he needed. In fourth-grade science class he had listened while the dyspeptic Mr. Towne explained about bodies, men and women, the moods and ravages of puberty, and thought: Well, now I know. Those troubles are left for everyone else, the ones who haven’t been warned. It was arrogance, of course. Just because something had been described to him didn’t substitute for experience; this was a simple idea, but he kept forgetting it. He crashed into his own morphing self, his dropped voice and thrumming teenage blood with a kind of shock. He forgot, until his mother’s death reminded him, that he hadn’t experienced death yet. Each rite of passage was, for Bruce, a loss of innocence, and the babies were no different. He had seen them, mottled and bloody, lifted one after the other from Charlotte’s womb. He had heard their Apgar scores stated in the firm tone the nurses here had, watched them fret under the cleaning cloths and be bundled into those plastic boxes and wheeled away. They were all right. He had read books, pored over the literature Charlotte brought home, befriended men with their own warnings and descriptions, but nothing had prepared him for the unsteadiness he still felt in his feet as he stood beside Charlotte’s recovery bed, holding her hand, waiting for the doctor to return to the room. Boyd had just left, but a nurse had called him back. Routine, she said. All he could think was that there were two of them: perfect. Ethan and Ben.
“COME WITH ME,” the squash-playing intern said. “She’s gone back into the OR.”
Yes.
Coming.
It must have been three-quarters of an hour since they’d begun cooing through the window. Knox thought she could have remained there through the night. The endless, lost time that Charlotte’s room had evoked—the room, she could see now, that had held her sister’s spark but also a lesser redolence of waiting, of the uselessness that hospitals necessitated for families, the television noise, the pilgrimages to the cafeteria, the standing by as the patient dresses herself methodically in stale clothes for her overdue release—was distilled, outside the NICU, into what felt like no time at all. They had learned that the nearest baby was Ben. The nurse had said goodbye and left them. Knox looked up when she departed, then turned back to the window. She stared at tiny Ben’s tiny parts: his locked fists, his bent legs, the nub of penis no bigger—smaller, even—than an eraser on one of her parents’ golf-scoring pencils.
Now the intern led them down hallways that Knox didn’t recognize. At one point she wondered, Where are the animal cages? They took the stairs instead of the elevator. The intern took the stairs two at a time. Knox was reminded of what it felt like to arrive after tip-off when she went to home basketball games with her father at Rupp: here was a similar concrete stairwell, a frightening exhilaration. Her father knew the back passages of the arena. He was allowed to hustle through them, ahead of Knox; he sat on the board of the university. As on game days, theirs were the only footsteps she heard in the stairwell now, noisy scuffs bouncing off the thick walls.
Behind Knox, someone tripped. She wasn’t sure if it was her mother or her father. It was difficult to tell from the thunking sound, the brief “ah” she heard after, like a whispered swoon.
She kept moving.
No one said anything. It may have been that there wasn’t enough time or breath to ask questions to the intern’s back, or to say, as much to oneself as to anyone else, What is happening?
They reached the OR. The intern turned to them. She said, “I have to go in. Wait here. Your daughter is hemorrhaging. I’m sorry, I tried to find you. Someone will be with you.” She swung through the windowless doors.
“All right,” Knox’s mother said, with absurd calm.
The three of them stared at the place where the intern had just been, stared at the door until it was still.
Knox thought, with some doubt: I’m here. This is where I am.
She didn’t look at either of her parents. She realized with a kind of satisfaction that she was capable of obliterating herself to the point at which any further movement was unnecessary. She could just stand, keep her eyes on a fixed place, not think, not say a word. To speak to one another, to acknowledge each other, would be wrong. Better to stand together