Losing Charlotte (17 page)

“I almost walked away while the guy was talking to me,” Robbie said. “It’s like … I forgot I was supposed to keep standing there.”

“What do you want me to do,” Knox said to her brother. She hoped, in that moment, that he would ask her to do something impossible, something humiliating. She remembered the truth-or-dare games she had roped Robbie into during the years right after Charlotte left, when Robbie was too young to protest. She had made him eat raw eggs and dog biscuits. She had made him stand in a locked closet for one hour. She had made him climb into one of the haylofts and stick his finger in a rat trap. She had made him kiss her once, his lips pressed inexpertly against hers for whole minutes, after having watched a salacious evening drama some oblivious babysitter had allowed her to stay up for. Ask me to die for you, Knox thought, and I will. Just ask me to. I want to.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Robbie said. “What do you think? No one’s normal.” His voice broke.

Knox went to hug him. He was an inch or two shorter than she; her nose came to rest in his hair, which smelled like cigarette smoke and something sweeter, a leftover shampoo smell. He let her hug him, and then moved out of her arms, wiping his face.

They made their way down to the pool without talking any more. Knox could hear the sprinkler system ratcheting in another part of the yard, its
chicka chicka
and the audible arc and fall of drops as they rained in near unison against the grass. She could hear her own shoes meeting the walk, and not her brother’s. He picked his way in front of her in the dark.

They reached the pool deck, stopping together near one of the plastic chaises. The two of them stood in place there for a few moments. Robbie put his hands at the small of his thin back and breathed the night air. Knox squatted, bounced on her heels. The pool water itself was black, blacker even than the darkness around them. It lapped quietly against the tiles that lined the sides of the pool. Trying to maintain her balance, Knox scuffed her shoes off
one at a time. The brick had trapped the heat of the day and felt warm underneath the tensed soles of her feet. She kept her eyes on the pool surface as Robbie began to undress with a controlled rapidity. It would embarrass both of them if she spoke or looked at him while he was undressing, so she stayed as she was.

Robbie’s jeans and shirt landed on the seat of the chair between them. He moved toward the pool steps in his boxer shorts and descended into the water smoothly, making a minimum of sound, until his body disappeared with a slosh, and his head reemerged. Knox could see that Robbie’s eyes remained closed as he rubbed the wet from their sockets, pushed a mess of hair up from his face.

“Feels warmer than last night,” he said softly. “Like the heater is on.”

He didn’t expect a reply. He turned away from Knox and began to stroke away from her toward the deep end, kicking up water with louder splashes now. He would swim a few laps while Knox herself undressed and slid into the shallow end, spending minutes bobbing with the water at her armpits, her head and neck dry, before she talked herself into dropping down, immersing herself in the soundlessness and the uniformity of temperature and the light pressure against all her limbs as they floated up. Knox did this while Robbie crawled up and back. She held in the last of her breath, sprung off the bottom, and corkscrewed though the water once, twice. The material of her bra and underwear grew heavier, threatened to float away from her with their own thrust as she moved. She didn’t swim for too long, just let herself flay like that, then hauled herself back up the pool steps and out of the water. She found her clothes, pulled them on over her wet skin, wrapped Robbie’s jeans around her shoulders. She walked the length of the pool, passing Robbie as he splashed below her. When she got to the diving board, she stepped out to the edge that hung over the water and lowered herself carefully down until she was sitting, curled, her arms around her shins and her knees close to her face, close enough for her to smell chlorine on her skin. She waited for Robbie to finish. She stuck the tip of her tongue out and touched
it to one of the water drops on her knee. It tasted like it smelled: of diluted bleach, of leaves decomposing.

Robbie swam halfway back, then made his way over to the side and pushed himself up and out of the water with his forearms in a deft motion, the pool releasing him with a plunging sound. He got to his feet, cupped his hands inside his armpits, and trotted quickly toward where Knox sat on the diving board, his boxers plastered to his legs and drooping low off his hips in a way that made him look skinny and young, that made Knox think of waterslides and birthday parties.

“I have your jeans,” she said to him, once he’d drawn close enough. “Here.” She slid them off her shoulders, wadding them together so she could hand them back.

“No, I’m getting back in,” Robbie said. Even his voice seemed to shiver. Knox could hear the acquired Virginia in it—the glottal swing and expansion that had rubbed off enough during his freshman year to last him through the summer, that he must have used to shout for beers with in overcrowded basements. She suddenly wondered if there was a girl, somewhere, that he had been calling, a girl who was looking forward to him returning to school. She hoped there was. “It feels better in the water,” he said. “God, I should have brought a towel.”

One or the other of them said this every night. Knox breathed a kind of acknowledging laugh, a hum: I know, we don’t know what’s good for us, we don’t even think of towels until it’s too late. She breathed, too, that familiar guilt: she was the older one; she should be the one remembering what it was they needed.

Robbie hopped onto the metal ladder to Knox’s left and lowered himself back into the water, sighing a little. He treaded over to the diving board and reached up, gripped with both hands near Knox’s crossed feet, and held on.

A minute passed. Knox could hear a steady dripping under the board.

“I’ll tell you something if you tell me something,” he said at last, his voice echoing up from the cave of space under the board.

She had been getting ready. This was something they had started doing, after their swims—only she and Robbie talked like this, no one else.

“I have mine,” she said.

“Go.”

“You may have heard it.”

Robbie waited. Knox was gathering herself, trying to remember the details of the story she’d chosen. Any story about Charlotte she knew well was necessarily old, and she couldn’t always guide her mind back to the point of it, or separate out what she might have been told from what she’d experienced firsthand. This one was about a moment in which Charlotte had raised her hand to wave to their father in the sales pavilion, briefly confusing the closest auction hand and halting the bidding, causing the auctioneer to joke about the eager little lady with the outsized bank account in the seventh row, causing all heads to swivel, and their mother to close her fingers tightly around Charlotte’s arm, forcing it down. They had been warned many times never to do this, to be ever conscious of their movements during an auction, and Knox kept her arms vigilantly pinned to her sides at all times in that frigid arena as the twitchy yearlings were paraded past, lest she forget. Knox had wondered, at the time, if Charlotte had meant to do it—a bewildering possibility given their father’s subsequent stern lecture, which she could never have imagined provoking on purpose. Charlotte, though, had let herself be reprimanded, had stood in the aisle after the gavel came down like she hadn’t a care in the world.

Finally, Robbie lifted his head to the edge of the board and looked up at her. His eyelashes, shorter, blonder than Ned’s, gummed together into wet points.

“Go.”

“Sorry,” Knox said, and started talking.

B
RUCE

T
HE
NICU
WAS
the only place Bruce knew how to be.

He hated the crowded elevator one had to take to get to it, the pressure mounting in his chest as the box rose. Given another second, he knew, he’d erase the silence around him with the scratch of his voice; but once again the doors slid open too early, and the few people he’d been close enough to touch, had stood closer to than any normal definition of propriety would allow, exited without ceremony into the empty, white air of this place that contained more than any place should ever reasonably contain. He hated the approach, the construction-paper letters on the walls of the corridor, the stupid mural of smiling fish, the waiting room where the day’s roster of expectant grandparents and their hangers-on sat waiting for their own news, too confident behind the newspapers they were pretending to read. Every inch of the room, from floor to furniture, was covered in industrial carpeting, and Bruce knew the very thoughts of its occupants, the soup they were anticipating for lunch, the content of the jubilant e-mails they were composing prematurely in their heads. He hated the desk his special badge
allowed him to circumvent. He and Charlotte had checked in there, and other couples stood, checking in there, too: the women swaying on their feet, overdressed, too much of the world outside, as if oblivious that their connections to everyday enterprise had already been severed. They were floating in the blackness of space, untethered, in their tasteful jersey maternity dresses with their BlackBerrys on
VIBRATE
and their overnight satchels packed just so, slung over their tensed shoulders. They made Bruce angry. He knew what was contained in their bags: white cotton nightgown sets and changes of pregnancy underwear and address books and sanitary pads and a few leaves of stationery and a dopp kit and a tiny onesie and hat for the baby to go home in and snacks, probably some kind of gourmet trail mix flecked with chocolate morsels, which no one would ever consume. Trail mix, as if this were a hike, an outing. That’s what Charlotte had packed—that and a half-pound bag of peanut M&M’s, though on their hospital tour they’d been assured that food was forbidden. Bruce remembered, distantly, his quaint outrage at this: His wife would require some rocket fuel for the epic journey she was about to undertake, wouldn’t she? Ice chips? Was that a joke? Had anyone else seen the labor and delivery films? He’d looked around at the other participants on the tour; no one had answered him, though a few shot him sympathetic looks. He’d been muttering. Charlotte had squeezed his hand. He and Charlotte had held out some vague hope that she’d have a go at actual labor, even though the twins she carried all but guaranteed a C-section, and their OB had scheduled one months before, to fall on a date that preceded her due date by one week, though they’d never made it that far. He didn’t make eye contact with the couples now as he stepped past the desk, though the men were desperate for him to look at them; he could feel it, feel their eyes on him. They wanted recognition, or pity, acknowledgment—I’ve been there, dude, it’s going to be fine—anyway, they wanted something he couldn’t give.

As the men looked at him, angling, the nurses looked away, failing to greet him once he’d pushed the metal panel that admitted him into the private unit through automatic doors. It was clear
from their casual laughter and the pauses they indulged in before answering one of his questions, the internal gathering and even impatience they were not afraid to let him glimpse, that they’d made some bargain long ago not to feel. Except for one, Sophia, who seemed to have a different shift each day so that Bruce could never depend on her presence, they failed to smile or exude much palpable warmth. He supposed that, compared with what he needed from them, it was a saner choice to offer him nothing; otherwise they might be consumed, tip into him and be burned up. Yes, that made sense. The room was only slightly larger than the conference room at his office. Tall, metal Isolettes on casters, nubby recliners, and all manner of monitoring machines were its furniture. It was loud; the alarms on the Brady cardiograms rang ceaselessly, printers spat out reading after noisy reading; this was an atmosphere of emergency, as opposed to the hushed haven Bruce had expected. That part, he didn’t hate. It felt appropriate, and he dissolved into the hum and activity as if he were falling into water, negotiating the maze on his way to the corner Ethan and Ben’s crib occupied, a beautiful, light-filled corner, with a view of the East River that might make Bruce laugh under other circumstances, so wasted was its beauty on him and the other occupants of this floor. A developer would kill for this view. Apartment seekers would ransom their grandmothers for it. Instead, Bruce pictured a face like his own as viewed from outside, the sole face visible from behind an acre of glass, pale, eyes fixed on the barges below as they plowed forward, their progress barely discernible except for the crescent of white churn in their wakes.

What he loved: seeing the boys. Only that. The exhale he was able to produce when the boys came back into his sight after his night away from them—another meaningless night he’d already forgotten, had already voided from the ledger of nights. His miraculous boys.

The chair Bruce sat in was gray. He occupied it for about ten hours a day, if you subtracted lunch, and the inevitable perambulations he had to make when the noise filled his head so that it brimmed. He’d written a report in grade school about the Siberian
gulag, where guards swaddled their shoes in cotton and trained themselves to move so silently that their very presence contributed to the torturous goal of confusing prisoners as to whether the voices in their heads were actually audible in the pervasive absence of sound. Here it was the opposite, though the effect must be the same; the sound was what pervaded; the thoughts were what you couldn’t identify, because you might have spoken them instead of merely thought them; someone was always speaking here, asking you to repeat your story and repeat, repeat, repeat. Bruce had no idea why the doctors and hospital workers from different specialties couldn’t seem to coordinate information and thus relied on him to stitch the quilt together every time they made their rounds. “Hi, I’m Cassie from social work. So how are the babies doing? Twins, yes?” Cassie would stand there, reading the chart, getting up to speed. Somewhere on the chart was typed the phrase
maternal death
, though Bruce suspected it was near enough to the bottom of the page that some people never got to it. When they did, he could read it in their faces, and the satisfaction that coursed in his veins then was as powerful as a drug. He wanted Cassie to know every last detail. He wanted Cassie, well-meaning Cassie, on her knees.