She bangs the elevator button and replays the way Ben touched Whitney’s face, her neck. The intimacy more shocking than the visions of flesh she’s tortured herself with for weeks. She bangs on the button again and the elevator doors open. The repercussions spin so fast she can barely process them. This is happening to Jacob and Rebecca. Not her. The key doesn’t mean anything.
Aiden. Aiden, who was right about the kind of person Whitney is. Aiden, who isn’t perfect, but forgives the way she treats him over and over, because he loves her. Aiden, who hasn’t ever not been there for their family. He wouldn’t do this kind of thing to her. He might look, he might fantasize, but he wouldn’t stroke another woman’s face with the kind of tenderness she just saw. He isn’t anything like those two. Standing in the wake of what she’s just witnessed, she’s never felt surer. She wants to fold to the floor of the elevator and weep in relief.
The elevator dings. Parking level 4.
She wants to be far away from what is happening in that hospital room. That disgrace. That putrid taste they’ve left in her mouth. They’ll all have to pretend she was never there.
In the car, though, she cannot bring herself to start the ignition. The adrenaline has worn off and her chest is tightening. She is shaking. She tucks her chin and presses her temples as hard as she can, and when she lifts her head, the noise that comes from within her is monstrous. She has only known herself capable of it once, when she pushed Chloe out into the world. She lets the sound fill the car for as long as her lungs allow, she feels out of herself, spliced open, she is everything she is never allowed to be. She feels the reverberation of her voice long after she can no longer hear it.
She looks around her at the dark empty cars. She is exhausted.
Everyone seems to think only of themselves. When has she ever made a choice with only her needs in mind, just because she wanted to? Put herself before her own family? Put their happiness at risk for her own? She never has, no matter the cost to herself. She’s never been so selfish, so reckless, so cruel. She is a mother. She is a wife. She is a good person.
She bangs her hand on the car window. Her throat is raw.
She still has it, the real estate listing for the apartment, although it’s long leased by now. It’s curled into a scroll at the back of the junk drawer in the kitchen. She’d had a meeting at the bank a few days after, then a call with a family lawyer, one of those big franchise places that give twenty minutes free. She’d needed to know how it all felt. And she lets herself relive that feeling every day. Just to see.
But who is she without this life she has, if she’s not this mother, this wife? Who is she?
She blows her nose and then she looks at the time. She needs to get groceries for dinner. And they need paper bags for the yard waste because the collection is tomorrow. These mundane responsibilities do not end. Some days these mundane responsibilities are all she has. She takes a deep breath, and she presses the puffiness out of her cheeks. She straightens her back. She puts on her seat belt. And then she finally starts the engine.
52
Blair
Four Months Ago
What date are you looking to move in? First of March?”
She is quick to shake her head. She doesn’t like the question, it feels too certain. “No timeline. I’m flexible.”
She runs her finger along the laminate counter and then opens an empty cupboard with shelves lined in floral wallpaper. An older woman lived here alone. Maybe died here. She thinks of stocking it with things that only she likes to eat. How it would feel to shed herself of the dozen expired cans and unused spices and untouched cereals and the stale bag of marshmallows.
She puts her hand against the glass of the window in the apartment’s main room, because it’s something people do. Something about temperature escaping, she isn’t sure. There is a lever on the window frame that turns, that lets air in through a six-inch gap, and she could let the cool breeze in all night long if she lived without Aiden. He insists the room be warm.
The shower is combined with a shallow tub. A pane of bubbled glass runs along the side, on a track that is black and mucky. But she can clean mold. She can clean the mirror. She can replace the vanity light that belongs in a motel.
There’s a closet with hangers that have been left behind. She thinks of the grown children who might have cleaned out the dead lady’s things. She pulls one down and smells it, expecting the smell of death. Loneliness. Floral perfume. But nothing.
There would be a new order for her clothes in this closet, there would be only one laundry basket waiting underneath to be filled. Sometimes she would wear an outfit all day that not one other person would see before she took it off again.
She turns to the place where a bed would go, and it barely looks like enough space for a double. Something about the possibility of this being self-fulfilling is comforting to her. Well, the bed isn’t big enough anyway. Well, there was never any room for someone new. She is lonely, desperately and achingly lonely, the way a mother with a family is not supposed to be. And yet here, the loneliness would feel different. Self-imposed, and reasonable.
The second room has the better view, and this is how she’ll sell it to the innocent daughter whose life she would be upending. They can almost see the waterfront from here. They’ll almost see the sailboats when the weather warms. This is almost like our family was before, almost the life I wanted for you, she thinks. And the thought of Chloe in this room makes her mawkish.
“Would your sofa fit? Do you have a sectional?” The Realtor keeps her hands clasped at the tail of her dark green blazer as she circles, the heels of her ankle boots driving like stakes into the parquet flooring.
“I don’t know what I have,” Blair says. And it’s true that she does not.
There’s a hint of pity on the Realtor’s face, like she’s had this situation before. Like she knows exactly why she’s there, and that there will be no commission, and that this woman in front of her, rolling the brochure into a scroll, is only testing herself. It’s the way Blair stands in the middle of the apartment and turns herself around like she’s a frightened child in a crowd, looking for the grown-up who brought her here. That, and she doesn’t ask enough about the rent. She doesn’t try to negotiate.
In the elevator on the way down they are both quiet.
“I’ll be in touch,” Blair says, in the unremarkable lobby.
“Sure.”
Blair warms up the car and waits for her pulse to come down. She is exhilarated and liberated, and there’s a buzz in her head that she can’t remember having before. She could drive to the bank and open her own account. She’s used a free calculator on a divorce lawyer’s website to estimate how much support he’d have to pay her each month, and it could work. Just barely. She tries to imagine herself living there. Being separated, selling the house. Worried about money. Working every day, a single mother. Is it freedom? Is it insanity? She thinks of what Whitney said a few months before when she came over for a glass of wine. About her mother. The bus ticket she kept for years. The way out. She hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it. She wanted to know how the possibility felt. She stares at the brochure in her hand.
But then all she can feel is foolish. And a walloping ache for the expired cans of soup in her cupboard, and the mess of her husband’s shaving bits in the sink, and the way her toes feel in the stair carpet that she hates. The sound of him coming home. Chloe in between them in their bed. The routine they know. And this is what happens when she fantasizes about a separation; she always flips back. To the security of living diminished.
She takes her phone from her bag and calls her mother.
She tries again. And again. Her mother so rarely answers her cell phone anymore. At least not for Blair’s calls, fizzing with updates about Chloe and Aiden and the latest ongoings. She never tries the landline at their house, in case her dad answers.
She’s about to give up, when she hears her mom clear her throat.
“It’s me,” Blair says. Her voice catches. She swallows. “It’s been awhile. Just wondering what you’re up to.”
Her mother asks her to hold on, and Blair can picture her moving through the house to the backyard, where her father won’t hear her. She puts the phone back to her ear and sighs.
“Thanksgiving, I think it was,” her mom says, but she doesn’t think, she knows. Blair looks up to the roof of the car and wants to tell her the phone works both ways.
“Well yeah, things have been busy. And I’ve been feeling . . . not quite myself.” She’s regretful as soon as she says it. They’re both only comfortable at a distance. But she wonders sometimes if her mother resents her for the seemingly happy life she has. Maybe they could salvage something between them if she understood Blair could relate to her more than she thinks.
“Mmm-hmm,” her mom says. “Well, you’ve always been quick to feel stressed out. Everything good with Chloe?”
Blair pauses before telling her she’s working on her first science project. That she and Aiden go swimming twice a week now, she’s learning all the strokes.