Charlie and Mindy Bk. 04 Ch. 06

"When I went into the closet to hang up some clothes, I found Mom and Dad's suitcases and those packages from the airline, where we left them when we were in a hurry to get back to school."

She stopped to sniffle a bit. I sat down on the floor beside her; I put my arm around her and drew her closer. She rested her head against me, and she spoke again: "When I saw them I knew I should wait for you, but I couldn't help myself. I just had to see what was in those packages.

"I opened the little package first. It had Dad's keys in it, along with his billfold, his passport, and the other junk he always carried in his pockets.

"And then I opened the other package. It had Mom's purse in it. I dumped it on the bed and I found her passport, some of her makeup, and the other stuff she always had with her. And her keys.

"I was thinking about getting their suitcases when I noticed that one of the keys was an old-fashioned one. I looked more closely, and it hit me; I tried that key in the trunk. It worked.

"I know I should have waited, and we should have opened it together. But I didn't.

"These books… They're Mom's diary. It goes back several years before you were born, to when she was a teenager. I didn't even know she kept a diary.

"Charlie, I'm so sorry I didn't wait for you. Can you forgive me?"

Her tear-filled face looked up at me. I remember thinking, too, then, that I wished she had waited. But ever since we we'd been children, back to the earliest beginnings of my memory, I hadn't been able to hold a grudge against my little sister for more than a few seconds.

"Of course, Mindy," I said. "Nothing you would ever do could make me feel so bad that I wouldn't forgive you," I said, holding her tightly against me. I bent down and kissed her forehead. Her arms encircled me and held me.

And I went on. "It's all right. I'm just sorry I wasn't here to hold you when you got so sad."

Her crying intensified a bit. She sobbed out, "You're too good to me, Charlie. You don't know the worst of it, yet, dear."

Maybe, I remember thinking, there really is something I don't know—she's never called me "dear" before. Still, I couldn't imagine what Mom might have written that would make what my little sister, my lover, had done as unforgivable as she seemed to think it was.

She continued, "This is something we should have read together, Charlie. I'm so sorry I dug into Mom's trunk without you.

"Read here," she went on. She reached for one of her toilet paper bookmarks in the book on her lap, opened the book to that page, and pointed at a paragraph. That paragraph was the first of an entry dated the nineteenth of the June in the year before I was born. I read:

This afternoon, I told Mom that I'm two-and-a-half months pregnant. She was very upset that I'd gotten myself pregnant without being married. "What kind of woman would do this thing?" she asked. "Not my daughter," she shouted angrily in answer to her own question. "Not mine!" She was so enraged that she reverted to her childhood Russian. She called me "nekul'turnyaya," her deadliest insult. And then, as if I hadn't already fed enough fuel to the fire, I confessed that David, her son and my brother, is the unborn child's father. She exploded; she threw me out of her house, saying she never wants to see me or hear from me again. Or David, either.

The arithmetic was easy—too easy. I did it in my head in an instant. When I reached the inescapable conclusion, I felt like an elephant had stepped on me. I was born on the tenth of January—the January next after the June in which Mom had written what I'd just read. I knew who that baby—doubly illegitimate, because conceived by unwed parents who were brother and sister—grew up to be. The baby that was forming in my mother's womb on the day she made that entry in her diary had been me.

(To be continued)

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