Losing Charlotte (3 page)

“I totaled my four-wheeler so bad this weekend.”

“You did?” Knox would say.
“Guh, guh, guh.”

“Your hair looks good today, Miz Bolling.”

“Thank you, Brooke. After me—
huh, huh, huh.”

She worked through lunch, serving the potato salad family style at her assigned cafeteria table. She worked until her break time with Marlene, and then headed back into the bald fluorescence of her classroom, where she worked with the middle school and olders for the rest of the afternoon. She moved from desk to desk as the students labored through movie reviews, descriptions of their houses, whatever pieces of paragraph Knox could convince them to devote their attention to long enough to keep composing sentences, forming words. Words looked warped to them; letters misbehaved on the page. Even spoken sentences could reconstitute themselves in midair and be rendered nonsensical for the ones with auditory problems, so Knox often found herself beginning again with an explanation or command. She guided each of them toward the letter table when they needed to take a break from their compositions to reestablish the curvature and sound of one
of the ABC’s, make their pencils push through a letter as if for the first time.

At four o’clock or so, Knox would close the door of her classroom behind her and head home. She took the rural route home instead of the highway. This tacked an extra twenty minutes onto her drive, but she preferred to avoid the subdivisions and access roads that were lapping up against the town boundary like so much dirty water. The route she took soothed her. She drove through the corridors near the city center that delineated the older, more established neighborhoods, then past the college campus, the modest rows of houses where groups of students—she among them, once—clustered, marking their presence with mismatched porch furniture, too many cars in the stunted drives. She passed Rupp Arena, the looming Baptist church, the courthouse, and the handful of high-rises and shopping courts that made up the haphazard and dying downtown, then sped over the viaduct and into the open country that she recognized as much by feel as by sight. Knox could remember lying on the backseat of their mother’s car, Charlotte beside her, and guessing where they were by the sensation of the road as it curved and dipped, and the blur of treetops she could just make out through the top of the open car window. “We’re at Middlebrook Farm now,” Knox would say, and Charlotte would sit up and look, say, “You’re right!” her dark hair lifting in the breeze. Then she’d lie back down, cover Knox’s face with her hands, count to twenty. “Now where are we, Knoxie?” How sweet it was to answer “Train tracks, coming up,” without thinking, then bump over them while her sister laughed, bracing herself against the jolts the worn shocks of her mother’s car couldn’t quite absorb.

The road ran east to west. Knox often had to flip the sun visor down on her drive home, but in the warm weather she liked driving into the sinking light, getting dazed by it. The ripe yellow-green of the fields in late afternoon could make her almost dizzy with pleasure. She sped toward the stud division of her parents’ farm, where Ned supervised the days and breeding schedules of the fourteen stallions, and on those days when she felt like it, or
when she and Ned had plans for supper, she turned into that drive and walked down the pathway that ran from the farm office to the stallion barn. She might find Ned in the breeding shed, shouldering with all his weight into the side of a mounted stallion, trying to keep him on balance and unhurt until he’d had a successful cover. The grooms would be helping him, four or five men circling and supporting two tons of quivering, copulating horseflesh, calling “Whup,” “Steady,” “All right,” for the few minutes it took. Or she might find Ned in the little room off the shed, equipped as it was with microscopes for checking sperm motility and with video machines for going over the breeding tapes made for shareholders and the owners of the mares that had been vanned in from other farms. In the anteroom, with its plastic windows that looked onto the padded ring where Danny Boy or Banjo Man had met his mare, Ned would stare at one of the two television monitors, a petri dish full of the day’s sample having been slid into place on the microscope tray. Above him, on a screen, pale villi undulated against a gray ground, making Knox think each time, That is what white noise would look like, if white noise were visible.

When he wasn’t supervising a breeding, Ned might be giving a tour, leading a curious couple who’d stopped in on a cross-country driving trip from stall to stall in the stallion barn, recounting the racing careers of each of his charges, his hands deep in the pockets of the loose khakis he always wore. When he took his right hand out to adjust the bill of his cap or tug on a bridle to get one of the stallions to raise his head from the feed bucket for a snapshot, one of the tourists might ask before they thought: What happened? What happened to your hand? Knox had heard this question get asked once, having left her car to idle in the drive and run up to the barn with a quick request or bit of news, she couldn’t remember which. She’d hung back in the barn’s entrance, her hip flush against the fieldstone that curved up toward the central cupola, and waited for Ned to come clean the way he did for the foreign exchanges down at the Rosebud when they got curious after a few beers. Three years had passed since Dynamite, now dead, possessed of a wide cruel streak unusual even in a top stallion, had bitten
Ned’s right index finger off at the top knuckle and spat the tip into the sawdust they used to soften the floor of the breeding shed. One of the grooms had hustled the horse back into his stall while the other two ran to her father’s office for help. Her father had called 911, then thought better of waiting for an ambulance and gone for Ned with the idea of getting him in his car and driving him to the closest hospital. He’d found Ned dead quiet, standing in the middle of the shed, squeezing his right hand with his left. There was blood, but not as much blood as you might have expected, her father had said. He’d asked Ned where the piece of finger was, and Ned told him, “Here. In my pocket.”

At the hospital, they’d offered to helicopter in a hand surgeon from Louisville. He could be there well within the hour, which was plenty of time. Knox’s father was relieved; he put his arm around Ned’s shoulders and said something like, Let’s sit down here to wait. It won’t be long.

But Ned just looked at him, pale, and shrugged against the pressure of her father’s arm. He kept gripping at the towel that was wrapped around his closed fist, said, I don’t see why I have to wait, let’s get this over with now, let’s do it. Her father protested, according to both of them, that Ned had to hang on until the surgeon got there. There was nothing to do but sit, and he’d find someone to give Ned some more painkillers until it was time to prep him, which would be in just a minute. The bit of finger had been taken by a nurse who had met them at the doors to the hospital—put, everyone assumed, on ice. Her father talked sense to Ned until Ned told him, in a harsh voice her father had never heard him use, I don’t need it, Ben. I can live without it. And when her father had creased his eyes in a show of patience and opened his mouth, Ned had said, Get off me, Ben, I’m in too much pain.

That had done it, Ned said. His head was in her lap when he finally told her the story himself. Knox watched his face redden and his mouth twitch into his sorry, half-formed smile as he spoke of pushing her father away. Her father had promoted him to stallion manager when he was only twenty-two. He had paid for Ned’s
first car and cosigned for the Lexington apartment that Ned’s mother still lived in.

It was the shock, Knoxie, he said. All I could think was I wanted to get home. I was embarrassed. That horse had bullied me.

I know, Knox said. She tried to imagine how Dynamite had gotten enough leverage to rip the flesh off at the knuckle. She wanted to ask about that, to pull Ned away from himself and back into a recounting of the action, the quick yank of the stallion’s head. Embarrassed—she had felt embarrassed, too, when Ned grazed her cheek for the first time with the bandaged place, and she had barely been able to keep herself from jumping.

I could have waited, Ned went on, but I just yelled for them to stitch me up, and then your dad drove me home. I am one idiotic fuck, Ugly.

He was trying to laugh, which made Knox look away. You’re not, she said, before shaming herself into looking back. She didn’t want him to laugh just then, when he didn’t mean it. It had been too late to do anything about his finger by the next morning, when her father called her, assuming that Ned had stayed over when he hadn’t answered the phone at his own house. “I thought for sure he’d be with you,” her father had said, forcing Knox to ask what had happened. She drove to Ned’s and found him asleep on the couch, still in yesterday’s clothes. When she woke him, he looked at her in fear, as if he knew that she would be angry with him for his foolishness and regret.

But what he told the nosy tourist in the barn that day, the day Knox came upon him with a group and decided to watch him from the threshold, was: “You know, my girlfriend shot it off. She hated for me to point out better-looking women.” He was moving as he spoke, pulling a brass rod out of its latch and sliding a stall door smoothly open to reveal the stallion inside. His voice was sure and easy.

After a second, people began to laugh. Knox could hear release in the laughter, which lasted just a beat too long: the young man hadn’t felt the need to satisfy their curiosity with something true,
thank God. Knox zeroed in on a guy in maroon University of Alabama shorts and a silvery brush cut as he clasped his wife closer and nodded with exaggerated vigor into her face. She grinned up at him, nodding back. Marlene probably wouldn’t appreciate the fact that Knox had found this funny. It had been all she could do at the time not to walk up to Ned and grip him in a half nelson, just to give the people their money’s worth. Play the pussy whip, the ball breaker—it would be easy. She could improvise her indignation, would prefer some light fakery to the reality of Ned’s need for her, his sad, sweaty head in her lap. Other women seemed to crave weakness in their men—or at least frequent displays of vulnerability. Charlotte had seemed to, for some unknown reason, in her own husband, who trailed her like a puppy, Knox thought. But Knox craved moments like these, when Ned, or her father, held people in the thrall of a joke or gesture and kept the world in love with them and their maleness. She didn’t know why. In the end, she had decided to stay hidden, and made her way to the little shaded parking lot behind the farm office without letting Ned see her. She had been glad for him that day, in a way she hadn’t, not really, when he had finally steeled himself to accept sympathy and free Guinness from the grooms at the Rosebud Bar.

They had dinners together, she and Ned, and the two of them and her parents, before and after the accident. Knox was pleased to see that the scrim of normality that hung over their interactions hadn’t been completely pierced along with Ned’s skin and bone. Ned kidded with them about suing. Her father shook his head. Knox watched them woo each other, their faces lit from below by the coals in the outdoor grill, their tongs darting forward and back, pushing corn, swordfish steaks, into the hottest places. Her father’s hands looked so much like hers; and Ned’s, compact and soft despite their work, their palms infused with an old knowledge of her body, were altered. On those nights, watching from her place on the back porch, Knox did have to admit that as much as she preferred normality to whatever its alternative was, it felt strange, even shocking, that something brutal could be followed
by nothing other than dinner. No one howled, or ran. And yet a tiny bit of permanent damage had occurred.

W
HEN
K
NOX
OPENED
the door to her cabin, the phone was ringing. She put her backpack down on a chair and moved to answer it, instinctively ducking a beam that stretched low over the entryway.

“Hey,” she said, thinking it was probably Ned on the line. She hadn’t seen his truck at the barn on her way home.

“It’s me.” Charlotte’s gravelly voice. Knox’s sister Charlotte was pregnant with twins—both boys—that were due at the end of September, and to Knox’s ears even her sister’s words sounded heavy, as if her voice too had become stooped under the barely supportable weight she was carrying. Knox did a quick mental check: they had last spoken a couple of weeks ago. Since then, Charlotte had left her a message; and hadn’t she also sent an e-mail? More than one? Shit.

“Oh, hi! Sorry I haven’t called,” Knox said in a breathy rush. “It’s been really busy here.” Even to herself, who knew she
had
been busy at the center all month, with the extra tutoring sessions she’d allowed some of the parents to talk her into, this sounded like a lie.

“I thought it was summer,” Charlotte said. “I’ve been picturing you beside a pool all this time.” She inhaled at an odd point toward the end of the sentence; Knox imagined her high, curved belly; she supposed it might be difficult even to breathe by now.

“We run that learning differences program in the summertime.”

“Oh—right, you’ve told me. Sorry.”

Fifteen seconds in, and they’d both apologized for something. This was a familiar rhythm between Knox and Charlotte, or had been in the years since they’d become grown women who nevertheless remembered what it was like to hurl childish invective at each other, to love and hate each other so nakedly, and so simultaneously, that the mere existence of the other could serve as an
intolerable, maddening offense. Knox had wondered whether or not the bare fact of growing up with a sister, any sister, sharing a house and a set of parents and chunks of DNA, necessitated some sort of lifetime, knee-jerk atonement. Not that there weren’t actual, identifiable things to apologize for. But Knox was careful to hew to the present moment. She’d trained herself to, for her own sake as opposed to Charlotte’s; it was just easier for her not to expose herself, because the role of wounded little sister was, among other things, damaging to her pride. And if pride goeth before a fall, her father used to joke with her, remembering all the times she’d stood before him with scraped knees or bruised feelings, every cell in her body concentrated upon the refusal to cry, then she’d go ahead and take the fall. Love suffused his handsome, square face as he said it. How he understood her, her magnificent dad. She’d always been helpless before him. As a child she’d dabbed his Skin Bracer aftershave behind her ears more than once before she’d left for school and spent the day moving through the halls of Lower School in the bubble of his familiar scent, moony as a lover.