and lowered the boys in—slowly, carefully, as if into water.
When their bare feet stuck out, and they sat slumped against the fronts of the seats, their arms limp, their faces just visible above the chin straps of their comical hats, Knox and Bruce began to push the boys forward and back, only a touch, never letting go, watching each other with smiles playing on their lips. Knox took her cues from Bruce, and never lifted the seat higher than he did. The boys were silent. Their eyes darted; they looked shocked by this new experience. Knox breathed a deep draft of the fetid, smelly air and held it, taut with anticipation of any expression either of the boys might relax into, any clue as to what they were thinking. This anticipation was as close to happiness as she’d come, she thought, in the last three weeks. She was glad that she noticed.
Ethan’s eyes widened; then his face twisted into a mask of anguish, and he began to wail. Knox could see the white rims of his gums, the ridges at the roof of his mouth. He was terrified; his arms stiffened until he seemed to be holding them apart from his body, opening them to the park like a tiny infante from a seventeenth-century painting. Ben took up the cry, and until she and Bruce were able to react and raise the boys into their arms to quiet them, Knox was aware of the image they presented, of a man and woman pushing two frantic newborns back and forth in the park. The image was so desperate, so obviously a misguided, willed attempt at Family Fun, that Knox found herself giggling once she’d pressed Ben against her, and stood rocking him in the sun, separated from the traffic at the northern edge of the square by only a scrim of dead trees and a fence. This was a public humiliation; surely the boys’ screams had registered by now with the hippies on the wall, the crowd by the fountain, the homeless man trying to catch a nap on the floor of the dim men’s room. As Ethan’s sudden panic had been contagious, so was Knox’s laughter, and soon Bruce joined her, his laugh higher in pitch than she would have expected it to be, a silly cartoon twitter that only added another layer of ridiculousness to their circumstances.
“We have no idea what the hell we’re doing, do we?” Bruce said, rubbing Ethan’s back.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Knox said.
KNOX
KNOX HAD BEEN gathering up laundry, balling it into her duffel bag, where a pile of the babies’ soiled, weightless clothes already waited. She paused, rocking on her haunches on the floor of her attic room, her hair hanging irritatingly in her face, reminded of all those madwomen in books, the hidden, dangerous ones, stashed in sloping cubbies like these. Rochester’s wife. Cinderella. She was clammy with sweat, pitying herself. The only time she wasn’t in motion in this house was when she slept, and God knew sleep had been impossible to come by. The attic smelled like sour milk and cardboard.
She squatted in place. What would she say now to Charlotte, if she could?
They were who they were. Ned had told her she didn’t owe Charlotte anything, though surely the truer thing was that they owed each other everything. Would she assure Charlotte she was here, that the boys were okay, that Bruce—though she wasn’t at all sure of this—was okay?
Bruce. He wouldn’t leave the house. Though his pretext for the time he spent on the living room computer was work, Knox had glanced in passing at the screen the other day and seen him scrolling through some text on the hospital’s Web site. What was the working definition of survival, for Bruce? Was this it? She was used to Ned, to her father: men who expressed pain only under duress, as a kind of shameful last resort. But that day at the playground, he’d struck her as a vessel rigged to spring open at the slightest touch. This both unnerved and intrigued her, though they hadn’t had another conversation like the one they’d had that day. Still, the possibility of disclosure seemed to hang like a scrim in the rooms they passed through, floating overhead but low enough to brush against, should they wish to raise their hands toward it.
Would Charlotte even be comforted by her presence here? The thought of her sister tending to those she loved after her own