by Heather Clay
“Thank you, honey. You know, I wish I was there. I wish I could help.”
Her mother sounded so far away.
In the kitchen downstairs, the coffee was still hot. Knox gulped some down before joining Bruce in the living room, where she could hear one of the boys fussing. Ethan lay prone on his back in front of Bruce, who knelt on the floor, wiggling some cotton pants onto Ethan’s legs. Ethan lay red-faced, his cries thin and sporadic, as opposed to sustained; maybe this was his complaint, Knox thought; maybe she’d become capable of discerning meaning in the babies’ noises, instead of freezing up at the sound of them, wanting only for them to stop of their own accord. Ben was strapped into a complicated seat nearby, looking concerned and a bit engulfed by all the fabric and padding around him. There were toys fastened to a bar in front of him—ridiculously so, Knox thought, as he wasn’t mature enough to reach for them, or perhaps even see them; they hung more than a foot away from his face. A colorful, plastic key set. A striped fabric doll with googly eyes that Knox instantly hated without justification. She sat on the floor beside Ben. It seemed only polite to speak to him.
“Your brother doesn’t like that,” she said.
Ben’s mouth worked. His fingers fluttered against the blanket that had been draped over his lower body.
“He wishes he could stay in his pajamas all day. But that would be uncivilized.”
At this, Ethan unleashed a howl that sounded born more of pain than protest.
“Ugh!” Bruce said. “I hate these things.”
“What happened?”
“I just pinched his leg with the snap.”
“Do you want me to try?”
Bruce looked at her.
“I think I’ve got it under control, thanks. Why don’t you run out for some bagels for us?”
“Okay,” Knox said, though she could only remember having eaten a bagel once before in her life, and once had been enough. “Listen, I’m sorry I slept in. I’m going to get a clock today.”
Bruce was back at the snaps, his mouth twisted in concentration. “It’s okay, buddy, almost done,” he murmured.
“What time did the boys get up?”
“I got them up at seven-thirty. Don’t worry about it. There’s a bakery on the corner. Do you need some cash?”
She resolved not to oversleep again.
KNOX HADN’T PREVIOUSLY experienced days that were lived at two such completely different speeds at once, so that the feelings of extreme tedium and of the hours disappearing so quickly that there was no accounting for them were inextricable from each other. The week passed. Messages piled up on her phone: from Ned, from Marlene, her mother. Each evening, Knox planned to call them back, and instead was lost in a fug of TV, takeout, and last-minute tasks. She learned to boil a kettle of water at the end of each day to have at the ready for the night bottles. To wash the bottles themselves out by hand throughout the day, so they didn’t pile up—the hot water required for this was cracking the skin at her knuckles already; Knox added dish gloves to her growing mental list, even as she realized that these phantom objects she had planned to shop for at some phantom hour of leisure might have to be procured by a phantom servant, whose characteristics she took pleasure in imagining. She learned to keep a burp cloth on her shoulder for feedings; Ben had a habit of spitting up. She learned that Ethan burped most easily when his back was rubbed in circles while facing forward on her lap, and Ben needed little finessing beyond being lifted onto her shoulder and patted once. She learned how to close off pockets of time, as if she were tying off tourniquets; during the feedings, during the times afterward when she burped one or another of the boys, during the times they needed rocking to sleep, or to be walked the length of the living room, up and down, because they needed calming or something to look at or some sense of motion to distract them from their helplessness; she’d already become adept at needing nothing in the present, and at forgetting the past and the future—even a future so immediate that it would afford her the gratification of a trip to the bathroom to pee, the sustenance a slice of cheese hurriedly stuffed into her mouth in the kitchen might provide. She could check out, become invisible to herself; she was a pair of arms, a shoulder, and a brain during these times, and her brain was not hers but a universal brain, a database she’d accessed the password to that held specific information on housework and child care: clean pajamas, yes; crib sheets, change; pacifiers, sterilize; within the coming hour: wake, change, and bathe. Knox motored through the apartment like she had been programmed. This afforded her more satisfaction than she would have anticipated. Her accomplishments were small and almost immediately rendered necessary again as soon as she’d achieved them, but, like the steps that made up one of her long runs around the perimeter of the farm, they added up to something. She was tired—stupidly so—but was able to rouse herself, stand, and perform at the points she needed to. She kept going. The balls of her feet were sore from crossing the wood floors, the muscles in her left shoulder tender. She didn’t think.
On Friday, she and Bruce bundled the boys into their double stroller for a checkup at their pediatrician’s office. Throughout the week, Knox felt, she’d been able to stay out of Bruce’s way fairly well, offering him wordless company at night, in front of one of his police dramas or A&E biographies, but otherwise orbiting as opposed to colliding with him during their days. Their exchanges had been about the babies, about chicken tikka masala versus chicken vindaloo, about whether or not it was time to do another load of whites. Her thought was that Bruce wanted it this way, that they were existing together in a kind of purgatory which, due to its brevity, made small talk superfluous. They were waiting together to board a train, having just witnessed a shooting in the station. They could exchange glances of horror and bewilderment, defer to each other during the police questioning. But they wouldn’t try to know each other; what was the point of that? Knox had even thought to feel relieved that Bruce’s old jumpy eagerness seemed to have leaked out of him—his eyes left her face now before she’d even finished answering one of his questions. And this was fine; had he needed anything from her beyond what she was giving, she would have failed him.
This morning, though, she’d felt almost constantly in Bruce’s way. She’d been standing in the wrong place when he’d opened the refrigerator door, and he’d bumped her with it; they’d both raced to be the first to apologize. In the boys’ room, they’d been reaching at the same time for diapers, for clothes, and had to finally agree to take turns dressing the twin they’d assigned themselves to, leaving each other alone to work in the small space. And at the front door, she’d had to stand aside while Bruce fitted the stroller through the opening; the carriage was too wide for her to stand abreast of it as they left the apartment.
“Just let us get through first,” he’d said, and Knox felt startled at the sharpness in his voice. She watched him struggle, shifting the thing from right to left in an effort to wiggle it over the threshold, the boys impassive in the car seat pods that were secured to the frame. Knox could just make them out under the sun canopy Bruce had already pulled over them, made of some navy-blue nylon that cast them into a safe gloom. No possibility of skin damage under there.
“Are you sure I can’t help you?” Knox said. She had the feeling of lighting a long fuse for the purpose of finding out how powerful the explosive was that lay at the end of it; getting Bruce to engage was surely better than remaining passive if she was going to be snapped at.
“It’s sort of like changing a tire, I think,” Bruce huffed. “Only one person can do it.”
“Okay.”
When they reached the bottom of the brownstone steps at last, having carried the stroller down together, urging each other not to let it tip, Knox said, “Do you want me to take them to the appointment by myself? I think I can handle it.” She wasn’t at all sure she could handle it and felt a bloom of anxiety, as well as surprise, when Bruce drew himself up to his full height, looked past her toward the end of the b
lock, and seemed to consider her offer. A street cleaner approached while she waited; she wondered how the boys were reacting to the noise, heat, and sensation that had assaulted them as soon as they’d been hauled outside. Had she remembered their bottles? Yes.
“No. They’re getting shots today. An MMR, I think, and the DTaP. I’d feel bad not being there.”
Knox had to shield her eyes from glare in order to look into his face. His beard had gotten fuller over the course of these few days, and his eyes looked red rimmed, whether from fatigue, or some darker emotion, she couldn’t be sure. He pursed his lips, exhaled. He’d put on a denim-blue T-shirt and a pair of battered corduroys, some shoes that looked more appropriate for the office than a hot stroll through the Village. Perhaps they’d been the only pair he could find. Knox felt struck by her ability to see him in that moment as a kind of archetype: man in crisis. She wondered how she looked; she’d purposefully avoided mirrors for the last few days, not that she spent a lot of time gazing in them at home. How many times had Bruce left the house in the preceding week? She knew he’d run the trash to the curb. He’d popped out for some paper towels the other night.
The words came before she had a chance to check herself against overstepping. “I can do all the talking. If you’re afraid. If we see … anyone you know.”
Bruce seemed about to speak, but didn’t. He nodded, then raised his shirttail and wiped it quickly against his forehead, where Knox could make out a glitter of sweat. His stomach was exposed only for a moment, long, with a light stripe of hair bisecting it at the middle, almost concave at its center, muscled at the sides. The glimpse of it evoked a gentleness in Knox that she put immediately to one side; it would embarrass Bruce, and there on the sidewalk, they stood close enough to each other that Knox was prey to the ridiculous notion that he could read her thoughts. Though she had nothing to hide; she’d merely realized that she had the power to help him, right now, and, just as she’d been in the habit of with Charlotte, this power helped her to see whomever she wielded it over in a better light, behave like a better person, she thought, than she naturally was.
“HI,” the boys’ doctor said when she entered the exam room. She was attractive in a bohemian, born-in-the-neighborhood sort of way, Knox thought, dressed in a snug halter top and vivid flowered skirt, sandals that looked as if they’d been tooled in some Greek marketplace in the seventies. She paused in front of the standing scale and held her arms out to Bruce. He entered them and stood in her embrace for a few seconds while Knox extricated Ben from his onesie. Bruce’s face was pale.
“And you are,” she said, after rubbing Bruce’s bare arms as if they were cold, giving him a last long, fraught glance. The bangles on her wrist chimed against one another as she extended her hand to Knox.
“I’m the sister,” Knox said, shaking. The doctor’s hand was cold and dry. “The sister-in-law. The aunt.”
“Well, it’s good you’re here. These guys need lots of calm, happy adults around them, after what they’ve been through. I’m Dorothy.”
The doctor’s ability to refer right away, with such openness, to the fact that the boys’ mother was dead came as both shock and relief to Knox. She suddenly wanted to be hugged by her, too—or to lie down on the paper-covered table, turn toward the Sesame Street wallpaper, and let the woman stroke her hair, maybe sing. “Kumbaya.” “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” “Big Yellow Taxi.”
“You want to keep him in your lap while I examine him? Hold his arms,” she said, referring to Ben. She scoped his eyes, ears, throat, checked his reflexes, rotated his thighs to check hip flexibility, measured his head circumference. After he was weighed and measured, a nurse came in and administered the shots, which sent Ben into such a rage that Knox found herself urging him to breathe while his lips turned indigo. She walked with him into the waiting area and jogged him up and down while he screamed. The receptionist kept her eyes trained on her computer screen, unfazed. There was only one other mother in the toy-cluttered room—an older woman—with a girl of about ten resting against her side. The woman smiled sympathetically at Knox, who kept bouncing. Amazing, how quickly one got the hang of bouncing. She felt as if she’d always been doing it, though she could count on one hand the times she’d even held a baby before, much less one this little. Ned’s old, bad joke: you could even count on his hand, and still come out accurate.
Dorothy’s cool fingers touched her shoulder, and Knox felt momentarily confused; was she getting that hug after all?
“Why don’t you come into my office,” Dorothy said instead, all business. Knox followed her into an adjacent room, decorated with an O’Keeffe image on a poster from the Santa Fe Music Festival.
Dorothy rocked back in her ergonomic chair.
“The boys look great,” she said. “Considering. I’m happy with their growth. When did the umbilical stumps come off?”
“Um—Ben’s, I think, on Tuesday. Ethan’s hung on a little longer.”
“Mm. Well, talk to them a lot. Just narrate what you’re doing around the house, read the newspaper aloud—it’s good for them. Make sure to use the A&D at every change; they both look a little red in that area to me. They sleep together?”
“Yes.”
“That’s okay for a little longer, but start phasing it out. Maybe for the naps. They’ll be turning and covering ground in that crib before you know it.”
“All right.”
“No stomach sleeping, I’m assuming.”
“No.”
“Now.” She fixed Knox with a look. Her hair fell in perfect corkscrews around her pert face. “About Bruce. You need to watch him for any signs of posttraumatic stress. You’re in the best position to do this. If he seems at all confused by events, forgetful, strangely agitated or withdrawn, if he shows weird signs of temper, changes in behavior, abuse of alcohol or drugs—these are all things you can come to me about, and I’ll get a referral for you. Is he seeing anybody now, anybody professional?”
“No—not that I know of,” Knox said. He doesn’t leave the house, she thought. Who could he see?
“Well, try to get him to. He certainly needs that.”
Ethan wailed from somewhere outside the room.
“Sometimes grief over maternal death can manifest itself in aggression—even toward the infant. I don’t mean to scare you. It’s just that it’s important for Ethan and Ben that you watch him, too. Do they have a baby nurse?”
“No. We’re the baby nurse, so far.”
“More outside help would be beneficial, too. Try to talk him into that. Is he going to sue the hospital?”
“I haven’t heard any talk about that.”
“Well, that’s admirable. A lot of people would sue the shit out of them, even though from what I understand there wasn’t any malpractice involved. Just a terrible, terrible thing. A freak thing. I learned about DIC in med school, but I’ve never seen it. Never had a maternal death in childbirth like that in our practice before. And she was so nice. I met her, of course, before the birth.”
“Yes.”
Knox thought she could begin to see, now, what Bruce had feared: that out in the world, it might become clear that their situation was even more devastating than they’d feared, that there were repercussions they hadn’t even considered. As opposed to offering the benefit of their perspective, people with cooler heads, objective people, might simply have the time and space to grasp how fucked they really were. It scared Knox, the idea that her sister was a point of discussion among obstetric and pediatric professionals throughout the city. Charlotte as cautionary watercooler tale. As downtown Manhattan myth, chat room ghost story. This story belonged to her family, surely, and didn’t have the breadth to shelter any stranger who might want to huddle under it. In her arms, Ben began to whimper, perhaps echoing his brother’s agitation. Did they worry about each other, Ben and Ethan? Did one’s distress become the other’s distress, this early in their lives? She could probably ask Dorothy, but she wanted to get out of thi
s office. She rose from her seat, dropping a burp cloth and Ben’s pacifier in the process, then dipping at the knees to try and retrieve them without jostling Ben. And why did Dorothy assume that Knox had any ability to persuade Bruce to do things like enlist psychiatrists and baby nurses to his aid, when she couldn’t even seem to convince him to let her help eke the stroller through the door?
“I am so sorry about your loss,” Dorothy intoned from her desk as Knox contorted further to reach and gather Ben’s little set of accessories. Knox could picture her jamming at a Dead show, her taut little body writhing in ecstasy, her corkscrew curls bouncing in time with the relentless drumbeat. So sorry for your loss so sorry so sorry for your loss sosorrysosorry.
“Yes,” Knox said, for the second time. “Thanks.”
SHE FOUND BRUCE at the receptionist’s desk, paying the bill. Ethan was already strapped into his seat; Bruce had left his cotton pants off, so the round camouflage-printed Band-Aids that covered the places the needles had poked Ethan’s soft thighs were visible. His eyes were closed, and each breath he drew contained a leftover shudder from his earlier crying fit. Ben’s eyes were bright as Knox strapped him in, too; suddenly, he looked owllike to Knox. Rapt and full of understanding. His cheeks were blotchy.
“Try some infant Tylenol,” the nurse called to them as she crossed into another exam room. “Point eight—the lowest amount in the syringe. That’ll make them more comfortable after the vaccinations. And make sure those Band-Aids come off in the bath tonight. They end up in the funniest places if you leave them on—you’d be surprised.”
“Okay,” Knox called back when it seemed clear Bruce wasn’t going to answer.
Bruce scanned the credit card receipt the receptionist handed him and signed. Soon, after another brief struggle with a set of stairs and a heavy door, they were out on the sidewalk together.
“Should we go home?” Knox said. She was reeling. The crying, Dorothy’s efficient delineation of directions from which further calamity might strike, the coffee she’d drunk that morning, refilling her cup from the coffeepot the several times it had cooled while she’d been distracted from her breakfast. They stood together, in the sun, the gargantuan carriage between them. Knox seized the handle and began pushing it back and forth, just a little, while they waited for Bruce to say something. She did it as much to steady herself as to soothe the boys with the movement.