Losing Charlotte (13 page)

Her mother stood up. “Okay.” There was a lack of breath in her voice, as if she’d failed to inhale before speaking.

Knox rose; she picked up the backpack she had stuffed with a few things from the cabin, lifted it onto her shoulder. The three of them walked together toward the glass doors. Knox noticed how shiny the floor was underneath their feet, under the finely made leather shoes that her father wore. The doors parted for them, and they were out in the hot, close night. Bugs jumped under the lights of the canopy above them. A black car sat idling in the drive, its rear doors open.

“It’s all happening as we speak,” her father said. He squeezed Knox’s shoulder as he guided her into the backseat of the car. “So we’ll just get there as fast as we can.”

Knox’s mother went around the other side of the car and scooted into the middle of the seat. She clutched her purse against her lap. Knox’s father got in next to her mother and closed the door.

“Okay,” he said to the driver. Knox saw him take her mother’s
hand as they pulled away from the canopy. Inside the car it was plush and cozy. Knox thought quickly, guiltily, of Marlene. She would gripe at Knox for leaving her on no notice, but Knox thought she would understand. A couple of days. This is where she needed to be. A cesarean, a new reality that was hitting her in increments, shaping itself around her. She would make something up if Marlene asked her about the expense of flying to New York, something about getting a good fare on Delta at the last minute. There was no need for Marlene to know that Knox’s life at the reading center was different from the one she had grown up with, the one she could return to now, made a child again on nights like this. Marlene had never, not once, been on a plane.

“Remind me to call Marlene,” Knox said. A light drizzle started up outside. They moved onto the highway. The brake lights from other cars fuzzed in the sudden wet on Knox’s pane, flaring like bright thistles. Somewhere, just ahead of them, were the lights of New York.

“Okay,” her father said.

The hospital abutted the East River; there was a long porte cochere, a circular drive leading up to it. It was raining hard by the time they got there. Knox opened her door and knew to push out of the car as quickly as she could, so that her mother wouldn’t suffer any brief frustration at being hemmed in. But when she stood, she realized that her mother had climbed out after her father, and that the two of them were jogging toward the entrance. One of her father’s arms was raised against the weather, as if he could elbow it out of their way. Knox hiked her backpack over her head and walked after them. Here was another set of glass doors, a reception station that her parents seemed to know to bypass. A hall, a huge elevator, onto which an expressionless person, in plain clothes, rolled a waist-high machine of some kind. One floor up, and the person rolled out, getting hitched in the gap for a moment before Knox helped him by forcing the machine a bit from behind. On four, Knox’s father touched the small of her back, and they emerged into a hallway. At the far side of it, chairs of differing sizes
were grouped among what looked to Knox like tall cages, built of cheap, untreated wood. As she passed them, Knox saw that the cages housed a number of stuffed animals: a straggly lion, a hanging macaw, a kind of ape holding a synthetic yellow banana. There were children’s drawings on the wall, drawings that, compared with the ones at the center, struck Knox as being so studiously naïve that they might have actually been made by adults.

At the end of the hallway, her parents approached a white desk. This area seemed to Knox to emit the color white; the only variations being the pink overshirt worn by the short-haired woman who was busying herself above an open file cabinet. The woman did not look up at her parents’ approach, but smiled at them when her mother said, “Excuse me?” Knox never thought of her mother’s voice—or her own, for that matter, not since boarding school—as being accented, but in the odd quiet of the hallway, she could hear a distinct lilt that she wondered if the woman noticed.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked.

“We’re here to see Charlotte Bolling. Charlotte Tavert,” her father said.

“Oh hi,” the woman said, extending her hand toward her father to shake, then shaking her mother’s hand in turn. She shook with energy; Knox could see the tendons and muscles shift in her slim arm as she moved it. This is a woman with a regular squash game, Knox thought. She allowed herself to imagine the woman’s life, her virginal stint at Yale Med School, cradling heavy books in her arms as she walked across a quad, her Dorothy Hamill hair gleaming in the sun. She remembered, as if remembering a taste, how to make Charlotte laugh. It rushed back to her. She would say something about the nurse. Charlotte would snicker and say something like Yes, she’s a walking seventies hair commercial. The kind of joke they used to have together, when Knox was a kid.

The woman nodded at Knox, who brushed a drop of rain from the side of her face.

“You’re Charlotte’s family,” she said, stating the fact with self-satisfaction, as if she had invented Knox and her parents herself.

“Why don’t you wait here, and I’ll go check. If she’s in the recovery room, you might be able to go down and sneak a peek at her.”

“That would be great. Thanks,” Knox said. She felt a need to reassert her presence, her age. To hear her own voice.

“Can you tell us anything? Is everyone all right?” her mother said.

“Are you the doctor,” her father said.

The woman smiled again. “Intern,” she said. “As far as I know, everything’s gone smoothly. You know things started to move quickly once your daughter got here. We thought at first that she’d be in triage for much longer. I’ll go check. I’ll send Dr. Boyd up if I can.”

“Thank you,” her father said. “Thanks very much.”

The woman pushed the file drawer closed and moved down the hall, away from the direction Knox and her parents had come in. The shoes she was wearing made loud squishing sounds on the linoleum that Knox could still hear once she’d turned the corner.

“Would you guys like something? I could go see if there’s a vending machine,” Knox said.

“No, but get yourself something to drink,” her mother said. “Absolutely. We’ll be here.”

“All right,” Knox said.

She left her pack on the floor by her father’s feet and walked back toward the wooden cages. There was a public phone hanging on the wall there. It was mounted low over the chairs, so low that Knox had to kneel on one of the smallest chairs—a red one obviously meant for a preschooler—in order to dial comfortably. Marlene picked up on the first ring.

“You expecting a call?” Knox said.

“Well, hello,” Marlene said. Her voice was so full of warmth that Knox felt first surprised, then shamed. She wished for a moment that she could just be calling to say hi, that she phoned Marlene at home more often, for reasons that weren’t related to students or scheduling.

“What’re you doing,” she said.

“Oh, Jimmy’s got the football on. I’m sitting here bored out of my mind. I feel like the season’s closing in on me. Seems like it starts in June now and just never ends.”

“Guess where I am,” Knox said.

“Where.”

“New York. My sister’s having the babies.” Knox swallowed. She felt suddenly, terribly, far away from her life.

“Oh! Oh hon, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful! But—it’s a little early, isn’t it? I guess twins usually are. Is everything okay?”

“Yep, looks like it. But Mar, I’m sorry, I won’t be back for a couple of days,” Knox said. “I just wasn’t thinking and I got on a plane to come up here. So I wanted to ask you to cover for me if it’s all right. The reports I’ve been working on, I got through
T
so there’re only a couple left, I’ve been doing them alphabetically—”

“What is wrong with you?” Marlene said. “Just enjoy yourself, I know what to do. What kind of person apologizes for being with family at a time like this?”

“A responsible educator like me, I guess,” Knox said.

“Oh, is that what you are.”

“It takes one to know one, so maybe you wouldn’t understand.”

“What I understand is that being around babies is a good thing for you right now. I’m ready to become a godmother. Lord, I thought you were calling to tell me you’d run off with Ned. Maybe I’m disappointed.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll call you, Mar. Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t thank me. God. Be with your family. I’m going to combine the classes until you get back.”

“Thanks.”

“Okay, hon.”

Knox hung up the phone. She bent at the waist and reached toward her feet in an attempt to stretch her legs. Her nose grazed her skirt just above her knees; she inhaled the familiar smell of her detergent and briefly missed the swan, reminded of its body at rest, piled onto itself. She felt suddenly irritated with Ned. Why did he have to put her in a position to disappoint him, when things between them worked well as they were? She exhaled and reached
a bit farther, extending the tips of her fingers as far as they would go. She would call him later, and hopefully the sameness she depended on would be restored. She kept longing out of her mind and thought of diving, of falling off the tip of a board in a tight pike, unfurling the length of her body to straight, slipping into water that way.

B
RUCE HAD STOOD
outside the window of the thrift shop at St. Luke’s Church. He had pretended to eye the plaid windbreakers, battered lamp shades, beaded and misshapen evening bags (why did a church thrift shop, geared to the poor, look so crowded with sequined
purses
, he wondered) that hung on the other side of the glass.

Behind him, Hudson Street pumped with traffic. To his left stood the iron gate that marked the entrance to the church garden. If he moved through the gate and took the path that wound around behind the church and into the small garden, where a few benches were arranged under the trees, he would find his wife. She was back there. He had watched her disappear down the path. If he let himself go to her, he might find her sitting on the one swath of grass that was unspoiled by trash or the scrubby groundcover that squirrels and rats scratched in, making the leaves above them shake as they moved. He knew the place; they had sat together with the newspaper and sandwiches there, before. She might be sitting on the grass, or lying down on it, her dress drawn up to the tops of her thighs. The backs of her legs would be crosshatched in red when she stood, and she would shake out her dress and put her hands at the center of her back, look around. He could picture this easily, the bits of grass that would go flying when she shook out her dress, the way the cotton of it would have gone thinner in the heat, would cling to her differently. He stood where he was. He walked through the gate.

Bruce saw Charlotte before she saw him. She was standing near the door to the rectory, a metal door that opened onto the garden
from the back of the church. She was speaking to a woman. The woman held on to the hand of a little girl; the girl dragged against the force of the woman’s grasp, leaning away from her as if she were walking into a windstorm. Her body hung at an angle to the grass. If the woman lets go, that kid will fall, Bruce thought. He moved toward his wife. It crossed his mind that if the girl slipped from her mother’s hand, he could reach her in time to catch her body and prevent her from possible injury, and that Charlotte would see.

“Sure,” he heard Charlotte say, laughing. “Go ahead.”

The girl straightened suddenly, and reached toward Charlotte’s belly. She touched it with her hand slightly cupped, like she was trying to deliver an extra puff of air to Charlotte’s skin, or measure all that was contained under the slope of her dress. Bruce felt a rush of pride that made him almost hostile toward the girl, toward the tentative awe in her touch. That’s right, he thought. You wish you could have her, but you can’t. Sorry.

Charlotte looked up at him. He had almost reached her, was stepping over the edge of the lawn now. Bruce saw that the smile on Charlotte’s face didn’t die, but remained where it was.

“Oh,” she said.

The woman looked up at him, too. “Bruce,” she called to him.

He froze. He looked more closely at the woman. Was he supposed to know who she was? He waited for her to become familiar, ticking off the seconds as he searched her face.

“You remember Iris,” Charlotte said.

“I, um,” Bruce said. “Hello.”

The woman laughed. “I’m not even sure we’ve actually met. We’re neighbors of yours.”

“Well, hi,” Bruce said. “Sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

“This is Nora,” the woman said. She gestured at the little girl.

“Hi,” Nora said, scowling at him.

Bruce felt the sun’s heat on the top of his head. The weight of it reminded him of the child’s game, the one that consisted of one person widening his fingers over the crown of another person’s
head, insinuating the spread of a yolk. He felt better, now that he could see Charlotte, but he still wished the woman and her child would go away.

“Bruce has been following me,” Charlotte said.

She smiled up at him. Her expression was so sweet that Bruce forgot not to smile back, despite the fact that she meant to embarrass him in front of this stranger.

“Mm?” Iris said.

“He gets worried about me in the big bad city,” Charlotte said. “Don’t you,” she said to Bruce.

Bruce smiled at Iris. Looking into Iris’s face, which held an open friendliness in its heart shape, in the freckled darkness around the eyes that made Bruce think suddenly that she was old to be the mother of such a young girl, he thought it might be easier to simply confess everything. If Charlotte was bent on talking about this, he might as well be allowed to speak from his own point of view. “I told her that it makes me nervous for her to take the subway by herself. You know, at this point. I’ve seen how people won’t give up their seats. It’s just—”

“I get exhausted taking the subway myself,” Iris said. “It can feel like a battle.”

“Yes,” Bruce continued, encouraged. He kept his eyes on Iris’s, which were catlike, flecked with tiny shards of yellow and green. “Exactly. I asked Charlotte to take a cab uptown if she had to go, and then she walked out the door, and I had this feeling that she hadn’t listened to anything I’d said.”