Losing Charlotte (26 page)

“Mm. Well, talk to them a lot. Just narrate what you’re doing
around the house, read the newspaper aloud—it’s good for them. Make sure to use the A&D at every change; they both look a little red in that area to me. They sleep together?”

“Yes.”

“That’s okay for a little longer, but start phasing it out. Maybe for the naps. They’ll be turning and covering ground in that crib before you know it.”

“All right.”

“No stomach sleeping, I’m assuming.”

“No.”

“Now.” She fixed Knox with a look. Her hair fell in perfect corkscrews around her pert face. “About Bruce. You need to watch him for any signs of posttraumatic stress. You’re in the best position to do this. If he seems at all confused by events, forgetful, strangely agitated or withdrawn, if he shows weird signs of temper, changes in behavior, abuse of alcohol or drugs—these are all things you can come to me about, and I’ll get a referral for you. Is he seeing anybody now, anybody professional?”

“No—not that I know of,” Knox said. He doesn’t leave the house, she thought. Who could he see?

“Well, try to get him to. He certainly needs that.”

Ethan wailed from somewhere outside the room.

“Sometimes grief over maternal death can manifest itself in aggression—even toward the infant. I don’t mean to scare you. It’s just that it’s important for Ethan and Ben that you watch him, too. Do they have a baby nurse?”

“No. We’re the baby nurse, so far.”

“More outside help would be beneficial, too. Try to talk him into that. Is he going to sue the hospital?”

“I haven’t heard any talk about that.”

“Well, that’s admirable. A lot of people would sue the shit out of them, even though from what I understand there wasn’t any malpractice involved. Just a terrible, terrible thing. A freak thing. I learned about DIC in med school, but I’ve never seen it. Never had a maternal death in childbirth like that in our practice before. And she was so nice. I met her, of course, before the birth.”

“Yes.”

Knox thought she could begin to see, now, what Bruce had feared: that out in the world, it might become clear that their situation was even more devastating than they’d feared, that there were repercussions they hadn’t even considered. As opposed to offering the benefit of their perspective, people with cooler heads, objective people, might simply have the time and space to grasp how fucked they really were. It scared Knox, the idea that her sister was a point of discussion among obstetric and pediatric professionals throughout the city. Charlotte as cautionary watercooler tale. As downtown Manhattan myth, chat room ghost story. This story belonged to her family, surely, and didn’t have the breadth to shelter any stranger who might want to huddle under it. In her arms, Ben began to whimper, perhaps echoing his brother’s agitation. Did they worry about each other, Ben and Ethan? Did one’s distress become the other’s distress, this early in their lives? She could probably ask Dorothy, but she wanted to get out of this office. She rose from her seat, dropping a burp cloth and Ben’s pacifier in the process, then dipping at the knees to try and retrieve them without jostling Ben. And why did Dorothy assume that Knox had any ability to persuade Bruce to do things like enlist psychiatrists and baby nurses to his aid, when she couldn’t even seem to convince him to let her help eke the stroller through the door?

“I am so sorry about your loss,” Dorothy intoned from her desk as Knox contorted further to reach and gather Ben’s little set of accessories. Knox could picture her jamming at a Dead show, her taut little body writhing in ecstasy, her corkscrew curls bouncing in time with the relentless drumbeat. So sorry for your loss so sorry so sorry for your loss sosorrysosorry.

“Yes,” Knox said, for the second time. “Thanks.”

S
HE FOUND
B
RUCE
at the receptionist’s desk, paying the bill. Ethan was already strapped into his seat; Bruce had left his cotton pants off, so the round camouflage-printed Band-Aids that covered the places the needles had poked Ethan’s soft thighs were visible.
His eyes were closed, and each breath he drew contained a leftover shudder from his earlier crying fit. Ben’s eyes were bright as Knox strapped him in, too; suddenly, he looked owllike to Knox. Rapt and full of understanding. His cheeks were blotchy.

“Try some infant Tylenol,” the nurse called to them as she crossed into another exam room. “Point eight—the lowest amount in the syringe. That’ll make them more comfortable after the vaccinations. And make sure those Band-Aids come off in the bath tonight. They end up in the funniest places if you leave them on—you’d be surprised.”

“Okay,” Knox called back when it seemed clear Bruce wasn’t going to answer.

Bruce scanned the credit card receipt the receptionist handed him and signed. Soon, after another brief struggle with a set of stairs and a heavy door, they were out on the sidewalk together.

“Should we go home?” Knox said. She was reeling. The crying, Dorothy’s efficient delineation of directions from which further calamity might strike, the coffee she’d drunk that morning, refilling her cup from the coffeepot the several times it had cooled while she’d been distracted from her breakfast. They stood together, in the sun, the gargantuan carriage between them. Knox seized the handle and began pushing it back and forth, just a little, while they waited for Bruce to say something. She did it as much to steady herself as to soothe the boys with the movement.

At the end of the avenue, a block south, was a park. Knox thought she recognized the stone arch at its entrance from film scenes set in Washington Square—had Charlotte lived so near to Washington Square? It was funny, in New York, how Knox always questioned her recognition of the iconic places; when she’d first seen it out the window of her taxi at Charlotte’s wedding, Knox didn’t believe her father’s assertion that they were passing the Empire State Building, simply because it was right
there
. And she hadn’t exactly made a banner effort to get to know the city on her few visits here—she could even admit that there had been something almost defiant in her cluelessness that she couldn’t seem to help at the time. A black woman, pushing another double stroller,
made her way past the arch, a tote bag with a plastic shovel protruding from the top slung over her shoulder. Another woman, cell phone in hand, followed her, holding the wrist of a little boy—was he two, three? Knox didn’t have the experience to tell, and the kids she taught at home were older. The boy held his crotch with one hand, and tripped after his mother, his legs pressed together.

“They don’t have to go down again for an hour or so, yet,” Knox said. “Maybe we should take a walk.”

“That was hard,” Bruce said. He traced an arc against the dust on the sidewalk with the tip of one of his heavy, polished shoes. It occurred to Knox that he might be lonelier in her presence. Was he making a greater effort than he would to keep things together, all for her benefit? If she hadn’t been there in the room, would he have collapsed, sobbing, in Dorothy’s arms?

“A walk would be good,” he said, attempting a smile.

They entered the park, a concrete bowl flanked by a few grassy areas and a low wall on which clumps of self-consciously counter-cultural high school kids sat in the shade, their teeth showing white through a haze of pot smoke, their tattooed and pierced bodies and beaded hair lending them a ceremonial aspect, as if they’d gathered for a ritual offering to the Sun God instead of the highly amateur rendition of “Little Wing” that Knox could hear one of them picking on his guitar as they passed. The sound of clapping reached her ears, like rainfall; a crowd was gathered on the far end of the fountain, watching someone perform. She smelled grease, sunscreen, the reek of urine. The leaves on the few trees were dusty. Pigeons waddled out of their way; ahead of them was a small, enclosed playground where a few parents stood listlessly pushing their toddlers in swings. The black woman Knox had seen before stood next to a shin-high painted donkey on a spring, while a girl with perfect French braids rocked back and forth on it, singing to herself.

Knox, who was pushing the stroller, paused in front of the playground gate, which looked like it might have been originally meant for a medieval jail. It looked eight feet tall and was finished at the top with a row of fussy iron spikes. A padlock hung open on
a limp cord that someone had draped through the bars. Was there a fear that the clatter bridge would be stolen? she thought. The children? Or maybe that some of the showy troubadours from the wall, a few of whom she’d bet used to play here not so many years ago, would leave baggies of unsavory things on the ground at night if they got in, open for little explorers to stick their noses in.

If she’d been asked, why the playground? at the moment she pushed the gate open and began to back the stroller in, she might have produced an answer about the comfort that a picture of the future, of life going on for the boys, might provide. This would become a familiar spot for Ethan and Ben; soon they would be climbing onto the donkey, wrestling each other for the next turn on the slide. As it was, she was operating on instinct, fueled by a nascent fear. Bruce wasn’t talking, and this suddenly worried her. The idea of returning to the house and diving back into their ocean of tasks with an unbroken silence to contend with—silence that Dorothy had alerted her to the possible dangers of—seemed like something to avoid, if she could find a way to do it. There were benches here, and something to look at, and bottles for the boys if they kicked up a real fuss again.

Knox rolled the boys to a stop in a bench by the swings and sat, without asking Bruce whether or not he cared to.

“It seemed a little cooler over here,” she said. “We don’t have to stay long, if you want to get home.”

“I’m fine,” Bruce said, though that wasn’t exactly what she’d asked. He sat beside her and stretched his long legs out in front of him.

“It’s strange,” he said, after they’d spent a full minute watching the French-braid girl laboring to stay upright while she pushed a dirty plastic lawn mower up a ramp. “I used to pass by here all the time, and now here I am, inside.”

Knox nodded. The fact that Bruce was initiating conversation made her wonder at herself; maybe the silences between them had been comfortable, and she was worrying over nothing. They did, after all, need to maintain some space within the confines of the house.

“We don’t know each other very well,” Knox blurted, the confusion over where she stood suddenly overwhelming her.

Bruce looked at her.

“No, we don’t,” he said simply. Knox couldn’t say whether she’d expected him to make a joke or protest by asking her what she was talking about, they were family—but that he seemed so unmoved by her remark was unsettling. Bruce sat up straighter, peered under the boys’ sun canopy.

“I’m not imposing, being here, am I?” Knox said.

“What?”

“I’m here to—I guess it’s important for me to know I’m helping you. If not, then I hope you’d tell me.”

Bruce scratched at his chest, raking the thin material of his shirt back and forth over his skin. He pressed his lips together, squinted, then looked at Knox again. She had trouble meeting his eyes, but made herself; she didn’t want to seem chicken.

“You’re helping,” he said.

A couple entered the gate then, pushing a stroller of tangerine canvas, its chassis poised ridiculously high off the ground. The woman came toward them first, sat down on the opposite side of their bench; the man struggled to catch up with her, bumping the stroller over the rubber matting that covered the blacktop where they sat.

“If you’d listen to what I’m saying,” the man said. He was so average looking in his baseball cap and baggy shorts that, even staring at him, Knox wondered if she’d be able to pick him out of a lineup five minutes hence. His wife, however, was memorable, if not beautiful; her red hair was tied up in a messy bun; her tortoise-shell statement eyeglasses were oversize for her tiny face.

“I have been listening, and it sucks,” she said. “If you want to go, then go, but I’m not going to fight about it anymore because it’s upsetting to Susannah.”

Susannah, if that’s who she was, sat like a dissolute queen in her palanquin, tongueing the spout of a SpongeBob sippy cup.

“I’m not going to go,” the man said. “I’ll just stay home if you’re going to act this way.”

“Susannah, do you want to go get some pizza? Daddy has to go do Daddy things with his Daddy friends.” The woman took hold of the stroller handle and began walking with it out of the playground as quickly as she’d come in. Her husband stayed behind for a moment, his hands working visibly in his shorts pockets, the coins in them clinking together, then followed, leaving the gate ajar behind him. The black woman quickly moved to shut it before her blonde charge pushed her lawn mower through the gap.

Knox and Bruce watched them go.

“God,” Knox said. “Makes me glad I’m not married.”

As soon as she said the words, she regretted them.

“Well, you don’t know what marriage is like,” Bruce said.

“That’s just a few seconds in their day.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You fight, but you keep coming back to the same resting place. And when you get back to it, it’s where you want to be.”

Knox drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She dug her short nails into the skin of her thighs, but couldn’t manage to press them in deep enough to hurt. She’d wanted Bruce to confide in her, she supposed, though now that words were actually coming she was afraid where they would lead.

“I used to follow her, you know. Around the neighborhood. If she’d leave the house, I’d find myself doubting, after a while, that she’d come back when she’d said she would, and then I’d just shadow her like a loser until she came home.”

“Bruce—”

“My mother said to me once that she’d been taught when she was a girl to look for a man who loved her just a little bit more than she loved him. Of course, she thought it was bullshit, and was the kind of woman who wanted to be head over heels in love, all the time. But the strange thing is, I
did
become that guy. I might have loved your sister just a little bit more than she loved me. And I didn’t mind—or I wouldn’t have traded it. Of course I
minded
.”