Does a ten-year-old have any concept of what his body can survive? Does he have the capacity to understand what his physical self is and isn’t capable of? Does any of them? How can the human physical form create another life, regenerate tens of millions of its own cells in seconds, and yet be so precariously fragile? How has she spent decades going about her day, her work, not letting this discrepancy consume her, like it does now?
She lowers her chin, stares into the glass doors to the dark kitchen. She can see her own muted reflection, her hands clutched now at her chest, the jacket billowing gently. Her eyes lower to where life is growing inside her. She feels some kind of connection to Whitney. Maybe it’s something maternal. Why has she been drawn there?
She hears voices on the street and then the close of a car door before it pulls away. She leaves the backyard with the jacket hood pulled up and her head held low. She sees the front door to Blair’s house shut and a light come on. In the space between the curtains, she watches Aiden move through the family room. He’s looking at his phone, his thumbs typing. He takes his shirt off and falls onto the couch.
Upstairs in her own home, she senses Ben is awake when she walks into the bedroom. She slips into the sheets, pulls herself close to him.
“I heard the front door,” he says.
“I went across the street, to their backyard. To see where he fell.”
She waits for him to ask why, but he is quiet.
“I think he might have been trying to hurt himself. Maybe to prove a point. Or maybe he didn’t want to live anymore. I don’t think it was a freak accident.” She sits with the realization as she’s saying it. An intuition. She slips her hand over her belly under the blanket. “I have no evidence, nothing to go on, and you know that’s not like me. But there’s this feeling I get in the room with her and Xavier. This . . . profound sadness about her, like there’s something she can’t bring herself to say. More than a sense of guilt, or regret.” She rubs her forehead and feels exhausted now. “I don’t know if I’m making any sense.”
He turns onto his back, and so does she. She finds his hand and kisses his knuckles. He moves himself on top of her and puts his mouth to her neck, he tastes her, sucks on her cold skin. He’s hard against her already. They haven’t wanted each other like this in a long time, not through the years of calendars, and tests, and blood.
Tonight, something has changed. She lets him take her, her body hidden in the dark. She starts to get out of her cycling mind, but then she is thinking again of the grass where Xavier would have lain. The tremble of Whitney’s hand in hers. Her broken uterus. Her lies. The one hundred and thirty days that tomorrow will mark. The feeling of blood between her legs. He is inside her now, he is filling her. She thinks of the wands they probe her with at the clinic, of how far they jam them inside her. The pain that makes her arch her back on the exam table, the whimpers she must stifle. She feels wetness then, real wetness, and the panic is back. But his hands have pinned her shoulders down and she can hear air hiss through his clenched teeth. She catches her breath every time he shoves himself into her, so much harder than he ever has before. Like he’s angry. She can think only of his penis smeared in her blood, of the sheets soaked in red beneath them. Of what the sight of this will do to her.
She puts her hands on his chest and shoves him away. He slips out of her.
“You okay?” He is trying to slow his breath.
She flinches as his sweat drops on her face.
Her hand feels the stickiness on the inside of her thighs, and she lifts her fingers to her nose in the dark, searching for the familiar metallic scent. She feels him lie down beside her.
She is all right. She is fine. There’s no blood. She rolls toward him, and they find each other’s hands and hold tightly. Her mind had been elsewhere, but so was his.
She must believe they will be okay.
He turns on his side, she moves her body close. She wants to feel the warmth of his back against her growing middle, to believe in what they are becoming.
34
Whitney
Seven Months Ago
Whitney sits at her desk and reads Xavier’s October progress report from school. Louisa found it in his backpack and texted her a photo.
Below average. Below average. Below average. Nearly every line of the report. Needs significant help to complete. Needs daily reminders. Not meeting expectations. And perhaps the worst: Lacks motivation. Does not take pride in his work.
None of it is a surprise. They have hired a tutor. They have agreed to let him join the senior chess club with the older students, an opportunity to improve his confidence. He excels in math, in abstract reasoning, in pattern recognition. He struggles in everything else.
She knows this, but she feels nauseated seeing these failures on paper. She needs to be harder on him, despite what Jacob thinks. He defends him. He worries she puts Xavier down too much, that she speaks of him too critically to other people. And maybe he is right, and maybe she overstates his deficiencies because it helps her manage her own expectations of who he is. But look. Look at this report. This proof. She can feel the window closing on the time she has to mold Xavier into the child she wants him to be, instead of the child he is.
She is about to leave when Grace slips in and asks if she’s seen the email. She has not, but she can tell by Grace’s lowered voice, by the way she’s clutching the side of the door, that the email is not something she will be happy to see.
And she’s not. She is bcc’d and it is short and formal. The client has been fired from the telecom company. And if the client is fired, Whitney’s firm will be let go next. There’s a proposal for a half-million-dollar employee-engagement strategy on the client’s desk that she had told Whitney she’d sign by the end of the calendar year, and Whitney had known then that the unusual delay was indicative of something. They have been the most impressive name on her client list for four years, they justify the salary of an entire account team of very good people, and she needs them.
She stares at the email and wonders who else she can call at the company, who she has a good enough rapport with. Who will likely be taking over. Maybe there’s still a chance, if she can get ahead of it. She could ask for a meeting and reinforce everything they’ve done for them, present an amended project scope, and reduce their fees. She is looking through her emails to find the last correspondence with a director she once met at a charity dinner, a wet-mouthed, off-putting man whose name she cannot remember, when the client herself sends another email, just to her this time.
She’s so sorry. She wishes it would end differently for Whitney’s firm, but she has been told they’ll terminate all consultancy contracts. Procurement would be in touch. Let’s go for lunch after the holidays, she suggests.
Fuck. You. It is all Whitney thinks, and she says it to the screen, and she knows she should have more grace than this, she should write back to express her sympathies, tell her she’ll move on to bigger and better things, thank her for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees. But right now, she lets the anger win.
These frustrations—the child doing terribly in school, the loss of her most lucrative client—are the excuses she will summon later, for the brief moment she feels the need.
She sends the photo of the progress report to Jacob, who is in Manhattan for the night, a gallery opening. She doesn’t add any comments.
When she pulls into the driveway, she can see the children through the tall windows at the front of her home. The twins are chasing Xavier around the living room, scampering over her expensive glass table, and there is something dark, maybe a chocolate brownie, in Thea’s hand. She wonders if Louisa has given up. She should go inside, let her go home early. But there is something uncomfortable growing up her spine and into her neck, and it is the anticipation of this: Mommy, come downstairs! I’m hungry! Sebastian hit me! I need a wipe! Zags won’t share!
She cannot do it. She will sit in the driveway instead and stare at her phone. She puts the car in park, and that is when she sees a figure in her rearview mirror—it is Blair. Blair, who can make work disappear. Blair, who thinks her challenging and underperforming son is special. Blair, who will surely be up for a glass or two of wine. She turns herself on like a switch. She is out of the car, saying she’d just been thinking of her. Chloe is behind her; she is looking for Xavier.
“Go on in and find him, Chloe, they’re running around with Louisa.” Whitney never goes to Blair’s house. But today she looks across the street and she thinks of the chaos on the other side of her own door and she says, “Do you mind if we go to your place this time?”
* * *
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