parking lot behind the farm office without letting Ned see her. She had been glad for him that day, in a way she hadn’t, not really, when he had finally steeled himself to accept sympathy and free Guinness from the grooms at the Rosebud Bar.
They had dinners together, she and Ned, and the two of them and her parents, before and after the accident. Knox was pleased to see that the scrim of normality that hung over their interactions hadn’t been completely pierced along with Ned’s skin and bone. Ned kidded with them about suing. Her father shook his head. Knox watched them woo each other, their faces lit from below by the coals in the outdoor grill, their tongs darting forward and back, pushing corn, swordfish steaks, into the hottest places. Her father’s hands looked so much like hers; and Ned’s, compact and soft despite their work, their palms infused with an old knowledge of her body, were altered. On those nights, watching from her place on the back porch, Knox did have to admit that as much as she preferred normality to whatever its alternative was, it felt strange, even shocking, that something brutal could be followed by nothing other than dinner. No one howled, or ran. And yet a tiny bit of permanent damage had occurred.
WHEN KNOX OPENED the door to her cabin, the phone was ringing. She put her backpack down on a chair and moved to answer it, instinctively ducking a beam that stretched low over the entryway.
“Hey,” she said, thinking it was probably Ned on the line. She hadn’t seen his truck at the barn on her way home.
“It’s me.” Charlotte’s gravelly voice. Knox’s sister Charlotte was pregnant with twins—both boys—that were due at the end of September, and to Knox’s ears even her sister’s words sounded heavy, as if her voice too had become stooped under the barely supportable weight she was carrying. Knox did a quick mental check: they had last spoken a couple of weeks ago. Since then, Charlotte had left her a message; and hadn’t she also sent an e-mail? More than one? Shit.
“Oh, hi! Sorry I haven’t called,” Knox said in a breathy rush. “It’s been really busy here.” Even to herself, who knew she had been busy at the center all month, with the extra tutoring sessions she’d allowed some of the parents to talk her into, this sounded like a lie.
“I thought it was summer,” Charlotte said. “I’ve been picturing you beside a pool all this time.” She inhaled at an odd point toward the end of the sentence; Knox imagined her high, curved belly; she supposed it might be difficult even to breathe by now.
“We run that learning differences program in the summertime.”
“Oh—right, you’ve told me. Sorry.”
Fifteen seconds in, and they’d both apologized for something. This was a familiar rhythm between Knox and Charlotte, or had been in the years since they’d become grown women who nevertheless remembered what it was like to hurl childish invective at each other, to love and hate each other so nakedly, and so simultaneously, that the mere existence of the other could serve as an intolerable, maddening offense. Knox had wondered whether or not the bare fact of growing up with a sister, any sister, sharing a house and a set of parents and chunks of DNA, necessitated some sort of lifetime, knee-jerk atonement. Not that there weren’t actual, identifiable things to apologize for. But Knox was careful to hew to the present moment. She’d trained herself to, for her own sake as opposed to Charlotte’s; it was just easier for her not to expose herself, because the role of wounded little sister was, among other things, damaging to her pride. And if pride goeth before a fall, her father used to joke with her, remembering all the times she’d stood before him with scraped knees or bruised feelings, every cell in her body concentrated upon the refusal to cry, then she’d go ahead and take the fall. Love suffused his handsome, square face as he said it. How he understood her, her magnificent dad. She’d always been helpless before him. As a child she’d dabbed his Skin Bracer aftershave behind her ears more than once before she’d left for school and spent the day moving through the halls of Lower School in the bubble of his familiar scent, moony as a lover.