Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  At the end of the avenue, a block south, was a park. Knox thought she recognized the stone arch at its entrance from film scenes set in Washington Square—had Charlotte lived so near to Washington Square? It was funny, in New York, how Knox always questioned her recognition of the iconic places; when she’d first seen it out the window of her taxi at Charlotte’s wedding, Knox didn’t believe her father’s assertion that they were passing the Empire State Building, simply because it was right there. And she hadn’t exactly made a banner effort to get to know the city on her few visits here—she could even admit that there had been something almost defiant in her cluelessness that she couldn’t seem to help at the time. A black woman, pushing another double stroller, made her way past the arch, a tote bag with a plastic shovel protruding from the top slung over her shoulder. Another woman, cell phone in hand, followed her, holding the wrist of a little boy—was he two, three? Knox didn’t have the experience to tell, and the kids she taught at home were older. The boy held his crotch with one hand, and tripped after his mother, his legs pressed together.

  “They don’t have to go down again for an hour or so, yet,” Knox said. “Maybe we should take a walk.”

  “That was hard,” Bruce said. He traced an arc against the dust on the sidewalk with the tip of one of his heavy, polished shoes. It occurred to Knox that he might be lonelier in her presence. Was he making a greater effort than he would to keep things together, all for her benefit? If she hadn’t been there in the room, would he have collapsed, sobbing, in Dorothy’s arms?

  “A walk would be good,” he said, attempting a smile.

  They entered the park, a concrete bowl flanked by a few grassy areas and a low wall on which clumps of self-consciously counter-cultural high school kids sat in the shade, their teeth showing white through a haze of pot smoke, their tattooed and pierced bodies and beaded hair lending them a ceremonial aspect, as if they’d gathered for a ritual offering to the Sun God instead of the highly amateur rendition of “Little Wing” that Knox could hear one of them picking on his guitar as they passed. The sound of clapping reached her ears, like rainfall; a crowd was gathered on the far end of the fountain, watching someone perform. She smelled grease, sunscreen, the reek of urine. The leaves on the few trees were dusty. Pigeons waddled out of their way; ahead of them was a small, enclosed playground where a few parents stood listlessly pushing their toddlers in swings. The black woman Knox had seen before stood next to a shin-high painted donkey on a spring, while a girl with perfect French braids rocked back and forth on it, singing to herself.

  Knox, who was pushing the stroller, paused in front of the playground gate, which looked like it might have been originally meant for a medieval jail. It looked eight feet tall and was finished at the top with a row of fussy iron spikes. A padlock hung open on a limp cord that someone had draped through the bars. Was there a fear that the clatter bridge would be stolen? she thought. The children? Or maybe that some of the showy troubadours from the wall, a few of whom she’d bet used to play here not so many years ago, would leave baggies of unsavory things on the ground at night if they got in, open for little explorers to stick their noses in.

  If she’d been asked, why the playground? at the moment she pushed the gate open and began to back the stroller in, she might have produced an answer about the comfort that a picture of the future, of life going on for the boys, might provide. This would become a familiar spot for Ethan and Ben; soon they would be climbing onto the donkey, wrestling each other for the next turn on the slide. As it was, she was operating on instinct, fueled by a nascent fear. Bruce wasn’t talking, and this suddenly worried her. The idea of returning to the house and diving back into their ocean of tasks with an unbroken silence to contend with—silence that Dorothy had alerted her to the possible dangers of—seemed like something to avoid, if she could find a way to do it. There were benches here, and something to look at, and bottles for the boys if they kicked up a real fuss again.

  Knox rolled the boys to a stop in a bench by the swings and sat, without asking Bruce whether or not he cared to.

  “It seemed a little cooler over here,” she said. “We don’t have to stay long, if you want to get home.”

  “I’m fine,” Bruce said, though that wasn’t exactly what she’d asked. He sat beside her and stretched his long legs out in front of him.

  “It’s strange,” he said, after they’d spent a full minute watching the French-braid girl laboring to stay upright while she pushed a dirty plastic lawn mower up a ramp. “I used to pass by here all the time, and now here I am, inside.”

  Knox nodded. The fact that Bruce was initiating conversation made her wonder at herself; maybe the silences between them had been comfortable, and she was worrying over nothing. They did, after all, need to maintain some space within the confines of the house.

  “We don’t know each other very well,” Knox blurted, the confusion over where she stood suddenly overwhelming her.

  Bruce looked at her.

  “No, we don’t,” he said simply. Knox couldn’t say whether she’d expected him to make a joke or protest by asking her what she was talking about, they were family—but that he seemed so unmoved by her remark was unsettling. Bruce sat up straighter, peered under the boys’ sun canopy.

  “I’m not imposing, being here, am I?” Knox said.

  “What?”

  “I’m here to—I guess it’s important for me to know I’m helping you. If not, then I hope you’d tell me.”

  Bruce scratched at his chest, raking the thin material of his shirt back and forth over his skin. He pressed his lips together, squinted, then looked at Knox again. She had trouble meeting his eyes, but made herself; she didn’t want to seem chicken.

  “You’re helping,” he said.

  A couple entered the gate then, pushing a stroller of tangerine canvas, its chassis poised ridiculously high off the ground. The woman came toward them first, sat down on the opposite side of their bench; the man struggled to catch up with her, bumping the stroller over the rubber matting that covered the blacktop where they sat.

  “If you’d listen to what I’m saying,” the man said. He was so average looking in his baseball cap and baggy shorts that, even staring at him, Knox wondered if she’d be able to pick him out of a lineup five minutes hence. His wife, however, was memorable, if not beautiful; her red hair was tied up in a messy bun; her tortoise-shell statement eyeglasses were oversize for her tiny face.

  “I have been listening, and it sucks,” she said. “If you want to go, then go, but I’m not going to fight about it anymore because it’s upsetting to Susannah.”

  Susannah, if that’s who she was, sat like a dissolute queen in her palanquin, tongueing the spout of a SpongeBob sippy cup.

  “I’m not going to go,” the man said. “I’ll just stay home if you’re going to act this way.”

  “Susannah, do you want to go get some pizza? Daddy has to go do Daddy things with his Daddy friends.” The woman took hold of the stroller handle and began walking with it out of the playground as quickly as she’d come in. Her husband stayed behind for a moment, his hands working visibly in his shorts pockets, the coins in them clinking together, then followed, leaving the gate ajar behind him. The black woman quickly moved to shut it before her blonde charge pushed her lawn mower through the gap.

  Knox and Bruce watched them go.

  “God,” Knox said. “Makes me glad I’m not married.”

  As soon as she said the words, she regretted them.

  “Well, you don’t know what marriage is like,” Bruce said.

  “That’s just a few seconds in their day.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You fight, but you keep coming back to the same resting place. And when you get back to it, it’s where you want to be.”

  Knox drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She dug her short nails into the skin of her thighs, but couldn’t manage to press them in deep enough to hurt. She’d
wanted Bruce to confide in her, she supposed, though now that words were actually coming she was afraid where they would lead.

  “I used to follow her, you know. Around the neighborhood. If she’d leave the house, I’d find myself doubting, after a while, that she’d come back when she’d said she would, and then I’d just shadow her like a loser until she came home.”

  “Bruce—”

  “My mother said to me once that she’d been taught when she was a girl to look for a man who loved her just a little bit more than she loved him. Of course, she thought it was bullshit, and was the kind of woman who wanted to be head over heels in love, all the time. But the strange thing is, I did become that guy. I might have loved your sister just a little bit more than she loved me. And I didn’t mind—or I wouldn’t have traded it. Of course I minded.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So, I wouldn’t judge. You might get a glimpse of something, but you may as well be reading one line of a play. You won’t really understand.”

  Bruce was right. Knox had never understood Charlotte’s marriage, or really—aside from her parents’ union—marriage in general. Had she tried? Ned wanted to figure out what their future together was meant to be, but she preferred her pocket-sized life. The kind of existence in which you could experience the gamut of human feeling in the course of a day sounded like hell on earth. Why had Bruce let himself in for that?

  “Why,” she heard herself asking, “did you love her so much?”

  Bruce watched the couples at the swings.

  “I couldn’t make a list for you. I just loved her,” he said. “That’s it.”

  Knox sat still. She pretended to check on the babies, who she’d thought were asleep but were still blinking in the navy-blue light that filtered onto their naked heads. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she whispered to them. Ben twisted a balled fist against one of his eyelids. Ethan’s pacifier had dropped from his mouth.

  “What about you and Ned,” Bruce asked. “You’ve been together a long time, right?”

  “You sound like Charlotte,” Knox said.

  “You don’t have to talk about it.”

  “No—it’s just that he’s just such a … fact. It would be like describing my relationship to gravity.”

  Bruce nodded.

  Why did she feel guilty, saying this? She’d simply been caught off guard by the question. She missed Ned, actually. Surely it was because she was unused to being away from him that she felt incapable of a fuller response than this one. How did you take the measure of what a person meant to you? What you meant to them? It was impossible, she thought. Better not to try.

  “I don’t believe in God,” Bruce said.

  “You don’t?”

  “I mean, I have no idea where Charlotte would be, aside from the crematorium. Nothing else seems plausible to me.”

  “Well,” Knox said. She braced herself against the wave of trite language that threatened to engulf her, let it break and flatten over her until she could say something true. She waited for one beat, two.

  “You believe in that,” Bruce said. “Can you tell me what you think?”

  “I’ve always thought what my mother thought,” Knox said, surprising herself. “Thinking about God was all tied up in my love for her early on, because every time she talked about him, it was to comfort me. God is like a bedtime story, for me. I think of God, and I hear my mother’s voice.”

  “There are worse things than that.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I hear my mother’s voice when I see a picket line,” Bruce said. “Never cross a picket line, never cross a picket line,” he whined. “What opportunity did she think a kid was going to have to cross a picket line?”

  Knox laughed.

  “Just not getting to say goodbye,” Bruce said. “Not getting to say anything.”

  “I know.”

  “How can that be?”

  He started to cry, more motion than sound, his body shaking slightly.

  After a time, Knox handed him a baby wipe she’d dug out from the diaper bag; Bruce accepted it wordlessly and blew his nose into it. He was still watching the swing area, where a father who looked all of nineteen was struggling to extract his son from one of the rubber bucket seats. The boy’s shoe had caught in one of the leg holes, trapping him, as his father tried to lift him out by the armpits. “You’re hurting meee!” the boy called.

  “That’ll be Ethan and Ben soon,” Knox said, though she had trouble conjuring the image, or believing that they’d ever have real words at their disposal, or grow big enough for shoes.

  “Maybe we should try it,” Bruce said. He’d recovered his voice. Still, Knox didn’t know if he was serious.

  “I don’t think—they can’t even hold their necks up,” she said. Ugh, she sounded like a killjoy, even to her own ears. But it was clearly a bad idea. Surely Bruce hadn’t meant it.

  “The seats are so deep they’ll be supported, see? Maybe they would like it.”

  “Aren’t those things crawling with kid germs?”

  “We’ll wipe their hands down. We can just hold on to them and let them feel the motion of it—not even let go. Come on, let’s do it. For one second.”

  He was fumbling with the clasp of Ethan’s seat harness. Knox looked at Ben; he appeared ready to close his eyes at any moment. But the realization that Bruce was in motion, spontaneous motion, whatever her thoughts on the matter were, was enough to generate a lift within her that was physical. Whether from relief, or curiosity, or something less readily defined, she felt her heartbeat accelerate, and began to unstrap Ben in turn. So, they would do something that wasn’t on the schedule. Bruce had his own reasons; she didn’t need to know what they were.

  Bruce had stashed two sun hats in the mesh bag that hung from the stroller’s handle, and handed one to Knox. She tugged it onto Ben’s head; under its wide brim he looked to her like a ninety-year-old man, dozing in his back garden. She smiled at him. He was light in her arms as she walked behind Bruce, the soles of his shoes slapping audibly against the rubber matting. They found two bucket seats, side by side, and lowered the boys in—slowly, carefully, as if into water.

  When their bare feet stuck out, and they sat slumped against the fronts of the seats, their arms limp, their faces just visible above the chin straps of their comical hats, Knox and Bruce began to push the boys forward and back, only a touch, never letting go, watching each other with smiles playing on their lips. Knox took her cues from Bruce, and never lifted the seat higher than he did. The boys were silent. Their eyes darted; they looked shocked by this new experience. Knox breathed a deep draft of the fetid, smelly air and held it, taut with anticipation of any expression either of the boys might relax into, any clue as to what they were thinking. This anticipation was as close to happiness as she’d come, she thought, in the last three weeks. She was glad that she noticed.

  Ethan’s eyes widened; then his face twisted into a mask of anguish, and he began to wail. Knox could see the white rims of his gums, the ridges at the roof of his mouth. He was terrified; his arms stiffened until he seemed to be holding them apart from his body, opening them to the park like a tiny infante from a seventeenth-century painting. Ben took up the cry, and until she and Bruce were able to react and raise the boys into their arms to quiet them, Knox was aware of the image they presented, of a man and woman pushing two frantic newborns back and forth in the park. The image was so desperate, so obviously a misguided, willed attempt at Family Fun, that Knox found herself giggling once she’d pressed Ben against her, and stood rocking him in the sun, separated from the traffic at the northern edge of the square by only a scrim of dead trees and a fence. This was a public humiliation; surely the boys’ screams had registered by now with the hippies on the wall, the crowd by the fountain, the homeless man trying to catch a nap on the floor of the dim men’s room. As Ethan’s sudden panic had been contagious, so was Knox’s laughter, and soon Bruce joined her, his laugh higher in pitch than she
would have expected it to be, a silly cartoon twitter that only added another layer of ridiculousness to their circumstances.

  “We have no idea what the hell we’re doing, do we?” Bruce said, rubbing Ethan’s back.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Knox said.

  KNOX

  KNOX HAD BEEN gathering up laundry, balling it into her duffel bag, where a pile of the babies’ soiled, weightless clothes already waited. She paused, rocking on her haunches on the floor of her attic room, her hair hanging irritatingly in her face, reminded of all those madwomen in books, the hidden, dangerous ones, stashed in sloping cubbies like these. Rochester’s wife. Cinderella. She was clammy with sweat, pitying herself. The only time she wasn’t in motion in this house was when she slept, and God knew sleep had been impossible to come by. The attic smelled like sour milk and cardboard.

  She squatted in place. What would she say now to Charlotte, if she could?

  They were who they were. Ned had told her she didn’t owe Charlotte anything, though surely the truer thing was that they owed each other everything. Would she assure Charlotte she was here, that the boys were okay, that Bruce—though she wasn’t at all sure of this—was okay?

  Bruce. He wouldn’t leave the house. Though his pretext for the time he spent on the living room computer was work, Knox had glanced in passing at the screen the other day and seen him scrolling through some text on the hospital’s Web site. What was the working definition of survival, for Bruce? Was this it? She was used to Ned, to her father: men who expressed pain only under duress, as a kind of shameful last resort. But that day at the playground, he’d struck her as a vessel rigged to spring open at the slightest touch. This both unnerved and intrigued her, though they hadn’t had another conversation like the one they’d had that day. Still, the possibility of disclosure seemed to hang like a scrim in the rooms they passed through, floating overhead but low enough to brush against, should they wish to raise their hands toward it.