Losing Charlotte (27 page)

“I’m sorry.”

“So, I wouldn’t judge. You might get a glimpse of something,
but you may as well be reading one line of a play. You won’t really understand.”

Bruce was right. Knox had never understood Charlotte’s marriage, or really—aside from her parents’ union—marriage in general. Had she tried? Ned wanted to figure out what their future together was meant to be, but she preferred her pocket-sized life. The kind of existence in which you could experience the gamut of human feeling in the course of a day sounded like hell on earth. Why had Bruce let himself in for that?

“Why,” she heard herself asking, “did you love her so much?”

Bruce watched the couples at the swings.

“I couldn’t make a list for you. I just loved her,” he said. “That’s it.”

Knox sat still. She pretended to check on the babies, who she’d thought were asleep but were still blinking in the navy-blue light that filtered onto their naked heads. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she whispered to them. Ben twisted a balled fist against one of his eyelids. Ethan’s pacifier had dropped from his mouth.

“What about you and Ned,” Bruce asked. “You’ve been together a long time, right?”

“You sound like Charlotte,” Knox said.

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“No—it’s just that he’s just such a … fact. It would be like describing my relationship to gravity.”

Bruce nodded.

Why did she feel guilty, saying this? She’d simply been caught off guard by the question. She missed Ned, actually. Surely it was because she was unused to being away from him that she felt incapable of a fuller response than this one. How did you take the measure of what a person meant to you? What you meant to them? It was impossible, she thought. Better not to try.

“I don’t believe in God,” Bruce said.

“You don’t?”

“I mean, I have no idea where Charlotte would be, aside from the crematorium. Nothing else seems plausible to me.”

“Well,” Knox said. She braced herself against the wave of trite language that threatened to engulf her, let it break and flatten over her until she could say something true. She waited for one beat, two.

“You believe in that,” Bruce said. “Can you tell me what you think?”

“I’ve always thought what my mother thought,” Knox said, surprising herself. “Thinking about God was all tied up in my love for her early on, because every time she talked about him, it was to comfort me. God is like a bedtime story, for me. I think of God, and I hear my mother’s voice.”

“There are worse things than that.”

“I suppose.”

“I hear my mother’s voice when I see a picket line,” Bruce said. “Never cross a picket line, never cross a picket line,” he whined. “What opportunity did she think a kid was going to have to cross a picket line?”

Knox laughed.

“Just not getting to say goodbye,” Bruce said. “Not getting to say anything.”

“I know.”

“How can that be?”

He started to cry, more motion than sound, his body shaking slightly.

After a time, Knox handed him a baby wipe she’d dug out from the diaper bag; Bruce accepted it wordlessly and blew his nose into it. He was still watching the swing area, where a father who looked all of nineteen was struggling to extract his son from one of the rubber bucket seats. The boy’s shoe had caught in one of the leg holes, trapping him, as his father tried to lift him out by the armpits. “You’re hurting meee!” the boy called.

“That’ll be Ethan and Ben soon,” Knox said, though she had trouble conjuring the image, or believing that they’d ever have real words at their disposal, or grow big enough for shoes.

“Maybe we should try it,” Bruce said. He’d recovered his voice. Still, Knox didn’t know if he was serious.

“I don’t think—they can’t even hold their necks up,” she said. Ugh, she sounded like a killjoy, even to her own ears. But it was clearly a bad idea. Surely Bruce hadn’t meant it.

“The seats are so deep they’ll be supported, see? Maybe they would like it.”

“Aren’t those things crawling with kid germs?”

“We’ll wipe their hands down. We can just hold on to them and let them feel the motion of it—not even let go. Come on, let’s do it. For one second.”

He was fumbling with the clasp of Ethan’s seat harness. Knox looked at Ben; he appeared ready to close his eyes at any moment. But the realization that Bruce was in motion, spontaneous motion, whatever her thoughts on the matter were, was enough to generate a lift within her that was physical. Whether from relief, or curiosity, or something less readily defined, she felt her heartbeat accelerate, and began to unstrap Ben in turn. So, they would do something that wasn’t on the schedule. Bruce had his own reasons; she didn’t need to know what they were.

Bruce had stashed two sun hats in the mesh bag that hung from the stroller’s handle, and handed one to Knox. She tugged it onto Ben’s head; under its wide brim he looked to her like a ninety-year-old man, dozing in his back garden. She smiled at him. He was light in her arms as she walked behind Bruce, the soles of his shoes slapping audibly against the rubber matting. They found two bucket seats, side by side, and lowered the boys in—slowly, carefully, as if into water.

When their bare feet stuck out, and they sat slumped against the fronts of the seats, their arms limp, their faces just visible above the chin straps of their comical hats, Knox and Bruce began to push the boys forward and back, only a touch, never letting go, watching each other with smiles playing on their lips. Knox took her cues from Bruce, and never lifted the seat higher than he did. The boys were silent. Their eyes darted; they looked shocked by this new experience. Knox breathed a deep draft of the fetid, smelly air and held it, taut with anticipation of any expression either of the boys might relax into, any clue as to what they were
thinking. This anticipation was as close to happiness as she’d come, she thought, in the last three weeks. She was glad that she noticed.

Ethan’s eyes widened; then his face twisted into a mask of anguish, and he began to wail. Knox could see the white rims of his gums, the ridges at the roof of his mouth. He was terrified; his arms stiffened until he seemed to be holding them apart from his body, opening them to the park like a tiny infante from a seventeenth-century painting. Ben took up the cry, and until she and Bruce were able to react and raise the boys into their arms to quiet them, Knox was aware of the image they presented, of a man and woman pushing two frantic newborns back and forth in the park. The image was so desperate, so obviously a misguided, willed attempt at Family Fun, that Knox found herself giggling once she’d pressed Ben against her, and stood rocking him in the sun, separated from the traffic at the northern edge of the square by only a scrim of dead trees and a fence. This was a public humiliation; surely the boys’ screams had registered by now with the hippies on the wall, the crowd by the fountain, the homeless man trying to catch a nap on the floor of the dim men’s room. As Ethan’s sudden panic had been contagious, so was Knox’s laughter, and soon Bruce joined her, his laugh higher in pitch than she would have expected it to be, a silly cartoon twitter that only added another layer of ridiculousness to their circumstances.

“We have no idea what the hell we’re doing, do we?” Bruce said, rubbing Ethan’s back.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Knox said.

K
NOX

K
NOX HAD BEEN
gathering up laundry, balling it into her duffel bag, where a pile of the babies’ soiled, weightless clothes already waited. She paused, rocking on her haunches on the floor of her attic room, her hair hanging irritatingly in her face, reminded of all those madwomen in books, the hidden, dangerous ones, stashed in sloping cubbies like these. Rochester’s wife. Cinderella. She was clammy with sweat, pitying herself. The only time she wasn’t in motion in this house was when she slept, and God knew sleep had been impossible to come by. The attic smelled like sour milk and cardboard.

She squatted in place. What would she say now to Charlotte, if she could?

They were who they were. Ned had told her she didn’t owe Charlotte anything, though surely the truer thing was that they owed each other everything. Would she assure Charlotte she was here, that the boys were okay, that Bruce—though she wasn’t at all sure of this—was okay?

Bruce. He wouldn’t leave the house. Though his pretext for the
time he spent on the living room computer was work, Knox had glanced in passing at the screen the other day and seen him scrolling through some text on the hospital’s Web site. What was the working definition
of survival
, for Bruce? Was this it? She was used to Ned, to her father: men who expressed pain only under duress, as a kind of shameful last resort. But that day at the playground, he’d struck her as a vessel rigged to spring open at the slightest touch. This both unnerved and intrigued her, though they hadn’t had another conversation like the one they’d had that day. Still, the possibility of disclosure seemed to hang like a scrim in the rooms they passed through, floating overhead but low enough to brush against, should they wish to raise their hands toward it.

Would Charlotte even be comforted by her presence here? The thought of her sister tending to those she loved after her own death made her jealous, actually, though she wasn’t proud of it. “Mom and Daddy are fine,” she heard Charlotte saying. “Ned is getting along.” Her voice sounded smug as it ricocheted through the halls of Knox’s imagination.

She should have tried harder. She should have answered all of Charlotte’s calls, instead of picking and choosing the moments that best suited her. She should have gotten more involved during the pregnancy, when it was suddenly clear that Charlotte wanted her to. But whenever this kind of guilt threatened to push her under, she’d proven capable of grasping on to a justification to hold her afloat. When Charlotte had first left home, she hadn’t answered any of the letters Knox had sent her at Walton, though Knox had primed herself to wait the four days it would take for a letter to arrive, then checked the mail daily for a response. Wasn’t that true?

She felt infinitesimally small, even as she thought it. Well, she was trying harder now.

Last night, Ben flashed a smile at her while she struggled to pull a sock onto his twisting foot, and Knox had stopped what she was doing to peck at his cool cheek with kiss after kiss. It was too early
for smiles, but she’d seen one. When she looked up, Bruce was watching her, and it occurred to her to feel guilty. This wasn’t hers. But as soon as the thought came, it was gone. Thank God she was here, thank God the boys had someone else to love them, right now. Bruce seemed to thank her, too, with his look—she hadn’t imagined it, she thought—and the moment passed.

She and Bruce had developed a routine of their own, which shaped itself around the babies’ emergent schedule. They’d put the boys to bed a half hour earlier on successive nights this week, letting them cry for short bursts until they’d established a fairly consistent bedtime of eight-thirty. When the door to the boys’ room was closed and the baby monitor switched on, Bruce dialed a neighborhood place for hummus, warm pita, lamb sausages. Knox would open a bottle of red wine; she’d taken to stopping at a nearby liquor store on her short, daily walks with the boys (she’d appointed herself for this job after the last pediatrician’s visit; Bruce hadn’t volunteered to come along, and they didn’t discuss it). They would unfold a frayed tablecloth and drape it over the ottoman, sink onto the couch with their glasses and food containers to watch another installment of Bruce’s crime show, which seemed to run simultaneously on nine different channels as far as Knox could tell. She found herself missing Robbie as she ate—too quickly, without truly tasting—and watched more bullets entering skulls in slow motion, more bodies being dissected by teams of nubile forensic pathologists in tight slacks. She would refill her glass and vow to call her brother, her parents, Ned, as soon as the show was over—at which time she could only summon enough energy to climb up to her futon and arrange her body upon it, often without having brushed her teeth.

In the mornings, Bruce fetched the boys first; they were diapered and bouncing in their little seats on the kitchen floor when Knox appeared, dressed for breakfast. She finished making the bottles before sitting down to coffee with Bruce, who leafed through the
Times
without speaking to her while she fed one of the boys, then handed her the paper to read while he fed the other.
They moved through their days in this kind of silent, increasingly efficient compromise, taking turns, trading off. For some reason, Knox found herself holding Ethan more often, and Bruce holding Ben, but otherwise it was like they’d been twinned, too, completing each other’s actions, sharing the whole of their days. Two weeks from the last one, there would be another pediatrician’s appointment, after which, if the boys were healthy, they could fly. Knox organized the changing table’s drawers. Bruce bought some faster-flow bottles, and the feeding times shortened.

The laundry needed doing now, though, or neither of the boys would have clean pajamas for their next nap. Knox pushed her legs up to a standing position and hoisted the duffel onto her shoulder. She remembered the towels she’d thrown into a corner of the room’s closet at different points in her hurried mornings over the past week and nudged the door, already slightly ajar, farther open with the toe of her boot.

The box she’d tossed them behind was too large to nudge aside without setting down the duffel; she dropped it to the floor and decided to drag the box out of the way altogether. She winced at the scrape the cardboard made against the wooden boards and stayed in a crouch as she impulsively opened it, lest she need to spring quickly to her feet and explain herself. She was trying to get at her towels. Was that all right? Did anyone mind?

On the top: Unopened bank statements, dog-eared magazines, birthday cards. A cocktail napkin with a phone number on it, a brochure from a small French hotel, a blank W-2 tax form. There were several Walton alumni magazines with covers that featured savage-looking girls wielding hockey sticks, or pale figures in theatrical costumes and stage makeup ill suited to their youth, captured during some soulful soliloquy. Knox rifled downward, discovering nothing of note but the all-too-familiar version of herself, still poking at objects as if
they
were alive, instead of the family members she’d investigated through the little spy missions she’d gone on as a kid. Why had she thought she could better find her family on her own, by sifting through the things that belonged
to them, instead of trusting what she saw and heard in their presence? It was the secrets she trusted more, she thought. Here she was, looking for them again. What secrets? To what end?