“I know. I couldn’t believe it was him this morning. I mean, these kinds of things happen every day, but right across the street, to a family we know. It’s just . . . it’s awful.”
“Let me get you some water.”
She watches as he moves around the kitchen. The display of concern, the constant attempt to nurture her. Like he’s convincing himself that caring for her, and not their baby, will be enough for him. Trying to silence the bitterness that might win, eventually.
She knows he wants to love her. But love can change. Love is based on an idea about who the other person is, and she isn’t wholly that idea anymore.
“Why don’t you go for a run,” he says. She used to run all the time. Miles after a long shift, shaking off anything that lingered, doubt about how she’d handled a case, niggling worry she’d sent a child home when she shouldn’t have.
Maybe, she says. She lifts the water to her lips. He turns around to wipe his hands on the dish towel. A little longer than he needs to.
He’s asking now about the days off work for Oregon. She promises to sort it out.
He asks why she doesn’t want the coffee.
She looks down at her untouched mug. She tells him she’s had one too many at the hospital.
She can do this now, lie to him so fluently. Like the words aren’t really hers. Like none of the dishonesty counts because it will have happened in the Before. And everything will be better in the After. She only cares about the After.
She goes upstairs to sleep and makes sure her ringer is set loudly. She has less than three hours before she has to go back, unless the resident needs her sooner. In their bedroom she slips off the pants that are too tight around the waist. And then she listens to make sure his footsteps still come from the main floor. She lifts her T-shirt up and looks at her middle in the mirror on the back of their door. She has never made it to one hundred and twenty-nine days. There are weeks, maybe only one, until her shape will be too obvious to hide.
He can no longer bear the burden of so little hope. But she cannot live without it.
15
Whitney
The Hospital
She puts the tip of his right index finger between her teeth and gnaws at the nail until the thin strip pulls off. She keeps the crest between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She touches the exposed pink skin on his fingertip and wonders how much he can feel now. Her touch? Her presence? Has he heard her say how sorry she is?
Everything about him at ten years old feels so familiar. A part of her. But they are nearly at the time when this begins to change. He has been growing away from her since the day she gave birth, and soon she will start to feel it, physically, in the way a child no longer seeks comfort in the gesture of a mother’s affection. Soon, he will love her less than he once did. And then soon after that, she will begin to feel irrelevant to him. He will become more uncomfortable when she is around than when she is not. And then, he will not think of her much, or think much of her either. They’ll only touch for a quick hello, a cordial pat good-bye on the strong, round shoulders of a man.
Isn’t that how it goes, with sons?
If he lives. If he doesn’t remember what happened.
She runs her finger under his eyes, as though he has tears to wipe. She puts her hand over the ventilator that covers his mouth. She imagines she is the one filling his lungs with air, that it is only she who can save him.
His laughter comes to her mind then. She can imagine the lift of his cheekbones, the stretch of his jaw, but she cannot hear how he sounds. What sort of pitch is it? How is it possible that she can’t remember how he laughs? Might Jacob? Might Louisa?
Does he ever laugh when he is around her?
She doesn’t remember laughing much as a child herself. The only laughter she recalls is through the wall from the television set in the apartment next door. Her father would bang every once in a while for the guy to turn it down, and her mother would complain about the banging being worse than the noise of the television, and her father would say that if she didn’t like it, she was free to leave, though everyone understood she would never do such a thing.
But Whitney knew her mother kept a single bus ticket hidden in her interior coat pocket. Good for any weekday, no expiration, direct to the national terminal three hours away. She can hear this exchange perfectly, still, and there is even a sense of comfort she can remember in the predictability of it all, in the way he’d flop back down in his chair, wincing at the pain in the aching hip that had taken away his livelihood. And his ability to back her mother up against the wall, his words spewing. He’d hum a verse or two of Johnny Cash to soothe himself, not any more than that. But she cannot remember any of them laughing.
And so, no, maybe there isn’t enough laughter in the Loverlys’ house, at least not when Whitney is home. When she is home, there is a lot of her phone, and a lot of shoulds, and a lot of tears when the behavior isn’t what she needs it to be. There is not a lot of room for spontaneity. There is not a lot of time.
She tries to think of when she last played with him, LEGOs or a board game or chess, or one of those plastic spinning things he collects that she can’t remember the name of.
She doesn’t really like to play. In fact, she hates to. There is no productivity in play. She hates the plastic bins full of toys, and hates sitting on the floor. She hates making the noise of a car and pretending to be a cougar. She hates the mundanity. She hates trying to sound light and cheerful and surprised when she isn’t. She hates feigning interest in things that aren’t real.
Will you play with me? When can you play with me? Can we play after dinner? Can you build something with me? She must close her eyes and brace herself for the whining, for the fuss, when she tells them: I’m sorry, but I can’t right now. There are a few other things I have to do.
Does she always have something else to do, or does she always find something else to do? She thinks of the schedule on her phone, that color-blocked, chock-full calendar that she lives or dies by. There is no color assigned to him or the twins. There is no color assigned to Play.
Had they ever lain together, in the sunshine, and looked at the clouds? Had they made up stories together, silly songs, silly words? Did they know the kind of unique joy they’re supposed to?
She isn’t that kind of mother.
A mother like Blair. Who has made different decisions than she has.
She picks up Xavier’s hand and puts his nails to her lips again. She once threatened, offhand, to rub onion on his fingers every morning if he kept biting them relentlessly, something her mother used to say to her. He hadn’t thrown his usual excuses at her. He had only asked if she could please stop talking about it. That chewing on his nails was sometimes the only thing that made him feel better.
Better about what? But he didn’t have an answer. She left him alone. She knows what that’s like, doing something you’re not supposed to because it gives you the thing you need most. A sense of relief. A sense of control.
There is a doctor in the room now. She can’t listen to this person, she can’t pretend to know what he is saying to her. She wants to shush him, to cover her ears. Go away, go away, go away. She smells alcohol. And then latex. She squeezes Xavier’s limp hand because it feels good to make sure he’s still there, that there are tissues and muscles and bones. That he isn’t a memory.
Memory. The doctor says this word now just as she’s thinking it. Xavier’s memory. Trauma. There is some kind of scan. Swelling. The words “plate” and “skull” and “blood supply.” A jumble of numbers with decimals.
She opens her eyes to see him. She’s heard other mothers say they often catch a glimpse of what their child will look like when they’re older, that a certain expression moves their imaginations forward in time. This happens, sometimes, with the twins. But Whitney never thinks about Xavier in this way. With him, she could never see past the day, the hour, the boy he is in that very moment. Needing, wanting, challenging. Pushing her right to the very brink.
16
September
The Loverlys’ Backyard
The rawness in her throat is familiar, but she can’t swallow it away—this time it’s shame, sour and thick. Whitney pulls herself up from the bedroom floor and stares at Xavier, who is staring at her. They both look to the open window above the backyard party. She clutches her breasts as though she’s been exposed, as though someone has ripped off her clothing and left her bare. Her face is burning now, her brain clocking the options that could make this better.
She can pretend he was about to ingest something poisonous.
She can lock herself in her bedroom for the remainder of the afternoon.