Chapter Text
Prologue
“Do you know what this is, Charlotte?” The voice is soft, deep. Comforting and familiar, but now laced with discomfort and worry.
“Yep,” she replies glibly. “Bang!” Makes a gun with her finger and thumb and winks at him. Her giggles die when she sees that he’s not laughing. “I’m not allowed to touch it.”
“Some day,” he says, “you might have to, so this needs to be our secret. But if you have to use it, you tell your mother where it is. She doesn’t want to know now, but she might need to. You both might need to, if anything ever happens to me. Just like I showed you before." He points to the safety, lets her hold the weight of it in her hand, with his hands over hers for guidance.
This is Important; she can tell by his tone. It’s deep, gravelled, like something is catching his words in his throat. “Promise me that you’ll remember where it is.” She nods. She has an excellent memory, especially if she can match an image with a sound. That’s why she’s so good at the piano. The click of the box, the sliding of the metal corners on the wood floor under the dresser in the guest bedroom. There’s more in the box than just a gun, she notices. There’s money, and papers. One of the papers has her picture on it.
“Is this a pretend box?” she asks, curious. There’s never been a gun in a pretend box before. The boxes, sometimes he shows her little books with her picture, but a different name. There are stories he makes up to go with the names, and she practices memorizing them. Mom doesn’t like it when they play that game, but she likes to pretend she’s a spy.
Just like Daddy.
“Kind of, sweetheart. Only, this is more serious.” He slides it away under the floorboard, but she stops him and asks him to wait.
He looks confused, but patient as she reappears in the guest room with her special keychain; the one she keeps on her big girl purse from Mommy. It’s a little metal pair of ballet slippers. It was just a little thing he’d given in and bought her (one puppy-dog look from her and you cave like a house of cards, Ray) when they went to the mall (what on earth do you need it for, sweetheart? what key are you going to put on that chain?), but she carried it everywhere. It was her talisman. She’d read that word in a book and liked how it sounded. Talisman. Magic. Like that game Bobby and Greg down the street played and then got into trouble with their mom for playing because it had demons and magic and stuff.
She put it into the box. “If it’s serious,” she says, “I don’t want to forget it.” He coughs and looks away from her as he puts the box away. “Are you crying, Daddy?”
He doesn’t say anything, just hugs her and says they’ll go watch Fraggle Rock now. She skips down the hallway, singing “Dance your cares away…”
Worry’s for another day.