Chapter 7

Zaire | Before

They look like us. Mr Oriel, Mr Cezanne, Mr Forrest and Mr Salvatore all sit together and they look like us. I don’t know where the women are, Natalia took them off about an hour ago and they are a no-show for lunch. My father is still in Paris, arriving in two days. It’s the earliest he could arrange the trip for. I try not to resent the fact that the parents of all my friends got here within twenty-four hours of her death and mine couldn’t. His absence is abundantly obvious to me, a gap between Nick Cezanne and Matteo Salvatore.

“This is creepy,” Leo says, also staring at the table of fathers. “Is he still carving that headstone?”

Matteo Salvatore arrived while carving Charlotte’s details into a slab of stone with a marble angle on the top. Raffiel gets the talent with woodwork from him. Mr and Mrs Cezanne insisted he didn’t have to, but he insisted that he did.

“If I could do this when I was eighteen, I can do this now,” he said stubbornly. “The workshop still here? I’ll be in there, Lea.”

“He’s almost done,” Raffiel answers. “And this is weird. I heard my parents talking about how it was exactly like when they were eighteen.”

“My dad disappeared for about three hours to my mum’s fury.” Leo makes a face. “Darling Raelynn needs the attention of her father at a crucial time like this.”

“The surgery was three months ago,” I say. “And she wasn’t even that close to Charlotte. Why?”

“You’re the one she never shuts up about.”

“They’ve got a date. You know, for the funeral,” Hawk says. “It’s two days from now. The police agreed and we’re all here, so…”

“So we’re going to put her in a box and bury it,” I deadpan. “We can hold hands and skip afterwards.”

“That’s mean,” Leo says. “God, this sucks. Why her? She did everything right and——”

“What do you mean?” I turn to him. “What did she do? Because it seems to me that for the past six weeks all she did was bail on stuff we were meant to do together.”

“I’m just saying that it’s not like she killed someone.” He shifts uneasily in his seat. “It’s just so unfair that she’s dead.”

But his eyes say that he meant something completely different.

“Hey, boys.” Mr Cezanne takes at seat at the end of our table. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

“Sure,” Raffiel answers.

“Will you be pallbearers at the funeral?” The words rush out quickly and he keeps talking. “You four knew Charlotte much better than any estranged cousin or, hell, me. She’d tell me to get my hands off her coffin and let her friends do it.”

“She would,” Hawk says with a sad smile. “I’ll do it.”

“I’m in too,” Raffiel agrees.

Leo simply nods. And now, all eyes are on me.

“I’ll carry Charlotte’s coffin.” I pause. “And I’m sorry for your loss, sir.”

“Thank you, Zaire. I am sorry for yours also.”

It’s only when he’s gone that I realise his eyes were clear of tears and his voice steady. Emotionless. Too emotionless.

• * *

Charlotte Brooklyn Cezanne will be buried in a white dress, her red streaked blonde hair down while wearing her electric blue Doc Martens. Glistening at her throat is her blue necklace, the one she hated in the last few weeks of her life. This is ridiculous. They’re still clinging onto the image of the old Charlotte, refusing to see what’s right in front of their eyes.

Charlotte didn’t love life like she used to. She hated it. She scowled, she dyed. The tips of her blonde hair the colour of blood, she stopped being the Charlotte I knew. But she was still Charlotte. And she hated that necklace.

I glance behind me to check that nobody else is in the church and unclasp the necklace, quick as a wink. I then fasten her silver bracelet with ravens carved onto it on her left wrist before stepping back to examine my work. She looks like Charlotte now. With her bracelet that she refused to remove in that last half term and her red tinted hair and the lack of the necklace, she’s Charlotte again.

I slam the coffin shut like I was told to do so Matteo can nail it shut when he gets up here with the hammer.

“Mijo?” I recognise Dad’s voice immediately.

“Dad.”

He pulls me into a tight hug and doesn’t let go for a while. He’s holding back the tears, trying to hold it together for me.

“Thanks for coming,” I whisper.

“Wouldn’t miss it.” He pulls away. “I’ve cancelled all my shows this summer. We’re going to go home. Together. You, me, Abuela.”

“Dad, you were in Venice this summer,” I protest. “You can’t cancel your shows for me.”

It seems that his phone agrees because it starts ringing just after I say the last word. Dad holds up a hand to say just a sec and clicks answer.

“Yes, I’m sure, Cindy,” he says. “My son needs me and frankly, I don’t give a damn how angry the Italians are getting. I don’t like pizza much anyway.”

The person on the other end tries to protest.

“Cindy, I’m not doing it,” he sighs. “Anyway, I’ve got a funeral to get to.”

“The Italians will come for you,” I warn. Have you seen Raffiel’ dad when someone interrupts his carving?”

“You’re forgetting that I grew up with this guy. I can take him easy-peasy.” Dad straightens his tie. “It’s going to be here, right?”

I nod. “How do you know you can take him?” I ask as we sit down on the ground together.

“Because I beat him up when we were fourteen.” He cracks a smile. “He—”

“What did he do?” I ask after a long, awkward pause. “Dad?”

“Nothing. He just irritated me, that’s all.”

It’s a lie. A small one, but still a lie. My father can keep his cool better than anyone I know. I once saw some drunk lady spill a glass of red wine on his white shirt and all he did was laugh and say he didn’t like it much anyway. It was his favourite shirt.

“Armando,” Mr Cezanne greets as he walks into the church. “Glad you could make it, mate.”

They share one of those I want to hug you, but I’m too cool to hug someone hugs that Claire parents share. It’s basically just patting the other guy on the elbow while leaning in a little. There may be a class we take in Year Thirteen teaching us how to hug the Claire way.

“How’s she looking?” he asks. “I can’t. It’ll make me go all hysterical.”

“Beautiful, sir,” I answer. “As beautiful as she can be right now.”

The necklace burns a hole in my pocket as the words slip off my tongue. The necklace was his mother’s, Charlotte told me that. The memories I have of Eleanor Cezanne are vague and fuzzy. But I do remember the way she always wore high necked dresses or blouses with that necklace resting on top. A strange detail, but a detail nonetheless.

“Hammer coming through,” Mr Salvatore calls, holding a hammer up over his head. “You wankers wanna get hit or what? Move out of the way.”

“Thank God Raffiel didn’t turn out like him,” Lea, Raffiel’s mum, mutters to herself.

Raffiel smiles. “Yeah, Mum. Who wouldn’t want me to turn out as the arty, witty guy you fell for?”

“I meant you don’t call people wankers and use the word please,” she replies.

It causes me to smile too. It causes a small, warm feeling in my chest that I cling onto as the service begins. The old vicar from the church in the village has a slow, dull voice. It’s easy to drown him out. It’s harder to drown out Nick Cezanne as he begins to talk about his daughter when the vicar finishes.

He talks about Charlotte when she was a baby. He talks about young child Charlotte and young child Zaire. How we built a pet cemetery together when we were six after my pet hamster (who was called Hammy because I was such an imaginative child) and Charlotte caught a glimpse of the novel in her father’s study. He talks about Charlotte as she grew up. He talks about every Charlotte.

“It’s a goddamn tragedy that she was taken away from us so early,” he says to finish. “But as I’m sure someone will say sometime, an angel’s true home is heaven.”

Charlotte wasn’t an angel. Charlotte wasn’t an angel. Charlotte wasn’t an angel. Charlotte wasn’t an angel.

I repeat the thought over and over again as the four of us rise to carry the coffin outside to the freshly dug grave in the tiny cemetery next to this tiny church. I repeat it over and over, hoping to erase the meaning of his words. Hoping to remind Charlotte that I always knew who she was.

“To the baddest bitch of them all,” Leo whispers with a smile as we lower the coffin into the hole.

“To the baddest bitch of them all,” we echo quietly.

It’s when I’m going to the dorm to grab my stuff that I hear them. Dad and Mr Forrest. They’re in the corridor just in front of our dorm, talking in hushed voices. I pause right in front of the door to hear what they’re saying.

“Come on, it’s exactly like Diego,” Mr Forrest is saying. “You can’t deny it, it’s practically the same event.”

“His death was not an event, Ethan,” Dad hisses. “And who cares? Claire is a freaky place and freaky things happen.”

“If you want, I can——”

“You and your ravens stay out of what happened to Diego,” Dad says angrily. “If Nick wants you to find out what happened to Charlotte, I won’t stop you. But don’t you dare go looking into what happened to Diego.”

“Dad?” I call. “Are you there?”

“Yeah, Zaire,” he answers, suddenly all calm. “You ready to go?”

I open the door and nod. “Hey, Mr Forrest. Let’s go, Dad.”

Not once does he mention what they were talking about. And not once does he mention the name Diego.