Now, Chloe drinks the lukewarm water at the kitchen table. Blair puts Aiden’s dinner plate on the place mat in front of him.
“Mom. Aren’t you going to say hi to Daddy?” The tone of Chloe’s voice is changed.
Blair feels chastised. She lived through years of her own mother slamming down plates of cold chicken in front of her father. It was the tension she’d chewed through every night.
“Of course!” She smiles. She leans down to kiss Aiden on his stiff lips. “How was your day, hon?”
“Excellent.” He doesn’t look at her. He moves his chair closer to the table and smiles at Chloe instead, whose eyes are on Blair. Then the two of them resume. Blair tidies the counter and listens.
She doesn’t want to know a life in which she no longer overhears them together. Chloe laughs differently when he is home. She sings more. She is sillier.
She slips into a scene that could be their future. The overnight bag she would pack for Chloe. The sound of the knock on the apartment door when he’s there to get her. Having to see his new clothes, his new haircut. Having to confront the happiness he’s found without her, there in the frame of her dismal apartment doorway. The deadbolt lock women use when they feel nobody will protect them. The crushing repetition of chronic loneliness, the deafening silence of hours upon hours alone when she does not want to be alone. Chloe’s laundry smelling differently when she comes back from his place. Chloe’s careful answers to her prying questions. What people will think of her. How shrunken she will feel.
She’s not sure she would be any less angry than she is now.
They are calling for her. They want to tell her a joke they’ve made up. And then Chloe asks for ice cream with sprinkles.
Blair runs the scoop under hot water and listens to them negotiate how many rounds of hangman they’ll play before bedtime. The steam fogs the window above the sink. She packs the ice cream neatly into the cone. She shakes the rainbow sprinkles on top.
Her husband’s mouth over Whitney’s nipple. The rush he would feel staring at the darkened pinch of her asshole as he fucks her from behind. Not wanting to leave each other when they have to go home. Feeling more pity than guilt when they see Blair, with her stretched-out jeans. The sandbag breasts under her shirt. Her cluelessness.
She delivers the cone to Chloe and then makes another for Aiden.
When she puts the carton back in the freezer, she notices Aiden’s phone on the kitchen counter. She turns her back to them.
Her heart races every time she puts in his password. Nothing about this ever feels good to her. This collision of fear and anticipation. She doesn’t want to find something she can’t unlearn. She doesn’t want this to be the last second in the before of their lives. It is terrifying and it is addicting and she can never talk herself out of it.
She scrolls quickly, looking for Whitney’s name in his sent texts and then his email and then his messaging app and then his recent calls. He’d be calling her, texting to see if she’s okay. But there’s nothing but innocuous chatter with his friends.
She puts the phone back on the counter and pulls her shirt away from the dampness in her armpits. The relief is an anesthetic, for now.
Chloe is calling her. Blair needs to be with them. She needs to take a turn at the game.
She tries again. She stands behind Aiden and puts her hands on his shoulders. He pulls her lower so that her head is next to his. He rubs his face against hers and she feels the scratch of the day’s growth against her cheek, smells the remains of his aftershave. He lifts his cone to her mouth, an offering. She feels Chloe watching them. Almost suspiciously. Blair licks the ice cream.
Can Chloe feel the foundation underneath her cracking? Will she wake up one day and no longer feel as safe as she has for the last seven years? She thinks of her unspoiled, impressionable heart. Blair cannot do that to her. She is desperate not to. She owes her more, and she will assume any cost.
Both things can exist at the same time: the resentment, and the comfort. The despair, and all that love. She pecks Aiden on the corner of his mouth. And then again. She sees the satisfaction in her daughter’s face, and then she lowers her eyes to the hanging man.
25
Rebecca
It’s only 7:00 p.m. but she needs to find somewhere to lie down. She can feel the tension in her back after just a few hours of standing. Every little ache makes her nervous now. Go away, go away. She lets the resident on her shift know she’ll be back in twenty minutes, and she finds an on-call room where she can rest.
Rebecca can see her sometimes when she closes her eyes. The first one. She was the size of a pomegranate, the app had said, the week she left her, although she had looked bigger in her hands. They measure in utero from crown of the head to the bum, as though the baby’s twiggy legs, fully formed with every bone, with ten tiny toes, do not matter yet. She thinks of the hand towel she had wrapped her in, soiled with the makeup she had washed from her face a few hours before, at the end of a nineteen-hour shift. Of how it felt for the baby to come out of her. The physical sensation of the bulge passing through her. She cannot let go of that feeling.
They hadn’t decided on a name. And nothing had felt right after she saw her. It’s hard to choose a name you love that you will never get to say.
She doesn’t want to let herself think about this now, not in the middle of a shift.
But this is the thing about miscarriage. It is not an event, something that once happened and has ended. Miscarriage goes on and on, follows a woman through her days and her dreams, and then she will have blissful split seconds when she forgets, when her brain can still feel the gratification of having that baby, until she remembers the baby is not hers anymore, and hasn’t been for days or even weeks. There will be blood that soaks her sheets and odor she can’t recognize. There will be appointments where they prod her, make sure she’s spat everything out, because if not, what’s left from that life could kill her. She will think of herself as a vessel that can only expel, that will never find pleasure again in being entered.
Rebecca had lain on her bed after it happened the first time and could feel only the heat of anger. Cheated of what she had thought was hers for nearly eighteen weeks. She hadn’t known how badly she wanted the baby until she couldn’t have it. But there was nobody to shout in the face of, to convince she should be given back what she was owed. And when the wrath subsided into sadness, she could think only of her mother. How unbearably hard it would be to tell her the baby was gone.
Ben had been crushed, but then he’d been optimistic. Bad luck, he had called it the first time, almost casually. We’ll try again. Like a mulligan in his golf game.
The second fetus had landed in the toilet bowl in a mass of tissues. She had been dreaming of the baby’s limbs hanging from her in the hallway of a dark labor and delivery ward, when the sensation of contractions woke her out of sleep. The cramps grew over the hours that followed as she crouched in her nightshirt in the shower, until she could feel it was time.
Afterward, she lay, wet, on the cold tile floor, until Ben came into the bathroom and brought her back to bed. She asked him not to flush the toilet and he had shaken his head, he wouldn’t.
Once he fell asleep, Rebecca cupped the fetus out of the pink toilet water. It felt like a goldfish in her palm. She touched it with her finger, the slimy beginning of life. She put it in a plastic sandwich bag and tucked it under the bathroom sink on a stack of toilet paper rolls, and she waited, sleepless, for the morning. She was on day shifts that week. She showered and dressed, and as the sun was coming up, she brought the bag to the sparse backyard of their new house, the yard they were meant to clutter with tricycles and sandbox toys. She dug a hole as deep as she could by the fence made of pine, the wood still blond and fresh and smelling like the forest, and placed the plastic bag with her fetus inside. She covered it with dirt, packed it firmly, and then drove to work, her soiled hands on the wheel of the Prius. She scrubbed clean in the steel sink of an empty operating theater when she got there.
The third one left her in the staff bathroom during a busy shift, at the same point in her pregnancy as the second. It was fast, like a bowel movement, as though her body were getting used to ridding itself of any life that wasn’t her own. She had spotted the day before, but the cramping was so light that she convinced herself it was her tired back, a strained muscle. For two hours, maybe three, she could believe that was all the discomfort was.