? ? ?
There is a crack, another home run, and she is jolted as Ben claps his hands, speaks to the players as though he is standing on the baseline. He settles, twirls a strand of her hair around his index finger. He leans to kiss her head and fast-forwards through the commercial.
She will tell him tonight. Tomorrow she will be five days further along than she was the first time. She has never had to admit to a lie before. And maybe this is more than a lie. The outcome might make this an unforgivable, unthinkable betrayal.
She, Dr. Rebecca Parry, has separated herself from the irrational woman who has been hiding the pregnancy from her husband for four months. Who didn’t tell him, because soon it was likely to be a lie that no longer mattered. But now that other woman, the one who was certainly going to lose her baby, who had only been hiding something the size of a pea, and then a berry, and then a grape, and then a plum, has finally found hope again, and the lies are not moot at all. They are missiles. I need to tell you something, Ben. I need you to hear me out. This could be the time it works. This could give us everything.
A hit. He pumps his arm, he swigs the beer. And then he leans back and is quiet. His laptop is closed on the table. The sun is moving behind the house now, and the room is shadowed and cool. She finds him here more and more now in the afternoon, asleep on this couch when she comes home.
She knows he won’t survive another loss.
But she’s not sure if they’ll survive without a baby.
Maybe it’s her time for the miracle. Maybe she has saved them.
Her phone glows on the table, a new message from her colleague in the ICU.
Xavier’s status getting worse. Mom still won’t speak. Can you help?
18
Blair
She paces the kitchen, trying to think of what she should bring to the hospital for Whitney. She’s felt immobilized for the past twenty minutes, since Rebecca called to ask if Blair could come. She looks across the street at the Loverlys’ house, but she can’t go back in there to get Whitney’s things, not right now. Instead she goes upstairs and packs her only cashmere sweater, a gift from Whitney that always felt too nice to wear. A travel-size toothpaste. A spare phone charger.
She places each item in the bag with the same thought: she’s been lied to. She’s been made a fool. But now Whitney needs her. She calls her again, although Whitney hasn’t answered her phone all day.
Xavier. It doesn’t feel possible that he’s unconscious. She sits down on her bed to hug the duffel bag, her chest aching. She wants to see Chloe. She wants to run to school and rip her from the classroom and keep her safe from everything. She worries, she worries constantly, and this is why. Bad things happen. When Blair holds out an arm against a child in the car, shouts up the street to be safe, questions whether the barbecued chicken is too pink, Whitney floats her hands down through the air as though quieting the orchestra. Stop worrying so much. As though Blair’s worrying is a fault and not the natural state of motherhood. A wasted emotion. As though it doesn’t serve a purpose at all.
At the hospital, Whitney won’t be stuck in catastrophic thinking, she’ll be taking charge. Demanding the doctors do everything to save her son and accepting nothing else. Whitney is the strong one, the controlling one, the one who gets exactly what she wants at all costs.
The last thought unsettles her. Blair zips the bag with shaking fingers.
She must compartmentalize right now. She must do what Rebecca asked and go to the hospital.
When she leaves the house, Mara calls her name from her porch.
“I’m so sorry, Mara. I have to go, I’m running late.” Blair speaks as she jogs, she barely turns her head on the way to the car parked on the street.
Whitney and Aiden fucking. The deceit was almost inconceivable. Almost.
Stop thinking about this, she tells herself, starting the car. It’s not the time. She shouldn’t have been snooping in the first place.
She shouldn’t have seen the smashed coffee cup in Xavier’s room.
Or that prescription, so many pills gone.
The backyard party in September wasn’t the only time she’s heard Whitney lose her temper with Xavier. There could have been an argument. A misstep. The recklessness of rage.
The impulse of a person to lie when they have a lot at stake.
But, of course, accidents happen.
A few weeks ago, Blair had gone to the Loverlys’ backyard to get Chloe for dinner. Whitney had just come home from the office. They stood together talking, Whitney’s heels in her hand. Blair liked these opportunities to fasten herself into the rhythm of Whitney’s day.
Blair asked about the vacation she and Jacob were planning to a place in the Caribbean Blair had never heard of, although Whitney referenced the island like it was Target. Blair was hungry for more details than Whitney shared—how much it cost, what kind of room. If they’d be flying business class. But she was careful to quell her curiosity. She didn’t like to highlight the disparities between them.
She’d kept one ear on Chloe, who had been inside, playing upstairs with Xavier. They were jumping on the bed in his room, squealing, fits of giggles floating into the backyard.
The bed was under the window.
Blair wanted to interrupt Whitney, to ask her to hold her next thought for just a minute so she could shout up for Chloe to be careful near the open window, but then Chloe leaned out and yelled down, “Hey Mom! Come see our gymnastics routine!”
“She can almost land a flip! She’s incredible!” Xavi’s head and shoulders popped out beside her.
“GET INSIDE! BE CAREFUL!”
The next second, Blair reddened at the panic in her own voice, the mad waving of her arm.
She had asked Whitney about it several times before, the disastrous potential so obvious of a bed under a third-floor window without even a screen. Could Whitney not see this? She had said she would handle it, put a lock on, although Blair hadn’t ever seen her take care of anything like that. Things just happened around her home. Help always at her fingertips, Jacob always finding the solutions, whereas Aiden couldn’t even see the problems. There were no lists, no afternoons of back-to-back errands that kept them all functioning. Whitney was a conductor; Blair was a grinder.
Whitney had barely lifted her eyes up to the window. “Close it, Xavi!” But she’d sounded apathetic. She was dismissive. “Don’t worry. He knows to be careful.”
And then she had checked the phone in her hand as it chimed. An email she was waiting on. Blair stared at Whitney’s face, concentrated on the screen. Sometimes it was like the children weren’t there at all. Not until they irritated her enough to snap at.
Her jaws clench. She can’t question Whitney about the key right now. Perhaps it’s fair game, though, given the circumstances, to wonder how a little boy falls from a third-story window in the middle of the night.
19
Whitney
The Hospital
A voice behind her says they have good news: someone is finally on the way to be with her, they’ll be here in ten minutes.
She hears Blair’s name. And nothing about that feels good.
They hadn’t known each other well for the first year of living on Harlow Street, beyond a hurried and casual hello when they happened to be outside at the same time. They’d moved in a month apart, the Loverlys to their beautiful new home that had taken eighteen months to build, and the Parks to their semidetached fixer-upper across the street. Xavier and Chloe had been too young to take a genuine liking to each other yet.
When the twins were two weeks old, Jacob caught an awful flu and was bedridden for three days, barely able to keep fluids down. Louisa couldn’t come; she lived with her grandmother then, who was in frail health, and Louisa couldn’t risk bringing germs home. Whitney had been coping okay until that point, recovering from a caesarean and working from bed, often with a twin on one of her breasts. She planned to nurse for six weeks. She couldn’t do what she did with Xavier, who had wanted her breast at night for far too long. She wanted to get back to work. She wanted to get away from the multiplying children. She’d been ambivalent herself about having more, but Jacob was right that a sibling, one sibling, would benefit Xavier, and they could afford more help this time around.