“I know you have, you poor thing.”
Mara holds Rebecca’s chin between her thumb and her other fingers, and this tenderness makes Rebecca want to crumble. Her eyes close and the tears spill. She leaves Mara outside and slowly walks upstairs to her bathroom. And then she sits on the toilet and stares between her legs and watches the thin stream of crimson curl through the water like smoke.
43
Whitney
The Hospital
She holds her breath and whimpers, she thinks no, no, no, but she is doing it, she is waiting for the beeping to start and for someone to come in and take her hand off his air tube. To save him from his mother.
She starts to count. The numbers are slow. They morph together in her mind.
This is the only option. She can feel the relief just ahead of her, she is running to keep up with it, she is almost there.
“Is everything okay?”
Whitney gasps and lets go of the tube. She stares at her hand.
The nurse pulls the chain on the overhead light and moves quickly to the other side of the bed, and Whitney is shaking her head and trying to find the words. “I think there was something wrong, I was trying to fix it.”
“It’s all right,” the nurse says, but she is checking the tubes, the attachments, she is looking at the monitor and adjusting the clamp on his finger. Whitney’s head is dizzy, and she wonders if they are going to take her away, if they will arrest her. She should be arrested. She is not safe for him, she never was.
She shakes so violently that she is sure the nurse will know.
“Is he okay?” Whitney asks.
“Hmm?”
“Is he all right?”
The nurse nods, she is holding her finger against the screen of the IV machine, she is saying something under her breath, repeating a number, checking the chart, checking the number again. She checks his arm where the intravenous is. And then she leaves.
It’s then that Jacob clears his throat. Oh my god, she thinks.
He’s in the chair at the back of the room.
She hadn’t heard him come in. When had he come in? What had he seen?
She holds herself still on the rail of Xavier’s bed and stares at the floor. Her face burns. He would have stopped her, she thinks. He wouldn’t have let her do what she was about to do.
But sometimes she feels like he’s testing her. To see how far she’d really go, before he’s there, watching, saving, reminding her again of who she needs to be.
“You should leave here for a bit,” he says. “You need to sleep. And see the twins, they miss you and Zags. I’ll stay.”
Whitney shakes her head and keeps her eyes on their son. She won’t leave him. He can’t make her go. She grips the bedrail. She won’t let anybody move her.
A few minutes later, she hears the rustle of Jacob’s jeans as he uncrosses his legs and stands. He doesn’t say anything when he walks out of the room. He hadn’t brought her back anything to eat.
Had she really just done that? She looks at her hand. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she’s so tired that she’s hallucinated. She doesn’t know who that woman was.
She thinks about the texts, about the repeated questions from the authorities, about how close she is to losing everything.
She reaches to find the lever and lowers the side rail of his bed. She shifts his body over just an inch. First his hips, and then slowly his torso, and then she gently lifts his head. And then she kneels on the bed and lowers herself down beside him. She faces him, and slides her arm across his chest, under the highway of tubes and cords, and puts her trembling cheek against him. She doesn’t care if this isn’t allowed. She doesn’t care if it’s breaching a safety protocol. She will lie here with her son on this bed until somebody carries one of them away.
She imagines them sitting together on the floor of his bedroom, while he talks her through everything he knows about chess. She has her legs crossed, like his, and she asks him questions. She takes notes, so that he feels important. She draws a sign on a piece of printer paper that says do not disturb! expert lesson in progress! and tapes it to his door. They spend an hour like this, together on the floor, and for the first time, she pays attention to every tiny thing. The wideness of his eyes when he’s thinking. The gestures he’s adopted from his teacher, the way he nods, praises her like an adult does. The new words he uses. The way he carefully draws his bangs away from his eyes like a curtain.
And then she remembers a particular feeling, a moment in an otherwise unremarkable day. Xavier was five months old. She was tired. She lay on the floor of his nursery, on a thick wool rug, staring at the glowing sphere of cloudy glass in the center of the ceiling, the pump sucking her milk into a flimsy plastic bag that would be sealed and dated and filed in the freezer. She couldn’t get the smell of petroleum jelly out of her nose. She was lulled by the tempo of the motor whomping in her hand. The light above suddenly looked to her like the moon. The room felt like her whole world, and it wasn’t enough. None of it was enough, not even the baby she loved, in the bedroom beside her, being soothed to sleep by his father. She had thought it then—I will always want for more.
* * *
? ? ?
She can hear the machines. He’s still alive. She has not killed him. She never would have. In that cloudy state of waking, she has the relief of feeling nothing for a split second before the memory of what she’s done crests again. She wants back into the obliviousness of sleep, but Jacob’s voice is pulling her away. She hears other people then too. She smells strong coffee and opens one eye to see if there’s sunlight behind the window blind, if she’s slept all day or for fifteen minutes, but there is no sense of a daily rhythm in this room.
“It’s positive, yes, but this usually moves slowly.”
“We’ll hold off on surgery for now.”
“It’s a critical time.”
Jacob is promising them he’ll wake her up now, he is thanking them for letting the rules slide this once. She feels the nurse behind her tinkering with the vial changes, the click of the tube clips opening and closing. She smells the tacky medical tape, the waft of sanitized hands above her head.
Jacob’s breath is in her ear now. There was movement. He’s saying Xavier was trying to open his eyes while she was asleep with him in the bed. That he must have felt her there with him. She puts her lips on Xavier’s face, she kisses and kisses, until her husband pulls her shoulders back, away from her son.
44
Whitney
Nine Years Ago
If you want her to pinpoint the moment she’s hungry for, it’s when they enter her. The submission of it. I have you, you’re in me, you’ve surrendered. It’s animalistic, she knows. Teeth of a predator in a neck.
In the hotel elevator, on the way up, she thinks about how to get to that point as quickly as possible, if she might ask him to sit at the foot of the bed, watching, while she eliminates the need for his rough finger pads on her skin, the performative removal of her underwear. No part of that exchange interests her, although they’ll think it does, they’ll think they are earning the part that comes next. But her arousal is in the very possibility—in giving herself the permission.
She’s on a business trip in Paris. It’s her last night here.
She keeps her wedding rings in the hotel safe.
She places her phone facedown on the bedside table, ringer off.
There are underclothes she saves for these occasions, so as not to mix the pleasures.
The smell of bar olives on their breath, the cocktail napkins in the pockets of their suit jackets. The socks, the collar stays that have occasionally been left behind, dropped in the wastebasket after they’re gone, before she washes her face, settles the flush in her cheeks, brushes her teeth and then brushes again, and then rinses with spearmint mouthwash. Gone, it’s all gone, she can let herself believe it’s that easy.
Except this time there is a knock on her door at seven in the morning, as she’s putting the pump’s flange on her nipple. Her tits are about to explode.
She has had only four hours of sleep.
Her husband. Her unexpected husband. He has taken the red-eye to Paris, a surprise, the kind that takes weeks of planning and covert arrangements for childcare. He has takeaway espressos in his hands.
She is swollen and damp between her legs still, when he cups her in his palm on the bed. He’ll think this is because of him. This, and the heat in her face, the pound of her heart when he puts his head to her chest.