“With the summer break starting in a few weeks, though, I wanted to suggest you might work on strengthening Xavier’s friendships with the kids in his cohort. Find him a buddy or two for some playdates this summer. For a nice strong start to sixth grade, socially. I can send you the names of some parents—”
But no. Whitney does not want the names of more parents. She does not want the teacher’s thinly veiled criticisms. She understands exactly what the woman is telling her: Your son has no friends. He’s a loser. There’s only so much time left to turn things around for him. Does she think Whitney doesn’t know? Does she think Whitney can’t see this about him? He is her child. She is his mother.
Her throat is tightening. She doesn’t want to sound emotional. This shitty public school Jacob insisted on, she knew it wasn’t good enough. This school doesn’t have to answer for anything. Xavier deserves better. She will find him a private school for September, one with nicer children; she will get on the phone first thing tomorrow afternoon, and they’ll call in every favor they can, and she’ll donate whatever she has to. His academic performance alone won’t be good enough to get him in, but she’ll make it happen somehow.
She thanks the teacher. She tells her how much she appreciates the call. She wants to drive there now and take him out of class, get him away from those fucking kids. She imagines the girls in the cafeteria making fun of him while he eats at lunch with his mouth open—he’s told her this before, that sometimes they point and whisper, and he doesn’t know why. She’s reminded him a thousand times to close his lips while he chews. It breaks her heart to think of him being teased like that. Being made to feel repulsive.
The names of some parents. She thinks back to the barbecue in September. How little she’s heard from the other fifth-grade mothers since. The gossipy group chats she’s been dropped from. How it stings. She’d been waiting for an invitation to something at some point, for one of them to reach out. But there’d been nothing but silence.
And then she thinks of what Jacob said on the phone earlier that day. That he shouldn’t have gone to London. Like she wasn’t good enough. He doesn’t voice his judgment about her often, but it’s there. In his cool silence after she loses patience with the children, the way he pulls them into him, wraps his arms around their heads while he looks past her, like he’s wishing in those moments that she was not there.
Like he doesn’t think she can be trusted.
She should, to be safe, cancel her plans tonight.
She slams her phone on the desk.
Outside her office door, Grace lifts two fingers. Two minutes until her last meeting of the afternoon. She collects the agenda, her notepad, her phone. A crack has grown across the screen, across a photo she took last year of Jacob and the three children on the beach. Their matching striped bathing suits. The salty curls in their hair. She leaves it on her desk. She won’t think any more about her family right now.
22
Mara
Mara has become good at reading lips. It’s a skill of the lonely. But Ben’s back was to her as he spoke to Blair on the driveway earlier today, right after she left the Loverlys’ house. And her hand was cupped over her mouth. In shock, it seemed like. Something is going on next door, and she’s satisfied to have had a hunch all morning. She’s annoyed she missed Rebecca’s car leave while she was making Albert a snack—that was her ticket.
She should get out for an hour to take her mind off it, or this will consume her all day. Pick up some potatoes for dinner and give her legs a proper stretch. The thing is, if she leaves, she might miss something again, and it’s not like anybody will come over later to tell her what’s going on. She’d better stick around. She’ll finish the laundry in the basement and then she’ll get back out there, to the porch, to watch for them all to come home.
She thinks, while she folds, about the time in her life when she’d felt tethered to her house in a different way. To the family inside who needed her. For years she was the referee in a boxing ring, the opponents unfairly matched. Only one of them knew how to throw a punch, although those punches were never physical. Somehow that made it worse, though. It was much harder to protect her son from Albert’s words. From the way he made Marcus feel. But she tried.
She can’t, now, remember how it felt to be throttled by that responsibility. By the endless obligation. She touches her neck, thinking of how hard it was to breathe sometimes. How her chest would ache. She pulls at loose skin that doesn’t feel like it could possibly be hers.
She had sat outside on the porch then, too, when it had all been too much. In the middle of the night while they slept, she would wrap her housecoat snug and light one of Albert’s cigarettes. Something about the first inhale gave her a kind of permission. She could indulge the ugliest part of herself, the part she couldn’t face when her son’s sweet breath tickled her ear or when she smelled the custard left in the corners of his mouth. She was never lying when she spoke to others about how blessed she was to have the son she did. About how he lit her up. He made her feel whole.
But there was another truth, too, that burned at the center for all those years, and that was the truth she never said out loud. That she felt angry. And resentful. For having a son who needed her in the way that he did. For the kind of mother he needed her to be. Thinking of it now chokes her up. The exhaustion of carrying that every day, whittling away at the resilience she relied on to survive, while she gave and loved and listened desperately for his voice like the wind whistling through the trees.
She stopped looking Albert in his eyes back then. She was terrified about what he might recognize in her. Unlike him, she didn’t have the luxury of hardening into stone.
The love she’d felt for Marcus could bring her to her knees. And it did, some nights, right there on the porch, on the varnished planks of pine. Some nights the love and anger and the unfairness of it all hurt so much that she could swear someone’s hands were gripped around her neck. She’d reach up to feel for them. She never allowed herself the relief of tears.
* * *
? ? ?
Now, she ambles up the basement stairs with the basket of folded laundry on her sore hip. She hoists it onto the kitchen counter next to the stairs, and notices the pot is missing from the coffee maker. But she smells the strong waft of coffee. She turns around. Albert is lying on the linoleum floor, his pants soaked in a pool of brown.
She crouches and places her hands on either side of his head. He’s conscious, but his eyes go through her. She smacks his cheeks, unsure of what to do. His upper body looks tense. She fumbles to reach for something, to do something, but she can’t think of what. She scrambles to the phone in the other room.
“An ambulance, for my husband. He’s on the kitchen floor, he can’t speak.”
She can barely understand what the operator is saying to her, something about staying with him, about checking his breathing, but the panic takes over, and she can’t make sense of what to do next. She puts the receiver on the side table and goes back to him.
“Albert? Can you hear me? An ambulance will come. I don’t know what else to do.”
She wets a dishcloth and wipes the sweat from his forehead. She kneels next to him, her arthritic knees burning, and lifts his head onto her lap. She can hear a voice from the receiver in the other room, but it’s too faint to make out. She tries to think if it’s been minutes or only seconds since she called 911, when she’ll start to hear the sirens, if the front door is unlocked. Will they be able to get a stretcher up those stairs and through the doorframe? Will it be wide enough? Will they carry him out there themselves?
His eyelids are lower now. She puts her hand over his mouth and then her finger under his nose and she can’t be sure if she can feel anything. She can’t be sure.
Her mind jumps from the static noise from the phone receiver to the weight of his head on her lap to the smell of the coffee. She’ll never brew a pot again. She closes her eyes and doesn’t open them again until she hears the sirens. She stares at the door and waits for something to happen. There’s a knock before it opens and the floor shakes from the weight of their steps, their huge black boots coming toward her. She falls back, away from Albert, she moves like a slug to the corner of the kitchen floor. She doesn’t know how to answer their questions. They cut his shirt with scissors and put paddles on his skin. She thinks about ripping his shirt into rags for her cleaning, like she does to all their tattered clothes. The sopping squares of flannel absorbing the spill after they leave.
It feels like they’re standing over him for hours. And then minutes. There’s a calm in the kitchen she can’t make sense of, so little fuss. It’s all nearly perfunctory. They sit back. One of the paramedics asks if anyone else is home. She shakes her head. There is nobody.
“Do you have someone who can help you right now? Any children, or . . . ?”
“No,” Mara says. “No family.”
“A neighbor, maybe?”