I passed her the lid of the Thermos, filled with cider, and took my own sip straight from the bottle. It was hard to take my eyes off her in that moment, to not stare at the flush of her cheeks, at her dark eyes, wider and brighter now that we were looking out over the city. Those eyes stayed on mine for a moment before she turned back to watch the spot where the two rivers met at The Point.
A shiver wracked through her, and I shrugged off my coat, draping it over her shoulders.
///
"Are you nuts?" she scolded, but she pulled the coat around her tighter. "You'll freeze."
"I'll live."
She smiled, a lazy, drunken smile that curled softly on her lips like the tips of a warm flame. "Thank you," she said, nudging her shoulder into my rib. "Always such a gentleman, even when you were a rule-breaking piano prodigy."
I always waved her off when she referred to me that way, but inside, I beamed. There weren't many people in my life I'd ever really wanted to impress, but Charlie was one of them, along with my father. I still remembered the first time he heard my audition for Juilliard, and he told me that even though I was a little shit, he was proud of me. Those were his exact words.
I missed him.
For a long while, Charlie and I just stood there, both of us leaning over the railing and pointing out different things here and there as we drank the cider. We found the stadium where the Steelers played, and the field belonging to the Pirates - those were both easy staples to spot. We joked about our parents and their long nights at the country club we spotted off in the distance, or how we used to play in the water down at The Point. We told ghost stories about the old historic buildings downtown, and even tried to point out our old houses, which was mostly from memory of our parents pointing them out as kids. We couldn't actually see them, but we could imagine them, the two yards touching, two families sewn together by proximity and later by love.
Every now and then, a sadness would sweep over every inch of her, from her tired eyes to her small hands cupped around the mug of cider. And though I knew Cameron was the one responsible for that sadness, I couldn't deny that I was happy he'd been too busy for their date.
If it meant I got to have this night with her, I'd wish for him to screw up time and time again.
"He is my favorite," Charlie spoke after a long period of silence.
She took a tentative sip of her cider, her eyes focused on the lights below us, and I frowned, wondering if she'd read my mind about Cameron. But her next words steered the conversation in a completely different direction.
"The little boy you saw me with earlier this week," she clarified. "Jeremiah."
I opened my mouth to ask a question, to ask why he's her favorite, but something told me she already knew what she wanted to say. So I just stood beside her, our arms touching, and I kept my eyes off in the distance to give her space to feel out her words.
"I had a son," she said, her voice cracking.
It was the last thing I expected her to say, and the words hit me like a shot gun bullet, piercing me at different depths. It was the first time she'd mentioned her son, and I knew she hadn't brought him to dinner with her parents. There was no way Gloria would ever miss out on the opportunity to see her grandson.
My stomach churned, already sensing the direction the conversation was going.
Had. Past tense.
"Actually, I had two. Twins." In my peripheral, I saw her smile, her pink lips turned up in a sad kind of joy. "We'd been so happy to find out we were having two. It was the best eight months of my life, being pregnant with them. But Derrick, he was stillborn."
A pained breath escaped my nose, and I closed my eyes tight, wishing I'd heard something else out of those sweet lips of hers. I put my arm around her shoulders, pulling her into me, just letting her know I was there, but she wasn't finished yet.
"The other, though," she said, her voice shaky, and I didn't have to pull back and look at her to know there were tears in her eyes. "He was a fighter. I held him for less than a minute before he was rushed off to the NICU, where he lived for the next nine days." She shook her head. "The only nine days of his life."
"Charlie, God, I am so sorry," I whispered, tucking her closer to me. I wrapped my other arm around her as her head fell against my chest, and I was thankful I'd abandoned the empty Thermos on the ground. I had both hands to hold her, to embrace her, to stroke her hair and rub her back. "That's … I don't even have the words. It's heartbreaking."
"It was," she choked. "They would have been five this year, starting kindergarten, probably in my class. Derrick, he would have been the oldest, even if just by a few minutes, and I imagine he would have had the same strong build as his father. But Jeremiah," she said, and my heart cracked with the realization.
He had the same name as the child in her class, and he would have been the same age.
"I think he would have favored me. Just from those forty-eight seconds of holding him, of feeling him against me, I think he would have been the small, timid bookworm like his mom."
///
"Shit, Charlie … "
"When Jeremiah - the one you saw me with - when he walked into the classroom on the first day of school this past August, my breath caught at the sight of him. I can't explain it, but before I even knew his name, I just felt this pull to him. And then when I called roll … " She paused, shaking her head where it was buried in my chest. "Oh Reese, my knees buckled. They nearly gave out. It was like my own son was there, in some way, not completely, but in a way that told me he's still with me somehow. In my heart, in spirit. I don't know. It sounds silly."
"It doesn't."
"It feels silly," she confessed. "But, I've had this connection with him ever since. And he's just like I imagined my little Jeremiah would have been. Quiet, shy, but so, so smart. And kind. His heart is as big as the world, and I know when he's older, he will do amazing things. I just know it."
I didn't have any of the right words that I needed to comfort Charlie in that moment. I didn't even have words for myself, to ease the ache that had built heavier in my chest with every word she'd spoken. All this time, I thought I'd seen a woman who used to be a girl, broken by a marriage that didn't make her happy.
How wrong I'd been.
How devastatingly naïve and stupid I'd been.
"Sometimes, I have entire days go by where I don't think of either of them," she said softly. "On a weekend day, a Saturday or a Sunday, when I play in my garden or clean around the house or lose myself in a new recipe. And then when I think of them again, I feel terrible for ever forgetting, even if just for twenty-four hours."
"It's okay to keep living," I assured her, still rubbing her back with a warm, hopefully comforting hand. "You know they would have wanted you to. They'd want you to be happy."
"I know," she said, but she shook her head. "It's easier to say that, though, than to actually believe it. To actually do it."
Charlie let me hold her, both of us silent, both of us moved in our own ways.
I wanted to crawl inside her and hold the most tender parts of her. I wanted to wrap her heart in my arms, soothe her bruised and aching soul with my touch. But, then again, hadn't her husband wanted to do the same? How had he handled all of this? Was this the reason they were so distant, that she was so sad, or was it something more?
After a moment, Charlie breathed a long, heavy sigh into my chest. "I still have stretch marks from them, you know," she whispered. "Marks from a birth that barely happened, from children I never got to raise."
I squeezed my eyes shut tight, fighting back the emotion threatening to overcome me in that moment, at those words. Then, I placed my hands around her thin arms, pulling her back from me to look into her eyes.
"Show me."
Her eyes were wet and wide with confusion as she looked up at me, the lights from Pittsburgh shining in their gloss. "What?"
"Your stretch marks. Show me."
Charlie's brows bent together, her hands hesitant as they moved to her stomach. She opened my coat she wore first, then unbuttoned her own beneath it. Her hands finally found her thin blouse and she yanked it from where it was tucked into her jeans, lifting it along with the tank top she wore underneath.
Chills broke against the pale skin of her bare midriff, and I dropped to my knees, leaning in closer to find the shiny pink marks that ran across that white skin like tiny roads on a map. I pulled one glove off, reaching forward with warm fingertips that made her shudder when I pressed them against those marks. My fingers skated the lines, the thick bottoms of them that faded off into thin tips. A tear fell from where Charlie watched above me, hitting my wrist, and I cast my gaze upward to find hers.