Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  Try explaining that to somebody like Marlene. Knox would sound crazy. Hell, maybe she was.

  KNOX HAD SOME PARENT REPORTS to finish. She could either stand in place like an imbecile, the phone still in her hand, or get to them while she had a chance, considering she might not even be in the state tomorrow. There was nothing she could do, for the moment, and she already had plans to join her parents for dinner. In the meanwhile, she ached for some distraction from the whirl in her head.

  She crossed the yard, passing too close to the edge of the pond and causing the swan to unfold its neck from across the length of its back, where it rested during sleep.

  Kwaa, kwaa! Kwa kwa ka!

  “Quiet, bird,” Knox said, noting the theatrical sternness in her voice. She occasionally caught herself playing to an imagined audience, throwing language into the air as if the burnt land was the back of a packed theater. She skirted the bank and began to walk up the road that led to the Parrish Barn, where a computer was housed in the observation room. She didn’t have a computer in her cabin but was welcome to walk in the direction of her parents’ house, up the other slope of the shallow cleft she lived in; there was one in her father’s study. Still, Knox liked the Parrish Barn, a quarantine barn for sick and barren mares, virtually deserted in the early evenings, and she longed for silence at the moment.

  She grazed her fingers along a middle rail as she moved up the fence line; her fingertips were blackened with dried paint when she lifted them away. During the few summers she’d been encouraged to accompany Charlotte to sleepaway camp, she had remembered the feel of fences the way the older girls claimed to remember the skin, hair, faces, bodies of boys they had left behind in hometowns. Knox could lie in a faraway bed and know exactly how it would feel to rest her palm against the polished wood of a stall door. Or to wrap it around a milkweed stalk and yank, the sinew of the plant cutting against her as she pulled. She felt blacktop pebble her knees when she knelt on the dock to practice her sailing knots and straw prick her feet when she waded barefoot in the cold grass toward the mess hall; and she could never leave trees alone, would pluck leaves and work them between her fingers like the tiny, petrified blobs of black that she snapped off the edges of the boards now as she walked and fidgeted with, let fall.

  She hadn’t spoken much during those few summer weeks away in the mountains of North Carolina, not even to the boys from the brother camp who’d sought her out at the dances, looking to impress Charlotte by doling out attentions to her little sister—they called her Legs, and Red, referring to her tall, skinny figure, her strawberry-blond hair and lashes. Knox hadn’t minded the special notice she received; she’d just never known what to say. She was unable to bat back the nicknames, keep the jokes in play. This had happened, too, with the girls. The sophisticated girls from places like Dallas and Atlanta who, in their faded board shorts and boyfriends’ borrowed oxfords, seemed all the more eager, at first, to know her. Knox knew she wasn’t beautiful. She also knew that this wasn’t supposed to matter, but it did. Even the compliments her father gave her at this age, in an obvious effort to shore her up, were damning: he told her she was striking, exhorted her to wait until she grew into herself and then wow. It was Charlotte, for the time being, who made her exotic. Charlotte with her haunting face and bedroom hair and baritone voice and contraband cigarettes, the knockout body, her way of floating among the assembled at breakfast as if she didn’t even notice where she was. Charlotte with the magic; she’d always had it. A pimply twelve-year-old sidled up to Knox at the punch table and told her he would “drink your sister’s bathwater, if I could” in a voice so thick with desire it scared her. Her fellow campers were attracted to any knowledge about Charlotte that they could gain; and though Knox stood to benefit from their curiosity, she had vacillated quietly, fatally, between lame attempts to foster the girls’ interest and annoyance at their hunger for information. They wanted stories, gossip, anything. They wanted Knox to hate Charlotte, or to be her closest confidante, to be her equal, her opposite, her superior. But it had been difficult to follow the script, or to be vivid enough in whatever part she might play—the rival, the source, the enigma—had she ever managed to decide on just one.

  “Your sister is the most …,” one or another of them would say. When she couldn’t come up with the proper word, she might shortcut right to: “You know?” Knox knew. She kept herself from asking: Did you mean to say favored? Enviable? Overrated? Exactness seemed important. But of course she never did anything but smile and cock her head, waiting to be dismissed from the conversation.

  Thank God that part of her life was over.

  The Parrish Barn was cool inside and fairly empty, most of the horses having been turned into the fields for the night. Knox made her way past stall doors labeled with white cards: HEAR THE MUSIC, NO FOAL; SWEET CANDY, NO FOAL; PRIMA DONNA, DROPPED FILLY. Prima Donna had miscarried, then. Knox looked closer; the mare stood at the back of her stall, her muzzle pressed against a barred window. She looked all right, though still heavy and swollen about the middle. Her ankles were bandaged, and a persistent fly worried her withers, causing the skin on them to wrinkle and twitch.

  “You rest, honey,” Knox said. “That’s right.”

  The mare stamped once in the straw. Knox watched her, willing the mare to turn around that she might convey … something. Pity? Understanding? After a minute she gave up and let herself into the observation room.

  The air was close, stung with medicinal smells, stale food and coffee odors, the sharp dust, straw, and manure from outside. There was a littered desk, a thirdhand couch, a large window onto the adjoining stall, through which a vet or groom could keep an eye on whatever mare most needed to be watched. Knox sat at the desk, turned on the computer, and logged into her e-mail account, organizing a few battered Styrofoam cups into a stack as she waited for the connection to fire.

  Three new messages flashed up: one from Marlene, one from herself (a file of unfinished reports she’d sent from the center to the farm address earlier that day), and one from Ned. Knox cleared her throat. She would start in on the reports and ignore everything else for now. She clicked on her file, opened the letter she’d begun to compose to Brad Toffey’s parents. She had decided on addressing the report to “Mr. and Mrs. Toffey,” though she had only ever met Brad’s mother, Dorothea, and had heard from Marlene that she and her husband were having problems—Dorothea herself had apparently called Mr. Toffey a honking bastard when Marlene had asked if he should be included on Brad’s school pickup form. “There’s good Toffeys and bad Toffeys,” Marlene had said. “I know just about everyone in that clan.” Marlene had tried to tell Dorothea to let the center know if there were family issues it needed to be aware of. But unless Brad’s behavior at the center changed drastically, bad Toffeys weren’t really anyone’s business.

  She spent the better part of the next hour explaining to the Toffeys, plural, how their son had progressed during his summer school term. He had begun composing stories of his own (the protagonists were always named Brad and possessed of superhuman powers), whereas back in May he had been nervous even to dictate to her, fearful he would sound stupid. She emphasized everything she could think to about Brad’s accomplishments, knowing that Mrs. Toffey had a hard time, that she tended to wrap her fingers around Brad’s pale, hairless forearm if he got recalcitrant in the carpool line, drag him toward the passenger door, tell him not to “be so damned hyper.” Knox tried to ease Brad out of that grip with her praise and made a mental note to put his rough drawing—of a Laker dunking a basketball, “BT” emblazoned on his uniform—on the front cover of the mimeographed journal her class would publish at the end of the summer.

  She moved on to another report, finished that and two more before she thought to open Marlene’s e-mail, take a tiny break before getting to the final two reports she had to finish. She swiveled round once while the message opened, dizzying herself with a small rush of speed and air and messy scenery before stilling the
chair and herself with her feet, read:

  You know, I thought about it, and you are ugly. Can’t believe I didn’t see it before. Love, Mar

  Knox laughed out loud. From the other side of the barn, the mare snorted in response.

  “Hey,” came a voice behind her. Knox turned in the chair and saw Ned standing in the doorway.

  “Oh—”

  “What’s so funny?” Ned let the screen door catch on its loose spring and bounce against his back, where it rested. His glasses were smudged and glinted pink in the sunset light from the window when he cocked his head.

  She smiled. “Nothing. Marlene’s a shit. You surprised me.”

  “Didn’t mean to.”

  Knox stretched her arms up and tilted her head back. She twisted her hands at the wrists, like a ballerina, a sorceress, and took a deep breath. Ned stayed where he was in the doorway. Knox held the breath, stretched farther, then exhaled, mildly taken aback that Ned wasn’t reading her movements as an invitation to move closer. She laced her fingers together and lowered them to her lap.

  “Well hi,” she said. “Charlotte thinks she’s having the babies tomorrow.”

  “I was just up at your parents’. They got a call from Bruce, said she’s going to have the surgery tonight.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. You should go up to the house.”

  Knox blinked. “But I just talked to her,” she said. “It’s supposed to be tomorrow.”

  Ned rubbed at his chin with the back of his hand. “Well, I guess they were able to schedule it earlier. I think they want to get ’em out. You should go on up.”

  Knox gripped the arms of the swivel chair as if to push herself out of it, then paused. There was something so still in Ned’s face, though now he smiled slightly at her.

  “I shouldn’t be worried, right?” she said.

  “No. Your mom’s running around like you all just won the lottery. Everything’s fine.”

  “Mm.” The light was fading even as they spoke, and Ned’s dun-colored work clothes seemed suddenly indistinct from the outlines of the screen door, the dusty barn aisle behind him. Knox bit her lip, attempting to ground herself against a kind of creeping vertigo, wake herself up. The room was oppressively hot. She wanted to move out of it and outside, just as she, impossibly, wanted to finish the reports she’d been working on, sit alone at the desk, walk down the hill to the cabin when she was finished, get a run in before the last light, warm up some dinner. She worked to quell a strange, unsummoned annoyance at the notion that her routine had been so fatally interrupted.

  “Could you give me a ride? Or—” She saw a reticence tighten Ned’s mouth at the request, a balk that made her want to back right off, as much as it confused her. “I could walk. I’ll walk up there.”

  “Could you? One of the stallions nicked his foreleg; the groom wants me to go have a look. I’ll try to stop by after and see what’s happening.”

  “Okay.” So she was being asked to be careful with him. Perhaps that was it. Last night hadn’t drifted into the ether—nor, she realized, should she have expected it to. Not so quickly. Well, if he needed a bit of distance, she could give him that, was happy to, even under these circumstances. It was a step toward the status quo; the quicker she made it the quicker ease between them would be restored.

  “So I’ll see you later,” she said. She hoped she sounded generous, sincere. Still, she felt surprised when Ned turned as she spoke, hooking his blunted finger into the screen door’s handle.

  “Sounds good,” he said. He pushed the door open, walked through it. The soft treads of his boots made very little sound against the concrete; after two or three steps Knox felt unsure of where he was. It was only when she heard his truck’s engine turn over that she knew for certain he was out of the barn.

  Knox sank back in the chair, faintly hurt, her feeling of disorientation growing stronger. She swiveled back around and glanced at the computer screen. She knew she should be rising into action, and yet remained where she was for a moment, then another. She clicked the report file closed, and, before she could think about it, clicked onto an e-mail attachment that Charlotte had sent her months before.

  The computer sputtered and hummed. The screen went blank for a moment, became a square shape that began to define itself by faint degrees as Knox watched. Two knobs, like the fat heads of fiddlehead ferns that grew by the pond, showed themselves inside the shape, grew brighter. Glowing type appeared at the bottom of the square. It read: Charlotte Bolling Tavert. Frat. M. M. New York Presbyterian Hospital. Digital Lab.

  It was an early sonogram of babies. The picture came a bit further into focus, then stopped refining itself. Knox stared. She brushed a strand of damp hair from the side of her face and tried not to be angry at herself for feeling so little every time—only a sensation of waiting for something in the image to become animated, for a tiny foot to kick through the frame at her, forcing her to duck. She could see the head-heavy, concave shape of one body curled in on itself; the other knob looked like a belly, or maybe a backside.

  “Little aliens,” Knox mouthed at the screen.

  Knox heard only the rustling of straw as the mare shifted her stance. She pictured the mare’s heavy bay head at the stall window, gazing out, wanting space, the light reflected in her wet eyes, threads of snot quivering in the soft caves of her nostrils as she breathed. She realized she did feel something. To see the twins like this was to imagine their pleasure at being suspended in the fluid and heat of her sister’s body, ultimately protected, and hadn’t she wanted, admit it, to be in exactly that place at points in her early life, to crawl inside her sister and rest, letting Charlotte be her mouth, eyes, ears, bed, blanket? Was she jealous, of all things? She didn’t want children of her own. She and Ned didn’t speak about this, but he knew, just as she knew that everyone, including Ned, assumed a woman could be talked into motherhood eventually. Well.

  Knox picked out an unseeing eye, a black bead that looked to her like a caper. It had all transpired so quickly. Charlotte had become a person with babies inside her, before Knox had even had a chance to get used to the weird enthusiasm with which she’d become a wife. She was spinning beyond Knox once again, uncatchable as mist.

  “Damn you,” Knox said to the screen, shocking herself. The words in her mouth sounded comical, strange enough to move her. She reached to shut the computer down, resolved to let Marlene finish the last reports if that became necessary. She rose from the chair, the material of her skirt gripping its cracked leather surface for a moment before nudging itself free. She walked out of the room, past the mare, down the barn aisle, and into the rosy evening.

  It wasn’t until she found herself outside that she remembered the unopened e-mail message from Ned. As she made her way toward the fence line, long grass whipping at her bare legs, she briefly wondered whether or not it contained something that he thought she’d read, or if he had been annoyed or disappointed when he realized, as he must have, that she hadn’t looked at it yet. Well, she thought, maybe that was what had been wrong with him. There wasn’t time to worry about it now. If Charlotte was about to be operated on, her parents would be packing for New York; she would be faced with whether or not to join them.

  Knox stopped against the fence, gripped a middle plank with both hands, and held on. It was still warm with the day’s heat. She stood still for a moment, suddenly more scared than displeased by the momentum she felt. She wanted nothing more than to remain here, curled against the post like a weed.

  She turned just as Ned’s truck appeared in the distance. It was coming from the back of the farm, where the shop was, and heading silently away from her, up the far hill. At the top of it Ned stopped and turned right, moved down the access road that would bring him to the entrance to the stallion division, where he’d speak into a security squawk box and drive through a pair of painted metal gates. Knox watched his pickup get smaller and less distinct. The only word in her mind was: wait. She raised a hand an
d raked it through her hair before she remembered the fence-black on her fingertips. Friction had a way of turning the paint to a dust so fine it could be inhaled as an irritant; she closed her eyes, trying not to breathe.