Chapter 4
Charlie sat on the beach and watched the sun set over the water.
Usually, this made him feel peaceful.
Tonight, though…tonight he felt as if the sun were setting permanently on some part of his soul. He felt bereft.
His words with Don last week didn't really qualify as an argument, because only one of them had been angry. His hurt over the book, the dinner — it was old. Not so much dealt with, as assimilated. He hadn't realized how much, until Don brought it up.
With the team back together after a week, they were busy enough that he had finished his work with FBI Admin without running into Don again last week, and Don had not come to the house over the weekend. He was feeling pretty badly about that by Monday. He hadn't meant to get Don so angry that he would cut himself off from them entirely. That wasn't fair to Dad. But then Larry mentioned Megan's busy weekend in the field, and he felt better. Don was just working all weekend.
At any rate, the time alone had given him space to think, and he was afraid now that something was broken. Over the last year, he had continued to consult whenever Don asked him, but as he recalled the last year, he noticed that he had stopped trying to confide in Don. He only answered questions that he was asked, perfunctorily, without details — and Don never asked for more. Sadly, he had realized that in some ways, he felt closer to Don's team members than he did to Don. Whenever he was in the office, he felt a welcome rapport with them — but always felt that he should maintain a certain professional distance from Don.
Out of the office…Well, he was seeing Megan a lot when she came to see Larry. They would no doubt double-date, if Charlie could get a girl to look at him twice…or maybe just figure out when one was, in time to do something about it. He and Colby had gone out for beer a few times after a case. He had given David's niece a tour of Cal Sci and tried to steal her from UCLA. Don? Don he saw at dinner. He was glad that Don came so often — he knew how much it meant to Alan. But he didn't think for a minute that Don would keep coming, if Alan weren't there.
A couple of times in the last year, overwhelmed, Charlie had tried. When he was having dreams about their mother. When Amita got the job offer from Harvard. Don was polite enough. He listened, but he didn't ask any questions that would prolong the conversations, either. Both times, Charlie had just stopped talking, asked Don if he needed his help on anything, and then left.
In earlier days, he had considered his own responsibilities. He had tried to get Don to share things with him, he had tried to make him understand that he wanted to be a good brother. But Don was not big on sharing. At least not with Charlie. He wouldn't talk about Kim, or Terry — at one point, he had actually declared those questions off-limits. He talked about work, a lot. Too much, probably. Charlie smiled sadly for his father. Poor Alan. Two sons who were too entangled in work to create entanglements — and grandchildren — elsewhere. At least the two of them had that in common.
And that was about it. Five years seemed like a big age difference when they were growing up, especially when it was complicated by Charlie's gift and everybody's attempt to grasp its implications. His parents had found themselves making decisions they never thought they'd have to make, and often left in the dust by the strange and complex workings of his mind. He himself had hated being so different from everyone else, and it took him years to devise ways to slow his synapses down enough to sleep at night. Don was put first in the uncomfortable position of suddenly no longer being an only child, then in the worse position of being in the same classes as his much younger brother. So no, they had never had much in common.
He was hoping that as adults, they could find connections.
Maybe too much was unresolved.
Maybe it was just never meant to be.
So he accepted the level of intimacy Don seemed comfortable with. He tried to tell himself that he was satisfied with that.
The sun was almost down, now. It was almost dark. The breeze had picked up, and was coming off the ocean in waves that smelled of saltwater and blew sand into his hair. He flexed his bare feet into the ever-shifting grains. When you saw a beach in the distance, from a car window, or in a picture…it looked solid. Yet when you made yourself part of that beach, from the first step it moved beneath you. You quickly learned to trust enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other, or you ran back the other way as fast as you could. The struggle of staying, of negotiating the terrain, was always worth the effort, Charlie had found. The further into the beach you got, the more it revealed its treasures to you.
Charlie sighed.
Maybe he should have tried harder.
