a passion for studying the Great Depression. Melissa had told Charlotte Bryon could name any politician from the nineteen-thirties, any movie star, any sports figure, any gangster, any floundering tycoon.

  “She told me he was the smartest person she ever knew,” Charlotte rolled over, her face pressed into the stubbly grass and let her eyes find me, like two stars rising from the earth, searching for a path to the sky. The light reflected off the short, sharp blades and shimmered inside her stare. “She said he had a nerdy laugh and he hated to talk in front of a lot of people, but when he did, they loved him.”

  “Do you think that’s why you hated stages when we met you? Do you think you got it from him?” Phillip asked.

  “How could I? Stages aren’t genetic. There’s no gene for spotlights.” Charlotte’s bitter tone snuck in as thin as a razor blade, and as sharp. “I don’t think you get anything from your parents except your love handles and your hair color. The rest you just learn.”

  “Disagree,” Phillip protested. “My grandfather was a singer and I never met him. I didn’t learn to love it. I always did.”

  “You probably have a freakish genetically engineered throat or something. That’s a body part. You can inherit that.”

  “Singing isn’t a body part,” Phillip insisted. “Or acting. It’s something down underneath all the parts.”

  I was about to give myself ten seconds of being extremely attracted to Phillip but he chose that moment to make a crude joke in his Beevis and Butthead voice about body parts. I rolled my eyes and groaned. “No cartoon voices here. You sound like such an idiot I feel like an idiot by association,” I complained.

  He snorted, and let the unpleasant noise dwindle into a choke at the back of his throat before he shut up.

  “How do you know if you’re a good singer?” Charlotte asked.

  “If people clap.” Phillip sat up so he could see over me to where she lay. “Do you like singing? Because Megan is really bad. She can kind of hit the right notes but she’s so scared she sounds like a fourth grader.”

  “Thank you.”

  Phillip smiled. “You say you don’t cuss, Megan, but when you tell me ‘thank you’, I know what you’re really saying.”

  I laughed in spite of myself.

  Charlotte stood up, walked around me to sit next to Phillip. She scrutinized him, pinching her bottom lip between her thumb and finger. “So you are a boy scout and a singer and an actor and you go camping and…stuff.”

  “Was that a question?” He grinned, his chest puffing out.

  “No, just an inventory. Sing a song.” She slammed down her command like a short order cook. It was much more dare than request.

  Phillip didn’t flinch. His eyes grew more amused. “Which one?”

  “One from the musical you were in last year.” They sat so close, their knees almost touched, but his head rose well above hers.

  Phillip’s voice shattered the still night, jumped out fearless and strong. He dove into the first line of ‘The Street Where You Live’ and laughed when he didn’t a hit a note, pounded his chest, took a quick breath, and shaped the sound easily the next time he came to it. I could tell he loved the look of shock on Charlotte’s face, loved the way her shoulders jerked when his volume rose.

  If you didn’t know about the Beevis and Butthead voice and his preoccupation with bathroom jokes and his annoying lack of maturity, you would think Phillip was beautiful when he sang. He could do it in a way that was triumphant and self-deprecating, laughing at himself and mastering the notes all in one breath. Charlotte wiggled backwards, embarrassed, turned her face toward the ground and refused to raise it until he finished. When he let the sound expand over the hillside, ricochet off the treetops I looked around for people, wondering if they would follow the song and come to investigate. I half expected a park ranger to threaten us with a ticket for noise after ten o’clock.

  But when he finished I gave him a thorough round of applause and then pinched his cheek just hard enough to hurt. “You are very cute when you sing. I could almost keep you for a pet.”

  He flicked my hand away and pulled gently on Charlotte’s hair. “Your turn.”

  That got her attention. She whipped her head up and demanded to know what he meant.

  “You know you want to sing. I did it. You do it.”

  “I don’t want to.” She stomped back to her sleeping bag and shoved her legs inside. Uncomfortable silence reigned for three seconds before she screamed. I squealed in reaction, jerked my body away from her, and scoured the ground for snakes or other terrible creatures.

  She pointed up, her finger jerking over our heads. “I saw one. I saw one.”

  I ducked, envisioning bats or other terrors but she continued. “I saw…one of the…stars…go…”

  “Fall?” Phillip finished calmly for her.

  “Yes!” she screamed. “It actually did the whole streaky light thing.” Her finger pantomimed a long arch over the sky and I followed it, imagining the trail of light.

  “I thought it didn’t start for three more hours,” I said while I looked up, afraid I missed the only one. I don’t know why, but I didn’t actually believe in meteor showers yet. And if they did exist, I didn’t think I would ever be lucky enough to witness one.

  “Just a scout flying ahead of the others. They’re coming,” Phillip promised.

  “That was so pretty,” Charlotte exclaimed. Her chin pointed up, the moonlight felt its way down her long, smooth throat. I saw Phillip’s expression change as he watched her, his eyes scanned her face, ran along the strands of her impossibly thick hair. He turned away when he saw me looking at him, laid back down on his blanket, swallowed too many times. His Adam’s apple bounced uncomfortably as he pretended to concentrate on the sky.

  “So there really will be more?” I asked. The sky looked so static and unchangeable. I couldn’t imagine one of those pinpricks of light tearing loose and cutting through the black fabric of night.

  “There should be,” Ph
illip said. “I can’t believe it’s this warm and this clear and we got here. I’m particularly impressed by you, Megan. Jolly good work convincing the parents.” He said it with a stiff lip like a British man holding a pipe between his teeth.

  There was idle, meaningless chit chat that lagged and lulled, filled in the minutes while we watched the sky, unwilling to miss another meteor. As midnight neared I thought Charlotte had dozed off while Phillip and I reminisced about our favorite parts in past productions. I was pulling out my best Oizer impersonation from Steel Magnolias when Charlotte’s quiet voice made me jump.

  “I read Grapes of Wrath. Twice.”

  I turned to look at her, wondering where her meandering voice would take us, and Phillip sat up so he could see her speak.

  “I read Of Mice and Men and the Jungle and biographies of Bonnie and Clyde.” There was something helpless in her voice as she recited her strange list. Her last word caught and tore, released a small gasp. “I didn’t even like Grapes of Wrath. I don’t care about the dust bowl. I pretend I do, but I don’t really.” A tear fell out of her eyes, rolled down her upturned face, and disappeared into her hair. She blinked and another followed before she swiped her hand across her wet skin.

  “Did you like Of Mice and Men?” Phillip asked. “Because it changed me.”

  “Phillip,” I whispered through clenched teeth.

  She plowed on despite us, despite the weight of sadness I could almost see pressed to her soft chest. “I’m nothing like him. I didn’t get any of him. I think I didn’t. I don’t even know for sure.”

  The wind felt cold on my wet eyes and I pushed my hand against my heart, willed it not to complain with sharp, hard beats. It was the sting that came with breathing that pushed the words out. “I’m so sorry, Charlotte. I keep thinking if I could go back I would tell him to just let the car hit me. I didn’t have a life yet and…”

  “Shut up, Megan,” Phillip growled. My mouth snapped closed, surprised by the bitterness of his tone. He stood up and walked away, leaving us to exchange confused looks, her worried eyes asking me what to do. The unspoken question was so clear I shrugged and my eyes dried in the wind of his cold departure. I didn’t know whether to apologize or demand an apology. Fifteen feet away Phillip’s silhouette raked a hand through his hair, a fast and angry gesture.