Images tumbled violently against one another in Knox’s mind like rocks in a stream: of their father’s face when Charlotte began excusing herself too early from the dinner table years before, of the rococo margins of the unanswered letters she’d sent to Charlotte at boarding school, thick with spiky ball-point doodles of flowers and vines, of the white undersides of her mother’s oval nails that were visible when she overturned her hands in her lap and seemed to forget them, while she wept, her father’s arm around her tiny shoulders, her father smiling apologetically at Knox, saying, Come on honey, it’s not that bad, the skin at his temples gray. Charlotte couldn’t get out of bed. Charlotte needed a higher dosage. Charlotte regretted that none of them understood her. Charlotte couldn’t come home, hadn’t had time to send the gift yet, was sorry, so sorry, but she couldn’t spare the time required to disengage from the consuming fire of her own lot, though she loved them, she loved them all, love ya, Knoxie! Love you!
They drove home in silence that night. Charlotte had given her a glance before climbing back into the passenger seat, but Knox assumed her outburst that night had had a sobering enough effect on both of them to render moot any lingering questions about her ability to stay on the road. The pike they lived on swallowed drunk drivers whole. Knox remembered a boy, a neighbor’s child, who’d run off the road at sixteen and killed himself and a friend at the base of their drive. That was years ago. She remembered suicidal games of chicken in high school, friends occupying adjacent lanes, cresting hills that way, the midnight roulette of the bored and high. She was careful, her foot light and jumpy on the accelerator as the miles broke open before them.
Knox had apologized. It was that or subject herself to the sound of the rant in her head, and she didn’t want that. As she sat at the table across from her sister, she’d come belatedly to her senses and realized again that the fight with Charlotte might be hers alone. She’d fashioned her existence, in large part, as a staunch against the gaps Charlotte had blown in her parents’ confidence, in their image as a family, and done it willingly, but she’d be damned if she’d make herself vulnerable to Charlotte’s disapproval on this score by detailing all the ways she might have been different if only Charlotte had. Spoken aloud, that would most likely have sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous. But that didn’t make it any less true.
And she’d seen something in Charlotte’s eyes, in the bar, that she also didn’t want realized in speech—a flash of tired impatience at the fact of her. The very fact of her made things harder for Charlotte when she was here. Maybe always had. Dutiful Knox, watchful Knox, eminently sane, easy Knox … she’d quit with the adjectives while she was ahead. There was nothing any of them could do about that, so best to leave it alone.
“Don’t mind me,” she’d said.
And Charlotte had stared at her, looking pale as a ghost.
THE HOUSE wasn’t hard to find. Knox had never had a handle on what streets, if any, might be obscure to a cabdriver coming into Manhattan and had proffered the address tentatively. But she recognized the block when they turned onto it and found herself wishing that her taxi had managed to get briefly lost so that she might have called Bruce for directions and managed to arrive in gentle stages, as opposed to all at once. As it was, she felt like the angel of death. She and Bruce hadn’t seen each other since the night in the hospital, though Knox had had a chance to visit the boys in the NICU once more before accompanying her mother and father back to Kentucky. She’d had not one, but two, glasses of watered-down Chardonnay on the flight and felt sleepy and overanxious at once, as if she’d been up all night. She’d picked at her lunch. She paid the cabdriver and lugged her duffel awkwardly up the steps of the brownstone, scraping its wheels against the concrete as she climbed.
She had to knock for almost a minute before Bruce came to the door. He loomed into view behind the thick glass panes beside it, the beginnings of a beard stippling his