She opens the photos. She finds an album she’s created.
They are the photographs of women she doesn’t know. Mothers she has had in her emergency room over the past couple of years. The ones who have children she doesn’t think will make it in the end. She began taking their pictures without letting herself think about what she was doing. A quick and silent tap from the corner of the room while she was meant to be doing otherwise, sending an email to another doctor or looking up a dose. She flips through the photos. Some are side profiles, lips bit, a hand on a temple. Some are distorted from motion. In others, the women are looking right at her. They’re all pallid, and tired, and hunched. None of them is aware of what she’s doing.
This is a breach of privacy she could be fired for, and she has promised herself she will delete them. But for now, she needs these faces, in case this baby leaves her too. If her uterus cannot hold on, as she’s been told it likely will not. She needs them to remind her that despite how much she wants it, becoming a mother is the most foolish thing a woman can do. That a love like that will inevitably hurt her more than she could possibly imagine. Bludgeoned, like the mothers in the photos, like Whitney, three floors above her. Or cut over and over during the long years of motherhood, a dull heartache following everywhere she goes.
And yet she wants it all so badly. Somewhere along the way she has become frighteningly desperate for it.
13
Whitney
Wednesday
It is the morning before she’ll sit guard at her oldest child’s hospital bed. Whitney stands in the conference room with her back against the wall, trying to look as though she is enjoying the baby shower brunch she’s throwing for her most valuable senior executive, who has asked her for an extra six months of maternity leave. Whitney agreed to the time off because she doesn’t want to run her company like the men who run the competition. She wants to be supportive of the women she employs. She wants to be liked by them. But she was disappointed when Lauren asked her. Whitney had thought Lauren was more like her.
They are passing around soft newborn sleepers and patterned gauzy blankets. There are still more gifts to open and croissants to eat and mimosas to drink for everyone but Lauren. There are a few young fathers on her staff, but Lauren will be the first mother other than Whitney, and so the women are talking feverishly about babies with only secondhand authority, a friend who co-sleeps with twins, a sister who gave birth in her bathtub. She doesn’t like that babies and marriages are the only things in a woman’s life celebrated like this. She’d refused to let anyone throw her a shower. Someone passes around a card in which they’re meant to write well-wishes and advice, but Whitney has none, despite the three kids. Nothing that Lauren will want to hear. She writes, instead, that she will miss her.
She slips back to her desk to think about the presentation tomorrow morning. The pitch deck was final five days ago, and they’ve rehearsed every word, performed mock questions and answers; they have prepared for this meeting for three months. She likes this stage in the process, the perfecting. The small but critical details. Quietly practicing her delivery, the right words, the moments of emphasis. Visualizing the success at the other end.
The outcome of the meeting is pivotal to the future of the growing consulting firm she’s built over the past seven years. If she wins this business from the bank, a huge change-management mandate for a global merger, the firm’s revenue will more than quadruple. It will put them in new markets. She’ll open an office in London. It will attract top talent from her competition. It will set them up for a different level of acquisition, and she’d have the clout to retain part ownership. She’ll be elevated.
She wants this win more than she’s wanted anything.
She’s going through the proposed budget for the fourth time when Lauren knocks on her door. “Whitney! That was far too generous of you, as always. You’re the best.”
“You deserve it.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come to the meeting tomorrow?”
“Don’t even think of it. You’re officially done. Go get a pedicure or something, enjoy the day before it rains.”
Whitney doesn’t know what this feels like, to equate slowing down with enjoyment. But she can feel Lauren’s body soften as she hugs her good-bye, she can feel her relief at the mere thought of leaving work behind. Lauren’s husband makes a lot of money in commercial real estate, more than Whitney can pay her, although she earns the highest salary on her staff. Lauren might not come back to work, Whitney knows this. There’s a high probability that she’ll push the baby down her birth canal and be convinced, like most women are, that giving is the most important thing she can do. Her milk. Her sleep. Her self-worth. The more she gives, the more she’ll be praised. The selfless mother. Look at how good she is with that baby. That’s how it begins.
Whitney knows not every woman believes what she does: that independence, in all its forms, is the most important kind of power. That the world is made up of the enviable and those who envy. She made the decision early in her life that she would never be the kind of person who just perpetuates the sense of power the most enviable live with—instead, she would be one of them. And every decision she makes is a choice to remain at the higher end of that balancing scale.
She saw few other options for herself, if she was to have a different kind of life than the one she grew up with. Unfairness lived on her father’s lips—the rules were unfair, the government was unfair, the world was unfair. But she couldn’t understand why he never did anything about it. Why there was never a plan to make anything better. He worked for the town on seasonal contracts, cutting grass and salting roads, but pain in his hips put him on disability from time to time.
Don’t insult your father, her mother had said, smacking her on the side of the head when she asked why he didn’t just get a different job, why they didn’t have more money. And then she had kissed her, and rubbed the spot where she’d just knocked her. She did this often, followed her aggressions with affection, like one erased the other. We’re just ordinary people, Whitney, doing our best. And one day you’ll see for yourself what that’s like.
She’s been getting up every day at 4:00 a.m. for nearly a decade. An unordinary hour. The hour when her whirling mind wakes her, and there’s nothing to be gained by the futile attempt to fall asleep again. There is no value in allowing her inner dialogue to wander, creating problems where there aren’t any. There is no value in simply being busy—everyone these days is busy. There is value in focus. In the satisfaction of control and the productivity of lucrative work.
She leaves the house most days before Jacob and the children wake up. Louisa arrives by 5:45 a.m. to pack the kids’ lunches and handle the morning routine. Whitney tries to be home in time to say good night, or by dinnertime when Jacob is traveling. But she knows what Louisa and Jacob don’t tell her—things run more smoothly when she isn’t there.
She doesn’t submit to the social contrivances that cause other working mothers so much guilt. She doesn’t let herself think about what’s happening at home when she is not there. For her, it’s a matter of what she enjoys, and she enjoys working more than she enjoys spending idle time with her children. She cannot find gratification in those hours. She cannot recognize herself as the warm body leading their routines, the person marching everyone along, responsible for school forms and extra clothes and the application of sunscreen. The onslaught of demands, the whining, the constant changing of their minds after she’s made what they want, given in to what they want, bought what they want.
She needs windows of time with them, not stretches. Small, orderly windows.
And then there is the matter of Xavier. He adds a tension to it all that she has never been able to cope with. There is a frequency to him that clashes with her own. The irritation feels nearly electric in her at times, and she doesn’t like this about herself. The ease with which he threatens the control she thrives on is unsettling. She doesn’t know where the anger comes from. Why it’s always there, lying in wait.
She and the twins have more tolerance for each other. Her experience of them is distinct from her experience as Xavier’s mother. Their built-in companionship, their fixation on each other’s plump and happy faces, the way they seem to need each other more than they need her. She is the roving mother figure. The mother who is not Louisa. She feels, sometimes, like they accept her limitations in ways that Xavier cannot.