“Where?” Chloe looks closer and he grins teasingly at Blair, but she turns away from him. He comes behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder. He wants to soften her. She can smell the booze while he gets himself a coffee.
He still wasn’t home when she fell asleep at two in the morning. She had texted him seven times. Where are you. It’s late. Where are you. Jacob’s car was at home by 11:00 p.m., so Whitney would have been alone at the hospital. She had tortured herself with speculation. She had held her head under the pillow and begged for her brain to stop spinning.
She can’t do it anymore.
“Upstairs.” It’s all she can say to him.
She sits on the end of their bed and waits for him. He is expecting her to be the irrational wife, to spew the anger she reserves only for him. She thinks of how much to say. How far to go. She has nothing but a corner of foil packaging and a key. And hours and hours of assuming the worst. That is all she has.
There is no plan. No idea what to do next if he says, Yes. That’s a key I gave her to my office, where we fuck. That’s a wrapper from the condom I used. I can’t keep lying to you anymore. Are we done here?
He lies on the bed next to her and puts his hand on her lower back.
“You want an apology, and I owe you one. I’m sorry I was so late.”
“Where were you?”
“I should have called. We went back to Lin’s house after the pub and he got the poker chips out. I didn’t realize how late it got.” He rubs her gently.
“You didn’t answer any of my texts.”
“I didn’t have my phone out, I didn’t see them until I left. I’m sorry.”
She looks over at his hands, resting now on his chest like he might take a catnap. She thinks of who his hands have touched. Of how easy it is for some people to lie.
She walks downstairs to the living room to pick up the pants he left on the floor. She digs into each pocket. His credit cards, his car key, his phone. There is no receipt from the pub. She puts his password into his phone and scans his texts. There is nothing from the night before. Not even her own frantic messages to him. He has deleted them.
He has never deleted her messages before. Their text chain is like an appendage of their marriage. A record of their days. She is always there, at the top of his screen. The first thing he sees.
He looks asleep when she comes back into the bedroom.
“Why did you delete all my messages?”
“What are you doing?”
“Just answer me.”
“I have no idea why. I just did.”
“So someone else wouldn’t see them?”
“They weren’t exactly nice messages. The last one told me to fuck off. Do you think I wanted to keep them?”
She walks to the dresser and takes out the key. She places it in the palm of her hand and puts it close to his face.
“That’s my key. Where’d you find that?”
He reaches to pick it up, but she closes her fist. There is something in his voice, a distinct patience she doesn’t expect, an effort to remain calm. She warns herself again. She will not be able to rewind. She thinks of Chloe downstairs doing her word search. She can walk her to school, and then separate the laundry into piles by color. She can take the ground beef from the freezer to defrost for dinner. The day can go on, everything intact.
“Whitney had it,” she says instead.
“Whitney? Why?” He’s propped on his elbow now. He rubs the stubble on his face. The whites of his eyes are pink.
“You tell me.”
He laughs then. He lies back down. He has mocked her concern. She is meant, now, to feel foolish.
“Maybe she found it at the gym? I thought I might have lost it there. I don’t know, you’re the detective. Ask her.”
Her heart pounds as he tries to defuse the room. “She doesn’t go to that gym anymore. Why wouldn’t she just give it to you if she found it?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, Blair. Because she forgot, maybe? That’s a key to the back door of my office. But it’s useless now anyway, they had to change the lock because I lost it.”
He leaves the bedroom and starts the shower.
She follows. She wants to run out of the house and leave him there with Chloe, with the breakfast dishes, with the empty fridge, the piles of laundry, the boredom, the routine. With the knot in her stomach that has weighed her down for weeks, since she found the corner of the condom wrapper. She wants him to feel what it’s like to drown in all of it. She wants to strip him of the ease with which he walks through his life, the calmness he can so easily find. She wants to rip the shower curtain from its flimsy plastic hooks, she wants to crank the temperature to scalding hot, she wants to put her fingers in his pubic hairs and pull them all out.
She yanks back the vinyl. “Are you having an affair?”
Her entire body beats, waiting. Waiting.
36
Rebecca
She is roused in the morning by the feel of the mattress moving beside her. She has the next two days off. She waits in bed until she can smell the coffee Ben is making. Downstairs she pulls her robe closed, stands at the counter, watches him pull groceries from the fridge to make breakfast. She wonders if he’s thinking of last night, of how it felt for her to shove him away. Did he feel that she was protecting something? Did he wonder?
“Ben.”
He lifts his head, smiles at her. Asks how she’d like her eggs.
“I’m pregnant.”
His eyes drop to the carton he’s just opened.
Each second that he is quiet feels like he’s backing up further and further away from her. But he is motionless. She wishes he would smash an egg. The whole carton. Tell her she is insane. Anything but the silence.
“More than eighteen weeks. The furthest we’ve been by five days.”
She wants to tell him that she’s scared too. That sometimes she feels like a monster throwing fetuses at the wall to see which one sticks, but here they are—it’s working this time. She wants to tell him she’s sorry, but this is what she had to do.
“You said you knew your cycle, that we didn’t need condoms every time.” He places his fingertips on the edge of the counter. “This wasn’t—”
“I need you to want this as much as I do.”
“It’s not a matter of what I want.” His sharpness startles her. “It’s a matter of what we can survive. And you’re not accepting that! You’re banking on some miracle. You’re not . . . you’re not yourself anymore.”
“There is a chance. There’s hope.”
The crack in her voice when she says the word “hope” makes her feel more vulnerable than she has with him in a long time. More than the hours together in waiting rooms and the nights on the cold tile floor and the blood he has helped to clean from her. She is tired of feeling resilient. Of being rational like a physician is supposed to be. Fuck the statistics she’s become a part of. Fuck the chances of the outcome. Yes, it is science, it is biology, it is a matter of cells. Her body is either physically capable of sustaining a life or not. But she is also a woman who wants to feel the weight of her own writhing newborn on her bare chest. She wants to know what it feels like to be fanatically consumed. To catch herself in the gestures of her child one day and be stunned that this exquisite creature belongs to her. She feels owed that chance no matter what is rational or sane or likely.
He exhales long and steadily, and she doesn’t want to be in the room with him anymore, not if he can’t lift his head and say what she needs to hear. She waits.
And then she turns away, walks slowly up the stairs, into the room he painted three years ago, attentively, lovingly, as he wondered about who their child would be. She misses her, the first baby she held, although she doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t know her daughter’s voice or what it feels like to be seen by her. Or loved by her. She is undefined. She is ethereal. The room is empty, it is waiting, and Rebecca lies down in the middle of the hardwood floor to watch how the morning light changes the color of the walls.
37
Blair
Aiden does not open his eyes. He tilts his face up into the weak stream of their old shower head. He has had enough of her this morning. He is dismissing her. He won’t even give her the dignity of denying it with his words.
“Did you hear me—”
“Yes, I heard you! And of course the answer is no. For fuck’s sake, it’s offensive that you’re even asking.” He tugs the shower curtain closed. She stares at the speckles of mildew along the edge that she hasn’t been able to get out. She waits for him to say it—Don’t project your daddy issues on me. I wouldn’t do what he did. But he doesn’t.