But Whitney is impossible to say no to. The music is like something in a Miami beach club. Blair watches the way Whitney moves and tries not to think too much about what her own body is doing. And it starts to work. She feels a rare kind of freedom, an unfamiliar sense of fun. And then something akin to pride. She is relieved to have more alcohol, she takes another sip. She reaches her hands above her in the way other people seem to do, loose, snaking, and she swings her head to the side. And then the other side. Her eyes lose their focus. She can still surprise herself. She can still feel alive.
Jacob stands then, and she thinks for a moment that he might dance with them, too, and she’s jerky, she begins to lose her rhythm. But then he touches Whitney’s hips and moves past them both into the kitchen. Blair reaches for Whitney’s hands and copies how she’s moving again, and she can feel her confidence recover. She turns her face to where Aiden sits back, watching, his leg crossed, hand on his ankle. He’ll like this, his uptight wife having a good time for once. He’ll see that she can be loose. She can be fun. Maybe he’ll feel a little aroused. She puckers her lips a bit. She thinks about how they could have sex tonight. She could instigate things for once. Slip her hand into his underwear while he’s brushing his teeth. She feels herself swell between her legs and she’s surprised herself again. She lifts her eyes to meet his.
But her husband isn’t watching her. He has a glassy look she recognizes. A hunger. He is fixated on Whitney’s body, her breasts, the bare back of her dress. The tip of his tongue trails his lower lip slowly. Blair stops moving. The tequila burns hot in her chest. She is not there at all—she never is.
17
Rebecca
She wakes up from her nap to the sound of the television downstairs in the living room. She takes a few seconds to place that it’s only midafternoon, she’s still on call. The image of Xavier in the trauma room comes back to her. Ben is watching last night’s baseball game, he is clapping and hollering, forgetting in the excitement of bases loaded that she’s asleep upstairs.
“Come on. Come on! YES.”
He’ll be wearing his Yankees hat backward. He’ll be having a light beer. She will slip beside him on the couch and put her head on his lap for another twenty minutes before she goes back to the hospital for the last few hours of the shift.
But first she picks up the iPad from the floor beside her and clicks on the link to the forum she has saved in her bookmarks. She hasn’t let herself do it yet, not in this pregnancy. She finds the page for the month her baby is due, October, beautiful, crisp October, and she begins to scroll the message boards. The selfies in bras and underwear that track every change in shape, the questions about the color and scent and texture of discharge, it all fascinates and embarrasses and thrills her, like it had all the other times she allowed herself the indulgence. She won’t let herself fall back into the habit of consuming the details, but she allows herself five minutes, just today.
She hears Ben clapping again as she comes down the stairs afterward. He jumps when she touches his neck from behind the couch.
“You’re awake. Is the game too loud? One more inning and then I’ll get back to work, I’ve got a few calls later this afternoon.”
He is reaching his arms up toward her, he wants to hold her. She thinks of how it would feel to pass an infant into those arms, fed and tired. She sits beside him, lowers her head onto his lap, in the glow of the bright screen. His hand is on her side, above her hip, and she stiffens—he might reach around, might feel her swelling middle as he pulls her tighter into him. But he so rarely touches her there now, given all that has happened.
* * *
? ? ?
We need to stop trying for a baby,” he’d said. They were sitting at the foot of their bed five and a half months ago. He had held her hands and fiddled with the rings on her finger, the rings he had given her. There was exhaustion in his voice. He didn’t want to be thinking this way. She shook her head no—no, they would not have this conversation right now. No, they would not have this conversation ever.
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
“Do what? You want this, Ben! You want us to have a baby.”
They were supposed to want the same things. The same future, the same house, the same family. She had pulled his hand to her mouth, to make sure he could feel that she was right there beside him, the lips of the wife he loved. He stared at her toes. He couldn’t have meant it.
“It’s too hard. For us both,” he said. His voice was flat at first. “We need to accept that this isn’t going to happen for us. We can’t keep making babies and losing them like this. All the wanting and the failing, over and over and over. And for how much longer? When will this end, what’s the number? Six? Ten? Fifteen? One of us needs to make this decision, or we’re going to destroy ourselves. Can’t you feel it happening already?”
“You’re just scared, Ben. You’re giving up because you’re scared. What if we wait a bit this time? We can take this month off and you’ll feel better after a break.”
She needed him to hear the desperation in her voice. He was silent for too long, and then shook his head slowly.
“So, you’re just . . . you’re done? No baby? Just like that?”
He said he was sorry, that he loved her. That he needed her to understand. He was quiet while she let him hold her. But she hated him.
Another woman might have felt relief. Or pounded her hands into his chest. Might have screamed that it wasn’t up to him. Might have convinced him that they should not give up hope. Recited the stories on the message boards, the women who try for years and years and years, who are told it is impossible, and then it happens. Magic, it was kind of like magic, and if she of all people could make herself think this way, couldn’t he? The word—“miracle”—it’s all around her, it floats through the hospital corridors and is whispered at the fertility clinic, and everyone says they happen every day, and so, where is hers?
She could beg him. It feels like the only option left.
But Rebecca wondered if he meant something else when he said, This isn’t going to happen for us. Us. What he meant was, this wasn’t going to happen because of her. He had to accept that he had chosen a life with damaged goods. The nieces and nephews he flew across the country to see four times a year, the nursery he had already painted in a color called Calamine. He had wanted a child more than she had at first. And now he was giving up? Now the hope was too hard to feel? Now that her obsession and desperation has worn her threadbare? This should have made her angry, but it only made her scared. Keep me, she thought. Don’t throw me away. She was ashamed of these weak thoughts, but there they were.
They were so far away from siblings chasing one another through the field at his parents’ farmhouse. From filling their mudroom with raincoats and mucky boots.
So she agreed with words she could barely get out. They would stop trying. There was sound reason to what he was saying, and the rational part of her brain that she trusted in every other hour of the day could accept this. But she was trembling in his arms.
The defeat wasn’t a respite, it was excruciating. She cried quietly into her pillow every time she was alone in the bedroom. She could barely bring herself to answer when her mother phoned. She moved heavily through her shifts at the hospital feeling more barren than she had before, although nothing had technically changed. She had been holding on to more hope than she’d realized.
Ben had been especially tender with her in the days that followed. Doting and soft. But then he seemed to find a kind of lightness for a while. Relief, it must have been, until the weeks marched on and the emptiness was palpable again. But she had never felt anything close to relief. She found herself drifting away from him when he was near, leaving the room, putting in her earphones even though she wasn’t listening to anything. She started running again to get out of the house, but every pound on the pavement felt like a punch, a reminder of the broken body she lived in.
Three weeks later, after she felt the dull ache of her ovary releasing an egg as it did exactly every twenty-nine days—the compliance of it almost cruel—she couldn’t help herself. She felt for him under the blanket on the couch as the credits rolled on the television screen. She acted ravenous for him again. Him, and not his sperm, for the first time in a long time. They hadn’t had sex since he told her he wouldn’t try for a baby anymore.
“I’m not ovulating,” she had whispered to reassure him. And then softer, more convincing: “I just want you. I need you.”
She had clutched his hips tightly to her while he came.
On the day before she took the pregnancy test to confirm what she already knew, she asked him one last time. A Hail Mary that could change what she’d done.
“Do you still feel that way? About trying?”
He had pulled her close, put his chin on her shoulder. She could feel his chest sink, every bit of air gone before he spoke.
“I can’t go through it again, Rebecca. I’m grieving that future. I’m moving on. And you need to move on too.”
* * *