Charlie and Mindy Bk. 03 Ch. 05

"You," she said sternly, "are going to live a lot longer than that. Because I plan to, and I can't do it without you."

"Deal!" I replied.

She smiled. "Deal!"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We were to return to school that Friday. Mom would to take a few hours off from work that morning, in order to drive us to the airport in Denver. Our flight wasn't as early as Dad's had been, but it was early enough that neither Mindy nor I was particularly happy about it. We'd be leaving home around six-thirty in the morning so that we could get to the airport by eight for a nine-thirty flight.

Mom had been moody and subdued ever since Dad had left. I supposed that she must have missed him, and that maybe she was going through a stretch of hard time at work.

On Wednesday evening, Mom asked us to be packed by suppertime on Thursday, because she wanted to spend some time with us that evening. So we started getting our things together after our Thursday morning exercises—which were back to normal, Mindy's period having ended the previous day. We were pretty well finished before lunchtime, and we spent the afternoon snuggling and reviewing our French and our calculus.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

That Thursday, around eight, as I undertook the last of the scullion obligations that had resulted from the New Year's Eve bet I'd lost so spectacularly, Mom asked Mindy to come upstairs to the master bedroom with her. I reckoned that Mom wanted to have a girl-talk with her.

About twenty minutes later, as I finished in the kitchen, Mom came to the head of the stairs and asked me to come up and join her and Mindy. I thought I heard a catch in her voice as she did so, and, a moment later, when I walked into the master bedroom, I found Mindy sitting on the bed. She was crying; tears rolled gently down her cheeks. I looked toward Mom, wondering what was going on. She stood about eight feet from Mindy, and she looked older than her years. Her shoulders were bowed as if under intolerable weight, and her face was cold, severe.

Mom looked directly at me. She said, her voice full of despair and finality, "I know."

There was only one thing she could mean. I looked at Mindy more closely. Anger, grief, and apprehension distorted her face. But in spite of the burden of her own emotions, she gave me a look of reassurance.

"I know that you and Mindy are having sex with each other," Mom said bleakly.

I opened my mouth to say something, but no words came. There were no words.

"You don't need to say anything right now," Mom went on. She sat down on a chair that faced the bed.

My only thoughts at that moment were for Mindy, and I reacted without considering anything but her. Without even breaking step, I went directly to her where she sat on the bed that Mom and Dad shared—and I sat down beside her. I turned toward her, and I took my little sister, my lover, whom I loved beyond all things, into my arms. Her little body molded itself to me, her arms enfolded me, and she sighed. She was still distraught; her tears still flowed; but I could feel her little frame begin to relax as I held her against myself.

"I wish," Mom went on, "that I could have approached the two of you together about this, but I had to talk to Mindy alone first, so I could be absolutely sure."

My mouth opened; I wanted to say something—anything. But nothing came out.

Thinking, maybe, that I was about to try to deny her accusation, Mom said, "No—not about what you're doing, but about how you came to be doing it."

She sighed before she went on. "I need to apologize to you, Charlie, for the doubts and the suspicions that went through my mind when I understood the secret my children have been sharing. I was afraid that you'd forced Mindy—driven her, somehow, into something that she doesn't want. If you had done that, I think it would have killed me.

"That's why I had to talk to Mindy alone—so I would know that she could say what she wanted to say without you here to influence her.

It dawned on me then that, because I'm male and older than Mindy, I would naturally be the object of suspicion like this from anyone who discovered our relationship. It was a very unpleasant revelation.

Mindy, reading my mind as only she could, squeezed me reassuringly. If there had been any doubt in my mind that we were still in this together, that squeeze would surely have driven it out. But I'd had no doubts to begin with, and I communicated that with the squeeze I gave her in return. Wherever Mom was going with this, I was sure that Mindy was on my side—and she could be sure that I was on hers.

Something about the way Mindy and I had interacted had affected Mom positively. It was as though she now saw something that she had not at first believed was there at all. Her expression softened a bit, but she said nothing about it. Instead she continued; her tears flowed freely as she did. "The sexual relationship you have with each other isn't something that any mother wants to find between her children. But there it is."

She paused, gathering her thoughts.

"You're adults now, even if your mother doesn't always want to believe it. You can make your own choices, and, apparently, you have made choices of your own. I know that they don't have to be the choices I would make for you. And, now that I know there's no coercion or duplicity between you, that you made your choices freely, it's not my place to criticize them—or either of you."

She turned to Mindy. "Mindy," she asked gently, much more herself than she had been just moments earlier when I had entered the room, "will you go downstairs, please, and let me talk to your brother privately for a few minutes."

Mindy, still crying, squeezed me again. She looked into my eyes, reached up, and kissed me gently on the lips, and then she stood up and left the room. She closed the door as she went, and a few seconds later I heard her little feet on the stairs as she descended slowly, wrapped in misery.

Mom looked directly into my eyes; her eyes were the same compelling blue that Mindy's were.

"Charlie, Mindy says that you two are deeply in love with each other. What do you have to say about that?"

Words were hard to find. I looked directly into the deep blue fire that burned from my mother's eyes, and I nodded my head. Somehow, I found my tongue, and I said, "Yes, Mom. I'm deeply in love with Mindy, and she's deeply in love with me."

"What makes you think Mindy is in love with you?" she asked.

There was only one possible answer. "She's told me that she is. Again and again. I believe her."

"And why should Mindy think that you're in love with her?" She sounded skeptical.

"I've told her so. Many times." Once again, it was the only possible answer.

"We don't lie to each other," I went on. "Ever. We agreed when we were little—even before you married Dad—that we wouldn't ever lie to each other.

"We try to live by that agreement. We call it 'The Code.' We've both fu…uh…messed up once in a while, but never about anything important. And whenever I've messed up, I've straightened out my little lie before it could become a big one. Mindy's always done the same."

Her eyes bored into me. And then softly, almost wonderingly, she said, "I believe you. Mindy told me, too, that you don't lie to each other—in the very same words you just used. Including the 'ever.' But she didn't mention your 'Code.'"

Her back stiffened some and her shoulders straightened. Her face softened further, and it seemed as though scores of years sloughed off of her. There was new strength in her voice as she spoke again. "I've wanted so much to believe that what's happening between the two of you isn't something cheap and tawdry, Charlie. Now I do."

"I think I knew in my heart that you weren't forcing her—that you couldn't do something like that to your little sister. But the doubt and the suspicion wouldn't go away. I, of all people, should have trusted you both, but I didn't—and I'm sorry for that."

"How…?" I started. But I could get out only that single word.

"How did I discover what you two were up to?" She completed my question. I saw that the corners of her mouth actually turned upward a bit.

"Charlie," she said, "you're one of the brightest young men I've ever known. But sometimes you don't use what you've got.

"Do you really think that a woman who's had two children, a woman who, for the last ten years, has shared a bed with a man she finds extraordinarily sexy, a woman who's kept house for two mates during her life, wouldn't know what semen stains on sheets look like?

"I expect to find those stains on your sheets, Charlie. Young men either masturbate or have wet dreams. Or both."

I think I turned bright red, then. Young men also hate to be told that their mothers understand that they are sexual beings. Especially, they hate to have their mothers tell them so.

She went on. "But after you two left for school in August, I found semen stains on Mindy's sheets as well as on yours. I guessed then that she'd found a young man she liked and had brought him home when no one else was around. And I smiled to myself and thought that now that she was 18, it was about time for her to be doing something like that. I knew that she was on the Pill for other good reasons, so I wasn't worried about her enjoying a little recreational sex."

She was smiling for real, now. And it dawned on me, for the first time, that she was going to support us.

"And then the two of you came home for your Christmas vacation. Before long, I saw that something was different. You two have always thought the world of each other, but you came back home with a bond between you that's much tighter than anything I'd ever seen before. And there were stains in Mindy's bed again.

"I think I knew, but I was in denial. I didn't want to believe, so I tried not to think about it. And then, the morning Dad left, as I drove back from the airport, I finally thought it through and admitted to myself that I knew what was going on.

"But I still didn't want to believe it, so I dithered. And while I dithered, I began to have nagging doubts about how the two of you had come to be doing what you're doing with each other.

"Yesterday, I realized that I had to settle my doubts about my son. I knew that I could never forgive myself if I were to learn someday that you'd been… I hated to think it, and I hate to say it…abusing Mindy, and that I should have known it, but that I'd ignored the evidence.

"So, really, I had no choice. I confronted her a few minutes ago, and she admitted that the two of you have been sleeping with each other. She knew what I was afraid of, and, as the faith I ought to have had in the two of you would have told me, she exonerated you completely. She even tried to tell me that she seduced you!"

She looked directly into my eyes again; her deep blue eyes burned with a mother's love for her firstborn.

"I didn't believe for one second that she was entirely to blame! She was trying to repay an old debt." A shadow of a smile flickered across her face as she went on. "She was trying to cover for you the way you've always covered for her! You used to fool me into giving you her lickings when the two of you were little. I know for a fact that I thrashed you once for fighting—when I should have been thrashing Mindy. I didn't learn until several years later that the reason you'd been fighting was that the other boy was a bully who'd hit Mindy after she'd called him something very uncultured and that I won't repeat."

That would've been Dan Shearer, a nasty, stupid bully who'd hit Mindy after she'd called him a "dumb fuck," and whom, in consequence, I'd tried to drown in a handy mud puddle I'd decided God had put there for that purpose. Mom hadn't known then that I'd tried to drown the son of a bitch, but my cuts and bruises, and the mess I'd made of my clothes, had been presumptive evidence that I'd been fighting. I'd admitted it, and she'd thrashed me with one of Dad's belts for it.

"If I'd known then what Mindy had said to precipitate your fight, she'd have been the one who got the whipping—not you."

That had been why I'd stubbornly refused to tell Mom why I'd taken on that bully; I'd guessed that she'd blister Mindy's butt if she'd found out her daughter had been so uncultured as to say "fuck."

"I've no idea how many other times you quietly accepted punishment that was rightly hers—but I know what you were like; I know how seriously you took protecting your sister; and I'm sure, absolutely sure, that there were other times."

I didn't have any idea how many other times there'd been either—not because it hadn't happened, but because I couldn't remember all of the incidents. I'd just figured that it was all part of the big-brother job.

"If I'd thought about how you used to protect her—even from me—it might've alleviated some of the pain I've felt in the last few days.

"Now I have a dilemma, it seems. I must either accept your choices and support you, or I have to reject those choices—and the two of you along with them.

"You may be adults, but you aren't parents. So you can't know yet what it's like to love as a parent. I love the two of you more than there are words for. I could never reject either of you—let alone both.

"I'm so sorry for my suspicions and my doubts, Charlie. Can you forgive me?"

"There's nothing to forgive, Mom. Of course you wanted to protect Mindy. I'd expect nothing less from you." I, at least as well as anyone, understood wanting to protect Mindy. "And I'm sorry that we've disappointed you. Can you forgive us?"

"Oh, Charlie," she replied. "You haven't disappointed me. Neither you, nor she, nor the two of you. I'm a bit distressed. Like I said, this isn't the kind of thing a mother wants to learn about her children. And I wonder if the two of you have any idea of what a long and rocky road you'll have to travel in order to stay together.

"I can't approve of what you two are doing. But I won't disapprove, and I'm trying to accept. I have to, I want to, and I will support the two of you as best I can."

"Did you tell Mindy that?" I asked.

"No. Not yet. And I was too harsh with her, too. She must think I'm very angry. But I had to have the truth from her. And I couldn't take a stand before I'd talked to you privately. You might have contradicted her. I knew—knew—that you wouldn't. But without your side of the story as well as hers—"

"Then I need to go to her," I said, interrupting. "She needs to know where she stands with you. She knows where she stands with me, but she's sad and afraid, and she needs to know—needs desperately to know—what you've just told me."

I got up and stepped toward the door. Just before I reached it, I turned and looked back at her. "I'm sorry, Mom," I said. "I shouldn't have been so short with you. Do you need to say more to me now?" I asked.

Tears flowed down her face, but she smiled at me. "Only that the way my children have tried to care for each other in the last half hour, the things the two of you have just said to me, and the way you need to go to her now, convince me that you are in deeply love with her—and that she is just as deeply in love with you.

"I need to collect myself. I'll be down in a few minutes. She needs you. Go to her. Comfort her."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I found my little sister lying on the living room couch, face down, sobbing into a cushion. Lost, as she was, in her tears, she hadn't heard me come into the room. She started when I placed my hand on her shoulder as I sat down beside her on the edge of the couch. But after the initial surprise, she knew my touch.

Immediately, she rose and threw herself into my arms, wrapping her own arms around me as she did. I backed up until I sat fully upon the couch. Turning herself toward me, she drew her legs up against the back of the couch so that she lay on her right side, her upper body in my arms, her hips and legs extending to my own right on the couch.

Deep, wrenching sobs wracked her little body. I held her close and stroked her.

"It's all right," I said. "I'm all right. You're all right. Mom's all right, and she's all right with us. And remember—there's nothing…nothing!…that we can't face together."

Slowly, her spasms abated. As they subsided, she looked up at me from the haven of my encircling arms. Tears still streamed down her cheeks as she said, "I know, Charlie. I'm safe with you. Always!"

I kissed her forehead. "Always!" I said.

I looked into her teary eyes and smiled.

"Big Brother and Little Sister," I whispered to her.

The first line of our private litany worked the magic we'd woven into it during our shared childhood. Her sobbing stopped and I felt the tension leave her body. She gave me the first smile I'd seen on her face since she and Mom had disappeared to talk privately.

She whispered back the response. "Best friends and lovers."

We looked into each other's eyes and, together, we whispered to each other, "Now and always!'

"I love you so much," I continued—still in a whisper.

Almost herself again, she whispered back to me, "I love you even more!"

We squeezed each other. And then she backed up a bit and looked up at me again, wonder in her eyes. "Is Mom really okay with…us?" she asked.

"She's okay," I said. "Maybe not any better, but okay. She says she doesn't approve, but she won't disapprove either. She will try to accept, and she promises to support us.

"Oh," I continued, "and she says she loves us both more than there are words for."

"Really?" she asked in disbelief.

"Really," I said.

"Oh, Charlie," she said, falling into my arms again and placing her cheek on my chest. "She was so angry. I was so afraid she wouldn't forgive us. She looked so old, so defeated, so despondent when she talked to me. She even thought you might be raping me—but I think I made her understand that it was all my fault."

"She's herself again," I said, putting my right hand under my little sister's chin and lifting her face so that she looked up at me. "But I'm afraid you've misjudged her about fault. She's onto us. She knows all about my wrongful conviction in the case of Dan Shearer."

At that memory, Mindy smiled again through what remained of her tears.

"She suspects that she wrongfully convicted me on quite a few other occasions—which she did. And she thinks that when you tried to take all the blame for our relationship you were trying to repay that old debt—an imaginary old debt as far as I'm concerned.

"She's got the blame for…us…right where it belongs—spread evenly between the two of us. We're both grown-ups, we're both in this together, and we both walked into it with our eyes wide open. And am I ever glad, on all three counts."

"Me, too," she said, simply, and reached up to kiss me.

I held my beloved little sister in my arms as we exchanged a gentle, lingering kiss—a lovers' kiss. We ended it as we heard the firm tread of Mom's feet on the stairs. I looked into the deep blue of Mindy's eyes, and she returned my look. Together we whispered to each other, "I love you."

We did not break our lovers' embrace when Mom entered the room a few seconds later. It was not that we wanted to rub her nose in something she might find distasteful, but that we now wanted to be honest with her about the way we cared for each other. And that we each needed the other's support in what might be another difficult moment.

Mom had recovered from the black mood she'd been in when she'd called me into her bedroom, and she seemed to take our embrace in stride. She sat down near us, choosing a chair where Mindy could see her without having to crane her neck or twist herself out of my arms.