It wasn't until his second session that Charlie told Kelley about all the stuff he couldn't remember. She'd been totally imperturbable all through the last session, so it felt like a kind of victory to see her eyes go wide, her hand going still and then moving quickly on her pad of paper.
"Right," she said. "Well, clearly we have even more to talk about than I thought we did."
Kelley said she wanted to focus on the present, so for the next few appointments Charlie told her about his dad and Larry and hockey statistics and the weather, and sometimes about what new things he'd remembered that day. It was weird, but not really bad, and he found himself talking more in his hour with her than in entire days with his father. Maybe because he didn't have to worry about giving anything else away, or saying the wrong thing, or disappointing her. No matter what Charlie said, Kelley's most emphatic response was, "Hm."
Charlie had killed twenty minutes relating the previous night's stilted dinner conversation when Kelley said, "Mm-hm," and then looked him straight in the eye and said, "Charlie, how often do you find yourself thinking about Don?"
It came out of nowhere, and Charlie felt suddenly breathless. All he could think of was the idle, careless tone of Williamson's voice. I see you've been playing Scrabble. Do you like it when he fucks you?
"I... don't know?" Charlie said, his voice coming out strangled, helpless under her steady gaze.
"What kinds of things do you think about when you think about him?" Kelley looked down at her notebook as she spoke, and Charlie was able to catch a breath.
The last day's thoughts flashed through his brain. He'd thought of Don while he was in the shower, with his hand on his dick. He'd thought of Don when he opened up his computer and saw the folder of files he never looked at, a surge of fear edging that pothole in his memory. He'd thought of Don when he passed the closed door to Don's bedroom, a sharp burst of fury and the image of his fist slamming into Don's face. He'd thought of Don when he woke up, reaching across the bed in search of him, his fingertips expecting to be stopped by Don's back every inch of the way. He thought of Don when he ate and he didn't know that Don had gotten his fair share, when he stepped out of the solitude of the bathroom and Don wasn't in sight.
Kelley looked up at him expectantly, and Charlie was acutely conscious that the three feet between her chair and his was not far enough. But his hands were free and he had a clear line to the door. Charlie took a deep breath and said, "I don't want to talk about it."
Kelley tilted her head and then looked down and wrote something, but all she said was, "Okay."
Charlie swallowed hard, and tried to control his breathing.
"Okay?" His voice pitched embarrassingly upward, and Kelley looked up again.
"Yeah, Charlie," she said. "Okay. Why don't you think about why I might have asked you what you think about, and think about why you don't want to talk about it, and see if you come to any interesting conclusions, all right? That's your homework for the next few days."
"Okay," Charlie repeated, trying to control his voice, but it still came out a question.
Kelley's lips quirked upward a little. "Do you want me to write that down for you?"
Charlie shook his head. Homework. Think about thinking about Don. "I've got it."
Kelley's smile flattened out as she went on watching him. "This really isn't an interrogation, Charlie."
Charlie nodded. He could almost believe that.
"I'm going golfing this afternoon," his father announced over breakfast.
Charlie looked up to find his father studiously not looking at him.
"That's nice," Charlie said, although his voice went a little unsteady. He wasn't alone in the house often, and it still made him...
He took a deep breath. Made him scared. Kelley had told him he had to acknowledge fear in order to master it.
His father looked up at Charlie, studying him for a moment before he spoke. "You could come with me, if you like."
Charlie kept breathing. The idea of leaving the house definitely made him scared. But--
"Like we used to," Charlie said. He could remember it, now that he thought of it. He hadn't wanted to go then, either, though he knew how and even had special clothes for golfing. He hadn't been scared then, just aggravated and impatient.
He couldn't think what had made him agree to go before, because he hadn't liked it, and he was terrible at it. But when he looked back at his father, still waiting for an answer, he felt an echo of what he'd felt then, a strange compassion, the sense that going golfing with his father was somehow a way of taking care of him. It was the same painful, tender sense he'd had when he tried to make Don take painkillers, or bandaged his wounds. Charlie didn't know what hurt his father had suffered that Charlie could help by going golfing; he didn't know how he'd come to understand that. But he couldn't stop feeling it, now that he'd remembered.
"Like we used to," his father agreed. He paused before adding carefully, "With Don, too."
Charlie's throat went tight. With Don, of course. A family outing. Charlie reached for any recollection of that, but it eluded him as everything associated with Don did. Still, maybe that was answer enough. Charlie was the only one left to golf with his father.
He summoned up a crooked smile. His father would be there. He wouldn't be alone. And he had to do this. "You know I'm probably even worse now."
His father's smile was wide and bright. "Oh, my son, I am counting on it."
Charlie woke up and squinted at the television, which showed two brightly smiling correspondents in red, white, and blue windbreakers. Six days into the Winter Olympics, he recognized all of them. This was the afternoon shift; he'd missed the morning coverage completely.
Charlie rubbed his eyes and then winced and rubbed the back of his neck instead. He remembered sitting up on the couch after his dad had gone to bed, ice dancing and four-man bobsled giving way to women's curling around three in the morning, and he'd resigned himself to another sleepless night.
Apparently women's curling had done the trick, though. Charlie stretched and sat up, freezing when he spotted David sitting in the armchair, his cheek braced on one fist and his eyes closed.
Charlie didn't move until his heart slowed down from its first panicked racing. He scooted carefully back across the couch, away from David. David didn't move apart from the slow, crooked rise and fall of his shoulders. He wasn't wearing a suit today.
Charlie tried to remember what day of the week it was. Thursday, maybe? Thursday afternoon? David ought to be at work--but then FBI agents probably worked odd schedules, didn't they? Crime-fighting probably wasn't a 9 to 5 business. Crime wasn't, after all.
Then again, maybe David was on duty. Maybe he was assigned to checking up on Charlie, and catching a nap on the job.
Charlie remembered Don sleeping, that first night. Even then, even when he was a prisoner and Don was his guard, Charlie had dared to approach him while he slept. And Don hadn't hurt him, and David had worked with Don, after all. David had no reason to hurt him--and if he'd wanted to, Charlie had been lying here asleep for hours.
Charlie stood up cautiously, stepping carefully around his notebooks full of scores and results and medal rankings. He made himself breathe evenly as he walked over to David, the sounds of the television covering any noise he might have made himself. He glanced down when he reached David, and spotted the butt of David's gun, just visible between his hip and the side of the chair.
Charlie reached out cautiously and touched David's shoulder. David startled awake, sitting bolt upright, eyes wide. Charlie couldn't stop himself from yanking his hand back, his heart jumping again, but he stood his ground.
"Charlie," David said, not moving a muscle, looking up at him.
For the first time, Charlie realized that David was as frightened of upsetting him as Charlie was frightened of David hurting him. It was a strange reversal, being the one on his feet, looking down at the man in the chair. Being the one who frightened someone else.
It made his stomach hurt.
Charlie smiled as reassuringly as he could and took a step back.
"Didn't want you to get a cramp in your neck," Charlie explained, rubbing his own stiff neck with one hand.
David smiled, his posture easing. "Thanks, Charlie."
Charlie's smile turned sincere, and the knot in his stomach loosened.
"Charlie," Kelley said. "You know the deal. We only meet in the garage if you sit down and look at me, otherwise we're going back in the house."
Charlie winced and turned away from the boards. "I know, I just..."
Kelley was giving him her stern look, so he didn't try to elaborate, but came over and sat down again. As soon as he did, Kelley stood up and walked over to the chalkboard, which didn't seem fair.
"You've been doing a lot of work out here in the last few weeks."
Charlie shrugged uncomfortably; mention of the amount of work he'd been doing lately just reminded him of how he'd done nothing during the Olympics.
"It's been slow going. I'm still not making much headway with supergravity, so I've just been working other analyses, whatever I happen to think of. Nothing particularly novel, I can't seem to--"
Charlie bit his lip.
Kelley looked over her shoulder at him, and then came back and sat down across from him. "You can't seem to... work like you remember working before?"
"Yeah," Charlie admitted. "I mean, I used to--I had all these ideas, all the time, everything I looked at was something I wanted to explore mathematically."
Charlie looked down at his hands, away from Kelley's patient gaze. The silence stretched out.
"And now?"
Charlie shook his head. "I just want someone to give me a job to do. I can't--I can't think of things like I used to, I'm not Charlie Eppes like I used to be, I'm just--"
He had to stop again. His heart was starting to race, his throat going tight, and he could almost taste the adrenaline. He didn't want to talk about this, but he couldn't bring himself to say so.
"You're not the same as you were before," Kelley repeated. "But you're still getting better, you're still regaining memories. You are improving, Charlie, and you will continue to improve."
Charlie shrugged. "Geniuses are like athletes. You hit a peak, you only stay there so long. Mine might be over now, I might--this could be a career-ending injury, I might not be able to work--"
Charlie flinched from the words as they left his mouth, curling inward, arms wrapped around his stomach. "No, I mean--I can work, I can work, I just--"
"Charlie."
Charlie gritted his teeth, shutting off speech. He could work, though, even if he couldn't go back to CalSci yet, even if he couldn't do the same work, he could...
"Charlie, what do you think will happen if you can't work?"
Charlie stared at her. "I can work. Kelley, I can."
Kelley held up one hand, palm out. "I know, Charlie, I know you can. This is just a hypothetical. What if you couldn't? What if you couldn't work at all?"
Charlie looked at the board. The evidence was there, he could still work, it was all over the board. "I can--"
"Charlie."
He swallowed. "I have to--people have to work, everyone has to work. I have to be able to support myself. CalSci's not going to keep me on sick leave forever."
"What would happen if you lost your job and couldn't get another one? What would happen to you?"
Charlie's fingernails dug into his palms, heart pounding, and he would not, he would not be driven into a panic just by Kelley's questions. He could say stop if he had to, he could walk out if he had to, but if he wanted to get better, if he wanted to be well enough to work, he had to be able to answer her.
"I wouldn't have any money." The words came out a hoarse whisper, choking and awful in his mouth but insubstantial in the air.
"Charlie, what do you spend money on now? You own your house. Your dad buys the groceries. You have bills, but I'll bet you also have savings."
Charlie shrugged stiffly. It wasn't that he needed the money, exactly, he just--
"Charlie, your father wouldn't let you starve. Larry wouldn't let you starve. You've never been poor, you don't have any reason to fear not having money."
Charlie looked up at her warily.
"Look at how scared you are right now, and tell me what you are actually afraid will happen if you can't work."
Charlie squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to breathe, and to think. He was on the verge of panic, real total panic, at the thought of not being able to work. He clenched his fists tighter, then stopped and flexed his fingers, reminding himself they were there, able to hold chalk, and not--
"Gangrene," he blurted, eyes flashing open.
Kelley blinked. "Gangrene."
He'd been scared then, too, when he'd woken up disoriented in the dark with bandages on his fingers. If his hands wouldn't work, if the drugs didn't wear off and let him think--Williamson wouldn't have any use for him if he couldn't work, and then...
"I'm afraid I'll die. Be killed." Charlie swallowed hard, realizing belatedly what he was admitting--but Kelley hadn't said a word about anything else he'd told her. She wouldn't betray him in this, either.
"I had to work," he said, looking down at the floor. "That's why they kept me alive. If I couldn't work, they'd have killed me. If I wasn't useful."
"And now?"
Charlie looked up.
Kelley was watching him intently. "Is anyone going to kill you now, if you can't work? Your dad? Larry? Your boss?"
Boss was Williamson, but Williamson was dead and burned, thousands of miles from here. It took Charlie a moment to attach the word to a vague mental image of the assortment of older professors who'd been Department Head during his time at CalSci. They'd existed mainly in the form of gently pestering emails and less-gently pestering office visits and long, boring meetings.
"No," Charlie said slowly. He took a deep breath and looked around the garage. No one was watching him here. No one was waiting for his results.
"No." It had been nearly two months since Don said the words to him, and Charlie realized he was finally starting to believe it.
"No one is going to hurt me."
Charlie stared into the darkness, gasping, rubbing his hands against the dry soft sheets. Not shingles underneath him, because he was not perched on the roof. Not waiting for Don to save him from the rising water. Not reaching for the approaching shape only to find cold, waterlogged flesh under his grip. No blank stare from eyes already going cloudy. He was not alone with the dark water rising.
But still alone, and still in the dark. The adrenaline was ebbing away, leaving him empty and exhausted. Charlie fell back flat on the bed and stared toward the window. In his dream the water had come from the koi pond, rising and rising like a bathtub overflowing, and he'd known he couldn't get further from it than the roof. He'd been sure Don would save him, right up until he grabbed Don's hand.
Kelley had told him he would have bad days, bad weeks, and he knew this was just a bad few nights, sleepless hours punctuated by nightmares when he did doze off. He knew that, but he couldn't feel it. All he could feel was the crushing weight of his body and the slowness of his brain and the dread of another hour of patient prodding--questions and answers and always more questions. Don wasn't going to save him from this. Charlie was on his own.
For all he knew, Don was dead.
Charlie took a deep shuddering breath, but it wasn't even a surprise to finally think it, not really. He'd known it was a possibility--known it since he first woke up in the garage. Don had left behind his coat, left behind the FBI and his family and Charlie. Charlie tried to feel something--anger, or the terror of the dream, or grief--but there was nothing but more weariness.
Don might be dead, and whether he was or not he wouldn't come back for Charlie, so tomorrow night would be just like tonight, and so would the night after that, and next month, and next year. Charlie would be alone in the dark, and the water would rise in his dreams even if the backyard stayed safe and dry.
Charlie rubbed his face. He had to move, had to do something. Kelley had told him not to just lie there thinking about not sleeping, if he wasn't going to sleep. He got up and turned his back on the window, on the backyard and the koi pond, heading out of his bedroom.
He escaped as far as the bathroom, turned the light on and stood for a moment staring at his own wide-eyed reflection. He could brush his teeth, get dressed, begin a new day full of doing nothing in particular at three in the morning. Get an early start.
But it would just be another long day, just like yesterday and the day before, just like tomorrow. Don wasn't coming for him, and this wasn't going to end. He would still be that crazed-looking man in the mirror with the scar standing out brightly on his pale face, light-years away from responsible, tenured, sane, normal Dr. Charles Eppes.
Charlie opened the medicine cabinet--to push his reflection away, to get the toothpaste. But there was an unexpected little row of bottles on the shelf, and Charlie let his hands fall to his sides and stared.
The aspirin was back, and the Tylenol, and the old prescription bottles. And the sleeping pills.
His father must have put them back; his father must think he was well enough to be trusted. Charlie was getting better, after all. Kelley was pleased, his father was pleased. But he still wasn't better, not really. He still couldn't work, still couldn't sleep, still couldn't stop dreaming of Don, awake or asleep. He couldn't stop wanting Don, his brother, who had abandoned him. Who was the only one who knew, the only one who'd been there with Charlie through it all. Who might be dead for all Charlie knew.
Charlie barely had to think before reaching for the bottle of sleeping pills. He could take just one, drug himself to sleep. He could rest after all.
The bottle was heavy, full, the pills rattling against each other in Charlie's hand.
He could take one, wake up hours from now knowing all the same things he knew now. And tomorrow night it would be another pill, and another one the night after that, and he would string himself along with drugs and questions, months and years of Kelley's exquisitely professional gentleness, his father's careful kindness. There wasn't much point in stopping at one pill.
No one was going to hurt him anymore.
So he'd have to do it himself.
Even full, the bottle weighed barely anything--nothing like the solid metal heft of a gun, for example--to be a thing that could do so much damage. So little mass to end this, end him, right now; and yet it could. It would, as soon as he twisted the top. It was a miracle of modern technology, plastics and pharmaceuticals.
Charlie turned the bottle to stare at the label, but the name of the active ingredient didn't pull any helpful dosing information out of his brain. Of course they didn't simply list the LD50 on the package. They wouldn't want to encourage this sort of thing.
But Charlie was brighter than your average aspiring overdoser. He could work this out without simply taking the whole bottle (inelegant, inefficient, and perhaps even counterproductive). There was a recommended dosage listed, and a maximum safe dosage--the given maximum would include a comfortable margin of error; even double wouldn't be enough to kill, likely. Of course, he would need to build in his own margin of error, would need to be certain of his desired outcome. He could simply take the entire bottle, but what if even that wasn't enough, and he had to deal with the stupid aftermath? He had to calculate before he acted, he had to get this right the first time.
The bathroom light was too bright, casting the small black type of the label in sharp relief, stinging Charlie's eyes. He squeezed them shut and let the numbers play out in his head--his own body mass, the likely average body mass they were basing the dosage on, ratios and metabolism curves--
The knock on the door startled him, his fist clenching tighter on the bottle.
"Charlie?"
Charlie stared at the bottle, his heart racing faster--he had to--he had to now, the window of opportunity was closing--but there wasn't time to be sure, and he needed this, he needed--he couldn't figure it fast enough, such a simple problem and he couldn't work it out.
"Charlie? Are you all right?"
Charlie shook his head frantically, his throat closing so that he couldn't catch a breath or speak--couldn't swallow if he wanted to, and still he couldn't let go of the bottle.
He pushed off from the sink instead, flung himself back and made his feet catch up, stumbling and scrambling to the door. He hit it hard, a jolt of pain through his shoulder that made his eyes water. He fumbled the door open, blinking to clear his vision, and his father was standing there. Charlie mutely held the bottle out to him; his hand was shaking, the pills rattling like a snake about to strike.
His father peeled his fingers back, took the small, deadly weight from his grip.
"I think," Charlie whispered. "I think I'm not--not ready--"
"You're tired," his father said gently, and walked him back to bed. Charlie fell asleep sometime before dawn, staring at the ceiling, still trying to work out the lethal dosage, still trying to find the error in his calculation.
Charlie was sitting on the porch steps when Larry pulled into the driveway, and he met Larry at the bottom of the walk. Larry gave him a quizzical smile.
"Hello, Charles. It's good to see you outside."
Charlie nodded, glancing reflexively behind him at the house. "I've been going out golfing and running errands and stuff with my dad." He smiled, because he was learning to own his limitations. "Practicing. I'm getting better at it."
Larry nodded, still standing between Charlie and his car. Charlie could see he understood immediately that it was going outside that Charlie was getting better at, not golf. Golf appeared to be a hopeless case, but as far as Charlie remembered it always had been. "That's good. Practice is good."
Charlie nodded, studying Larry's face. There was no longer any visible sign that Charlie had struck him--no lingering scar on his lip or cheek. Still, there was a certain wariness between them. It wasn't a physical fear, which Charlie thought he would recognize in Larry as easily as in himself, but something more difficult to quantify. This was a fracture of their friendship, still unhealed.
Charlie eased backward a step, carefully not crowding Larry toward the car.
"I was wondering if you might be willing to help me with that," Charlie said, forcing himself to keep his eyes steady on Larry's face. "I want to learn to drive, and from what I remember of the first time around, it's... probably better if I don't ask my dad to teach me."
He tried out a small smile, which Larry's mouth mirrored. Larry's eyes, however, stayed steady on him, calculating the reasoning behind the request. Charlie had already gone over his own calculations with Kelley--a desire for autonomy, a mode of transportation better armored than a bicycle, a way to work with Larry on something other than the math he couldn't currently manage. Now Charlie waited, breath held, for independent confirmation from a second source.
"Don wound up teaching you the first time, you know," Larry said. His eyes narrowed slightly, probing.
Charlie's breath caught, his own smile faltering as a pure sharp shock of longing ripped through him--it stole his breath, the way he wanted to be back in the car with Don, the two of the shut away from the rest of the world with an endless highway stretching out before them. He forced himself to breathe and to hold Larry's gaze, letting Larry see whatever he would see. Charlie missed Don; everyone knew that.
It explained the blank spot, at least. Charlie wondered how much he would remember when he got behind the wheel, without being able to remember Don teaching him. "Oh."
"Charles..." Larry said softly.
Of course Charlie couldn't escape the unspoken question. It wasn't anything like a coincidence that Larry was here today. His father had kept his habitual silence toward Charlie, but Charlie didn't believe for an instant that that silence extended beyond Charlie's actual presence.
Charlie himself had talked this out with Kelley already. He was owning his limitations. Also his mistakes, and his self-thwarted acts of self-destruction.
"Yes," Charlie said, looking down at his feet, fighting the nervous smile, the urge to be flippant as he remembered doing whenever he told Larry important things. He recalled abruptly that he had come out to Larry when he was nineteen with an elaborately dirty joke he'd rehearsed for hours beforehand. Larry hadn't laughed, and Charlie had nearly fallen apart before his friend's patient, solemn kindness.
"Yes?" Larry repeated.
Charlie looked up, and the look was just the same, patient, kind, waiting for Charlie to reveal an awful secret Larry had long since deduced on his own.
"Yes," Charlie said again, steadily. "Yes, I didn't overdose on sleeping pills two nights ago because I couldn't calculate the optimum dose."
Larry nodded slowly, almost formally, in acknowledgment.
"Well, I'm tempted to swear I will never say another word against your perfectionist tendencies," Larry said, "except that I hope it doesn't presage your attitude toward left turns."
Charlie had been home more than two months before he finally decided to deal with his email. He'd opened up his inbox and looked a few times, stared at the impossibly long list of messages and the flashing warning about being over his data storage limit. He recognized some of the names he saw there, individual senders and mailing lists. He'd seen his own name in a few subject lines.
But after two months he was ready. It had finally occurred to him that he'd had this problem before--email ignored too long, though admittedly never for eight months solid--and he knew how to solve it. He deleted the entire contents of his inbox, and then walked away from his computer while the actual deleting went on. He spent an hour and a half sitting on the porch with his DS in his hands and his back to the house wall.
When he went back inside, his inbox was empty and the flashing red message had gone away--but now it became obvious that another folder, one named Actually Read These still contained 58 new messages.
Actually Read These.
Amita had made him set it up, because of his tendency to ignore everything in his inbox for far too long, or to delete things en masse from time to time. This folder was the target of a special filter, which redirected emails sent by Amita and by the head of CalSci's math department: the two people he couldn't afford to ignore, in his old life.
Charlie clicked on the folder and scrolled to the bottom, the oldest emails.
Four were dated July 6, the day he'd been taken. They were all from Amita: Papers for you to sign and Where are you? and Paging Dr. Eppes and Charlie?
Then there was one from Dr. Sandoval on July 7, Regarding the crimes on campus yesterday.
After that, all the emails were from Amita. The ones dated July 20, 23, 25, 26, and 30 had no subject lines. On August 6 it was One month, and on August 8, I miss you, and on September 5, Your birthday.
The sizes of the messages were all upwards of 2k, some much larger. These were not the brief missives of that first day, the emails she had actually expected him to see.
On October 9, the subject line said Don is gone too.
In December, the domain of the sending email address changed to harvard.edu. The first email from Harvard had the subject line Where are you?
The last email was dated January 1, early in the morning--before Larry could have called Amita to tell her. The subject line was blank. After that--when Amita must have known he was home and theoretically able to check his email--there was nothing at all.
Charlie bit his lip, staring. It was dozens of emails, hundreds of kilobytes of data, and he didn't think any of it was intended for him--even the ones he had been meant to read were months out of date, out of time and out of place. Still, he was hesitant to delete them.
He opened a new message instead, steeling himself, and typed in the Harvard address.
Amita,
I got your emails. Is there anything in them I ought to read?
Charlie
He stared at the little message, thinking he ought to say more--they had been friends, teetering on the edge of more, and it made his chest hurt to remember that. Amita's smile, his own shy careful hope, the manifold branching possibilities.
All of that potential had been shut down by four men with guns on a morning in July, redirecting him to the unknown, the unimaginable. Don. He couldn't tell her any of that, couldn't explain just how he'd gone awry; maybe it was better to say nothing at all.
Charlie clicked send, got up and walked away again, but he'd barely made a single circuit, pacing, before he heard the soft chime of arriving email.
A 59th message had arrived in Actually Read These. Charlie opened it.
Please don't.
Charlie nodded firmly to the computer, selected all, and clicked delete again. When all the messages were gone, he deleted the folder and filters for good measure.
He sat a moment staring at his empty inbox--blank slate, fresh start--and then the computer chimed and a new message appeared, sent from Amita's Harvard address. The subject line read Hi.
Charlie,
I'm glad to hear from you. How are you holding up?
I miss California, but Boston is a great city...
The windows and door were both open, but that didn't quite add up to meaningful cross-ventilation. In the middle of the afternoon on the first properly hot day of spring, Don's bedroom was stiflingly hot. Charlie had just managed to reassemble the bed frame and put the box spring and mattress back in place. The bedding and pillow, scattered in pieces around the room, were probably headed for the trash.
Charlie jumped when someone knocked on the open doorframe, reaching reflexively for the cordless drill still sitting on the floor by the bed. He realized what a gruesome weapon it would make at the same time he registered his father standing in the doorway, and smiled sheepishly.
His father just quirked his eyebrows. "Kelley's here. She said you can meet up here or downstairs, whatever you prefer."
Charlie looked around the disarray of Don's room, the reassembled bed beside the wall the only island of normalcy.
It wasn't like Kelley didn't know, though. She might as well see it for herself.
"Up here's fine," Charlie said, laying the drill down again.
His father nodded. "I'll be in the basement," he said. "Give a shout when you're done--we should go somewhere for dinner. It's too hot to cook."
Charlie nodded, sitting down on the bed to mentally catalog that exchange as his father walked away. His father had casually suggested going out for a meal--like he'd often done, before--and Charlie had agreed without thinking. Now that he was thinking about it, he still didn't feel more than a baseline sense of anxiety at the prospect of going out. They would take a car to some restaurant--maybe that Italian place he and his dad had gone to during finals last spring, or the steakhouse where they'd celebrated Amita's thesis defense. They would eat. Everything would be all right.
"Charlie."
Charlie looked up as Kelley stepped inside, tugging at the collar of her t-shirt. He was abruptly conscious that he was sweating, and that the heat would be uncomfortable for anyone who didn't crave the illusion of sitting in a sheltered spot in the desert with the sun beating down.
"Hi," he said, bouncing to his feet. "Sorry, we can--"
"No, this is fine," Kelley said firmly. She had a bag on her shoulder and a folding step-stool in one hand. She set up the stool in the clearest patch of floor by the windows, and pulled a bottle of water from her bag along with her notepad.
"I came prepared. You're not putting me off my game that easily."
Charlie sat down again when Kelley did, resting his hands on his knees and waiting for the standard opening question. Kelley took a long drink of water and then obliged him.
"First or last?"
Kelley had established a standard minimum proportion of each appointment--fifteen minutes of the hour--to be spent talking about Don. Charlie was allowed to choose whether it was the first or last fifteen minutes. He tried not to betray too much preference for either, or to alternate between them too consistently. Of course, it was impossible for the human mind to generate a truly random pattern, so he'd learned to stop calculating and answer according to his first impulse. If nothing else, it was faster.
"First."
Kelley nodded, taking another sip of water and glancing around the room. Charlie wondered whether she would ask him about it--they'd discussed his destruction of Don's room pretty exhaustively, fifteen minutes one day, taking over an entire hour on another--but Kelley said, "Tell me something good about Don."
Charlie stared at her for a moment, at a loss to think of one good thing--to choose one good thing out of a multitude.
"He saved my life," Charlie said finally, but Kelley had heard that one before and waved it off.
"Something small, something specific. A regular thing."
Don had saved Charlie's life every day, in dozens of small, specific, regular ways. It had all been about his survival, but Charlie swallowed his objection and tried to formulate the sort of answer Kelley was looking for. "He shared his comic books with me."
Kelley nodded her approval, and her gaze didn't stray to the brightly-colored litter of torn and crumpled pages in the corner near the closet. Charlie had found some of Don's old comic books, in one of those cardboard boxes in the closet. There would be no repairing them, but he might be able to identify the issues and find them on eBay...
"Do you think he used to do things like that, before you were kidnapped?"
Charlie looked back to Kelley and frowned. "I don't think I read--"
But if he had read Don's comic books, or comic books he associated with Don, he probably wouldn't remember it now. The lingering holes in Charlie's memory were becoming more distinctive. He couldn't remember any of his birthdays before his thirteenth, which he'd celebrated with his mother at Princeton. He couldn't remember celebrating Hanukkah at all--he still, after all this time, couldn't remember the prayers. He'd looked them up, but they slipped straight out of his brain as soon as he read them, like he'd never seen them before.
Charlie shrugged. "Maybe? There's no logical way to determine it one way or the other, unless I left some physical evidence of having read Don's comic books."
Kelley waved her hand. "I'm not looking for proof, Charlie. I'm asking you whether you think the way Don treated you after you were kidnapped was essentially similar to the way he treated you before."
Charlie smiled fiercely. "I'm pretty sure he never fucked me before."
Kelley nodded and said nothing.
Charlie looked down at his hands. "I keep wondering, though, if... if maybe I wanted him to, before."
Kelley still didn't say anything, and Charlie didn't look up. The thought had occurred to him weeks ago, and here in the safe still warmth of Don's room, sitting on Don's bed--the site and subject of any number of his fantasies in the months since he'd returned home--it spilled out.
"I wanted him to when I met him. Almost right away. It should have felt wrong, but it never did. I just wanted him. It felt wrong to him, I know it did, he couldn't stand it. But I just..."
Charlie glanced up to see Kelley sitting very still, watching him, her face almost unreadable with the bright afternoon sunlight behind her. She'd chosen her spot carefully.
"Have you considered the opposite?"
Charlie nodded, scrubbing his hands through his hair. "What if I didn't want him before, you mean? And then I remember and it feels wrong to me, too."
His stomach twisted in anticipatory nausea--the taboo would come crashing back when Don finally came back to him, when the man he'd fucked became his brother, when he finally remembered the mouth that had sucked his cock blowing out birthday candles. All his longing would turn to disgust, and Charlie would never want to see Don again. He would want nothing more than to forget everything they'd done, everything about those months that right now seemed like the good parts. Even reading comic books together would be tainted by the memory of doing so nearly naked, wrapped up with Don in the shared sleeping bags.
He would know just how Don felt, and exactly why Don had abandoned him here without even telling him the truth.
"All right," Kelley said softly. "Let's call that fifteen. Have you noticed it's about a hundred degrees up here?"
Charlie looked up with a grateful smile. "I woke up this morning and the AC had come on for the first time. I was cold and I kind of--freaked out. This is better."
Kelley nodded and they were off, talking about the weather.
In April Charlie started visiting the comic shop. He and Kelley had agreed that he was ready to graduate from occasional solo trips around the block to actual errands, and Charlie had been thinking about comic books lately. There was a shop only ten blocks from the house, close enough to walk in daylight, with a cell phone in his hand, having told his father exactly where he was going and when to expect him back.
The first time Charlie had mentioned his destination, his father had nodded. "I know where it is. Don used to go there."
Of course he had; it was close enough to walk to, and some of the comic books Charlie had reconstructed were old enough to have been bought before Don could drive. Charlie had wondered if the proprietor would be one more person who remembered things about Don that Charlie couldn't, but the man behind the counter was Charlie's age, maybe younger.
The first time Charlie came in, he asked Charlie whether he needed any help finding things. Charlie had shaken his head and retreated to the back of the store, the bins of back issues. Since then, every time Charlie came in--once a week, on Fridays--he just nodded at Charlie and left him to wander the store undisturbed.
Charlie, in exchange, bought comics by the armful. He'd discovered on his first visit that the comics he and Don had read together were months old, years old, some of them, so he had a lot of catching up to do--and then too, all the comics were connected to each other (a whole universe made of strings, all connected). He found himself drawn rapidly down new avenues of inquiry.
Today he'd first picked up the new current issues he wanted, and then headed for the back, where the older issues were lined up in boxes according to title and age. Charlie set the comic books he'd already chosen on the edge of a box and began to sort through its contents, mentally reviewing what he'd already bought in the last few weeks and what he still needed to acquire.
He heard the chime that signaled the front door opening and glanced up automatically, then froze. There was a man standing in the doorway, tall and broad-shouldered with the casually athletic posture comic shop customers did not normally possess. The day was warm, but the man was wearing a light jacket over his t-shirt.
To hide his holster.
Charlie tried to remember to breathe like Kelley had been teaching him. I am afraid, he thought. It didn't make the gunman in the doorway any less terrifying, though. It didn't even get him out of the doorway.
Distantly, Charlie heard the shop owner greet the man, and he saw the gunman say something in return, smiling brightly. But the gunman's eyes were on Charlie, and Charlie couldn't look away. He was smiling at Charlie, eyes surrounded by weathered lines--like Don's--but this man looked nothing like Don except the intent look in his eyes and the economical way he moved.
Charlie tried to remember to breathe. He risked a glance toward the shop owner, but he was ignoring the gunman, as though he weren't a threat at all, turning his back as the gunman came inside--he was complicit--
Charlie looked back to the gunman, who was walking toward the back of the store. Charlie tensed, choosing his moment--and when the gunman reached the halfway point of one aisle, Charlie bolted up the other, running flat-out for the door.
He heard a shout behind him, saw the shop owner's head jerk up, wide eyes staring as he flashed by--he actually felt a hand on his arm for just an instant, and he threw himself through the door and hard to the left, toward home, faster, faster--
He could hear shouting behind him, and maybe footsteps closing in, or maybe just the thunder of his own heart. He was breathing in huge gasps, lungs straining, and he wasn't going to make it ten blocks without getting caught, he needed--
His phone, should have called before he ran. Charlie looked down, shoving his hand into his pocket, trying not to slow down as he fished his phone out and flipped it open, but even as his finger hit the 4 button he was jerked backward, an arm like an iron bar clamping around his chest as he was hauled back against the gunman's body. His phone flew out of his grip. Charlie watched its arc through the air, one arm uselessly outstretched--and then he jumped instinctively backward, into the gunman's grip as a car barreled past, just beyond the reach of his fingertips.
The gunman pulled him backward from the street a little way, steadied him on his feet and let him go. Charlie turned to face the man, heart still racing--racing all over again--to see that his smile had disappeared, though his gaze was still as intense.
"Charlie?" He sounded uncertain, almost wary. Charlie realized belatedly that that was what he'd been shouting--Charlie, Charlie wait, hey, Charlie.
Still, Charlie took a cautious step backward--glancing in the direction of the street this time. His phone was still lying there on the asphalt, miraculously seeming to be in one piece.
"Sorry, here--" and the gunman reached under that light jacket. Charlie flinched, but the gunman pulled out a badge as he stepped past Charlie and into the street, waving it in the direction of traffic as he trotted out to Charlie's phone, picking it up and then moving a few feet further to pick up something else.
A badge. Of course. He'd worked with Don and Don's team for months; he must have met more than just David and Terry along the way.
The gunman--the agent--the putative agent--held out the entire contents of his hands toward Charlie when he got back to the sidewalk: Charlie's phone and its battery, both badly scuffed, and his own badge.
"My name's Billy Cooper," he said as Charlie took all three. "I used to work with Don."
Charlie looked from the badge to the man's face. The picture was obviously of the same man, but the photo was years old, showing someone less weathered, with a wide careless smile. The badge itself looked just like Agent Henne's. It could be legitimate. Charlie gave it back and reassembled his phone, feeling a little relieved when the display lit right up.
"I don't remember you," Charlie said, eyes on his phone.
"Yeah," Billy said. "I figured that out right about when you tried to throw yourself into traffic to get away from me."
Charlie glanced up at Billy, but he wasn't smiling. "But you know me."
Billy nodded. "I worked a case with you and Don last spring. You helped us track down a fugitive who got loose in LA."
Charlie shook his head. He didn't remember that, either, though there was probably something about it in those computer files he never opened.
Billy raised his hands, palm out. "I'm gonna take something out of my pocket," Billy said. "Something you might find interesting, okay?"
Charlie backed up another step, his hand tightening on his phone--but if the man intended to pull out a weapon and kill him on a street corner in broad daylight, then it was as good as done. Charlie nodded.
Billy reached carefully into his pocket, withdrawing folded paper which he offered to Charlie.
Folded postcards, Charlie realized as he accepted them. There were three, folded together, and the outermost one showed an image of the Hollywood sign. Charlie separated it from the others and turned it over, and his throat went tight.
The handwriting was Don's. COOPER was written above the address, and in the space for the message was a single scrawled word. Alive. The postmark was Los Angeles, dated January 2. The first day of mail service after Don left him here.
Charlie blinked rapidly and looked at the other two. One mailed from Chicago, November 12, also addressed to COOPER. The second day they were together, Don had told him the date. November thirteenth.
The last postcard had a picture of the Chicago skyline, but the postmark was somewhere in Wisconsin, November 23. The day Don had been taken away from him, the day... There was no name with the address, no message on the other half of the card.
Charlie folded it again at the crease, shoved all three back together and handed them back to Billy. Don had sent these to him; with the badge, they represented a significant preponderance of evidence.
"Is there some reason you're here now?" Charlie tried not to sound irritated and thought he failed pretty badly, but Billy smiled.
"I guess Don didn't tell you."
Charlie shook his head--Don had certainly never mentioned this man, not in identifiable terms.
Billy's smile widened. "You owe me a beer."
Billy's car was parked around the corner, so Charlie rode with him back to the house. He wasn't really prepared to hit a bar with Billy, but there was beer in the fridge at the house, and Charlie would be on firm footing there. Billy had seemed to hesitate, but didn't argue. They took a direct route back, without Charlie entertaining more than a few seconds worth of thoughts about Billy driving away in the opposite direction with him.
They parked in the driveway, and Charlie got out of the truck quickly, running around the front so that he'd precede Billy up the walk. As he'd half-expected, his father came out the front door to see who'd arrived. His eyes lighted quickly--relieved, Charlie thought--on Charlie, and then moved past him.
Charlie watched his father's mouth tighten, the look in his eyes going unreadable. "Hello, Charlie. Agent Cooper. Excuse me, I was in the middle of something."
As Charlie watched, mouth hanging open, his father turned away and walked back into the house without another word, shutting the door firmly behind him.
Charlie looked back at Billy to find him still standing right beside the truck, rubbing the back of his neck and looking away. Charlie walked back down to him.
"Okay, what the fuck was that?"
Billy's head jerked around sharply, but he only met Charlie's gaze for a second before he looked away, out toward the street.
"Don and I worked together, years ago, in fugitive recovery. We were damn good at what we did, but it was weeks on the road. Months out of touch sometimes." Billy glanced at Charlie, then past him to the house, and away again. "It's hard on a guy who cares about his family. Hard on his family. That's why your brother gave it up."
Charlie nodded shallowly. That seemed to be what Don did. Gave things up for Charlie. Charlie hoped he'd appreciated it.
Billy squared his shoulders and looked Charlie straight in the eye. "Your dad never liked me. Always thought I'd take Don away for good, and I guess I did. I knew he was going after you. I encouraged him."
Charlie blinked, but Billy's gaze didn't waver. Charlie looked to the house, where his father was, alone, and back to Billy, who had encouraged Don to come after him.
"I guess I really do owe you that beer, then."
Billy cracked a little smile, and trailed Charlie as far as the porch. Charlie hesitated on the steps. "Why don't you, um--I'll just--"
Billy nodded and sat down on the top step, splaying his legs out and tilting his head back against the baluster in a pose of instant relaxation. Charlie squinted, but couldn't tell how much of it was fake. "I'll be here, Eppes. Go on."
Charlie turned and went into the house, heading immediately for the sounds of activity in the kitchen. He found his father frowning into the sink, scrubbing something vigorously.
All the dishes had been done before Charlie left for the comic shop. "Dad?"
His father stopped, but stood still for a moment, head down, before he looked at Charlie. "You all right, Charlie?"
Charlie nodded quickly. There was no need to tell his father about the scare he'd had. It had been all right. Just Billy, and Billy was all right. Even if his father didn't like the man, he knew him.
Charlie glanced toward the fridge. He should just get the beers, go back outside, let his father alone. But Billy's words kept bouncing around in his head, and he needed to say this.
"Dad, I'm sorry."
His father looked up sharply, actually turning to face him now. "Charlie, it's all right--it's your house, you can have guests, I just wasn't expecting to see Agent Cooper of all people."
Charlie shook his head, stepping further inside the kitchen but stopping short of his father, keeping himself out of reach. He shoved his hands into his pockets, staring down at his feet.
"Dad, I'm sorry. Don would be here if it wasn't for me. I'm sorry."
"Ah," his father said softly, and something seized in Charlie's chest.
He realized with perfect clarity, as soon as he heard that noncommittal sound, how entirely he'd been expecting his father to brush off the apology, assure him his guilt was misplaced, let him off the hook.
"Charlie."
Charlie forced himself to raise his chin and meet his father's gaze, but it was every bit as kind as he had expected it to be. Charlie took a breath.
"I could tell you it's not your fault," his father said. "But I'll bet you and Kelley have already discussed that at some length."
Charlie smiled a little, a compulsive twitch of his mouth, and nodded. To Kelley, at least, he could explain just why it was his fault, and Kelley allowed him his uncertainty. Maybe it would have made some difference if he and Don had never had sex, if Charlie had taken no for an answer any of the first thousand times Don said it. Maybe Don would have been willing to deal with everything else if he hadn't needed to get away from Charlie. They couldn't know.
"You know, your brother said the same thing to me."
Charlie bit his lip and held his ground as his father closed the distance between them--but the hand on his shoulder was his father's hand, warm and comforting. Nothing to retreat from. "Don saved me."
His father nodded. "But first he apologized to me for getting you kidnapped in the first place. And I'll tell you what I told him, Charlie. For whatever part of this might be your fault, I forgive you."
"Oh," Charlie said, and his eyes went wide. His father would allow him the same uncertainty Kelley did, sight unseen. Would allow him his apology, even, but would give him this in return. Oh.
His father took the hand from his shoulder, reached up and ruffled his hair. "Now go. Talk to Billy and let me be a crabby old man in peace."
Charlie smiled cautiously and ducked past his father to the refrigerator; he hesitated for a moment with his hand hovering over the beer in the fridge, and then grabbed the whole six-pack. He thought they'd have more than enough to talk about.
"Why don't you take a left up here," Larry said, more or less casually.
Charles stiffened in the driver's seat, his hands tightening spasmodically on the wheel. "A left?"
Larry nodded. The issue wasn't Charles' proficiency at turning--he'd needed hardly any instruction in the mechanics of driving once he got behind the wheel, and he was a long way from the reckless young genius who'd blown by a patrolman doing 92 in a 35. All Charles really needed was confidence, and that was coming slowly but steadily. "I have the utmost faith in you, Charles."
Charles glanced sideways at Larry before returning his gaze to the road ahead. "You're sure? Left?"
"It's a fine day for it," Larry said gently, and Charles visibly gritted his teeth, nodded, and signaled as he moved into the turn lane, waiting at the light to enter CalSci's campus.
It was a fine day for it. Charles had been doing well lately, and not just behind the wheel. Perhaps more importantly, on this particular Monday morning, in the brief lull between the end of classes and the start of final exams, most students were holed up somewhere with their books or still sleeping off late nights of studying. Charles would be able to get into and out of his office without any danger of being mobbed.
Larry directed him through campus to the parking lot nearest the building that housed the Math Department, but once they were parked Charles struck out unerringly, leaving Larry to follow. It was startling, though Larry realized it shouldn't have been. Charles had nearly all his memories back; navigating the campus on foot would be automatic for a man who'd been at CalSci, in one capacity or another, for more than ten years.
Even now, even here at CalSci, Charles still seemed so different from his old self that it was hard to believe he knew exactly where he was going. Nonetheless, he led Larry directly to his building, in through the smaller side entrance and up the quietest stairwell. When they came around the corner--Charles hesitated for just a moment, and Larry made to step around him and lead the way, but Charles shook his head and went on--Larry breathed a sigh of relief.
The door of Charles' office was clear of the notes and pictures--many of them, strangely, of goats--that frequently adorned it. He'd asked the departmental secretary, Sarah Gantry, to clear everything away and box it up for Charles to see later.
Charles reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys, let himself in. He put his shoulder into the door just the same way he always had. As the door opened, standing on the threshold, Charlie looked back at Larry for the first time since they'd gotten out of the car, his eyes a little wide, a wobbly smile on his face. That was Charles, that nervousness; Larry remembered the same look on his face during his first lecture, all of twenty years old, younger than some of his students. Smarter than everyone in the room, Larry himself not excepted.
"Go on," Larry said quietly, as he had that day. "You can do this."
Charlie nodded and stepped inside.
Larry followed him, but he stayed near the door as Charlie made a first slow circuit of the room, letting his fingers trail over stacked papers and dark computer screens and the dozens of toys and knickknacks scattered around.
"It's just how I left it," Charles said, his voice hushed. "Everything is..."
He finally looked up and saw the chalkboard; Larry saw it as tension across his shoulders, a sudden stillness.
He didn't know, himself, what Charles had been working on. Amita had been fascinated and puzzled by it; she'd spent an hour copying down the contents of the chalkboards into a notebook before she went to Harvard, carefully labeling each page by Dr. Charles Eppes, CalSci, July 2005.
"I, um." Charles closed the distance to the board, reaching out toward it with a shaking hand. "Larry, what..."
Larry's heart sank. "I was hoping you could tell me."
Charlie shook his head, and let his hand smack flat against the slate. His shoulders jerked once, silently, and Larry nodded.
"I'll be just down the hall," Larry said, and let himself out.
Charlie was sitting with Kelley in the shade of the garage, tearing a fallen green leaf into smaller and smaller pieces, when she asked, "Did you scream much?"
Charlie's hands went still and he looked up at her, startled. "Did I scream?"
Kelley nodded, as though it were a perfectly reasonable question to ask. "Yeah, you know, scream, like--" and without warning, she tipped her head back and screamed, full-throated and loud and long.
Charlie flinched back from the sound. His stomach knotted instantly and his fists clenched, the back of his neck prickling.
Kelley stopped, looking back at him. "Like that. Did you?"
Charlie felt dazed, and looked around the backyard in search of some anchor in reality. "I--I guess I--sometimes."
Even as Charlie forced the words out, he remembered screaming, his heart beating faster at the memory of Randy's hands on his arms, his hands bound and his eyes covered, Don out of reach but not out of danger. There had been nothing for him to do but scream. He'd never been loud enough to drown out Randy's laughter.
"A few times," he muttered, looking down at the grass between his knees.
"Didn't help much, huh," Kelley said softly. She knew about Randy, and the blindfold, and the handcuffs. She knew.
"Not really, no." Charlie forced his chin up, straightening his back and breathing deeply. The little rush of adrenaline was already fading. He wasn't there anymore; that had been a long time ago and far away and Charlie had won and the sun was shining. "Why do you ask?"
Kelley grinned. "I think you should give it another shot."
Charlie frowned. "Screaming?"
"Yeah, just--" her mouth widened, chin tilting up, and Charlie waved his hand, cutting her off.
"I get it, I know what you mean. Why?"
Kelley grinned and screamed right at him, her nose and eyes wrinkling as her mouth went wide, and the wordless sound pushed at him like a physical thing, making Charlie press himself back against the garage wall. His heart raced all over again, even though Kelley was smiling playfully.
He tried to think it through--what her goal was, what she was trying to show him, what she was doing. She caught her breath and screamed again, a higher pitch, piercing. Charlie was tempted to cover his ears, but that had to be the wrong answer--he could barely think, because Kelley was screaming at him.
The next time Kelley paused for breath, her posture shifted backward slightly, and something clicked in Charlie's brain; he felt himself stop thinking as he took a breath and screamed right back. For a few seconds the sound buffeted between them, but then Kelley went silent, leaning back on her hands as Charlie went on screaming until he ran out of breath.
He hauled in a breath and the next scream burst out of him without volition, with the same inescapable momentum as a sob--but this was nothing like crying. The scream shook his body at an entirely different frequency, his skin humming and his fists clenching. Charlie was on his feet before he decided to stand, and he stalked around the yard, screaming at the sky and the garage and the house and the street and Kelley, still sitting in the shade.
He started to feel it, a bright rasp in his throat like the ache in his shoulder when he threw things or the sting of his knuckles when he hit the wall. He pressed his fists to his stomach and screamed harder, pushing against the little thread of pain, pushing out more than air. Sound waves would shake everything loose at a sufficient amplitude.
Every time he'd been hit in the mouth, every time he'd been told to shut up or else. Every weapon brandished at him. Every drop of water that had filled his mouth, in nightmares or nightmares come to life.
Every evil purpose they'd put him to, every crime he'd committed, every life he'd helped to take or helped to ruin, they all rattled in his lungs, compressed to the diameter of his throat and forced out.
He didn't realize he was running until he realized the backyard was blurring with his motion; his screams were stuttering on laughter, dizzy and hysterical. He realized the koi pond was rushing toward him and leaped, howling fiercely in midair.
His feet hit bottom with a jarring thump and just kept going. Charlie landed on his ass in the midst of a cannonball splash, the water lapping at his chest. Charlie drew up his knees and screamed at the fish, writhing shadows retreating to the shelter of the rocky edge.
It was getting hard to catch his breath--he kept laughing when he was supposed to be inhaling--but the momentum of screaming was carrying Charlie along now. Pond water was dripping down his hair and the back of his neck, and Charlie wiped his wet eyes with his wet hand and looked around for Kelly as he howled.
His breath stopped all at once, a painful sudden stall. Kelley was talking to a uniformed police officer; another was edging toward Charlie, a baffled frown on his face.
Charlie was already panting, his heart racing furiously. The officer was wearing a gun, Charlie noticed--of course he was, he was on duty--but he had his hands spread out to his sides as though he were walking a tight rope.
He paused a foot from the edge of the koi pond and nudged a flopping fish back into the water with his foot. Charlie winced at the small splash, and glanced around, but there were no other stranded fish outside the pond.
"Sir," the officer said, crouching slowly down on the other side of the rocks, hands still outstretched to either side. "Your neighbors called us, they were worried about you. Are you all right?"
Charlie made a conscious effort to breathe more slowly as he played those words over in his head. His neighbors had been worried. His neighbors had called the cops. Charlie looked up at the gray-haired man in a blue uniform, C. Oldham emblazoned on his chest. Charlie looked toward Kelley, to where Oldham's partner was listening to her explanation with a skeptical look.
The men with guns were here to protect him. Months too late, nearly a year too late, but they were here.
"Sir?" Oldham repeated. "You okay?"
Charlie looked down at himself, hyperventilating in the koi pond, his throat on fire from screaming long enough for the neighbors to freak out and call the cops. He laughed on a ragged breath.
"No," Charlie said, squinting in the dazzling sunshine as he smiled up at Oldham. "I'm not. But I will be."
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