Losing Charlotte Read Online Free PDF

taking her cues. No, it was the familiarity of this dynamic that was making her anxious: Charlotte holding the cards again, making her work for the most pertinent information. She had always relished doling out details like some smug Scheherazade, withholding context, pretending she didn’t hear Knox’s questions, taking her sweet time. It made Knox angry, but then Charlotte had a knack for eliciting responses inappropriate to their circumstances. Relax, Knox thought. You don’t have to play.
    “It’s fairly normal toward the end, I guess. But if it’s really low, then the babies have to come out.”
    “When?” In five minutes? A week?
    “Maybe tonight. That’s why I’m calling. Wild, huh?”
    “Charlotte, is this good, or bad?” Nope—she was playing. Knox sighed. She rubbed at the shelf of bone and muscle at the top of her shoulder; she’d been wearing her most uncomfortable bra all day; its strap was digging in. It was her lot to be skinny enough that her very bones collided painfully with the material requirements of the world, though she was always trying to put on the weight to match her height, it seemed, and her ability to “eat everything in sight”—greasy cheeseburgers for lunch, doughnut after doughnut in the faculty lounge—resulted in a lot of jealous squawking from Marlene. She’d been running farther than her usual route lately, too, overdoing it; her lower back was sore. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to change her clothes.
    “Sorry, I couldn’t hear, what was the question?” Charlotte fairly shouted into the phone.
    “I mean,” Knox adjusted her voice. She’d sounded, just now, as if she were speaking to one of her students. “I mean, isn’t it early for the babies to come. And are you in any kind of distress, and is this threatening, healthwise, for anybody. That’s what I mean.”
    “Oh,” Charlotte breathed out, or snorted; Knox couldn’t be sure. The sound just read like so much static over the phone. “No. Every thing should be okay, they tell me. The boys are cooked—the worst-case scenario is that they won’t be able to come home with us right away. It’s just all moving a little fast. You can imagine.”
    One of the problems, Knox suspected, regarding her history with her sister, was that she couldn’t imagine, not as fervently or with the same suspension of disbelief that Charlotte could, not ever. Knox had long accepted her lack of patience for fantasy as a kind of failure on her part, even felt apologetic about it; when, years before, Charlotte had assumed that she could pick up the mantle during a game of pretend, she’d felt shamed at the blank her mind drew when faced with what the Boxcar Children should scrounge up for lunch, or who, exactly, was chasing them as they were running for their lives. Now, when the assignment was to imagine how it felt to live in Charlotte’s body, her marriage, her days, her present state of mind, Knox drew a similar blank. It wasn’t that she couldn’t project herself by degrees into the life Charlotte described to her when she called, just that the resulting images she came up with seemed so generic, so one-size-fits-all, that they struck Knox as applicable to faceless hordes as opposed, specifically, to Charlotte. Strangely, Charlotte was the only person who’d ever caused her to feel this shameful opacity. But that was life, she supposed; each person in it held the power to summon a different version of you.
    “So it’s probably good, then,” she said.
    “Yes. Probably.” Now Charlotte was the one who sounded like she was speaking to a child.
    “Okay.”
    “I talked to Mom and Dad,” Charlotte continued. “I’m just waiting to hear whether they want to admit me tonight, and if they do, they’ll probably do the C-section in the morning.”
    “Are Mom and Dad coming?”
    “Of course they’re coming. If they need to. These are their first grandchildren.”
    “I know—”
    “I thought you might come up