had planned to nurse), bottles, a steam sterilizer, pacifiers, preemie clothes, and diapers. He let the voice mail fill up, and instead of listening and responding to its contents, went about assembling a blast list of e-mail addresses so he could update the rest of the world, and then promptly forget it existed.
He forced himself up and down the bright aisles of Gourmet Garage and filled the refrigerator with groceries—individual yogurts, sports drinks, pasta sauce, a bag of apples, an arbitrarily chosen pound of orzo salad, marinated steak. He tried to eat. That had been on the list, too. Eat. Lionel’s wife must be some kind of clairvoyant, he thought. Or a saint.
KNOX HAD INFORMED HIM that she was coming once the boys were released from the NICU, had written him back in response to his last e-mail. She hadn’t mentioned a hotel. When Bruce had finally summoned the energy to call her, trying to gauge the seriousness of her intent (and, he suspected, to put her off the idea, though it was painfully clear he would be in need of the kind of help she was offering until he hired somebody), she’d sounded strange on the phone. Perhaps she felt guilty about Mina and Ben’s clear inability to come back to New York at the moment. Though he supposed he hadn’t expected his conversations with Mina to go the way they had, and couldn’t claim to know exactly why his mother-and father-in-law hadn’t yet suggested a date on which they’d come, part of him was admittedly relieved that these recent days hadn’t been further complicated by their presence. Was it more painful for Ben and Mina to see him, or to see the boys, or to be in Charlotte’s house, where even the smell of her perfume still dominated? Bruce suspected that Ben was the primary reason; Mina had mentioned that he wasn’t well, then changed the subject—but it was impossible to be sure. Bruce put his suppositions, and the way he might end up feeling about them, into the category of things to deal with later, and perhaps never. Anyway, he was sure he’d sounded strange, too. How could any of them resemble who they’d been? He’d never known Knox well, at least not well enough to predict her response to … this. He’d been surprised, a little, at her offer. It frightened him, actually, though in his dulled state he found he could ignore that and acquiesce to what was practical.
He’d been relieved so far not to have to talk during his hours here, except in response to the questions the doctors and nurses posed. Though he didn’t think of Knox as a talker, not as the kind of person who needed to fill a vacuum with noise. Still. The only talking he voluntarily undertook was to the boys—barely above a whisper, and tentatively—while he held them. For some reason he felt embarrassed at the possibility that he would be overheard doing this, marked as clumsy by the people around him who were more experienced with children. He couldn’t afford to be learning on the job; he felt instinctively that he needed to know exactly what he was doing, to have been made an expert father through the very appearance of his children in the world, and even to appear vulnerable on this score to a stranger was to have failed. He might have preferred simply to stare at Ethan and Ben, communicating what he needed to in silence, but Sophia had assured him that this was a good thing to do, that they might already recognize his voice, and would feel relief at hearing it often. He didn’t know what to tell them, except that they were going to be okay. He described the view, described each of them to the other. During the times when both boys lay in the Isolette facing each other, exhausted from the work of growing well enough to get out of here, Bruce watched them, his arms slack at his sides, and wondered what he was beholden to tell. Charlotte would have known how to direct the parts of their lives that still confounded him toward their places in an orderly line; she was good that way, could take an argument that had left him reeling and soften it the next morning, describe to him the ways in which this happened to everyone, was part of the beautiful bargain they’d made, was healthy. She’d be wry and talk about what