She stares at the larger one and imagines Whitney arching on her back as she pushes it inside herself. Lying on their king bed as Jacob watches her from the chaise across the room. She knows they like to do this. Whitney told her so at the bottom of a second bottle of wine last summer. Blair loved possessing this confession, this titillating thought in the back of her mind when she saw them together. She’s hoped for more from Whitney, more uninhibited throwaways about her sexuality, but the topic seems to extinguish their conversation lately. Like maybe Whitney knows she said too much before, although Blair is naturally the more prudish one. Sex with Aiden is a performance she can barely bring herself to do anymore. But here, in Whitney’s bedroom, the arousal comes easily. She runs her thumb down the silky rubber of the larger vibrator and then places them both back in the bag.
Next, she opens the drawer where Whitney keeps the fancier lingerie. She lifts the navy lace bodysuit that matches the robe she had on earlier. She notices the slit in the fabric of the crotch. She slips her fingers through and thinks of Jacob doing the same and feels herself warm. Before she can change her mind, she undresses. She steps into the bodysuit and pulls it up. The high-cut bottoms are too tight and her breasts too slight to fill out the wire cups.
She lies on the end of the bed and reaches for the opening in the lace. She can’t remember the last time she has felt like this. She doesn’t touch herself often. But now, she thinks of Jacob and Whitney there with her in the bedroom. Of Whitney watching as Jacob moves closer to Blair. They have invited her, they have asked her to do this for them. She is worthy of them. She is desirable. He enters her.
Seconds later, she unfurls. She stares at the blown-glass pendant above her. The boldness leaves her much faster than it came. She peels off the bodysuit and places it neatly in the drawer.
As she washes her hands in the en suite bathroom, the marble warm under her feet, she’s reminded of what Jacob would really see. She turns away from herself in the mirror, the endorphins gone. She could never let another man put his fingers where her own have just been. Or his face, in her wiry hair and her loose folds. The intimacy of even a kiss feels repulsive to her. She doesn’t know when this change happened.
In the cabinet behind the mirror, Blair surveys the thick green glass vessels of skin-care products. Regenerating cleanser. Reparative moisturizer. Restorative eye cream. Resurfacing serum. Rejuvenating face clay. Redefining body balm. Revitalizing body oil.
She picks up the package of birth control pills. There are unpopped foils throughout the month again. A few weeks ago, she had slipped and mentioned them to Whitney by mistake. The topic of vasectomies had come up. Jacob would never do it.
But don’t you worry when you forget to take your pill?
Whitney had looked at her curiously. She’d never told Blair she was on the pill.
I’ve been taking it so long that I never forget, was all she had said.
Blair puts the package back on the shelf.
Yeast infection suppositories. Yeast infection ointment. Aluminum-free deodorant. Sensitive-enamel toothpaste. A spool of mint floss. Hemorrhoid cream. Smoothing hair cream.
The transparent orange cylinder with the label peeled. She takes off the white lid and shakes the tablets into her hand to count them. There are only six left in total. There were twenty-three last time she was here, almost two months ago. She likes to keep track of how often Whitney needs them, although she’s never mentioned to Blair that she has the prescription. Blair had looked up the pentagon-shaped tablets online and found out they’re Ativan. For anxiety. Insomnia. Trouble sleeping.
She drops her eyes to the marble tiles under her feet. She thinks of the coffee all over Xavier’s floor. Has there been anything off about Whitney lately? Something she might have missed? She tries to recall the last few times they’d been together with the kids. They haven’t seen each other as frequently as usual, but Whitney’s had dinner meetings and cocktail engagements.
She looks down at the dish of fine jewelry that Whitney rotates through most often and is surprised that her wedding rings are there, the emerald-cut diamond between baguettes and the solid gold band. She almost never takes them off, not even when she sleeps. Blair puts them on her right-hand ring finger but can’t move them past her knuckle.
She picks up a diamond pavé bracelet instead. She slips it on and admires her wrist in various positions, in the way one does at the counter of a jewelry store. This is something she does every time. A ritual that isn’t about her admiration of the pieces, but about feeling like a different kind of woman. A woman who has the confidence to wear expensive things. Who can buy expensive things for herself. She drops it back in the dish without the delicacy with which she’d picked it up.
She dresses and takes her phone from Whitney’s bedside table. She notices the time on the screen and realizes Louisa will be home soon.
But there is one place she’s forgotten to look. She sits on the bed and opens the drawer of the side table. Earplugs. Scented pillow spray. A cuticle pusher. The usual things. She unfolds a birthday card from the kids that Louisa had made. Xavier had signed his name in cursive with a heart dotting the i.
She puts down the card and sweeps her hand to the back of the drawer in case there’s anything she might have missed. She feels something that hadn’t been there the last time she checked the drawer. She slides it forward to see. A small, pink satin pouch with something in it. Something cool and metal. She opens it, shakes it into her hand.
A key. She turns over the tag on the silver loop and then she recognizes it. The keychain is Blair’s husband’s. His initials are embossed in the leather. A. P.
10
Whitney
The Hospital
Whitney tries to figure out what day of Xavier’s life it is. 3,680 is the answer she comes to after a long time of adding the numbers in her head at the side of his hospital bed. She likes the reprieve of the math. She says this number to herself over and over, so she doesn’t forget: 3,680 days. How many times has she felt the weight of him on her, on her hip, in her arms, on her back? 3,680 days. How many times has she told him she loves him? This number feels important. Tombstones should be etched with total number of days lived instead of dates, she thinks; the dates mean nothing. And then she shakes the image of wet, gray granite from her head; the thought was a betrayal. She whispers the number. She wants to count each day one by one now. To feel the weight of 3,680 in her mouth.
One. Two. Three . . .
* * *
? ? ?
Two days after Xavier was born, they had brought him home from the hospital propped and padded in the car seat, handling him with the delicacy of live ammunition. Jacob wanted Whitney to spend the day in bed with the baby.
“I gave birth, I didn’t have open-heart surgery.”
But he insisted. He brought her coffee and toast and Advil and opened the windows wide for an early spring afternoon sunbath.
He wrapped the baby in a blanket, not so much swaddled as packaged, and placed him gently beside her before he slid onto the other half of the bed. The baby lay examined between them like a rare species. They leaned on their elbows and stared. He yawned, the tiniest of yawns, and their eyes darted to each other. A yawn! She touched his matted hair, the folded tops of his ears. Jacob left to get her a glass of water. When he came back, she was inconsolable, and she didn’t know why. He took her head between his hands and rubbed her temples with his thumbs. He handed her a tissue and nodded, although she had not said a thing. Everything, they both knew, had changed.
When she stopped crying, the tears gone as easily as they came, he went to the store to get groceries for dinner. She remembered, then, about an email from her boss she hadn’t responded to before she’d left for the hospital. She’d gone into labor two and a half weeks early and didn’t have the last details at work sorted out yet, although she’d been promised nobody would encroach on her role. Senior director, human capital group. Eight to twelve months until they had the partner conversation, that was her plan. And if that didn’t work, she’d go out on her own.
But she knew how these things worked, and so she wouldn’t be taking much time off. She wouldn’t sit around for months, anxious she was being displaced with her clients. She’d feel calmer staying in the mix, knowing she hadn’t lost any ground. She could manage to keep an eye on things remotely until she was ready to be back in the office in a few weeks’ time. She and Jacob had started interviewing nannies but hadn’t found the right person yet. Her friends with children said she was unrealistic. Yeah, we all thought we’d be back to work quickly too. She’d heard that kind of refrain almost as much as she’d heard What a surprise, I didn’t think you wanted kids.
And she hadn’t thought so either, for a long time. But soon after she turned thirty, it seemed as though everyone around her was pregnant. Even the friends who had been in child-free solidarity. Each of those new babies was treated like an accomplishment, and this had surprised her, that they considered motherhood that way. Their sudden air of superiority. It was around that time when she started to feel the tug.