Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 58)
Rating: M for graphic violence and language
Fandom: The Mentalist
Summary: Patrick Jane has lived his life obsessed with the capture of Red John ever since finding his beloved wife and daughter slain by the maniac's hand. Now, 10 years to the day after that horrific night, a young woman appears in Patrick's life, someone who threatens to destroy everything his life has become in the interim… if not his sanity, itself.
Author's Note: Trying to keep on a writing streak. I can't remember what date I made Charlotte's birthday in this story. I know it was around the same date Red John originally took her (October 30th) but I can't remember if I set an actual date in this story yet. I went back and looked but this story is pretty big, so I am going to make her birthday October 31st, Halloween, and if I am off by a few days, please just accept my apologies now. This is a shorter chapter, but it's an important one. -Lex
"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?"
- Roy Batty, Blade Runner
"Paul McVeigh was as superior as his forebears would have expected (and they were very WASP forebears). How bright-eyed, how interested, how quick. Yet Paul also saw terrible things in the sky when it lightninged and thundered, endless terrors in the most familiar shadows. And he felt things that were not entirely warranted- more grief than a dead bird demanded, more beauty and grandeur than a winter night's sky possessed. His sensitivity, in short, went beyond the useful to the useless and to the harmful itself." - "Let's Go Play At The Adams'" by Mendal Johnson
"What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said."
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Somewhere in the realm of the giant grownups there was fighting and anger. He sat on the carpet and pushed a toy truck back and forth and Peter watched him with those bright, teary eyes he had, nose red and dripping.
When Petey reached for the truck, Patty swatted his hand away with his own baby-fat fingers.
"No. Mine."
"MINE!" Petey said back, immediately.
"Mii-iiine!" Patty retorted, louder. Peter began to wail. Somewhere in the shadows and the bigness, in the distance, there was yelling and then stomping and then there was Mommy, marching into the living room, a suitcase in one hand (her's). She dropped it on the floor by the large console black and white TV and disappeared again.
"It's not fair to split them up!" Daddy was yelling.
Patty had gone back to playing, but Petey now made a clucking noise in his mouth to get Patty's attention.
"Lissun," Petey said, and cocked his head in the direction of the adult voices.
"You're the one who said we would split everything down the middle, you asshole!" Mommy's voice.
"Not KIDS, you bitch. You don't split kids up! Especially twins!"
More stomping.
Petey looked at Patty and his eyes got very big with the white showing all around the blue.
"Oh-shit," Petey said. One word. Oh-shit.
Mommy came back into the living room and she had another suit case, a smaller one, covered in stickers.
"Peter, come on. We're leaving. Say goodbye to Patrick and get your shoes on."
Peter stared at Mommy. He didn't fully understand. Where were they going.
"I don't have all day," Mommy said sternly. She was getting angry.
Daddy had come into the living room now. He sunk down onto the cushions of the sofa, pulled his cigarettes from his front shirt pocket and began to smoke. He already had a beer on. The theme from Barney Miller was playing in the background.
"Where?" Petey said when Mommy grabbed him back the back of his shoulder and began to pull him toward the door. "Where goin', Ma?"
"Stop asking questions and come on. Say goodbye to your brother."
"Paddy come, too?"
"Patrick's staying with Daddy." Mommy's voice was distant, edge in ice.
"Why, Ma?" Peter again. At 2 years and 3 months old. he was quite a talker.
"PETER! Enough with the bullshit questions. Say goodbye to Patrick, or don't. I don't have all day!"
Peter's eyes were as big as full moons in a black sky. They were beginning to leak tears full of emotion a 2 year old couldn't possibly begin to understand. Hands still dimpled in baby pudge came up, wiped the tears away.
"Patty... Patty," He started, and then patted the fire truck he'd wanted.
Patrick stared at his brother. It was like looking in a slightly elongated mirror. They looked similar, but by no means identical. Peter had darker hair, a longer face, less joy in his features, even at two. He was Patrick's shadow, in the Jungian sense of the term, already, at two, full of an instinctive understanding of tragedy that defied the laws of child development.
"Patty." It was one word, and it broke in the middle.
"Pete?" Patrick said, and turned his head to the side.
"I've had enough of this shit," Mommy said, and she took Peter strongly by the arm then, hauled him towards the front door of the trailer. A few fat tears slipped out of his eyes, ran down the swollen curves of his toddler cheeks, caught the light in shining lines.
"Bye, Patty," he said in his high, chirping voice. "Love you."
Patrick didn't say love you back. He didn't understand what was happening.
"Love you," Peter Jane said as their mother hauled him towards the front door. His face was caught in dappled sunlight, green and yellow, moving over it. Tree light.
Patrick watched his brother disappear from view. Got up off the floor, still holding his fire truck and slowly walked to the front door. He put his hands on the bug screen and pressed, looked out. There was Peter getting in Mommy's car. There he was in the backseat, looking out through the back window, and now his face was broken and red and his mouth was open in a deformed oh shape as he cried.
Peter was upset, and even thought Patrick didn't understand exactly why he was so distraught, the look of him with his red, crying face and his hands on the glass as the car pulled out of the drive stirred something new and achy in Patrick Jane's toddler soul, something he didn't have words for and something which over the course of the next few years would come back to him only in painful dreams and sudden crying spells in the day for which he had no conscious explanation.
Jane woke up with a start. He could feel tears on his cheeks, the ache of grief in his chest and his throat strong and strange as a spirit possession.
He got up, confused- more than a little distressed- and walked out of his bedroom and into the bathroom. He turned on the light, urinated in the toilet, washed his hands and stared at his haggard expression in the mirror.
His cheeks were tracked with tears and suddenly, unexpectantly, he found himself crying. Not loud sobbing, but the tears were suddenly much more in volume, and the sense of harsh loss and grief ratcheted up another notch.
He only had fractures of his dream left for his conscious mind to manipulate, but it was enough.
Something about Red John... Peter... as a toddler.
Being taken away. Saying goodbye.
Saying: "I love you."
Well, of course. Of course.
He hadn't been born evil.
No... no, he hadn't.
Jane stared at himself, feeling stunned and like he was in a free fall, like the ground below him was suddenly no longer solid and he was falling. It was a feeling of pronounced vertigo, a feeling like he was high on a mountain looking out over a rocky cliff and might fall.
He'd always disliked heights.
"Get it together, Patrick," he told himself finally, and turned the cold water on. He took handfuls of water in his cupped hands and splashed his face over and over until the suddenly pressing, needling urge to break into impossible sobs began to subside.
He'd been under a lot of stress, and that stress was letting up recently, and that's all this was.
That's all this was.
After a while Jane found himself shivering, arms covered in gooseflesh. He shook his head, shuddered.
Then he pulled his bath towel from the towel rack and gently dried his face and hands, turned off the bathroom light and went into the kitchen to make tea and warm up and think.
When he had the water on the stove going he wandered down the hall, gently pushed open Charlotte's bedroom door. Smiled gently at the impossible sight of her.
She was asleep in her bed and had kicked the comforter with the hyperactive, psychedelic colours onto the floor. She had an impossibly young face in sleep, eyes swollen and buggy, eyelashes long and dark and cheeks rounder and younger looking than they were in the daylight, infused with a gentle pink flush against her otherwise milk-white skin. Dixon was on her bed, too, and roused immediately at Jane's presence, large boxy head coming up off the mattress, eyes flashing as the light from the hall hit them. In that moment the puppy seemed more bull than dog, and even though said puppy clearly loved Jane, Charlotte was the one he served.
Reassured that the sudden presence at his master's door was only Patrick, Dixon lowered his head back onto Charlotte's belly with a tired huff. Her furry, muscular, knight-on-four-legs.
"Good boy," Jane said affectionately, smiling at the scene, and closed the door as quietly as he could.
He went back into the kitchen and pulled the kettle from the stove element just as the kettle began to squeal and sputter boiling water. He took the coffee mug Charlotte had purchased him for his birthday back in May (the one which proudly proclaimed he was the best dad in the universe) off the hanging wall rack which read "MUGS", gently placed it on the counter, dropped a green tea bag into it and filled it with boiling water.
Then he took his cup of tea to the kitchen table and sat down in a chair and let his tea steep.
An image of himself as a toddler- his own face reflected back to him in the unfeeling screen of the console television as Peter was pulled away by their mother- came back to haunt Jane in his mind's eye. The image burned with a fire as sharp as a hornet's sting.
Peter's longer, more dour face flickered over the memory like a tortured ghost. The red, snotty face of a sobbing toddler who would become a monster called Red John as the car pulled away.
(Love you)
Peter had known that was the last time in any real sense he would see Patrick... at least until their reunion 8 years later. Somehow he had known.
Patrick hadn't known. He'd cried seeing his brother's face, but only because his brother was crying, not because he understood. He hadn't understood.
At the time he hadn't understood at all.
Jane had finished his tea. He couldn't get the dream out of his mind. It had all the hallmarks of a repressed memory, as opposed to a dreamed fantasy, and that bothered Jane.
He'd had fleeting memories of damaged, cruel ten-year-old Peter of course. Growing up, memories in dreams that were gone by the time he brushed his teeth but which served as a warning that he didn't need to go digging about in his past. He could let sleeping dogs lie. There was nothing in his past for him. He had to move on...
He couldn't remember a memory of toddler Peter before, though, a memory of the human who would become Red John before he'd gone darkside, and the intrusion of such a memory was increasingly destabilizing.
He couldn't afford to feel any compassion for Red John. None at all. Not after all the bastard had done, not only to Angela, and to Charlie... but to countless innocent victims. No.
No.
Red John was a monster.
End of story.
He was unsalvagable. And, more than that, he was dead.
And that was just as well.
Still, two hours later when the clock in the oven display screamed 4:15 in eerie neon green (the same colour as the grade B science fiction alien movies of the late 70s and early 80s little Tricky boy had loved so much back in the day), Jane was still ruminating. He felt uneasy, and tortured in a way that was new to him. And Patrick Jane was used to feeling tortured.
Finally, he ran his hands over his face, over his budding stubble and pressed on his eyeballs.
"Fuck," he told the empty kitchen in a sleep-raspy voice. "Fuck this shit."
He got up, carried the now-empty cup to the sink, dropped the used tea bag into the trash can under the sink, and wandered back to bed.
He knew he wouldn't sleep again tonight, but sitting in the relative dark of the kitchen was somehow worse than lying in bed and pretending he might drift off.
Impossibly, Jane woke to the bellowing scream of his alarm at 6:30 and groaned. His head hurt and the inside of his mouth tasted like something small in the Rodentia order had decided to crawl into it to die. Jane crawled out of bed, grabbed his three piece suit from the closet and wandered into the hall in his pajamas and house coat.
He could hear the water running in the bathroom and knew Charlotte was already up and having his morning shower. Dixon came running down the hall then, carrying his red rubber Kong ball, and dropped the ball at Jane's feet. Jane smiled.
"Morning, Dixon," Jane said pleasantly, still half asleep, and picked the ball up. Dixon turned his head to one side, the standard "what are you going to do now?" body language of the canine and waited. Jane tossed the ball down the short hallway and watched as Dixon scrambled after it, a blur of long legs and big paws and wagging tail. Dixon was back a second later with the ball, tail all but a blur.
"You're a good boy, aren't you, Dixon?" Jane told the dog and went into the living room, turned the morning news on. It was the same old shit, but it was a routine Charlotte was used to. It was something normal people in normal homes did... watch the morning news. Jane went and got a cereal bowl from the cabinet, got his high fiber cereal from the cupboard, filled the bowl. Got the almond milk from the fridge and was half way through his breakfast when Charlotte came into the kitchen drying her hair, already dressed for school.
"Morning, Patrick," Charlotte said tiredly and even though her eyes were still half shut, she went and got a bowl and her box of Cookie Crisp from the cupboard. Jane had already started some coffee, not only for her today, but for himself as well.
He felt exhausted and foggy.
"Thanks, Patrick," Charlie said, grabbing the coffee pot and pouring half of it into a 7-11 big gulp cup.
"Easy, kid," Jane admonished gently. "You already have enough trouble sitting still in class, from what I've been told."
Charlotte ignored this and fished the hazelnut Coffee Mate out of the cupboard, dumped far too much into the Big Gulp cup and stirred everything with a fork.
"I need to wake up," she said to no one in particular.
Jane nodded and helped himself to a cup of coffee himself.
"I didn't know you imbibed on the sweet brown nectar of the Gods known as java," Charlie said, clearly pleased with her early morning wit, and earned a grin from her father as a reward.
"Most days I don't, but today... I do."
"Why is today different?" Charlie said in between gulps of coffee and Cookie Crisp.
"I didn't sleep well," Jane admitted.
"Oh?" Charlie said, like she was digging for more information, but then became distracted with the assembly of her lunch.
"I thought you did that last night?" Jane admonished as his teenager pulled boxes and cans out of the cupboards and dumped food into her tin Aliens (complete with an embossed image of a Xenomorph Queen "smiling" on the front) lunch box.
"I forgot," Charlotte admitted somewhat sheepishly. In went a Fiber one brownie, a microwavable Chef Boyardee Mac and Cheese cup, the standard can of Yoohoo and a Capri-Sun drink pack, a sugar free apple sauce...
She had the wonder bread and Smucker's strawberry and peanut butter Goober jar out and was making a very sloppy PB and J when Jane put his cereal bowl and coffee mug in the dishwasher and hurried off to get his shower.
"Dad?" Charlotte called down the hall.
"Yes?"
"Should I make soup to put in the Thermos?"
"It's up to you but we leave in less than 40 minutes," Jane called back as he stepped into the bathroom and shut the door. Time for a quick shower and tooth brushing, shave and change into his suit.
Beyond the bathroom door he heard Charlotte yell: "I'm talking Dixie out to do his business now, okay?"
"OKAY!" Jane yelled back over the rush of the shower.
"I'll lock the front door, okay?!"
"OKAY!"
He lathered quickly, ran shampoo through his hair, shaved in the shower, brushed his teeth and spat and was out in under 7 minutes. He ran some deodorant under his arms, wrapped a towel around his waist and went to his room to change.
When the front door opened again, he felt a surge of fear run through him. It was only Charlotte, though. Of course. Back with the dog.
"Good boy, Dixie," Charlotte said, sitting on the sofa and flipping through the channels before settling on something that sounded like Saturday morning cartoons.
"Your backpack and gym bag and everything are ready to go?" Jane said entering the living room, towel drying his hair.
"Affirmative, Captain," Charlotte said in a voice that let Jane know she was doing some character from a movie or TV show he hadn't yet seen. He sat with her on the couch and watched cartoons- what appeared to be a retro version of Transformers- and then it was time to go.
"Have a good day, Dixie. I love you," Charlotte crooned as they stepped through the door and Jane felt a chill run through him at her words and had another flash of his dream-memories.
Now was not the time to focus on that, though.
Charlotte was distracted by video games on the way to school, silent except for the occasional curse when her performance failed to live up to her expectations and Jane let her be. She gave him a hug and kiss when he dropped her off, grabbed her gym bag and backpack and jumped out of the passenger side of the car, almost tripped over an untied shoelace, righted herself and grinned back winningly.
"Have a good day at work, Dad. I love you."
She was calling him 'Dad' as opposed to 'Patrick' more and more often these days. Jane didn't comment on the change, lest he jinx himself, but her use of the word 'Dad' warmed something cold and broken and neglected deep inside his soul.
"You must be tired," Jane said back in response to her words, smiling. "You just said the L-word on school property. What will the cool kids think?"
Charlotte considered this, blushed a little, nodded. She had a crafty expression on her face, now.
"There aren't any cool kids at this school, you know."
"Ah!," Jane said back, still smiling his winning smile.
"Say hi to Lisbon and Rigsby and Cho and Van Pelt for me. Be good. See you after school," Charlotte added before slamming the passenger side door and waving her goodbyes. Jane waved back and then pulled out of the school parking lot, out through the front gate and was back on the main road, back towards the CBI. He had a lot to talk to Lisbon about.
Jane pulled into the CBI parking lot, turned his car off and sat in the driver's seat. He didn't get out right away. He watched agents enter and leave and considered his child, and Lisbon, and the sum total of what was his life. He considered his childhood, his early precocity and his supreme memory, a memory which had allowed him to manipulate people and dig into their heads like a gopher on speed. And yet, his life was marked with a consistent and confusing amnesia, a sort of oblivescence which didn't add up at face value. People with normal lives (and Jane knew that "normal" had a very wide berth and that abuse and trauma- up to a degree- were still, unfortunately, "normal")... people with normal lives didn't walk around with their heads full of holes.
Sure, they forgot things. Everybody forgot things. But they didn't forget twin brothers ripped out their lives by an unnecessarily schismatic fate. They didn't forget- for decades- their beloved childhood dogs, especially when those dogs had been decapitated in front of their bulging, horrified eyes.
They didn't grow up and out of trailer park poverty and into the type of successful silver-tongued enfant terrible media personality he had, either... not without some sort of help.
There were gaps not only of memory but of knowledge, a growing sense of something unseen and larger than himself working in his life in the shadows, a force that wasn't just the cunning hand of his morally neutered brother, either. Whatever had happened to Peter to turn him into Red John was Sisyphean in scope and had a long reach. Jane didn't like that idea, either. It felt like he was softening Red John's blows, morally absolving him of the full depravity of his actions, making him the victim. Just the suggestion that Red John might not be fully responsible for his handiwork struck Jane as perverse...
Red John had been a monster. If Charlotte was right and he was still physically alive, he was still a monster to this day, as monstrous as it was possible for a physical human being to ever become.
But, also, maybe... was the increasingly unnerving possibility that he might be some sort of victim.
Maybe the ultimate type of victim, if there was such a thing.
The thought made bile bubble up in Jane's throat, the salty sour adumbration of vomit. When he looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror, his skin was pale as swiss cheese, his eyes over-bright and haunted.
Lisbon would notice right away, of course. They all would. He looked like a man in shock.
Finally, Jane pulled himself out of his reverie with a long, drawn out suspiration and forced himself to disconnect his seatbelt. His hands were shaking, just a little bit.
Time to start the day. The good old CBI. At the very least, he was working for a fairly decent organization for the purposes he had in mind. If he played his cards right, maybe he could even get Rigsby to make him a cup of tea.