Losing Charlotte (34 page)

Authors: Heather Clay

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: Losing Charlotte

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They made love twice, and after the second time, when Bruce had covered the length of her with his body to shield it from the cold and they lay there like that, silent, perhaps shocked at last, one of the babies started crying.

“Oh my God,” Knox said.

“It’s time for the next feeding,” Bruce said.

They got up together. Knox snatched up Bruce’s dress shirt from that day on her way out of the room simply to button up against the chill; Bruce stayed as he was. In the kitchen, they poured water from an old kettle into two clean bottles, working side by side. By the time they had mounted the stairs, the boys were in full cry.

They had to sit on the floor to feed them; there were no chairs. The boys opened their mouths like birds, then closed their lips around the bottles Bruce and Knox offered them, silent at once,
except for the odd swallowing sound, and the intermittent little hum that Ethan tended to make when he was drinking.

After a few minutes, Knox said, “In a Victorian novel, we would get married.” Her voice rasped as if she’d been awake for days.

“Read a lot of Victorian novels?”

“Some.”

Bruce smiled at her.

“Don’t worry. I don’t want to marry you,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Why am I happy,” Knox said.

“I don’t know. Me too.”

It was strange, but there it was.

She would be kidding herself if she denied having pictured other things in those moments. She pictured herself back in her attic room, having claimed it for herself, then in Bruce’s room, having been claimed by him through an act of magical transference that circumvented all questions, all obstacles. She knew this was fantasy. But for Knox, even the most impossible of projections felt like the result of a process she’d hitherto felt incapable of, maybe
been
incapable of. She had an imagination after all.

She’d found a family, and it wasn’t hers. Call it tragic irony or a positive sign; whatever name it went by wasn’t going to make the next part any easier.

Bruce had stayed out the week, then packed up the boys and taken them back to New York. He’d had no intention of staying on any longer, and though he’d exacted promises from each of them for extended visits later in the fall, Knox could see that the life he’d known with Charlotte and would return to now—inasmuch as he could—held far more pull than this place did. Than she did. And that was only right. Still, he’d left the boys with her parents and some soft toys on their living room rug and walked down to her cabin on his last afternoon to talk to her.

“I’ve been thinking, I want you to come every other month for at least a day or two,” he’d said. “If you’re willing. I think Ethan and Ben would benefit from that. I’d like them to know you and for you to be part of their life.”

He’d spoken so formally, she’d wanted to laugh. At least sit down, she’d been thinking. At least ransack my refrigerator. Don’t stand there like a stranger.

She stopped herself from referring to the center. Fall term was fully under way now, and she knew Marlene had been snowed from taking up her slack, but she didn’t feel like pretending, even to herself, that her work there constituted a career she couldn’t turn away from when she wanted to. She was good at the kind of teaching she did, but she was replaceable; this summer had proven that. And hadn’t that been part of the appeal of her position, if she was being honest?

“I’ll see,” she told him, simply.

“Would Ned—”

“No. Don’t.”

Bruce blinked. It was strange, having him here; as if reading her thoughts, he looked around.

“I’ve never been in here before,” he said. “It’s nice.”

“Thank you.”

He looked at her.

“Charlotte knew you loved her,” he said. “It was hard for her to absorb things like that and trust them when she was at her worst, but I wouldn’t worry about the kind of sister you were or weren’t. Just worrying about that at all is more than some siblings do.”

Though this felt like cold comfort, Knox nodded.

“Thank you,” she said.

Bruce rubbed at his chin. Like her, he made the rooms and furniture in her cabin look diminutive with his height. He sighed.

“I am so tired,” he said, and smiled. “So, so fucking tired.”

“I know.”

“Knox. I’m really grateful to you.”

“I know,” she said. And though it wasn’t all she wanted now, if she told herself the truth, it was best. She needed to sort out her reasons for wanting anything before she proceeded into the next day, and the next, it seemed. On the wind-blasted tundra that was suddenly her life, it was important to stand still and gather her bearings before she took her next step.

Every year, her father repainted these fences, set the budget for mowing, plowed the muck pile under, and sowed it with lime. The horses that were gathering at the fence line to get a good look at her now were birthed, raised, sold. Some were bred or buried here, too. The whole life of Four Corners was conducted in cycles, from the menses and gestation periods of the mares to the seasons sold for each stallion, and of course the farm, under her family’s stewardship, had had a life, too, a life that was only a fragment of a greater, longer existence. If her parents decided to sell—and they’d been talking about it, she knew, though they were trying not to let her hear—another family would live here, raise Thoroughbreds here, or not. If the easements held, the acreage would survive undeveloped, though who could say whether or when larger parcels would be sold off, their boundaries changed, refenced, replanted, built out in various ways.

The defining misapprehension of her life, Knox now saw, was that one could work to protect a private world, to encase it, arrest it. How, when she’d grown up here, surrounded by sex, birth, and death, by live, fallible organisms everywhere, had she allowed herself to fall for this idea? But she had, while all the time, the animals around her moved through their infancies, childhoods, middle years, declines, deaths; the grass faded and browned and was reborn. Knox had worshipped the ascension, the foaling season, the spring, without recognizing the point on the arc at which things naturally gave way.

Charlotte would have died on another day, if not on the day Ethan and Ben were born. Before Charlotte died, Knox hadn’t known, really known, that any of them would die; she supposed this was one definition of childhood. The way Charlotte changed everything, in life
and
in death, felt accelerated, shocking, but of course change was the very stuff they were made of. Last night she had rung in the New Year alone, having begged off the party she and Ned had agreed to go to months before, a predictable balloon-drop thing at a local country club, the kind of event made more palatable by the ease with which they could make fun of it, back when there was ease between them to speak of. Ned was a
gentleman; though she’d steeled herself and explained to him as best she could about how she’d known nothing, not even herself, and thus couldn’t be expected to know that the unspoken promises she’d been making him were hollow at their core all this time, he was the type to honor previous commitments, and there had been no question of him not taking her to the party. So she’d been the one to back out, and sat at her frost-webbed window with a cup of weak tea, watching the dark, and wondering if she’d find the courage to take Bruce up on his invitation to join the boys’ lives in some way, or if this, too, would be a path to forming herself in the new gaps Charlotte’s absence had left, as opposed to the old ones. She’d been made of putty, with a talent only for occupying the hollows that had been bequeathed to her, and no idea what else to do.

Time would tell. She reached into one of the roomy pockets in her barn jacket; she’d brought apples. Birthday presents. She swung herself over the gate, lit on the hard, packed earth on the other side. She made a few clicking noises out the side of her mouth; in an instant the yearlings were nuzzling at her hands. Though she, and her parents, and Robbie, Bruce, and the boys, had survived, no aspect of their old family remained. They were a new family, born together with Ethan and Ben. Just as all the foals on the farm held one birthday in common, so all of them held an hour in common, after which they were new people with new lives. Each day from now on would be fraught with the music of accident, even of catastrophe; Knox was mortal, as was everything and everyone she’d ever loved. This was the music that had always been playing, its notes the only constant in all the world; she could finally make it out, humming in the dead grass and within every breath and step she took. The view, at least, was undiminished by the rhythm of it; she could see half the county from here, when she raised her head, and the house she’d grown up in, and the horses surrounding her and the way the land looked, as beautiful as ever. She scattered the rest of the apples on the ground, turned, and kept walking.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HANK YOU
to my parents, Blythe and Robert Clay, who have made every good thing possible, and who I’m just plain crazy about. Thanks to each member of my beloved family and in-law family for years of encouragement, interest, and support. Particular thanks are due to my brother Case and his wife, Lorin; to Lorraine Clay and Elizabeth Baldwin; to Sylvia and Joe Frelinghuysen; to Joy de Vink; and to Gioia and John Frelinghuysen. My gratitude to my husband, Nick, for the untold things he is and does for me every day, and to our beautiful daughters, Amelia and May, is boundless.

To Bill Clegg, my knight in shining armor, and to the gifted Jordan Pavlin for her unerring eye, careful hand, and innate kindness: I cannot thank either of you enough for your guidance, efforts, generosity, and patience, and feel so fortunate to know and work with both of you.

Thanks to Naomi Schub, Leslie Levine, Matt Hudson, Sue Betz, Kathleen Fridella, Peggy Samedi, Maggie Hinders, Carol Carson, Emmy Kenan, the MacDowell Colony, the people at Paragraph, and my teachers and friends from my time at Columbia for crucial help along the way.

Finally, thanks to Jenny Minton Quigley, without whom this book—and many other, much more important things—would not exist, and whose steadfast belief and friendship are among the great gifts of my life. Jenny, I love and will always be grateful to you.

A N
OTE
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Heather Clay is a graduate of Middlebury College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has published short fiction in
The New Yorker
magazine’s debut fiction issue and written for
Parenting
magazine. She resides in New York City with her husband and their two daughters. This is her first novel.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clay, Heather, [date]
Losing Charlotte / Heather Clay.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59303-0
1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title
PS3603.L3865F63 2010
813′.6—dc22 2009023439

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

v3.0

Table of Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Part I