But now Blair stares at the hospital room door, that conviction waning. She can’t get Chloe’s words out of her head. The cloak of guilt loads her down. She walks in slowly, wondering if Whitney will tell her to leave again. She’s in the same chair, wrapped in the sweater Blair brought yesterday, still stroking Xavier’s hand with her thumb. She doesn’t look up.
There are more machines than last time, more bags of liquid draining into him. There’s gauze taped over his heart with two thin white tubes hanging from it, the other end entering a hole through his neck. A patch of his head is shaved now. He looks barely there. Blair had forgotten about the swelling of his eyelids, the plastic brace around his neck. She holds her fingers under her eyes to dam the tears. From the chair on the other side of his bed, she reaches for his limp, warm hand.
Nobody would care if you died.
He already looks dead.
She feels light-headed.
He’s only ten. But he was wiser than those ten years. And he hadn’t been himself, not this school year. He was shrinking, as her own daughter was flourishing. Retreating, while Chloe was melding with the other girls. Blair feels the shame grow. She was raising her to be kind and good. But somewhere along the line, Blair has failed.
She puts her mouth close to Xavier’s ear.
“Chloe didn’t mean it,” she whispers. “She’s so sorry.”
The nurse knocks to say the surgeon is coming by in a minute. Blair stands and wipes her face. She can’t plot against Whitney—she can’t try to make her the villain in this, when her own daughter might be to blame for what’s happened. It’s not right. She’s not that kind of person.
But she needs Whitney to give her a reason to stop thinking the worst about her and Aiden, to stop obsessing over the key. Anything.
“Have I done something wrong?” Blair asks. Her voice shakes. “Or is this about Chloe?”
Whitney finally lifts her eyes from Xavier. She stares past Blair, at the wall. “I can’t talk about this right now, Blair, I asked you not to—”
“About what Chloe did at recess?”
Whitney is eerily still.
“Come on, Whit, we’re closer than this.” Blair reaches for her arm. She wants to shake her awake, pinch her until she speaks, end this ridiculous tension between them, but Whitney yanks her arm away.
“Blair, please.” Whitney looks irritated with her. She shakes her head. Closes her eyes for just a moment, the way she’s seen her do when her children frustrate her. She looks back at her son.
Blair feels humiliated. She was wrong—they are not closer than this. She doesn’t mean much to Whitney at all.
Betraying her must have been so easy.
The key she found in Whitney’s drawer is in her coat pocket. A grenade with the pin pulled. She slips it out and holds it inches away from Whitney’s face.
“Why do you have this?” Blair asks.
Whitney looks slowly to Aiden’s key chain. The initials. She is unblinking again. And then her face tilts, as though something has just occurred to her. Something has finally pulled her mind from the clench of a vice. Only then does Blair realize what she herself will have to answer for.
Whitney looks up. “I could ask you the same thing.”
50
Rebecca
It’s been three hours since the blood started and the cramping hasn’t begun yet, but she’s taken three naproxen. She wants to evaporate into a place where she can feel nothing. She is on the cusp of sleep, thinking of lying on an operating-room table, slicing herself open with a scalpel, splaying her insides, throwing every one of her reproductive parts on a metal cart and kicking it across the sterile room, the crash of the instruments, the steel kidney basins clanging on the floor, her womb splattering like a water balloon. The sound of the splash wakes her.
She opens her eyes, sees the lamp on her nightside table, the empty glass of water, the pocket diary. Three seconds, four, and she remembers. She doesn’t want to live through what’s coming for her.
There are no more chances after this. She is done. There is finally no hope at all, and the unfairness is unbearable. She rolls to put her face into the pillow.
Downstairs she paces in the kitchen, she shoves things, the kitchen chairs, the garbage can. She throws her keys across the room. She waits for the pain to take hold of her lower back as the fog of the painkillers begins to lift. Her brain recognizes what’s coming and her body is tense, it is already exhausted. The gully under her tongue fills with saliva and she spits, her head hanging over the sink.
Ben hasn’t texted, he hasn’t called. It’s nearly noon. Her face crumples with the regret of telling him about the pregnancy. Four and a half hours too soon. She bangs a fist on the cupboard door.
He could come home any minute and say that he feels it—the hope. The best chance they’ve had. That he forgives her, that he is grateful she never gave up, that she was right about miracles after all. And she will fall to her knees.
She walks to the living-room window with her lower back in her hands to look for him. There is a ripple of something coral pink—Mara’s cotton nightgown, in the breeze. She is on the stairs. She hasn’t left. Rebecca opens the door, but Mara barely turns as she speaks.
“I wanted to make sure you’re okay,” she says.
“Thank you. You can go, though, really. You’ve left your door open.” She thinks she can hear Mara’s phone ringing. “Is Albert there? Is that your phone?” But Mara doesn’t seem to hear her. “Ben will be home soon, it’s really okay.”
“Ben’s gone to the hospital. I heard him tell the cabbie when he left.” She gestures to the street.
“The hospital?” Rebecca thinks of the emergency room they’d gone to the first time. She cannot make sense of how he knows she’s losing the baby again. And why he’d go to the hospital without her. She can’t make sense of anything.
“The hospital where you work,” she says. “Where the boy next door is. And his mother.”
Rebecca moves through the explanations. Ben must have thought she was called back in for a consult. He must be looking for her.
But it’s the way Mara said his mother. The way her eyebrows lifted. The way she’s now kneading her thumb into the palm of her other hand.
Mara looks back at her again. Rebecca watches the woman’s chest rise and then fall, one long, weighty breath.
She leaves the front door open and turns to find his laptop on the kitchen table. She has never done this before, invaded his privacy. She has never had a reason to. But she opens the screen and clicks on the email icon. She types Whitney’s name into the search bar and presses enter.
Whitney Loverly?(No Subject)?November 2, 2018
One email. Only one email. She imagines what it will say: Could you put the garbage out for us while we’re away? Collect our mail?
Hey! Thanks again for the new glove, he loves it. I wish you’d let me pay you back. If Rebecca is working tonight and you’re looking for some company, pop by for a drink again. Btw, meant to ask you—maybe text is better? W.
51
Blair
It isn’t until she’s in the parking lot of the hospital, furiously searching her bag for her car keys, that she realizes she forgot to give Xavier the card from Chloe and the die-cast airplane. Chloe will ask the second she walks in the door. And the optics of a gift would look good. She runs her thumb over the fading American Airlines decal on the side of the yellowed airplane. It must have been Jacob’s when he was a boy. She’ll leave it outside the door.
She peeks into the room from the hallway to see if the surgeon is there yet. Instead, she sees Jacob, his back toward the door. She must have just missed him in the hallway.
He reaches out to touch Whitney’s cheek with the back of his hand. Whitney pulls slightly away from him. He tries again, and this time she doesn’t move. Her hair curtains her face, and her shoulders begin to shake. She is crying—Blair’s visit must have upset her. Jacob slides his hand to the nape of her neck and strokes her with his thumb, as her head slowly moves closer into his chest, like she’s finally succumbing to some sense of relief. His hand slides into the neck of her shirt. And then he looks back to the door.
Blair moves away from the glass, but before she can avert her eyes, she’s caught staring—at Ben. His gaze darts to the floor as his lips move quickly and his hand pulls away. He is saying something brief to Whitney. Something panicked. Whitney turns her back to him and the door. He walks to the far corner of the room, where he knows Blair can’t see him.
Blair places the airplane and the card on the floor. She can’t process exactly what she’s witnessed, but something has just implicated them all, and each second is more loaded than the next as what’s happening becomes clearer.