Robbie waited. Knox was gathering herself, trying to remember the details of the story she’d chosen. Any story about Charlotte she knew well was necessarily old, and she couldn’t always guide her mind back to the point of it, or separate out what she might have been told from what she’d experienced firsthand. This one was about a moment in which Charlotte had raised her hand to wave to their father in the sales pavilion, briefly confusing the closest auction hand and halting the bidding, causing the auctioneer to joke about the eager little lady with the outsized bank account in the seventh row, causing all heads to swivel, and their mother to close her fingers tightly around Charlotte’s arm, forcing it down. They had been warned many times never to do this, to be ever conscious of their movements during an auction, and Knox kept her arms vigilantly pinned to her sides at all times in that frigid arena as the twitchy yearlings were paraded past, lest she forget. Knox had wondered, at the time, if Charlotte had meant to do it—a bewildering possibility given their father’s subsequent stern lecture, which she could never have imagined provoking on purpose. Charlotte, though, had let herself be reprimanded, had stood in the aisle after the gavel came down like she hadn’t a care in the world.
Finally, Robbie lifted his head to the edge of the board and looked up at her. His eyelashes, shorter, blonder than Ned’s, gummed together into wet points.
“Go.”
“Sorry,” Knox said, and started talking.
BRUCE
THE NICU WAS the only place Bruce knew how to be.
He hated the crowded elevator one had to take to get to it, the pressure mounting in his chest as the box rose. Given another second, he knew, he’d erase the silence around him with the scratch of his voice; but once again the doors slid open too early, and the few people he’d been close enough to touch, had stood closer to than any normal definition of propriety would allow, exited without ceremony into the empty, white air of this place that contained more than any place should ever reasonably contain. He hated the approach, the construction-paper letters on the walls of the corridor, the stupid mural of smiling fish, the waiting room where the day’s roster of expectant grandparents and their hangers-on sat waiting for their own news, too confident behind the newspapers they were pretending to read. Every inch of the room, from floor to furniture, was covered in industrial carpeting, and Bruce knew the very thoughts of its occupants, the soup they were anticipating for lunch, the content of the jubilant e-mails they were composing prematurely in their heads. He hated the desk his special badge allowed him to circumvent. He and Charlotte had checked in there, and other couples stood, checking in there, too: the women swaying on their feet, overdressed, too much of the world outside, as if oblivious that their connections to everyday enterprise had already been severed. They were floating in the blackness of space, untethered, in their tasteful jersey maternity dresses with their BlackBerrys on VIBRATE and their overnight satchels packed just so, slung over their tensed shoulders. They made Bruce angry. He knew what was contained in their bags: white cotton nightgown sets and changes of pregnancy underwear and address books and sanitary pads and a few leaves of stationery and a dopp kit and a tiny onesie and hat for the baby to go home in and snacks, probably some kind of gourmet trail mix flecked with chocolate morsels, which no one would ever consume. Trail mix, as if this were a hike, an outing. That’s what Charlotte had packed—that and a half-pound bag of peanut M&M’s, though on their hospital tour they’d been assured that food was forbidden. Bruce remembered, distantly, his quaint outrage at this: His wife would require some rocket fuel for the epic journey she was about to undertake, wouldn’t she? Ice chips? Was that a joke? Had anyone else seen the labor and delivery films? He’d looked around at the other participants on the tour; no one had answered him, though a few shot him sympathetic looks. He’d been muttering. Charlotte had squeezed his hand. He and Charlotte had held out some vague hope that she’d have a go at actual labor, even though the twins she carried all but guaranteed a C-section,