“The pitch was Gone Girl meets Fifty Shades. But at its core, it’s a story about these two sisters—”
This sounds an alarm bell. Over the years, Charlotte has written many a roman à clef, including family and friends among her thinly veiled characters. When pressed about the similarities to real people and events, she’s always leaned on the standard disclaimer: “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” Despite that, the circumstances leading up to the loss of my virginity were memorialized for all time in a story about a girl named Ellice that Charlotte published her senior year in the high school literary magazine. Another time, the older sister was named Gabriella; and once Charlotte thought that by adding a B—Bella—she’d throw people off the scent that her protagonist’s older sister was me. As for her own doppelg?ngers, Charlotte was only slightly more creative. She went through a phase of cycling among the Sex and the City characters; instead of Charlotte, her stand-in was named Carrie or Samantha or Miranda. Once she even called her fictional counterpart Wilbur, a Charlotte’s Web allusion.
“Wait a sec. This isn’t your blog that no one ever looks at. This is a real book. People are going to read this.”
She laughs. “That’s kind of the point. For people to read it. But, to put you at ease, no . . . it’s not about us. It’s fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”
“Of course it is,” I say with an eye roll. “Are the two sisters named . . . Charlemagne and Eleanor?”
“No. Emily and Clare.”
“Great. So you used our middle names. Very creative.”
“I’ll change them if you want. But you should be honored that I think you have the makings of a great literary character. Besides, it’s the younger sister who’s really messed up. The older sister is the moral compass of the book.”
This much I believe. Charlotte always paints her alter egos with harsh colors, and the characters based on me always seem too good to be true.
“You must be ecstatic,” I say.
“I don’t know about ecstatic, but I am very excited . . . and also more than a little scared about the prospect of having to finish it. But it comes at a time when I really needed some good news in my life.”
This revelation stops me short. I hadn’t realized anything was troubling Charlotte, aside from the usual ups and downs with Zach.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
“No . . . no. It’s just . . . I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I’m the family screwup, and now I have some small measure of validation that I’ve done something right. You know what I mean?”
I do. All too well, in fact. It’s part of the roles that Charlotte and I have been assigned in our family drama. I’m the steady one, the sensible one. She’s the free spirit, the dream chaser. I have long wished we could switch parts. Oddly, it never occurred to me that Charlotte might feel that way too.
“Char, you’re twenty-five years old and about to be a published author. You’re way ahead of the curve. When I was twenty-five . . . I was doing arraignments in traffic court.”
She smiles, but I know I haven’t alleviated whatever is bothering her.
“Thanks,” she says as my consolation prize.
“No, I’m serious. I’m so proud of you, Char. Such an amazing accomplishment. And Mom would be over the moon.”
Our mother died when I was nineteen and Charlotte was a month away from becoming a teenager. She had been diagnosed with cancer a year before and underwent the most brutal form of chemotherapy in hopes of surviving long enough to attend Charlotte’s high school graduation. I suspected she knew this was asking too much, and that surviving long enough to see me graduate from college was her true goal. She didn’t come close to either.
Had my mother lived, I imagine that both my sister and I would have taken vastly different paths in life. For starters, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have gone to law school. My mother’s almost-constant mantra was that I possessed a special musical talent.
“You don’t realize it now, Ella,” she’d said, “but a voice like yours is a gift from God. There’s nothing sadder than turning your back on the thing that makes you great.”
She had high hopes that, after college, I’d take a year or more and live the life of a singer. A struggling one, at least. Waitressing, auditions, the whole nine yards.
When she died, so did that dream. Instead, I gravitated toward pleasing my father, which meant following in his footsteps. And so, after college, rather than auditioning for Broadway, I went to law school.
But my detour was minor compared to Charlotte’s. Before our mother died, the long-running joke in our family was that Charlotte was the only creature on earth happier than our dog. Nixie would run around the house with her tail wagging for no reason at all, and Charlotte always seemed even more joyous than that. By the time I graduated from college, however, my sister had been fundamentally transformed. The happy-go-lucky tween who sang out loud without realizing it suddenly became closed off and moody. She wore nothing but black and applied her makeup so heavily it was almost like a mask. For as long as I could remember, Charlotte had talked about plans for becoming a doctor—and not just any kind of doctor. By twelve she knew she wanted to go into pediatric cardiology. But after witnessing our mother’s demise, it was apparent that being around death was the last thing she wanted, so she declared herself a writer.
My reference to our mother is enough to bring both of us to tears. We wipe them away with the same motion—mirror images.
“So, when can I read this masterpiece?” I ask.
“I’ve got it right here.”
Charlotte reaches down into her backpack, a green canvas one that she bought at a thrift store—that’s where she buys all her clothing, usually paying a price by the pound. Out of it she pulls a white, loose-leaf binder of the two-inch variety and hands it to me.
“Normally I’d just e-mail it, but I know you prefer reading actual paper books,” she says. “So I went to OfficeMax and had them print it out.”
I open the binder to the title page, which reads in large, bold font:
Dead Certain, by Charlotte Broden
I turn the page: To my sister, Ella, because . . . because.
“Aw,” I say. “You dedicated it to me?”
“Who else? Like I said, I’ve only written the first half. So what you have are the events leading up to the crime, but the identity of the murderer is still unclear. After you’re done, if you want, I’ll tell you who did it.”
I flip through the pages. “What’s the second half going to be about?”
“The older sister. She’s going to solve the crime.”
“Of course she will. But aren’t you afraid the murderer will slip town while you’re writing the second half?” I say in my snarkiest tone.
“Spoken like a true lawyer,” she says with a laugh.
I’m sure she didn’t mean it as a rebuke. After all, I am a lawyer. Still, it stings. A bit of self-loathing on my part.