Losing Charlotte (2010) by Clay Heather

Author:Clay, Heather [Heather, Clay,]
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-14T19:18:36.359000+00:00

A GUY from the buy side, who Bruce kept up an e-mail correspondence with at work, had sent him a to-do list when he’d heard. Lionel Tregoe was the father of four, and though Bruce had never met his wife (and had only met Lionel himself twice, both at fairly useless conferences held at the Midtown Sheraton), he suspected she’d been the one to type out the directives he’d been following all week, and he was grateful to her in a way he could never be to those responsible for the strange early deliveries of flowers and personalized children’s clothing, some of them with attached notes of such brevity and cheer that Bruce felt a kind of vertigo at the possibility that the small detail of Charlotte’s death was actually going to be politely ignored in some quarters, at least when it came to the gifts. One friend of Charlotte’s grandmother’s had gone so far as to phone in an order of blue balloons from her remote Kentucky assisted-living facility, though Bruce wasn’t sure how she’d managed it. On the other end of the spectrum, a band from one of Charlotte’s acting classes had already taken it upon themselves to start a blog in tribute to her life, which he couldn’t, and perhaps never could, bear to look at—not least because the people involved, her friend Stephen among them, had always struck him as self-involved twits. But the list was something he could use, and in the eternal space between sunrise and 10:00 a.m., the hour the NICU opened to family visitors, he’d started to go about the tasks it outlined. He had placed an ad for a babysitter in the Irish Echo, posted another on Craigslist, and left a message at a placement agency Lionel’s wife recommended. He had lugged the car seats to his garage and installed them, after a full hour and a half of wrestling, in the backseat of the car. He had made a trip to a terrifying baby emporium the size of three football fields for cases of formula (Charlotte had planned to nurse), bottles, a steam sterilizer, pacifiers, preemie clothes, and diapers. He let the voice mail fill up, and instead of listening and responding to its contents, went about assembling a blast list of e-mail addresses so he could update the rest of the world, and then promptly forget it existed.

He forced himself up and down the bright aisles of Gourmet Garage and filled the refrigerator with groceries—individual yogurts, sports drinks, pasta sauce, a bag of apples, an arbitrarily chosen pound of orzo salad, marinated steak. He tried to eat. That had been on the list, too. Eat. Lionel’s wife must be some kind of clairvoyant, he thought. Or a saint.

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