They open a bottle from a local winery Whitney hasn’t heard of before, and it isn’t chilled, but it is the only alcohol Blair has in the house. Whitney looks around the family room and can’t remember when she was there last. There is something quaint and comforting about Blair’s house. The slipcover sofa and matching chair. The television on an old pine bench that Blair whitewashed herself. The light cotton of the curtains, almost like children’s bedsheets, so thin you can see through them.
She wanders to the shelves Blair has styled with horizontal book spines organized by color, a careful arrangement of photographs in rose-gold frames, tiny potted succulents. She picks up a photo of Chloe and Aiden and Blair, probably from last summer. Blair and Chloe have the same freckles, the same cuteness. Their heads are touching, and their hair falls so that she cannot tell where Blair’s ends and where Chloe’s begins. Aiden is behind them in the photograph, tanned, smiling. He looks ten, fifteen years younger than he is. There is something about him. She cannot help but think that he doesn’t look like he belongs. To them, to the moment in the photo.
“I put some ice in.” Blair is beside her now, handing her a glass, looking at the same photograph longer than for just a glance. She doesn’t say anything. She turns back to the room, apologizes for the mess, although there isn’t any. Whitney is assuring her the place looks good, the place looks great. She picks up another photograph, this one of Blair’s mother and father, and tries to find her features in their noses, the contour of their faces, the way they stand, each with a hand on the neck of a horse that stares right at the camera.
“You don’t talk much about your mom,” Whitney says. “What’s she like?”
“My mom? Let’s see.” She looks up to the crease where the wall meets the ceiling, as though she’s never had to think about this before. “She’s very simple. Likes to sew. She watches a lot of soaps.”
Whitney can’t help but laugh. “That’s it? Oh my God, I hope my kids can come up with something better than that about me one day. What kind of woman is she? What makes her tick?”
Blair’s hand is over her face now, laughing too. “Oh, she’s just sort of . . . I don’t know. Empty.” The laughter is over. She takes a drink.
“How so?”
“Something changed in her at some point, when I was eight or nine years old, I’d say. Before then, she was lighter. Happier. We’d all have tickle parties and that sort of thing. But then eventually she and my dad stopped talking to each other and things were just . . . tense.” She glances away from Whitney. “I think maybe my dad had someone—” She stops herself, shakes her head. “I don’t know. Maybe not.” She clears her throat and sits up. Whitney waits, but Blair looks stiff. She won’t say more.
“I think my mom thought about leaving us when we were young. Leaving my dad, definitely, but also leaving us kids,” Whitney says, running her finger around the rim of the wineglass. She hasn’t shared this with anyone before.
“I’m so sorry.”
“No, it’s—sometimes I wish she had left, to be honest.”
“But, Whit, that would have been traumatic. That would have changed your whole life.”
“And it would have changed hers. Instead she barely functions now at seventy. She seems twenty years older than she is. Do you know she still lives in the same sad apartment we grew up in? She won’t leave. Probably waiting for my dad to die.”
“Yeah, but look who you’ve become. And the life you have now compared to how you grew up. I know she didn’t have much, but she gave you something by staying, right? That kind of stability shapes a person for the better.”
Whitney shakes her head. She doesn’t want to tell Blair about how her dad used to speak to her mom. She sometimes wondered if her mom preferred him in pain and out of work, because he couldn’t follow her around anymore, his mouth hissing in her ear. He could barely stand.
“No, she felt trapped, going through the motions,” Whitney said. “I always knew it. She kept this bus ticket hidden in her pocket for years, like on any given day she might just go out for the groceries and keep walking straight to the terminal.”
“I’ll never understand wanting to leave a family like that.”
“But the sacrifice of motherhood isn’t for everyone, right? It changes who you are in the world. It’s this irreversible decision that alters so much of you. She loved us, I know. I could feel it. But I think she daydreamed about who she could be without us weighing her down like a brick. It’s not easy for everyone. Even if you think it’s what you wanted.”
Blair’s eyebrows raise and she glances around the room. “I get that. But we go into motherhood knowing it’s a selfless thing, right? We put them first, even when it’s hard. We try to make the right decisions, no matter what. And then they turn out to be thriving, happy people who do good in the world. At the end of the day, that’s the most important thing. That’s all I want.”
Are you kidding me? Whitney thinks. Are we really going down this road? As if wanting anything more for oneself would be excessive. As if they must satisfy the quota for selflessness, and only then, after the accommodating and the pleasing, can they be anything else.
“Of course, every mother wants their kids to be happy. I just mean, it’s nearly impossible for a woman not to lose herself in the process. It’s a kind of . . . voluntary death, in a way.”
But Blair doesn’t say anything. And then the silence feels too heavy.
“Well, in any event. Fuck. It’s not for the faint of heart, is it?” Whitney takes a swig, exaggerated, wanting the tension to go away. Blair’s attempt to laugh with her is throaty and insincere; she reaches for the bottle to top them up. Whitney knows she’ll change the conversation now. She’ll talk through their plans together for Christmas Eve, the fondue they’ll have with the kids, the matching slippers she’s ordered for them all.
But instead Blair is quiet. She tucks her legs under her.
“How was Chloe’s report card?” Whitney knows she’ll want to be asked.
“All fine,” Blair says, but she’s tempering. Chloe does nothing but excel. “And Xavi?”
“Not so fine. I mean, we got the tutor this year, but . . . I don’t know.”
“The tutoring will take some time, but it will help. He’ll get there with the right support. And some patience. He’s so capable. He’s such a good kid.”
Like she’s the expert. Like Whitney needs to be convinced of her own son’s potential. Like Blair could do for him what she cannot.
Whitney wants to go. She’s feeling the wine now, and she’s hungry, and wants to check the phone she made a point of leaving in her bag. “Well, speaking of, I should go relieve Louisa. I’ll send Chloe home now.”
“Yeah, Aiden should be here any minute.”
They hug, and when Whitney pulls away, she keeps Blair’s hand in hers.
“Everything okay?”
“Of course,” Blair says after a pause.
But Whitney wonders if she should stay after all. She could tell her she understands more about Blair than she might think. That she wishes Blair had her own version of her mother’s bus ticket hidden away in a pocket somewhere. An option. But Blair would never have bought the bus ticket. She would never have even considered it.
There is freedom in the truth, she thinks from the front door, watching Blair rinse their glasses over and over at the sink. And there is suffering in the lie.
Whitney leaves the house with her heels in her hand, and the pavement is cold through her nylons. She hears a car door close behind her.
“I’ve heard you tell your son not to be outside without shoes on.”
She spins around. He is smiling.
Through the numbing of the alcohol, she can still recognize it. The moment that can go either way next. Teetering on something dishonorable, but not yet incriminating. Words, they are only an exchange of words. Seconds. Nothing to feel guilty about yet. Nothing a mother shouldn’t do.
“We never had that drink, did we? We should, whenever, you know, it makes sense.”
The glance at her home. At his.
That could have been it, a thing someone says and never follows through with. The proposition of it, the possibility, like the bus ticket in her mother’s coat pocket.
35
Blair
Friday
It is 6:45 a.m. on the day after Xavier’s accident, but he is not the first thing Blair thought of when she woke up. She slams the cupboard doors and rattles the dishes in the sink. This is a generous grace period. She’s been seething for an hour. Chloe looks up from the word search she is doing at the kitchen table while she finishes her breakfast. Blair closes the next cupboard door gently.
Chloe calls to him in the family room, where he is still on the couch.
“Dad? Mom wants you to get up now.”
He ambles into the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water.
“Good morning, darlings.” He ruffles Chloe’s hair and points to a word on the sheet. “Irate. I-R-A-T-E.”