“You’re awake.”
But she’s so tired. She lifts her head, and suspended in the familiarity of his voice, it feels for the first time as though she might survive this. But the feeling is gone just as soon as it comes. She waits for him to berate her. To smash something into her head, like she deserves. To kick her skull. So that it splits, blood dripping down her forehead, between her eyes, a river along the bridge of her nose. She wants him to be violent with her, just once. She wants to feel what it’s like.
She begs him silently.
But of course, he would never hurt her. He adores her. He needs her. He is careful when he wraps his arms around her, like she is the delicate one on the brink of death, and not their son. And yes, maybe she is. His breath is warm on her neck and smells of coffee, and then her neck is wet with his mucus and tears, and she can feel the shake of his chest on her back. She lifts one hand to feel his hair and she thinks she can smell the stagnant air of the plane in his shirt.
When Jacob stops crying, he walks slowly to the other chair and takes a seat across from her. His wedding band clinks on the rail of the bed as he reaches for Xavier’s other hand, and the noise rattles her—she looks at her own finger, bare where the diamonds he gave her thirteen years ago should catch the lights of the machines against the boy’s pale skin.
She always sleeps with her rings on. But she had taken them off on Wednesday evening.
There had not been a second to think of something so obvious before she left for the hospital to see if her son was alive.
She is wondering if her husband will notice.
She is wondering if he’s thinking about the bedroom window. If there has been even a fraction of a moment when he believed it was something as innocent as an unlocked pane of glass, a restless and sleepless boy, the complete misfortune of a freak accident.
He has asked her to stop yelling so much. He has said to her before, Whitney, do you ever hear yourself? Do you know what that’s like for the kids? But he is more precious with her than he should be, like he’s the only one who can see how delicate she really is. How close she comes to being pushed just a little too far.
She is wondering what her husband will ask her, what he might accuse her of, but he speaks at that very moment: “I’m sorry.” His head hangs, his chin tucked into his chest like he wants to disappear inside himself too. “I keep thinking that if I’d been there . . .”
If he’d been there, nothing would have happened. Xavier would have been safe. He doesn’t mean this exactly. But it is a fact that she was there, and he was not. And it is a fact that their son is fading away in a hospital bed. That the end is hours away, not months, not decades.
She thinks of what Xavier wrote on the wall.
She thinks of what happened right before her son fell from the window.
This is when she starts heaving again.
31
Rebecca
She isn’t herself with the last few patients she sees. Her energy is low. Everything feels off.
“I’m sorry, can you tell me again what medications she takes?”
“Can you walk me through his past medical history once more?”
It is Xavier, it is Whitney, it is Blair who had left so upset, but mostly it’s the conversation she will have with Ben when she gets home. She could wait, put it off another few days yet again. But there is, she knows, something about tragedy that can change a person’s perspective on things. Maybe in the midst of a crisis, he’ll find it within himself to forgive what she’s done. She’s more than eighteen weeks along. Only six weeks away from the baby being viable enough that a doctor would fight to save it. There is finally a reason to feel hope. And even gratitude. Their neighbors, she will remind him, are praying for their child to live.
She buys a pair of slippers from the gift shop before it closes for the night. Dr. Menlo, who is overseeing Xavier’s case, is leaving his room as she arrives to give them to Whitney. The doctor tells Rebecca she’s concerned about the depth of the coma. That the damage to his brain might be worse than they’d originally thought. The chances of recovery lessen by the hour, without some kind of positive indication. They’ll wait overnight to see if things improve, and then they’ll likely need to move forward with the surgery.
Rebecca knocks on the door to his room. She and Jacob hug.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so, so, sorry,” she says.
Jacob says his head is spinning. He’s thought of another question for Dr. Menlo. He asks Rebecca to sit with Whitney while he leaves to find her.
Whitney hasn’t moved from where she first sat that morning. Rebecca puts the slippers on the floor near her feet and lowers herself into the chair on the other side of Xavier. She thinks of that gap the doctor had spoken of when she was a resident, the space between expectations and reality. That gap becomes tighter and tighter when all a parent can do is wait. Soon, there will be no room for hope at all.
The IV machine begins to beep, the antibiotic is finished. Rebecca silences the machine and feels fluttering in her abdomen again. “I’m pregnant.”
She doesn’t want to say this to a mother who is losing her child, but the words come out before she can stop them. The admission is an exchange of vulnerabilities. She’s been privy to so much intimacy in that room.
“I went for bloodwork the other day, and the nurse who was filling out my form asked how many times I’ve been pregnant. I held up a hand. Five fingers. Five.” Rebecca pauses. She leans forward, her eyes on Xavier. “And then she asked how many children I had. I watched her write the zero in the box and I thought, Wow. There it is right there, like a final score. Five-nothing.”
She watches Whitney knead her son’s knuckles like clay.
“People love to say there are so many ways to be a mother. Like it’s some kind of consolation for women like me.” Rebecca stands. She touches Xavier’s foot under the blanket. “You asked me that question earlier, about why I haven’t had a baby. I just wanted you to know.”
She hears Whitney inhale, long and steady, and then: “Rebecca?” Whitney pauses and finally lifts her face. “I’m sorry.”
It’s the only time in three years that someone has said this, and only this—I’m sorry. Without advice, without platitudes, and she doesn’t expect the simplicity of this validation to move her like it does. She clears her throat and gestures to Xavier. “I hope things go okay overnight. I’ll call to check in tomorrow.”
Jacob comes back to the room and motions for Rebecca to step outside. He asks if she’ll walk to the cafeteria with him to get Whitney something she might finally eat.
On the way downstairs, Rebecca reiterates what she knows Dr. Menlo has already told him, and nothing more. Jacob seems to understand but wants to hear it all again from her. He asks her to repeat herself, like nothing is sticking. He touches the frame of his glasses, he is thinking, he is asking her questions about outcome probabilities that she doesn’t feel comfortable answering for him. He orders a bagel for Whitney and a coffee for himself, and they sit on a bench in the atrium.
“He’s not a heavy sleeper. He wakes up sometimes. We found him sleepwalking once when he was five or six.”
He is trying to reason through the unreasonable. Rebecca watches the atrium begin to clear, staff going home to their families. Parents in slippers, with no appetites, wandering to the cafeteria where they’ll stare at the options and go back upstairs empty-handed.
“They asked me a couple of questions as soon as I got here,” he says, dazed. “About Xavier. And how the window opens.” He gestures with his hand, like he’s unlatching, trying to remind himself. “There was a woman from social work there too. She said it was just protocol. That she needs to make sure there’s no reason to feel concern for Xavier’s safety in our home.” His finger pecks at the plastic lid of coffee. “Even the suggestion of that, about my wife. It makes me feel sick. Of course he was safe with her. With us.”
“Of course,” Rebecca repeats. Maybe he’s only thinking about the window, how high it is from the ground, about the lock they never put on.