? ? ?
At the airport, Marcus took everything in a few paces behind her. They sat right beside the gate and waited for the boarding call. Mara held his knees to stop his legs from bouncing. His anxiousness was inevitable. He would be calm once they took their seats. When their row was called, she nudged him along down the boarding bridge. She could always find patience with him; it was a necessity of their life together. But she was finding that hard now, with the tension of travel getting the better of her, the heavy tote on her shoulder, the line of people they were holding up, the mess of documents in her hands that she didn’t want to drop. She wanted him to enjoy this. She wanted to enjoy this herself.
“Come on, Marcus, hurry up.” A young couple pulling carry-on suitcases brushed by, knocking her elbow, and the tickets and passports and her wallet scattered on the floor. Marcus watched her scramble to pick everything up while the line grew behind them. “Marcus, help me, for Christ’s sake! Don’t just stand there!”
She was flushed with embarrassment as he stood over her. She heard a tsk from a passenger stepping around them and wanted to tell the woman to go to hell. She stuffed everything in her shoulder bag and fixed her bangs, which were matting to her forehead.
“Listen to me,” she hissed to Marcus, his chin pinched between her thumb and her index finger. “Smarten up. Walk faster and act your age for once. I’ve had enough.”
She flicked his head away from her before she let go. She’d never said it before—I’ve had enough. But she had. Her eyes brimmed quickly as she marched to the plane door, not looking back at him. She composed herself in time for the cheery attendant to welcome them on board.
It was just before takeoff when she heard the change in his breathing as he looked out the window at the tarmac. He twisted uncomfortably. She had taken his hand in hers, stroked his knuckles. She felt bad for losing her patience earlier, she wanted them both to start again.
“Close your eyes and count,” she reminded him. “It’ll be okay.”
The plane rumbled down the runway. She heard the metal clink against his armrest but realized too late that he’d unbuckled his seat belt. She smelled the odor of his armpit as he reached over her to grab the headrest of the man beside her in the aisle seat. He was trying to climb over her, to leave the plane. She pushed him back into his seat and wrapped herself around him as tightly as she could. He was as big as she was now, and strong. His shirt felt damp against her face. She could feel his heart pound against her. He panted in her ear. She whispered to him.
“It’s okay, Marcus, just sit still, just breathe. You’re okay. Lots of people feel anxious on a flight. It’s completely normal.” The man beside her shifted away from them. He lit a cigarette before he shook the page of his newspaper. Mara’s face burned.
Marcus touched his chest where the anxiety often gave him pain.
“I know,” she reassured him. “You’ll feel better in a minute. Look.” She pointed out Marcus’s window to the layer of pulled, white cotton sinking lower beneath them. She was overcome with the sensation of something she had already seen. And then she placed it: the dream she’d had when she was pregnant with him. Of her womb padded with clouds like the ones they could see now. Of how peaceful he had floated inside her. Of the quiet.
She let go of him and leaned back in her seat then. She rested her eyes. The white noise on the plane was soothing for them both. He’d be all right. The most stressful part was behind them. They’d be able to see the deep green shores of Lisbon as they descended, and he’d like that. She wondered when the coffee might come by. If Marcus might want a glass of tomato juice.
And then she felt Marcus’s fist hit her stomach. The wind was knocked from her.
She gasped for air as she watched him go rigid in his seat, trying to grab her. Trying to tell her something. His other hand yanked at the collar of his shirt and his face was distorted in pain. He was in agony. His heart. She gulped desperately and finally found a breath.
“My son! Someone help us! Something’s wrong!”
He was pulled into the aisle on the floor and disappeared from her view. She climbed over the seats, screaming for him, shoving bodies out of her way. Someone grabbed her by the armpits and dragged her to the back of the plane, thrashing. Her head smashed on the corner of a serving cart. They held her against the emergency door with her hands behind her back and her face pressed into the cold metal. She tried to shake the din of the overhead speakers from her ears, to scream loud enough for Marcus to hear her, but someone’s hand pushed harder into her skull.
* * *
? ? ?
When they landed the plane in Houston, she was brought to a hospital for stitches and sedation. They kept her overnight. She didn’t see Marcus’s body for two more days. They told her it was his heart, that he went quickly. Likely a preexisting condition, triggered by stress. She refused the autopsy—she didn’t need anything confirmed, it didn’t matter. She knew she had killed him by making him get on the plane. If she’d listened to Albert, he’d be alive.
She called home to tell him the morning after Marcus died. He’d sobbed. His heartbreak felt cruel and undeserved, but she’d always known there’d been love, somewhere deep underneath the cruelty. She’d hung up the phone as he’d cried.
After the morgue, back at the motel, she sat in an empty bathtub with a steak knife she stole from the diner where she’d stared at a plate of food for two hours. She thought long and hard about what she believed to be true. There was heaven, and there was hell. And there was the promise she had right then, the guarantee that if she stayed alive, she could see him when she closed her eyes. She could bury her nose into the smell left on his pillowcase at home. She could hold his die-cast airplanes while she slept. And she could eat her breakfast, looking at his empty chair, knowing that he had mattered.
* * *
? ? ?
The afternoon sun has another hour until it dips below the roofline of the Loverlys’ third story. Mara makes her way across the street to the Loverlys’ front door and bends down to place the paper airplane at their doorstep.
58
Rebecca
Whitney jumps when Rebecca’s cold hand touches her forearm. She puts her mouth close to Whitney’s ear. “Was my husband here?”
Whitney doesn’t answer.
Rebecca tells her to follow her out of the hospital room. That she obeys her is the only confirmation Rebecca needs that, yes, he was there. Yes, there is something between them. The adrenaline dulls the ache in her lower back. The pad between her legs is heavy.
She opens the door to a small empty room down the hall. Whitney hesitates.
“Sit down. I need you to sit down.”
Whitney does. Rebecca paces in small steps. She’s got her here in this room, but she has no plan. She wanted Ben to be here, she wanted to feel what it was like to see them together.
“How could you have let me comfort you? Hold your hand?”
“Rebecca, I can’t do this right now, I need—”
“Don’t,” she snaps. She looks away as Whitney starts shaking. She is losing her son, but Rebecca has nothing. She is wrung. She cannot formulate the questions she should be asking.
She tries to put together a story of what’s happened, but nothing fits. There is no space for misunderstanding or a different explanation. You’re not yourself anymore, Ben said to her that morning. Her, it is her. The losses have changed her, yes. The obsession has consumed her, yes. But what he’d meant was, you are not who I want you to be. You are no longer enough for me. They were broken, but they had not shattered together.
There’s a knock on the door and then Jacob slips his head in. He tells Whitney he’s back, he’s brought her a change of clothes. And then he sees that she looks panicked. He takes a step into the room. “What’s going on, you okay?”
Whitney moves so close to Rebecca that she can smell Whitney’s sourness, the odor of her armpits. This is the woman Ben touches. He holds this woman’s flesh against his own. She wants to reach out to touch Whitney, too, to imagine what this feels like for Ben. Her sweatshirt. The maintained tips of her hair. She wants to twirl the diamond stud in her earlobe. There are feelings, there must be feelings, but she can’t make sense of his having the capacity to love someone else. This person. She is nauseated. She turns her face away from Whitney’s breath—she’s whispering in Rebecca’s ear:
“Please don’t do this. Don’t say anything to him.”
Whitney, with her three children. Breasts that have fed. A cervix that has delivered.
“Whit,” says Jacob, impatient. “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”