Losing Charlotte (29 page)

“I don’t know what Charlotte ever said to you. But I shut her out. I was not a good sister to her for a long time.”

Bruce closed his eyes. Something about the oddly intimate sight of him this way provided Knox with a brief moment of comfort, even though this was only a facsimile of him in sleep. She’d been worried about him; she felt the full weight of this now.

“What’s a good sister? Is there a definition in the dictionary for that?”

“A friend. I was angry with her all the time.”

“Well, she wasn’t easy.”

“No.”

She wanted to ask: Not easy how, from your perspective? But she was aware that she was talking to Bruce about his wife and
needed to quell the bounce of excitement in her chest at the unexpected possibility—the most far-fetched possibility on earth, it had seemed—that Bruce understood her.

“I think she just wanted to know you were on her side,” Bruce continued, and Knox’s small hope turned despairing in an instant: here was confirmation of complaint, of bad opinion pooled between husband and wife that she would never be fully privy to.

“I know.” She pressed against her eyes with the palms of her hands. Peekaboo. I see you. “And I wasn’t. I should have been, but I wasn’t after a certain point. Honestly, it was easier once she’d left. She made our mom cry.”

“Well, that was a long time ago. She was a teenager.”

“She made my father feel bad. She forgot about me when she went away. She never even really knew Ned.” She took up all the oxygen, Knox thought, she left no room for anybody else’s problems, she was always the beautiful one—What was she doing? She sounded pathetic.

“I love your family, Knox. I’m not going to act like I understand everything about it. It’s yours. But I don’t want you speaking like this in front of Ben, okay?”

Bruce broke off. At the same moment, Ethan began to cry softly, without having fully committed himself, in the next room. He was waking up.

“I’ve been careful not to let them see me breaking down. I don’t think it’s good for them, and neither is this.” He wasn’t looking her in the eye.

“Of course, I’m sorry.”

She had scooted herself to the edge of the chair she sat in. As Bruce shifted to go to Ethan, Ben appeared to bobble in his arms, and Knox reached forward to steady him, though immediately Bruce corrected Ben’s angle as he rose. As she moved to sit down again, she noticed another change in Bruce’s face; the muscles around his brow contracted and his thin lips parted slightly in surprise.

“Is that … Charlotte’s?” he said.

Knox followed his eyes downward, where the hem of Charlotte’s yellow slip had come loose from her waistband and dropped into sight below her shirt. She felt her chest prickle with sweat.

“I know. I was wearing it. It’s so weird,” she blurted. “I forgot I had it on.”

Bruce said nothing. Knox wished she could make them both disappear, absenting them completely from the moment so that only Ben was left, lying peacefully on his blanket, opening and closing his tiny hands. She was a freak. She had no business. She guarded against the defensiveness she knew could ride right in on shame’s back, against saying to herself: But she’s mine, too, my sister. No—there was no excuse for this violation.

“Bruce, I’m sorry,” she said. “It was in the closet upstairs. I should have asked. I just threw it on.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” Bruce said. “It wasn’t mine.”

She nodded. Bruce watched her for a moment, then turned and carried Ben out of the room. Knox remained where she was, her hands clasped in her lap, numbly wondering how much time she should allow before following Bruce. Despite everything, he would need help with Ben while he changed Ethan and got him dressed. But she remained where she was, turned to stone.

T
HEY GAVE
each other a wide berth during the week left before they flew to Kentucky. Knox wouldn’t have called them wary of each other, exactly. Once again, it was easy for them to avoid one another if they chose, with the necessities of the boys’ care hanging between them. They were polite, and on the surface of their shared, work-filled hours, it appeared that little had changed. “Ugly, it’s me. When do you need me to pick you up?” She and Ned had hardly spoken at all since the first week she’d been in New York. At first, she’d attributed this to an abstract understanding he must have of the wormhole she’d fallen into; he’d been with her every moment in Kentucky, hadn’t he, before she’d come. Then she remembered the awkwardness between them before this all happened, the way he’d behaved the
day after the bluegrass festival, and wondered if he was giving her room or, justifiably, taking some room for himself, now that she didn’t need him to bathe, feed, and rock her to sleep. Of course, she wasn’t exactly available now. If he had the energy to chase her down, he’d find her; otherwise, he wouldn’t. Today, he’d found her: hustling by the hall table, Ethan sprawled against her chest in his carrier, his long, bare, skinny chicken legs bouncing against her stomach.

“Well, speak of the devil,” she said, the lightness in her tone belying the way she felt, even upon hearing his voice, which was lonely.

“Your father told me you were coming on Thursday, so I wanted to be of service.”

“How nice. But we’ll have car seats and a lot of gear, it looks like. I think Mama should fetch us in her car.”

“Oh. Okay. I hadn’t thought of that. How are the boys? I can’t wait to see them.”

“And me, right?”

“Naturally.”

False, easy cheer. Why did she feel so guilty about it? Knox rubbed her fingers up and down one of Ethan’s calves, tickling him. He stared up at her from his place under her chin, serious as a heart attack, his lips slick with drool.

The memorial was scheduled for Saturday. Ned read her the announcement in the paper.

The next pediatrician’s appointment came and went. Ethan contracted a fever after the shots this time, but it broke within a day. They spent the night before the trip back home packing the boys’ clothes, bottles, bottle brushes, blankets, pacifiers, diapers, wipes, formula, special laundry detergent, hooded towels, bath liquid, lotion, thermometer, gas and fever medicines in case, infant nail clippers to keep their faces from getting scratched during the course of their time away, burp cloths, the music player they relied on at night. The double stroller stood by the door, unfolded and ready. There was hardly enough time between the moment Knox zipped the suitcase Bruce had allotted for the twins’ things shut
and the midnight feeding to fit in a trip to the bathroom, much less a coherent conversation.

On the airplane, though she and Bruce sat side by side, they spent their time trying to joggle the boys into sleep and keep their hands and faces from touching the armrests. Knox must have knelt down twenty times to pick something up that had fallen onto the floor or into the aisle, bracing Ethan in her lap all the while. She didn’t see the land changing, thousands of feet beneath them, settling into the green, undulating country she knew best. She could feel herself descending at the end of the flight, feel that they were about to touch down, but until the plane bumped onto the tarmac she couldn’t have said exactly how close they were to the ground. She wished there was some way to know whether or not Bruce absolved her. She was carried forward and placed her hands over Ethan’s ears as the brakes screamed and they hurtled to the end of the runway, then slowed, rolled, turned, and reached the gate, where she and Bruce would gather their things and carry the babies into the airport; somewhere inside, her parents stood, she thought. Though perhaps just her mother had driven to get them. When she finally was able to glance at the field beyond Bruce’s window, she was startled by the layer of frost that lay over the grass as they moved past, graying it slightly. She could see the racecourse in the distance, on the far side of the highway; the rows of stately old trees there were beginning to turn. Overnight, it seemed, autumn had come.

• III •

B
RUCE

T
HIS IS HOW CRAZY
manifests itself, Bruce thought. Like this.

He was standing in his suit and tie in the beautifully appointed library of his mother- and father-in-law’s house, holding a glass of white wine, surrounded by people. An employee of his father-in-law’s, a short, muscular man in an unfashionable tie, stood at his elbow, the tops of his ears pink, clearly alarmed to find himself in such close proximity to the bereaved husband. He rattled the ice cubes in his own glass and gazed along with Bruce into the heart of the gathering, where Mina stood beside her husband’s chair, her small hand draped protectively over the back of it, smiling in thanks as someone gripped her shoulders and leaned closer to speak to her, the picture of a gracious hostess, except for the slight dapple of mascara that sooted her cheek, and the downward pull that seemed to weight her features, even as they forced themselves into expressions of gratitude, understanding, and welcome. In another society, it would be acceptable, Bruce thought, for her to burn herself in effigy, to swaddle herself in white and take to the streets, to keen. In this one, she was throwing a cocktail party. The
dining room table was cheek to jowl with sterling chafing dishes, manned by handsome-looking women in dark bouclé. This was the time for special friends and family to gather before climbing into their assigned cars. They would leave for the church in half an hour.

“Southern funerals,” the man said. If he’d introduced himself, it had taken Bruce only an instant to forget his name. “You really need a football stadium. And a doggie bag.”

Bruce nodded, tried to smile. “All the food,” he said.

“My wife brought the cheese straws,” the man said. “Try those, if you get a chance.”

Neither of the boys had slept much the night before in the guesthouse, which Mina had decorated every inch of for them, even ordered furniture for. The room she’d designated for the babies was much more luxurious and finished than their room at home. Everything matched, was swathed in cream and pale blue. Ethan and Ben looked dwarfed in their gargantuan cribs and clearly were going to need a few days to get used to them.

“How’re your boys doing,” the man asked, and Bruce momentarily wondered if he’d spoken aloud.

Bruce glanced at the man, whose flush had expanded to include the whole of his broad, frightened face. Bruce wished that the two of them inhabited an alternate universe, wherein he could acknowledge and thank this person for his obvious valor. I wouldn’t want to talk to me, either, he thought. Thank you, this is good of you, and I know it.

“We’re all hanging in there,” he said instead, his voice duller than he’d wanted it to sound. He cleared his throat.

“Yep,” the man agreed quickly, as if this was the response he’d expected to receive and he was pleased now to have it. “You know, it’s a funny thing. In mares, twins aren’t ever allowed to come to term. They just don’t thrive, aren’t robust to race. Could be dangerous for the mare to have them, too, I imagine.”

“Oh. Well. That’s not why Charlotte died. She hemorrhaged, but that could have happened with one baby, too. It didn’t really
have to do with twins.” Even as he spoke, Bruce questioned himself. This was true, wasn’t it? He’d been over and over what the doctors had said. Disseminated intravascular coagulation; he’d revisited the same pages multiple times on the Internet on various medical sites. He’d wondered if he was remiss, a fool, not to be filing a lawsuit, though he had found no fault so far in the records of Charlotte’s care he’d been provided with. But declaring this, out loud, forced Bruce into a new disorientation; how could he be sure of even the most basic facts? It was just so much jargon, in his mouth. Jargon had killed his wife.

“I see. You know, I shouldn’t have said that,” the man said, touching his arm. “I hope you don’t think I was being rude.”

“No. Don’t worry.”

“She was beautiful,” the man said into his highball. He rocked forward onto the balls of his polished wing-tip shoes. “Just a beautiful girl.”

On the far side of the room he saw Knox. She was leaning against a section of wall in an ill-fitting gray dress. She’d been careless with her hair, pulled it back into a ponytail; strands escaped from its sides, glinting redder than usual in the sunlight that poured in through the casement windows. She, too, held a wineglass and raised it now to her lips. Bruce had been on his own, essentially, with the boys since they’d arrived the day before yesterday, and he had to admit it was strange, to be suddenly without Knox’s presence in his orbit, during the feedings. She’d been staying away, he thought, and that might be good.

There had been that day, in New York, when he’d seen she was wearing a nightgown under her clothes, a nightgown he himself had bought for Charlotte and that she’d worn only once, before pregnancy forced it into the back of some drawer. She’d worn it to appease him; he had seen, as soon as she pulled it from its little box, that it was a color she never wore. He’d been annoyed with himself then, and frightened that Charlotte felt, uncharacteristically, that she couldn’t say what she obviously felt, which was that he’d missed his mark. Things between them were still fragile in
those days immediately following his confession. Their marriage had shed its skin and was still in the process of growing a new one over the tender flesh it was made of. They’d clung to each other, unprotected and careful.

When he’d recognized it on Knox, he’d been shocked. Not that she had it on, necessarily, but by the plainness of what he’d never seen before: that Knox and Charlotte were sisters, physically. In a kind of flash, he could see them superimposed upon each other, their parts corresponding as he’d never thought they could. Not three feet away from him, there was Charlotte’s look, there was the same sloping nose, there was her
family
. He could see it. He wondered then if the wives’ tale that applied to couples about growing to look more and more alike the longer they were together could apply to siblings, too. Though Knox and Charlotte looked at first glance to be made up of different strands of their parents’ DNA, surely the experiences they’d shared here in this house, on this breeding farm, had shaped within them a certain set of identical traits that could show themselves to the keenest observers. Ethan and Ben looked nothing alike, and yet it was impossible for Bruce to imagine that anyone could fail to see them for what they were: brothers. That Knox and Charlotte were sisters was instantly, uncannily clear.