was natural in life and in death. Now Bruce was left alone to justify and reckon with what they’d had together, without Charlotte to explain any of it, to explain himself, back to him. Theirs had been as fathomless and bewildering and defiant of logic as any couple’s shared life, he supposed, before the end. But how could he really know?
They had been married almost five years, tried to have a baby together for three. Finally, insemination—the turkey basting, Charlotte had called it—had worked, a fact that left them incredulous and grateful. They hadn’t had to do in vitro, which they’d dreaded equally, after all.
No. Whatever litany of facts he began with, when practicing the telling, turned reductive within seconds. Start again.
In a grassy corner of the park, they would lie on their backs, not unlike Ethan and Ben now, his head flush with her hip, her legs extending beyond his line of vision, and the tips of Charlotte’s fingers would gather up folds of her cotton skirt and she would pull it up by increments, inch by inch, so slowly he was mesmerized, he was laughing, waiting to see how far she would go, knowing she wouldn’t be wearing anything under her clothes in summer.
Was this their marriage?
Start again.
They had loved each other. He was sure of that. Beyond this, he wasn’t sure of much: what her friends thought, what her parents had been privy to, the true measure her siblings took of him. His bond to Charlotte had been a solid thing built on sand, so that he simultaneously trusted in its strength and doubted anew each day whether, when his eyes opened, it would exist. He had no religious faith, but the ecstasy of belief—this had been available to him in the privacy of his bedroom, his kitchen, in conversation held over the noise of their leaky shower. He was a supplicant at his own breakfast table, sipping Charlotte’s perpetually shitty coffee. His communions were the toasts they’d made across countless tables in New York, looking each other in the eye with an exaggerated concentration that always made him laugh; Charlotte thought it was bad luck to clink while looking away. Bruce had read somewhere that the tradition of the toast dated from the Middle Ages as a precaution against getting yourself poisoned; the contents of one’s cup were meant to spill a little into the cups of one’s companions, and a refusal on anyone’s part functioned as an instant alarm. “If I go, you go,” he and Charlotte had made a habit of announcing to each other, sotto voce, bug eyed, knocking their wineglasses together as hard as they dared without breaking them.
Bruce climbed out of the gray chair. The boys had been asleep in their Isolette (though how they could sleep through all the racket in here was a mystery) for the better part of an hour now. He would take his hall walk, grab another Coke at the vending machine, circle the floor in time to be back before their next bottle-feeding.
Knox was due to arrive the next week. The boys would be home then, according to the doctors. Bruce thought, as he pushed his way out of the NICU doors, aware of the few curious eyes that lit upon him in the waiting area as he emerged, an emissary from the VIP section of the obstetrics wing, closed off to the plebes with a velvet rope fashioned out of everybody’s worst nightmare, that his grasp of Charlotte’s history within her family had never been total, perhaps couldn’t be, because of his mortifying, groveling helplessness in the face of any intact family. It wasn’t easy for him to understand why his wife wasn’t closer to Mina and Ben and Knox and even Robbie, though he tried, repeating Charlotte’s version of events to himself in his head from time to time: Mina and Ben’s devotion to each other and their growing business was so complete during Charlotte’s early childhood that she’d felt, if not left out, then uncomfortably peripheral. Though she’d been loved and attended to, she was close enough to the edge of the circle the three of them made that she could imagine stepping into the cold territory beyond its circumference. This made her feel both terrified and curious. As she grew, some part of her ceded the insider status to Knox willingly (though Charlotte never seemed to forget the ferocity with which, according to her, Knox had claimed it), and began to