“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