Charlie Quinn Lets Go: A Novel

by Jamie Varon

“Do you ever feel like . . .” Josh started, his eyebrows stitched together “. . . like the pandemic changed you? Like you’re trying to go back to your 2019 life and your 2019 ways of doing things and you just . . . can’t? Your 2019 self is gone forever. That life is a distant dream. Everything is different now. Like maybe you’re meant to do something else or be someone else entirely? Like you don’t even know who you are anymore?”

“You hate emotions?” he asked, wide-eyed. “Yes, they’re very distracting.” “I’m a Pisces. I’m just one big emotion all the time.” “I’m a Virgo. I like order.”

I’m all feelings. You’re all to-do lists.” She laughed. “I can’t tell which is healthier.” “Neither,” he said. “I fear you are emotionally repressed and I am emotionally fragile. A terrible combination. We should never fall in love.”

Mom always said, Hating yourself is a gift to the patriarchy, Charlie baby.

It was the kind of childhood that seemed idyllic when you’re a kid, but then you become an adult yourself and your memories shift. You realize maybe being your mom’s life coach and confidante and shoulder to cry on wasn’t very healthy.

Jackie Quinn wanted to be our best friend a lot more than she wanted to be our mother.

She held herself and her body like it was sacred, like she was worthy of existing.

There were so many good times. It was terrifying how easy it was to forget them, when all you’ve done is hold on to your resentments.

Mom always said people needed permission from others to let loose and that’s what Quinn Canyon represented. Permission to be free. Mom was always the first to give in, to show everyone how it’s done.

Love could lift you to perilous heights, holding only the hand of a fallible human being, who could any day decide to change their mind and walk out the door.

“I never understood how you could deal with rejection so much,” I said by way of some sort of explanation. “Or Dad leaving. Or any of it. To me, I looked at you and thought, she should live more carefully. More boxed in. You kept opening yourself up over and over. How? Love, wanting things, is just . . . painful.” Mom seemed to still, her face scrunched in thought, her hands wringing the steering wheel. “Charlie, you think you get to choose whether you love or not,” Mom said. “You either close yourself off to love or you don’t. Those are the only options. There is so much unspent love inside you. It still exists. You just use so much energy trying not to feel it. But where does it go?”

She was always cool under pressure. Driving in LA could turn anyone into a maniac, yet she remained calm. I had seen Mom fall apart many times before, but it was less of a rage and more of a withdrawal from life. I had always watched those moments and thought—this was what happened when you opened yourself up, you end up flat out on the bed, comatose and disengaged. God, I had hated seeing her cry.

“It’s easier to give up,” she said. “Live behind walls and be guarded. I think about giving up a lot. Of course I do. But I just have this stubborn belief that life is meant to be lived. We’re not meant to be perfect or even happy all the time. The reason joy can feel so incredible is because we know the absence of it. Everything exists in contrast. If I stop being open to pain, I stop being open to all the other things I love about life. I hate being rejected. I wish my career had taken off already. But I refuse to not try. I refuse to close myself off to life. It’s not because I’m stronger or anything. I just make a choice over and over to endure it.”

“You have but one short wild ride on this earth, Charlotte. All I want is to see you give it all you’ve got.”

The idea that I had somehow rubbed off on her made me sick with nausea. Unexpectedly, I wanted my positive, upbeat mom back with such a vengeance that it shook me to my very core.

“If I spend all my time wishing things had worked out differently, I miss the life I’m having right here, right now. Why would I torture myself like that? If I resist what’s meant for me, I end up unhappy. But if I see all that is working for me, I’m left with peace. If I can just trust that a rejection is a redirection and everything works out in perfect, divine timing, then the moment I am having right here becomes precious and perfect. I am exactly where I’m supposed to be and nothing is wrong.”

“I just don’t think we have as much control as we want to believe. I trust that what’s meant to be, will be. And what’s meant to go, needs to go. And all of it is working for my highest good.”

“I’ve been living in fear for a long time, Mom. I think I might be open to another way, but let me do it on my own terms. In my own time. Okay?” “Always,” she said. “I’m here for the journey, Charlie baby. I go where you go.”

Or times with our dad when he’d sweep into town and the world felt glittery and magical again. Because, the depth of your joy can also match the depth of your despair. If you feel it all, you have to feel the bad things, too. That was the part I couldn’t shake. It seemed to me that giving up joy was a fair trade for never having to be irreparably broken ever again.

If you never confront the past, never let it catch up, you can almost convince yourself you’ve outrun it entirely. Almost.

That was his cliché pattern—when he came into town, it was time to have fun. He wanted to leave me with memories. But what he didn’t know was that when he left forever, those memories, no matter how golden, turned to ash. Dad had weaponized fun against me for the first ten years of my life. I always let him back in, always lowered my walls, got swept up in his energy, in the whirlwind he’d create when he deemed me important enough to return to for a weekend. He thought if he distracted me, plied me with sugar, and gave me anything I could ever want for those few days, all sins would be forgiven. And they were, over and over. I always believed I could be enough to make him stay. Fun enough, good enough, exciting enough. But he always left.

Grief can somehow make you more courageous, more willing to not waste any time. I haven’t always seen it that way, but I’m beginning to, more and more.”

“I mean, yeah, sure, at first. I was pretty catatonic, honestly. Worst birthday ever. Hate birthdays to this day. But then my heart sort of . . . closed? That gave me the control back. If he didn’t want me, I didn’t want him. I wasn’t going to beg.”

“You and Benny are my magic,” she said. And it was so honest and raw that I felt like the most horrible daughter for all the ways I’d been resenting her. All the ways I’d withheld from her. She hadn’t wanted to be rejected, but all I’d done for years was reject her. My eyes stung. But, how do you stop a pattern? How do you get out of the well-worn groove of your own anger and hurt?

How do you love people without knowing when you’ll lose them? How do you bear it? Isn’t it easier to just not love at all?

“That’s why I hold on to my dream. That moment when you drop into a character, when you’re not saying the lines, but the lines are coming through you. You can tell in your food, Alex, that you are passionate about the way you create art with your ingredients. The dishes come through you.”

All we’re ever doing with creativity is making different combinations of the same base ingredients. Writers, with the same collection of letters. Actors, interpreting those written words based on their own experiences. Photographers, showing us how they see the world. I love that about art.”

“This isn’t fortune-telling. It’s a portal for self-discovery.”

Everybody seemed capable of love with such startling ease. And all I ever wanted was to stop my heart from wanting it.

In the end, Charlie made Benny and me better, not because she made us more cautious, but because she made us more well-rounded.