Whitney, who had a response to everything, who had been running full tilt all afternoon, had only raised a hand to her clavicle. Blair had touched her shoulder.
“Makes you see her a bit differently, doesn’t it?” Rebecca had said. Blair wondered if it was judgment she heard in Rebecca’s voice—of course they have empathy for Mara, even though they don’t sit and chat with her on that porch like Rebecca does. She and Whitney are the mothers, Blair thought. Rebecca can’t possibly understand like they can.
* * *
? ? ?
Mara is gone from the fence now and Chloe is sitting on the grass, tying the flower stems together for a crown. Blair moves off of Aiden’s lap and watches her, wondering if she should have gone to the fence to say hello. At the very least.
“Hey, you okay?” Whitney puts a drink in Blair’s hand, but Blair can’t have another. She’ll dump it down the bathroom sink so Whitney doesn’t see. She will find the remote for the outdoor speakers and turn down the volume of the goddamn music; the twins should be in bed. She wishes Whitney would put a bra on. She hates that she feels homesick when she’s seventeen steps from her own front door. She wants Aiden out of that backyard. She wants him to fix the drain in the laundry room and then clean the grill of their barbecue and then sit with Chloe for the last of her weekend homework. She wants to see something wholesome in him again. Something to pacify her.
Blair hasn’t answered Whitney’s question, but Whitney doesn’t seem to notice. Blair turns back to find the woman, the sparkly cheeked girlfriend, to relish a sense of dominance she feels entitled to on this turf—but first, she sees Jacob and Aiden together, and they are looking at the woman too. They watch her run her finger under the hem of her little shorts, pull the denim from the wedge between her round, firm ass cheeks. Her finger stays there, inside her shorts, for a second too long, an inch too far not to notice. Aiden turns slightly as his stance shifts, so now Blair can’t read his lips, but Jacob is grinning at whatever off-color comment he’s made.
Blair looks away. Something about the moment is telling her, calmly, rationally: this marriage is going to end. And then she thinks about how it would feel if Aiden was dead. About the relief she would have if he was really gone, rather than just gone from her.
27
Mara
Her front door is still propped open from the paramedics, and from the porch, she can hear the phone ringing again in the living room. There’s a dullness to the daylight now, the sun getting lower. They’ve been calling her all day. The hospital, she assumes, or the morgue. They’ll want her to make decisions and probably pay them something. She thinks about Albert’s wallet, about the bank, about what to do next. They’ll want her to collect his damp clothes. His watch. How long can she wait? What do they do when there’s nobody to call?
She’s been out here for hours, trying to decide how the aloneness feels. She doesn’t notice Ben until he’s right in front of her.
“How are you?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for the answer. “You’re probably wondering what’s going on.” With my husband’s body? she thinks. With his soul? Do I believe in the pearly gates of heaven anymore? But, no, he’s talking about next door. About the boy. He’s saying there was an accident last night. He’s mentioning Rebecca being at work and something about the father on a flight from London and something else about brain surgery. He has no idea that Albert is dead. That the ambulance took him away today. That tiny fraction of time can be erased in one rub with the end of a pencil. Mara only nods. She’s thinking of how small her kitchen felt with the stretcher in there, like a dollhouse. And then it’s like Ben is floating away, off her porch and into his own home. She can’t remember what she said to him.
That poor child.
And then she realizes she forgot to check the backyard this morning for the paper airplanes, although they might be damp from the wet ground last night. She must not forget to look. They’re important to her.
She holds her hands in front of her. They’re trembling.
She wants to be downstairs, in the basement. In Marcus’s old bedroom.
She pulls the cord on the bedside lamp. He’d always left it on at night, although she’d tell him to turn it off for the sake of the electric bill. But she’d liked to come down once he’d dozed off, to study his face when he slept. Sometimes she sleeps here when she’s restless at night and thinking in circles about him. She imagines how it would feel to see sixty-one years on his face beside her.
She’d set up this room in the basement for Marcus when he turned thirteen. She’d hoped some physical distance in the house from Albert would help him feel less anxious. Albert never even saw the room. He only stomped around above, his footsteps like a drumbeat that raised her son’s heart rate while he read comic books under the covers. The airplane models are still on the dresser, sky-blue paint on the walls. She never cleaned out the dresser drawers. In the closet is a box with his favorite things, some trinkets, a rubber-band ball, a Hardy Boys book. The Great Airport Mystery. There was a die-cast airplane in the box for years, but that was the only thing she gave away.
He had loved airplanes as a child and asked Mara every day when he’d get to go on one himself. When he was ten years old, Mara decided they would fly back home, even though the cost was stupidly expensive. The possibility had sat with her for years, but if they were going to spend that kind of money, she wanted to make sure he was old enough to remember it. She decided to tell Albert rather than ask him. Their parents were getting older, and his mother was ill with a cancer that would never go away, so she knew he’d reluctantly agree.
She left the invoice from the travel agency on the kitchen table one evening, next to his warm plate of glazed ham, with a number to call the agent in the morning about the payment. He folded the invoice and put it in his back pocket and said he would take care of it.
Mara filled an entire suitcase with gifts for their families. She had a nice sport jacket made for Albert by the tailor down the street, knowing he’d want to look sharp for his family. But he wouldn’t even try it on. She could sense his reluctance about the trip, and knew it had nothing to do with the cost of the flights. It should have been easy for him to describe their son’s difference to other people: he’s just like other children his age, but he doesn’t speak to anyone except his mother. He has anxiety. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing to fix or heal or hide.
She’d once overheard Albert use the word “slow” when speaking quietly on the phone to his older sister. She wasn’t sure if he came up with that himself or if someone else had put the word in his mouth, but either way it wasn’t accurate at all. That word described traffic at rush hour, not her sensitive, perceptive boy. Nobody could hear the things he whispered to her, so they didn’t know about him at all. They had no idea.
But Mara didn’t care what Albert thought of Marcus anymore. She didn’t care what anyone thought of him. She couldn’t wait to take him on an airplane. He had never anticipated something with so much excitement before, and she loved seeing this part of him come alive.
The Saturday morning of the flight she woke up early to wash and set her hair in curlers. She wrapped a small gift she’d bought her son for the trip: his own small die-cast airplane that said American Airlines across the side. He would love it. She put it next to his cereal bowl and dressed herself while Albert slept. At nearly nine o’clock, she shook Albert’s shoulder and said it was time for him to get up and shave; that their taxi would be there in half an hour, that he hadn’t even packed his things yet, that she was about to wake their son for breakfast. He had rolled over and told her to close the curtains.
“But we’ve got to be at the airport by—”
As soon as those words left her mouth, she knew they were not getting on the airplane. She wasn’t even sure he had the tickets. He had changed his mind. He couldn’t go through with the trip home.
When he got out of bed an hour later, she was drinking her coffee, waiting for him at the kitchen table. Their son was in the other room, playing with his airplane, sulking. He’d cried when she told him the trip was canceled, asked if it was a problem with the jet engines, because he couldn’t fathom any other reason they were no longer getting on that plane.
“You call them all, Albert,” she hissed. “You tell them why we aren’t coming anymore.”
He didn’t even lie to her. Didn’t give her the decency of an excuse.