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 and 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.
BRUCE
BRUCE TAVERT HAD LEARNED early that mothers can leave. In fact, if he’d been asked to identify a major theme in his life—and there was a party game to this effect, he thought—then that particular theme might have been it. Mothers can leave. Can and do.
Two events in his childhood taught him as much. The first occurred when he was eleven, a fifth grader at the Bancroft School in Manhattan.
His best friend, Toby Van Wyck, lived in a suburb just north of the city. Toby commuted in with his father, the two of them rising early, breakfasting together, then taking the thirty-five-minute train ride to Grand Central. On the train, Mr. Van Wyck skimmed the Times and the Journal, while Toby listened to tapes on his Walkman (Squeeze, the Hooters, New Order, old Who) and penned designs and characters onto the outside of his plastic organizer, which he would show to Bruce once he arrived at school, having taken the subway from Forty-second Street to the Upper East Side with his father. Toby’s mother usually drove in to pick him up at the end of the school day, his baby sister strapped into her car seat in the back. Some days, his mother took the train in, and left Lisa with the au pair.
One day, Toby’s mother didn’t come at all. Bruce stood with Toby in the school lobby, fingering the Hacky Sack that he kept in the pants pocket of his uniform. It had been at least an hour since the headmistress had called Toby’s father at work in an effort to find Mrs. Van Wyck after she saw Toby and Bruce together at the end of pickup, sitting against a wall with their knees drawn