Take One With You (5 page)

He texted her back.

on my way

He added ‘I love you’ in Morse code, spelling out the dots and dashes, something he hadn’t done since she was a little girl. It had always been their little secret from her mother, a fun remnant from his Navy days. Even if she’d forgotten how to read it, she’d remember the meaning.

He grabbed his coat and was out the door, laughing at the look he imagined on her face if she’d managed to see the text before they took her phone away.

Sarah’s mother was nowhere nearly as effective at damage control as her husband had always been, which was just another thing for which she could be blamed by Sarah. She wanted to blame his death on her, too, but even Sarah couldn’t bring herself that low.

Her parents had been talking on the phone when her father had missed the curve and careened off the road just half an hour from the jail. As Senator Crane figured, the police had called his wife and she had decided to wait until morning to fill him in, and had thus been taken completely by surprise at his call. She hadn’t even been aware that their call had been tragically cut off, but simply assumed they’d lost the signal and went back to sleep.

Given the circumstances, all charges were dropped, of course. Even in death, the senator had considerable pull with the local police.

No one ever knew, until much later, why the senator had decided to drive back in the middle of the night to do what he could have probably accomplished with a phone call, or certainly assigned to a local attorney.

Every night since, Sarah had imagined killing herself, but instead ended up only implementing new ways to cause herself problems, as if being in jeopardy might actually bring him back. But as he wasn’t coming back anytime soon, the whole situation was basically an exercise in futility. The only reason she got in trouble in the first place was to spend time with him.

***

Marge immediately knew she’d fucked up, but there was nothing she could say or do to take it back. The bitch had her now. She sighed and started tearing up her report.

Fuck me.

They both knew that Marge’s slip of the tongue was Sarah’s get-out-of-jail-free card, and she would play it. Oh, how she’d play it.

Because Sarah was most definitely not her father’s daughter. And that was the other half of the problem.

2 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE

Tweet Details:
TOWY “farmers” now estimated at over 2 million worldwide

“I can hack his email account if you want.”

Charlie had, of course, already done so.

Anne just looked at her son. She was vaguely aware of how unhappy Charlie had been ever since she’d married Brad, but more and more she’d found ways to dull her own pain that had probably been blinding her to just how separate he’d become.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Charlie,” she said carefully, not wanting to start an argument. They never argued when Jim was alive. They’d been a family then. What they were now was something else entirely.

“He’s cheating on you, Mom,” Charlie said. He knew this to be true from the emails of course, but couldn’t say so. Subconsciously she knew he was right, but Anne had not yet been able to face the reality of her irreparably broken marriage.

She slapped him, causing his eyes to grow wide and his jaw to go slack. His mother had never once hit him in all his years. Charlie was almost happy about it; at least it showed signs of life, but the look of absolute devastation in his mother’s eyes made it too hard to be happy about much of anything.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, almost like a prayer, but there was no taking back the words that had hurt her so. No act of contrition could ever undo what he’d done in a simple moment of frustration. The look in his mother’s eyes was a look of utter worthlessness, and Charlie would have gladly given life and limb if he could reverse time and take it all back. What made it worse was that he knew his mother wanted the very same thing.

She lowered her head in her hands and began to cry.

Charlie tried everything, but she was inconsolable. His stepfather had made his mother feel increasingly bad about herself over the last couple of years, and try as he did to cheer her up, Charlie knew at some point there was a line that had been crossed, and even her only child could not bring her back. For the first time in his life he understood what a soul mate really was, because he knew that his father had been that for her. Losing her husband had taken something from deep inside that not even Charlie could ever replace.

She had her good days, of course, but for the most part the bad days began to overwhelm her. Where once he had been able to elicit a laugh with one of the jokes they’d shared from when he was a boy, it seemed like her smiles were mere ghostly representations of a time in their lives that would never return. His suggestion of what they both knew, that her marriage was a sham, seemed not to be something from which she would ever recover.

“Bessie’s out of her tank, Mom!”

Anne looked up from her newspaper at her son. She’d read the same story several times now and couldn’t seem to grasp what it meant. Charlie was smiling down at her hopefully, with that same expression that made her so sad every time she saw it cross his face. It was in his eyes, something no mother should ever have to see in her child.

It was pity.

She tried to focus on what he was saying, but suddenly she was taken back to that terrible Saturday years ago, looking up at her eleven year-old son.

“Daddy won’t wake up.”

She was sitting in the chair she had slept in, reading the morning newspaper, and when she looked into the eyes of her son, that was when she knew that her husband was dead.

Anne jumped up and went to the back of the house, followed by her only child, and the two of them shared a moment no mother and son, or anyone, should ever have to share.

They looked down at the body of her husband and his father.

“Mom, what are you doing?” Charlie screamed, and she was jolted from her memory.

Anne was standing in the middle of her bedroom, staring at the empty bed.

“What’s happening?” She looked at Charlie, and there was only fear, because he knew that she had been, for a moment, completely lost inside her head, which they both knew was an increasingly dangerous place to be.

Charlie guided her back to the living room and didn’t attempt to remind her of the joke they’d shared about Bessie, his tarantula that she had, against every ounce of better judgment, allowed him to get after the death of his father. She had worried that he’d developed a morbid fascination with death around that time, looking up terrible things on his new computer and behaving oddly. She considered taking him to a therapist, concerned that he might develop suicidal thoughts or urges, but he seemed to calm down a bit after he got the spider, as if his interests were a wide-cast net that he’d learned to focus more narrowly in order to catch whatever prey he’d been looking for.

Their Bessie joke had been the first bit of humor they’d shared after her husband died, the first time laughter had returned to their home, and Charlie’s mother had loved the crazy spider for that.

He’d found Bessie on the Internet, and she’d let him buy the arachnid and a terrarium for his room. It was only a month after the death of his father, and though she hated the thing initially and would have preferred a dog or even a goldfish, she had always recognized the fact that her son was unique, and she indulged him. She had to admit it looked rather delicate and even beautiful at times, as long as it wasn’t moving. She cringed to see those spindly legs in operation, but that was just the sort of thing that little boys think are cool, and Charlie spent hours and hours in his room, watching Bessie in fascination. The females supposedly lived much longer than the males, something she could never bear to tease him about, given the circumstances.

So it had been a shock when her son emerged from his room and told her that his spider had escaped its enclosure.

“What?” she very nearly screamed. “Oh my God!”

And then she saw him smile; an event that had been all too rare of late, and she knew that she’d been had.

Her jaw dropped and then she got the giggles, which turned into laughter, which morphed into something akin to real guffaws. For a while she could hardly breathe, and it was infectious. The two of them laughed until they cried. Charlie actually doubled over and collapsed into her lap like a child, and though he was much too big for it, she held him in her arms and rocked him like a baby until their laughter subsided.

It seemed like they’d reached a milestone in their life after Jim, the first time either one of them really felt safe since he’d passed. They felt
close
, an intimacy they’d not shared since Charlie was a baby, and the bond forged that day around the circumstance of a silly joke had lasted until the day she no longer responded in the usual way. The day she forgot herself and her son and everything they’d gone through together.

Charlie had never failed to get a smile out of his mother, or been facetiously directed to stay in his room until he ran across his creepy pet, until that day. The day he lost any hope of bringing her back to her old self.

And he desperately wanted to do just that. It had been his single-minded obsession for months.

For the first time, Charlie knew he would never be his father. His mother had chosen another man, his hated stepfather, and the full weight of that choice had never borne down on him until the moment that his mother didn’t recognize his attempt to save her.

Charlie began to withdraw from the world, much as his mother had done, and though he knew where he was headed, he was unable to stop himself. Like a train that had jumped the tracks, there was only one place his journey was going to end.

It really was similar to what he’d read about people who’d been in car accidents, when time had slowed and the impact, while inevitable, was both minutely observable and inescapable. Charlie was trapped in that ‘moment before,’ the instant when you know something very bad is going to happen and all you can do is watch and wait.

It was while he was waiting that he met a girl named Sarah and introduced her to his other online friend
,
clairebea
r
.

1 YEAR, 11 MONTHS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE

REUTERS News at 6:08 p.m. EDT

NEW YORK CITY (AP) – The United Nations formally announced the establishment of a special advisory commission to deal with the worldwide phenomenon known as the TOWY crisis, appointing former Surgeon General of the United States William Bradford Chase as its head. The Advisory Commission on TOWY Neutralization and Opposition Worldwide, or ACTNOW, will hold meetings beginning next week while the General Assembly is in session, with permanent commission members to be named in conjunction with recommendations from The Second and Third Committees. The TOWY crisis has now claimed almost thirteen thousand lives globally, including both perpetrators and random victims, but the exponential increase in deaths over the past three months and the recent incident during Congressional hearings has raised its profile among member nations, leading to the dissolution of the TOWY Ad Hoc Committee in favor of a semi-permanent commission. The practice, which originated in the United States, has now spread to almost every corner of the globe through social media in less tha
n
two year
s
, and the suicide rates in some areas have more than doubled.

In the weeks after she’d slapped her son for the first time in his life, Anne Sanderson seemed to fall into an even deeper depression. She knew deep down that Charlie was probably right about her husband; there had been far too many late nights at the office and business trips that were extended over a weekend.

But she didn’t want to know.

It was as if she was trapped in some horrible soap opera, filled with the requisite extra-marital clichés and tropes and it had all been scripted and timed down to the second and there would be no deviations even if she found the strength to rouse herself from her stupor, which she most certainly could not do.

It was painful for her and painful for her son, but all she could do was watch and wait and hope for it all to end.

Charlie grew more morose by the day. He spent almost all of his time ensconced in his room at the computer, and there was no one to bring him out of his shell. At least, no one his mother knew about.

***

r u fukn srs?

Charlie blinked. He wasn’t sure what to type in response to this girl, as usual. She was like no one he’d ever met, well, “met” if you counted Internet forums in general and sites for people suffering from depression in particular. For all he knew she was some fat, forty-seven year-old hermaphrodite from Cleveland instead of a hot young computer hacker from the next state over.

For some reason, he chose to take her avatar at face value, which was a thumbnail of a girl with long brown hair and dark, intense eyes who seemed to be everywhere Charlie looked these days, which was mostly in chat rooms filled with some of the saddest people he’d ever encountered.

He’d seen the same user name on three or four different sites over several months before he dared address her. Charlie was a lurker, mostly, fascinated by the exquisite suffering of anonymous strangers. Sometimes he googled their screen names and tried to figure out as much as he could about their lives if their stories interested him. So many people with tragedy and suffering in their lives, all looking for solace in the posts of electronic strangers.

Some said misery loves company and some said that people starving in North Korea didn’t affect one’s appetite whatsoever. Charlie wasn’t sure, but there was something about the forums that kept him hanging on.

Something about
her.

She was outrageous and outspoken and had been banned from two sites that he knew of because of her behavior. Nonetheless, she intrigued him. Even when she was rude and downright unkind, there was something about her insight that cut through the usual blather like a knife and got to the heart of the problem. A humanity that could not be denied.

Empathy, he thought, although from her bitterly caustic persona, he would never have accused her of such a thing. And he could tell, to her, it would be just that.

An accusation.

Once Charlie stayed up all night watching an amazing thread in which
unwanted_image
seemed to talk a desperate woman from the Midwest out of killing herself and her disabled child. Charlie didn’t know whether others had attempted to call the authorities or contact the owners of the website, but for several hours it felt like just the three of them, the despondent woman, her unlikely savior, and himself, observing from the shadows. The moderators were all but useless; even those supposedly trained to deal with such people eventually hung back and allowed the anti-troll to work her magic.

Not long after that was when he first “spoke” to her, with an offhand and indirect comment on a subject long forgotten. She had responded immediately, not allowing him to remain on the periphery of the conversation, as was his practice.

wtf d u kno abt it?
were her first words to him, a phrase they would eventually share as a kind of milestone in their friendship, much like the tarantula-on-the-loose joke Charlie and his mother had shared.

Even then, he never quite knew how to respond.

r u fukn srs?

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He was always overly cautious with her, for some reason. Hell, he knew the reason. It was as obvious as the bristles on Bessie’s back. Just another defense mechanism.

u thr chikless?

He didn’t like it when she got too aggressive and now it was directed at him. She was like a powder keg, filled with a rage for which she never sought help from the others. Her participation appeared to be strictly one-sided, only as a commenter, never a confessor, although Charlie suspected the truth was that commentary was her therapy. He saw subtle hints the others in her threads seemed to miss beneath her rough, bombastic exterior. Clues that told him her problems might not be all that dissimilar to his own.

:D

That was unexpected. In all of his time observing her online, he had never seen her post such a symbol. She was definitely not an emoticon-type girl.

Charlie couldn’t help himself.

He typed:
lol

She responded quickly
:
cheesdick

That’s more like it
.
he replied. Charlie, unlike most teenagers and possibly most human beings who texted, generally disliked abbreviations and shortcuts and the lack of grammar and capitalization so inherent in electronic communication, whether it was on his phone or in forums.

There was a long pause, too long for Sarah, and for a moment he thought he’d lost her. He’d spent months cultivating their relationship, such as it was, and he’d been waiting for this moment, and he’d blown it. At that instant he realized that he had actually thought of little else for a very long time.
unwanted_image
had been his savior just as surely as that woman from Minnesota with the disabled kid, and he’d completely fucked it up.

“Shit.”

He waited. Nothing.

He was about to slam his keyboard when she finally responded.

call me

“Whoa.”

What’s your number?

He almost added a snarky sobriquet at the end, but decided against it. If she was actually reaching out to him in the real world, maybe she needed a friend.

She did.

They spoke on the phone for hours that night. It was the first real conversation Charlie had had in weeks. Her story spilled out like a river, long dammed and ready to rock and roll. And it turned out that Charlie had been right.

Aside from their personalities and general areas of interest, they actually had quite a bit in common.

***

On the night his mother decided to kill herself, Charlie was two hundred miles away meeting Sarah face-to-face for the very first time. It never occurred to Anne that her son would realize immediately that she had picked that night on purpose because he was away; she was a little too far gone for that. Ironically, had she not been more doped up than usual on anti-depressants, she might have chosen another night, and Charlie might have been around to stop her.

As it turned out, Anne Sanderson had finally made a decision with results that worked out exactly as she had planned.

Over the course of several months, she had become more and more estranged from her husband, and though she had slapped Charlie when he suggested Brad was having an affair, she finally decided to find out for herself. It quickly became an obsession, and while her son Charlie was following around an electronic troll waiting for just the right moment to begin a relationship, so was his mother shadowing a real one, looking for the proper moment to end her own.

Had either Charlie or his mother known of the other’s fixation, chances are that much subsequent tragedy would have been avoided, but such was not the case. As Charlie fixated on the personality known a
s
unwanted_imag
e
, his mother became more and more determined to catch her husband in the act of adultery, so much so that it was almost all that she thought about. She
knew
he was cheating, but she had to
know.

As a child, Anne’s maternal grandfather, who would eventually grow up to marry a woman with an anxiety disorder, had been told by a friend that there was treasure inside the bricked over fireplace in the one-room school house they both attended. The boy thought of the treasure so often that he came to accept the reality of its existence and focused instead on how to retrieve it. He
knew
it was there, and he had to
get it.

So he was shocked when he worked all day one Saturday chipping away at the mortar around a single, loose-looking brick, and when finally pulling it free, reached his arm as far as it would go into the void and feeling nothing in the dark but dust.

He had tricked his mind into accepting a fantasy as reality, and so had difficulty when the time came to perceive things as they really were.

Anne, of course, had the opposite problem. She had tricked her mind into believing a fantasy that she knew wasn’t real, and it was oh, so easy to revert to reality. Dangerously easy. But she couldn’t catch him in the act. He wore plausible deniability around his shoulders like some evil cloak of invincibility, urging her to take another pill and give up her paranoid delusions, all the while purposely feeding them to toy with her emotions, which only depressed her more.

When Charlie told his mother not to wait up, that he was going to see a girl, the conversation that might have passed between them as casual information even a week before turned into something more.

“What’s her name?” she asked, and Charlie, who might have once reacted sullenly because of their fight, stopped to tell his mother all about Sarah, leaving out some parts, of course, such as where they’d met. It was the first substantial conversation they’d had in weeks, and they were like parched Bedouins in the desert. It was almost as if they had lost nothing of their relationship, but then the conversation turned, and it was as if the easy words had been a mirage.

“You were right, Charlie,” his mother suddenly said.

“About what?”

“Brad. I know he’s cheating.”

Charlie’s brow furrowed, his eyes dark. Brad had always been a sore spot between them, and the last time his name had been spoken it had been ugly.

“What are you doing with him, Mom?” Charlie nearly cried. Years of emotion poured out of him, all of the anger and bitterness about the betrayal of his father’s memory and their ruined lives flowed forth like a nasty, poison river.

Anne just stood there and let it wash over her; she was almost happy for him to finally let it out. She should have been more open to it before.

When Charlie was done, he felt tired and empty, and his mother took him in her arms and held him, whispering over and over in his ear, “I’ll make things right, son. I’ll make things right.”

When Charlie finally pulled away, his mother’s eyes were peaceful for the first time in a very long time. He even thought he saw a glimmer of hope in there, somewhere. She wasn’t happy, but she was, how could he describe it?
Reconciled.

“You enjoy your time with Sarah, son,” his mother said. “Life is short.” And she smiled so sweetly that Charlie felt tears welling up in his eyes. He had been such an asshole to have stayed mad at her for so long. He could see that now. Everything seemed clear to him, now.

“I’ve gotta go, Mom,” he said. “It’s a long drive.”

She nodded. “Yes. It’s getting late.”

Something bothered him about the way she said that, and it wasn’t, of course, the fact that they were the very last words he ever heard his mother say. He had no idea of that at the time. It was the way she said it, with an almost dream-like quality. As if she had not actually accepted reality, but rather stepped into a fantasy, a world in which everything would be all right.

And both of them knew that just wasn’t true.

Charlie made the three and a half hour drive in three, and he and Sarah were halfway through their meal when his mother sent him a text just before stepping off the vanity stool in her bedroom, swinging just a bit before the kicking stopped.

As soon as Charlie left, Anne had driven to her husband’s office and finally caught her husband in the act, laughing and kissing his secretary as they left for the evening, probably to some fancy hotel downtown.

She doesn’t look like the cheap motel type,
Anne thought, giggling at her insight.

She entered the building after they’d left, and used the key to her husband’s office she had managed to keep from him, despite all of his precautions. There were several of his employees there, and she smiled and greeted them each by name, explaining that her husband had forgotten some papers and asked her to stop by.

They knew she was lying, of course, but were too embarrassed to say anything at all. Their boss had just left with the woman they all knew to be his mistress; whatever else happened, it was none of their concern.

Anne went through his files and found what she was looking for, and used the series of neatly typed numbers to open the safe that was hidden in the floor beneath his desk. In spite of her generally drugged state, there was something purifying about her decision. Something that cleared her mind a bit. She hadn’t really known whether she could do it until her conversation with Charlie, but somehow she knew he would be all right.