of breath in her voice, as if she’d failed to inhale before speaking.
Knox rose; she picked up the backpack she had stuffed with a few things from the cabin, lifted it onto her shoulder. The three of them walked together toward the glass doors. Knox noticed how shiny the floor was underneath their feet, under the finely made leather shoes that her father wore. The doors parted for them, and they were out in the hot, close night. Bugs jumped under the lights of the canopy above them. A black car sat idling in the drive, its rear doors open.
“It’s all happening as we speak,” her father said. He squeezed Knox’s shoulder as he guided her into the backseat of the car. “So we’ll just get there as fast as we can.”
Knox’s mother went around the other side of the car and scooted into the middle of the seat. She clutched her purse against her lap. Knox’s father got in next to her mother and closed the door.
“Okay,” he said to the driver. Knox saw him take her mother’s hand as they pulled away from the canopy. Inside the car it was plush and cozy. Knox thought quickly, guiltily, of Marlene. She would gripe at Knox for leaving her on no notice, but Knox thought she would understand. A couple of days. This is where she needed to be. A cesarean, a new reality that was hitting her in increments, shaping itself around her. She would make something up if Marlene asked her about the expense of flying to New York, something about getting a good fare on Delta at the last minute. There was no need for Marlene to know that Knox’s life at the reading center was different from the one she had grown up with, the one she could return to now, made a child again on nights like this. Marlene had never, not once, been on a plane.
“Remind me to call Marlene,” Knox said. A light drizzle started up outside. They moved onto the highway. The brake lights from other cars fuzzed in the sudden wet on Knox’s pane, flaring like bright thistles. Somewhere, just ahead of them, were the lights of New York.
“Okay,” her father said.
The hospital abutted the East River; there was a long porte cochere, a circular drive leading up to it. It was raining hard by the time they got there. Knox opened her door and knew to push out of the car as quickly as she could, so that her mother wouldn’t suffer any brief frustration at being hemmed in. But when she stood, she realized that her mother had climbed out after her father, and that the two of them were jogging toward the entrance. One of her father’s arms was raised against the weather, as if he could elbow it out of their way. Knox hiked her backpack over her head and walked after them. Here was another set of glass doors, a reception station that her parents seemed to know to bypass. A hall, a huge elevator, onto which an expressionless person, in plain clothes, rolled a waist-high machine of some kind. One floor up, and the person rolled out, getting hitched in the gap for a moment before Knox helped him by forcing the machine a bit from behind. On four, Knox’s father touched the small of her back, and they emerged into a hallway. At the far side of it, chairs of differing sizes were grouped among what looked to Knox like tall cages, built of cheap, untreated wood. As she passed them, Knox saw that the cages housed a number of stuffed animals: a straggly lion, a hanging macaw, a kind of ape holding a synthetic yellow banana. There were children’s drawings on the wall, drawings that, compared with the ones at the center, struck Knox as being so studiously naïve that they might have actually been made by adults.
At the end of the hallway, her parents approached a white desk. This area seemed to Knox to emit the color white; the only variations being the pink overshirt worn by the short-haired woman who was busying herself above an open file cabinet. The woman did not look up at her parents’ approach, but smiled at them when her mother said, “Excuse me?” Knox never thought of her mother’s voice—or her own, for that matter, not since boarding school—as being accented, but in the odd quiet of the hallway, she could hear a distinct lilt that