Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  Her mother was hurrying toward the door to greet someone; Knox saw the woman she’d hired for the day to bring the boys to the service, then bring them home again once they’d made their appearance. Her mother had—gently, it’s true—insisted to Bruce that Ethan and Ben would want to know, later in their lives, that they had participated in this day, even for a few minutes, and solved the problem of who would look after them by providing the name of the lady who stepped into view now, the soft wave of her hair frosted gray around her face, holding one twin in each plump arm. The boys were dressed identically in navy blue jumpers over white shirts—also provided by her mother.

  Knox was momentarily overtaken by the sense that this was a play, and they the actors, hushed in the wings. She felt sick. Perhaps if she’d thought to drink another glass or two before leaving home, she’d feel calmer.

  Ned was at her side. He whispered in her ear, “You okay?”

  She nodded. Her mother drew the woman holding the twins closer, and when Ben saw Knox, he began to whimper and wriggle against the woman’s chest. Knox reached for him without thinking.

  “This is my younger daughter,” her mother explained to the woman, who smiled pityingly, and handed Ben over. Knox gathered him up and kissed the top of his head, her eyes briefly closing. Ben stilled, and quieted.

  “You have quite a way with that little man,” her father whispered, standing close to her now. He seemed smaller, diminished in some way, his jacket too loose on his frame.

  Knox’s eyes filled with tears.

  “I love you,” she whispered back.

  It was time to move into the church. The place was full of people and murmur and dusty light. There wasn’t any music yet; Knox shuffled down the aisle in her appointed place behind her parents and Bruce, abreast of Robbie, who kept glancing at her as if for affirmation that he was going through the correct motions. As she walked, she was aware of the looks she and Ben were receiving, the sighs emitted when people saw the baby in her arms. She hadn’t meant to draw further attention to herself in this way, to have this special status conferred upon her, and felt some mild shame that Bruce’s arms were empty; Ethan would be brought to their pew through a side door; the woman holding him was behind them somewhere.

  They slid into the pew. Ned and Robbie had switched places at some point; now Ned’s hand was at her back, guiding her. She braced her legs and sat down with care; Ben was drowsing in her arms, and she didn’t want to jostle him. Her stockings chafed her at the waist; she was hot. A current seemed to be moving through her, threading through her arteries like a wire, humming with an extraneous energy that was too much for her body to contain. Was she going to have some sort of episode? She tightened her arms around Ben and felt grateful for the curve and solidity of the wood under her, for its smoothness. It was cherry, she thought, suddenly. Hardwood with lethal flower, horse killer.

  The minister led them in prayer. Lindsay Acheson was slated to speak. After the hymn, she made her way to the gilded lectern, her round face streaked with tears.

  “Charlotte was my best friend as a little girl,” she began in a reedy voice. “And though the years thrust us apart in some ways, I will never forget her high spirits, her sense of mischief and fun. Once—”

  Knox glanced to her right, at Bruce. He looked frozen in place. She grazed Ben’s back with her fingers; he stirred, then rearranged himself on Knox’s breast, completely asleep now.

  Lindsay continued. This is a memorial for Charlotte’s youth, Knox thought, not for Charlotte herself. The flowers at the altar were pink and fluted. The picture of Charlotte that had been chosen for the program looked too young, too innocent, to really be her. Knox had no idea where it had been taken. Had her mother asked Bruce to provide it?

  The minister touched Lindsay’s arm as she descended from the lectern. He looked hollowed out to Knox, devoid of color, his robe furling around him as he moved as if there were nothing substantively corporeal under it. He smiled before speaking.

  “I did not know this young woman in life,” he began. “Though it has been my pleasure to get to know the Bollings recently, and to get to know Charlotte through the recollections of those who loved her. This is one of the most difficult tasks a minister can be faced with: the memorializing of a person whose hand one never shook, whose face one never saw animated in conversation.”

  Knox stole a glance at her mother, who sat rigidly upright, her fine hair teased into a gossamer cloud around her face. Her eyes were rapt; Knox could see this man could break her with a word.

  “The artist Piranesi was trained as an architect. He was famous for his etchings, which took existing Roman ruins and restored them to their original glory. He re-created what was missing, through his art. I suppose you could call this some version of my job, to fill in both my gaps in knowledge so that I may do full honor to Charlotte’s life, and to fill in the gaps in each of you today created by her loss, so that we may feel more whole, and our celebration of her more whole.”

  The minister paused to sip from a glass of water that had been placed somewhere at his elbow; it took him twice as long as it should have to accomplish this small thing.

  “A series of Piranesi’s etchings, though, called Imaginary Prisons, were different from his other works,” he continued. “These were also of architectural structures, but instead of visions of perfection, they were mazes without exits. Staircases led upward into stone walls, doors were placed without purpose. In these works, the edifice became a trap, a trick, a nightmare.”

  What is he talking about, Knox thought. That he’d referred so openly to the fact he’d never even met Charlotte made her feel anxious. Couldn’t he have lied about that?

  “Such is life with and without God. With God, we have the power to realize the vision of the great architect of our lives, and to realize the fullness of our relationships with others. Without God, the most magnificent of structures—mainly, us—becomes devoid of meaning and purpose. Perhaps Piranesi understood these distinct possibilities. But what it’s important to know is that without God, the process of assigning the life and death of this cherished young woman her proper place and meaning in each of your lives may become a maze from which it is impossible to discover any exit.”

  Knox felt her thoughts crowding through her; she was unable to slow them down. Her knee grazed the pew in front of her as she shifted, and she found herself focusing on the place of contact, where there was a nick in the varnished surface of the wood, which glowed like something vital.

  Too quickly, it was her turn. She looked down at Ben, his transparent eyelashes fanning against the skin of his cheek. His lips, the color of the altar flowers, were parted. God, he was dazzling. A perfect thing. It was clear to her that she couldn’t wake him, that she needed to bring him with her up to the lectern now. She formed a basket with her forearms and, pressing him to her, negotiated her way over Ned’s knees, and past Robbie, who was trying to stand to make way for her, his young limbs a tangle, a puzzle he had to solve.

  There was a microphone at the lectern, a dark bulb at the end of a small arc of brass, beckoning her. If she spoke directly into that, she would wake Ben, would frighten him, she thought, so she positioned her mouth slightly to the left of it, bending down, her body mirroring the shape of the brass rod, a long, slim, curved thing, live, electric. Knox rested one of her elbows on the wooden edge of the stand, to steady herself.

  “I wanted to say something about love,” she said, looking up at last as the final word proceeded from her lips. There were hundreds of faces staring up at her, expectant. There were Marlene and Jimmy, their shoulders touching. She could hear she’d been too loud, despite the precaution she’d tried to take; the mike was picking her up, and Ben shifted in her hands.

  “I wanted to say something about family, also, today,” she went on, though she knew it would happen, and it did: Ben’s dark eyes blinked open; they were Charlotte’s eyes; and he opened his mouth in a wail that gathered volume and urgency as
it came; he had no idea where he was, or what was happening. Knox raised the top of his head to her lips, began whispering into his ear, bouncing in place. In a moment, Bruce was moving toward her, his hands splayed, his face full of understanding. She met his eyes. They’d been part of a sacred dance, the two of them, and she hadn’t understood until she was back home that it might be over for good.

  “Hey,” Bruce mouthed. His face twisted into a half smile. “Let me take him.”

  Knox stepped toward him, and the delicate handoff was under way; Bruce’s tapered hands closed around Ben, who started to calm in his father’s presence. Bruce moved aside, toward the side aisle; he’d stand out of the way in lieu of returning to his seat. Knox bit her lip, resolved to gather herself. What was it she’d wanted to say? That she needed to recover? Her eyes scanned the front pew, the faces of her people, and lit on Ned’s, with his strong clean-shaven jaw and pretty eyes behind his glasses, telegraphing such encouragement in his expression. Go on, he seemed to be saying with that face, as well known to her as her own, and suddenly it came to her, what had eluded her, before. I don’t love you, she thought. Not the way I’m supposed to. When she was too overcome to continue speaking, she thought she registered forgiveness in his look, and she wanted to tell him that he didn’t understand, and that she was so sorry, so, so sorry, but then she felt the minister’s hand resting gently on her back, and she was waving her hands in front of her face, and stepping aside.

  KNOX STOOD on the porch of the guesthouse where Bruce and the boys were staying, a baking dish in her hands. She’d spent the last two and a half hours making lasagna, though what she’d wanted was to lie down in her dress and sleep and perhaps never wake up. Instead, after the reception at her parents’, she’d driven out of the field where the car guys—the same group, with the pimples and lazy smiles and self-deprecating manners and blinding white dress shirts she remembered from all her parents’ summer parties, now gone silent, their gazes sorrowful and kind—had parked her, and made her way straight to the Kroger’s in Versailles, where she’d powered up and down each wide aisle, surprised at what she seemed to be doing. The place was a psychedelic whirl of color, vast as a midway; at this time of the evening it seemed peopled by the aimless and elderly, each customer more tragic, sunken, and shambling than the next. Her cart was overly large and difficult to keep on course. Her uncomfortable heels smacked against the linoleum to the time of the piped-in music all around her. Canned plum tomatoes, no-boil noodles, bags of shredded cheese, ground beef, oregano, cumin. She needed everything. She could smell dust here on the porch, the sour odor of decomposing leaves. A breeze touched her face, and she knew from the weight of the air that it would rain soon. She’d finally changed into jeans while the lasagna baked, filling her cabin with an extravagance of scent that made her ashamed of the lacks it had suffered on her watch. She’d never cooked. There was so much she’d never done. The dish she held was too hot, too heavy for her to bear gracefully; she raised one foot off the ground and tried to balance it on her knee, where it teetered, the foil she’d laid over the top and forgotten to crimp under the handles sliding partly off. She’d made enough for eight people, but she hadn’t known how to reduce the one recipe she’d found in the cabin in a Joy of Cooking that her mother had relegated to a shelf there, probably for the sake of decoration rather than out of any real faith that Knox would put it to proper use.

  Bruce opened the door. He wore a loose T-shirt with the suit pants he’d had on earlier. A burp cloth was slung over his shoulder. He held on to the edge of the door, as if he wanted to be prepared to close it after her, once she’d gone.

  “Are the boys down,” Knox asked. She whispered out of habit, though the room her mother had prepared for the babies was well out of earshot.

  “Hopefully,” Bruce said. He didn’t smile. “They’re in their cribs, anyway.”

  Knox stood still, waiting to be invited in. Bruce watched her.

  “I made lasagna,” she said stupidly.

  “Thank you,” Bruce said.

  “It was a long day,” Knox said. She took a breath. “It wasn’t what I wanted, either. I just wanted you to know that.” As she said this, she became so dizzy with sorrow for herself that she felt she might have to hang on to the door, too. Her throat pained her, and she knew she was going to cry.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and tried to compose herself. At least she could show Bruce she didn’t mean to be crying, and was fighting to stop. “I’m—could you take this fucking dish?”

  Bruce laughed, then, a laugh that degenerated into coughing and then renewed itself while he moved to relieve her.

  “Sorry,” he said. He opened the door wider, still laughing. It was a laugh she hadn’t heard in New York—there was something reckless in it, as if he might have given himself permission to go mad. He looked straight at her, one of his hands balancing the lasagna. Knox ducked past him, though she hadn’t formally been asked inside. Where else did she have to go? Robbie was headed back to school the next day; Ned was lost to her; it was too cold to swim. What she really wanted, she knew the instant she entered the desolate hallway, was to hold one of the babies. She wanted her arms filled with them, to smell their heads and their lotioned, still-skinny bodies inside their pajamas. She wanted to rub her index finger along the ridges their spines made, over the brief jut of their shoulder blades, rest one of their soft, diapered butts on her forearm, press them against the length of her torso, and stay. She resolved not to stop moving and crossed toward the stairs. She could hear Bruce set the dish down somewhere behind her, and his footsteps on the bare treads climbing after hers, but he made no effort to stop her.

  The door to their room was open; a humidifier hummed somewhere inside. In the glow from the nightlight stood two round cribs, trussed up with gingham and eyelet, along the walls of what Knox remembered now was a former study, paneled in some cheap veneer. The trappings of the nursery were incongruous with the soul of the room, but the preparation her mother had put in was everywhere: there were two matching hampers, a storage system with coordinating baskets, an elaborate mobile hung from a hook in the ceiling. The plush rug underfoot muted her entrance, and she didn’t even know which twin she was lifting until he was in her arms: Ethan, just a touch lighter, the slight knob at the top of his skull discernible under her palm, which was gliding over him, reading his form like Braille. She held him against her and swayed in place, nuzzling his scalp.

  Bruce stepped into the room. He seemed to consider each piece of furniture in it. Knox felt strangely embarrassed for him, for a moment, there among all the baby comforts; the fact that he—and, indeed, Charlotte—would never have been responsible for the existence of a room like this, yet was forced to make it his temporary dominion, emasculated him somehow. It was as if her mother had turned Bruce himself into an infant by creating this frilly environment for his sons. God, she was tired, thought Knox. She had better put Ethan down again, before she fell asleep right here and dropped him.

  There was a knocking sound; Knox looked and saw the diaper pail rolling on the floor; Bruce must have stumbled against it. Immediately, Ben started to wail. She began jogging Ethan up and down in her arms by instinct, but after a few seconds it was clear he wouldn’t wake. Bruce reached down into the other crib for Ben; when he raised the boy to his shoulder, Ben gave a loud burp and lowered his head against Bruce’s T-shirt, asleep again as quickly as he’d roused himself. Bruce began to rock him, just as he might if Ben were still awake, dipping low at the knees and moving from side to side about the room, drawing U’s in the air with his long body. He traced a slow, rhythmic circle around the place where Knox stood with Ethan, his eyes trained straight ahead, his face expressionless. Knox put Ethan down and waited until Bruce had lowered Ben into the opposite crib, then preceded him out of the room.

  Bruce left the door open a crack. They stood on the landing that overlooked the front hall.
The only light here was from a lamp Knox’s mother had plugged into a corner below them.

  “I’m sorry,” Knox said.

  “For what,” Bruce said.

  “For needing that. I almost woke them both up.”

  “You know,” Bruce said. His face looked severe. “I think you apologize too much.”

  “I’m also sorry for today. There was just—there wasn’t enough that honored you, and how much you loved her.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Bruce’s brown eyes flashed; he looked suddenly capable of hitting her.

  “Your wife was just … frozen in time. Didn’t that bother you? It bothered me, and I contributed to it.”

  “So you’re fixing it with a casserole?”

  “It’s lasagna.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Knox,” Bruce began slowly, as if he were speaking to a child. “Charlotte is dead. Ethan and Ben’s mother is dead, and they’ll never know her. I will never talk to my wife again. I am fucking terrified. Do you honestly think that what got said or not said at a church service makes any difference to me? I’m trying to get through the day. Your guilt over … whatever. It doesn’t help me.”

  Knox lowered her head. She was nodding, though her eyes were welling with tears.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, or what is going to happen to my life. So if you can help me with that, you’re welcome to. If you can’t, then I honestly don’t need anything extra to worry about. A memorial is an hour and a half of my existence, all right? Not life and death. Neither is one of the boys waking up, or—much of anything else, come to think of it. Not after … I can’t even fucking say it again. Maybe once I can even say it, I’ll be better off.”