by Heather Clay
Knox was starting to sob now, her hand over her mouth, trying to be as quiet as she could. Her chest felt as if it were exploding; it felt good, actually. Good and terrible at once.
“Hey,” Bruce said, grazing her hair with his long, tapered fingers. “Come on.”
She tried to stop, or to indicate that she was going to stop soon, but she couldn’t get her breath.
“Your lasagna helps me. Your lasagna helps me enormously.”
Knox attempted to smile, and failed.
“Knox.”
Something about the sound of her name in his mouth made her cold, and she stood shivering in front of him.
“I wish she could see you with them.” The words seemed to jerk out of her. “It’s not fair.”
When he wrapped his arms around her, the warmth came as a relief. This was her first thought. Then his chin was resting on the top of her head while he held her, and by the time he lowered his face to kiss hers, she had an understanding of what was happening and had chosen it. She couldn’t claim not to have chosen it, or to have been swept up into something she wasn’t conscious of, or couldn’t control. No, she had chosen it, and in the moment, she was glad.
KNOX
THOUGH IT WAS STILL EARLY, Knox was surprised at the deep quiet in her parents’ house when she entered. She crept up the stairs like an intruder, trying not to think of her mother and father, openmouthed in sleep at an hour she would have normally found them at the breakfast table, if life were in any way proceeding as usual. She should turn around and let herself out so as not to risk the embarrassment of waking them. But the idea of returning to the cabin now, to the forced companionship with herself she’d have to endure there, sat like dead weight in her. She wanted ballast, and company—or, at least, the familiarity of her old bed. She made her way slowly, carefully, to her room.
She opened the heavy door off the landing, and paused. Something about the sight of the space, arranged like a shrine to her girlhood, shamed her. She was so tired; she’d planned to lie down on the eyelet coverlet that hung down to the floor, grazing the carpet with its scalloped edge like a veil, but to disturb it now struck her as a violation; the pillows were arranged in such a smooth symmetrical pile; Knox thought of a bier, floating away on the lake of soft carpet. She turned away from the bed and took inventory in a squint; the light streaming through the windows was already too bright. There was her desk, an expanse of bleached pine on which sat the framed pictures of her family; while Charlotte had displayed an array of snapshots on the corkboard wall in her own room, always of herself with various friends and always changing, Knox remembered curating this select group of photographs at an early age and framing them herself: a wedding photo of her parents, a shot of herself and Charlotte bursting through a corona of hose water in the side yard, their bathing suits puckering across their flat chests, and a posed shot of the five of them standing together in front of a fence, Robbie in a bassinet at their feet, pried loose from a Christmas card she’d begged off her mother one year.
On the sideboard that functioned as a bookshelf: a tilting hodgepodge composed of the stuff of school reading lists, for gotten library books, academic texts for the anthropology major Knox had switched halfway through her years at UK. She blinked, then brought her hands together and rubbed. Surely there was a box somewhere up here. She hunted one down in the adjacent guest room and carried it back across the landing, floating it, full as it was of air, onto the rug in front of the shelves. She’d set to work gathering books the center could use; there was an anemic library there, and the classrooms were always hard up for books the students could practice with. Yes, this struck her as a legitimate way to spend the morning. She’d even alphabetize as she sorted. She took a breath and began.
She’d fed the boys this morning and let Bruce sleep. To even touch on the image of herself in the half-light in the babies’ room, shushing Ethan as she waggled the bottle gently against Ben’s gums to entice him to suck faster, made her feel like her blood could catch fire; her face was hot with the memory even as she worked to push it aside. What had she been doing there? Once the boys were both topped up and burped and drowsing again in their cribs, she debated waking Bruce, but left the partially empty bottles at the threshold of the room as evidence of the feeding, snatched her clothes up from the pile they’d formed at the foot of Bruce’s bed, and left. She hadn’t worked overly hard at being quiet; she was conscious of a certain, albeit weak, defiance in the way she’d clattered down the stairs and let the screen door spring shut behind her. She supposed the idea of skulking around like a fugitive from her life, trying not to make a sound, was all too familiar to her. But as soon as she’d reached this house she’d been at it again, trying to minimize her presence, the affront of it, to the point of rendering herself invisible. Wasn’t that how she behaved?
Knox slid a handful of paperbacks toward her and balanced their spines against her palm, then fanned them out. The dust reached her nostrils and pricked them; she sneezed. She had no idea how she would feel when she saw Bruce again. She supposed, if she were honest with herself, it would depend on how he felt when he saw her, and this shamed her all over again, but it seemed immovable. Perhaps he would decide, then, how things would be. There was little in between that Knox could discern: she had done something terrible, or she hadn’t. Her mouth was dry. Her heart was doing that thing it sometimes did when she ran: beating too hard and too irregularly in her chest, frightening her.
Knox put the paperbacks down on the sideboard shelf, wrapped her arms around herself. It was freezing in here. Maybe she needed to eat something. Instead of making the necessary motions toward the door, Knox knelt beside the box, then lay fully down beside it, twining her fingers over her eyes. Just for a minute she thought. I won’t move.
She heard someone pushing their way through the open closet that linked her parents’ dressing room to hers; her mother had had the closet’s back removed when Knox was born, so that night visits could be accomplished more quickly. There was the scrape of clothing being pushed to one side, a rattle as the neat rows of slacks and blouses her mother kept there swung back into place. Knox knew she should sit up, that the sight of her on the floor might be alarming, but she couldn’t seem to initiate the set of small, bodily tasks that would accomplish this.
“Honey?”
Her father’s voice. Knox did sit up, realizing how sure she’d been that it would be her mother who would appear; she felt guilty at the sight of her father’s ashen face. He loomed over her in the oversize navy bathrobe he’d worn on Sunday mornings ever since she could remember, his features clean shaven—he must have showered already—this evidence of routine reestablished relieved Knox somewhat even as she organized herself and scrambled to her feet.
“Daddy, I’m fine! I was just—lying on the floor.” She laughed nervously. When she reached to touch his arm, he batted her fingers away lightly and gathered her into a hug. Knox had long been as tall as her father, but she reflexively bent her knees a bit and lowered her head so that it was flush with her father’s shoulder and stood like that, buried in the fragrant, dark blue plush of the robe, so that after a few moments she forgot if her eyes were open or closed. She felt her throat constricting and forced herself to pull back and smile at him, her hands clasped around his upper arms. Her father smiled at her as if from a great distance, as if he were smiling into a camera with the sun before him, unable to make out exactly where the lens was.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“I don’t know. I just didn’t want to be at home, I guess.”
“That’s right,” he said, patting her cheek and then settling himself into her desk chair. Knox noticed he was moving stiffly, that he grasped the sides of the chair with both hands. Please don’t get old, she thought. Not yet. “You should have slept here last night,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think to make sure of it.”
Knox flushed, despite herself.
“You stay
right here,” he said. “You just move right back in here if that’s what you want to do. Goodness knows Mom and I would love it.” His eyes were the color of the cornflowers that grew wild at the back of the property, such a clear, delicate color, a surprise in an otherwise rugged face. He seemed to stare right into her. Knox remembered again how elemental, steady, and unquestioned her love for her father was—as much a part of her as those photographs on the desk were part of the room.
“Do you want some breakfast,” she asked him, though of course he was perfectly capable of getting breakfast for himself, if he wanted to.
“Couldn’t eat,” he said. He patted at his stomach, hidden somewhere under the folds of the robe. “Maybe I’ll lose some weight.” The skin around his eyes crinkled; he seemed to wince at his own poor joke.
“All I want to do is eat,” Knox offered.
“Lord knows there’s plenty of food. I have no idea what we’re going to do with it all.”
“Well. You can take it to the office.”
Knox’s statement hung in the air; she wondered suddenly when, even whether, her father would go back to working full days again, he who’d built everything here. She was still standing; she lowered herself back onto the floor. Her father looked about him, taking in the details of the room.
“I come in here to sleep sometimes, did you know that? When your mother is snoring.” He grinned. “I like this room. What’s going on there?” He pointed to the box.
“Just packing up some books for the center. I don’t read them anymore.”
Her father looked stricken for a moment, then recovered. “Don’t take too many. I like things in here the way they are.”
He smoothed his hand across the wooden surface of the desk, then picked up one of the picture frames, the one that held the photo of their whole family together. He studied it. Knox kept expecting him to put it down, but he seemed to peer closer at it as the seconds ticked by.
His eyes swung back up to her face, appraising.
“You’ve turned out,” he said, surprising her. If anything, it seemed inevitable that the comment he’d make would be about Charlotte, her presence in the picture versus her absence now.
He handed the frame to her, and she forced herself to look at the image it contained. She might have been eleven or twelve; pale and freckled, her strawberry hair cut unflatteringly and caught up by the wind, she stood next to her sister, the slim stalk of her arm protruding out of the cap sleeve of her Easter dress to touch Charlotte, as if to guide her sister back into the group. Charlotte had drifted into the foreground and her mouth was open, partially smiling; she appeared to be giving direction to the photographer, or attempting to complete a story she’d begun before they’d all assumed their poses. Her sister wore a gauzy peasant skirt. Whereas Knox looked embattled by the weather, which was obviously a bit too chilly for the clothes they all wore—her cheeks and knees reddened, the skin on her bare legs mottled and vaguely blue—Charlotte looked like some gypsy on a heath. She looked … resplendent. The energy in her body and swirling hair seemed to strain away from Knox’s touch, away from all of them. There was no weather that wouldn’t suit her and no contest here, never had been. Her sister’s beauty and vitality jumped out of the picture, eclipsing all of them: the pink suggestion of Robbie in the bassinet, her mother, hip cocked, in high-waisted jeans, her father with a nearly comical abundance of hair.
“What do you mean,” Knox said, looking up.
“When you were born, there was something fragile about you. I can’t explain it. It wasn’t like the boys—you were skinny, but you weren’t premature, you were healthy. It was more like you had a tenuous hold on things. It felt like we could see through your skin, sometimes. You didn’t grow as fast or as early as your sister had, I guess, and she was all we’d known. You clung to us like a little weed. We worried about you.”
Knox nodded, unsure how to respond.
“And look at you now,” he went on. He smiled at her with such love that Knox had to will herself not to glance away.
In her mind, she implored: Tell me. What do you see? She had no idea how people saw her; it often surprised her that they saw her at all.
“I got tall,” she said instead, calm as she could. “You’re biased, anyway.”
“You turned out,” her father said. He rocked forward in the chair, effectively closing the subject. “You’ve always been hard on yourself.”
The thought entered her consciousness: She could confide in him. He would understand, better than she did, certainly, why she’d gone over to see Bruce last night and stayed, whether or not that constituted a betrayal or one night out of many spent trying to caulk a wound.
“Honey, you all right?” her father asked her.
“I don’t know.”
He cocked his graying head, considering. Knox sat alert, ready to incriminate herself. She set the photograph down beside her on the rug, faceup.
“You think the boys are going to be all right?” he said.
Knox cleared her throat. But before she could muster any words, her mouth flooded with saliva; she wondered, suddenly, if she was going to be sick.
“Knoxie? You need a glass of water?” Her father raised himself halfway out of the chair.
She shook her head, first slowly, then faster before she stopped. She rubbed at her face with her hands, ordering herself to recover. She’d come this close to burdening, bewildering, her father with a needless … God. The smile on her face when she raised her head again was as dazzling as she could make it.
“You know what? I think I do need some breakfast,” Knox said. “I just got a little shaky.”
“Okay,” her father said, watching her.
She didn’t need his benediction—or if she did, it wasn’t fair to ask him for it. This was a moment in a lifetime of moments. She’d move through it. It occurred to her that this was how Charlotte might have felt within her days, ruthless within a self-generated propulsion that kept her from getting caught up in every small exchange. Was this the greatest difference between them? It felt revelatory that she might simply move through. Though it was possible that lack of sleep and the sense of incredulity that had been dogging her for days was responsible for the punchy relief that was filling her now, filling her very lungs with air.
“Dad,” she said, after a pause. “Are you going to go to work?”
“Not today,” he said.
“Soon?”
He scanned the ceiling, and sighed.
“I suppose. Setting yearling reserves doesn’t really seem to matter right now.”
“Sorry.”
He drew the lapels of his robe closer to each other with his fingers, and tucked his hands into his armpits.
“Cold in here.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go downstairs.”
They made their way to the kitchen. They sat across from each other at the table, the cereal in their bowls untouched, and outside the crows, who wintered together in the bare locust tree near the house, numerous as leaves, strutted in the yard. It would be another hour before her mother appeared, noon before Robbie, dressed for his flight back to Virginia, slipped into his chair and joined them.
KNOX’S MOTHER reached into a suede purse she’d drawn out of the coat closet, extracted a brush no bigger than her hand, and started dragging it through her hair. She dropped it back into the purse, fished out a lipstick, and applied it blind with an expert touch to her puckered mouth. Her face looked grim. Earlier, she’d said to Knox, “I think I should go check on the boys.” The way she’d looked at Knox as she spoke, then nodded after, as if something had been decided, seemed to Knox to signal an unspoken invitation or a plea for an escort. Had Knox become the caretaker, as opposed to the overgrown cared-for, so quickly? She nodded back, trying to convey her understanding. Like that, they were readying themselves, letting themselves out into the cold, headed for the garage, though the walk to the guesthouse would take no more than a quarter of an hour.
Perhaps her mother needed to seize the moment, lest her resolve fail her; Knox could tell that the proximity of Ethan and Ben was somehow frightening to Mina; from her place in the passenger seat, she watched her mother jam the keys into the ignition.
“Dad seemed good this morning,” Knox said. “Better.”
“Really,” her mother said loudly, her body turned to peer out the back window as she waited for the garage door to grind toward its apex. “That surprises me.”
Knox swallowed. She was used to reflexive comfort from her mother, not cold truth. She resisted the urge to press her mother further, to wheedle some reassurance out of her. She stilled her foot, which was tapping in the well; she felt as if she’d drunk a pot of coffee when she’d had none at all this morning. There was the question of how she should act when she saw Bruce, separate from, but related to, the question of how she should feel. As her mother navigated the sloping drive, signaling at the bottom despite the fact that they occupied what might be the sole moving car for miles around on this quiet morning, she sensed a growing giddiness in herself that felt tied up in her childhood memories of being driven everywhere by her mother, in her desire to distance herself from whatever her mother had meant just now, from the weight of … everything. It might be crazy, but why couldn’t she imagine a trajectory in which the night before played toward its best and furthest conclusion? The momentum she’d sensed during her conversation with her father seemed to be taking hold of her. What if she just capitulated to it, completely? What would happen? What if she tried not to care? She failed to recognize herself in these questions, which was good. Even exhilarating.
They wound through a stand of bare walnut trees, straight as flagpoles on either side of the access road.
“Mom,” Knox said suddenly. “Do I smell smoke?”
“No,” her mother said, her face expressionless.