“Do you want to play chess with us?” Xavier speaks only to Blair. Whitney pulls his hand from the fruit. He grumbles, she shushes. She wipes his fingers with the dish towel. She removes a perilous wineglass from the edge of the kitchen island. He is always doing what she doesn’t want him to do, and she wishes she couldn’t see these things, that she were blind to these irritations.
“I’d love to play with you, Xavi, but it’s getting late.” Blair touches his hair as his face deflates. She rubs the top of his arm and chases his eyes with hers until she catches him. She smiles playfully—he brightens again. Whitney stares at them, wondering if she ever falters. Yells. Screams.
“Say good-bye now, Xavier. Up to the shower,” Whitney says, but he ignores her.
“Do you know that the longest ever game of chess was 269 moves? Or maybe it was 629.” He tells this to Blair, but he looks at Whitney before he speaks again. She is rearranging the fruit onto a smaller plate, avoiding his eyes. “Once I played a game with, like, 120 moves. The chess club teacher said it was the longest game he ever watched.”
“Wow, good for you. Can you come over next week to give me another lesson?”
He nods, puts his fingers into the icing on the mini cupcakes and licks them. He’s not usually this chatty. Whitney watches in silence. Whitney wants Blair gone.
“And did you know the longest flight of a paper airplane is 29.2 seconds? From a fold called the Star Fighter. I’ve made one before. You’ve gotta pinch the tip, like this.” He squeezes Chloe’s nose between his thumb and index finger and she giggles before she swats him away.
“Xavier, I said go upstairs.”
“Chloe, can you please tell Daddy it’s time to go?” Blair kisses her, pats her bottom, and then a pleasant sigh. As if there’s no tension. Tonight, this pretending makes Whitney feel foolish, like Blair is doing her the favor of pity.
“Are we going to pretend it never happened?” Whitney asks.
* * *
? ? ?
Blair is stunned by Whitney’s words. She can’t find a reply. Isn’t that what we do for each other? she thinks. We turn a blind eye? We protect each other’s dignity? How dare you do this to me, Blair thinks, how dare you humiliate me? She is stunned Whitney would bring up Aiden’s gaping at her like this. They’ve never had a confrontational moment before, and the discomfort is engulfing. She turns to look out the back of the house to the yard, to see if Aiden is coming. To make sure Chloe can’t hear them.
But then Whitney says, “The way I screamed at him up there. I lost my shit. It was bad, wasn’t it.”
Blair exhales. The yelling, that’s what she means. Whitney’s arms are crossed high over her chest now, like she’s conceded that it was a questionable choice of dress for a neighborhood barbecue, and Blair can see the boldness has finally left her. Blair turns off the water in the sink and wrings the dishcloth. She knows they aren’t talking about the fact that Whitney treated him so cruelly. She knows they are talking about the fact that everyone heard.
“Look, you can’t let this consume you. People will forget it ever happened.”
“No, they won’t.”
“Xavi already has—he was in a great mood just now.” She knows it will sting to point out how cheerful her son is in Blair’s presence. Whitney presses her hand into her forehead.
Blair can insist the screaming from his room wasn’t as bad as it was, she can talk until Whitney is convinced. Lies that might make Whitney feel better. But she thinks of Whitney’s perfect breasts on flagrant display, and of the catering bill paid without a glance at the total, of Whitney pulling her up to dance when she knows she hates to dance, and Blair decides she doesn’t want to make this any easier for her.
“That thing you said about Xavi, though, to the moms from school. Afterward. About him having serious problems right now, and seeing the behavioral specialist. Is he?”
Whitney puts down the tray of picked-over desserts. Her lower jaw slides and Blair regrets bringing it up. There was the embarrassing display of rage. And then there was the lie about her son.
“I had to say something to those women, Blair. They already think I’m a shitty mom.”
“They don’t think that. They know you have a lot on your plate.” A pause. Blair could keep reassuring. But instead: “I just wanted to make sure everything’s really all right with him. That there’s nothing concerning you about him. Is he struggling with anything, is he—”
“It was just a white lie. He’s fine, and you know that.”
Blair thinks to herself, for the first time: Do I know that? Do I know that Xavier is okay? Does Whitney really believe he’s fine? She thinks of how it must have felt to be the target of that explosive anger. Of how often that might happen. Of how pleasant and easy the boy is when he comes over to her house, without Whitney.
Whitney is about to say something when Aiden and Jacob come in from the backyard.
“Great party, Whit, thanks.” Aiden touches her shoulder, kisses her good-bye on the cheek. “I’ve got a three-hundred-dollar bottle of tequila with your name on it, a gift from a client. You’ve got to try it. I’ll bring it over.”
“Anytime, yeah.” But Whitney is busying herself, she is fiddling with plastic wrap. She doesn’t look at him. Chloe is pulling Aiden away from her side, leading him to the door.
Whitney gives Blair a final stare in the kitchen that says, I thought you were on my side. I thought I could count on you to make this better. What Blair would never admit is that it’s not the rage that concerns her the most, or even the lie she told about Xavier. What she can’t shake is how effortless the lie was. How easily those words seemed to roll off Whitney’s tongue.
Blair is following her family out of the kitchen when she hears Whitney’s voice, low.
“Blair, there’s something else.”
Whitney looks back over her shoulder toward her front door, where Aiden is speaking with Jacob and Chloe is tying her shoes. They are out of earshot. Whitney’s hands slide to the back of her hips, and she bites on her lower lip, and this makes Blair more nervous. Whitney opens her mouth, there is something she needs to say, something that has tempered her eyes in a way that tells Blair it is Whitney who holds the pity now. That Blair has a reason to be worried too. In that one beat of silence, Blair knows she cannot let herself hear whatever comes out of Whitney’s mouth next. She has a terrible feeling it will be something about Aiden. She cuts her off before her first word.
“I should get going, Whit, I’m sorry.”
Whitney’s jaw closes. Blair expects her to be annoyed, but instead she looks relieved. It’s this relief that makes her worry more than everything else she will replay about the party in the days that follow. Before Whitney turns back to the plastic wrap, Blair feels her stare at the olive-green shorts Blair is wearing, at the bulky pockets, at the cuffed, wrinkled hem, and when she gets home, she throws them in the garbage can at the side of the house.
47
Blair
Blair sits at the bench near the front door with Chloe’s card and Xavier’s die-cast airplane in her hands. She’d thought Whitney might have been involved with what happened to Xavier, but it’s her very own child who might be responsible. She isn’t sure if she can go to the hospital, knowing what Chloe has done. She’s been Googling phrases on her phone that feel impossible: Can a ten-year-old commit suicide? Rates of suicide in children under 12. Pressure creeps around her skull, from the back of her head to her temples. He’s so young. But she can see it now—there was a darkness in him. There was always a sadness. It was part of what Whitney couldn’t deal with, his long face, his unsettledness. His anxiousness.
“Was she okay at drop-off?”
Aiden stands over her, his suit jacket hanging from his index finger; he’s late for work.
“Seemed to be. I’ll email her teacher, I’m not sure what the school knows.” She folds her shaking fingers into her lap. She can’t bring herself to repeat what Chloe told her at the drugstore. She needs to keep control of this and make it go away. What if Xavier dies? She can’t have them bear the burden of that blame for years to come, with the kids at school, the teachers. The parents. She won’t. She needs to get ahead of this before everyone makes up their minds about why this has happened. “I think I’ll go to the hospital to see Whitney again.”
She watches Aiden bend for his dress shoes, wincing. She waits for his reaction to the mention of Whitney’s name, but he says nothing. She’d gone the whole last hour without thinking about the possibility of them fucking each other. She can’t decide if she regrets showing him the key or not.
“Can I ask you something?” she says slowly. She wants to give herself time to back out. But this is her family. Her daughter. “Do you think it’s strange nobody’s talking about how Xavier fell? Why he was up so late at night at the window like that? If he was really alone?”