Chapter 37

If I could have jumped up out of my skin, I would have. I badly wanted to, but the shock had numbed my mind, turned my muscles to jello and the best I could manage was to scuttle backwards like a sand crab until my shoulders rammed into a headstone. I slipped on the cold ground and landed flat on my back, with my legs still scrambling for traction.

She walked towards me, a crooked smile on her lips. Her hair was lighter than I remembered, more brassy than the burgundy red I was familiar with. The shape of her eyes was the same, but the color was a slightly paler greenish shade. She moved differently too, not as smoothly or athletically as the woman in my memory. This woman was younger than my Carlie had been when I met her. This girl looked a lot like Carlie, but she wasn't her.

"You look so much like her..." I said.

Her smile widened. "Thank you. People tell me that all the time. You're him, aren't you? There just couldn't be two like you. You're Ike Blacktower, right?"

I'd gotten some control over my body, got my feet under me and stood up slowly, brushing myself off.

"My name is Ike Blacktower, yes. And you have to be Carlie's little sister Charlene."

She held her hand out to me. I wrapped my big pale skinned hand around hers and we shook.

"Call me Charlie, everyone else does."

"Nice to meet you after all these years Charlie. I think I have a message for you. Carlie wanted me to tell you that she loves you, always and forever."

Charlie's face took on a dazed expression, like she couldn't believe what she'd just heard.

"Charlie? Are you okay?" I asked, concerned when she didn't respond.

She shook her head and blinked rapidly. "I've been having these dreams for the past couple of weeks and my sister's always in them. She's been telling me to come see her, that there's someone I'm supposed to meet."

I shivered inside my navy pea coat, and not from the cold.

"She's been telling me the same thing. Except I'm supposed to keep a promise she made to someone."

Charlie giggled suddenly and turned her face away.

"Did I say something funny?"

She shook her head franticly, laughing even harder.

I stood there looking down at her while she doubled up with laughter and folded over, dropping to the ground and gasping for breath. I looked around helplessly, suddenly wondering where the girls had gotten off to. I spotted Izzy's head a few rows away near some other statues and waved my arms, trying to get her attention. She must have seen me, because she, Lilly and Peggy came hurrying towards Charlie and I.

Izzy spotted Charlie kneeling on the ground, laughing like a hyena, and raised her eyebrows. I lifted my hands, palms up, in the universal sign of hopeless stupidity.

Peggy peered out from behind Izzy and took in the scene, and looked up at me.

"What did you do this time?" she asked.

"Nothing... I swear."

"Who is she?" Lilly inquired.

"Carlie's little sister, Charlie."

"Why's she laughing like that?" Izzy asked.

"Beats me. I gave her the message from the dream like Carlie told me to, and told her I was supposed to keep a promise she'd made to someone. Then she started laughing and won't stop."

Lilly moved closer and squatted down to get a better look. "I don't think she can stop. It looks to me like she's hysterical."

I quickly linked with Charlie and went looking for the source of her non-stop laughter. There was some small feeling of amusement, but not nearly enough to account for her hysterical reaction; there was also a deep pool of fear, jealousy, anger and remorse next to what felt, to me, like an enormous column of insecurity with huge heavy chains of guilt linking the two that tasted of grief tinged salty blood.

"Damn... this won't be fun." I muttered and began to drain off her emotions.

The amusement I left alone, concentrating primarily on the pool of negative emotions. I siphoned them into myself; feeling more and more like a blood engorged tick as they filled me up.

"She's very pretty." I heard Peggy say as if from a distance.

"Yes she is." I replied. "She looks a lot like her sister. When I first saw her I thought she was Carlie. The resemblance might have something to do with whatever her problem is."

"What are you doing Ike?" Izzy asked me.

"Draining off her more negative emotions. Hopefully that will stop her laughing and then she can tell us what's going on. Then, maybe, I can do something more permanent to help her."

Charlie's manic laughter finally tapered off. She was gasping for air and wiping the tears from her eyes while Lilly helped her to her feet. The pair of them walked unsteadily to a concrete bench beside a nearby path and sat down side by side. Peggy, Izzy and I followed after them while I continued to drain her feelings.

Charlie had started breathing a little easier and was looking pretty embarrassed. She glanced around at Lilly and the girls and then back at me.

"Who are your friends?" she asked me.

"Girls, this is Charlene Van Luten... my... uhmm, I guess ex-sister in law is the official title. Charlie, these are my girls. This is Izzy, and this is Peggy and the mother hen sitting next to you is Lilly."

"Your girls?" she asked mischievously.

I filled my lungs and sighed heavily. "My wives, Charlie. They're my wives."

She started laughing again, but this time I could feel that it was under control, her control.

"What did you do, move to Utah and become a Mormon?"

The girls were all beaming at me, and then Peggy started bouncing around on her toes. She pointed at the angel statue over Carlie's grave.

"Look at all the flowers!" she said excitedly.

They all turned to look at what had gotten her so worked up. The dead flowers I'd planted around the base of the angel statue had bloomed brightly and somehow multiplied into a hedgerow of brilliantly colored blossoms. Even the grass looked taller, thicker and more luxuriant.

While they admired the flowers, I kept poking around inside Charlie's feelings. My evaluation of Charlie's emotional state led me to believe that the only solution to her problem was going to require a lot of blasting and a bit of patchwork.

"Ike, where did you get all the flowers?" Lilly asked me, breaking my train of thought.

"Hmm? What flowers? Oh, those... there was a bundle of dead ones already there. I just planted them and unloaded my feelings into the ground."

"You made dead flowers grow." Peggy said accusingly.

I shrugged. "Would you rather I killed them? I can, if you'd prefer."

Izzy slugged me in the arm. Peggy kicked my shin and Lilly looked as if she wanted to hit me as well.

"The next person who hits me is going to wet their pants, so help me!" I snarled.

Which was tantamount to an open invitation, and if I'd been thinking clearly I'd have realized it. Not more than an eye blink had passed before I was being pummeled by all three, Izzy beating on my arm, Peggy flailing away at my ribs and Lilly lept up and started pounding on my chest.

I wrapped them all up in a giant bear hug and lifted the three of them off their feet. Linking quickly I flooded the trio with a blaze of love and affection that had them all squealing with delight and moaning with barely contained passion. They went limp and I was suddenly left holding three hundred plus pounds of dead weight in my arms.

Charlie watched with an interested expression as I set them down next to her on the bench, leaning them against one another and moving around behind to prop them up and make sure they didn't fall over backwards.

"What was all that?" she asked.

I stalled for a couple of moments before responding. "Charlie, how much did Carlie tell you about me?"

"What do you mean?"

"Did she ever tell you about my talent?"

She looked puzzled. "I don't know what you're talking about. What talent?"

I sighed loudly. "Charlie, if I want to, I can feel other people's emotions. I can also make people feel things that I feel or want them to feel. What happened just now was me letting the girls know how much I love them and how much they turn me on. My feelings for them are very strong and they tend to get overwhelmed when I let them share it."

She looked at me like I was a two headed chicken. "You're pulling my leg, right?"

I shook my head. "No. It's the god's honest truth. When you were laughing I could tell what you were feeling. All your fear, jealousy, anger, remorse, guilt and insecurities... it's kinda like reading a book. I think I understand why you feel the way you do, but if you want me to help you with your problem it would help if you understood why you feel that way."

She stared at me for a time, watching me hold the girls upright while they slept.

"When Mama and Daddy brought Carlie home to be buried... when the minister was reading over her casket... I started laughing. I wanted to cry so badly, but instead I started laughing and couldn't stop. It was hours later when I finally passed out. Ever since then, when someone starts talking about her I start laughing."

I nodded my understanding. "Your parents, when you were younger did they spend a lot of time telling you that you should be more like her? Telling you that you weren't as good or as smart, that kind of thing?"

"Yeah... they did that even before she went off to college. But after we heard she'd died it got worse. I loved my sister Ike. She was so smart and pretty and popular. I wanted to be just like her. But nothing I did was ever good enough for them."

"Charlie, you look a lot like her, but you aren't Carlie and you shouldn't be trying to be Carlie. I went thru this sort of thing when I was a kid too. My father wanted me to be more like my brother, but I couldn't because I wasn't him. Caused us all kinds of problems for a long, long time. You might want to bear in mind that parents are just people, exactly like you and me, which means they screw up. I doubt they intended to make your life miserable... it just worked out that way."

"Can you make me stop laughing?"

"I think so. You resent Carlie, don't you? All the things you used to admire about her, you resent the hell out of her for being pretty and smart and popular... and you resent her for dying, leaving you alone and for having your parents turn her into some kind of family saint, don't you?"

"Yes! They'll never love me the way they love her. I'll always be second best, no matter what I do."

She turned away and stared off into the distance.

"Charlie, I loved your sister; I knew her better than anyone, and I know for a fact that she loved you. I could feel how much she loved you every time she said your name. She was really hurt that your folks wouldn't let you come out for our wedding. She wanted you to be her Maid of Honor so badly. I'll tell you something else you might not know... she was proud of you. Carlie was always telling me how smart you were, how well you were doing in school. She'd read to me sometimes from the letters you wrote her. None of the secret sister stuff, of course. She looked forward to getting those letters. Carlie didn't want you to be like her, she wanted you to be you, and be happy with the woman you were going to become."

I could hear her sniffling and struggling to hold back tears. "She really was proud of me?"

"Charlie, you never had a bigger fan than your sister."

She was silent for a while and then announced with some surprise, "I'm not laughing! We've been talking about her and I'm not laughing."

"I've been draining off most of your negative emotions. You have a lot of guilt and insecurity tied up with the memories of Carlie and they're all connected to negative emotions. You are badly conflicted, kiddo. You love her but you also resent her... even hate her, because of how much pain her memory has caused. The thing is... if I remove the guilt and negative feelings you won't have any excuse for your insecurities. You'll have to deal with them."

"What insecurities?" she asked.

"Thinking you aren't pretty enough, or smart enough or good enough. Charlie, there will always be someone somewhere who is better looking, smarter, taller, shorter, faster, stronger or more capable than any of us. That's just the way things are. Yes, you look like Carlie and I always thought she was beautiful. But you don't look exactly like her, and I think you are beautiful in your own right. Carlie was one of the smartest people I've ever known, smarter by miles than me. I don't know myself just how smart you are, but she thought you were pretty damn bright... so you can't possibly be a dummy."

"What about my folks? They don't think I'm nearly good enough."

"Honey, I wish there was something I could do to make them treat you better... well, maybe I could, but it wouldn't be how they really felt. What I think you need to do is learn to see yourself thru other people's eyes, and I don't mean your parents and I don't mean any of the people around Dover. You should leave this place and go out into the world. Meet some people who have never heard of Carlie and find out what they think of you. Be the person you want to be, not who your parents want you to be."

"Mama's already told me that if I leave they'll cut me off and disinherit me."

"What's more important to you, money or being happy and at peace with yourself?"

Izzy and Lilly chose that moment to wake up, followed a couple of heartbeats later by Peggy who leaned back against me, pressing the side of her face against my crotch and mumbled, "I think I wet myself."

I reached down and ran a hand over the exposed side of her pretty face. "That's okay, half-pint. We'll go back to the hotel and you can change."

"I think I need to change too." Lilly announced, pressing her thighs together.

"I guess that means Ike won the trifecta." Izzy said, grinning up at me.

"How is it I won but the three of you end up with all the warm fuzzys?"

"Clean living?" Peggy suggested with a giggle.

I huffed out a puff of frosty breath and gave them all a hug. "Charlie, did you drive here?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No, I took a cab from the house."

"Well, why don't you ride back to the hotel with us? While the girls change I'll see what I can do to fix your laughing problem."

She agreed to come along, so we hurried out of the cemetery, got into the car and drove back to our hotel room.

The girls rushed into the bathroom with changes of underwear and new pants in hand. Charlie and I sat down on the edge of one of the big beds and faced each other. She examined the room and paid special attention to the beds we'd pushed together.

"You really do sleep with all of them, don't you?"