Chapter 4

Over the next few days, we fell into a magical routine. She would disappear for the day, leaving the house in her sweats without having done her hair or makeup, to “hang out with Sam.” I’m not sure what they did all day, but she always seemed to tell our parents she was going to “appointments” or something instead, so I guess they weren’t supposed to know for whatever reason. She didn’t come home smelling like pot, which was my first thought — she always smelled of that intoxicating, vaguely flowery, eau de Charlie — so it wasn’t that.

Truth be told, I didn’t really care what she was doing during the day as long as she always came back home that night. And she did, inevitably arriving sometime after our parents had gone to bed. I would see her car and give it a few minutes, trying to make it look like I hadn’t been waiting eagerly in my room, going through the motions in video games while compulsively checking out the window to see if she was there yet.

Something had changed between us since that night in the shower — obviously. Not just sexually, though. I felt more connected to her than I had to anyone ever in my young life, and while she didn’t hold back on her hilarious jokes and teasing, she was more affectionate, too.

I was living for that affection, now — even the hair-ruffling that came every morning at breakfast (or lunch, as people with jobs probably call it). And maybe even more, I lived to see that sisterly smile I’d suddenly found myself addicted to.

She didn’t seem to be smiling much at all otherwise.

Puzzle time was mostly quiet. She didn’t mind me hanging around, studying her every movement, no longer bound by a sense of shame (which, truth be told, I did feel a little ashamed about) and so able to look closely at the subtle ways her lips would move as she considered a puzzle piece and its place in the big picture.

She seemed to consider each one more and more carefully as she made progress, even though I thought that would’ve made the process go faster, not more deliberately. Instead, she spent 10-15 minutes on each piece, always rolling one over and over between her fingers while carefully examining the bridge and surrounding forest in the picture, nearly fully intact now. Charlie’s expression rarely changed while she was concentrating: a slight furrowed brow, her lips a straight line, though not pressed together.

But as I spent hours over the next few nights studying her, I noticed there were tiny tells about what was going on underneath, and I put more energy into studying than I ever had in school. Her lips would part occasionally. Her face would relax just a bit or tighten just a bit. Something was going on in there. I just ... wasn’t quite able to translate what all those little tiny microexpressions were saying. Yet.

In her baggy gray hoodie and matching gray sweatpants, I couldn’t work myself up into a lather looking at her legs, or her shoulders, or her smooth, soft, skin anymore. But that really didn’t bother me.

It kinda made me feel more grown up, really, that I’d sort of graduated from being turned on by the obvious, like her incredible body. Well, I mean, okay, obviously it still turned me on. But the way she was around me now, it screamed of an odd kind of intimacy, making me feel privileged that I was allowed to see such a beautiful woman in her most casual state — like she trusted me to see the real her.

And she didn’t mind — always seemed to brighten just a bit, in fact — when I’d find a new way each night to tell her how beautiful I thought she looked. And there was never any shortage of ways.

Charlie didn’t like me to try and help with the puzzle though. I could hang around, and we could even chit-chat — usually centering on her college escapades with Sam, which I was perfectly happy to hear about, especially the many that didn’t involve them wearing an overabundance of clothes — but the puzzle was something she was doing on her own.

Fair enough.

After puzzle time, though, came bathroom time.

I liked bathroom time much more.

When she’d had enough of slowly assembling her puzzle, she would head upstairs to the bathroom, knowing I was never far behind. She’d go through her nightly ritual, and I’d sit on the toilet seat and watch her as she stripped for a shower.

Each night, I joined her and would go to bed afterward satisfied and wondering how this had become so normal. A week ago, it wouldn’t have even been something I’d dared to fantasize about. Now?

Now I stepped into the warm shower with my sister every night, without exchanging many words. She would soap me up by hand, lingering over my softest parts, and gently shampoo my hair. The first couple of times I’d tried to return the favor, but she stopped me immediately. I hadn’t tried again.

We barely talked during our showers, though I’d tried striking up conversations. Mostly she seemed to just like that I was there, smiling that warm smile and seeming to just enjoy how enamored I was with her every move, how turned on I got just by her being her.

Each shower ended a little differently — sometimes she would kiss me on my lips, sometimes everywhere but. Sometimes she would take me in her mouth, sometimes with her hand. Once she let me rub my cock all over her slick skin until I was hard enough to burst — and then she let me, right onto her perfect, perky breasts. It was an incredible feeling, to see my semen slowly leaking off my sister’s chest. If I was dreaming in a coma, I hoped they never pulled the plug.

We’d grown close in a short time, me and my sexy sister, and by the next weekend, I was starting to worry about what life would be like when she went back to college in the fall. I didn’t want her to leave.

I was thinking about that as I came downstairs, seeing her in her usual spot, dressed in her now-usual baggy gray hoodie and hideously matching baggy gray sweatpants. She had her hood pulled up, which was unusual, and was bent over the puzzle table, arms braced. I could see the puzzle was almost done, but there were several more puzzle boxes strewn about the table, spilling onto the floor — all opened and bleeding pieces.

“Hey, Charlie? What’s ... goin’ on?” I said, tentatively, as I entered the room from the kitchen. Something wasn’t quite right, even for her usual statuesque demeanor. She remained unmoving, hunched over the mess of pieces, both her palms planted firmly on the table.

Her face was obscured from the side by her hood, and half of her was cast in shadow by the one lamp she always had on. I came closer and placed a hand lightly on her shoulder.

As I rounded to see her face, I saw it was red and tear-streaked. Those usually sharp, glowing green eyes were now puffy, and burning with a rage I’d never seen in them before. She was breathing heavily, I noticed now, almost wheezing.

No. Not raging.

Sobbing.

My hand resting on her shoulder seemed to break whatever dam she’d quickly built up when she heard me coming down the steps, and her body broke into quiet, violent convulsions.

Charlie’s face contorted, scrunched, reddened even more, and she gasped for air between quiet heaves, fresh streams of tears streaking her face while she let out the most chilling sounds I’d ever heard — if only because it was my snarky, beautiful, invincible older sister making them.

She turned to me, snot running out of her nose, an earlier round of tears already having stained the front of her hoodie, and a mix of shame and fury roiled across her features.

But as she looked in my eyes, all the other emotions clouding her face seemed to melt away, and the only one left was... despair? Is that what that is?

I didn’t know what to do.

What could be wrong? Jesus, what could be so wrong?

I’d never seen her like this. Charlie had her moods, of course, but...

I reached out for her, wanting to make it stop however I could, wrapping my arms around her. She accepted my hug, but didn’t return it. She just stood there while I tried to comfort her, not really knowing how. I only knew it was my job to stop it, to make my sister feel better.

“Charlie,” I said quietly, “what’s wrong? What happened?”

Her sobbing subsided, and she wrapped her arms around me, finally, cupping the back of my head and kissing me on top. She probably wiped her nose on my hair while she was up there too, but I figured it was probably best to let that one slide.

She gathered herself as we separated, and leaned on the puzzle table again, surveying what she’d been working on and the various boxes with their upended contents.

“There’s a piece missing,” she said, her voice quaking. She wiped her nose and pointed to the conspicuous hole at the end of the bridge in her all-but-completed puzzle. All in all, a fairly unimportant piece, I thought.

Is she being serious?

I tried to divine some clue about if she’d actually had some sort of mental break, or if this was an elaborate joke, or what.

I couldn’t read her. She just stared at the space where the piece should’ve been, her eyes still welling up.

“Okay ... and ... you were ... looking for it...? I guess?” I said, gesturing to the other puzzle boxes and trying to sound like I thought this was a perfectly reasonable reaction to such a thing.

She nodded.

“I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe it got put into the wrong box, but ... I couldn’t find it, Danny. It’s not anywhere.”

She looked at me, pleadingly, and I felt more helpless than I’d ever felt. She didn’t look desperate, exactly, more like she didn’t expect to find it anywhere at this point. Just ... despairing that whatever had happened to it, she’d never get it back.

“Charlie, what ... I don’t ... why ... why is this... doing this to you?” I said, stammering my way through trying to sound diplomatic. “It’s only one piece, right?”

She wiped her nose with her sleeve, and looked down again at the 499 pieces that were all in place. But I knew she was just seeing the one that was missing.

“It’s incomplete, Danny,” she said, as if that explained everything.

I stared at her in silence for a few seconds, trying to figure out what she was really talking about.

What the hell could do this to a woman like her?

“It’s not your fault the piece wasn’t in there. I probably ate it as a child or something,” I said, trying to get her to laugh. Smile. Anything.

I rubbed her back, like Mom used to do when I fell off my bike or something, doing my best to be comforting. She didn’t seem to notice. She seemed to barely notice me at all, really.

“How will you ever know what it’s supposed to be, if there’s always a piece missing?” she said, to no one in particular, but certainly not to me. “Who knows what it was supposed to look like. What it could’ve been if it was whole.

“One piece is all it takes to make sure it’s forever broken.”

She said it as if there was nothing more to be said.

And for a full minute, there wasn’t. Just the ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room, and the occasional sniffle as she tried to keep from dripping anything more onto the card table.

The look on her face said she wasn’t preparing to move from that spot for quite a while. Maybe years. Maybe forever.

“Charlie,” I said finally, gently breaking the silence, “you do a puzzle because it’s fun, not because you wanna know what it looks like when it’s done. You can already see it on the box!” I reached across her and picked up the lid — carefully placing my thumb over the spot where her puzzle was missing a piece — and showed her the box top that looked exactly the same as what she’d assembled.

She just shook her head slowly.

I don’t know what the hell is going on, but ... I need to get her to engage. Just anything but stand there and stew.

I started to hunt through the nearest puzzle — something about a forest — looking back at the open space on the wooden bridge. I sifted through a couple more boxes, holding the shapes up, reaching across Charlie to see if they were close. She stood as still as the table, indifferent to my frenetics.

Finally, inside a Sleeping Beauty puzzle, I found a piece that looked like it was shaped pretty close to what her missing piece should’ve been. I laid it down and pressed it in with my finger, willing the cardboard to bend and shift and snap just enough until finally it seemed to fit, though not completely flatly. But for the moment, it completed the puzzle, even if it looked so wildly out of place — the hot pink of a princess’s gown amid what was supposed to be part of the end of the wooden bridge — that the whole thing was worse off than it had been before, I thought. But that wasn’t the point.

“There, see, Charlie?” I said softly, putting my hand on hers and gently tilting her chin toward me. “There are enough puzzles in the world that even if you lose a piece, there’s always another one out there that can make it whole again.”

Charlie turned to me and smiled. It was strained, and almost ... pitying. Like she was looking at me for the well-meaning 14-year-old boy I was. But it was warm.

She hugged me tight.

“Thank you, Danny,” she said in her froggy, post-sob voice. She pulled me closer and I melted into her soft hoodie. In that moment, it felt as warm and inviting as our showers. “You’re an idiot, but you try so hard.

“And I love you.”

She broke the hug and took my face into her hands, resting her forehead on mine. Hers was burning up, and her misty, bloodshot eyes made me want to tear up too just looking into them. My face was flushed for other reasons, not sure what to make of her calling me an idiot, but happy that she at least seemed somewhat distracted from Puzzlegate.

“I just ... wanna make you feel better,” I mumbled with a shrug, a little embarrassed that I really was what she’d said — just some stupid kid trying too hard.