“I don’t like when you yell at Zags,” he whines into her ear, an assault of wet breath. “Daddy said no more yelling.”
Xavier glares at her and then he leaves the kitchen, calling for Louisa. Who will have heard it all from the next room, thinking of how Whitney has only just come home, she hasn’t been with them for hours on end, she hasn’t earned the right to feel suffocated by their very presence. Thea wails for Whitney from the floor where she’s now splayed. The resentment tightens behind her shoulder blades, it moves up and wraps around her neck. She can’t be with the children. She can’t do this tonight. She puts her son down on the floor, but he clings to her, every limb and finger a tenterhook. She unlatches him as he cries. Thea calls for her again as she leaves. She walks up to her room with her laptop, away from them all.
29
Blair
Aiden slips his head into Chloe’s room as Blair is reading the bedtime story.
“I’m going out for a bit, okay?”
She looks back to the page. Everything inside her heightens, like there’s a threat in the room instead of her husband.
“Where are you going, Daddy?”
“Just out to see some guys from work, sweetheart. It was my friend Lin’s last day today.”
She settles back into the nook of Blair’s arm. She waits for Blair to read, but Blair can’t. How could he socialize on a night like this, when their friends’ child is in the ICU? She thinks of the shower he just took, the aftershave she can smell. Perhaps he won’t be socializing at all. She wonders if Jacob has arrived at the hospital yet. Or if Whitney is alone, waiting for Aiden to meet her there.
She feels insane. Or is this a whisper, speaking to her? She imagines herself looking back on this moment with the shame of idiocy.
He doesn’t step out of Chloe’s doorway. He is waiting for her to say, Have fun. You won’t be too late, will you? But she can only formulate the words that are in front of her on the page, until he interrupts:
“You’ll be all right? I’m sorry, the timing’s bad given . . .” He nods his chin down to Chloe. “Just call me if you get any updates, okay?”
She stares at the book.
After they hear the front door close, Chloe looks up at her. “Are you mad at Daddy?”
“Mad? Of course not. Why?”
“You’re always mad at Daddy. You don’t love him anymore.”
Blair feigns surprise with a wide-open mouth. “Chloe! That is not true at all, and you know that. I love Daddy very much. He’s my favorite person, besides you.”
Chloe looks away from her, back to the page. “Okay. If you say so.”
“Baby. Everything is absolutely fine. Please, don’t worry.”
But there is skepticism in Chloe’s small face. She knows. And Blair has just told her that she is wrong. That her intuition isn’t valid, not when it’s uncomfortable. No, darling, we pretend. This is how the life of a woman looks.
Blair swallows and finds her place on the page.
These decisions she has made—this marriage, this daughter, this life—she has made them just like everyone else does. With promise. With the belief that she was a different kind of woman than her mother. That she would be happy enough.
* * *
? ? ?
When Blair was eleven years old, she’d gone to her grandparents’ house with her father one Saturday in the summer. Her mother hadn’t wanted to come with them, but Blair hadn’t minded; she liked when she and her father went places just the two of them. When they left home, her mother was in the kitchen, pulling the elements off the stove and soaking them in the sink. Blair noticed her wiping her eyes with her sleeve, her hands in yellow rubber gloves that were supposed to smell like lemon. The black marks on her shirt could have been from the charcoal caked under the coils. Or maybe she was crying. Blair hurried past her and called good-bye from the front door.
Not far from her grandparents’ small bungalow, on the way home, her father stopped the station wagon outside an apartment building that had only three floors and bricks the color of hot mustard. A woman shouted through a small square window that she’d be down in a minute. Her father left the ignition running and said not to touch anything. The woman opened the door to the building, and then he was gone.
Blair bit all her nails, waiting for him. She unbuckled and lay down across the hot vinyl back seat and pretended she was naked in the cabin of a sailboat. With Ian Mackenzie from school, who seemed to have the superhuman ability to see straight through her. She pressed her hand between her legs and squeezed herself over her underwear.
The whole car shook when her father flung himself back in. He pulled out the cigarette lighter and blew smoke at his face in the rearview mirror.
“Come sit up front if you want.”
He never let her ride up front. He smelled like her auntie’s hair spray, but it wasn’t her auntie’s apartment.
A half hour later she had to pee, but she didn’t want to ask him to stop for a bathroom. He hadn’t said anything after they pulled out of the apartment parking lot, but then:
“Your mother, she’s a good woman. You know that, don’t you?” His voice was different. She had to watch his lips move to make sure the words were coming from him. “She puts up with a lot. A lot more than she should.”
He sniffled. And so she sniffled, too, to make it seem like it wasn’t a big deal. Like people sniffled all the time. Like she hadn’t even noticed he was crying.
She was hot, too hot, and rolled down the window. She wanted to be home with her mother. The good woman. She wanted to be eating grilled cheese at the kitchen table, while her mother made a casserole and listened to a rerun of The Young and the Restless blare from the other room. She wanted to lie on the carpet in the spare bedroom and watch her mother’s right foot work the pedal of the sewing machine under the desk.
But when they got there, being near her mother didn’t feel like she wanted it to. She didn’t feel like being nice to her. She didn’t want the smell of that other woman’s hair spray in her nose.
“Why didn’t you come today? To Grandma’s house?” she’d asked her.
Her mother sighed. She’d slammed the oven closed. “Oh, I don’t know.”
She’d turned her back. She’d placed the oven mitts on the laminate counter and she just stood there until they heard the toilet flush from down the hall. Blair’s father came into the kitchen, buckling his belt. He put his mouth to her mother’s neck and held her shoulders firmly. Sweet darling pie, he always called her mother, although she hated pie. She hated anything too sweet. He said dinner smelled good. He said he was hungry. Blair watched her mother stiffen. She watched her head turn to the side, away from him, and slowly close her eyes.
The good woman.
30
Whitney
The Hospital
It is a younger Jacob who is trying to stop the smoke alarm from beeping in her dream. He is teetering on the leg of a chair in the kitchen of their first home, like a circus act, fiddling with the buttons overhead to make the noise stop before the baby wakes up too soon from his nap. She is hissing for him to hurry up. She still has so much to do. So much to finish before the child is lying on her again, sucking from her, testing her. She rattles the chair he stands on. She smells toothpaste.
And then she’s awake.
She opens her eyes in the hospital chair and sees there’s no rim of light around the window blind she’s staring at. It must be evening. There’s a nurse cleaning Xavier’s mouth with a mint-green sponge, and another changing the vial of medication on his beeping IV machine. Or machines. There could be three, there could be ten, there could be fifty. She won’t look at them. She pretends the nurse is not there and studies Xavier’s hand again instead. His skin is hot from the fluids coursing into his vein. There’s a brown bandage across the tiny tube, and the smell reminds her of the ones she’d been given as a child at school, the tackiness on her skin sticking for weeks.
He’d been right Wednesday night, before he whipped the fruit bowl across the kitchen. She hadn’t liked him sometimes. Sometimes she’s wished he was a different kind of child. It’s hard to say exactly how, or what about him she wanted to change, or when she began to feel this way. But he had known.
There is a coat on the chair across from her that was not there before.
She realizes it’s her husband’s coat. He’s here.
She puts her head between her legs. Someone places a plastic kidney tray below her face and she spits stomach acid for a few minutes until she finally heaves. Nothing comes out. She is brought a wet cloth for her chin that smells like antiseptic.
She feels Jacob come into the room and she closes her eyes as he touches the back of her neck. She has failed him, she thinks. She always knew she would.