Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  Days later, Charlotte lay in bed with a stack of magazines. She’d been there all evening, was “in the weeds,” she’d said; the drugs were making her tired, irritable, hungry, restless, and Bruce had made her a cup of tea. The short length of hallway back to their bedroom was dark. Bruce’s foot caught on the edge of the runner, and he stumbled slightly; hot liquid sloshed onto his hand.

  “Ow!” he said.

  “Wha—” When he reached the doorway, he saw that Charlotte had fallen asleep. His cry must have woken her; she sat upright, her hair half covering her face, her eyes unfocused, her pupils black and large. She looked at him as if he were a stranger. The strap of her tank top was falling off her shoulder; one of her cheeks was marked with deep, pink creases. In an instant, her face changed, breaking into a confused smile. The sight of him had oriented her.

  “I was having a dream,” she said, rubbing at her forearm. The tip of her tongue slid against her lower lip, wetting it. “What time is it?”

  “Around nine,” Bruce said.

  “Nine?” She looked at him pityingly, tenderly, as if she knew. His bowels twisted, and he wondered if he should leave the room. He took a step toward the bed.

  “Charlotte,” he said. He hadn’t planned this; it was something in the moment, in the vision of her there, that was pushing these words from him; now he wasn’t sure if he felt sick at the thought of not having told her yet, or of telling her at all, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  Charlotte looked instantly more alert. She stared at him, not moving.

  “What,” she said.

  “I am so sorry.” He was too afraid to reach for her hand. He started to cry.

  “Did you sleep with someone?”

  “Yes.”

  Her mouth tightened, but she remained still. Bruce felt every object in the room vibrate. He wiped the tears off his face quickly, not wanting to seem like he was trying to court her pity. What had he done? He wanted only to reach for her.

  “When,” Charlotte said finally.

  “Last week. She was—I paid her,” he said. He wanted her to understand, but at the sound of his words, he felt engulfed. He was unworthy of her. She would know this definitively, now.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  He dutifully raised his eyes to hers, his face hot, contorted. She held his gaze, searching his eyes for something.

  “You really did that?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Bruce. A hooker?”

  He said nothing.

  “Did you wear a condom?”

  “Of course.”

  She picked at the sheet arranged over her lap. She drew her legs up and hugged them, resting her chin on one of her knees. She hadn’t looked away from his face, and he had no choice but to look back, to offer himself whole to her. As she watched him, he saw something evolve within her expression. Her eyes narrowed and then softened. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. Finally, she dropped her gaze and shook her head.

  “Charlotte,” he said in a strangled voice.

  But when she looked back at him, it was like a benediction. She smiled sadly. Again, her eyes seemed to be searching his; in Charlotte’s he could read surprise, and something else, something he could barely bring himself to trust … a kind of mutual recognition. She hadn’t thought him capable of risk, perhaps, or of actual transgression.

  “Come here,” she said.

  He lowered himself onto the edge of the bed, careful not to touch her. He bowed his head and covered his face with his hands.

  “I had no idea you were so scared,” he heard Charlotte say. Her voice was quiet, stripped of inflection. He nodded into his hands; again, she knew what he hadn’t, about himself.

  IT WAS shortly afterward that the pregnancy was confirmed. The subject of Bruce’s betrayal wasn’t closed forever; they returned to it and had different versions of the same conversation on Charlotte’s black days, the ones when she couldn’t rouse herself from bed in the mornings, when she questioned the veracity of everything that came into her head, but she’d had those days before they were married, before Bruce’s confession; they were part of her. Bruce didn’t mind these arguments; he welcomed the chance to beg Charlotte for forgiveness all over again, and ultimately receive it. This seemed to reassure them both.

  Bruce began to look at couples on the street, in the park, lolling on the steps in Union Square, with renewed interest. He wondered if each of them had undergone a moment—or many—that would remain forever inexplicable to anyone else but was understood within their universe of two, rendering them bound in a new way. After a moment like that, you were helpless, purified, this yet another of the thousand facts his boys would never, could never, be told.

  KNOX

  AT THE AIRPORT, Ned reached around her waist, hooked his fingers through a couple of her belt loops, and hiked her jeans over her hip bones. She leaned into his chest for a moment.

  “These are falling off you,” he mumbled into her hair. “You need to fatten yourself up.”

  “Well, I hear New York has a lot of fancy restaurants.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said. He was keeping his voice light, had been trying to keep it light ever since the last time they were both here, when Ned had picked Knox and her parents up at the nearby private terminal. He had driven them back to the house, seen her parents inside, then brought her back to his dim bedroom, his mouth taut, wrapped her up in the unzipped sleeping bag with the flannel lining he used for a duvet, and rocked her to sleep, talking to her all the while about nothing: the objects in his room, the Earl Scruggs interview he’d listened to on the radio in the barn that day, how the newest stallion was getting along after having kicked at his stall wall the week before, inflaming the hell out of his front left pastern. In the morning, he had scoured his tub with Comet while she slept and then run her a bath, held her hand tight as she descended into the hot, clear water. She had stayed over at his place for several nights, sleeping or trying to sleep, Ned talking to her slowly like he did to his horses. She was sure they had made love more often in the two weeks since Charlotte died than they had in the two months, give or take, before all this happened. Her breasts and stomach were rubbed red; the skin on her upper thighs felt sticky to the touch when she dressed in the mornings. She had her theories. She had lived in his bed and he’d fetched her things from his kitchen: bread and cheese sandwiches, bananas sliced into bowls of milk and peppered with cinnamon; these were the things Ned fixed for her; she was so ravenous all the time.

  He’d let Knox push her ice-cold feet under his thigh to warm them while she ate, let her eye the outlines of his handsome, fleshy face as he talked. She had always seen the child in him; that was one of the things she loved about Ned: she could see sweetness and an old petulance at once on his lips and imagine all the things they had begged for and whispered at three, at seven; she could make out, clearly, a willingness to please behind his eyes with their hooded lids, their long, straight lashes that the secretaries in the farm office loved to swoon over, embarrassing him on purpose. Everyone had something indelible in them, lodged deep in their features; Ned’s something, she thought, was kindness. It seemed he was doing his best to save her life. She kept meaning to tell him this, but he’d cover her with his warm body, and she’d forget the words to whatever little speech she’d put together. She’d listen to the breath in her ear, to the blood pumping in her own head. She held herself still (how recently she used to pride herself on the energy she could bring to fucking, on twisting herself into positions that would keep them both safe in the knowledge that at least her skill in bed couldn’t be questioned, even if her commitment could be), and tried to be thankful that, despite what her head thought it wanted in her worst moments, her limbs seemed to not want to be dead, not yet. This took no small amount of focus. When she came, she didn’t make a sound. She closed her eyes. She shuddered.

  It would take another month for Ethan and Ben to receive the requisite shots;
and after the time they’d had to spend in the NICU, no one was about to rush Bruce or ask him to take any chances, just to get the boys on an airplane. Knox’s mother was planning the memorial for just over a month hence, to allow for the twins to travel; and Knox had informed everyone—her parents, Bruce, Ned—that she would be the one to fill in the gap in the meantime, doing feedings, shopping for groceries, lending an extra pair of hands for the pediatrician’s visits, and whatever the hell else there was to do, then assisting with the flight home.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Ned said now. “You don’t owe her this, you know.”

  “No?”

  “Stay. Stay here with me.”

  “I can’t. What is Bruce going to do? I’m her sister.”

  Ned said nothing, but watched her patiently, as if waiting for her to recant. She’d sounded melodramatic, and he was too wise to her touchiness on the subject of Charlotte to let her play this role completely straight.

  “Yeah,” he drawled, finally. “You are. But that doesn’t mean you have to overturn your life right now. You’re going to mess yourself up, Knox.”

  “No, I’m not. What about the boys? They’re my nephews. They need me.”

  “If you’re going for their sake, then go. That’s one thing.”

  “Why else would I be going?”

  Ned took off his glasses, went through the motions of cleaning them, replacing them.

  “I don’t know.” He sighed. “You’ve got to ask yourself, honey—is this something you would have done while she was alive? Maybe you just don’t want to let her go.”

  “Let her go? She hasn’t been dead a month!”

  “I didn’t mean that, exactly. I think I meant let go of the idea that you’re always supposed to fix things. Because you can’t, certainly not now. And once you get that idea in your head with her you always end up in a bad place.”

  “It’s not like I’m moving up there. I’ll be back in a few weeks, for goodness’ sake.”

  “You’re going to be in her house,” Ned said. “Among her things.”

  “I know that.”

  “You have nothing to feel guilty about, if that’s what you’re doing.”

  Knox said nothing.

  “You want me to come with you?” Ned looked so worried that Knox was momentarily tempted, and felt her irritation at him lessen.

  “You hate New York,” she said.

  Ned smiled, but his eyes were serious, intent on her face.

  “What’s not to hate?” he said.

  THEIR FAMILY HAD BEEN TOGETHER, all five of them, at Christmas. That was the last time. They sat around the breakfast room table, crowded together on Charlotte’s first night home, Charlotte shoehorned between Knox and their father, her place mat overlapping with theirs at the edges. Their mother sat in a low-seated antique chair that had been pulled up to the table’s side; Robbie, home too for his winter vacation, had fetched her a pillow to sit on at the beginning of dinner after they had laughed at how comparatively little of her torso showed above the table’s surface and torn off little scraps of bread to toss in her direction as if she were an urchin who’d materialized in their midst. “Please, suh,” Knox’s father said, cupping his hands together and holding them out. Knox’s mother compressed her lips, pushed at his shoulder with the heel of her hand, raised her head, and straightened until she sat up taller. She flicked a piece of bread back at Robbie, who ducked. Bruce was to arrive the next day, Christmas Eve; if Bruce had been with them that night, Knox thought, they might have been ranged around the dining room table; it was more generously sized, and anyway Bruce inspired this increased formality in Knox’s family—each of them seemed to galvanize in his presence, in the presence of Bruce and Charlotte together, the same way they did for company. Of course, extra efforts were being made tonight, too. Though they sat around the everyday table, they ate by candlelight. Knox’s father had opened a second bottle of the red wine his wife had set out on the buffet behind his chair.

  “It’s not like they make you do anything,” Robbie was saying.

  “Oh no,” Knox said. “I’ll bet they just show up in your room at four in the morning and put a hood over your head and tell you that if you don’t pound twelve beers in a row you’re a sorry excuse for a man. But it’s not like they make you do anything.”

  Robbie grinned at her. His top teeth were colored pinkish. “I thought you decided not to rush when you were in college.”

  “So she’s right!” Knox’s mother covered one side of her face with her hand. “Oh, Rob, not funny. You be careful. No teenager should be forced to drink like that—your little bodies are still growing. Ben, this makes me nervous.”

  “Thanks, Mama,” Robbie said. “It does so much for my confidence when you refer to my little body. Really.”

  At this Knox, her father, and then Robbie began to laugh.

  “What?” Charlotte touched Knox’s sleeve. “I didn’t hear.”

  “Not you,” Knox’s mother said to Robbie. “Not yours specifically.” Her eyes were bright; she spoke quickly. There was a giddy moment Knox recognized, that, for her, represented one complete definition of pleasure: a minuscule stretch in time wherein they waited for Robbie, having been perfectly set up, to utter a killer line.

  “Coming from a dwarf—” was all he had to say. They laughed harder; Knox’s father picked up his napkin and swatted at the table; Robbie leaned back in his chair, looking satisfied. “That’s it,” Knox’s mother said, mock indignant, struggling up from her low chair and pushing it away from the table.

  “What,” Charlotte said, the word a high plaint. She held Knox’s arm now. “I missed it.”

  Knox forced herself to look at Charlotte. Her own face, the base of her throat, felt warmed from the wine. Beyond that, she felt good, charged with a kind of invincibility that made her want to turn back toward the other faces around the table, keep herself tangled up in the laughter and talk. She might say anything—there was a momentum to these dinners, to nights like these. Charlotte’s lips were turned up at the corners; her eyes planchets, waiting to be stamped with an explanation. They scanned Knox’s face. Knox had noticed, when Charlotte first walked through her parents’ back door late that afternoon, that she looked paler since the last time they had seen each other, like one of the deeper layers of her skin had been rinsed of its pigment and put back again. Winter in New York, maybe; her cuticles were pink and raw looking where the nail beds met them, her ear ice cold against Knox’s cheek when they hugged. Otherwise, Charlotte had looked like herself, her dark, flyaway hair pinned under the strap of a backpack she’d carried onto the plane, the curves of her seeming to extend into the room before her under the layers she wore: fitted army jacket, back-cowl sweater, flannel skirt, tall boots that accentuated an already heavy step. She had changed for dinner, and now wore a corduroy shirt and earrings that stopped just below her jawline and shone like minnows in the light from the candles. She had drawn her legs up so that she sat cross-legged on her chair, her knees resting on its arms, her feet upturned.

  Knox sighed. She had no idea how far back to go in order to reconstruct what Charlotte might have missed. The hand on her arm irritated her; her sister demanded a constant inclusion that Knox found rude, that she herself would never have felt entitled to. Charlotte had been watching her for much of dinner; Knox had sensed it, the gaze had made her more than a little ruthless.

  “It was nothing,” she said. She picked up her wineglass and sipped from it. “Robbie made a joke.”

  Charlotte waited. Knox took another sip of her wine. She wanted to turn away but couldn’t.

  “It’s too hard to explain,” she said, but when Charlotte narrowed her eyes, angled slightly toward their father, and began to open her mouth, she heard herself speaking. “Mom doesn’t want Robbie to drink so much at school.” She touched Charlotte’s hand, and Charlotte’s eyes returned to her face. Charlotte smiled and raised her eyebrows; Knox zeroed in on the hieroglyph of freckles th
at marked the bridge of her nose, so faded with the years that Knox wondered if they had in fact disappeared altogether, if she was seeing them out of habit.

  “I heard that part,” Charlotte said.

  “She said something about growing bodies …”

  It felt as if she were lifting the words off the bottom of a lake, struggling to push them up, sediment streaming all around her. She didn’t want to be talking, but she made herself sound just eager enough.

  “And then Robbie said, ‘Coming from the midget’ or whatever—”

  “Oh,” Charlotte said. “I got it.” She squeezed Knox’s arm, then turned to reach behind her for the wine bottle. She topped off Knox’s glass with it. She twirled her wrist up at the end of the pour, sending a stray drop into Knox’s glass rather than down the bottle’s side. “Keep it up,” she said, and winked.

  Knox kept her lips pressed together. The base of her scalp felt prickly. Had her words come out sounding strange? What was Charlotte talking about? She wanted to protest, but just then Charlotte lowered her feet to the ground, half rose out of her chair, and said, “Mom, why don’t you let me do the dishes.”

  Knox’s mother was dragging another chair in from the dining room. She stopped and looked up.

  “It’s nice just to sit together,” she said. “Just leave them. I’ll need plenty of help from everybody tomorrow.”

  “I’m shopping tomorrow,” Robbie said. “For all of your presents. So I’ll have to help when I get home.”

  Their mother laughed. She scooted the chair into its place and sat down. “There, is that better,” she said, looking around.

  “Much,” their father said. “Welcome to our world, Min.” He reached out to pat her on the shoulder.

  “I can do them,” Charlotte said. “Believe me, I do the dishes every day in New York, and I never break a one.” There was a sudden, insistent edge in her sister’s voice.

  “It’s nice just to sit together,” Knox said, enunciating each syllable the way she did with her students.