She goes to Chloe’s room. She smooths and tucks the blankets on her bed, picks up her nightgown from the floor. Her chest aches and her face burns. She is tired of everything, every feeling, every thought. Of who she has become. She listens to the pipes turn off, to his wet feet slap the clean tiles of the bathroom floor. She wants him to come find her. To put an arm out for her to slip under. To deny it again and do whatever he has to do to make her feel better.
She thinks of how his hands shook when they stood at the altar. Of picking blueberries at the end of his parents’ lane when Chloe was three, the purple stains on all their fingers that lasted for days. Of the humidity that fills the second floor when he showers with the door open, of how it makes the ends of all their hair curl. Of the scent of his skin seeped in their pillows, even after she’s changed the cases. Of how sweet he used to make her coffee every morning, the extra sugar, too much cream. These are the unremarkable currents of a reliable life together, the life that once felt like it was enough.
She can’t decide what it means to have finally confronted him. To have freed a vicious rodent from a cage, and although the threat isn’t rattling in her hands anymore, it’s still alive somewhere. It will come back.
She needs everything explained. Irrefutably. But she cannot, right now, ask Whitney.
“Why are you crying?”
Blair hadn’t heard her footsteps. She turns away from the door so Chloe can’t see her face. “Go back downstairs,” she snaps.
“I was just—”
“Chloe, I need a minute! Go, please.”
But Chloe does not go. She wraps herself around Blair’s waist and she squeezes her. Blair thinks of the first time she thought of her mother as small. As sad. As weak.
“But why are you crying, Mommy?”
“I’m not, I’m okay. I’m fine. Let’s finish the word search before school.” Blair wipes her face and smiles. She tosses a rainbow-shaped pillow on the bed and pats Chloe on the bum. She pulls her hair back, wraps an elastic, and says, in the highest pitch she can muster, “All good? Let’s go.”
But as she jogs down, she feels Chloe pause at the top of the stairs, watching her.
* * *
? ? ?
Aiden comes into the kitchen as Blair helps their daughter find the word hanukkah. She avoids his eyes as she rinses the spoon he used earlier, closes the carton of cream he left open, wipes the drops on the counter from his sloppy pour.
At the table she pulls Chloe onto her lap. They have to tell her about Xavier before she goes to school and the rumor mill begins churning. She pushes her hand into Chloe’s small chest to feel it thumping and sniffs yesterday’s playground sweat from the nape of her neck. She remembers her silky head in the palm of her hand, the weight of a grapefruit, all the comfort and promise a newborn life still holds. And then Chloe pulls away.
Thank God it wasn’t her.
“Can you guys tell me what’s going on? With Xavi?”
Aiden sits down and strokes her cheek. “Xavi had an accident,” he says. “A bad fall from his bedroom window on Wednesday night. He’s going to be in the hospital for a bit while he gets better.”
“Oh.” Chloe is quiet. She looks at Blair. “But how did he fall?”
“We aren’t sure. It was late at night, so nobody knows what happened.”
“Oh,” she says again. She tucks her chin and stares at her lap. Blair pulls her in tightly. She didn’t want to tell her. She didn’t want her to worry.
“Is he going to be okay, after the doctors fix him up?”
“Of course he will, honey. Everything will be just fine, all right?” Blair kisses her head as Aiden stares at her. Blair shoots him a look to say nothing more.
“Is this why you were crying upstairs?”
Blair doesn’t look at Aiden. She nods.
“Can we get him a card? And give him that old airplane he left here? It’s his favorite one, so he’s gonna wanna play with it at the hospital.”
“You’re a good friend, Chloe.” Blair kisses her. “Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go pick out a card at the drugstore before school? We’ll have time if we leave now.”
Aiden sighs audibly when she leaves the room. Blair stands to pace the kitchen.
“Hear anything more yet this morning?” he asks, with an ease that feels strange to Blair after what she’s just confronted him with.
“Nothing.”
She hadn’t told him about Whitney’s reaction at the hospital yesterday. She’d said only that she was coping as well as expected. That she’d brought her something to eat. He flips through the newspaper but doesn’t take out a section like he usually would. He pushes it across the table and sips his coffee. Blair leans on the counter and watches him. Wondering.
He comes over and kisses Blair’s head, puts his arm around her neck. He holds his lips there for a moment. Let’s move on from that nonsense earlier, he’s telling her. He can always seem to do this, forgive.
But this morning it feels different. She watches him move around her, studies the quickened rise and fall of his chest. He pours her more coffee, and then some for himself, and the silence is thick. He scratches his jawline, the jawline she can trace in her sleep. He rubs his neck, the neck she has hung from so often. There are physical parts of him that feel almost like physical parts of her, and while she can’t find the attraction for him that she used to have, while she doesn’t even like him most days, she feels possessive of him. That is her jawline. Her neck. Her whistling husband.
Perhaps they’re just in the sagging, ambivalent middle of a marriage.
He goes upstairs to get ready for work. She waits for Chloe and looks around the kitchen, the table nobody has cleared, the pillows that are smushed on the couch from where Aiden slept.
She thinks about a night when they were early in their relationship. They were out for dinner after work. They were still finding things to talk about, stories and favorites and places they wanted to go together. She remembers thinking, as he spoke, that she didn’t know what being lonely felt like anymore. She had lost the envy toward her thirtysomething friends who one by one had cocooned into their own relationships, ones they knew had a future. She had finally found that future for herself. She didn’t have to fear that she’d never have the things she so desperately wanted: A child. A nice home. A nice life. She’d already established her career, and she didn’t have to give that up. She came of age in the nineties, girl power, a woman’s right to have everything, to be everything. And she was determined she would, unlike her mother.
When the server took their plates, Aiden had reached for her knee under the table. She’d thought of the painful wax she’d gotten the day before. The sex they would have that night. She had chosen a light meal for dinner. She reached below and took his hand, and they touched each other’s nails, each other’s knuckles. He had asked what she wanted to do the next day.
“Oh, I don’t know. Pick up some groceries. Maybe go to yoga and then catch up on work.”
“How about we look at places,” he’d said.
“Places?”
“A house. Together.”
He had laughed then at her delight, her surprise. He’d raised his glass in her direction, and she had lifted hers to touch his. She had felt like she’d won something. Him? A life that looked the way happy lives did? The champagne he had ordered made sense to her then. She had felt exhilarated. And in love. And then relieved. And then she made tracks with her fork in the chocolate mousse on the table between them.
She had mused aloud about neighborhoods they could afford on their combined salaries. About the number of bedrooms. He nodded along as she spoke, and when she lifted her eyes, he looked pleasantly focused on something behind her. She licked the chocolate from the bottom of the fork and held it in front of her, staring at the tines, his face unfocused in the background. She did not want to turn around to see what he was looking at. But she had. The woman looked amused, she spoke to her friend behind the cover of her hand, and then glanced up to see him again. Her eyes met Blair’s instead. Blair turned back to Aiden. He cleared his throat. He dug into the last of the dessert and said to her, “So tomorrow. I’ve got showings booked for us at ten.”
She understood in that moment something about him that she had not wanted to be true. But there are risks people take when they want something badly enough. There are things they learn to ignore. It was just a look. She loved him. He was the one, or at least the one she had chosen. She had already decided on a life with him. She had already come so far.
38
Blair
Outside, she sees Mara standing on her porch in her nightgown. Chloe waves as she scoots past, but Blair wonders why she’s not dressed yet, it’s unusual. She calls for Chloe to wait, and she jogs across the street, lets herself through the rusty iron gate.
“Did you and Albert hear what happened at the Loverlys’? Wednesday night?” The morning sun is in her eyes and she shields her face to see Mara.
“I did,” Mara says. Blair waits for her to say more, there is always more. She follows Mara’s eyes to the Loverlys’ driveway. Jacob’s car is there, but the curtains are drawn, the house still lifeless. Her lips look tight.