Page 33 of Return to Whitmore
“Don’t you think you should have asked me for permission first?” Jack said to Ralph, clapping his shoulder to let Ralph know he was joking.
Ralph beamed. He looked like the happiest person Charlotte had ever seen.
That night, Charlotte, Jack, Ralph, Kathy, and others in their Greenwich Village art community went out for a raucous night of drinking and celebrating. Ralph, who worked as ajournalist for several art magazines in the city, was a brilliant conversationalist and very good at remembering details about Charlotte’s friends. This was just one of the things Charlotte loved about him. The fact that she was never sure if she loved him as much as she’d loved Vincent felt like a part of life. Everyone loved their first love the most. It had been her first experience of love, her first go at it. But that didn’t make her love for Ralph any less special.
That night, when he’d had maybe one too many beers, Jack brought up the question of where they were going to live. “Are you going to move in with me and Charlotte?” He looked directly at Ralph, waiting for an answer.
Ralph laughed. “I can’t imagine we’ll do that, as much as we love you, Seth.”
“But Charlotte can’t leave our apartment,” Jack said. “I won’t give her up! I already lost her once before.”
Around the table, Charlotte’s friends’ smiles dimmed with confusion. Once before rang in the air over their table. Nobody save for Charlotte and Jack knew what it meant.
The bar felt suddenly ominous. Charlotte couldn’t imagine why Jack would try to give the game away like that. He was losing his edge, maybe. Or maybe he was tired of playing pretend.
“When did you lose each other before?” Ralph asked, tilting his head.
Jack’s face broke into a lopsided grin. “In our past lives!” he tried to joke. “Charlotte and I were meant to be best friends. Actually, we were meant to be sister and brother. We even sort of look alike, don’t we?”
Everyone agreed that they did, sort of. Charlotte tried to laugh it off, but there was a strange look behind Jack’s eyes, one that told her that nothing was all right.
A few days later, Charlotte was washing dishes in the kitchen, and Jack was at the kitchen table, writing notes to himself in a journal. Charlotte wasn’t privy to what was in the journal and often wondered if it was a list of all the lies Jack had told so that he could keep track of them. Drawing a breath, she cut the water, turned around, and asked, “Why did you say that the other night at the bar?”
Jack quit writing but kept his pen poised. “What do you mean?”
Charlotte knew he knew exactly what she meant. She remained quiet and crossed her arms.
Jack put the pen down. Finally, his eyes to the wall, he said, “The past few years haven’t gone the way I planned.”
“And how did you plan them?” Charlotte asked. She wanted to say, Nothing ever goes the way we plan. Don’t you know that by now?
“I planned to find Tio Angelo by now,” Jack said. “I planned to get to the bottom of what happened the night of the fire. But I’ve encountered one dead end after another.”
Charlotte rubbed her chest. “Maybe Tio Angelo really did die that night.”
Jack lent her an ominous glare. “It’s unlikely. Let’s just say that.”
“You haven’t shared more details,” Charlotte said, her voice breaking. “You haven’t let me help you as much as I want to.”
“You have to work on your career,” Jack pointed out. “I want you to focus on that.”
“What about your career?” Charlotte demanded. As far as she knew, Jack had continued to work odd jobs here and there before returning to Nantucket intermittently to “dig around” for details about Tio Angelo and their father and that night. He was wasting his life.
“Listen, Jack. Maybe there’s a time to let go of the past and move forward,” Charlotte said. “Maybe you can even take your name back again. We can explain to everyone that you were in witness protection or something. I don’t know. Or we can tell them the truth?”
Jack scoffed and got up from the table, closing his journal.
“And maybe it’s time to tell Mom where you are,” Charlotte said. “Allegra and Lorelei, too. They’ve thought you were dead for years and years. It would be a huge gift to them.”
Hovering in the doorway between the kitchen and his bedroom, Jack pressed his hand on the wall and took a breath. “I’ll think about it,” he said.
Charlotte’s heart leaped with excitement.
“Maybe at the wedding.” Charlotte dared herself to hope.
Jack turned and offered a soft smile, one that surprised her. “Maybe,” he said. “I didn’t know you could love anyone the way you loved Vincent.”
“I didn’t know it was allowed,” Charlotte agreed.
