Losing Charlotte (31 page)

Knox stood still, waiting to be invited in. Bruce watched her.

“I made lasagna,” she said stupidly.

“Thank you,” Bruce said.

“It was a long day,” Knox said. She took a breath. “It wasn’t what I wanted, either. I just wanted you to know that.” As she said this, she became so dizzy with sorrow for herself that she felt she might have to hang on to the door, too. Her throat pained her, and she knew she was going to cry.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and tried to compose herself. At least she could show Bruce she didn’t mean to be crying, and was fighting to stop. “I’m—could you take this fucking dish?”

Bruce laughed, then, a laugh that degenerated into coughing and then renewed itself while he moved to relieve her.

“Sorry,” he said. He opened the door wider, still laughing. It was a laugh she hadn’t heard in New York—there was something reckless in it, as if he might have given himself permission to go mad. He looked straight at her, one of his hands balancing the lasagna. Knox ducked past him, though she hadn’t formally been asked inside. Where else did she have to go? Robbie was headed back to school the next day; Ned was lost to her; it was too cold to swim. What she really wanted, she knew the instant she entered the desolate hallway, was to hold one of the babies. She wanted her arms filled with them, to smell their heads and their lotioned, still-skinny bodies inside their pajamas. She wanted to rub her index finger along the ridges their spines made, over the brief jut of their shoulder blades, rest one of their soft, diapered butts on her forearm, press them against the length of her torso, and stay. She resolved not to stop moving and crossed toward the stairs. She could hear Bruce set the dish down somewhere behind her, and his footsteps on the bare treads climbing after hers, but he made no effort to stop her.

The door to their room was open; a humidifier hummed somewhere inside. In the glow from the nightlight stood two round cribs, trussed up with gingham and eyelet, along the walls of what Knox remembered now was a former study, paneled in some cheap veneer. The trappings of the nursery were incongruous with the soul of the room, but the preparation her mother had put in was everywhere: there were two matching hampers, a storage system with coordinating baskets, an elaborate mobile hung from a hook in the ceiling. The plush rug underfoot muted her entrance, and she didn’t even know which twin she was lifting until he was in her arms: Ethan, just a touch lighter, the slight knob at the top of his skull discernible under her palm, which was gliding over him, reading his form like Braille. She held him against her and swayed in place, nuzzling his scalp.

Bruce stepped into the room. He seemed to consider each piece of furniture in it. Knox felt strangely embarrassed for him, for a
moment, there among all the baby comforts; the fact that he—and, indeed, Charlotte—would never have been responsible for the existence of a room like this, yet was forced to make it his temporary dominion, emasculated him somehow. It was as if her mother had turned Bruce himself into an infant by creating this frilly environment for his sons. God, she was tired, thought Knox. She had better put Ethan down again, before she fell asleep right here and dropped him.

There was a knocking sound; Knox looked and saw the diaper pail rolling on the floor; Bruce must have stumbled against it. Immediately, Ben started to wail. She began jogging Ethan up and down in her arms by instinct, but after a few seconds it was clear he wouldn’t wake. Bruce reached down into the other crib for Ben; when he raised the boy to his shoulder, Ben gave a loud burp and lowered his head against Bruce’s T-shirt, asleep again as quickly as he’d roused himself. Bruce began to rock him, just as he might if Ben were still awake, dipping low at the knees and moving from side to side about the room, drawing U’s in the air with his long body. He traced a slow, rhythmic circle around the place where Knox stood with Ethan, his eyes trained straight ahead, his face expressionless. Knox put Ethan down and waited until Bruce had lowered Ben into the opposite crib, then preceded him out of the room.

Bruce left the door open a crack. They stood on the landing that overlooked the front hall. The only light here was from a lamp Knox’s mother had plugged into a corner below them.

“I’m sorry,” Knox said.

“For what,” Bruce said.

“For needing that. I almost woke them both up.”

“You know,” Bruce said. His face looked severe. “I think you apologize too much.”

“I’m also sorry for today. There was just—there wasn’t enough that honored you, and how much you loved her.”

“What are you talking about?”

Bruce’s brown eyes flashed; he looked suddenly capable of hitting her.

“Your wife was just … frozen in time. Didn’t that bother you? It bothered me, and I contributed to it.”

“So you’re fixing it with a casserole?”

“It’s lasagna.”

They stared at each other.

“Knox,” Bruce began slowly, as if he were speaking to a child. “Charlotte is dead. Ethan and Ben’s mother is dead, and they’ll never know her. I will never talk to my wife again. I am fucking terrified. Do you honestly think that what got said or not said at a church service makes any difference to me? I’m trying to get through the day. Your guilt over … whatever. It doesn’t help me.”

Knox lowered her head. She was nodding, though her eyes were welling with tears.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, or what is going to happen to my life. So if you can help me with that, you’re welcome to. If you can’t, then I honestly don’t need anything extra to worry about. A memorial is an hour and a half of my existence, all right? Not life and death. Neither is one of the boys waking up, or—much of anything else, come to think of it. Not after … I can’t even fucking say it again. Maybe once I can even say it, I’ll be better off.”

Knox was starting to sob now, her hand over her mouth, trying to be as quiet as she could. Her chest felt as if it were exploding; it felt good, actually. Good and terrible at once.

“Hey,” Bruce said, grazing her hair with his long, tapered fingers. “Come on.”

She tried to stop, or to indicate that she was going to stop soon, but she couldn’t get her breath.

“Your lasagna helps me. Your lasagna helps me enormously.”

Knox attempted to smile, and failed.

“Knox.”

Something about the sound of her name in his mouth made her cold, and she stood shivering in front of him.

“I wish she could see you with them.” The words seemed to jerk out of her. “It’s not fair.”

When he wrapped his arms around her, the warmth came as a
relief. This was her first thought. Then his chin was resting on the top of her head while he held her, and by the time he lowered his face to kiss hers, she had an understanding of what was happening and had chosen it. She couldn’t claim not to have chosen it, or to have been swept up into something she wasn’t conscious of, or couldn’t control. No, she had chosen it, and in the moment, she was glad.

K
NOX

T
HOUGH IT WAS STILL EARLY
, Knox was surprised at the deep quiet in her parents’ house when she entered. She crept up the stairs like an intruder, trying not to think of her mother and father, openmouthed in sleep at an hour she would have normally found them at the breakfast table, if life were in any way proceeding as usual. She should turn around and let herself out so as not to risk the embarrassment of waking them. But the idea of returning to the cabin now, to the forced companionship with herself she’d have to endure there, sat like dead weight in her. She wanted ballast, and company—or, at least, the familiarity of her old bed. She made her way slowly, carefully, to her room.

She opened the heavy door off the landing, and paused. Something about the sight of the space, arranged like a shrine to her girlhood, shamed her. She was so tired; she’d planned to lie down on the eyelet coverlet that hung down to the floor, grazing the carpet with its scalloped edge like a veil, but to disturb it now struck her as a violation; the pillows were arranged in such a smooth symmetrical pile; Knox thought of a bier, floating away on the lake of
soft carpet. She turned away from the bed and took inventory in a squint; the light streaming through the windows was already too bright. There was her desk, an expanse of bleached pine on which sat the framed pictures of her family; while Charlotte had displayed an array of snapshots on the corkboard wall in her own room, always of herself with various friends and always changing, Knox remembered curating this select group of photographs at an early age and framing them herself: a wedding photo of her parents, a shot of herself and Charlotte bursting through a corona of hose water in the side yard, their bathing suits puckering across their flat chests, and a posed shot of the five of them standing together in front of a fence, Robbie in a bassinet at their feet, pried loose from a Christmas card she’d begged off her mother one year.

On the sideboard that functioned as a bookshelf: a tilting hodgepodge composed of the stuff of school reading lists, for gotten library books, academic texts for the anthropology major Knox had switched halfway through her years at UK. She blinked, then brought her hands together and rubbed. Surely there was a box somewhere up here. She hunted one down in the adjacent guest room and carried it back across the landing, floating it, full as it was of air, onto the rug in front of the shelves. She’d set to work gathering books the center could use; there was an anemic library there, and the classrooms were always hard up for books the students could practice with. Yes, this struck her as a legitimate way to spend the morning. She’d even alphabetize as she sorted. She took a breath and began.

She’d fed the boys this morning and let Bruce sleep. To even touch on the image of herself in the half-light in the babies’ room, shushing Ethan as she waggled the bottle gently against Ben’s gums to entice him to suck faster, made her feel like her blood could catch fire; her face was hot with the memory even as she worked to push it aside. What had she been doing there? Once the boys were both topped up and burped and drowsing again in their cribs, she debated waking Bruce, but left the partially empty bottles at the threshold of the room as evidence of the feeding, snatched her clothes up from the pile they’d formed at the foot of
Bruce’s bed, and left. She hadn’t worked overly hard at being quiet; she was conscious of a certain, albeit weak, defiance in the way she’d clattered down the stairs and let the screen door spring shut behind her. She supposed the idea of skulking around like a fugitive from her life, trying not to make a sound, was all too familiar to her. But as soon as she’d reached this house she’d been at it again, trying to minimize her presence, the affront of it, to the point of rendering herself invisible. Wasn’t that how she behaved?

Knox slid a handful of paperbacks toward her and balanced their spines against her palm, then fanned them out. The dust reached her nostrils and pricked them; she sneezed. She had no idea how she would feel when she saw Bruce again. She supposed, if she were honest with herself, it would depend on how he felt when he saw her, and this shamed her all over again, but it seemed immovable. Perhaps he would decide, then, how things would be. There was little in between that Knox could discern: she had done something terrible, or she hadn’t. Her mouth was dry. Her heart was doing that thing it sometimes did when she ran: beating too hard and too irregularly in her chest, frightening her.

Knox put the paperbacks down on the sideboard shelf, wrapped her arms around herself. It was freezing in here. Maybe she needed to eat something. Instead of making the necessary motions toward the door, Knox knelt beside the box, then lay fully down beside it, twining her fingers over her eyes. Just for a minute she thought. I won’t move.

She heard someone pushing their way through the open closet that linked her parents’ dressing room to hers; her mother had had the closet’s back removed when Knox was born, so that night visits could be accomplished more quickly. There was the scrape of clothing being pushed to one side, a rattle as the neat rows of slacks and blouses her mother kept there swung back into place. Knox knew she should sit up, that the sight of her on the floor might be alarming, but she couldn’t seem to initiate the set of small, bodily tasks that would accomplish this.

“Honey?”

Her father’s voice. Knox did sit up, realizing how sure she’d
been that it would be her mother who would appear; she felt guilty at the sight of her father’s ashen face. He loomed over her in the oversize navy bathrobe he’d worn on Sunday mornings ever since she could remember, his features clean shaven—he must have showered already—this evidence of routine reestablished relieved Knox somewhat even as she organized herself and scrambled to her feet.

“Daddy, I’m fine! I was just—lying on the floor.” She laughed nervously. When she reached to touch his arm, he batted her fingers away lightly and gathered her into a hug. Knox had long been as tall as her father, but she reflexively bent her knees a bit and lowered her head so that it was flush with her father’s shoulder and stood like that, buried in the fragrant, dark blue plush of the robe, so that after a few moments she forgot if her eyes were open or closed. She felt her throat constricting and forced herself to pull back and smile at him, her hands clasped around his upper arms. Her father smiled at her as if from a great distance, as if he were smiling into a camera with the sun before him, unable to make out exactly where the lens was.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. I just didn’t want to be at home, I guess.”

“That’s right,” he said, patting her cheek and then settling himself into her desk chair. Knox noticed he was moving stiffly, that he grasped the sides of the chair with both hands. Please don’t get old, she thought. Not yet. “You should have slept here last night,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think to make sure of it.”

Knox flushed, despite herself.

“You stay right here,” he said. “You just move right back in here if that’s what you want to do. Goodness knows Mom and I would love it.” His eyes were the color of the cornflowers that grew wild at the back of the property, such a clear, delicate color, a surprise in an otherwise rugged face. He seemed to stare right into her. Knox remembered again how elemental, steady, and unquestioned her love for her father was—as much a part of her as those photographs on the desk were part of the room.