Losing Charlotte (18 page)

Ethan and Ben were okay—improbably okay, though their stay here would be necessary for another week, until the fluid in their lungs cleared completely and they could handle feedings on their own. Their brains, hearts, and other internal organs were unscathed. Their esophagi were fully attached. They were probably not going to suffer any significant developmental delays; though time would tell on this score, the same was true for any kid. They were beautiful—dizzyingly so—and intact. Bruce had such difficulty grasping this that his pace would quicken each morning as he drew abreast of their Isolette, so that he could assure himself once again that their survival was true. They should look like accident victims, bloodied and deformed by trauma, he thought. But they didn’t—aside from the tubes, and the slight translucence of their skin and obvious lack of meat on their bones,
they were
babies
, their features tiny but formed, discrete, unblemished. His eyes seared, as if he were looking into the sun.

Ethan was longer. He had a raspberry-colored mark on one of his eyelids, which Bruce had been told would fade as he grew. There was a suggestion of fuzz, which lent a reddish cast to his scalp, though this was covered up most of the time with one of the striped caps the hospital provided for warmth. His nostrils flared as he slept; his fingers were tapered and elegant; he seemed to Bruce to possess a capacity for disdain that made Bruce proud and even more protective of him than he was, if that were possible: You’re right, he thought. Everything you’re thinking is right. Though Bruce held him anyway, for as much time as he was allowed each day, it was clear Ethan didn’t like to be held, not yet; he stiffened slightly within Bruce’s careful grasp, and his breath quickened.

Ben seemed dreamier. Phantom smiles animated his mouth while he dozed against Bruce’s forearm, his head cradled in his father’s left hand. His cries seemed briefer, more to the point, than his brother’s, as if he couldn’t wait to have them over. He was darker, would have Charlotte’s coloring, it appeared—though Bruce was careful as yet not to let his mind extend any further into the future than the next feeding time.

“You’re comparing them?” Sophia said to him this afternoon. She sighed, shook her coarse, hennaed curls. She wore a loud smock, printed with Warner Bros. cartoon characters, over her nurse’s clothing. Her face was punctuated with moles of different colors and shapes. “I’ve got two girls at home. Why is it always our instinct to compare them? I can’t help it, either. But it’ll get you in trouble, for sure.”

Bruce watched as Sophia slid Ben’s diaper off without waking him, and quickly fastened him into a fresh one.

“How can anyone help comparing,” Bruce said. “They’re so different.”

“The more different they are, the harder you’ve got to work to pretend you don’t notice, otherwise they’re going to try to figure
out which of them you think is better, or which one is more like you, whatever. It’s like a wedge. These things gone off at all this morning?” Sophia pointed at the Brady monitors.

“Ethan’s just once, but I turned him a little and it stopped.”

“Good. They’re too damn sensitive sometimes. A little reflux will set one of these machines off, or the wrong position—I’m glad you know that. Some people around here get hysterical.”

“We’re all hysterical,” Bruce said.

Sophia looked at him, smoothing at her Tweety Bird pockets.

“With good reason,” she said, after a long moment. “You been down to the chapel yet?”

“No.”

“You’re going to need all the help you can stand with these boys. You might as well get some from God.”

“I think I’ll get a Coke. Would you like one?”

“Go down there,” Sophia said. She didn’t smile. “It’s nice. Nobody will bother you.”

“Thanks,” Bruce said airily, and he tried to smile as he stood, though he wasn’t sure that he was successful, and in a moment Sophia was fiddling with a saline drip, her expression concentrated, inaccessible.

Bruce didn’t want to tell Sophia that he didn’t believe in God. One might assume that this shortcoming dated from his mother’s death, but his mother hadn’t believed in God, either, though she wasn’t incapable of invoking him as one might a character from one of Bruce’s comic books—a bumbling straight man, a Magoo. She railed at God, made jokes at his expense, but she didn’t actually believe he existed, nor did his rational, mathematically oriented father. What explanation could Bruce offer to the devout, to someone like Sophia? Sorry, I grew up in Manhattan. Sorry, my family spent weekend mornings debating op-ed columns, while everyone else was in church.

Bruce moved through the doors back into the corridor, past the desk. With each step he took away from the boys, he felt a familiar uptick in his level of unease; to be away from them was to doubt
anew their well-being and to subject himself to the clutching sense that he was exposing them to more terrible risk. He tried to ignore the feeling, stretched his stiff arms over his head and pressed his fingers ceilingward as he walked, cracking his knuckles. A woman with a long braid and a baby face sat in a wheelchair, looking pained and abandoned. A man—an overgrown boy, really, in a baseball cap and cargo pants—stood with his back to her, hunched over his cell phone. Cell phones weren’t allowed this close to the NICU. Their signals could interfere with the monitors, though everyone seemed to use them. The alternative was the decrepit pay phone in the waiting lounge, or the long, circuitous trek back to the hospital entry. Bruce himself had made calls from here before. He’d called Charlotte’s family, updated them on the twins’ imminent delivery, called his father, checked his messages, a thousand years before.

“Excuse me,” Bruce said to the man’s back. He said it softly, the faint smile he’d attempted for Sophia resurrected on his lips.

The man didn’t respond, perhaps hadn’t heard him. He continued to talk into his mouthpiece, his voice husky, not quite a whisper. When Bruce tapped him and he turned, his eyes were bright. He looked excited. Bruce almost felt bad for the guy.

“Okay, okay,” he said to whomever he’d called. “I’ve gotta go. Yeah, for sure, we’ll keep you posted!”

“Hey,” he said to Bruce, the word a question, as he snapped his phone shut. He looked at Bruce as if he expected to know him, expected in the next second to receive more good news. His face was open, smiling.

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know that you’re not supposed to use that in here.” Bruce gestured toward the phone. He felt himself working to keep his own expression blank, to banish the apology from it. His heart raced. What was it that had made him stop for this one, when yesterday he’d ignored another?

“Oh.” The man looked around. “Okay. Do you work here?” His eyes narrowed slightly, though his smile remained in place.

“No.”

“I was calling my wife’s parents to tell her we’re about to have a baby,” the man said, his voice even.

“I know. Still. There’s a rule.” Bruce felt an odd thrill—there had been one time at Bancroft when he’d almost fought a boy named Pete Harvey, had experienced those few seconds that existed between a provocation and the moment the response would come, his body taut, alive with a kind of ecstatic, out-of-nowhere indignation.

“Thanks. It doesn’t look like anyone’s around. But thanks.” The man’s voice gathered a subtle, progressive edge of sarcasm as he spoke; he turned a few degrees away from Bruce, his eyes bugging at his wife, whose face Bruce decided not to look at again.

“It interferes with the machines. Some people on this floor are hooked up to important machines.”

“Ted,” the woman said. Her voice was coaxing, even playful. The name emerged from her mouth sounding swooping, prolonged. He’s clearly a wacko, honey, let’s focus on the big picture. This, too, will be part of our birth story, the funny part, the part when Ted almost lost it, brave Ted, keep it together, Ted, I am having contractions right now, this is nothing, a fraction of a moment, it’s already gone. I’m over here, look at me, honey, and smile again. Our room is almost ready.

“My twins are hooked up to heart monitors in the next room. All I know is that they tell me cell phones could interfere, so you see my problem. I know you wouldn’t want to be responsible for any interference.”

Now the man’s features contracted. Bruce watched him. Something was happening. Ted’s jaw worked, and he wouldn’t look Bruce in the eye. This struck Bruce as curious and caught him momentarily off guard—he’d expected … if not an apology, then at least a pass, a connection, a tacit forgiveness. But he felt calm overall—poised, adrenaline having already permeated his body with its false high. He took a breath, measuring the inhale and the exhale deliberately, slowly.

“I’m really sorry to hear that, buddy. Good luck. All I’m trying
to do is get my wife through this process in one piece, okay? That’s it.”

Bruce stood in place.

“Good luck,” the man said again to him. He enunciated as if for a child and drew closer to the wheelchair, touching its back with his hand. “God bless.” This last phrase he practically spat at Bruce, who recognized it as his dismissal.

I don’t believe in God, Bruce wanted to say. He blinked. He felt like a subject of hypnosis who’d been abruptly woken. Of course: his misfortune was a contaminant to these people, worse by far than his meddling had been. He had both courted and been bracing himself against their pity, but he hadn’t anticipated such obvious anger. Bruce could feel the couple willing him out of their vicinity, as if the bad voodoo of his own experience here could hurt them. Ted was not going to let this happen.

“Sorry,” Bruce said. “Okay.”

“Great.”

“Okay.”

It took no small amount of will to make his body turn and resume walking. And as much as the power of the information he held in him threatened to best him and declare its own, anarchic freedom, he didn’t fling a word about Charlotte over his shoulder as he moved down the hall. In the ears of these people her name and fate would ring like a spell, a jinx, the designation of an ancient devil whose name must never, under any circumstances, be spoken. Bruce knew this, and his hands shook with the wish to make them recoil, but an equal part of him knew that as the steward of the most terrible secret on the ward, the Ring to his hobbit, he was charged with making it all the way to the vending machine, step by step, without once revealing to a stranger that his wife had died on an operating table just out of sight, six days ago, and he was now a single father of two infant boys, and no one was going to go out of their way to give him the space and time to understand this, much less to deal with it, and his previously unlimited choices had narrowed to two: either he could force one of the nonoperating windows
here open and let himself fall through space toward the barges on the silent, beautiful river, or go through the rest of his life this way. He picked up his right foot and put it down, his throat itching with sudden thirst.

A
GUY
from the buy side, who Bruce kept up an e-mail correspondence with at work, had sent him a to-do list when he’d heard. Lionel Tregoe was the father of four, and though Bruce had never met his wife (and had only met Lionel himself twice, both at fairly useless conferences held at the Midtown Sheraton), he suspected she’d been the one to type out the directives he’d been following all week, and he was grateful to her in a way he could never be to those responsible for the strange early deliveries of flowers and personalized children’s clothing, some of them with attached notes of such brevity and cheer that Bruce felt a kind of vertigo at the possibility that the small detail of Charlotte’s death was actually going to be politely ignored in some quarters, at least when it came to the gifts. One friend of Charlotte’s grandmother’s had gone so far as to phone in an order of blue balloons from her remote Kentucky assisted-living facility, though Bruce wasn’t sure how she’d managed it. On the other end of the spectrum, a band from one of Charlotte’s acting classes had
already
taken it upon themselves to start a blog in tribute to her life, which he couldn’t, and perhaps never could, bear to look at—not least because the people involved, her friend Stephen among them, had always struck him as self-involved twits. But the list was something he could use, and in the eternal space between sunrise and 10:00 a.m., the hour the NICU opened to family visitors, he’d started to go about the tasks it outlined. He had placed an ad for a babysitter in the
Irish Echo
, posted another on Craigslist, and left a message at a placement agency Lionel’s wife recommended. He had lugged the car seats to his garage and installed them, after a full hour and a half of wrestling, in the backseat of the car. He had made a trip to a terrifying baby emporium the size of three football fields for cases of formula (Charlotte had planned to nurse), bottles, a steam
sterilizer, pacifiers, preemie clothes, and diapers. He let the voice mail fill up, and instead of listening and responding to its contents, went about assembling a blast list of e-mail addresses so he could update the rest of the world, and then promptly forget it existed.

He forced himself up and down the bright aisles of Gourmet Garage and filled the refrigerator with groceries—individual yogurts, sports drinks, pasta sauce, a bag of apples, an arbitrarily chosen pound of orzo salad, marinated steak. He tried to eat. That had been on the list, too. Eat. Lionel’s wife must be some kind of clairvoyant, he thought. Or a saint.

K
NOX HAD INFORMED HIM
that she was coming once the boys were released from the NICU, had written him back in response to his last e-mail. She hadn’t mentioned a hotel. When Bruce had finally summoned the energy to call her, trying to gauge the seriousness of her intent (and, he suspected, to put her off the idea, though it was painfully clear he would be in need of the kind of help she was offering until he hired somebody), she’d sounded strange on the phone. Perhaps she felt guilty about Mina and Ben’s clear inability to come back to New York at the moment. Though he supposed he hadn’t expected his conversations with Mina to go the way they had, and couldn’t claim to know exactly why his mother-and father-in-law hadn’t yet suggested a date on which they’d come, part of him was admittedly relieved that these recent days hadn’t been further complicated by their presence. Was it more painful for Ben and Mina to see him, or to see the boys, or to be in Charlotte’s house, where even the smell of her perfume still dominated? Bruce suspected that Ben was the primary reason; Mina had mentioned that he wasn’t well, then changed the subject—but it was impossible to be sure. Bruce put his suppositions, and the way he might end up feeling about them, into the category of things to deal with later, and perhaps never. Anyway, he was sure he’d sounded strange, too. How could any of them resemble who they’d been? He’d never known Knox well, at least not well enough to predict her response to … this. He’d been
surprised, a little, at her offer. It frightened him, actually, though in his dulled state he found he could ignore that and acquiesce to what was practical.