Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  They had dinners together, she and Ned, and the two of them and her parents, before and after the accident. Knox was pleased to see that the scrim of normality that hung over their interactions hadn’t been completely pierced along with Ned’s skin and bone. Ned kidded with them about suing. Her father shook his head. Knox watched them woo each other, their faces lit from below by the coals in the outdoor grill, their tongs darting forward and back, pushing corn, swordfish steaks, into the hottest places. Her father’s hands looked so much like hers; and Ned’s, compact and soft despite their work, their palms infused with an old knowledge of her body, were altered. On those nights, watching from her place on the back porch, Knox did have to admit that as much as she preferred normality to whatever its alternative was, it felt strange, even shocking, that something brutal could be followed by nothing other than dinner. No one howled, or ran. And yet a tiny bit of permanent damage had occurred.

  WHEN KNOX OPENED the door to her cabin, the phone was ringing. She put her backpack down on a chair and moved to answer it, instinctively ducking a beam that stretched low over the entryway.

  “Hey,” she said, thinking it was probably Ned on the line. She hadn’t seen his truck at the barn on her way home.

  “It’s me.” Charlotte’s gravelly voice. Knox’s sister Charlotte was pregnant with twins—both boys—that were due at the end of September, and to Knox’s ears even her sister’s words sounded heavy, as if her voice too had become stooped under the barely supportable weight she was carrying. Knox did a quick mental check: they had last spoken a couple of weeks ago. Since then, Charlotte had left her a message; and hadn’t she also sent an e-mail? More than one? Shit.

  “Oh, hi! Sorry I haven’t called,” Knox said in a breathy rush. “It’s been really busy here.” Even to herself, who knew she had been busy at the center all month, with the extra tutoring sessions she’d allowed some of the parents to talk her into, this sounded like a lie.

  “I thought it was summer,” Charlotte said. “I’ve been picturing you beside a pool all this time.” She inhaled at an odd point toward the end of the sentence; Knox imagined her high, curved belly; she supposed it might be difficult even to breathe by now.

  “We run that learning differences program in the summertime.”

  “Oh—right, you’ve told me. Sorry.”

  Fifteen seconds in, and they’d both apologized for something. This was a familiar rhythm between Knox and Charlotte, or had been in the years since they’d become grown women who nevertheless remembered what it was like to hurl childish invective at each other, to love and hate each other so nakedly, and so simultaneously, that the mere existence of the other could serve as an intolerable, maddening offense. Knox had wondered whether or not the bare fact of growing up with a sister, any sister, sharing a house and a set of parents and chunks of DNA, necessitated some sort of lifetime, knee-jerk atonement. Not that there weren’t actual, identifiable things to apologize for. But Knox was careful to hew to the present moment. She’d trained herself to, for her own sake as opposed to Charlotte’s; it was just easier for her not to expose herself, because the role of wounded little sister was, among other things, damaging to her pride. And if pride goeth before a fall, her father used to joke with her, remembering all the times she’d stood before him with scraped knees or bruised feelings, every cell in her body concentrated upon the refusal to cry, then she’d go ahead and take the fall. Love suffused his handsome, square face as he said it. How he understood her, her magnificent dad. She’d always been helpless before him. As a child she’d dabbed his Skin Bracer aftershave behind her ears more than once before she’d left for school and spent the day moving through the halls of Lower School in the bubble of his familiar scent, moony as a lover.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked Charlotte now.

  “Fine, which is what’s weird.”

  “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

  “Maybe nothing, I guess. I came for my weekly check this morning, and they sent me over to the hospital. I’m lying here getting something called a nonstress test. I have this belt attached to me, and it’s hooked up to a microphone, and I’m not allowed to move. Very stressful, actually. Listen.”

  There was silence on the phone. Knox strained to hear something, and then an overpowering sound, like horses galloping in place, flooded the receiver.

  “Those are heartbeats—not mine, the babies’,” Charlotte said. “It’s so loud in here I can’t hear myself think.”

  “Why are you in the hospital?” Knox asked again.

  “My doctor thinks my amniotic fluid is low.”

  “Is that a problem?” Knox felt her own heart begin to beat faster, as if it were racing the hearts of the twins toward an imaginary finish line—not because she felt afraid, exactly; Charlotte herself sounded more excited than afraid, and it was from her sister’s effortful voice that Knox was taking her cues. No, it was the familiarity of this dynamic that was making her anxious: Charlotte holding the cards again, making her work for the most pertinent information. She had always relished doling out details like some smug Scheherazade, withholding context, pretending she didn’t hear Knox’s questions, taking her sweet time. It made Knox angry, but then Charlotte had a knack for eliciting responses inappropriate to their circumstances. Relax, Knox thought. You don’t have to play.

  “It’s fairly normal toward the end, I guess. But if it’s really low, then the babies have to come out.”

  “When?” In five minutes? A week?

  “Maybe tonight. That’s why I’m calling. Wild, huh?”

  “Charlotte, is this good, or bad?” Nope—she was playing. Knox sighed. She rubbed at the shelf of bone and muscle at the top of her shoulder; she’d been wearing her most uncomfortable bra all day; its strap was digging in. It was her lot to be skinny enough that her very bones collided painfully with the material requirements of the world, though she was always trying to put on the weight to match her height, it seemed, and her ability to “eat everything in sight”—greasy cheeseburgers for lunch, doughnut after doughnut in the faculty lounge—resulted in a lot of jealous squawking from Marlene. She’d been running farther than her usual route lately, too, overdoing it; her lower back was sore. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to change her clothes.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t hear, what was the question?” Charlotte fairly shouted into the phone.

  “I mean,” Knox adjusted her voice. She’d sounded, just now, as if she were speaking to one of her students. “I mean, isn’t it early for the babies to come. And are you in any kind of distress, and is this threatening, healthwise, for anybody. That’s what I mean.”

  “Oh,” Charlotte breathed out, or snorted; Knox couldn’t be sure. The sound just read like so much static over the phone. “No. Every thing should be okay, they tell me. The boys are cooked—the worst-case scenario is that they won’t be able to come home with us right away. It’s just all moving a little fast. You can imagine.”

  One of the problems, Knox suspected, regarding her history with her sister, was that she couldn’t imagine, not as fervently or with the same suspension of disbelief that Charlotte could, not ever. Knox had long accepted her lack of patience for fantasy as a kind of failure on her part, even felt apologetic about it; when, years before, Charlotte had assumed that she could pick up the mantle during a game of pretend, she’d felt shamed at the blank her mind drew when faced with what the Boxcar Children should scrounge up for lunch, or who, exactly, was chasing them as they were running for their lives. Now, when the assignment was to imagine how it felt to live in Charlotte’s body, her marriage, her days, her present state of mind, Knox drew a similar blank. It wasn’t that she couldn’t project herself by degrees into the life Charlotte described to her when she called, just that the resulting images she came up with seemed so generic, so one-size-fits-all, that they struck Knox as applicable to faceless hordes as opposed, specifically, to Charlotte. Strangely, Charlotte was the only person who’d ever caused h
er to feel this shameful opacity. But that was life, she supposed; each person in it held the power to summon a different version of you.

  “So it’s probably good, then,” she said.

  “Yes. Probably.” Now Charlotte was the one who sounded like she was speaking to a child.

  “Okay.”

  “I talked to Mom and Dad,” Charlotte continued. “I’m just waiting to hear whether they want to admit me tonight, and if they do, they’ll probably do the C-section in the morning.”

  “Are Mom and Dad coming?”

  “Of course they’re coming. If they need to. These are their first grandchildren.”

  “I know—”

  “I thought you might come up here with them. I don’t want to assume anything, though. I know how busy you’ve been.”

  Knox tugged again at her bra strap. She could feel herself flushing.

  “Are you being sarcastic?” she said, the words escaping her lips even though Knox knew better than to let them.

  “No. Knox. You said you’d been busy.” Charlotte sighed with audible exasperation. “Right?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re getting weird. I’m in the hospital. Are you actually arguing with me right now?”

  “I’m sorry, I misheard. No need to be dramatic.”

  “It is dramatic.”

  “Okay.”

  Charlotte paused. “Anyway. Talk to Mom and Dad. Let them know what you want to do. I just wanted to speak to you myself while I still had a chance.” The speed and breath that had animated Charlotte’s voice moments ago seemed spent. Knox swallowed, casting about in her mind for the right thing to say, the calm, conciliatory thing, but she and Charlotte had long ago stopped practicing the skills required to wrest a moment like this back. How could Knox make it not matter, conjure the lightness necessary for them to laugh it off, forget any misunderstanding had occurred? With Ned, or Marlene, or her parents, she would know without thinking.

  “I will,” she said. “Of course.”

  The words I got proposed to for the fourth time last night scrolled across Knox’s consciousness, unbidden. There seemed to be a million reasons not to tell Charlotte something like this in order to rescue their conversation, distract Charlotte with an entertainment of some kind, and at the same time there wasn’t any one in particular that she could point to. She opened her fingers and shuffled forward until the cord on her anachronistic dial phone stretched as far as it would go, then began to turn, wrapping herself up. It was strange; Knox remembered Charlotte parting the cheeks of her own ass so her sister could peer into the dark space contained there—God, they must have been bored that afternoon—and yet Knox felt inhibited about revealing the starkest facts of her life to her, things she might sputter to a stranger in the grocery store if she were the type to sputter. They rarely spoke about Ned, and when they did, Knox felt protective of every word, vetting it before it emerged, keeping her explanations neutral. They’d been forced by accident of birth into mutual territory, and yet emerged, Knox thought now, as if they’d been raised in separate countries.

  “Good luck,” Knox said. “Really. I’m just absorbing. It’s taking me a moment.”

  Charlotte cleared her throat.

  “Thanks.”

  “Please let me know what’s happening, all right? I’ll see you soon if this is really happening. I love you,” Knox said.

  “Love you, too.”

  They said their goodbyes. Knox unwound herself and put the phone receiver in its cradle. She stared at the wall in front of her, a pocket of sweat forming above her upper lip. She had hung a picture on that wall, but the wood was so old and mealy that the nail had never held, and she’d finally given up and twisted it free. She squinted, trying unsuccessfully to locate a hole in the grain. She felt emptied out, as if something had been exacted of her. Marlene would say she was jealous. She would blow smoke as she sighed, thus giving her pity, her wisdom, a visible shape. She would call Knox hon, a form of address so predictable that it was actually surprising. Marlene would be the perfect Marlene, puff hon then press her lips together, surely thinking that Knox wanted the life Charlotte had, with a worried husband and all the attention and babies and planes on the way. That was the problem, Marlene would say. Though, of course, Marlene couldn’t be more wrong in that department.

  FOUR CORNERS FARM, stallion division: fourteen studs, breeding shed, vet lab. Barns with beams hewed and heaved into place by Amish carpenters. Prep-house where mares-to-be-bred were given their glimpse of teaser (overweight, burr-plagued Pinto, butt of the grooms’ crudest jokes) through a sliding window—to be vanned home if they bared teeth, to be declared in season and walked into the circular breeding shed if they spread their haunches a little or didn’t react. Exercise track. Broodmares housed in three separate facilities, which the broodmare manager circled slowly in his truck, watching for cribbers, early foals, listening to the whinnied keening of mothers and babies once they’d been weaned from one another into separate fields. Yearling division, where the babies built muscle tone and tolerance for handling, were walked before potential buyers, before being entered for sale. Foaling barns, quarantine barns, receiving barns. Paddocks—individual ones for the hot-tempered stallions. Fields—long cleared of thistles and brush, studded with pyramids of green-black manure, pats of ancient, sun-bleached dung, striped and seamed with dried grass overturned by the mower. Trees: tall, spreading rows of them planted along existing fence lines, along the phantom fences that had been razed as the property expanded and changed. Muck pit at the back, undulating with used straw, piled house high. Fox hole. Sinkhole. Spring.

  Knox had had a recurring dream since childhood, of lying down in given places on the farm, rolling on the turf until it swallowed her up, and she felt surprised, even in sleep, at her happiness in going under. She’d grown up able to squint from her bedroom window, deliberately blurring her view of a roofline that marked the presence of the one house visible on a neighboring property. She’d imagined the fences that delineated Four Corners’ borders banked high as sea walls against a blank unknown that needn’t be thought about or explored while the grooms shouted to one another in the fields at dusk, while viburnum and honeysuckle and forsythia and fescue grew without stopping in the gathering dark until they had twined together to make a curtain tall enough to obscure the stars. This was their Eden, where her father chose which animals were bred and born and then named them, where they’d run around naked as Eve, she and Charlotte, in and out of the pond her cabin overlooked now, their bodies festooned with silky ribbons of algae when they emerged, awed at their own outrageousness, at the fact that there was nobody around to see, that all this, the daring, too, was theirs.

  She knew that any stranger might look at her now, her cabin curled up at the bottom of the hill her parents’ house stood on like a child at the foot of the family bed, and make the assumption she was that daughter. The sad, stunted one. The one who couldn’t let go. She and her parents had long handled this with frequent jokes (Maybe someday you’ll get rid of me, Knox would proffer; God willing, they’d say, rolling their eyes). But she knew that her presence at the supper table and the ease with which they floated in and out of one another’s days were a comfort to them—a great and necessary comfort, Knox had told herself. Though Knox was plenty proud of the world-class breeding operation her parents had built in an industry famously populated by playboys, hustlers, and dilettantes, and of the integrity with which they had obviously done it, the truth was that she was always trying to get back to something, something that seemed to reside in a past just beyond her reach, and it had more to do with what she sensed within the land than with what went on on its now-manicured surface. When the place had been wilder, so had they, her family—wasn’t that true? If not wilder, then … purer. She remembered the time before the finer stallions had begun retiring off the track into her father’s barn, bringing success with them with each cover, as a time before her family had been contaminated by
hurt and separation. Though she’d admit it to no one, Knox had come to half believe in the magical idea that, if she dug into the fescue under her feet, past the seams of earth and limestone and shale and scattered Wyandot arrowheads she occasionally overturned even now in her vegetable garden, she’d hit a lode that contained their former selves, that predated change.

  Before the farm became what it became, her father had converted four stalls in a tobacco barn. Their living room, still unrenovated, was furnished in winter with the wrought-iron chairs that lived on their porch in summer. He’d started from scratch, at twenty-seven years old, and there was something eternally romantic for Knox in the vision of her parents, of all of them, at this nascent stage, her dad playing sappy country songs on his guitar for them in the evenings after dinner, painting the rooms of their house himself one by one, lucky break after lucky break, cupping her mother’s butt with his hands when he kissed her in the kitchen. Of course, the business was evolving, the sport struggling to hold an audience. Her parents were getting older. Nature itself seemed at times to have withdrawn its promise to support the little universe that sustained them. It was already years ago that some alchemy of the cherry trees in early flower and the leavings of an invasion of tent caterpillars had frozen an unfathomable number of area foals in the womb; Four Corners alone had suffered forty or so stillbirths the first season of the MRLS epidemic, and some mares had died, too, in the bargain. That mystery had been defined as a syndrome, given its own name, and the cherry trees had all been cut down, but the sun shone hotter than ever this summer; the snowless winter had been too short; many claimed the foals were born faster and weaker each year; Ned kept wanting to marry her. At thirty-one, Knox was getting old, too, really, she knew it—climbing up to that crow’s nest beyond which the only real choice was to look around at the view and climb back down again, into actual middle age. She could hold fast against certain encroachments, but others—time, fate, the weather—felt too vast for her to combat, and, on her worst days, she didn’t know how much longer she could hold out. The view out the bedroom window of her cabin was different from the view she’d had as a girl, dominated not by a magnolia but by a half-dead catalpa—trash trees, her father called them, but this one flowered into glory every May despite the insult. Instead of squinting as she used to, she performed an act of imagination that excised all evidence of impermanence from her thoughts, until she’d made all her fears about the end of the world disappear, just like the roofline of her neighbor’s house all those years ago. Ned would call it stubbornness. Knox thought of it as survival, and, though her safe choices were plain for anyone to see, she felt she carried a hot secret when she engaged in this willfully naïve thinking, and that at her core lay something defiant—not safe, but radical, even dangerous. To put things in her Bible-studying mother’s terms: if Eve had been able to live as if she’d never tasted the forbidden fruit, innocent in her actions if no longer in her mind or in the eyes of God, wouldn’t that have been noble? The way a child could be seen as noble when, desiring to hide, he stood in place and plastered his hands over his eyes, defying all natural law by placing faith in the totality of his own perspective.