Losing Charlotte (32 page)

“Do you want some breakfast,” she asked him, though of course
he was perfectly capable of getting breakfast for himself, if he wanted to.

“Couldn’t eat,” he said. He patted at his stomach, hidden somewhere under the folds of the robe. “Maybe I’ll lose some weight.” The skin around his eyes crinkled; he seemed to wince at his own poor joke.

“All I want to do is eat,” Knox offered.

“Lord knows there’s plenty of food. I have no idea what we’re going to do with it all.”

“Well. You can take it to the office.”

Knox’s statement hung in the air; she wondered suddenly when, even whether, her father would go back to working full days again, he who’d built everything here. She was still standing; she lowered herself back onto the floor. Her father looked about him, taking in the details of the room.

“I come in here to sleep sometimes, did you know that? When your mother is snoring.” He grinned. “I like this room. What’s going on there?” He pointed to the box.

“Just packing up some books for the center. I don’t read them anymore.”

Her father looked stricken for a moment, then recovered. “Don’t take too many. I like things in here the way they are.”

He smoothed his hand across the wooden surface of the desk, then picked up one of the picture frames, the one that held the photo of their whole family together. He studied it. Knox kept expecting him to put it down, but he seemed to peer closer at it as the seconds ticked by.

His eyes swung back up to her face, appraising.

“You’ve turned out,” he said, surprising her. If anything, it seemed inevitable that the comment he’d make would be about Charlotte, her presence in the picture versus her absence now.

He handed the frame to her, and she forced herself to look at the image it contained. She might have been eleven or twelve; pale and freckled, her strawberry hair cut unflatteringly and caught up by the wind, she stood next to her sister, the slim stalk of her arm protruding out of the cap sleeve of her Easter dress to touch Charlotte,
as if to guide her sister back into the group. Charlotte had drifted into the foreground and her mouth was open, partially smiling; she appeared to be giving direction to the photographer, or attempting to complete a story she’d begun before they’d all assumed their poses. Her sister wore a gauzy peasant skirt. Whereas Knox looked embattled by the weather, which was obviously a bit too chilly for the clothes they all wore—her cheeks and knees reddened, the skin on her bare legs mottled and vaguely blue—Charlotte looked like some gypsy on a heath. She looked … resplendent. The energy in her body and swirling hair seemed to strain away from Knox’s touch, away from all of them. There was no weather that wouldn’t suit her and no contest here, never had been. Her sister’s beauty and vitality jumped out of the picture, eclipsing all of them: the pink suggestion of Robbie in the bassinet, her mother, hip cocked, in high-waisted jeans, her father with a nearly comical abundance of hair.

“What do you mean,” Knox said, looking up.

“When you were born, there was something fragile about you. I can’t explain it. It wasn’t like the boys—you were skinny, but you weren’t premature, you were
healthy
. It was more like you had a tenuous hold on things. It felt like we could see through your skin, sometimes. You didn’t grow as fast or as early as your sister had, I guess, and she was all we’d known. You clung to us like a little weed. We worried about you.”

Knox nodded, unsure how to respond.

“And look at you now,” he went on. He smiled at her with such love that Knox had to will herself not to glance away.

In her mind, she implored: Tell me. What do you see? She had no idea how people saw her; it often surprised her that they saw her at all.

“I got tall,” she said instead, calm as she could. “You’re biased, anyway.”

“You turned out,” her father said. He rocked forward in the chair, effectively closing the subject. “You’ve always been hard on yourself.”

The thought entered her consciousness: She could confide in
him. He would understand, better than she did, certainly, why she’d gone over to see Bruce last night and stayed, whether or not that constituted a betrayal or one night out of many spent trying to caulk a wound.

“Honey, you all right?” her father asked her.

“I don’t know.”

He cocked his graying head, considering. Knox sat alert, ready to incriminate herself. She set the photograph down beside her on the rug, faceup.

“You think the boys are going to be all right?” he said.

Knox cleared her throat. But before she could muster any words, her mouth flooded with saliva; she wondered, suddenly, if she was going to be sick.

“Knoxie? You need a glass of water?” Her father raised himself halfway out of the chair.

She shook her head, first slowly, then faster before she stopped. She rubbed at her face with her hands, ordering herself to recover. She’d come this close to burdening, bewildering, her father with a needless … God. The smile on her face when she raised her head again was as dazzling as she could make it.

“You know what? I think I do need some breakfast,” Knox said. “I just got a little shaky.”

“Okay,” her father said, watching her.

She didn’t need his benediction—or if she did, it wasn’t fair to ask him for it. This was a moment in a lifetime of moments. She’d move through it. It occurred to her that this was how Charlotte might have felt within her days, ruthless within a self-generated propulsion that kept her from getting caught up in every small exchange. Was this the greatest difference between them? It felt revelatory that she might simply move through. Though it was possible that lack of sleep and the sense of incredulity that had been dogging her for days was responsible for the punchy relief that was filling her now, filling her very lungs with air.

“Dad,” she said, after a pause. “Are you going to go to work?”

“Not today,” he said.

“Soon?”

He scanned the ceiling, and sighed.

“I suppose. Setting yearling reserves doesn’t really seem to matter right now.”

“Sorry.”

He drew the lapels of his robe closer to each other with his fingers, and tucked his hands into his armpits.

“Cold in here.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go downstairs.”

They made their way to the kitchen. They sat across from each other at the table, the cereal in their bowls untouched, and outside the crows, who wintered together in the bare locust tree near the house, numerous as leaves, strutted in the yard. It would be another hour before her mother appeared, noon before Robbie, dressed for his flight back to Virginia, slipped into his chair and joined them.

K
NOX’S MOTHER
reached into a suede purse she’d drawn out of the coat closet, extracted a brush no bigger than her hand, and started dragging it through her hair. She dropped it back into the purse, fished out a lipstick, and applied it blind with an expert touch to her puckered mouth. Her face looked grim. Earlier, she’d said to Knox, “I think I should go check on the boys.” The way she’d looked at Knox as she spoke, then nodded after, as if something had been decided, seemed to Knox to signal an unspoken invitation or a plea for an escort. Had Knox become the caretaker, as opposed to the overgrown cared-for, so quickly? She nodded back, trying to convey her understanding. Like that, they were readying themselves, letting themselves out into the cold, headed for the garage, though the walk to the guesthouse would take no more than a quarter of an hour. Perhaps her mother needed to seize the moment, lest her resolve fail her; Knox could tell that the proximity of Ethan and Ben was somehow frightening to Mina; from her place in the passenger seat, she watched her mother jam the keys into the ignition.

“Dad seemed good this morning,” Knox said. “Better.”

“Really,” her mother said loudly, her body turned to peer out the back window as she waited for the garage door to grind toward its apex. “That surprises me.”

Knox swallowed. She was used to reflexive comfort from her mother, not cold truth. She resisted the urge to press her mother further, to wheedle some reassurance out of her. She stilled her foot, which was tapping in the well; she felt as if she’d drunk a pot of coffee when she’d had none at all this morning. There was the question of how she should act when she saw Bruce, separate from, but related to, the question of how she should feel. As her mother navigated the sloping drive, signaling at the bottom despite the fact that they occupied what might be the sole moving car for miles around on this quiet morning, she sensed a growing giddiness in herself that felt tied up in her childhood memories of being driven everywhere by her mother, in her desire to distance herself from whatever her mother had meant just now, from the weight of … everything. It might be crazy, but why couldn’t she imagine a trajectory in which the night before played toward its best and furthest conclusion? The momentum she’d sensed during her conversation with her father seemed to be taking hold of her. What if she just capitulated to it, completely? What would happen? What if she tried not to care? She failed to recognize herself in these questions, which was good. Even exhilarating.

They wound through a stand of bare walnut trees, straight as flagpoles on either side of the access road.

“Mom,” Knox said suddenly. “Do I smell smoke?”

“No,” her mother said, her face expressionless.

“I’m not going to ground you.”

“I quit years ago. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

“Okay,” Knox said. She kept her voice gentle. It wouldn’t do to let any more of this in than she could help. She saw that now. It wouldn’t help any of them.

“Just, if you have anything you need to get off your chest, anything at all, I am here to listen. I can’t promise I’ll like what you say, but I won’t leave you alone with it.”

It was, deliberately, the same speech Mina used to give Charlotte, so many years ago. The barest hint of a smile flickered across her mother’s face, then was gone.

When they pulled up to the guesthouse, Bruce stood out front with the double carriage, one of the boys bundled in his arms. He drew his unsmiling face close to the twin’s, and pointed at their car, then pumped the baby’s mittened hand into a wave. Mina took one of her hands off the wheel and waved back.

“Look,” Knox heard herself say, pointlessly. But she wanted to claim the tableau with a word somehow, to direct attention toward it as if it were hers. She and her mother climbed out of the car.

“I was going to take them for a walk,” Bruce called. He seemed isolated against the landscape; it was lonely here; they should have come earlier. “Of course it’s only taken us an hour to get ready.”

“Let me see,” Mina said. She strode toward the carriage where Ben lay, then straightened and stood on tiptoe, her flats falling groundward to expose her pink heels, to see Ethan. She reached to touch his face, and Knox thought of the way she’d always been taught to approach a horse that might bite: slowly as opposed to tentatively, palm flat and open. As Mina stroked Ethan’s cheek, her face seemed to relax a little, though the set determination Knox recognized in her features hadn’t completely dissolved.

“He doesn’t know me,” Mina said.

“Of course he does,” Bruce said, looking straight at her. “Don’t you, Eth?”

“Maybe you should take them, Mama,” Knox said.

“I don’t know where there is to go,” her mother said. “Down to the yearling barn? Isn’t it too cold?”

“They just like the motion,” Bruce said. He settled Ethan in beside Ben; Knox noted how much more efficient he’d gotten at the strapping since she’d first arrived in New York. He drew a blanket from the basket under the chassis and tucked it over both boys so that only their heads, swaddled in the hoods of their fleece buntings, were visible. “It would be a real help, Mina. They’re bored of the sight of me.”

“Is there a bottle for them? What if they start to cry?”

“There’s a warmed one right here,” Bruce said, gesturing to a little bag strapped over one of the carriage handles. “But if they really fuss, just head back, and Knox can deal with it.”

Knox laughed. Her mother looked lost. She glanced from Bruce’s face to Knox’s, and back again.

“Okay,” she said, wrapping her fingers around the push-bar. “Wish me luck, then.” She picked her way down the walk and headed right, back onto the access road they’d driven in on. The only sound they heard was the squeak one of the wheels made against the blacktop.

“Do you want some tea?” Bruce said, startling her. Now that they were alone together, she had no idea what to say or where to look.

“That sounds great.”

She followed him into the kitchen. It was odd; she couldn’t think of a moment they’d ever been alone together. Her family, the boys—there was always another presence, somewhere in the house.

“That was nice of you, to nudge Mom like that.”

“Not at all, it’s good for me. I can use the break.” Bruce opened a cabinet. A layer of checkered shelf paper winged its way to the floor and rasped against the linoleum; there was nothing else in the cabinet.

“You know,” Bruce said, sounding surprised. “I have no idea if there’s really tea.”

“Bourbon?” It was Knox’s attempt at a joke, an allusion to the awkwardness she sensed in them both, but when Bruce turned to her, she couldn’t be sure how he’d taken it. He looked pale. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn last night—as was she. He crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed at his upper arms; a shiver seemed to run through him.

“I could look,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t really want any.” Knox watched him. The energy in her limbs had no place to rest; she wished she could stretch her arms around him, or dance, or take charge of the tea making if in fact there was anything in the cupboard to fix, which she knew
there wouldn’t be. There was only her lasagna, and some milk and juice in the fridge, the fruit in the bowl, and formula. Nothing else. She made herself sit. Her palms were clammy; she rubbed them against her jeans. Her brain and body seemed to be apprehending things separately and by degrees: Bruce was panicked. This was the way it was going to be. It was her job, now, to make him feel otherwise. Because there would be no convincing him that what had occurred between them was the beginning of something new, something else.