Losing Charlotte Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 anintolerable, 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.
    “How are you feeling?” she asked Charlotte now.
    “Fine, which is what’s weird.”
    “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
    “Maybe nothing, I guess. I came for my weekly check this morning, and they sent me over to the hospital. I’m lying here getting something called a nonstress test. I have this belt attached to me, and it’s hooked up to a microphone, and I’m not allowed to move. Very stress ful , actually. Listen.”
    There was silence on the phone. Knox strained to hear something, and then an overpowering sound, like horses galloping in place, flooded the receiver.
    “Those are heartbeats—not mine, the babies’,” Charlotte said. “It’s so loud in here I can’t hear myself think.”
    “Why are you in the hospital?” Knox asked again.
    “My doctor thinks my amniotic fluid is low.”
    “Is that a problem?” Knox felt her own heart begin to beat faster, as if it were racing the hearts of the twins toward an imaginaryfinish line—not because she felt afraid, exactly; Charlotte herself sounded more excited than afraid, and it was from her sister’s effortful voice that Knox was