by Heather Clay
“Good,” Knox said. “Everything is good.”
Charlotte didn’t rush to fill the pause. She squinted. “Ned’s meeting us later?” she said finally.
“He might. He’s having supper with his mother.”
“How’s he?”
“Ned, he’s fine,” Knox said, glad to have been prompted on a subject other than herself. “Working hard. He’s got a new truck. He’s so proud of it. It’s one of those big, awful ones with a backseat in it that you practically need a ladder to get into.”
Charlotte was looking at her with her head cocked. Knox brushed at her mouth, thinking she might have some fleck of dessert clinging to the corners. “He paid too much for it,” Knox went on.
Charlotte began to laugh. “I don’t care about his truck,” she said, and Knox flushed.
“He’s—we’re still the same,” Knox said.
Charlotte nodded, beat a little tattoo on the table’s surface with her fingers.
“You know, no one would blame you if you experimented a little, if you feel unsure,” she said. “It isn’t like you’re married.”
“But I am sure,” Knox said. She’d sounded defensive; she checked herself, breathed, glanced around the bar. When she met Charlotte’s eyes again, Charlotte was smiling.
“Of course. You always are,” Charlotte said. Knox thought her tone sounded vaguely insulting. She chose to ignore this.
Now Charlotte looked around her. “How’s work? How are the kids?” she said.
“They’re a handful,” Knox said. She launched into a story about the difficulty she and Marlene had encountered at the holiday program, the ultimate futility of trying to marshal the ADD-affected students onto bleachers for an hour of singing, when all they’d wanted to do was run. After a minute, it was clear that Charlotte wasn’t listening, and Knox changed the subject.
“What about Bruce,” she said. Yuppie Bruce, she and Ned called him; her encounters with him had always been awkward. “Will you be happy when he gets here?” Right away she regretted the way the question sounded, the he overly stressed, as if Knox had meant to ask whether Bruce had succeeded where the rest of them had failed. But Charlotte’s face looked impassive.
“Well, I’m looking forward to picking him up tomorrow,” she said evenly. “Having him around seems to make things easier.”
Knox closed her eyes for a moment; she felt a sharp, literal wince of pain in her head. “Why,” she said, hating what she heard, the word an overanxious bleat. She had meant to say something blithe, like: You know what would make us both happy? Two bourbons, allow me. Instead she sounded nine years old.
Charlotte shrugged. “Because he knows how to talk to Mom and Dad, for one thing. And I don’t seem to be able to.”
Knox inhaled through a small opening in her lips. A dull, familiar anger was overtaking her, and she needed to make it go away. How often did she get to sit like this, talking to her sister, the two of them friends in a bar, and Charlotte was being attentive, doing her best, she’d done nothing wrong by telling the truth. But it was too late.
“You could try,” she said. “You never really try.”
Charlotte watched her. It was difficult to tell whether or not she looked surprised. She began to say something, then stopped.
“I don’t understand you,” Knox went on. She was annoyed at herself; she could feel her eyes, her nose, filling as if the very inside of her head, too, were bent on involuntary exposure. “Why don’t you like being here? You seem so … absent.”
She looked down at the table, not wanting to see whatever Charlotte’s face might be doing.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said quietly.
“What is wrong with you, Charlotte?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Then why is it so hard for you to be happy?”
“I am happy.”
“Happy with us?”
There was a silence. Charlotte pushed her hair back and shifted in her chair.
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “We really don’t have to get into this.”
“What is this? Tell me.” Knox was in motion now; she needed a runway, a half-mile of track in order to slow herself down, not that she was trying.
Charlotte looked at her levelly.
“Not everything is about you. I know you’d like me to be different, but I can’t force everything to be perfect just for your sake, Knox. You want your little picture-postcard family scene, but maybe you should just grow up, and stop expecting that from everyone.”
“What? I didn’t ask you to come. I don’t expect anything from you, God knows.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Mom and Dad love you. Is it so difficult to be grateful, just for that?”
Charlotte glanced around her, perhaps in search of a bartender, or a closer exit.
“You don’t have to speak for Mom and Dad, and you don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “Worry about yourself.”
“I’m fine. I am the one who’s fine.”
“If you say so.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Knox’s voice was rising; she made a conscious effort to lower it, to hew closer to an equanimity that had flown from her grasp. Maybe Charlotte was right. How much wine had she actually drunk with dinner? “Don’t. You clearly see yourself as some sort of tragic figure. But what did any of us ever do to you? Maybe if you could stoop low enough to actually explain it to me, I’d have a better understanding of it. But as it is, you just seem cold to me. Cold and ungrateful.”
“Christ! Where is this coming from?”
Images tumbled violently against one another in Knox’s mind like rocks in a stream: of their father’s face when Charlotte began excusing herself too early from the dinner table years before, of the rococo margins of the unanswered letters she’d sent to Charlotte at boarding school, thick with spiky ball-point doodles of flowers and vines, of the white undersides of her mother’s oval nails that were visible when she overturned her hands in her lap and seemed to forget them, while she wept, her father’s arm around her tiny shoulders, her father smiling apologetically at Knox, saying, Come on honey, it’s not that bad, the skin at his temples gray. Charlotte couldn’t get out of bed. Charlotte needed a higher dosage. Charlotte regretted that none of them understood her. Charlotte couldn’t come home, hadn’t had time to send the gift yet, was sorry, so sorry, but she couldn’t spare the time required to disengage from the consuming fire of her own lot, though she loved them, she loved them all, love ya, Knoxie! Love you!
They drove home in silence that night. Charlotte had given her a glance before climbing back into the passenger seat, but Knox assumed her outburst that night had had a sobering enough effect on both of them to render moot any lingering questions about her ability to stay on the road. The pike they lived on swallowed drunk drivers whole. Knox remembered a boy, a neighbor’s child, who’d run off the road at sixteen and killed himself and a friend at the base of their drive. That was years ago. She remembered suicidal games of chicken in high school, friends occupying adjacent lanes, cresting hills that way, the midnight roulette of the bored and high. She was careful, her foot light and jumpy on the accelerator as the miles broke open before them.
Knox had apologized. It was that or subject herself to the sound of the rant in her head, and she didn’t want that. As she sat at the table across from her sister, she’d come belatedly to her senses and realized again that the fight with Charlotte might be hers alone. She’d fashioned her existence, in large part, as a staunch against the gaps Charlotte had blown in her parents’ confidence, in their image as a family, and done it willingly, but she’d be damned if she’d make herself vulnerable to Charlotte’s disapproval on this score by detailing all the ways she might have been different if only Charlotte had. Spoken aloud, that would most likely have sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous. But that didn’t make it any less true.
And she’d seen something in Charlotte’s eyes, in the bar, tha
t she also didn’t want realized in speech—a flash of tired impatience at the fact of her. The very fact of her made things harder for Charlotte when she was here. Maybe always had. Dutiful Knox, watchful Knox, eminently sane, easy Knox … she’d quit with the adjectives while she was ahead. There was nothing any of them could do about that, so best to leave it alone.
“Don’t mind me,” she’d said.
And Charlotte had stared at her, looking pale as a ghost.
THE HOUSE wasn’t hard to find. Knox had never had a handle on what streets, if any, might be obscure to a cabdriver coming into Manhattan and had proffered the address tentatively. But she recognized the block when they turned onto it and found herself wishing that her taxi had managed to get briefly lost so that she might have called Bruce for directions and managed to arrive in gentle stages, as opposed to all at once. As it was, she felt like the angel of death. She and Bruce hadn’t seen each other since the night in the hospital, though Knox had had a chance to visit the boys in the NICU once more before accompanying her mother and father back to Kentucky. She’d had not one, but two, glasses of watered-down Chardonnay on the flight and felt sleepy and overanxious at once, as if she’d been up all night. She’d picked at her lunch. She paid the cabdriver and lugged her duffel awkwardly up the steps of the brownstone, scraping its wheels against the concrete as she climbed.
She had to knock for almost a minute before Bruce came to the door. He loomed into view behind the thick glass panes beside it, the beginnings of a beard stippling his face, then disappeared again, and she could hear the sound of several locks being turned. The door opened, and now Knox could see that Bruce held one of the boys—swaddled up in a blanket, asleep—against his chest.
“Hi,” he mouthed, and stepped back to let her enter. His blue T-shirt stretched open at the neck, exposing part of his collarbone. His jaw looked sharp enough to cut, under the shadow of beard that, Knox noted, was flecked with gray. It was momentarily difficult to accept that he was real; but then, she saw him rarely enough that she was used to having to reorganize her impressions of him each time they met. Knox thought that the things in his face she’d always recognized might have become more pronounced since she’d seen him last: his dark brown eyes looked larger and his mouth looked more compressed. He was handsome in a way that hinted at a youthful handsomeness that had faded. His hairline may have been high to begin with. He was lanky, his wrists and fingers bony and tapered, and there was a stillness to him that posed a contradiction, given the kinetic energy that seemed to beam off his body. Bruce was the kind of guy who couldn’t help bouncing in his chair, or shifting in place where he stood, but who also waited a disconcerting extra beat before responding to something you’d said and tended to stare until you had to look away.
When Bruce leaned down to peck her on the cheek—he didn’t have to stoop far; Knox was nearly as tall as he was—she could smell milk, the residue of some powdery baby unction, undiluted sweat. She wondered when he’d last showered. The side of her faced buzzed from the abrasion Bruce’s beard made on her skin. The baby’s head dipped close to hers, a web of blue veins, narrow as hairs, visible just under the skin of his rosy scalp, which looked chapped. His lips were so pink, drawn in a precise, horizontal line; they twitched, as if even in his sleep he resented Knox’s interruption. He seemed to have no eyelashes. Knox stared at him in dumb wonder.
“Ethan,” Bruce whispered, nodding at him. “He just ate.”
He smiled at her, though Knox could see his face straining to hold the expression until he could see she’d registered it, then relax into a grimmer resting expression. He clutched the back of his neck with his free hand.
“Come on in,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you.” He spoke these last words in an exaggerated Vincent Price, Transylvania voice. Knox waited for him to shut the door and flip all the locks back into place, then hoisted her bag up and followed him down the dark hall.
She had tried to prepare herself for the possibility that Bruce would be overcome in some way when he saw her. How this would manifest itself she didn’t know, but she had gone so far as to rehearse certain responses in her head. As she peered into the crib he showed her toward now—a wide, white slatted job that had been set up in the living room and into which Bruce lowered Ethan next to Ben, she realized that she had discounted the twins altogether in her assumption that, as perhaps the closest living reminder to Charlotte, her arrival would force a certain level of emotion, for both of them, immediately out into the open. But of course, she wasn’t the closest living reminder of Charlotte, not by a country mile, and now could hardly believe the narcissism inherent in the way she’d pictured this scene. She stared at the babies, trying to decipher any features she recognized, now that their faces had cohered into something more than the red, twisting, bright-eyed blanks she remembered from the hospital. They still looked nothing alike to her—and didn’t yet look like anyone she knew, either, though Ben looked to have Charlotte’s coloring. They were curled facing each other in their swaddle cloths like quotation marks around the empty space between them, so small on the expanse of white sheet that Charlotte must have bought at some neighborhood shop. Ben’s fist twisted its way free of his blanket and pressed against his cheek. He twitched, sighed, stilled. Knox’s eyes filled with sudden tears, and she was grateful for a reason to keep her eyes trained downward, so Bruce wouldn’t see. This was how they were going to play it, she thought. No histrionics on purpose. She was not here to receive comfort from a widower; she knew that much, though it occurred to her that she already missed the version of events she’d pictured, that had them commiserating, comparing losses.
“They’re still sleeping all the time,” Bruce said. “But I think they’re about to come out of that stage. And they’re not quite on the same program, which makes things interesting.”
“I may mix up their names at first,” Knox said. She cleared her throat; the words had come out too coated.
“Ethan’s the one with the reddish peach fuzz,” Bruce said, quiet, gesturing toward one of the boys. “And the painful gas, unfortunately.”
“How have you been doing this?” Knox said.
“I don’t know,” Bruce said.
SHE ASSUMED he’d taken a leave from work. As far as she knew, there was no other help, aside from the housekeeper he’d mentioned while pouring her some coffee straight out of a glass beaker he’d brought into the living room, where they sat, waiting out the babies’ naps. Knox accepted the chipped mug Bruce offered her; it felt good to hold something warm in her hands, though the air in the room was close. Her hands wanted an occupation—otherwise, they might loose themselves from her body and fly away like birds.
“How are your mom and dad doing?” he asked. He took a slurp from his own mug, lowered it, and kept his eyes on the steam that rose from inside its rim.
“They’re okay,” Knox said.
Surely Bruce could recognize this as a shallow response; she’d left her father staring at the ceiling of her parents’ room, her mother starting at every ringing telephone. Knox had even wondered at her mother’s lack of fight when Knox had informed her that she wanted to spend this interim, before the funeral, in New York. She hadn’t expected her mother, a new grandmother despite everything, to acquiesce as easily as she had. But it was clear that her parents were in no shape to offer assistance to anyone except each other right now. Knox swallowed. The truth would only make Bruce feel worse.
“How are you doing?” Knox asked. She’d ventured the question to fill the silence, really; it seemed even more dangerous to let a true silence fall than to say the wrong thing.
Bruce stared at her, running his hands through his hair, ruffling it up on the sides and then smoothing it down again. For a long moment, Knox wondered if he’d forgotten her question, if she should manufacture another. But then he lowered his hands and slapped one against each of his knees, which bounced in place inside his grubby jeans.
“Um. I’m not sure what t
o say.”
“Oh—,” Knox began. There was something blank in Bruce’s eyes just now, making it hard to fathom his intent. Did he mean to delineate a boundary? Was he angry with her for the question? “That was stupid, of course—”
“No,” Bruce said. He opened his hands. “Really, I was being serious. It just feels right now like there’s Charlotte, and then there’s the boys. And each of those categories sort of requires a different response.”
“Okay.”
“They even cancel each other out. If the boys’ diapers are changed and there’s plenty of formula in the house and they’re … alive, and so am I, then that seems to mean I’m not thinking too much. I can actually block things out for stretches of time.”
“I guess that’s good,” Knox said. She felt some surprise at how relieved she was to assume the role of confessor, how easily the lines were coming. Had she and Bruce ever sustained a conversation of this length before? Not that she could remember, though that seemed hard to believe. She relaxed, just a little, in her chair.
“I always have to be thinking about the next thing I’m supposed to wash, or boil, or get ready. So.”
“That makes sense.”
“And as far as—I know I don’t want to go outside. The idea that I’m going to run into somebody at the deli who knows what happened—or, worse, who doesn’t—I don’t want that. So I’ve been staying in. Which is fine, because the boys are still so vulnerable to … well-intentioned strangers who’ll paw them, I guess. I saw an old lady on the subway stick her finger in some baby’s mouth, once.”
“I can take care of errands for you.”