began to cry, a repetitive, coughing cry that Bruce told her meant he was hungry, that she should go prepare a bottle for him and, if she had any questions, just yell from the kitchen. They traded babies. Knox would feed Ethan, and Bruce would empty the bath of its soapy load of water and refill it, and they would start again.
In the kitchen, Knox cradled Ethan with one hand while she ransacked a drawer for bottle parts. She found a bottle, a nipple, a plastic sleeve to twist onto the bottle’s mouth, and some apparatus that looked like a sieve. She had no idea how to fashion them into a whole. An empty grocery bag stood open and upright next to the garbage can. Ethan was crying in earnest now, stringing the coughs into a continuous wail, the heat of him rising against her body. She kicked the bag over to the counter and began to drop the various parts in, along with one of the cans of formula, so she could carry it all into the babies’ room and have Bruce show her. She’d look like an idiot, but she didn’t want to get it wrong. She had to work quickly. As she aimed for the bag, she felt her hand shaking.
AT LAST, the boys were down. Bruce ordered a pizza for them.
“We should pray they don’t wake up before it gets here,” he said. “That keeps happening to me, and by the time I get to eat, I’m not hungry anymore. I’ve gotten to where I can’t tell if one of them is crying or I’m just hearing an echo in my head.”
He smiled at her. “Do you want some wine? You look a little rough.”
“Yes. Wine.”
“Coming up,” Bruce said. He disappeared into the kitchen.
“Red or white?” he called.
“I don’t care.”
“Charlotte never wanted a TV,” Bruce said, reentering the room with two wineglasses and an open bottle of Cabernet. “But I told her we would want one once the babies were born. I even got cable for us.”
Something about the casualness of this, of the way Charlotte was introduced into the conversation as if she’d just stepped outside for milk, quickened Knox’s blood.
“What have you been watching,” Knox said.
“Anything,” Bruce said. “Mostly Forensics reruns. My low point came last night, when I realized I had already exposed the boys twice to the same Forensics: Philly episode in the span of their short lives.”
“Robbie and I watched that,” Knox said.
Bruce flipped around, then settled on a show in which young men who looked too old for their clothing took turns hurting themselves and each other for laughs. One of them waded his way into the middle of a swamp in an animal refuge, picked up a baby alligator the size of a house cat, and offered it his bare chest, at which point the alligator bit one of the man’s nipples and held on. The others bent double with mirth.
“Is this stupid enough,” Bruce said.
“Perfect,” Knox said
They sat together. Knox felt the wine and the abdication of talk wash over her. It was easy to imagine that she was sitting here with Robbie instead of Bruce if she let herself, and as she digested that thought, she felt something click into place. Her sense of what her relation to Bruce in the coming weeks was supposed to be had been vague: Was she here to keep up his spirits with forced cheer? Fade into the background like a servant? Ignore him altogether in favor of the boys, so that he could grieve in relative peace? But Bruce was her brother-in-law; perhaps it was time to begin thinking of him as a brother, insofar as she could. That would help to dilute the strangeness of being near him.
It was easy to have Robbie as a brother. Maybe she loved him as she did because he proved that she could get along with a sibling, that not everything had to be fraught where her role as a sister was concerned. She’d be a sister here, then, too—the kind she was with Robbie, and leapfrog somehow over the history required to make this natural.
KNOX WAS CONSCIOUS that night, as she dressed for bed, that she needed to be appropriately covered up when she appeared in the boys’ room for their 1:00 a.m. feeding. She dug in her duffel bag for the leggings she’d packed to run in, a long-sleeved T-shirt she’d brought in case the temperature dipped. It was stifling here