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