Finding Charlie

Chapter Three

Chapter Three (Thursday)

I sat in my car with a Starbuck’s mocha Frappuccino. I’d only gotten about three hours of sleep. At 2:30 that morning I’d watched twenty-seven people, none of which were my sister, get off the bus from Las Vegas. There had been one girl in a hoodie who made me look twice. I leaned against my steering wheel and squinted into the dusk, but as she crossed the street to her ride, she let the hood fall. Her hair was blond.

            I went back to my apartment and tried to sleep, but I was so worried I’d miss my alarm that I watched the clock all night. I got up before the alarm even went off. I’d had time for a long shower and to sit in the drive-thru line at Starbucks. I’d made it to the lot at Pima Community College by 7:30.

            I perked up whenever a black car drove in the lot. All Carmen could tell me was that Isaac drove something “black and sporty.” I didn’t really know anything about cars myself. To me, that meant everything from a Corvette to a Taurus.

            I had printed off the photo of Isaac that Carmen sent me. It was a little square in the top left corner of the paper. I had it spread over the steering wheel and my eyes darted from the page to the world outside my window.

            Charlie was in her second year at Pima. When she’d graduated high school, she’d had no idea what she wanted to study. We all decided it made the most sense for her to figure it out at community college prices, get some of her basic requirements out of the way, and transfer to a more prestigious university when she was a junior. It seemed like a good plan. But in the last two years, Charlie had changed her mind so drastically that none of her courses even counted toward the same major. Creative writing, graphic design, accounting. This semester she was taking animal anatomy and clinical pathology and pharmacology; she had decided to be a vet tech.

            I had gone to the University of Arizona and lived at home until my last year of school, when I felt I had finally earned the right to my own life. Charlie graduated from high school and I moved into my own apartment the following July. A year later, I finished my degree andaccepted the position at Desert Oasis. I’d been working there for nearly a year.

            The day I moved out, Charlie helped by unpacking the boxes I hauled across town. She put away silverware and made my bed and affixed the phone numbers for all the local delivery restaurants to my refrigerator, under a photo magnet of the two of us posed by the otter exhibit at the Desert Museum. At the end of the night, instead of driving her home, I drove up Mt. Lemmon, stopping at one of our favorite pull outs. It was about twenty degrees cooler up there, looking over the edge of the cliff at the city lights or up at the stars. We sat on the hood of the car with our drive-thru sodas.

            We were talking about something like getting curtains for my kitchen when she started crying. Begrudgingly, I put my arm around her.  I couldn’t help feeling a little resentful that she couldn’t just be happy for me. She had to make it all about her. It had always been this way.

            “I’m not even that far away,” I reminded her.

            “But it’s not the same,” she whimpered.

            “Of course it’s not the same,” I said. “That’s life.”

            It turned out, Isaac drove a Firebird. When I saw him, there was no mistaking it. He had dark hair and a narrow face, a long nose, dark eyes and lashes. He was good looking, but a bit too thin. He wore black skinny jeans and a messenger bag hanging low on one shoulder, looking as if it might tip him over.