Losing Charlotte (16 page)

“For what?” her father said.

“He doesn’t know, Ben,” her mother said. “Do you, Bruce? You’ve been in there with her, darling, haven’t you?”

Nothing is following, thought Knox. Words are not connecting here.

A nurse pushed out through the door.

“I’m here for you, Mr. Tavert,” she said to Bruce. “There’s another area we can wait in. Follow me.”

“But what about us? Can’t we go with you?” Knox’s mother asked, her voice rising.

“The doctor will be with you,” the nurse said. “Just hold tight where you are, okay?”

She led Bruce through another door next to the OR entrance. Knox and her parents stood, waiting, silent again, for what seemed like a long time. Knox stared at a frayed place in the canvas that covered the door Bruce had moved through, drawing herself more fixed with every breath and contracting her mind until it was temporarily fixed, too, fixed like the frayed place on the door, fixed into a kind of starry point: cold, still, immovable.

Breathe in, breathe out.

When Dr. Boyd emerged, his white coat was clean, and he wasn’t wearing a mask or gloves. That’s good, Knox thought. He’s clean.

“Hi,” he said. “Let’s sit down.” He spoke to her father. Knox felt a burning in her chest that was instant. All the organs in her caught fire at once. She wanted to close her eyes, but instead opened them wider, until she could feel the air of the hallway touching them, drying them out. Freeze, she thought: we are this family, this attentive family, waiting at the mercy of Dr. Boyd. Anybody walking by would be able to see the kind of family we are. If I could only be walking by, instead of here in this family.

“There were complications,” Dr. Boyd said, and Knox hated that she’d known he would say that, use that word. “Charlotte’s uterus failed to contract, which needs to happen in order for her
postpartum bleeding to stop. We gave her medication—” The words were rushing from him. Knox had only met him on this night. She didn’t know what his face meant, how to read it.

“You were giving her something when we were in the room,” her mother said. Her face was hard; the lines around her mouth seemed to deepen as she spoke.

“Yes. When it became clear that the medication wasn’t slowing the bleeding down, that Charlotte was experiencing what’s called uterine atony, we brought her to the OR in order to arrest the bleeding.”

“How—,” her father said.

Dr. Boyd looked at him. “We gave her a blood transfusion. Your daughter continued to bleed.”

Knox could see the tiny points of black inside the stretched pores on his nose. She wondered if, at any point, her mother, or her father, or herself for that matter, would smash the nose. That seemed possible. To smash his shiny nose, kick his chest, gnaw at the fleshy parts of his ears, push him, push him away. “Your daughter developed a very rare complication, something I’ve only seen a couple of times in my practice. It’s called DIC, which means that her blood refused to clot. The blood thins, to the point of, almost … a watery consistency. It thinned and at that point couldn’t respond to medications, or to any of the blood products we could provide, and I’m afraid that your daughter has ultimately lost so much blood that her organs cannot sustain function.”

Knox wondered if Dr. Boyd would begin to pant from speaking so quickly, from packing so many words into one breath. He stood fingering the pockets of his lab coat.

“This is what you’re telling us,” her father said. “How is there time for anyone to have a complication, we were gone for twenty minutes.”

“Unfortunately it only takes a matter of minutes for the patient to become incapacitated. We have even—in an emergency, a hysterectomy is performed, and I did perform that as a final resort. I know this is extremely difficult to take in, I understand that. What is important to know is that the clotting factors in your daughter’s
blood were used up, and she began to convulse. This happened extremely quickly. She was under anesthetic at the time, and wouldn’t have suffered.”

Dr. Boyd looked down at the floor. Then he looked up, and Knox thought she saw a kind of aggression in his face. “Your daughter has died,” he said. “At eleven forty-seven, a few minutes ago. I am so deeply—I’m sorry. This was something so rare and unexpected, it just, every physician dreads this happening, I can tell you. It happens in one out of about ten thousand cases. There are no predictors. It’s, I can call someone down to be with you, or to escort you to the chapel, or if you’d like to be alone, I can—”

“What?” her father said. “What?” He stood with his mouth open. Catching flies, that was Marlene’s phrase.

They stood together, in the hallway. Knox’s mother began to weep.

“I am here to answer any questions,” Dr. Boyd said. “To give you whatever you need.”

Knox felt aware of her face. She thought: This is the face I have now. She wanted to slap its unreal expression from it, so that her face would be opaque and not show anything to someone who might see. But she couldn’t move. The air seemed wetter suddenly; she realized that she had made a tent over her nose and mouth with her fingers and stood breathing through it, like a mask.

“I want to talk to someone else,” her father said.

Knox watched the frayed place on the door. She allowed the star of her mind to experience just one glimmer, smaller than a filament, of the reprieve that her father might affect with his words. He was getting to the bottom of things. He was a man of some power; he almost never spoke impolitely to anyone. When he did, something would happen.

Her mother was making a low sound. Knox couldn’t go to her. Her deep, fathomless work was not to move. If she had let herself think, she would have wondered whether, when Dr. Boyd spoke of death in his weak and watery voice, he meant a respirator or something, a coma or state from which Charlotte could surface.
Medicine could forestall almost anything. It was ridiculous what medicine could forestall, obscene. But she didn’t think.

God is here, God is love—

Suddenly Bruce came out of the door with the frayed place on it, as if Knox had summoned him with her gaze. He was no longer wearing his cap or mask. A nurse was with him. She was touching his arm at the elbow. Knox looked at his face and felt a cry beginning at the base of her throat. It was impossible to look at him and not know.

She thought he might move toward her mother. But he seemed to stop, at the center of the hallway, and sway there. Knox’s mother stayed where she was, and continued to weep, her eyes wide, watching him. After a pause Knox’s father walked past Bruce to the nurse, and demanded to speak to the doctors. How can this happen, he screamed.

Knox pushed her own cry back down. There was a roaring in her ears. She realized that she was the only person who saw that Bruce might fall; even the nurse was distracted now. A hate was filling her: thick, like oil. Hatred of the fact that she saw Bruce might go down, and that she couldn’t stop herself from moving toward him now, and gripping his shoulders in her hands, and holding him upright.

The cloth of Bruce’s sleeves moved under her hands, and she could feel the warmth of his skin underneath. She could feel the hairs on his shoulders. He was heavy; she planted her feet until he seemed to still. She could smell antiseptic soap on him, and the odors of the room where Charlotte had been.

“Okay,” she said, her hatred of everything making breathing difficult. Bruce began slipping again under her hands; she needed help. But there was no one to help.

“I’m right here,” she said, her voice even.

Drowning.

• II •

K
NOX

H
ERE WERE
the three weeks.

Here was her family, now.

She had sat up in the den with Robbie, some nights. Close together on the couch, not touching, until the talk shows were over, and they got up to go swimming, or Knox left for Ned’s.

They sat watching programs she couldn’t quite understand the purpose of: shows that flew to small towns and picked local teenagers to be made over like their favorite pop stars, behind-the-scenes documentaries about the filming of movies that weren’t in theaters yet. Here, on this night, was a tanned crew standing on a coastal hilltop, arguing and pointing to some spot in the middle distance, beyond a few cypresses and a chewed-looking stone house, while an actress in a red dress and forties hairdo stood to one side, laughing. Now the actress was being interviewed close-up; she sat in a director’s chair with the ocean behind her. She had changed out of the dress, lost the hairdo—had fast-forwarded a lifetime, Knox thought. She wore yellow-tinted sunglasses; the wind kept whipping tendrils of hair into her lip gloss, where they
stuck until she felt them and pulled them gracefully away from her face.

“Who is she,” Knox said. “She’s pretty.”

Robbie cut her a look, then rearranged the blanket around his shoulders. “You know her,” he said. “We just saw her on
Letterman
, talking about this movie.”

“Oh.”

Robbie trained the remote at the screen. “Do you want to watch any more of this,” he said. His voice was low and unmeasured; television had sucked the inflection out of it. His hair stood up from his forehead in a cowlick that looked like the result of a sweat-tossed sleep. His skin was ashy in the room’s low light.

Knox hesitated. She did want to watch. There was something about the saturated blue of the water behind the woman’s chair, the way her eyes remained trained on the interviewer, as if she couldn’t wait for the next question to come out of his smarmy mouth. She wondered where the movie was being filmed. On some Greek island? In Italy? Turkey? All places she had never been.

“I guess I don’t care,” Knox said. “I should go to bed.”

“Me too.”

But Robbie squinted his eyes, as if the television were backing farther away and he were trying to draw a bead on it. He pushed a few buttons on the remote. The screen went gray, and a question appeared:
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO ORDER THIS PAY-PER-VIEW EVENT?
Robbie used the remote to scroll down to
YES
, adding three dollars and ninety-five cents, according to the prompter, to their parents’ cable bill.

“I’m ordering a movie,” he said.

Knox licked her lips, which were dry. “Okay,” she said, though he hadn’t asked her permission. Neither of them moved. An image of a boxer receiving a punch to his jaw stretched to the edges of the television screen and remained frozen for a moment before motion began. Then a crowd was all of a sudden booing; a mouth-guard flew out of Sylvester Stallone’s lips in a swanning trajectory
that the camera followed; white drops of sweat erupted from his hairline, the sides of his wet, contorted face; he was going down.

Knox pulled her own blanket up to her chin; the air-conditioning in the house was so cranked they needed help to keep warm. “A-dri-an,” she offered softly, going for the South Philly accent, her voice rasping in mock pain as Rocky hit the floor.

Robbie turned up the volume a little, ignoring her. It was one-thirty in the morning. Their parents were asleep upstairs. Two clear plastic containers lay open on the coffee table, still half full of the taco salad Knox had picked up that afternoon from a drive-through place in town.

“Well, I’m going,” she said.

The ref rushed to Rocky’s side to count: One. The crowd counted with him. Two! He pounded the floor. Adrian looked scared to death in her high-necked cotton dress.

“How many times have you seen this,” Knox said. “Ten?”

“I dunno,” Robbie said. “Like fourteen.”

Knox waited. She herself wouldn’t ask. If Robbie wanted to stay where he was and watch
Rocky
for the fifteenth time, then that was what she truly wanted him to do. For some reason, it was completely up to him to ask. If she said anything about it, expressed any desire before he did, she would feel exposed and foolish, she knew.

Robbie glanced at her, then back at Rocky, who was in the process of taking a futile swing, meeting only air with his glove. He clicked the television off. Knox reeled for a second in the dark, the screen’s light still firing on her retina.

“I’m going to swim,” Robbie said. “You want to? Come on if you want.”

Knox breathed out in a rush. She nodded. This was what she looked forward to, though she knew she should make Robbie go to sleep.

She stood, folded both of their blankets quickly, and draped them over the back of the couch. Robbie was waiting for her in the back hall, his shirt blue-white in the gloom. He let himself out
first. Knox reached the screen door at the moment before it snapped shut with a whine that might be loud enough to wake her parents—or at least to disturb them; she wasn’t sure they were sleeping nights—and slowed it with the palm of her hand. She followed Robbie into the dark.

They walked, and Robbie began to rub his face. When they reached the pool house, he stopped walking and begun rubbing at his face and hair with both hands.

“I feel like I need to get fucked up,” Robbie said, trying to laugh. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“I know,” Knox said. She held her breath, hoping Robbie wouldn’t start to cry. It was like this, with none of them knowing who would need comfort next, or which way a moment would go. She was thinking of liquor. They had drunk a little wine the night before, but something hard might be better, if that’s what Robbie wanted. Tequila wasn’t a bad idea, if she could find any. In fact, it was a pretty good idea.

“Sorry to cuss,” Robbie said. He swung his foot, brushing the top of the grass with it.

Knox smiled. She felt engulfed by affection—almost nauseous with it—for a moment.

“God. Say what you like. I’m not sixty. No, wait—on second thought, go to your room.”

Robbie glanced up. He smiled back at her, though the smile was faint, perfunctory. “Mr. McGaughey came by at lunchtime while you were out. He kept telling me about these old pictures he has of her, from some Fourth of July party I don’t even think I was born for. It’s like, he wouldn’t stop talking about them.”

“People are nuts,” Knox said lamely. She had meant to say
ineffectual. Lacking in wherewithal
. “They don’t know what to say.” Now she sounded like their mother. She blinked her eyes a few times. Their mother didn’t seem to get it; she didn’t seem upset enough that their father seemed so bad off at the moment. Her father fell into the category of things she wasn’t capable of thinking about for longer than a moment or two. He had stayed in bed
for most of the time since they’d been back, a prone shape in the half dark of her parents’ room.