Losing Charlotte (23 page)

Authors: Heather Clay

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: Losing Charlotte

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Knox had apologized. It was that or subject herself to the sound of the rant in her head, and she didn’t want that. As she sat at the
table across from her sister, she’d come belatedly to her senses and realized again that the fight with Charlotte might be hers alone. She’d fashioned her existence, in large part, as a staunch against the gaps Charlotte had blown in her parents’ confidence, in their image as a family, and done it willingly, but she’d be damned if she’d make herself vulnerable to Charlotte’s disapproval on this score by detailing all the ways she might have been different if only Charlotte had. Spoken aloud, that would most likely have sounded ridiculous. It
was
ridiculous. But that didn’t make it any less true.

And she’d seen something in Charlotte’s eyes, in the bar, that she also didn’t want realized in speech—a flash of tired impatience at the fact of her. The very fact of her made things harder for Charlotte when she was here. Maybe always had. Dutiful Knox, watchful Knox, eminently sane, easy Knox … she’d quit with the adjectives while she was ahead. There was nothing any of them could do about that, so best to leave it alone.

“Don’t mind me,” she’d said.

And Charlotte had stared at her, looking pale as a ghost.

T
HE HOUSE
wasn’t hard to find. Knox had never had a handle on what streets, if any, might be obscure to a cabdriver coming into Manhattan and had proffered the address tentatively. But she recognized the block when they turned onto it and found herself wishing that her taxi had managed to get briefly lost so that she might have called Bruce for directions and managed to arrive in gentle stages, as opposed to all at once. As it was, she felt like the angel of death. She and Bruce hadn’t seen each other since the night in the hospital, though Knox had had a chance to visit the boys in the NICU once more before accompanying her mother and father back to Kentucky. She’d had not one, but two, glasses of watered-down Chardonnay on the flight and felt sleepy and overanxious at once, as if she’d been up all night. She’d picked at her lunch. She paid the cabdriver and lugged her duffel awkwardly up
the steps of the brownstone, scraping its wheels against the concrete as she climbed.

She had to knock for almost a minute before Bruce came to the door. He loomed into view behind the thick glass panes beside it, the beginnings of a beard stippling his face, then disappeared again, and she could hear the sound of several locks being turned. The door opened, and now Knox could see that Bruce held one of the boys—swaddled up in a blanket, asleep—against his chest.

“Hi,” he mouthed, and stepped back to let her enter. His blue T-shirt stretched open at the neck, exposing part of his collarbone. His jaw looked sharp enough to cut, under the shadow of beard that, Knox noted, was flecked with gray. It was momentarily difficult to accept that he was real; but then, she saw him rarely enough that she was used to having to reorganize her impressions of him each time they met. Knox thought that the things in his face she’d always recognized might have become more pronounced since she’d seen him last: his dark brown eyes looked larger and his mouth looked more compressed. He was handsome in a way that hinted at a youthful handsomeness that had faded. His hairline may have been high to begin with. He was lanky, his wrists and fingers bony and tapered, and there was a stillness to him that posed a contradiction, given the kinetic energy that seemed to beam off his body. Bruce was the kind of guy who couldn’t help bouncing in his chair, or shifting in place where he stood, but who also waited a disconcerting extra beat before responding to something you’d said and tended to stare until you had to look away.

When Bruce leaned down to peck her on the cheek—he didn’t have to stoop far; Knox was nearly as tall as he was—she could smell milk, the residue of some powdery baby unction, undiluted sweat. She wondered when he’d last showered. The side of her faced buzzed from the abrasion Bruce’s beard made on her skin. The baby’s head dipped close to hers, a web of blue veins, narrow as hairs, visible just under the skin of his rosy scalp, which looked chapped. His lips were so pink, drawn in a precise, horizontal line; they twitched, as if even in his sleep he resented Knox’s interruption.
He seemed to have no eyelashes. Knox stared at him in dumb wonder.

“Ethan,” Bruce whispered, nodding at him. “He just ate.”

He smiled at her, though Knox could see his face straining to hold the expression until he could see she’d registered it, then relax into a grimmer resting expression. He clutched the back of his neck with his free hand.

“Come on in,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you.” He spoke these last words in an exaggerated Vincent Price, Transylvania voice. Knox waited for him to shut the door and flip all the locks back into place, then hoisted her bag up and followed him down the dark hall.

She had tried to prepare herself for the possibility that Bruce would be overcome in some way when he saw her. How this would manifest itself she didn’t know, but she had gone so far as to rehearse certain responses in her head. As she peered into the crib he showed her toward now—a wide, white slatted job that had been set up in the living room and into which Bruce lowered Ethan next to Ben, she realized that she had discounted the twins altogether in her assumption that, as perhaps the closest living reminder to Charlotte, her arrival would force a certain level of emotion, for both of them, immediately out into the open. But of course, she wasn’t the closest living reminder of Charlotte, not by a country mile, and now could hardly believe the narcissism inherent in the way she’d pictured this scene. She stared at the babies, trying to decipher any features she recognized, now that their faces had cohered into something more than the red, twisting, bright-eyed blanks she remembered from the hospital. They still looked nothing alike to her—and didn’t yet look like anyone she knew, either, though Ben looked to have Charlotte’s coloring. They were curled facing each other in their swaddle cloths like quotation marks around the empty space between them, so small on the expanse of white sheet that Charlotte must have bought at some neighborhood shop. Ben’s fist twisted its way free of his blanket and pressed against his cheek. He twitched, sighed, stilled. Knox’s eyes filled with sudden tears, and she was grateful for a reason
to keep her eyes trained downward, so Bruce wouldn’t see. This was how they were going to play it, she thought. No histrionics on purpose. She was not here to receive comfort from a widower; she knew that much, though it occurred to her that she already missed the version of events she’d pictured, that had them commiserating, comparing losses.

“They’re still sleeping all the time,” Bruce said. “But I think they’re about to come out of that stage. And they’re not quite on the same program, which makes things interesting.”

“I may mix up their names at first,” Knox said. She cleared her throat; the words had come out too coated.

“Ethan’s the one with the reddish peach fuzz,” Bruce said, quiet, gesturing toward one of the boys. “And the painful gas, unfortunately.”

“How have you been doing this?” Knox said.

“I don’t know,” Bruce said.

S
HE ASSUMED
he’d taken a leave from work. As far as she knew, there was no other help, aside from the housekeeper he’d mentioned while pouring her some coffee straight out of a glass beaker he’d brought into the living room, where they sat, waiting out the babies’ naps. Knox accepted the chipped mug Bruce offered her; it felt good to hold something warm in her hands, though the air in the room was close. Her hands wanted an occupation—otherwise, they might loose themselves from her body and fly away like birds.

“How are your mom and dad doing?” he asked. He took a slurp from his own mug, lowered it, and kept his eyes on the steam that rose from inside its rim.

“They’re okay,” Knox said.

Surely Bruce could recognize this as a shallow response; she’d left her father staring at the ceiling of her parents’ room, her mother starting at every ringing telephone. Knox had even wondered at her mother’s lack of fight when Knox had informed her that she wanted to spend this interim, before the funeral, in New York. She hadn’t expected her mother, a new grandmother despite
everything, to acquiesce as easily as she had. But it was clear that her parents were in no shape to offer assistance to anyone except each other right now. Knox swallowed. The truth would only make Bruce feel worse.

“How are
you
doing?” Knox asked. She’d ventured the question to fill the silence, really; it seemed even more dangerous to let a true silence fall than to say the wrong thing.

Bruce stared at her, running his hands through his hair, ruffling it up on the sides and then smoothing it down again. For a long moment, Knox wondered if he’d forgotten her question, if she should manufacture another. But then he lowered his hands and slapped one against each of his knees, which bounced in place inside his grubby jeans.

“Um. I’m not sure what to say.”

“Oh—,” Knox began. There was something blank in Bruce’s eyes just now, making it hard to fathom his intent. Did he mean to delineate a boundary? Was he angry with her for the question? “That was stupid, of course—”

“No,” Bruce said. He opened his hands. “Really, I was being serious. It just feels right now like there’s Charlotte, and then there’s the boys. And each of those categories sort of requires a different response.”

“Okay.”

“They even cancel each other out. If the boys’ diapers are changed and there’s plenty of formula in the house and they’re … alive, and so am I, then that seems to mean I’m not thinking too much. I can actually block things out for stretches of time.”

“I guess that’s good,” Knox said. She felt some surprise at how relieved she was to assume the role of confessor, how easily the lines were coming. Had she and Bruce ever sustained a conversation of this length before? Not that she could remember, though that seemed hard to believe. She relaxed, just a little, in her chair.

“I always have to be thinking about the next thing I’m supposed to wash, or boil, or get ready. So.”

“That makes sense.”

“And as far as—I know I don’t want to go outside. The idea that I’m going to run into somebody at the deli who knows what happened—or, worse, who doesn’t—I don’t want that. So I’ve been staying in. Which is fine, because the boys are still so vulnerable to … well-intentioned strangers who’ll paw them, I guess. I saw an old lady on the subway stick her finger in some baby’s mouth, once.”

“I can take care of errands for you.”

Bruce was silent. He breathed in deeply, as if he’d extended himself too far and needed to rest.

“Thanks,” he said.

Knox sipped her coffee, glancing about her. Her sister had always lived like a magpie, among random, gathered clutter whose meaning Knox had to question: Once Charlotte had tacked up another postcard, did she forget its origin? Did it retain its significance, or just become part of the wallpaper? Everything looked
temporary
. On the mantel, which was carved from a black, veined marble and would look handsome in an apartment where it was afforded the dignity of a clock, maybe a pair of urns, sat a few candle stubs ensnared in a mess of petrified wax drippings. Snapshots fluttered from the edges of the mirror frame, a garland of paper flowers was hung asymmetrically over the door that led into the kitchen. Knox knew that the cabin was barer than it needed to be because she agonized over the right of any object to its own display, but the profusion of stuff that filled any room Charlotte had ever called a home made her dizzy.

“I still can’t believe it,” Bruce said. Knox looked at him. His face was contorting; he covered it with his hands. Knox sat there wondering: Should she go to him? Put her arms around him? What were they meant to expect from each other, now? She held her breath, thinking of the platitudes she’d rehearsed, unable to speak them. The moments during which she sat, deciding, felt charged, and endless. Her teeth were clenched together in her mouth, and she held her body so still, ready to spring up at the slightest suggestion that comfort was what Bruce required. But he could just as
well be needing her to freeze, like a statue, blind, deaf, dumb, as good as gone while he dispensed with this latest shudder of mourning. There was an etiquette, surely; they would have to fashion it together.

After a minute, the question answered itself; Bruce sighed and rose to his feet.

“We should go over some things, I guess,” he said. “While we still have a chance to talk.”

Knox’s nod was emphatic.

Bruce reached for a pad of paper from Charlotte’s desk. He shuffled around for a pen and finally found one after rattling open the desk drawer.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll just start at the beginning of the day.”

He sat down again, paper in hand. Knox got up and peered over his shoulder as he wrote, a good soldier, relieved to have somewhere to look. Bruce’s handwriting was cramped, and his letters leaned markedly to the left, as if shying away from the right margin of the paper. Knox was used to looking at a child’s grip when she tutored children; dyslexic kids often grasped their pencils like three-years-olds did, with every finger wrapped around. Bruce’s grip was an adult one, but it was awkward, not fully resolved, and he bore down too hard as a result.