She closes the curtain.
The group chats were filling up. The questions, bookended with vague sympathies, wondering what more Blair knows. How Whitney is coping. If there’d be a routine investigation of any kind, given the nature of the “incident,” the involvement of a child. There’s a tone of assumption in their language, like she’d hoped for. About Whitney. The careful treading, texts expertly constructed by vultures. So far nobody has mentioned what happened with Chloe, not to her. But she can feel the momentum of their curiosity, and it makes her nervous. Blair had turned her phone off and put it away for the night. She isn’t sure yet how she’ll respond next.
Back at the kitchen table, she leans to kiss Aiden on the cheek. She runs Chloe’s long ponytail through her hand. A waft of Whitney’s perfume—she lifts her wrist to her nose. At the kitchen sink, she runs the hot water, squirts lemon dish soap on her skin, and winces at the sharpness of the bristles on the scrub brush. She had gone to the Loverlys’ house this afternoon after Jacob left. Just one last time.
Everything had felt different when Blair walked through it. Cold and lifeless. She had stood at the bathroom counter and sprayed Whitney’s perfume once and then twice. She noticed the wedding rings were gone from the jewelry dish.
She’d walked carefully up the stairs to Xavier’s room. Nothing had been touched since she’d been there the day before—the spilled coffee had dried on the floor and the window was still wide open, the room cool. She’d rubbed the top of her arms and looked outside to the backyard, but everything seemed as it always did. She saw Mara in her garden next door. She was sweeping her hand through her hydrangea bushes, like there was something specific she was looking for.
The messy, black scribble of ink on Xavier’s wall. She’d run her fingers over it, and then she could see there’d been something written underneath that he must have been trying to cover up. She’d squinted, putting the letters together, and then stepped back, until she could see what Xavier had written.
The words had taken her breath away:
I DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR SON ANYMORE
Chloe and Aiden start a tie-breaker game of hangman. Blair says she’ll be right back to put the noodles on, and she walks upstairs to her bedroom. She’d gone to the Loverlys’ house that afternoon looking for the conviction she needed. Be thankful for the life you have. For the little girl who still holds your hand. For the husband who helped you build this life, who you made this precious daughter with, who still wants to slip into bed with you at night, to wrap his leg around you under the covers. Because it can all go in an instant, if you’re not careful. If you let down your guard.
Marriage isn’t about love; it’s about choices. And she has chosen this person, and this life. Her longing now for something that she cannot place, something she’ll never find, feels like nothing but ingratitude. A selfish hunger. She can’t live like that anymore.
She pulls the keychain from her pocket and drops it into Aiden’s gym bag. Nothing but a lost and found key. And then she opens her dresser drawer and takes the emerald foil corner into the bathroom. It feels pathetic to her now, nothing but a piece of garbage in her hand. She drops it in the toilet and watches it float. And then slowly, the triangle begins to submerge, like the sail of a capsized boat. She puts her finger on the handle. She has a good life, a blessed life. She will stop convincing herself otherwise.
60
Mara
She stares across the street at the paper airplane she left on the Loverlys’ porch and wonders again how Xavier is doing. If he’s still alive. She’d feel more responsible for the whole thing if she hadn’t been up late herself on Wednesday night, unable to sleep through Albert’s snoring, and heard the noise in the Loverlys’ backyard. She’d slammed her window shut and slept downstairs in Marcus’s old bed instead.
Little had she known it would be Albert’s last night alive.
Xavier used to join her for gardening last summer. Early every Thursday morning, he’d poke his head over the fence to ask if he could help, although it turned out he didn’t like getting his hands dirty. She’d bought him a pair of junior gardening gloves and told him her son hadn’t liked the feel of dirt under his nails either. She’d never mentioned a son before.
One morning at the end of the summer, out of the blue, Xavier asked about him again. Mara had told him he’d been gone a long time.
“Gone where?”
“He died,” Mara had said. “He died while he was flying.”
Xavier had looked pensive, tracing the wings of the die-cast jet she’d given him a few months before, the one Marcus had loved. He reminded her so much of him. She sensed he wanted to know more. Flying, how? Flying, where? But he must have known not to ask too many questions about a dead boy.
She first found the paper airplanes the following Thursday morning, the first week of school, when he couldn’t come over to watch her do the gardening anymore. It had been a particularly bad day, her mind stuck chasing the hardest question again . . . what if, what if, what if. And then there it had been, right at her feet when she looked down.
After that, she would circle the yard early every Thursday and collect the paper planes from wherever they’d happened to land. Sometimes lodged in the branches of the bushes, sometimes near the back fence or scattered on the grass, the noses bent or the paper soggy from the dew. She never told Albert, for fear he’d say something to the Loverlys about it.
She’d asked Xavier once if the planes were from him. He’d looked worried at first, knowing it’d be over if he got in trouble for being up late, with that window wide open, launching airplanes into the old couple’s backyard.
He swore they weren’t, that he had no idea what she was talking about. She’d mumbled, Oh, well never mind then. And then she saw him stifle a satisfied grin. Maybe he wanted her to think, for one wonderfully foolish moment, that they might have come from heaven.
She smiles now, thinking about this.
It’s been a long time since she’s had a proper drink. She pulls a glass from the cupboard and then the bottle of rum from the hutch in the living room, and she heads to the basement.
She’s going to miss those paper planes.
61
Whitney
Jacob turns off the engine in their driveway and they sit.
He made her leave the hospital, he insisted. He was relieved, she knows, that Dr. Menlo ordered her out of the room for the first time in two days. They want her to shower. To sleep and eat. To see the last bit of daylight in the sky. She has nothing left in her.
Maybe they don’t think she’s helping anymore.
Maybe the doctor knows something.
She didn’t want to leave, but it was safer to acquiesce, to get away from the hospital, where Rebecca could change her mind at any minute. Where Ben could come back to find her. She’d barely breathed while Rebecca was in the room alone with Jacob. She’d slid down the wall in the hallway and sat on the cold resin floor, watching feet pass her. Anticipating the end.
She doesn’t know why Rebecca spared them.
Blair might not.
Unsullied, virtuous Blair. She’d been someone Whitney aspired to be—the kind of mother she could learn to emulate. She should have known that attempt was futile. Despite Blair’s best intentions, there’s nobody who makes her feel like a more shameful mother. Nobody who would judge her more harshly if she knew the truth about Wednesday night. She could barely stand to breathe when Blair was in the hospital room next to her. Her very presence buried Whitney under a mound of guilt.
I will fucking handle this, Whitney had hissed to Ben when they saw Blair watching them together. Calm down and leave before Jacob gets back. But she didn’t know how she’d handle this at all. The shame was paralyzing. She’d never get Blair back, she’d known that instantly. She was losing everyone. One by one. She’d needed to think.
She can’t figure out how Blair got the key. And what else she might know.
* * *
? ? ?
A month ago, Whitney had pulled into her driveway at the same time as the red Honda had pulled up outside of Blair’s house. She had noticed in her rearview mirror how quickly the car had stopped, like the driver had thrown it into park before she’d taken her foot off the gas. A blond woman in skinny jeans and a cropped T-shirt—she was maybe thirty, Whitney wasn’t sure—got out and slammed the door. The woman had stood facing Blair’s house. Whitney had watched her in the mirror and didn’t feel right about her. She just didn’t. She did not look like a woman Blair would know.