am so deeply—I’m sorry. This was something so rare and unexpected, it just, every physician dreads this happening, I can tell you. It happens in one out of about ten thousand cases. There are no predictors. It’s, I can call someone down to be with you, or to escort you to the chapel, or if you’d like to be alone, I can—”
“What?” her father said. “What?” He stood with his mouth open. Catching flies, that was Marlene’s phrase.
They stood together, in the hallway. Knox’s mother began to weep.
“I am here to answer any questions,” Dr. Boyd said. “To give you whatever you need.”
Knox felt aware of her face. She thought: This is the face I have now. She wanted to slap its unreal expression from it, so that her face would be opaque and not show anything to someone who might see. But she couldn’t move. The air seemed wetter suddenly; she realized that she had made a tent over her nose and mouth with her fingers and stood breathing through it, like a mask.
“I want to talk to someone else,” her father said.
Knox watched the frayed place on the door. She allowed the star of her mind to experience just one glimmer, smaller than a filament, of the reprieve that her father might affect with his words. He was getting to the bottom of things. He was a man of some power; he almost never spoke impolitely to anyone. When he did, something would happen.
Her mother was making a low sound. Knox couldn’t go to her. Her deep, fathomless work was not to move. If she had let herself think, she would have wondered whether, when Dr. Boyd spoke of death in his weak and watery voice, he meant a respirator or something, a coma or state from which Charlotte could surface. Medicine could forestall almost anything. It was ridiculous what medicine could forestall, obscene. But she didn’t think.
God is here, God is love—
Suddenly Bruce came out of the door with the frayed place on it, as if Knox had summoned him with her gaze. He was no longer wearing his cap or mask. A nurse was with him. She was touching his arm at the elbow. Knox looked at his face and felt a cry beginning at the base of her throat. It was impossible to look at him and not know.
She thought he might move toward her mother. But he seemed to stop, at the center of the hallway, and sway there. Knox’s mother stayed where she was, and continued to weep, her eyes wide, watching him. After a pause Knox’s father walked past Bruce to the nurse, and demanded to speak to the doctors. How can this happen, he screamed.
Knox pushed her own cry back down. There was a roaring in her ears. She realized that she was the only person who saw that Bruce might fall; even the nurse was distracted now. A hate was filling her: thick, like oil. Hatred of the fact that she saw Bruce might go down, and that she couldn’t stop herself from moving toward him now, and gripping his shoulders in her hands, and holding him upright.
The cloth of Bruce’s sleeves moved under her hands, and she could feel the warmth of his skin underneath. She could feel the hairs on his shoulders. He was heavy; she planted her feet until he seemed to still. She could smell antiseptic soap on him, and the odors of the room where Charlotte had been.
“Okay,” she said, her hatred of everything making breathing difficult. Bruce began slipping again under her hands; she needed help. But there was no one to help.
“I’m right here,” she said, her voice even.
Drowning.
• II •
KNOX
HERE WERE the three weeks.
Here was her family, now.
She had sat up in the den with Robbie, some nights. Close together on the couch, not touching, until the talk shows were over, and they got up to go swimming, or Knox left for Ned’s.
They sat watching programs she couldn’t quite understand the purpose of: shows that flew to small towns and picked local teenagers to be made over like their favorite pop stars, behind-the-scenes documentaries about the filming of movies that weren’t in theaters yet. Here, on this night, was a tanned crew standing on a coastal hilltop, arguing and pointing to some spot in the middle distance, beyond a few cypresses and a chewed-looking stone house, while an actress in a red dress and forties hairdo stood to one side, laughing. Now