She shakes her head.
They stand close together so that she can’t hear them speak. One of them seems to be trying to convince the other of what they’ll do next, he is gesturing to Mara on the floor, he is looking around the kitchen. She feels embarrassed all of a sudden, like they can smell her loneliness. Like they can see the misery of their life together in the stained countertop, the table with only two chairs, the bare fridge door. No photos. No magnets. The other one walks outside, speaking into the radio on his chest. The first paramedic kneels where Mara is slumped against the kitchen drawers.
“There’s nothing left we can do. I’m sorry.” He keeps his blue gloves on. He wipes his brow with his forearm. Mara nods. He helps her up into the kitchen chair. “We can call the medical examiner, and then you’ll have to make arrangements with whatever funeral home you want to use. They’ll have to come get your husband. Which can take some time. Probably all day.” He looks around the kitchen again, at the mess all over the floor. “Or, we can take him to the hospital, likely Sinai. They can deal with things there. We aren’t really supposed to transfer in this situation . . . but if it would help you out.”
The medical examiner. Albert, damp, stained, growing cold on the kitchen floor. She wonders if they’ll cover him with something if they leave him here. If he’ll come back to life. If he’ll begin to smell. If this has all really happened.
She says the hospital would be best.
He asks if she’d like to come, if she’d like to go collect her things first.
“I think I’ll stay.”
The other paramedic is back now with the stretcher, and it fits easily through their door, and they’re tucking in straps and moving levers. She doesn’t watch as they take him away. She sits at the kitchen table, and she listens for the sirens again as they leave but they don’t turn them on this time. He was here, he was alive. Just thirty-five, forty minutes ago. The refrigerator is still humming. The kitchen window is open and the echo of the city floats in. Albert is gone, and she’s the only witness to the end, and it all feels impossibly unremarkable.
Nothing like the day she lost her son.
23
Rebecca
She stands outside the door of Xavier’s room and watches Whitney with her son, and wonders why Blair left in such a rush. A nurse, Leo, who normally works with her in the ER, is covering the intensive care unit this week. His shift is almost done. He stands beside her, slowly rubbing the sanitizer into his hands. She likes Leo. He’d noticed when she was pregnant for the first time, that she’d begun letting the coffees he brought for her sit until they were cold.
When she’d returned to work two days after the first loss, with pads in her bra to absorb the watery leak from her nipples, he’d greeted her at the start of her shift like he’d done for weeks: How are you and baby feeling? She could only shake her head as she watched her fingers type her password to log in. No, please don’t ask me that question. No, the baby is not here anymore.
She’d tried to stop her forehead from crinkling. She thought she’d be okay. He had understood right away. He’d put a gentle hand between her shoulder blades and made sure it was the last time she had to acknowledge to anyone what had happened. Nobody said a word to her. He’d had the best of intentions.
Her colleagues might have noticed she was pregnant the times that followed, but nobody said anything, and so how could she? How’s my day? Fine. But I was pregnant yesterday, and now I am not. How are you? The three-month rule of silence takes away the language for that kind of loss. The pregnancies weren’t supposed to matter, not enough to justify everyone around her being uncomfortable.
Now, outside Xavier’s door, Leo tells her that he heard Jacob’s plane should be landing soon.
“Do they think he might have jumped?”
His voice lowers for the last word. Jumped. Fell. Lost his balance. Rebecca isn’t sure what they’re considering. She’s no longer in his circle of care, so she’s kept at a distance, although she’s also made it a point not to know more. Yes, he is a ten-year-old, and devastating accidents happen to kids more frequently than anybody would like to think. But parents also lie. They protect themselves because they think they’ve learned a lesson and they won’t do it again.
The yelling, the screaming that she has heard from the house. And Jacob being away last night. She wonders if the police in the emergency room hallway would have agreed to come back later if the white mother with her head in her hands had looked different. One who isn’t dripping with every kind of privilege. And yet Rebecca had been the one to lift a temperate finger to the nurse, to make a sympathetic face so the officers would merely nod and walk away down the hall. Decide that, yes, it can wait, it is fine.
“I think it was just an accident,” she says to Leo. “A boy who couldn’t sleep. Testing the limits of gravity.” And it likely was exactly that. She has no factual reason to speculate otherwise.
She calls Ben as she walks back down to the ER. No improvements, she tells him. She’s not hearing anything positive from the team. Whitney still isn’t speaking. Like she’s grieving him already. More than a decade into this, and it’s still hard to understand how parents do it.
“Ben? Are you there?” She wonders if she’s lost service. He hasn’t said anything.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here.”
She’s thinking of it, too, their childlessness. She always is. She has never asked him, Does it cross your mind every day? Do you look the other way when you pass the swing set at the park? Do you hear my cries echo from the floor of the shower while you wait for the water to heat up every morning?
He tells her he loves her.
She says she has to go.
24
Blair
Aiden’s voice booms for Chloe from the front door, but she’d already leapt from her chair when they heard the knob turn. Blair heats up his plate, trying not to be irritated that the sauce will be pasty now. There are more important things happening than a ruined dinner. She’s been checking her phone every few minutes, anxious for an update about Xavier. Or a text from Whitney, apologizing—offering an explanation for turning her away, other than the one consuming Blair’s every thought.
The key is upstairs in her drawer, the weight of it palpable above her.
For the sake of the evening with Chloe, she needs to put everything aside for the next few hours. She is expert at veiling this internal confliction, going through the motions while thinking the worst of Aiden. She is counting on a reset with him after his visit to the store that morning. He normally lets things go so easily.
But now, he’s barely making eye contact with her. He’s only focused on Chloe. They’ve agreed not to tell her about where Xavier was today, not until the morning, in the hope they’ll have more information. He throws questions to Chloe about her day in rapid fire. They love this energy they get from each other. And then . . . and then . . . There is always more Chloe wants to tell him. He loves being the receptacle for her endless exuberance. He loves the easy parts.
Chloe begins to cough, and Aiden pushes out his chair.
“I’ll get you some water. Daddy’s got it,” he says.
Blair is standing right next to the sink. She feels him move around her, the plastic cup changing hands, the reach for the tap. He doesn’t run the water until it’s cold, like Chloe likes it.
They’d gone to Mexico last March. They couldn’t get three seats together on the plane, so Blair sat with Chloe in the row behind Aiden.
She entertained her for two hours with card games and rounds of I Spy. With thirty minutes left, Chloe asked if she could sit with Aiden. They swapped seats and Blair finally closed her eyes. Sometime later, she woke up to hear Aiden’s cheerful voice behind her: “Here you go, sweetheart. Daddy’s gotcha covered, don’t I?”
Blair thought of the flight attendant microwaving the small pizza. Walking it to their seat, running his card through the payment machine for him. She’d wanted to flip around and shove her head between the seats. No. You’ve never got it covered. You took a nap and played poker on your phone and you packed nothing but your own carry-on suitcase. You don’t take care of her. I do! I am the one who does everything. You ordered a fucking pizza from an in-flight menu!
But instead, she’d stared at her reflection in the black digital screen on the seat in front of her. There is never any point. They had six days of vacation ahead. She’d once heard a therapist on a podcast say that someone’s partner should calm their nervous system. She never stopped thinking about this—the way his very presence made her hold her breath.
* * *
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