The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [64]
Charlotte slid down in her chair and hugged herself. “That’s when she came at me. And she scratched my face. It stung. My fingers had blood on them when I touched my cheek. ‘Get out!’ she yelled. ‘Get out!’
“So I ran back to my bedroom and wrapped myself up in the sheets. I could hear the sirens and the sound of all these footsteps on the stairs.”
Charlotte paused and took a sip from the glass of water.
“When my mother finally came in … it must have been an hour later. She tiptoed over to my bed. I was so scared, I wet my pants. I just wanted to shrink into the sheets and disappear.”
“ ‘Well, Charlotte,’ she said, her voice was so low I could hardly hear it. ‘Your sister is dead. I think you snuck into her room and you suffocated her. But you forgot to take your bear.’ ”
“ ‘I did not, Mother,’ I told her. ‘I did not! I’m the one who put her back to sleep.’ ”
Charlotte felt as if her ears had filled with water. There was a rushing sound. Her heart was beating so fast, she put her hand to her chest.
“She picked up a pair of pinking shears and she started to chop at my hair. And while she chopped, she talked. She told me that she wouldn’t tell on me, that the police would never know. ‘It would ruin your father’s career,’ she said. And then she said that she’d never wanted me, not even when I was a baby.”
Charlotte stopped speaking. Her body was trembling.
In a voice so soft Dr. Greene had to lean in to hear her, she said: “She told me that every time she felt me kick her in the belly, it reminded her of what she’d lost; of all the things she’d had to give up. She said I made her feel ugly, useless.”
Charlotte rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. “I couldn’t move, Doctor. I just sat there in bed and waited for her to finish.” Charlotte touched the top of her scalp, as if to heal the nicks, the broken skin that had been left by the tips of the shears thirty years before. “Then she stuck a mirror in front of my face. ‘Look at yourself, Charlotte,’ she said. ‘Ugly and useless. That’s all you’ll ever be.’ ”
Afterwards, she remembered Nanny coming in to console her. “Your hair will grow back,” she’d promised, washing away the mess of snot and tears from Charlotte’s face. And her nanny was right. It did grow back. But there had been times in the years since that morning when Charlotte, shorn of everything including hair and childhood illusions, would look into a mirror and swear that there was nothing there, no reflection.
“Charlotte? Charlotte?” The voice seemed as it were coming from the bottom of the sea.
She was gripping the edge of her chair so tightly, her knuckles had turned white.
When the doctor reached out to touch her, Charlotte shrank back into her chair.
“Charlotte, I am so sorry. But we have to stop now.”
Which is when Charlotte grinned. “We have to stop now!” she mimicked. “Is that all you can say after my breakthrough?”
“It’s a lot to process, dear. For both of us,” he replied, quietly.
She stiffened and glared at him. “Are you afraid to look at me, Doctor?”
Rummaging around his desk, the frail, elderly man picked up a prescription pad. “Of course not, Charlotte,” he said, scribbling on the pad. “But I’d like to give you something to help calm you down. Just until our next session.”
Snapping the brass fastener on her bag open and shut, open and shut, Charlotte stared vacantly out the office window. “Yeah, right,” she, finally, said, buttoning up her cardigan and snatching the slip of paper. “Thanks for your time.”
The doctor just nodded and continued writing on his legal pad.
39
Like a child who sits parked in front of television for hours and then sees the screen go dark, Charlotte felt hostile, disoriented, sluggish. Using her hand to shield her eyes from the bright sunlight, she tried to get her bearings. Even the tree-lined street outside Greene’s office, a street so familiar to her she could have run its length blindfolded, felt foreign to her. She was thinking of the cartoon she’d drawn, the one her mother gave when she came to visit. There