Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  Finally, Robbie lifted his head to the edge of the board and looked up at her. His eyelashes, shorter, blonder than Ned’s, gummed together into wet points.

  “Go.”

  “Sorry,” Knox said, and started talking.

  BRUCE

  THE NICU WAS the only place Bruce knew how to be.

  He hated the crowded elevator one had to take to get to it, the pressure mounting in his chest as the box rose. Given another second, he knew, he’d erase the silence around him with the scratch of his voice; but once again the doors slid open too early, and the few people he’d been close enough to touch, had stood closer to than any normal definition of propriety would allow, exited without ceremony into the empty, white air of this place that contained more than any place should ever reasonably contain. He hated the approach, the construction-paper letters on the walls of the corridor, the stupid mural of smiling fish, the waiting room where the day’s roster of expectant grandparents and their hangers-on sat waiting for their own news, too confident behind the newspapers they were pretending to read. Every inch of the room, from floor to furniture, was covered in industrial carpeting, and Bruce knew the very thoughts of its occupants, the soup they were anticipating for lunch, the content of the jubilant e-mails they were composing prematurely in their heads. He hated the desk his special badge allowed him to circumvent. He and Charlotte had checked in there, and other couples stood, checking in there, too: the women swaying on their feet, overdressed, too much of the world outside, as if oblivious that their connections to everyday enterprise had already been severed. They were floating in the blackness of space, untethered, in their tasteful jersey maternity dresses with their BlackBerrys on VIBRATE and their overnight satchels packed just so, slung over their tensed shoulders. They made Bruce angry. He knew what was contained in their bags: white cotton nightgown sets and changes of pregnancy underwear and address books and sanitary pads and a few leaves of stationery and a dopp kit and a tiny onesie and hat for the baby to go home in and snacks, probably some kind of gourmet trail mix flecked with chocolate morsels, which no one would ever consume. Trail mix, as if this were a hike, an outing. That’s what Charlotte had packed—that and a half-pound bag of peanut M&M’s, though on their hospital tour they’d been assured that food was forbidden. Bruce remembered, distantly, his quaint outrage at this: His wife would require some rocket fuel for the epic journey she was about to undertake, wouldn’t she? Ice chips? Was that a joke? Had anyone else seen the labor and delivery films? He’d looked around at the other participants on the tour; no one had answered him, though a few shot him sympathetic looks. He’d been muttering. Charlotte had squeezed his hand. He and Charlotte had held out some vague hope that she’d have a go at actual labor, even though the twins she carried all but guaranteed a C-section, and their OB had scheduled one months before, to fall on a date that preceded her due date by one week, though they’d never made it that far. He didn’t make eye contact with the couples now as he stepped past the desk, though the men were desperate for him to look at them; he could feel it, feel their eyes on him. They wanted recognition, or pity, acknowledgment—I’ve been there, dude, it’s going to be fine—anyway, they wanted something he couldn’t give.

  As the men looked at him, angling, the nurses looked away, failing to greet him once he’d pushed the metal panel that admitted him into the private unit through automatic doors. It was clear from their casual laughter and the pauses they indulged in before answering one of his questions, the internal gathering and even impatience they were not afraid to let him glimpse, that they’d made some bargain long ago not to feel. Except for one, Sophia, who seemed to have a different shift each day so that Bruce could never depend on her presence, they failed to smile or exude much palpable warmth. He supposed that, compared with what he needed from them, it was a saner choice to offer him nothing; otherwise they might be consumed, tip into him and be burned up. Yes, that made sense. The room was only slightly larger than the conference room at his office. Tall, metal Isolettes on casters, nubby recliners, and all manner of monitoring machines were its furniture. It was loud; the alarms on the Brady cardiograms rang ceaselessly, printers spat out reading after noisy reading; this was an atmosphere of emergency, as opposed to the hushed haven Bruce had expected. That part, he didn’t hate. It felt appropriate, and he dissolved into the hum and activity as if he were falling into water, negotiating the maze on his way to the corner Ethan and Ben’s crib occupied, a beautiful, light-filled corner, with a view of the East River that might make Bruce laugh under other circumstances, so wasted was its beauty on him and the other occupants of this floor. A developer would kill for this view. Apartment seekers would ransom their grandmothers for it. Instead, Bruce pictured a face like his own as viewed from outside, the sole face visible from behind an acre of glass, pale, eyes fixed on the barges below as they plowed forward, their progress barely discernible except for the crescent of white churn in their wakes.

  What he loved: seeing the boys. Only that. The exhale he was able to produce when the boys came back into his sight after his night away from them—another meaningless night he’d already forgotten, had already voided from the ledger of nights. His miraculous boys.

  The chair Bruce sat in was gray. He occupied it for about ten hours a day, if you subtracted lunch, and the inevitable perambulations he had to make when the noise filled his head so that it brimmed. He’d written a report in grade school about the Siberian gulag, where guards swaddled their shoes in cotton and trained themselves to move so silently that their very presence contributed to the torturous goal of confusing prisoners as to whether the voices in their heads were actually audible in the pervasive absence of sound. Here it was the opposite, though the effect must be the same; the sound was what pervaded; the thoughts were what you couldn’t identify, because you might have spoken them instead of merely thought them; someone was always speaking here, asking you to repeat your story and repeat, repeat, repeat. Bruce had no idea why the doctors and hospital workers from different specialties couldn’t seem to coordinate information and thus relied on him to stitch the quilt together every time they made their rounds. “Hi, I’m Cassie from social work. So how are the babies doing? Twins, yes?” Cassie would stand there, reading the chart, getting up to speed. Somewhere on the chart was typed the phrase maternal death, though Bruce suspected it was near enough to the bottom of the page that some people never got to it. When they did, he could read it in their faces, and the satisfaction that coursed in his veins then was as powerful as a drug. He wanted Cassie to know every last detail. He wanted Cassie, well-meaning Cassie, on her knees.

  Ethan and Ben were okay—improbably okay, though their stay here would be necessary for another week, until the fluid in their lungs cleared completely and they could handle feedings on their own. Their brains, hearts, and other internal organs were unscathed. Their esophagi were fully attached. They were probably not going to suffer any significant developmental delays; though time would tell on this score, the same was true for any kid. They were beautiful—dizzyingly so—and intact. Bruce had such difficulty grasping this that his pace would quicken each morning as he drew abreast of their Isolette, so that he could assure himself once again that their survival was true. They should look like accident victims, bloodied and deformed by trauma, he thought. But they didn’t—aside from the tubes, and the slight translucence of their skin and obvious lack of meat on their bones, they were babies, their features tiny but formed, discrete, unblemished. His eyes seared, as if he were looking into the sun.

  Ethan was longer. He had a raspberry-colored mark on one of his eyelids, which Bruce had been told would fade as he grew. There was a suggestion of fuzz, which lent a reddish cast to his scalp, though this was covered up most of the time with one of the striped caps the hospital provided for warmth. His nostrils flared as he slept; his fingers were tapered and elegant; he seemed to Bruce to possess a capacity for disdain that made Bruce proud and even more protective
of him than he was, if that were possible: You’re right, he thought. Everything you’re thinking is right. Though Bruce held him anyway, for as much time as he was allowed each day, it was clear Ethan didn’t like to be held, not yet; he stiffened slightly within Bruce’s careful grasp, and his breath quickened.

  Ben seemed dreamier. Phantom smiles animated his mouth while he dozed against Bruce’s forearm, his head cradled in his father’s left hand. His cries seemed briefer, more to the point, than his brother’s, as if he couldn’t wait to have them over. He was darker, would have Charlotte’s coloring, it appeared—though Bruce was careful as yet not to let his mind extend any further into the future than the next feeding time.

  “You’re comparing them?” Sophia said to him this afternoon. She sighed, shook her coarse, hennaed curls. She wore a loud smock, printed with Warner Bros. cartoon characters, over her nurse’s clothing. Her face was punctuated with moles of different colors and shapes. “I’ve got two girls at home. Why is it always our instinct to compare them? I can’t help it, either. But it’ll get you in trouble, for sure.”

  Bruce watched as Sophia slid Ben’s diaper off without waking him, and quickly fastened him into a fresh one.

  “How can anyone help comparing,” Bruce said. “They’re so different.”

  “The more different they are, the harder you’ve got to work to pretend you don’t notice, otherwise they’re going to try to figure out which of them you think is better, or which one is more like you, whatever. It’s like a wedge. These things gone off at all this morning?” Sophia pointed at the Brady monitors.

  “Ethan’s just once, but I turned him a little and it stopped.”

  “Good. They’re too damn sensitive sometimes. A little reflux will set one of these machines off, or the wrong position—I’m glad you know that. Some people around here get hysterical.”

  “We’re all hysterical,” Bruce said.

  Sophia looked at him, smoothing at her Tweety Bird pockets.

  “With good reason,” she said, after a long moment. “You been down to the chapel yet?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to need all the help you can stand with these boys. You might as well get some from God.”

  “I think I’ll get a Coke. Would you like one?”

  “Go down there,” Sophia said. She didn’t smile. “It’s nice. Nobody will bother you.”

  “Thanks,” Bruce said airily, and he tried to smile as he stood, though he wasn’t sure that he was successful, and in a moment Sophia was fiddling with a saline drip, her expression concentrated, inaccessible.

  Bruce didn’t want to tell Sophia that he didn’t believe in God. One might assume that this shortcoming dated from his mother’s death, but his mother hadn’t believed in God, either, though she wasn’t incapable of invoking him as one might a character from one of Bruce’s comic books—a bumbling straight man, a Magoo. She railed at God, made jokes at his expense, but she didn’t actually believe he existed, nor did his rational, mathematically oriented father. What explanation could Bruce offer to the devout, to someone like Sophia? Sorry, I grew up in Manhattan. Sorry, my family spent weekend mornings debating op-ed columns, while everyone else was in church.

  Bruce moved through the doors back into the corridor, past the desk. With each step he took away from the boys, he felt a familiar uptick in his level of unease; to be away from them was to doubt anew their well-being and to subject himself to the clutching sense that he was exposing them to more terrible risk. He tried to ignore the feeling, stretched his stiff arms over his head and pressed his fingers ceilingward as he walked, cracking his knuckles. A woman with a long braid and a baby face sat in a wheelchair, looking pained and abandoned. A man—an overgrown boy, really, in a baseball cap and cargo pants—stood with his back to her, hunched over his cell phone. Cell phones weren’t allowed this close to the NICU. Their signals could interfere with the monitors, though everyone seemed to use them. The alternative was the decrepit pay phone in the waiting lounge, or the long, circuitous trek back to the hospital entry. Bruce himself had made calls from here before. He’d called Charlotte’s family, updated them on the twins’ imminent delivery, called his father, checked his messages, a thousand years before.

  “Excuse me,” Bruce said to the man’s back. He said it softly, the faint smile he’d attempted for Sophia resurrected on his lips.

  The man didn’t respond, perhaps hadn’t heard him. He continued to talk into his mouthpiece, his voice husky, not quite a whisper. When Bruce tapped him and he turned, his eyes were bright. He looked excited. Bruce almost felt bad for the guy.

  “Okay, okay,” he said to whomever he’d called. “I’ve gotta go. Yeah, for sure, we’ll keep you posted!”

  “Hey,” he said to Bruce, the word a question, as he snapped his phone shut. He looked at Bruce as if he expected to know him, expected in the next second to receive more good news. His face was open, smiling.

  “Hi. I just wanted to let you know that you’re not supposed to use that in here.” Bruce gestured toward the phone. He felt himself working to keep his own expression blank, to banish the apology from it. His heart raced. What was it that had made him stop for this one, when yesterday he’d ignored another?

  “Oh.” The man looked around. “Okay. Do you work here?” His eyes narrowed slightly, though his smile remained in place.

  “No.”

  “I was calling my wife’s parents to tell her we’re about to have a baby,” the man said, his voice even.

  “I know. Still. There’s a rule.” Bruce felt an odd thrill—there had been one time at Bancroft when he’d almost fought a boy named Pete Harvey, had experienced those few seconds that existed between a provocation and the moment the response would come, his body taut, alive with a kind of ecstatic, out-of-nowhere indignation.

  “Thanks. It doesn’t look like anyone’s around. But thanks.” The man’s voice gathered a subtle, progressive edge of sarcasm as he spoke; he turned a few degrees away from Bruce, his eyes bugging at his wife, whose face Bruce decided not to look at again.

  “It interferes with the machines. Some people on this floor are hooked up to important machines.”

  “Ted,” the woman said. Her voice was coaxing, even playful. The name emerged from her mouth sounding swooping, prolonged. He’s clearly a wacko, honey, let’s focus on the big picture. This, too, will be part of our birth story, the funny part, the part when Ted almost lost it, brave Ted, keep it together, Ted, I am having contractions right now, this is nothing, a fraction of a moment, it’s already gone. I’m over here, look at me, honey, and smile again. Our room is almost ready.

  “My twins are hooked up to heart monitors in the next room. All I know is that they tell me cell phones could interfere, so you see my problem. I know you wouldn’t want to be responsible for any interference.”

  Now the man’s features contracted. Bruce watched him. Something was happening. Ted’s jaw worked, and he wouldn’t look Bruce in the eye. This struck Bruce as curious and caught him momentarily off guard—he’d expected … if not an apology, then at least a pass, a connection, a tacit forgiveness. But he felt calm overall—poised, adrenaline having already permeated his body with its false high. He took a breath, measuring the inhale and the exhale deliberately, slowly.

  “I’m really sorry to hear that, buddy. Good luck. All I’m trying to do is get my wife through this process in one piece, okay? That’s it.”

  Bruce stood in place.

  “Good luck,” the man said again to him. He enunciated as if for a child and drew closer to the wheelchair, touching its back with his hand. “God bless.” This last phrase he practically spat at Bruce, who recognized it as his dismissal.

  I don’t believe in God, Bruce wanted to say. He blinked. He felt like a subject of hypnosis who’d been abruptly woken. Of course: his misfortune was a contaminant to these people, worse by far than his meddling had been. He had both courted and been bracing himself against their pity, b
ut he hadn’t anticipated such obvious anger. Bruce could feel the couple willing him out of their vicinity, as if the bad voodoo of his own experience here could hurt them. Ted was not going to let this happen.

  “Sorry,” Bruce said. “Okay.”

  “Great.”

  “Okay.”

  It took no small amount of will to make his body turn and resume walking. And as much as the power of the information he held in him threatened to best him and declare its own, anarchic freedom, he didn’t fling a word about Charlotte over his shoulder as he moved down the hall. In the ears of these people her name and fate would ring like a spell, a jinx, the designation of an ancient devil whose name must never, under any circumstances, be spoken. Bruce knew this, and his hands shook with the wish to make them recoil, but an equal part of him knew that as the steward of the most terrible secret on the ward, the Ring to his hobbit, he was charged with making it all the way to the vending machine, step by step, without once revealing to a stranger that his wife had died on an operating table just out of sight, six days ago, and he was now a single father of two infant boys, and no one was going to go out of their way to give him the space and time to understand this, much less to deal with it, and his previously unlimited choices had narrowed to two: either he could force one of the nonoperating windows here open and let himself fall through space toward the barges on the silent, beautiful river, or go through the rest of his life this way. He picked up his right foot and put it down, his throat itching with sudden thirst.