“Is Jacob with the twins?”
Whitney closes her eyes and shakes her head. “London. For work. Our nanny came over right away, but I had to wait for her.” Her voice curls. “I couldn’t go with him in the ambulance.”
Rebecca tells Whitney she’ll take her to see him now, that he’s intubated, and there is swelling. That this might frighten her, but he’s not in any pain. Another doctor will have to take over from there. The door slides open behind them and Rebecca turns to see a nurse with two police officers.
They’ll want to speak with Whitney; it’s routine. Rebecca registers the discomfort of this, although the questions they’ll need to ask don’t concern her, not technically. Rebecca shakes her head in their direction—Please, not now, not yet—and the nurse guides the officers down the hallway instead.
“There are studies that show patients in this condition know when family members are with them. You can hold his hand and talk to him, like you would if he was awake. Okay?”
Whitney stands and gathers the hem of her sweatshirt in her hands. She lets Rebecca slip her strong, steadying arm under her as they walk down the hall. Until Whitney becomes rigid. She turns her face toward Rebecca and their eyes meet for the first time.
“Is this why you don’t have children?”
Rebecca pauses. She doesn’t know what to say. This job? This hospital? This constant fear of something going wrong, the unbearable pain if it does?
She thinks of the hours she has spent on the floor of her bathroom. The bloody orbs sinking to the bottom of toilet bowls, the dancing strings of mucus. The weight of the hand towel on her lap on the way to the hospital.
Why doesn’t she have children? Because she cannot keep her own alive.
3
Blair
Good morning, darling girl. How’d you sleep?”
Chloe slips her arms around Blair’s soft middle and squeezes. She’s a slate wiped clean each morning. Blair rips a banana from the fruit bowl and puts it on her plate, along with one of the muffins she made yesterday while it rained in the afternoon. Because it had been Wednesday, and that is what she does on Wednesdays. The muffins, the bedsheets, the rinsing of the washing machine drum with white vinegar and baking soda. Sometimes she feels embarrassingly unevolved.
Chloe licks the excess cream cheese from the side of the bagel and makes noises of approval.
She wonders if Aiden ever notices the list she works her way through every day. Or the schedule she writes in the squares of the kitchen calendar. She wonders if he knows an eleven-year-old washing-machine drum needs to be cleaned at all. Maybe she’ll leave the soiled rags on his side of the bed tonight, so that at least he’ll know what an eleven-year-old washing machine smells like.
But now, it is Thursday. The bathroom. Chloe’s library books are due. Blair packed them in her knapsack last night, along with the bento box and clean gym clothes and a note to say she loved her, after she’d emptied the bits of crumb and playground sand into the sink. And then she’d taken two Advil for a headache and gone to bed early. Aiden said he had to work late on a presentation.
He’d already left for the gym when she got up; he must have had an early start today. She doesn’t remember feeling him in the bed beside her last night. But sometimes he sleeps in the spare bedroom so he doesn’t wake her up when he comes home.
She is peeling the paper from the base of her bran muffin when she lets herself wonder: had he come home?
She puts a chunk between her teeth. She imagines Aiden slipping in quietly to kiss their daughter as she sleeps, with a mouth covered in the filth of another woman. She can’t swallow the muffin. She spits it into the garbage.
“Coat and shoes, Chloe, time to go!”
She is a good girl, a smart girl, an only child who likes routine and clean hair and always says please, and yet her needs consume Blair. Or Blair finds herself needing to be consumed. She’d once felt she was the only person who could do what she does for her daughter in the way that she does. It’s why she never went back to work eight years ago after Chloe was born. And why she’s ended up where she is now. Feeling unremarkable. She is forty, and at forty, possibility feels increasingly behind her.
Blair kisses Chloe good-bye at the door and turns to face the empty house. Most mornings of the week, Chloe walks the four blocks to school with her best friend, Xavier. Blair must convince herself each time that she has made it there safe. That she isn’t in the back of a pedophile’s van. If her phone rings in the morning, the thought occurs to her instantly: it’s the school, and she never arrived. This maternal worry is the resting state of her mind.
Upstairs, she puts her nose against the concave ceramic of the bathroom sink. She is searching for the smell of the spearmint toothpaste Aiden would have spit, had he been home this morning. There’s only a hint of Chloe’s fluoride-free berry. The white towel hangs dry on the back of the door, although this isn’t unusual. He showers at the gym on the days he works out.
Everything can be explained if she wants it to be.
Everything can scream at her if she lets it.
She reaches under the sink for the bleach cleaner and sprays the tiles. She does not stop when the fumes sting her eyes. The questions anesthetize her. Who is he fucking? And how is he fucking her? And where is the fucking happening? The rivers of bleach race down the wall. The details of the affair feel more important than what the affair means, and this makes no sense, she knows, but the human brain has a way of desperately wanting to know how the very worst things happen. We can’t accept someone’s death until it’s explained—how and when and where?
But this is also a way of distracting herself from the truth, one that scares her more than the possibility of the affair and what it would mean: that she would do absolutely nothing about it at all.
That she’ll quiet the whispers and throw out the foil. She’ll tell herself he’s only at the gym, only in a meeting every time he doesn’t pick up. She’ll choose to live with this, the tinny white noise in the background of their lives, because she cannot accept the consequences of the alternative.
And nobody would have to know.
The aloneness she feels, it’s humiliating.
She is staring at a spot of mold when she’s startled by Chloe shouting from downstairs.
“Mom? Xavi isn’t home.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean nobody answered the door. I waited forever.”
Blair flies down the stairs, thinking of the time, of how Chloe will be late for school now.
Chloe’s face scrunches into the watch she’s just learned to read. “Am I going to miss the bell?”
“Maybe he’s gone early for chess club and forgot to tell you.”
But it’s unusual. Whitney will have left for work early, and Jacob is out of town, but their nanny, Louisa, would have been there, she is always there, marching those kids through the day.
“It’s June now, Mom, chess club is over. Can you text Whitney and ask her where he is?”
“All right, but let’s start walking, I’ll go with you.”
She sends the text while she wiggles her feet into her sneakers, the laces still tied. She stomps the sidewalk with satisfaction—she was home, she was ready and available. Look at my value. Look at how our daughter still needs me. She likes to orate in her head the things she wants her husband to hear.