Losing Charlotte (33 page)

As that thought penetrated her, she felt herself calming.

“Bruce,” she said, once she felt assured that she could keep her voice from shaking, “you don’t have to worry.”

“I love your sister,” he said simply and with relief, finally meeting her gaze.

“I
know
.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“There’s no good and no bad,” she said. Her voice sounded resonant in this airless space, convincing.

“It has nothing to do with you,” Bruce said, taking a step toward her, then stopping himself. “I just can’t—I shouldn’t have—”

“Bruce. You didn’t do anything wrong. We’re the same people as before. There’s no good and no bad and you don’t have to worry.”

She was repeating herself, as much to apprehend her own words as to make him understand. This was a change, this calm stealing over her in the midst of complication. She’d never denied herself the right to sort things into categories of right and wrong. Yet here she was, as much a moral relativist as she’d ever accused Charlotte of being.

She patted the seat of the chair beside her, and pushed it away from the table with her foot. Bruce sat down. She reached for his hand and held it chastely, briefly, before releasing it. She was balancing Bruce’s doubt with her own certainty, and this felt right. She could sense his gratitude. Her setting aside the alternate universe she’d allowed to take rough shape in her mind earlier, if only to test her own audacity, felt like a physical undertaking; her blood
itself seemed to bow for a moment under the weight of it, and then every cell in her body felt abruptly free. She knew it couldn’t last, even that the very lightness in her might be a measure of the distance she had to cover when she crashed back to earth, but she felt she could lift the gloomy house they sat in from its foundations if she wanted to. Bruce was beautiful, his face a study in hollows and sadness and concentration. He’d been Charlotte’s, but, in an irrevocable way, part of him belonged to her now, too; this had been true, hadn’t it, even before they’d come back to Kentucky. He took her in with his eyes.

Knox’s mother burst into the kitchen.

“Come and help me get them out,” she said. Her face was exultant. “I don’t know how to work the strap thingies. Oh, we’ve had the nicest walk!”

There were moments in everyone’s life, Knox supposed, that showed you that you weren’t the person you thought. Maybe these moments taught you something good about yourself, or shamed you. Whether you kept them to yourself or spent your time talking to anybody who’d listen in an effort to decode their meaning, or to reshape the truth until it became something you could live with, depended on the person. Marlene loved to talk about the moment her mean-as-dirt mother-in-law died, and she (Marlene) found herself supporting her even meaner-than-dirt father-in-law by the elbow at the internment as he cried, shocking herself most of all when she reached one arm around his stooped shoulders and stood there rubbing at his back, half expecting him to shake her off right there in front of the minister, when instead he folded himself into her embrace. She didn’t tell the story to brag on herself—more to illustrate, Knox thought, the possibilities in people, the unseen forces that could nudge us further open, or further toward kindness, than we might expect.

Bruce smiled at her. They followed Mina outside. Later, they would bring the boys back to Knox’s parents’ house, arrange them on the sofa, watch them, begin to think about dinner, discuss, tentatively, the rhythm of the days ahead. Ben would appear; Knox
would allow herself the briefest moment of curiosity: had it been her grace that made these small steps forward possible?

I’ll tell Marlene, Knox thought, feeling dizzy as she rose, the depth of her exhaustion making itself fully felt for the first time since early morning. She’ll be the only one.

• IV •

K
NOX

K
NOX COULD REMEMBER
a day in New York, before they’d flown home for Charlotte’s memorial, when she’d tried to imagine life a year hence. Now here she was, the leaves stirring overhead, pausing between each step she took along the serpentine path that led through this section of Washington Square Park, holding the boys’ hands in her own. At fourteen months, they were walking, though Ethan, his ankles flexible as a dancer’s, had only just begun to, his face cohering into a proud, secretive smile each time he pulled himself up and propelled forward without stumbling.

“Woof!” Ben squealed. He pulled at her hand, trying to speed her along. “There!” A woman who was passing them, pushing an elaborate pram, smiled at Knox, a smile of beneficent inclusion. They were drawing closer to the dog run. Knox tousled Ethan’s hair—curly and coarse, now, grown past the tops of his ears, and stood close behind him so she could brace him against her shins if he toppled backward in his excitement. The boys pressed themselves against the link fence, exclaiming over each animal that ventured close enough to nose at them through the wire. This was
their safari, she thought, while she sipped her coffee out of a paper cup, her arms drawn close to her sides against the early morning chill. They’d been up since six. When the boys began to stamp and chatter, Knox would set her cup down and rub her hands up and down against their sleeves, then against their cheeks until they laughed. She’d lead them all to the nearby diner Bruce had pointed out for her on Sixth Avenue, where they’d jostle together in a booth and she’d treat them to hot chocolates and the chewy, golden pancakes it seemed possible to procure on every corner in New York.

In the past year, Bruce had left his company and taken a salary cut to work at a firm that agreed to let him follow his accounts from home one day a week. The nanny he’d eventually hired was named Maya; she came from Tbilisi, where she’d known war on the streets and the disappearance of two uncles; and yet she was so full of the purest love for the boys, and joyful in their presence, that Knox wondered that she hadn’t been more obviously damaged by her short history. It seemed sometimes to be luck, to Knox, whether or not one was scathed. And at other times, she felt it was a matter of deciding. Bruce told her that Maya came every day to the house on Bank Street, at eight o’clock, and left after the boys were in bed.

Bruce and Charlotte’s house was different on this visit than it had been before; the clutches of toys on the floor of the living room, the smells of Maya’s cooking for the boys, had infused it with a different kind of life. Knox’s attic was still hers, though, as she’d hoped it would be. After she returned this morning with the boys, she would sit in the window seat and wait while Bruce fussed with the coffee in the kitchen. She would watch the street: the strange people, coming and going, different people every day, the odds stacked against their appearing before Knox at any point in the future. This had been Charlotte’s view, so different from the one Knox had had, at home, of her swan, her withered catalpa, her still pond, the tractors crawling in the distance.

It was a mystery, having a sister.

Her father’s career had been focused on a kind of translation of
genetic possibilities into reality; he knew as well as anyone that the same set of parents could result in a bafflingly disparate set of siblings, one fast, one knock-kneed, one easy, one rambunctious under the bit, difficult to break. She had worked as a translator in her own small way, though it was pretentious to call herself one, organizing symbols and sounds that made no sense to her students into symbols and sounds that did. Now Knox felt herself struggling to apprehend the meaning of her life thus far: her life with Charlotte, and her life without. For so long, she had assumed that the fact that Charlotte was one way necessarily meant that she was another. To admit that this had been a falsehood was to admit that she was charged with starting over, and didn’t know word one of the language.

She pictured Charlotte, down there on the sidewalk, hurrying by, dressed as she had been in the picture on Knox’s desk all these years, her skirt and hair whirling after her as she zigged around a low grate, the kind New Yorkers put in to establish parameters around trees. Knox almost wanted to knock on the window, so compelling was the vision. Instead, she whispered Charlotte’s name, over and over.

B
RUCE WAS
finishing a story he’d begun from the kitchen, though why he’d chosen to yell at her from another room instead of waiting to settle beside her before commencing any kind of conversation she didn’t know. Nerves, probably. Finally, he reappeared in the room where she sat with one eye on the boys, who were thrusting the contents of one of their toy baskets onto the floor and exclaiming at each other in nonsensical syllables. For the umpteenth time this weekend, Knox felt a rush of gladness that they had each other.

“So Iris, the neighbor, has another name for me, it turns out. She slipped an e-mail address under my door yesterday.”

“Women will flock to you,” Knox said, accepting her coffee. “Tragedy is sexy.” Terrible jokes were the province of the bereaved.

“Well, I’m not looking,” Bruce said. “Obviously.”

“Not so obviously,” Knox said.

Bruce took a sip from his mug. He may have been pretending he hadn’t heard her.

“Sorry,” she said.

Bruce had a friend coming for dinner, a guy named Toby he’d recently gotten back in touch with.

“Do you want Maya to stay?” Bruce asked her. “You could read to the boys and put them to bed instead, if you want to.”

“I don’t know,” Knox said. “I don’t want to confuse anyone’s routine.”

“It would be great,” Bruce said. “The boys would love it.” Knox searched his face and judged him sincere. She nodded.

“Okay,” she said.

“What about you,” Bruce asked. “Tell me.”

Knox cast her mind back to the times Charlotte used to use that phrase with her, snuggled up next to her in bed, appeasing. There were few times when Charlotte had paused long enough in the narrative of her own becoming, one she seemed bent on sharing with Knox in childhood, even when her young ears felt too small to contain it, to ask such a question; but those times had obviously meant something, because Knox remembered them with such clarity.

Ethan was suddenly at her feet. He tugged at the hem of her jeans, wanting to be picked up and gathered into her arms. Knox swung him into her lap, looked at Bruce, and shrugged, smiling. She would get back on a plane tomorrow for the return leg of a trip that would become terribly familiar to her over the coming years. She supposed that, somewhere in the spaces between Charlotte’s home and hers, she might begin to find out the answer to Bruce’s question, if she were lucky. She knew she was grateful for the ease between herself and her brother-in-law—for he would always be that—that allowed him to ask it, an ease made possible by their tacit agreement, made that distant afternoon in the kitchen of the farm’s drafty guesthouse, never to touch each other again.

I
T WAS ONLY LATER
that Knox questioned whether or not she had been present at all in the hospital the night Charlotte died. Just a halfway question really, not true delusion. She would think about absence. About how, in a certain kind of story, a photo is examined and the people who have let a ghost walk among them, and thought it human, exclaim over the blank space where the ghost’s image should be. She’d seen movies where this happened, or maybe heard the trick described in the scare stories that so often got retold for cheap thrills whenever girls got together in the dark. A picture, a smiling group, and in the middle, where the affable stranger (the one whom nobody had been able to get enough of) should be standing, would be just some blurry thing, some corona, with cars or houses or oblivious pedestrians exposed behind it. From within her own blank and disappeared space Knox would wonder where she had been at the moment that intern first rushed up to them and began speaking. Sometimes she thought of the intern as time itself, approaching too quickly, taking her arm and speeding her away.

The foaling season began in the spring and lasted through the early summer. Regardless of their particular birthdays, per a longstanding mandate of the Jockey Club, each foal on her parents’ farm—on any Thoroughbred farm, anywhere in the world—turned one on the first of January. This was the first day of their lives as yearlings, all; though the foals born in March looked nearly ready to race, and the June foals looked so runty it was a judgment call whether or not they’d be entered in the sale or kept back six months and sold privately. Back in Kentucky, Knox could probably count on four fingers the times during the last decade that there had been snow on the ground on New Year’s Day, and today was no exception; there was a gray-yellow light suffusing the sky, the sun showed thin, and the grass was the color of weathered cardboard, rough under her boots. On their communal birthday, the new yearlings had no notion that they’d become artificially older overnight. Their breath steamed from their mouths; they
stamped as Knox came into sight. What was time to them, or change?

They had moved toward Bruce’s bed in the guesthouse that night after the memorial and lay down together, Bruce’s mouth rough on hers. Knox hadn’t been surprised by her own urgency; she had just given way to it, as if it had been expected, as if she’d felt it before. Nothing could surprise her now. Her mother had made up the bed in the cold room with her own hands, and Knox thought of Charlotte at every moment; when her fingers pressed against Bruce’s ribs, she thought of Charlotte’s fingers there; when Bruce’s knee thrust itself between her legs and parted them, she thought of Charlotte’s legs, parting. Yet despite these thoughts, her desire was her own. She couldn’t slake it fast enough. She gripped Bruce’s lean back with her hands and rocked under him. She slid her hand over the inseam of his pants, and then under the fabric to feel him there, her hand gripping him, so different entirely from Ned, or from anyone, longer, smoother under her fingers. He was so hard. And in that strange house, he was suddenly beautiful. Knox never closed her eyes. She strained, in the dark, to see everything: his long thighs, the singular concentration in his face.