Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  Charlotte inhaled. Her face changed. She smiled at him. “Sorry,” she said. “You look cold. Do you want to go inside and wait? We don’t have to talk about this.” She reached her hand toward him.

  “It’s all right,” Bruce said. “I don’t mind talking. Let’s just do it upstairs. They can buzz us when they get here.”

  She nodded and reached her arms around him. Bruce let her hold him still, even though he was ready to move for the door. She arched her neck back, exposing her throat to him. He bent down and kissed it, then kissed up her jawline, up to the bare lobe of her ear, which he bit lightly.

  “Okay,” Charlotte said, laughing. “Upstairs is a good idea.”

  Bruce released himself from her arms, moved up the steps, and held the door open. When Charlotte moved past him, he looked down the street one more time, in the opposite direction of the dog walker, nearly flush with the building now. He saw a yellow truck far down the block. A man hung partly out of the driver’s side window, as if trolling for street numbers.

  “Coming?” Charlotte called from inside, where she stood outside his apartment door.

  “Yes,” Bruce called. There would be time. The movers would find the building, ring the bell. He hopped up the stairs toward his shoe, toward Charlotte, and let the glass outer door close behind him. As he pushed into his spotless living room behind her he thought of what she’d said, that she’d tell him everything. He swallowed. Everything was what he wanted.

  KNOX LET THE HEELS of her sandals knock against the cabinet below the kitchen counter in her parents’ house, over and over, until her mother walked over to where she sat on the counter, placed one of her hands on each of Knox’s knees, and told her that unless she stopped that right now she could expect something terrible to happen to her, and soon.

  Knox smiled down. She placed her hands over her mother’s, felt their heat, the slick of lotion on her skin, the slight ropiness of vein. She felt the chill of the gold cameo on her mother’s right ring finger. Her mother’s hands, their nails manicured to deep pink ovals, were like her: slightly but perfectly built. Built so that their small parts mesmerized with their vividness, somehow, enough to create an illusion of size.

  “Sorry, Mama,” Knox said. “I didn’t realize I was driving you crazy.”

  Her mother cowbit her knee with her thumb and forefinger. She made a face, nodded once. Knox waited until she had walked away to press against the cabinet with her heel, quietly this time, feeling the weight of the shelves and pots as she pushed them back inch by inch. She held her foot in place. She had entered the house roiling, somehow—expecting to feel helpless and overwhelmed in the face of having to follow her parents and their fragmented conversation from room to room, having to piece together what was to happen next by herself, based on half-answered questions and distracted movement. She had worried that she might fly apart in the middle of all that strangeness, in the house that she loved for its steady rhythms, for its dinner on time, its ritual half-hour naps at six o’clock, its wry, affectionate, glancing talk. On opening the door into the mudroom and hearing the voices in the kitchen, she had stood in place for a few moments, fighting a queasiness in her lower abdomen, waiting for it to pass. Then she had stepped into the gleam and clutter of the kitchen and found a calm suspension that surprised her. Her parents stood near the stove and smiled at her when she entered. Her brother Robbie sat slumped in the club chair in the far corner, leafing through the pages of a magazine. Oh, Knox thought, all right. This is something I can do. She said, Can you believe it. She asked what was happening. She reentered herself, felt the light blouse and skirt she’d changed into hanging on her body, defining its shape. She took the slice of tomato her father offered her and popped it into her mouth. Yum, she said. It was still warm from the garden and flooded her mouth with sweetness.

  We’re having pasta, her father had said. We’re waiting to see if we can charter a plane tonight, but there’ll be time to eat. We talked to Charlotte; she’s fine. Excited. They’re going to wheel her in in an hour.

  Now her brother said, “Guess who’s the sexiest man alive?”

  “Don’t know,” Knox said. She wondered if she should pour herself a drink.

  Robbie flipped a page of his magazine. It made a snapping sound. He narrowed his eyes, not answering. “How come they don’t do an issue for the sexiest woman alive? Or do they,” he said.

  “What is he talking about,” her mother said. She dipped two fingers into the pot on the stove with a practiced quickness; Knox thought of a gull dipping its beak to snap a fish, rising in a white flash. Her mother blew on a piece of spaghetti, then raised it to Knox’s mouth for her to nibble.

  “Tell me if this is ready,” she said.

  “I think it is,” Knox said, tasting. She swung her foot forward, letting the cabinet door release its tension and fall back into place.

  “I like it really al dente,” Robbie said. “Is it al dente?” He scratched at the place where his sternum lay under the thin, over-washed cotton of his Mr. Bubble T-shirt. Since he’d entered his Virginia college last fall he had collected a whole closetful of T-shirts that doubled as advertisements for American household products; Knox had seen Tide, Mello Yello, Tony the Tiger, and the Jolly Green Giant all march across his bony chest over the course of the summer. She looked at him. He was a boy in places and a man in places lately. Though the center of him remained reedy and slender, the work he had put in at the foaling barn and as a hot walker at the July sale showed in his arms, which had gone toned, darker from the sun, coarse with golden hair. Knox had been there on a few late afternoons when he stood on the diving board of their parents’ pool, patchy with sweat and complaining that he smelled worse than all the stalls he’d mucked combined, and jumped without taking even his shoes off. He’d swim a couple of lengths and then emerge, heavy and streaming, looking like both the little brother Knox had always known and the person—handsomer than Knox might have predicted—that he had almost become.

  “What’s al dente again,” her father said. “Is that the underdone one?”

  “It’s the perfectly done one, my darling,” her mother answered from inside the steam that billowed from the colander as she shook it over the sink. Her tongue touched the inside corner of her mouth with effort. “You all can go ahead and sit down. Robbie, fill the water glasses if you don’t mind,” she said, her face reddening from the heat.

  “Knox can do it,” Robbie said, even as he heaved himself up and made his way over to the cupboard.

  “I didn’t ask her,” her mother said, turning to give Knox a look that was amused, incredulous.

  “Poor Rob,” Knox said. “Works all day and slaves all night. I don’t know how he manages.”

  “Barely. I barely manage. Would you like one ice cube or two, princess?” Robbie said as he opened the door to the ice maker. The exposed well of ice breathed a whitish smoke into the air that climbed up the middle of Robbie’s body and made him look cold, suddenly unprotected. Knox fought an impulse to cross the room and hug him at the waist, rub at his limbs until they were warm again.

  They were waiting for the charter service to call back, and for the next update from Bruce. Her mother had already packed some things in a duffel that sat, looking deflated, at the bottom of the back stairs—packed like a wild woman, her father said, packed for both of us in under five minutes. Charlotte was at thirty-five weeks, early but out of the woods, and the babies were healthy, just ready to come, due to the low fluid.

  “Gross,” Robbie had said, from his place in the corner. Knox coughed, partly in laughter, partly to blunt the edge of her brother’s obnoxiousness. Rude was still a function of age for Robbie, rather than a full-fledged personality feature. Knox could tell that it would fall away from him—that it probably already had when he was with people other than family. She could relate; only in this kitchen was she the type to sit on counters, more prone to watch than to offer help with dinner. As a guest in other houses she itched to take
over the stirring of sauces, would rather chop than entertain the hosts with talk as they worked. Work was both an offering and an excuse to become more invisible. And yet here she felt compelled toward neither of those possibilities. She sat, in the midst of things, until she was asked to do something, anything, else.

  “This is serious, babe,” her mother said to Robbie, though Knox could see that she kept humming, choosing to be more excited than worried, within her current. If she were alone, Knox thought, she might be smiling to herself.

  They sat down at the table.

  “We might be able to jump on a commercial flight if there’s no jet available,” her father said, rocking back a little in his chair.

  “Let’s just wait and see,” her mother said. She reached for Knox’s plate, set it beside the serving bowl, and began tonging helpings of pasta onto it.

  “I could call Delta and see if there’s space on the night flight.”

  “We’ll know more once the charter company calls back,” her mother said. She ground pepper from the mill over Knox’s plate: crack, crack, crack. Her mouth looked too set, suddenly. Too concentrated. Stop, Knox thought to herself, I don’t want any more.

  “I don’t like that much pepper,” Knox said, and immediately flushed. She had sounded, absolutely, like a child. Her mother glanced at her.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll take this one.”

  “Your mother is the only one who really likes things spicy,” her father said. “But she forgets.”

  “I do,” her mother said. “I forget that you all are total philistines about food.”

  Knox breathed. She filled with a wanting: to get up from her place and circle the table, put her arms around her mother, her lovely mother, for letting slights pass unremarked on. Around her father, so dependably there under the blue cotton of his shirt, under the sheen the overhead light cast on the curve of scalp where his hair had thinned, for his assumption that she would accompany them on tonight’s trip, his strong kindness, his readiness to make things okay. Around Robbie, who sat chewing at a hunk of bread that he had already fished from the basket, his constant hunger hanging off him like a logo, the bones of his smooth jaw popping audibly as if to egg him on. These moments came. It was hard for her body to know how to contain them when they did come. They felt like a breaking. It had occurred to her before that this was all she needed, that any other kind of love existed for people who didn’t have this.

  “How were the kids today, Knoxie,” her mother asked. “I need to talk about something else, otherwise I get too nervous.”

  “They were good,” Knox said, determined to convey what she felt through her voice, through her talk. She sat up straighter. “Some of them are improving so much. I want to bring a group of them out to the farm before summer school’s over. Let them roam around a little bit.”

  “Ned could show them around the stallion complex,” her mother said. “That’s an idea.”

  “Or they could come to the foaling barn,” Robbie said. “We could use a little excitement over there. All we do is stand around and sweat and translate dirty jokes from Spanish into English.”

  “That’s nice,” her father said. Knox laughed, though she noticed that her father regarded Robbie with a grim expression for half a beat before he looked at Knox and smiled. She knew that Robbie could push the apathetic student act far enough to worry her father, who had made a bid for a small part of the farm acreage—acreage that now spread for two miles on either side of the road—the week after he graduated from college. “I think you should bring them out,” he said. “Call over to the office and have them set it up.”

  “I can just tell Ned,” Knox said.

  “I asked him to stay for dinner, but he said he couldn’t,” her mother said.

  “I know,” Knox said. She made a note to call him later, if only to register herself in his thoughts. She would call his machine, become a voice that played through the rooms of his house as he walked through them later, his boots weighing on the old boards.

  “The sexiest man alive is the star of a popular television show. He’s from Ohio,” Robbie said.

  “Who,” Knox said.

  “You can’t give up, you have to guess who it is.”

  “Maybe we should go over our options,” her father said. “We should decide what the plan is, don’t you think?”

  Knox’s mother got up from the table and went to the refrigerator. She opened the door, bent forward at the waist, reached in, pushed several cartons and bottles to one side, then the other. “Would anyone like butter with their bread,” she asked.

  “I would,” Knox said, though she didn’t usually take butter. It was easy to abandon whatever preferences she had when her parents cooked for her—or to forget, temporarily, exactly what those preferences were. During breakfasts at this table, to which she came as often as not on weekend mornings, she drank cup after cup of coffee simply because it was on offer, and left feeling heavy and unmoored at once, as if she might float out of the top of her head if it weren’t so leaden. She walked home, nodding like a narcoleptic, and crawled into bed, wondering why she hadn’t refused something—that last piece of bacon, the cluster of grapes that her father had clipped for her with a pair of kitchen shears. Now she slathered butter on a piece of crust, and listened.

  “Do we all fly up tonight, or do just Mom and I go, or what,” her father was saying. “That’s what I’m going to need to know. If this was a month from now, I’m guessing we would descend on Charlotte in shifts, but since we’re all together—”

  “Can I say something?” her mother said.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “I just think it’s a lot for the two of them, with the whole family all at once. We should wait and see what Bruce and Charlotte want us to do.”

  “So,” her father said. “Min, it never hurts to go over the possibilities. Whether or not the kids—”

  “Let’s just say that whoever wants to go can get packed, and we’ll wait for the charter company to call,” her mother said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. They might not even want me up there tonight.”

  “That’s ridiculous, honey.”

  “It’s not,” her mother said. Her voice rose on the not. Knox noticed that the redness she’d seen in her mother’s face as she stood over the sink had either returned or never dissipated. Then, more quietly, she said, “Sorry. I just don’t want them to be overwhelmed.”

  “I don’t have to go,” Robbie said. “I can come up next week, or before school starts.”

  Knox thought she saw gratitude flash in her mother’s eyes. She wondered if her mother imagined having Charlotte all to herself, if she feared any possibility other than that.

  “I don’t have to go either,” Knox said. The sound of her voice surprised her. “But I’d like to. Charlotte and I talked about it this afternoon.”

  Her mother looked at her.

  “You talked to Charlotte?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?” The innocence in her mother’s expression—the braced, expectant quality of it—made Knox momentarily wish she hadn’t spoken.

  “That she wasn’t sure what was happening next. She told me it would be good if I came, actually.”

  “She did?”

  Knox nodded.

  After a few seconds, her mother smiled in her direction. “Of course she wants you there. I think everyone should do whatever they feel they need to do,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “As long as the center can spare you right now.”

  “Okay,” Knox said. She felt exhausted. She buttered another piece of bread, then put it back down on her plate.

  “Dinner was delicious,” her father said.

  “Back to the subject,” Robbie said.

  “What?” Knox said.

  “The sexiest man alive takes baths with a Vietnamese potbellied pig.”

  “I’ll mull that bit of fascinating crap over.”


  Robbie rolled his eyes and stuck his tongue out at her. Her mother covered her smile with her hand. “Jesus, tough crowd tonight,” Robbie said, just before the phone rang.

  CHARLOTTE HAD LAID a wooden shelf across two stacks of bricks in front of the kitchen window. She had bought a small pot of basil, a pot of rosemary, a mint plant, an African violet in bright foil, and arranged them in a row on the shelf. She had bought a grapefruit-sized water mister, filled it at the tap, and placed it on the shelf beside the African violet. She had stood back and admired what she had done. She had placed one hand at the small of her back. Bruce had watched her from the hall. The sun was white in the kitchen and fell across her in a dazzling shard. He imagined it warm on her skin. That night Charlotte had twisted leaves from the basil plant, chopped them into a mossy pulp, made tomato and basil omelets for their dinner. He praised them extravagantly, appealing to the domestic pride that flowered from her in these tiny bursts.

  Charlotte had stood on the bench in their living room, in the midst of a party she had given to mark some minor occasion—Cinco de Mayo, or Bastille Day, or the Derby that ran each year just an hour from her parents’ house, about which Charlotte seemed to know little other than that the rest of her family was always in attendance, sometimes with a horse running, and that more juleps needed to be made, please: more. The mint on the shelf in the kitchen was brown by then; papery leaves lay scattered on streaks of dirt. A new pot of mint was bought, ice, sugar syrup, bourbon by the handle. Charlotte stood on the bench and her friends cheered. The television blared in the background. She danced to the music someone had put on: some Spanish guitar, or Piaf, or “Fulsom Prison Blues.” The song would be a detail that got lost. Bruce would remember, though, Charlotte lifting her shirt until her breasts were exposed. He would remember that the television was louder than the music, that it was possible to keep track of the race from across the room. “They’re all in line … wait, number five, San Dee Dee is getting set, all right, the jock has got the colt calmed, and they’re—” From his place on the window seat Bruce could see the pale blue veins that stretched from the aureoles of Charlotte’s tits when they appeared from under the raised hem of her blouse, though he was too far away to make out the goose-pimply texture of the skin just around her nipples. Her skin looked whiter from a distance. Charlotte caught his eye and beckoned to him in an exaggerated burlesque. Her—their—friends turned toward him, laughing. So he was expected to join her? Bruce glanced around, smiling. He was a little drunk. He shook his head. He had made the mistake of inviting a couple of guys from work, had invited Jeb Jackman to be kind; there was Jeb, whom he didn’t even know, by the doorway, with his fat tongue hanging out. Bruce shook his head. He waved his hand at Charlotte, as if to say, Go on, honey, enjoy yourself. Go on. A bell rang on the television; the gates crashed open.