Losing Charlotte (15 page)

“How long will each of them have to be in this unit?” her mother asked. “What does that depend on?”

“Mostly weight,” the nurse said, not unkindly. She raised her
eyes from her fingers and watched the tinted panel above the elevator door, waiting for the number of their floor to flash. “And whatever special problems or needs they might have.”

“But they’re fine,” her mother said. “We were told that they’re perfect, just premature.”

“That’s great,” the nurse said. She crossed her arms over her stomach, wrapped her hands around her elbows, which were left exposed by the short-sleeved tunic that she wore. Knox could see her fingers exploring the rough skin of her elbows, her upper arms; she was probably reminding herself to exfoliate during her next shower. “Preemies always have to be watched. They’re still developing, but I’m sure yours are fine at this point, neurologically. This wasn’t one of mine, so I don’t know the details.”

Knox’s mother looked up at her father. Her jaw looked set; the skin on her neck seemed to tighten.

“Mina,” her father said.

“If you don’t know any details,” her mother said, inserting a breathy laugh between phrases, “then it’s probably best not to scare us.”

“Sorry,” the nurse said. “Well, here we are.”

A plucked note sounded, and the elevator doors opened. The three of them followed the nurse around a corner and stopped in front of a small window. Knox realized that she had been imagining a wall of glass, an endless movie nursery, now that she stood jostling for space and peering into a room gnarled with equipment.

“I’ll just let them know who you are,” the nurse said. “You’re not allowed in here right now. The NICU’s very restricted, even if you’re family.” She pronounced it “knee-cue.”

“That’s all right,” her mother said. “Thank you.”

The nurse entered the room and spoke quickly to a woman in vivid, multicolored scrubs—the baby scrubs, Knox thought, the whimsical nursery scrubs, Ned would find that funny—before letting herself out again. Inside the room, the woman walked toward one incubator, its sides transparent, and pointed to it. She waited
beside the machine, though it was too far from the window for them to see much of anything, then moved closer to the window and pointed to another.

“They’re called Isolettes, those beds they sleep in,” the nurse said. She positioned herself against a nearby wall, there not being enough room for her at the window. Knox wondered how long the nurse would remain with them, if she was charged to watch them the way a retail assistant was assigned to shadow potential shoplifters. Inside the room, the scrubbed woman’s eyes were crinkled above her mask. Knox looked in through the plastic sides of the Isolette she pointed to now; whichever twin was inside lay lavender on white cloth, mewling silently, like a newborn cat. He lay on his stomach, his face turned toward them, eyes shut. He was naked except for a tiny striped cap on his head. Tubes snaked out from under him, and from taped places on both of his feet. As they watched, the woman reached in through a flap in the Isolette, gently turned him faceup with both of her hands, taking several long seconds. She arranged the tubes, two of which Knox could now see were taped to his chest, one of which disappeared into the chapped skin above his bandaged navel. The woman then reached for another tube and wiggled the tip of it into his mouth. The baby closed his lips, which looked like nothing but dabs of pink wet, around it. She reached behind the Isolette, produced a pair of dark blue eyeshades, and placed them over his eyes, then went to the other side of the room, flipped a switch. The light above the baby brightened.

“Oh,” her mother said.

“Oh my God,” Knox said.

“So … incredible, look,” her mother said.

They looked. They looked. A full minute went by.

“He’s a potato,” her father said finally. “Look at him.”

“How can he … do you think he’s Ethan?” her mother said.

“Those sunglasses,” Knox said.

“The light is for jaundice,” the nurse said.

“He’s like a snowbird in Boca,” her father said.

Her mother started to giggle. She wiped at her eyes.

“They should be next to each other, though,” Knox said. “I think they should be closer together.”

“Sweet,” the nurse said, glancing in. “Do you have any more questions.”

Her mother stopped laughing. “How are they possibly going to be okay?” she said. “Ben?”

“They will,” her father said. He kept his eyes on the glass. From Knox’s angle, it looked as if he was gazing into his own reflection. “They don’t say they are going to be all right unless it’s true. Bruce said tube feedings and time to grow were all they needed.”

“Oh,” Knox said. She felt sure she spoke, though she had the sensation that she might just be experiencing a loud, pressing thought. She didn’t recognize anything about the baby, except that it was unquestionably human, albeit a kind of human that she had never seen before. The antipathy she had felt for the sonogram images Charlotte sent her evaporated in the warm breath that fogged the inch of window just in front of her mouth; what was left wasn’t quite love, not yet. More like—curiosity. Mystery. Hilarity. Shock.

The baby body seemed to pant. The little patch of its skin that passed for a chest moving up and down, up and down.

T
HE GATES
crashed open; the bell sounded. Bruce had never known such happiness, or such fear. He thought he had, but he hadn’t. He laughed at the pattern he’d held in life, the pattern of being warned about what was upcoming and thinking the warning was all he needed. In fourth-grade science class he had listened while the dyspeptic Mr. Towne explained about bodies, men and women, the moods and ravages of puberty, and thought: Well, now I know. Those troubles are left for everyone else, the ones who haven’t been warned. It was arrogance, of course. Just because something had been described to him didn’t substitute for experience; this was a simple idea, but he kept forgetting it. He crashed into his own morphing self, his dropped voice and thrumming
teenage blood with a kind of shock. He forgot, until his mother’s death reminded him, that he hadn’t experienced death yet. Each rite of passage was, for Bruce, a loss of innocence, and the babies were no different. He had seen them, mottled and bloody, lifted one after the other from Charlotte’s womb. He had heard their Apgar scores stated in the firm tone the nurses here had, watched them fret under the cleaning cloths and be bundled into those plastic boxes and wheeled away. They were all right. He had read books, pored over the literature Charlotte brought home, befriended men with their own warnings and descriptions, but nothing had prepared him for the unsteadiness he still felt in his feet as he stood beside Charlotte’s recovery bed, holding her hand, waiting for the doctor to return to the room. Boyd had just left, but a nurse had called him back. Routine, she said. All he could think was that there were two of them: perfect. Ethan and Ben.

“C
OME WITH ME,”
the squash-playing intern said. “She’s gone back into the OR.”

Yes.

Coming.

It must have been three-quarters of an hour since they’d begun cooing through the window. Knox thought she could have remained there through the night. The endless, lost time that Charlotte’s room had evoked—the room, she could see now, that had held her sister’s spark but also a lesser redolence of waiting, of the uselessness that hospitals necessitated for families, the television noise, the pilgrimages to the cafeteria, the standing by as the patient dresses herself methodically in stale clothes for her overdue release—was distilled, outside the NICU, into what felt like no time at all. They had learned that the nearest baby was Ben. The nurse had said goodbye and left them. Knox looked up when she departed, then turned back to the window. She stared at tiny Ben’s tiny parts: his locked fists, his bent legs, the nub of penis no bigger—smaller, even—than an eraser on one of her parents’ golf-scoring pencils.

Now the intern led them down hallways that Knox didn’t recognize. At one point she wondered, Where are the animal cages? They took the stairs instead of the elevator. The intern took the stairs two at a time. Knox was reminded of what it felt like to arrive after tip-off when she went to home basketball games with her father at Rupp: here was a similar concrete stairwell, a frightening exhilaration. Her father knew the back passages of the arena. He was allowed to hustle through them, ahead of Knox; he sat on the board of the university. As on game days, theirs were the only footsteps she heard in the stairwell now, noisy scuffs bouncing off the thick walls.

Behind Knox, someone tripped. She wasn’t sure if it was her mother or her father. It was difficult to tell from the thunking sound, the brief “ah” she heard after, like a whispered swoon.

She kept moving.

No one said anything. It may have been that there wasn’t enough time or breath to ask questions to the intern’s back, or to say, as much to oneself as to anyone else, What is happening?

They reached the OR. The intern turned to them. She said, “I have to go in. Wait here. Your daughter is hemorrhaging. I’m sorry, I tried to find you. Someone will be with you.” She swung through the windowless doors.

“All right,” Knox’s mother said, with absurd calm.

The three of them stared at the place where the intern had just been, stared at the door until it was still.

Knox thought, with some doubt: I’m here. This is where I am.

She didn’t look at either of her parents. She realized with a kind of satisfaction that she was capable of obliterating herself to the point at which any further movement was unnecessary. She could just stand, keep her eyes on a fixed place, not think, not say a word. To speak to one another, to acknowledge each other, would be wrong. Better to stand together like those children who close their eyes in order to be nowhere.

They waited. For seconds or minutes.

“Let’s sit down,” her father said.

Just like that, the fear started. Knox ignored her father, tried to ignore the chill that began to crawl up her arms. He should have known that none of them was supposed to speak, that they kept everything suspended only through that small collusion. Her mother knew it; Knox could see out of the corner of her eye that her mother remained where she was.

“Mina, you’ve cut yourself,” her father said. Knox did glance over then; an inch of her mother’s slacks stuck to a place on her shin. It was possible that the place was darkened with blood.

“I fell on the stairs,” her mother said.

“Mina.” Her father sounded panicked.

“That’s enough,” her mother said. “I’m fine.”

Nothing more was said. Her father sat. Knox tried to calm herself, but the fear was loose now. It occupied that word,
hemorrhaging
, and lit here and there on her body. She tried to shake it loose. It was both outside and inside, growing around her heart and up her esophagus until it felt like she would choke. There was nothing to do but stand there, breathing it in and out.

“Everything is going to be all right,” her mother said.

It was. Could hemorrhaging even be normal, a side effect of labor, easily stanched? Anything common must be twice as common with twins. Everything twice, intensified, complications expected but no more complicated, in the end, than the everyday, than a dropped vase that doesn’t break and only needs retrieval from the floor. That was the case here. Otherwise Knox would be doing something, someone would be doing something. Otherwise, the feeling she had now of everything having been wrong would be a truth instead of a simple reaction to disorienting circumstances, a way to manufacture hindsight, to reshuffle causes so the effects made sense. With Charlotte, there was always a glitch. She meant it to be so, had to turn back on the sidewalk because she’d forgotten her gloves, left her wallet everywhere, asked waitresses ostentatious questions about their personal lives, locked herself out of her apartment. She had always required a few extra attentions, from everyone. When she was younger it had been
much worse. Beyond the wrecked cars, the lost summer jobs—sometimes Knox thought she was the only one who knew how bad it had been.

Her mother cleared her throat. She said, “Don’t worry. Someone is going to walk out of that door and give us some good news.”

Knox swallowed. She stayed perfectly still. The fear was wild in her now. It was growing out of the crown of her head. She said, “Yes.”

Her mother was religious. By her chair, in the corner of the library, there was a black leather-bound Bible and a stack of the
Science and Health
newsletters that came monthly and featured articles, Knox thought now, with titles like “Someone Is Going to Walk Out of That Door and Give Us Some Good News.” Hers was a private religion, structured more around quiet study than Sundays in church, though Knox was the occasional recipient of printed tracts that she found on the front seat of her car, or slipped under her cabin’s kitchen door, on the days after she confided some hurt or slight to her mother. The last time this had happened she had confessed some guilt related to Ned, referred to the stasis that clamped her whenever he asked her to declare her intentions; the next morning she had discovered, rolled up in her newspaper, an article titled “Wonderful Things Are Happening.”

Knox tried to think, the way her mother might: God is here. God is here. Then she let go of thought again.

“I’m going to go in there,” her father said. “This is crazy.”

They were silent. Her father stood, but he didn’t move through the door. He reached his hands up and interlocked them at the top of his head, sighed.

Just then, Bruce came out of the operating room. The cap sat on his head, the mask lay tight over the lower part of his face. Knox didn’t look for too long at his eyes, or at the rust-colored streak on the front of his scrubs.

“Bruce, what is it?” her mother said. Knox could tell that she had adjusted her voice; she sounded almost playful, as if she were asking him about a gift he had just handed her.

“I don’t—Something is wrong. They’re operating.” Bruce
spoke through his mask. His voice sounded high pitched. He sounded startled to find them there, startled to be talking.