“So what now, we’re going to be flagged in some system forever? Is that how it works? I mean, the injuries should show that he just lost balance and fell, maybe things were slippery from the rain yesterday. They can see the impact to his skull and measure the height and all of that, right? Doctors should be able to tell that kind of thing, it’s a matter of physics. They have no reason to question anything. And I told them that. We’re a good family, good people.”
Rebecca nods. She wonders if he’s thought through the scenarios of Xavier waking up and remembering what happened. There can be short-term memory issues with a head injury and loss of oxygen—but it can come back. Jacob is staring at the floor. His mouth opens. He wants to say something else, but he’s hesitating. She should coax him: Jacob, if you have anything you need to share about what might have happened, I’m here for you. She swallows, clears her throat. But he lifts the brown bag apathetically.
“I should get back to the room, I guess. Try to get her to eat this. She still won’t leave his side, she refuses. I don’t even know if she’s used the washroom yet.”
They move into the flow of foot traffic and Jacob is quiet. She presses the button for him at the elevator. “How are the twins?”
“I told them we were taking Xavier on a trip for a few days. I asked Louisa to take them to her apartment until the weekend. I wondered if the police might show up at the house, I had this vision of yellow caution tape—” Jacob stops himself. He turns away from Rebecca, looks in the other direction. “I keep torturing myself, rehearsing what I’ll say if we have to tell them Zags is gone, if things . . .”
“Focus on one hour at a time,” she says, touching his arm. “If there’s anything Ben and I can do to help you, just say.”
She’s uneasy, watching him go up the glass elevator. His assumption of a crime scene. But he’s in shock, he’s not thinking straight. And neither is she. She wants to go home. To Ben. He’d texted her while she was sitting with Whitney. He wanted to know if there were any updates. She calls him as she walks back to the ER to get her things.
“There’s a lot of swelling. But there’s not much they’ll do tonight. It’s a waiting game right now, but I don’t know . . .”
“God.”
She swipes her badge. “Jacob’s here now. He got on a flight out of Heathrow earlier today.”
“And Whitney?”
“She won’t talk or eat. Won’t leave Xavier for a second. I mean, she found him unconscious in the backyard. She’s traumatized.”
She’ll see him soon, she says. She thinks about what Blair said earlier that day, about Ben playing catch with Xavier. He avoids any reference to children around her, not wanting to remind her about how much he’d like a son of his own to spend time with. Of everything he’s giving up, being married to her.
She has to tell him tonight.
As she’s pushing through the double doors, saying good-bye to the nurse at admissions, unclipping her pager to clear the messages, she thinks again of Whitney’s despondency. It’s pulling at her. And then, like a smack, she understands it, she can see it: a pane of freshly shattered glass, the millions of tiny shards not yet fallen to the floor, and it’s so familiar to her, this place where Whitney is, of desperately holding on before the inevitable.
32
Rebecca
She lifts her head from the steering wheel and Ben is there, in the yellow light of the streetlamp, looking into the car window, always dusty from the underground parking lot at the hospital. He smiles. She is home, and she has the next forty-eight hours off, and he doesn’t know what she is about to tell him. He opens the door and lifts her into him.
“You okay?”
She nods. In the kitchen, she sees he’s made her a late dinner, but she doesn’t feel like eating. She takes a shower instead and lets the water run as hot as it can get before she steps in. She is barely wet when she hears his knock, feels the steam in the air move toward the opening door. His blurred shape moves on the other side of the foggy glass.
“Can I join you in there?”
“I’ll only be a minute.” She turns her back to the glass.
“You must be beat.”
The adrenaline races through her. She can’t have him see the change in her nipples, the obviousness of her shape.
“I told Mara about what happened. She’d been out there on her porch all day.”
“Did you ask if she heard anything last night?”
“She seemed shocked. She didn’t know a thing,” he says. She watches his shape come closer to the shower. She turns.
“What do you think the chances are that he’ll be okay?”
“Well, they’ve got to see some progress soon, or the odds are he won’t fully recover.” She doesn’t soften the truth with platitudes like someone else might. But anything can happen. But children are resilient. But the miracles we see in pediatrics. “The authorities interviewed them, apparently.”
“The police?”
“Routine stuff. They mostly just need to know if the child dies. Because if so, they’ve got to treat it differently . . .” She rinses her hair, her back still turned. She looks down at her body, wondering what he’d say if he saw her right now. If she stepped out, brought his hand to her warm, wet belly and held it there. If he could hide the longing she knows is still in him. Hidden, because of her. “Blair said something today about you and Xavier playing catch.”
“Once or twice, yeah.”
She turns off the water. Blair had made it sound like a regular thing, but most people are like that, they speak in ideas instead of facts. She needs a towel to wrap herself in. But he’ll expect her to come out like she usually does, dry off while they talk, lotion her body. Towel-dry her hair.
She holds out a hand. The other grips the shower door, holds it tight. She wonders if he’ll tease . . . Why so shy today? She keeps speaking. The games of catch. “Did you think it would hurt my feelings, you spending time like that with a little boy?”
He is quiet. And then:
“He wanted to try out for the softball team, so I was giving him some pointers. He never came to tryouts in the end, I think he knew he wasn’t ready. I felt bad, but it would have been even worse to cut him. Anyway.” He sighs. “It was nothing.”
She keeps the tiny baseball glove at the back of her closet. She had gone to the store where Blair works, minutes before it closed one day, to get a baby gift for a nurse. Her arms had been full of practical things, sleepers and swaddle blankets, when she saw a basket of little gloves, each with a soft baseball stitched in the center. She had taken the pregnancy test the day before. She hadn’t thought of a way to tell Ben until then. Blair wrapped it carefully in tissue with the rest of the gift, but then Rebecca pulled it out of the bag when she got home and placed it on Ben’s pillow. Later that night, she let him go up to bed first. He had picked up the glove and looked at her.
For real? He’d pulled her down and they’d laughed in a way they have not since. It was only three years ago, but in her mind, they were teenagers. Ripe and high and horny.
He’s gone from the bathroom when she comes out of the shower.
33
Rebecca
She tosses for an hour before she quietly gets out of bed, careful not to wake Ben. It’s 3:00 a.m. The house is too warm. Downstairs she turns the dial on the thermostat and pours a glass of water in the dark. Xavier is on her mind. She lifts Ben’s jacket from the hook at the front door and slips her feet into his running shoes.
Jacob’s car is in the driveway now. She wraps herself in the coat and walks briskly across the street to the side of the Loverlys’ property, Ben’s shoelaces dragging. She lifts the latch on the gate and cringes at the click of the metal. The gate is heavier than she expects, and she reaches to catch it before it bangs against the fence.
She moves slowly along the side of the house into the backyard.
She isn’t sure what she has come for, why she is trespassing like this. It feels more intrusive than she expected. The moon is covered by clouds tonight, and her eyes cross over the dark lawn. She turns on her phone’s flashlight to scan the grass, as though she might find an imprint of Xavier’s body in the blades. There are faint lines that run like tracks where she is standing, wheels, maybe, from the ambulance stretcher. There’s a soccer ball against the fence. A mini orange pylon. A wet paper airplane on the lawn. And on the concrete patio, just outside the back door, a stemless glass tipped on its side.
She picks it up and lifts it to her nose, certain of what she’ll smell.
She takes a few steps back and looks up to the third story, to the bedroom window. She keeps her sightline there and shifts slightly to the right, to be where she thinks Xavier would have landed. The height is staggering from where she stands.