Losing Charlotte (22 page)

“I never get asked to do anything,” Robbie said, but he wasn’t serious and excused himself to make a phone call.

“Go ahead,” Knox’s mother said, dipping a finger into the melted ice cream on her father’s plate and tonguing it off with a quick motion, a sheepish look at her father. The broken plate seemed forgotten, at least temporarily. “Have a wonderful time, girls.”

Now Knox kept her eyes on the road. It advanced toward her car in sections like fed line, reeling her in. So much wine had been a bad idea; she’d stick to Diet Cokes at the bar and feel better on
the drive home. The interior of the car was cold; the vent blast hadn’t turned to heat yet. Fields stretched to the left and right of the road in the dark. Yesterday’s snow still salted the road in places, snaked in long, perfect tubes down the top rungs of fences that showed themselves in her headlights. A mare standing flush with her paddock gate stuck her neck out over it as they passed, gave them the eye. Knox left her behind, swallowed in the night like she’d never existed, and thought with a kind of awe: She’ll stand there all night, just in that spot. That’s what mares did when left out in this kind of weather. She wanted to say something about this to Charlotte; though she had to drive carefully now, this road jazzed her even more in the dark, when all that was visible of the properties she knew was contained in the small, jumpy circumference of her high beams. Though she knew it was only farmland whizzing by her windows, she sometimes supposed on this road at night that she understood the deepest wonder of sailors, or African homesteaders, both connected to and unable to plumb the depths that lay, teeming, out of their sight. But Charlotte was burrowed down in the passenger seat, the hood of her jacket pulled over her head so that part of her face was obscured. Knox thought she might be asleep and, afraid to take her eyes off the road to reach for the radio, drove on in silence.

They reached Lexington. As Knox slowed to make a left at the viaduct, Charlotte stirred, sat up a little, and cut her eyes at Knox.

“Where to?” she said in a scratchy voice. She yawned.

“Well, there are so many bars to choose from,” Knox said. “Gee, let me think …”

“There are more than just the Rosebud,” Charlotte said. “Please, Knoxie.”

“Ned’ll be there later,” Knox said. “Besides, you won’t see anybody you know if we go someplace else. Come on.”

She pulled onto Broadway, then made a left and drove the few blocks to the oldest part of town where the former courthouse stood, where the sidewalks were wide, bricked, and crumbling. The Rosebud, its tiny glass front crowded with neon signs, was one of the few functioning businesses on its block. Cars lined
either side of the narrow street it stood on; Knox finally drove around the corner to park. As she walked with Charlotte through the door of the bar she felt a guilty awareness of why she’d wanted to come here; it was one thing not to know how to look at Charlotte at home without feeling stymied by every strange and competitive feeling she thought had evaporated when her sister had left home for good—but quite another to be trailing close behind her as they wove through a crush of people toward the back of the room, under the bolted televisions tuned to the local news, where there was a bit more space to be had and at least the possibility of conversation. Here, among the grooms she knew and the people she recognized as having gone to her grade school, or from the halls of UK, Knox felt not confused or wary but conferred upon by Charlotte’s presence. Billy, the assistant manager at Poplar Hill and a friend of Ned’s, flicked his eyes upward as Charlotte brushed past his table, following her as she moved; then, seeing Knox, smiled in recognition and half stood from his chair to reach for her hand and clasp it hello. “Buy you a beer later?” he shouted, and Knox jerked her head sideways toward the area they’d be sitting in, nodded, kept moving. She waved to the skinny, underage son of one of her parents’ friends who was standing near the brass tap, thought if she found herself next to him in the course of the night she’d tease him about being here in light of the early wake-up he had waiting for him in the morning; he was mucking out at the Horse Park this year in penance for some high school misdeed. She kept close to Charlotte, who must have first begun coming here at sixteen, whose picture was buried among the curling snapshots tacked to the wall by the entrance, who, according to Chuck the owner, warranted careful watching during the period she frequented the place so she didn’t “do anything stupid,” which Knox took to mean downing a shot or three too many, or perhaps going home with somebody who was sure to brag about it at the bar the very next night. She didn’t know, really. She did know that she had tried to use an old license of Charlotte’s the first time she herself had attempted to get in here, years ago, and that Chuck
had laughed his ass off and turned her away from the door. We already know that face, sweetheart. Come again when you’ve got your own picture to show and we’ll talk. Knox had never really liked coming to the Rosebud; she’d let Ned drag her along occasionally, but preferred her own porch or the next day’s lesson plans to this noisy, predictable scene. Yet here she was, preening her way toward the back as if she came here every night of her life. She felt the eyes upon them both as she and her sister—the one whose name people knew, the one who didn’t come home all that often—chose an isolated table near the ladies’ room door and sat down.

“Well,” Knox said breathlessly. “Are we having fun yet?”

It seemed as if Charlotte were still waking up. She blinked, then smiled. She looked Knox straight in the eye, holding her gaze until Knox finally glanced away, at which point Charlotte sloughed off her coat and draped it over the back of her chair.

“Do you want anything?”

“I’m okay,” Charlotte said. “Maybe in a minute.”

“Me too,” Knox said. She would make sure they had a good time tonight, she thought. The jukebox kicked on; a country tune trilled out of a speaker behind Knox’s head. I go walkin’, after midnight, out in the moonlight … A knot of college girls near the bar raised their plastic cups and joined in.

“This place,” Charlotte said. “Nothing ever changes.” She laughed, rolling her eyes a little.

“Sorry,” Knox said, and in that moment she did feel sorry. “In New York you must go to a new place every night.”

“No, it’s all right.” She put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “I don’t mind. Sometimes it’s nice when things stay the same. Anyway”—she focused on Knox’s face again—“I’m just glad to be out of the house. How is everything, Knoxie?” The emphasis in this last sentence fell on the word “everything,” and Knox felt herself flushing at the question, as if she were expected to give an accounting of some complicated life whose reach extended far beyond the boundaries of her own. She pictured the cabin that,
just at this moment, stood full of held silence, the eggshell-colored comforter folded down at the end of the bed, the squeeze bottle of dish liquid that was just less than one-third full (she’d buy a spare on her next grocery run) balanced on the edge of the kitchen sink. The car in the parking lot around the corner, its backseat piled with papers, manila files, going cold again in the winter dark; the keys in her jeans pocket; the two rolls of toilet paper in the basket on the floor of her bathroom. What was there to say about any of it?

“Good,” Knox said. “Everything is good.”

Charlotte didn’t rush to fill the pause. She squinted. “Ned’s meeting us later?” she said finally.

“He might. He’s having supper with his mother.”

“How’s he?”

“Ned, he’s fine,” Knox said, glad to have been prompted on a subject other than herself. “Working hard. He’s got a new truck. He’s so proud of it. It’s one of those big, awful ones with a backseat in it that you practically need a ladder to get into.”

Charlotte was looking at her with her head cocked. Knox brushed at her mouth, thinking she might have some fleck of dessert clinging to the corners. “He paid too much for it,” Knox went on.

Charlotte began to laugh. “I don’t care about his truck,” she said, and Knox flushed.

“He’s—we’re still the same,” Knox said.

Charlotte nodded, beat a little tattoo on the table’s surface with her fingers.

“You know, no one would blame you if you experimented a little, if you feel unsure,” she said. “It isn’t like you’re married.”

“But I
am
sure,” Knox said. She’d sounded defensive; she checked herself, breathed, glanced around the bar. When she met Charlotte’s eyes again, Charlotte was smiling.

“Of course. You always are,” Charlotte said. Knox thought her tone sounded vaguely insulting. She chose to ignore this.

Now Charlotte looked around her. “How’s work? How are the kids?” she said.

“They’re a handful,” Knox said. She launched into a story about the difficulty she and Marlene had encountered at the holiday program, the ultimate futility of trying to marshal the ADD-affected students onto bleachers for an hour of singing, when all they’d wanted to do was run. After a minute, it was clear that Charlotte wasn’t listening, and Knox changed the subject.

“What about Bruce,” she said. Yuppie Bruce, she and Ned called him; her encounters with him had always been awkward. “Will you be happy when he gets here?” Right away she regretted the way the question sounded, the
he
overly stressed, as if Knox had meant to ask whether Bruce had succeeded where the rest of them had failed. But Charlotte’s face looked impassive.

“Well, I’m looking forward to picking him up tomorrow,” she said evenly. “Having him around seems to make things easier.”

Knox closed her eyes for a moment; she felt a sharp, literal wince of pain in her head. “Why,” she said, hating what she heard, the word an overanxious bleat. She had meant to say something blithe, like: You know what would make us
both
happy? Two bourbons, allow me. Instead she sounded nine years old.

Charlotte shrugged. “Because he knows how to talk to Mom and Dad, for one thing. And I don’t seem to be able to.”

Knox inhaled through a small opening in her lips. A dull, familiar anger was overtaking her, and she needed to make it go away. How often did she get to sit like this, talking to her sister, the two of them friends in a bar, and Charlotte was being attentive, doing her best, she’d done nothing wrong by telling the truth. But it was too late.

“You could try,” she said. “You never really try.”

Charlotte watched her. It was difficult to tell whether or not she looked surprised. She began to say something, then stopped.

“I don’t understand you,” Knox went on. She was annoyed at herself; she could feel her eyes, her nose, filling as if the very inside of her head, too, were bent on involuntary exposure. “Why don’t you like being here? You seem so … absent.”

She looked down at the table, not wanting to see whatever Charlotte’s face might be doing.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said quietly.

“What is wrong with you, Charlotte?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Then why is it so hard for you to be happy?”

“I am happy.”

“Happy with us?”

There was a silence. Charlotte pushed her hair back and shifted in her chair.

“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “We really don’t have to get into this.”

“What is
this?
Tell me.” Knox was in motion now; she needed a runway, a half-mile of track in order to slow herself down, not that she was trying.

Charlotte looked at her levelly.

“Not everything is about you. I know you’d like me to be different, but I can’t force everything to be perfect just for your sake, Knox. You want your little picture-postcard family scene, but maybe you should just grow up, and stop expecting that from everyone.”

“What? I didn’t ask you to come. I don’t expect anything from you, God knows.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Mom and Dad
love
you. Is it so difficult to be grateful, just for that?”

Charlotte glanced around her, perhaps in search of a bartender, or a closer exit.

“You don’t have to speak for Mom and Dad, and you don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “Worry about yourself.”

“I’m fine. I am the one who’s fine.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Knox’s voice was rising; she made a conscious effort to lower it, to hew closer to an equanimity that had flown from her grasp. Maybe Charlotte was right. How much wine had she actually drunk with dinner? “Don’t. You clearly see yourself as some sort of tragic figure. But what did any of us ever
do to you? Maybe if you could stoop low enough to actually explain it to me, I’d have a better understanding of it. But as it is, you just seem cold to me. Cold and ungrateful.”

“Christ! Where is this coming from?”

Images tumbled violently against one another in Knox’s mind like rocks in a stream: of their father’s face when Charlotte began excusing herself too early from the dinner table years before, of the rococo margins of the unanswered letters she’d sent to Charlotte at boarding school, thick with spiky ball-point doodles of flowers and vines, of the white undersides of her mother’s oval nails that were visible when she overturned her hands in her lap and seemed to forget them, while she wept, her father’s arm around her tiny shoulders, her father smiling apologetically at Knox, saying, Come on honey, it’s not that bad, the skin at his temples gray. Charlotte couldn’t get out of bed. Charlotte needed a higher dosage. Charlotte regretted that none of them understood her. Charlotte couldn’t come home, hadn’t had time to send the gift yet, was sorry, so sorry, but she couldn’t spare the time required to disengage from the consuming fire of her own lot, though she loved them, she loved them all, love ya, Knoxie! Love you!

They drove home in silence that night. Charlotte had given her a glance before climbing back into the passenger seat, but Knox assumed her outburst that night had had a sobering enough effect on both of them to render moot any lingering questions about her ability to stay on the road. The pike they lived on swallowed drunk drivers whole. Knox remembered a boy, a neighbor’s child, who’d run off the road at sixteen and killed himself and a friend at the base of their drive. That was years ago. She remembered suicidal games of chicken in high school, friends occupying adjacent lanes, cresting hills that way, the midnight roulette of the bored and high. She was careful, her foot light and jumpy on the accelerator as the miles broke open before them.