She wanted money to take him to a specialist. She felt queasy saying this aloud to Albert. She knew before he answered that she’d made her concern too official for him. The examples too hard to refute. He wanted their son to be a certain kind of boy, beaming at the center of this life he had worked so hard for, and she was telling him now, with words she could not take back: our son is not that child.
He had left the room to have a cigarette and water the small back garden in the dark. They’d planted it together that spring, Marcus watching quietly from under a sun umbrella, uninterested in the dirt, the worms, the plastic containers that held the bulbs. They’d just bought the house on Harlow Street, a bungalow with cinnamon-colored brick on a strip of narrow property Albert could pace the width of in seven steps. He’d installed yellow-and-cream-striped aluminum awnings over the front porch and the front windows. He’d painted the low wrought-iron fence in the front yard a crisp white and tended the new sod with care. She watched him in the backyard from their bedroom that night, one hand on the hose, the other brushing his cheeks while his shoulders shook.
She brought Marcus with her everywhere she went. Sometimes he would hide in the footwell of the car and refuse to get out. Other times he would do all right until there was a certain clang, or the hairstylist at the salon bent down to offer him a lollipop. He would become stiff and stare, like an animal in the wild. Shy, everyone called him.
By the age of five, he only spoke to her in whispers.
She came to crave his warm breath on her ear, the sound of air passing through his teeth.
“Tell Mommy, why won’t you speak to anyone else? What are you frightened of?”
“It’s like I’m on the stage all day.” He hung from her back, clung to her shoulders, never far.
“On the stage? What do you mean?”
“Like everyone’s watching me at the theater. But I can’t remember what comes next.” The hot breath again. “They’re going to laugh at me.”
He amazed her with how smart he was, speaking both Portuguese and English fluently, completing adult jigsaw puzzles and memorizing every country on the map. He read softly aloud on Mara’s lap if Albert wasn’t home to overhear. But school was a challenge. He was often too anxious to make it through the day. Stomachaches and diarrhea led to one too many accidents. The children were cruel.
She decided she would teach him at home herself.
He became more a part of her than most children ever were of their mothers, although Mara had nothing to compare their unusual attachment with. She never ached for a moment without him underfoot, never shooed him away, even when she bathed or used the toilet. He lived on her like a layer of skin. He didn’t smile in front of anyone else but her, but she knew he was happy. He was happy with her.
By the spring Marcus was seven, Albert was staying late at work almost every day of the week. He would come home long after Marcus’s bedtime and wake up well before he rose. He occupied himself out of the house most weekends. Mara kept a calendar in a kitchen drawer, and she marked an X on the days when Albert didn’t see their son at all. After an entire month was filled with her angry black ink, she made sure their son was asleep, and then marched to the sitting room. She banged the television knob and threw the calendar on his lap.
“Four weeks. It’s been four weeks since you’ve laid eyes on him. He’s the greatest gift you could have, and you’re missing everything about him.”
He looked past her at the screen. He was like stone.
“What’s changed in you, Albert? What gives you the right to be so unhappy?”
His stillness infuriated her. He could ignore everything so easily. Their beautiful son. Their hardened marriage. The dangerous place they were headed. There were no other options for her here, no money, no family, no alternatives. He didn’t blink. She wondered where he went, how he could just disappear from the room. How she could never allow herself to falter, not for any of the waking minutes in her day. How she was never not there. For them, with them, in spite of them.
“You’re not the man I thought you were.”
* * *
? ? ?
Now, Mara watches the Loverlys’ house.
“What are you doing out here still?” Albert holds the screen door open. He’s in his burgundy robe and the smell of grease lingers in the terry cloth.
“Nothing.” She gestures for him to move out of the doorway, to make room for her. She’s surprised to see a sausage left on his plate. He’s never not eaten his breakfast.
“Not hungry today?”
“I guess not,” he says on his way to their bedroom.
She tidies up the kitchen counter, puts his plate in the sink, soaks the frying pan. He’ll want more coffee, she knows, so she throws out the soggy filter and replaces it. Scoops the grounds from the tin barrel. Fills the back canister with water. She waits for the gurgle; it doesn’t always work properly, twenty years old it must be, but he won’t replace it until he’s convinced the damn thing is dead. She tries to recall what she was going to do this morning. The laundry. And collect the paper airplanes from the backyard bushes, because it’s Thursday.
He comes back to the kitchen, buttoning his shirt, his fingers reminding her of the sausages. His swollen hands can barely make a fist anymore.
“Coffee’s on,” she says. “Come here, I’ll finish.”
He scoffs but he lets her do the last two buttons as he looks away from her. They haven’t looked right at each other in decades, not really—not like they used to. She wonders if he sees too much in the glassiness of her eyes, the whites dulled long ago. Or maybe he sees too little. Are their lives supposed to feel fuller than this? Does he sometimes cry about this too? He smooths the wisps of hair at the top of his head and clears the phlegm from his throat. He rubs his chest. He tucks his shirt in and sits at the kitchen table.
“Where is it?”
She slides his empty mug across the counter toward the machine, gestures to the cream on the table, and goes downstairs to the basement.
9
Blair
She double-checks the time as she approaches the front door to Whitney’s home. Not quite noon. She still hasn’t heard back from Whitney today, but she knows Sebastian and Thea are normally at a library program with Louisa on Thursdays. Louisa posts a family schedule in the kitchen each month, and Blair stealthily snaps a photo on a regular basis.
The massive windows at the front and the open-concept layout mean that Blair, from her own living room, can usually see straight through their house into the back garden. At least until midday, when the sun’s glare reflects her own tired house back to her.
Sometimes, on weekends, she watches Jacob make breakfast at the wide kitchen island. His trackpants sit low. She has watched Whitney wrap her arms around his bare shoulders and pluck fruit from his fingers. Once, she slipped her hand down the front of his pants. Jacob had put the spatula down while she stroked him, inches from the hot griddle, as the kids watched television in the next room.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen on her side of Harlow Street. Blair’s proximity to Whitney makes her painfully aware of this difference. She and Aiden live in a narrow patchwork starter home they were supposed to renovate five years ago. Her husband doesn’t know where the waffle maker is kept. She never thinks to touch him in their kitchen. She never thinks to touch him at all.
But she wouldn’t want everything about Whitney’s life. She wouldn’t like being consumed with work and absent for her daughter, divided and distracted all the time. Searching for the balance that eludes every woman. Balance isn’t even a concept Whitney seems to consider.
And yet Blair envies her. She wants to feel about herself the way Whitney does, she wants to know what it’s like to be in that echelon of women. The gratification of having made the right life choices.
The key was given to her as a spare for emergencies.
But there are never any emergencies.
She walks inside and punches the security code numbers. She turns the lock behind her and stands in the stark white entryway. An enormous abstract painting looms above, hung from wires like in a gallery. The mess of muted, mucky acrylics are as appealing to her as vomit, although she has pretended otherwise. She breathes in. There is a manufactured freshness to the air in this house, like a car at the dealership, like something newly unwrapped.
She slips her shoes off and walks toward the spotless kitchen, with its wide slates of black marble and knobless cupboards and quiet-close drawers. There isn’t an item out of place. No sippy cup on the counter. No spoon in the sink. No oil stains on surfaces from peanut butter fingers. Louisa must have been there and cleaned up the mess of breakfast already. Peppermint and citrus diffuse from the ceramic cylinder on the island. Louisa sells essential oils on the side. Whitney says they give her a headache.