We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel Read online

  My mother parked right beside the steps, careful to make sure the Volvo lined up with them perfectly.

  Callie was the first one out of the car. She bounded up the stairs, straight to the brass doors with their yellowing Plexiglas panes. She cupped her hands against the windows, trying to see past the film until my mother caught up with her and pulled on her shoulder.

  After a few minutes, through the cloudy glass we could see a heavy form coming toward us. The whole brass doorframe buzzed, and then the form behind the glass grew larger and darker. It leaned on the handle and held the door open. It was the guard, a squat man with the whitest, thinnest skin I had ever seen. So thin that you could see the purple and red veins of his balding skull. He had a regular white dress shirt on, with two gold epaulets Velcroed to the shoulders and a clear plastic badge clipped above his heart, with a ragged paper insert with the laser-printed epitaph SECURITY.

  As we shuffled through the door, he held out his hand. “Lester Potter.” He tapped the badge on the front of his shirt. Then, “Dr. Paulsen will be down in a minute.”

  When we were all through the door, he strode to a small desk in the lobby, sat down, and opened his newspaper, at which point we apparently became invisible to him.

  It was hard to make out the size of the lobby. Everything was covered in dark wood and velvet, which gave the room a gravitas it maybe didn’t deserve. The whole back wall was a grimy pink marble slab with roman numerals and Latin epigrams carved into its face. It was too murky to see anything more specific than that. The Toneybee kept the lights banked low: weak wattage bulbs made weaker by all the green glass lampshades. On either side of the room were heavy leather double doors, studded with brass. All that marble gave off a cold, dank sweat that hung in the air and clung to our skin and chilled us. Lester, in his chair, had buttoned a cardigan over his makeshift uniform. A modern standing metal lamp, the kind with many arms, the kind you would find in a teenager’s bedroom, stood beside his desk.

  Callie wore a pair of jelly sandals, and the thick, plastic soles sank deep into the heavy carpet, leaving bite marks in the pile. I brushed my hand against one of the heavy oak walls, felt the grain of wood scratch against my neon fingernail polish, and shivered.

  It was clear that none of us belonged there. And Lester Potter did not belong there, either—his makeshift uniform even shabbier and suspect, as he propped his elbows on his little desk and strained to read the newsprint in the glare of the lamp. None of us belonged there and we were all nervously ignoring the fact.

  My father walked the length of the room, Callie trailing after him. He wandered around, pushing on some of the doors. Lester Potter lowered his newspaper to watch but said nothing. My father settled in the center of the room, where a statue of a man stood, stocky and messy haired, BEETHOVEN carved into the base. My father glanced at Lester Potter and then, with a studied casualness, leaned against the statue, crossing his ankles. Callie reached for his hand.

  Lester Potter still watched my father. He was leaning over his desk now as if he was waiting for something to happen. But he said nothing. My mother opened her purse and began searching its contents for an imaginary stick of gum. My cheeks burned and I focused on the brightest thing in the room—the white crown of Lester Potter’s head, the veins of his scalp glowing through the gloom.

  It felt like a full ten minutes before we heard the shush shush shush of rubber soles on carpet.

  “Hello, hello,” a woman’s voice stuttered. “I’m sorry to be late.”

  My mother was already smiling eagerly. “Dr. Paulsen.”

  Dr. Marietta Paulsen was the Toneybee Institute’s research director. It was she who had conceived of the whole experiment, had handpicked us to lead it. She came at us with a nervous skip.

  I’d already decided, months ago, when I’d first heard her name, that I would not allow myself to like Dr. Paulsen. I saw now that she was much older than my mother, but she wore her hair like a little girl’s, cut close to her chin, fine bangs held back with two rose tortoiseshell barrettes. She had tiny pale eyes, set close together at the center of her face. They flickered back and forth in a way that made me feel both sorry for her and uneasy for myself. She was very tall. I noted, with a rush of satisfaction, that she had a wide, flat, obvious backside. She probably ties that cardigan around her waist to try and hide it, I told myself. She wore a gray wool skirt and an ivory-colored blouse, thick black stockings and bright green clogs and on her hands, a pair of blue latex gloves.

  “I hope the drive was all right. Laurel, Charles, you’ve been here before, but still, it’s easy to get lost.” As she spoke, Dr. Paulsen peeled off her gloves, balled them up, and stuffed them into her blouse’s breast pocket, a rubber boutonniere.

  She hesitated for a moment as if she was deciding something. Then she reached out and grasped my mother’s shoulders, pulled her into an awkward half embrace. “It’s so good to see you, Laurel,” she said into the top of my mother’s hair. “I can’t tell you how excited everyone here is. We really can’t wait to get started.”

  My mother, pressed under the crook of Dr. Paulsen’s arm, tried not to look startled. She lightly patted Dr. Paulsen’s back. “We’re all excited, too.”

  Dr. Paulsen let my mother go and turned to the rest of us. She rounded her shoulders forward and lowered her chin so that she could meet my father’s eye. “Good to see you again, Charles.” She shook his hand briskly. For Callie, who held my father’s hand, Dr. Paulsen put her hands on her knees and squatted, looked full into Callie’s face. “Lovely to meet you.”

  She stood up and turned to me.

  “And you, too, Charlotte.” Her eyes flicked briefly over my T-shirt, the one I had worn despite my mother telling me it was too tight. To Dr. Paulsen’s credit, she only frowned her disapproval for an instant before she met my eyes and smiled. She held out her hand.

  When she parted her lips to grin, behind her white, white teeth, I caught a glimpse of her tongue. It was the yellowiest, craggiest, driest tongue I’d ever seen. It surely did not belong in that mouth, in her, and I shot a look to my mother, who widened her eyes, who gave one quick shake of her head that told me to ignore it. I turned to Dr. Paulsen and smiled very widely back at her.

  Dr. Paulsen turned to Lester Potter, nodded a thanks to him, and then led us through the double leather doors to the hallway beyond. The hallway smelled like furniture polish and rotting brocade and underneath that something else, something warm and dark and rude. Wild animals.

  “This is the west wing.” Dr. Paulsen walked ahead of us. “Your apartment’s here, on the second floor.”

  “Where are the chimps?” Callie asked.

  “They live in the east wing,” Dr. Paulsen said. “But we’ll skip that for now. It would be too overwhelming to visit today.”

  All along the hallways were offices and labs and conference rooms, and Dr. Paulsen made a show of stepping into each one. The rooms had high, arched ceilings and gilt windowpanes that clashed with the wheelie chairs and gray-faced conference tables. One large room was a working lab with banks of counters and sinks and refrigerators, the labs’ sinks piled high with dirty glass vials. The animal smell was strongest there, battling with the reek of warm bleach and floor wax.

  Every room we entered, Dr. Paulsen pointed to each of us and said, “Laurel and Charles and Callie and Charlotte,” to whoever was inside. Mostly women in shorts and tank tops, despite the clammy air-conditioning. No one wore a lab coat like Dr. Paulsen’s. While Dr. Paulsen introduced us, I could feel them looking curiously at me and Callie. But before any of them could step forward to introduce themselves, Dr. Paulsen ushered us out of the room again. “Too many names to learn today.” We kept walking.

  “There are twenty researchers working at the institute,” Dr. Paulsen explained. “They all live off campus. We have eighteen chimpanzees in total. Plus the ground staff, the cleaning crew, myself, a small administrative staff and security.”

  “Oh, we’ve al
ready met security,” my father said.

  “Yes. Lester,” Dr. Paulsen said sheepishly. She slowed her pace until she walked beside my father. “There’s only one of him, so we can’t have him always at the gate—he can’t be two places at once. We really should probably have more security, you know, those animal rights protesters. It can get nasty. But we’re privately funded, thanks to our founder, Miss Toneybee-Leroy. We’re very low profile. She’s made sure of that. We’re kind of off the radar. Or at least we have been.”

  We kept walking, Callie threatening to break into an honest run until my mother caught her hand and gave it a shake. They walked ahead of us, Dr. Paulsen studying them. Without breaking stride, she drew a piece of chalk from her pocket, flicked her tongue over its stub, and then slipped it back. I was the only one who saw her do it.

  At the end of the hallway was a plain wooden staircase. “This is the private entrance to your apartment,” Dr. Paulsen told us. “We’ll get you settled in.”

  But beside the stairs was a large oil portrait banked with lights, the brightest we’d seen in the institute so far. The plaque on the portrait read MISS JULIA TONEYBEE-LEROY, FOUNDER, 1929.

  It was hard to tell from the painting if Julia Toneybee-Leroy was meant to be beautiful. She was a thin-boned woman with a fleshy jaw. She wore a green evening gown with long sleeves and a neckline cut too low, and she was sitting in an armchair. A thick curl of dull gold hair was painted against her neck. Her eyes were too frank. It was the gaze of a zealot. I didn’t know that word then, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have known enough, the first time seeing her, to use it for Miss Julia Toneybee-Leroy. I only knew that something inside of me flipped over when I saw that picture.

  In the painting, beside her, on a table, held up by a stick through the skull, were the bright, white bones of a squat skeleton.

  “Why are there baby bones in that picture?” Callie asked.

  Dr. Paulsen blushed a painful red. “Those bones are the remains of the first-ever chimp to live at the Toneybee Institute.”

  “Oh,” Callie said. She did not sound convinced.

  “Her name was Daisy,” Dr. Paulsen offered.

  Callie was still gazing up at the picture, trying to give it the benefit of the doubt. “How many chimps die here, like that?”

  “Oh, it’s not like that, Callie,” Dr. Paulsen rushed to explain. “Daisy died a long time ago, from a cold. There was nothing they could do. She wasn’t used to the winters. But we’re properly heated now and we take good care of everyone here.”

  “Well, is she still alive?” Callie nodded at the woman in the painting.

  “Julia Toneybee-Leroy? Yes, very much so.”

  “That doesn’t seem very fair,” Callie muttered, and my mother reached out and rubbed her arm, a comfort and a warning. “It’s okay, Callie.”

  Dr. Paulsen hurried us up the flight of stairs and away from the troubling picture. We arrived in a short, overly lit hall. This one had only one door, again of plain wood, with a buzzer set in the wall. Dr. Paulsen unlocked the door and we filed behind her into the front room. Our boxes had already been delivered and they were piled in towers all around us, but the furniture belonged to the Toneybee. We’d sold all of ours back in Dorchester. “They’re giving us brand-new furniture,” my mother had crowed. “Can you imagine?”

  The couch in the front room was just as saggy and broken down as the one we’d had in Boston. There were also a few wooden end tables that looked rich: dark wood carved with heavy curlicues. But when I stood beside one, I saw that the flourishes were nicked and the tops of the tables were scarred and printed with an infinity of fading water rings. I leaned against the table and it tottered slightly back and forth. One back leg was shorter than the others.

  Callie ran ahead of us, deeper into the apartment, throwing doors open as she went. I was slower, making a show of being unimpressed. I trailed my fingers over the freshly painted walls, pressed on the glass in the windowpanes. Behind me, I could hear my mother and Dr. Paulsen. Dr. Paulsen murmured something very low and my mother’s answer back was quick and light and clattering, her new voice here, overly bright.

  They’d decided something. My mother called to me and my father, “Dr. Paulsen thinks it’s best we all meet Charlie now.”

  CHARLIE LIVED BEHIND a door in the living room. He had a large, oval-shaped space with low ceilings and no windows and no furniture. Instead, there were bundles of pastel-colored blankets heaped up on the scarred wooden floor. Even from where I stood, I could tell the blankets were the scratchy kind, cheap wool. The room was full of plants—house ferns and weak African violets and nodding painted ladies. “They’re here to simulate the natural world,” Dr. Paulsen told us, but I thought it was an empty gesture. Charlie had never known any forests and yet Dr. Paulsen assumed some essential part of him pined for them.

  Charlie sat beside a fern. A man knelt beside him. “That’s Max, my assistant,” Dr. Paulsen said.

  Max was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt, his lab coat balled up on the floor. He was pale, with messy red hair. He was trying to grow a beard, probably just graduated from college a couple years earlier.

  In front of us now, Charlie had gotten hold of Max’s glasses and was methodically pressing his tongue against each lens. Max tried to coax the glasses away, but every time he got close, Charlie only bent forward and licked him, too, all the while looking Max in his small brown eyes. Max broke some leaves off the fern, ran them around Charlie’s ears and under his chin, distracting him.

  “They’re playing,” Dr. Paulsen explained.

  But it seemed more like a very gentle disagreement. Charlie shook his head at the leaves but stayed doggedly focused on tonguing Max’s glasses.

  “Max,” Dr. Paulsen called, and he squinted and waved. He picked up Charlie and brought him to us.

  As he came closer, Charlie let the glasses hang loose in his hands, and he craned his neck toward Dr. Paulsen. Now he looked like a baby. Taped around his waist was a disposable diaper. A few of his stray hairs were caught in the tape’s glue, and he kept dipping his fingers under the rough plastic hem, trying to worry them loose.

  My father went to him first. He gently rubbed the top of Charlie’s head, not wanting to scare him. Charlie flinched and my father moved away. Next came Callie, who smiled and smiled, trying to get Charlie to bare his teeth back, but he wouldn’t do it. Then it was my turn.

  I reached out my hand to touch him. I thought he would be bristly and sharp, like a cat, but his hair was fine, so soft it was almost unbearable. I could feel, at its downy ends, the heat spreading up from his skin beneath. I pulled my hand away quickly. The scent of him stayed on my fingers, old and sharp, like a bottle of witch hazel.

  Charlie yawned. His breath was rancid, like dried, spoiled milk. Later, when he got used to us, he would run his lips up and down our hands so that all of our skin, too, smelled like Charlie’s mouth and the hefty, mournful stench of wild animal.

  My mother was the last to hold him. She was crying and she said through her tears, her hands shaking as she reached out to touch him, “Isn’t he beautiful?”

  I wanted to say something snide. I wanted to say what I had been telling her since she told us about this experiment: that this was crazy, that she was crazy, that it would never work. I wanted to sign bullshit. But I looked into my mother’s face, wet and wide open with joy, and I couldn’t help myself.

  “Yes,” I told her, “he’s beautiful.”

  DR. PAULSEN STAYED for dinner, but none of us even pretended to eat. We were all watching my mother and Charlie. She sat at the head of the table, Charlie on her lap, a baby bottle in her hand, trying to get him to drink. She kept her face bent close to his, her chin butting the end of the bottle.

  Charlie spit the nipple out once, twice. Each time he rejected it, Dr. Paulsen’s hands rose up as if she wanted to push it back in his mouth herself. My mother only saw Charlie. She refused to be discouraged. The fifth time, he took it. Wit
h a loud, rude swallow he began to eat. He drank until the little plastic bag inside crumpled down on itself. He loved the bottle so much he wouldn’t give it up until my mother rolled a piece of lettuce and held it to his mouth. He parted his lips long enough for her to pull his empty away.

  Dr. Paulsen studied them, her hand close to her mouth in a fist, faint yellow streaks at the corners of her lips. She dropped her hand and I saw the chalk fall back into her pocket. She wiped her fingers on the hem of her sweater.

  She turned to my father. “You’re ready to begin teaching at Courtland County High?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Especially because Charlotte’s going there, too. She and I will help each other—you know, find our seat in the lunchroom and make friends and all that. Maybe we can even share a locker.”

  But Dr. Paulsen didn’t laugh. She was watching my mother and Charlie again. We all were. “And how do you think you’ll like teaching at Charlotte’s school?” she repeated.

  My mother looked up. “It’s getting late for him to be awake, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Dr. Paulsen hugged each of us good-bye. She patted Charlie quickly on the head. At the front door she stopped, turned. “He likes another drink before bed. Make sure to sign it to him, tell him what you’re doing.”

  She took a step backward, still watching Charlie. But he had set her aside, was concentrating on twining his fingers through my mother’s hair.

  When Dr. Paulsen was gone, my mother told us it was time for bed.

  Our first luxury at the Toneybee: Callie and I got separate rooms. Hers was at one end of the hall and mine was at the other.