Losing Charlotte (24 page)

Bruce glanced up at her. “This is partly wishful thinking,” he said. “It usually turns into a big blur at some point instead of a schedule. But I’m trying to get them on the same routine.”

“Wow,” Knox said.

Bruce’s smile was strained. “Is this overwhelming you? I could keep the monitor in my room at night.”

“No, no! I really want to help. I’m just—I’m still amazed you’ve been doing this alone.”

“It’s only been a week since I got them home,” Bruce said. His jaw worked. “A couple of nights, I’ve stayed here on the couch. Or had at least one of them in with me.”

“Do you—” Knox stared at the list. She felt that no matter how hard she looked at it, she wouldn’t be able to hold its information in her head. The babies ate and slept; that was all she understood. She would have to follow Bruce’s lead and rely on him to tell her hour by hour what she was supposed to be doing, it seemed. “Do you want to take turns at night?”

“I think we should do those feedings together, if you don’t mind. It’s just easier. Trust me; you’d want the extra pair of hands if you were doing those by yourself.”

“Well … when will you sleep? Don’t you want at least one night off, after a week of this?”

“I don’t want to sleep,” Bruce said.

T
HEY WOKE THE BOYS
for their evening bottles, and Knox held each twin in turn while Bruce gave them their baths in a baby tub he’d placed in the kitchen sink. Knox watched as Bruce lapped water against the sides of Ethan’s belly; the stump of his umbilical cord was still attached, protruding from his white abdomen like a spot of old dung. Bruce was careful not to get it wet. He rested Ethan’s head against his forearm, and Ethan blinked at the overhead light. He was the longer of the twins; seeing him so naked and helpless, droplets of water beading on his wrinkled forehead, Knox couldn’t help but think of him inside Charlotte’s womb.
He was just there
. Knox believed it, but she couldn’t feel it. Her mind
made little forays, little attempts to feel it: these were Charlotte’s sons. They were made of her. Any movement Ethan made in the bath now, Charlotte had felt from within her body, his shifts and hiccups, the jerk of his elbows. Knox thought of her mother’s faith, her ability to be impassioned by what she couldn’t see. It was like grabbing hold of something warm in the dark, and Knox both wanted and didn’t want to find the truth in these circumstances, in her brother-in-law’s barely scrutable presence. It was terrifying—but somewhat thrilling, too—to inch forward, feeling her way.

Ben burrowed against her, snuffling at her cotton shirt with his nose. Knox didn’t know if she was holding him the right way, if he was comfortable. She cupped the back of his warm head with her palm; Bruce had reminded her to do this before she’d picked him up. He’d also asked her to wash her hands. She wondered if Bruce—and who could blame him—was the kind of father who would turn out to be protective in the extreme, ready to do battle with every sharp corner and potential contagion that entered the boys’ sphere. Either way, it wouldn’t do to impose her own views on the boys’ care, since she had none. She’d washed her hands and held on to Ben as tight as she dared.

“What I do is have the towel ready, like this,” Bruce said. He’d tucked a corner of a hooded towel under his chin. He grasped Ethan under the armpits and lifted him into it, wrapping its sides around him quickly. “So he doesn’t catch cold.” Ethan peered out of the opening the top of the towel made, his eyes and nose visible. “Now I take him into his room, and I’ll show you what to do next.”

They walked single file, babies in tow, into the room at the far side of the stairs that Charlotte and Bruce had designated as the nursery. There was another crib set up against the left wall, and a changing table and bureau opposite. The room had the same haphazard quality that Knox recognized from the rest of the house; only one of its walls was painted; perhaps Charlotte had still been deciding on the right green, thought she had more time. Some do-it-yourself shelving leaned against the chair in the corner, hardware scattered on the rug below it. Knox felt the thrill of fear again, of reaching toward a flame, getting close enough to touch it,
but withdrawing just before contact. She found herself rubbing Ben’s back as Bruce talked.

Bruce let Ethan’s towel fall open in sections, rubbed lotion into his skin, then wrapped him up again. He smeared some A&D ointment on the pink slope of Ethan’s butt and diapered him, showing Knox the importance of tucking his minuscule penis under so his piss got absorbed into the diaper instead of leaking onto his pajamas. He snapped him into a footed outfit that looked too warm for the evening to Knox, though she said nothing. Ethan lay still, letting his father work on him, his eyes darting around. The snapping seemed to go on forever. Bruce put another cream on the chapped places on Ethan’s face and head. He threw the towel and the outfit Ethan had been wearing before the bath into a pile next to the changing table, which Knox resolved to scoop up and wash later. Did Charlotte and Bruce drop off their laundry at a service? Did they own a machine? She felt a sudden pierce of longing for home. She was terribly hungry, with no meal in sight, and no end to the evening that she could perceive—or chance for a pause during her time here that she could imagine. Any delineation between the basic concepts of night and day were artificial at best, according to the list Bruce had made.

Ethan began to cry, a repetitive, coughing cry that Bruce told her meant he was hungry, that she should go prepare a bottle for him and, if she had any questions, just yell from the kitchen. They traded babies. Knox would feed Ethan, and Bruce would empty the bath of its soapy load of water and refill it, and they would start again.

In the kitchen, Knox cradled Ethan with one hand while she ransacked a drawer for bottle parts. She found a bottle, a nipple, a plastic sleeve to twist onto the bottle’s mouth, and some apparatus that looked like a sieve. She had no idea how to fashion them into a whole. An empty grocery bag stood open and upright next to the garbage can. Ethan was crying in earnest now, stringing the coughs into a continuous wail, the heat of him rising against her body. She kicked the bag over to the counter and began to drop the various parts in, along with one of the cans of formula, so she
could carry it all into the babies’ room and have Bruce show her. She’d look like an idiot, but she didn’t want to get it wrong. She had to work quickly. As she aimed for the bag, she felt her hand shaking.

A
T LAST
, the boys were down. Bruce ordered a pizza for them.

“We should pray they don’t wake up before it gets here,” he said. “That keeps happening to me, and by the time I get to eat, I’m not hungry anymore. I’ve gotten to where I can’t tell if one of them is crying or I’m just hearing an echo in my head.”

He smiled at her. “Do you want some wine? You look a little rough.”

“Yes. Wine.”

“Coming up,” Bruce said. He disappeared into the kitchen.

“Red or white?” he called.

“I don’t care.”

“Charlotte never wanted a TV,” Bruce said, reentering the room with two wineglasses and an open bottle of Cabernet. “But I told her we would want one once the babies were born. I even got cable for us.”

Something about the casualness of this, of the way Charlotte was introduced into the conversation as if she’d just stepped outside for milk, quickened Knox’s blood.

“What have you been watching,” Knox said.

“Anything,” Bruce said. “Mostly
Forensics
reruns. My low point came last night, when I realized I had already exposed the boys twice to the same
Forensics: Philly
episode in the span of their short lives.”

“Robbie and I watched that,” Knox said.

Bruce flipped around, then settled on a show in which young men who looked too old for their clothing took turns hurting themselves and each other for laughs. One of them waded his way into the middle of a swamp in an animal refuge, picked up a baby alligator the size of a house cat, and offered it his bare chest, at
which point the alligator bit one of the man’s nipples and held on. The others bent double with mirth.

“Is this stupid enough,” Bruce said.

“Perfect,” Knox said

They sat together. Knox felt the wine and the abdication of talk wash over her. It was easy to imagine that she was sitting here with Robbie instead of Bruce if she let herself, and as she digested that thought, she felt something click into place. Her sense of what her relation to Bruce in the coming weeks was supposed to be had been vague: Was she here to keep up his spirits with forced cheer? Fade into the background like a servant? Ignore him altogether in favor of the boys, so that he could grieve in relative peace? But Bruce was her brother-in-law; perhaps it was time to begin thinking of him as a brother, insofar as she could. That would help to dilute the strangeness of being near him.

It was easy to have Robbie as a brother. Maybe she loved him as she did because he proved that she could get along with a sibling, that not everything had to be fraught where her role as a sister was concerned. She’d be a sister here, then, too—the kind she was with Robbie, and leapfrog somehow over the history required to make this natural.

K
NOX WAS CONSCIOUS
that night, as she dressed for bed, that she needed to be appropriately covered up when she appeared in the boys’ room for their 1:00 a.m. feeding. She dug in her duffel bag for the leggings she’d packed to run in, a long-sleeved T-shirt she’d brought in case the temperature dipped. It was stifling here in the room Bruce had assigned her, a second-floor space that Charlotte had used as an office during the times when she fancied herself consumed by some project. She’d been part of a neighborhood fund-raiser for a Democratic senatorial candidate, once; the man had lost spectacularly; he was a sculptor and poet who seemed committed to pursuing just causes in the little time he had to spare outside his studio. She’d tried her hand at a play; Knox knew that.
And there was the research she’d put into the fertility treatments she’d eventually come to need. Lists of doctors to contact, insurance forms, success rates, appointments to be made. Knox pulled on the leggings and shirt, as hot as it was. A bare nightgown would be inappropriate, a prim one embarrassing. She felt a flash of surprise that she cared either way what Bruce thought about such a trivial thing, but she was a guest here; attention to these kinds of courtesies would help things go smoothly.

She stretched out on the futon Bruce—or someone—had made up for her. She felt too tired to arrange the sheet over her, or get back up and pry open a window, let some air in. Tomorrow, she’d see about a fan, unpack properly. At least she and Bruce hadn’t seemed too uncomfortable around each other tonight. It had been okay, sitting up together with their pizza and wine. Bruce didn’t seem to dislike her close up, the way she realized she’d feared he might. Though surely the subject of her had come up between husband and wife. He might have had some preconceived notions about her, too. But being here was as good as being anywhere. She thought she might have been right to come.

K
NOX

K
NOX WOKE
, the sun on her face. She felt plastered to the bed; the effort to raise herself left her nearly breathless, and she sat up, panting. She was so hot; she began peeling off her shirt before she was fully cogent of where she was; in this makeshift guest room, in Charlotte’s house, Bruce downstairs, the twins to look after. What time was it? She added alarm clock to the mental list of things she needed, then crawled over to her duffel and fished out her mobile phone. Ten o’clock. Fuck! Bruce must have been the only man on duty for the last several hours; Knox had fallen back into bed after the last feeding she’d helped him with, at 5:00 a.m.

The phone buzzed right there in her hand, startling her so that she nearly dropped it.

“Hello?”

“Hi, honey.”

“Mom, I can’t talk long. I’ve overslept.”

“All right, I won’t keep you.”

Knox heard the hurt in her mother’s voice and cursed herself for sounding rushed. And yet, crouched on the bare floor, in her bra
and jogging pants, her day barely begun, she also felt a twinge of resentment for this intrusion, and a childish desire to make clear to her mother, who wasn’t here, who surely had no idea what her night had been like, the demands that had been placed upon her in the last twelve hours. Knox’s mother had never been the type to harass her children about milestones like marriage and children; if anything, Knox suspected, keeping the roles the way they’d always been, with Knox the child and Mina the mother, brought her a kind of pleasure. But Knox had seen the elation in her mother’s face when she’d gotten the news that Charlotte was finally pregnant, the drugs had worked, and it occurred to her that she wasn’t above punishing Mina for this in some way, if she wasn’t careful. See? This is how it would be, Mom. Your daughter harried, inaccessible, unmoored from any destiny she could control or call her own. Got your wish? As soon as she had the thought, Knox hated herself for it. She resolved to grow up. She’d been in New York less than a full day, and wanted martyr status?

“Sorry, Mom. I’m coherent now. I have a little time to talk.”

“If you’re sure. How are the boys?”

How were the boys? Knox had held them until her arms were sore last night. At Bruce’s direction, she’d rubbed Ben’s back for a full ten minutes until he burped, after he’d drunk a bottle around 2:00 a.m. Ethan had been restless at the 5:00 a.m. feeding and uncomfortable going back down; Knox had finally soothed him back to sleep by placing her pinkie in his wet mouth until his eyes closed. She thought of Bruce’s old lady from the subway. Another item to add to her running tally of needs: pacifiers.

“They’re good,” she said. Was there anything she could say that wasn’t laughably inadequate? “Healthy. Bruce has been doing a good job.”

“Do they look different already?”

“They do to me. Ethan is longer. He looks like the older one. And Ben is so—he seems like the less fussy of the two.”