She needs to make this go away.
She locks the Loverlys’ door behind her and turns to see Ben watching her from across the street. Her mouth is warm again with stomach acid. He’s walking toward her as she jogs down the driveway. He lifts a hand ever so slightly, as though he’s about to do something she needs to brace for. She stops and swallows down the burn.
“You okay, Blair?” He slows and crosses his arms gently.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Why?” She shields her eyes from the midday sun. Ben looks confused. He turns toward the Loverlys’ house and shakes his head, like he cannot believe what he is about to say next.
Time stops. The anticipation of what he might share feels exhilarating, the split-second high of knowing something bad has happened, but not knowing what. A worst-case scenario. Car crash. Aneurysm. Homicide. Outlandish thoughts, but nothing ever turns out to be what she thinks it is. Not the key, not the affair. Not the hurled cup of coffee in a child’s bedroom. And knowing this, she indulges the pleasure of imagining Whitney in a short-lived moment of struggle. The workday interrupted. The money with less meaning. The trajectory of her accomplished life a little less certain. Blair’s simple existence looking not so bad after all.
“I’m sorry, Blair, you . . . you were just over there, you looked like you knew.” He pauses. “Something terrible happened.”
* * *
? ? ?
She can only make it halfway up her staircase. She leans against the spindles. Her eyes shift to find something to focus on. The spot on the wall where the paint stroke shows. A magenta sequin from Chloe’s craft box that’s stuck on her sock. Thread, unraveling from the edge of the carpet runner.
Aiden was quiet for too long when she called him a minute ago from the sidewalk to tell him about Xavier. She didn’t want to analyze his reaction, the pace of his breathing, his pause, but she had. He asked, first, about Whitney.
“You need to go to the hospital to be with her,” he’d said. “Jacob is away, isn’t he?”
She hadn’t mentioned before that Jacob was away. But the two men are friends. Casual friends. Maybe he told him, maybe he saw him leave the house for the airport.
“I need to think for a second.”
“Blair, she shouldn’t be alone. You have to go, it’s already past noon.”
“I will. I just . . . I need some time to process this. My God, how will we tell Chloe?”
But Aiden hadn’t seemed worried about that. He’d seemed worried about Whitney. She’d nearly told him, then, about the state of Xavier’s room. The spilled coffee. But she’d stopped herself just in time. She can’t tell him she was in their house.
She wants the key gone. She doesn’t want the key ever to have existed.
She thinks of throwing it into the pond at the park. Or a fountain. Of how it would sink, become camouflaged among wishing coins.
She burns with shame when she thinks of what she did before she looked through the bedside drawer. Of how it had felt to orgasm on Whitney’s bed. Of how foolish she was to imagine herself in that way, given everything she knows now.
She pulls herself up, holding the railing.
She can’t let herself spiral.
Xavier will be okay, he’ll recover.
It’s just a key, she tells herself. A piece of metal.
It’s just her unoccupied, idle mind.
12
Rebecca
It’s half past noon when the charge nurse on coffee-run duty lifts a cup in Rebecca’s direction. She thanks her, but turns her attention back to the computer screen to see what lab results have come in. From tab to tab to tab she can feel the sting behind her eyes, but she’s still on call until tonight. She’s normally not fighting the urge to put her head down on the desk this early. A third resident is there now; he is getting the rundown from a nurse, and she’s relieved to have his help. She needs to peel the lids from her eyes, fight through the cripple of exhaustion, and convince her brain to find another gear. To get to the next hour, and then the next, until she is through to the other side of tired. She drinks a cup of cold water to wake up and then fills it again at the cooler as one of the mothers she met with earlier puts two baggies of her pumped milk into the patient fridge.
She calls up to the ICU again to check on Xavier. No change. Mom still not speaking much, brief answers for the social worker, the police officer—they’ll speak with Dad when he arrives. She’ll go up at the end of her shift to see if she can help with Whitney, but right now she needs to step outside. She asks the nurse to page her for anything urgent.
She’s putting her hip against the heavy door of the hospital entrance when someone calls in her direction. “Excuse me? Excuse me?” There’s a tightness in the voice. She turns to see a woman with an infant on her shoulder, bouncing him, like she’s trying to keep him awake. “How do I get to Emergency?”
Rebecca starts to give her directions, but the woman looks confused. Rebecca asks if she can touch the baby and then puts the back of her hand to his forehead, runs a finger over the fontanelle. He is okay, he’s cool and hydrated. She puts a hand on the woman’s shoulder and makes sure she can see her eyes. But she is crying now like the baby, she is trying to pass him to Rebecca.
“I dropped him, I dropped him when I was coming down the stairs. Something’s wrong with him, I can tell.” There are people staring, people slowing down, people pretending not to listen. Rebecca takes the baby, looks at his eyes, feels the back of his scalp for bumps. She looks for a volunteer and spots a teen in the green hospital vest handing out pamphlets. Rebecca asks him to show the woman to the admissions desk. And then she passes the baby back and puts her hand on the woman’s arm.
“I know you’re scared, but it’s going to be all right. We’ll get you sorted. We’ll make sure he’s okay.”
She will ask the woman the difficult questions later. Who was responsible for the child at the time? What happened immediately after? How long did she wait to bring him in? She will focus on the facts. Lacerations. Swells. Fractures. No parent wants to be in her emergency department with their child, but it’s her duty to make sure there are no inconsistencies, that the child is safe—and that is all. She reminds herself of this at the times when she feels the ugly pull of judgment. That kind of judgment is not her job.
But had she pressed Whitney enough? As much as she will this woman?
She makes a mental note to follow up about this with the team in the ICU. To make sure the proper diligence has been done. A matter of protocol, and that’s all.
The fresh air feels cleansing in her chest, and she has the rare feeling of not wanting to get back to work right away. There is something else she needs to do.
Sometimes she does it in the resuscitation bay on a slow shift, or the back stock room of the operating theater in the middle of the night. But this afternoon she takes the elevator down to the dim hallways of the basement, where they keep spare machines in the old clinics. She chooses a room at the end of the corridor.
The moment the door closes, she lets the fear consume her. Of what she might not find. Or of someone walking in to find her. But there is a sense of excitement, too, and the anticipation of the relief on the other side, as fleeting as it might be; the uncertainty will win again, it always does.
She lies on the table with her eyes closed while the machine warms up. She pulls down the top of her scrub pants and squirts the cold blue jelly on her abdomen. She takes the Doppler and reaches to tilt the screen in her direction.
The mass of cells are now a shape she can recognize. Feet and toes. A head. A brain. A brain that will develop the function to love her. The fetus jostles under the pressure of the wand while she listens through the static for the sound she came for. And then she finds it. The womp of the heartbeat. She lets it fill the room, until it sounds more like a constant, distant siren.
And then she looks away from the screen. She doesn’t like to remember the shape. She’s better off moving through her days assuming that what was confirmed to be alive inside of her soon won’t be. Matter that will expel. There is security, at least, in the constant state of disappointment. There is less threat for her there.
She wipes the jelly from her skin and stuffs the cloth in her pocket. She swings her legs around and sits up to check her phone. There’s a stream of texts from her husband. She’d called earlier to tell him about Xavier. My God, he kept saying. He’s asking now how she’s doing. Telling her he loves her. They are trying to be better. They are trying to move on. He’s asking about the trip to Oregon again. He wants to take her to the Willamette Valley, tour the wineries on bicycle. He knows it’s been a tough day, but has she finally scheduled days off work, midautumn? He needs to book their flights.
The baby is due in October. But he doesn’t know this.