Whitney had moved quickly out of her car toward the woman as she approached Blair’s house. She called out to her in the lowest voice she could so Blair wouldn’t hear from inside.
“Hey. Hey! Can I help you?” The woman turned around and Whitney saw she looked nervous. Like she was about to do something that scared her. Whitney came closer to her. She could see the whites of her eyes were too pink, her cheeks too flush. “I said, can I help you?”
“I’m here to return something to the asshole who lives here.”
Whitney knew it right then. “You mean Aiden?”
The woman’s jaw jutted to the side. She was thinking. She was thinking about how much to say, and the muscles in her arms looked tense. She was taut and shiny. She reached into her bag and took out a pair of sunglasses, rooting for something else, and Whitney recognized the frames right away. Their square shape, the fleck of peach in the tortoiseshell. She’d been at the neighborhood barbecue in September. She was the girlfriend of Jacob’s college buddy.
She remembers, then, how she had overheard this woman and Aiden talking at the party when Blair was inside tidying up. The brazenness with which Aiden had flirted, the way this woman had held on to his arm for a moment too long. She heard him tell her which office building he worked at downtown. That he often grabbed a drink after work at the pub at the bottom of the tower. Whitney hadn’t liked it. She’d almost said something to Blair at the end of the night, in the kitchen, as she was leaving with Aiden and Chloe. Hey, I don’t want to upset you, I don’t want to cause trouble. But if I were you, I’d want to know.
But then she hadn’t. Because it was Blair. And Blair wouldn’t have wanted to know. Whitney was reminded, that afternoon, how essential Blair’s friendship was to her life. She couldn’t have risked what they had, not to place a bomb in Blair’s hands that she’d never have wanted.
The woman pulled a small, pink satin pouch from her bag, and slipped out a key with Aiden’s initials on the tag. Whitney glanced toward Blair’s front window to make sure she wasn’t looking out between the curtains. She didn’t see Aiden’s car anywhere. She needed this woman gone before Blair noticed them and opened her door.
“Give me that. I’ll return it for you,” Whitney had said. The woman stared at the palm of Whitney’s hand. “The key. Give it to me now. And then leave.”
The woman looked stunned. And then she glared at the house again. She slipped the key back in the pouch. Whitney could see it in her face, the playing out of what was supposed to have happened, the revenge fantasy she’d convinced herself of for weeks. The dowdy wife opening the door, her sweetness dissolving to fear.
“You don’t want to do this. Trust me. I’ll make sure you regret it.” The woman looked at her hand for what felt to Whitney like a whole minute. And then she dropped the pouch and key into Whitney’s palm. Her lips pursed. She might have thought about snatching the key right back, but it was already in the pocket of Whitney’s jacket. “Go. And don’t ever fucking come back here.”
As she drove away, Whitney saw Mara on her porch, her eyes following the car down the street. They looked at each other, and then Whitney went inside, her heart pounding. She’d smelled Louisa’s lentil curry, heard the squeals of the three kids playing hide-and-seek with her upstairs. She’d walked straight to the stove and lifted the lid to see what was left in the pot; they’d all eaten already. She moved her spoon through the leftovers, convincing herself she’d done the right thing. Did Blair suspect anything? Has this been quietly destroying her? She wanted to go over right now and hug her. Whitney didn’t want this knowledge, but now she had it, and her friend would be humiliated to know that she did. Blair would want to deal with this privately if she ever did find out. So Whitney would not say a thing. Like at the barbecue in September, she would give her the dignity of pretending it had never happened at all.
And then there was the other complicating matter. The hypocrisy of how it felt to be so concerned for her best friend, so disgusted with Aiden.
She kept stirring. Thinking.
She heard Jacob’s feet descend the stairs. And then felt his lips.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” she said. “That girlfriend of Jamie’s, the one who came to the barbecue. Is he still seeing her?”
“They broke up awhile ago. She wasn’t relationship material, apparently.” He pulled away from her. He opened the fridge, took out a sparkling water. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Just thought I saw her the other day in the elevator at work.”
He nodded. But he was quiet.
“I think she’s got a red Honda,” Whitney pressed. “You ever see it around here?”
His brows lifted. He shrugged. He shook his head. He could have said, how do you know what car she drives? Why would she be around here? But then he turned to leave the room, and she knew there was something he was not telling her. Maybe he knew about Aiden too. But she said nothing else; she’d already gone too far. She didn’t want to have those words—“an affair”—floating in the air.
The shrapnel, she knew, was all around them, a threat underfoot in their homes, in between them while they slept. This damning debris—the hiss as it nears, the weight as it hits—was the most betraying. And discomforting. Life could explode at any moment.
No, she wouldn’t mention this, not to Jacob, not to Blair.
So much was traded in what went unsaid. In what was protected.
* * *
? ? ?
This was the way she could think about it, then. She could carry it all inside her, divided, like the dinner served to her fussy little children, the foods on their plates never allowed to touch.
62
Rebecca
Ben is the first person she sees when she walks through the doors of the emergency room across the street from the children’s hospital. He stands up from the chair in the waiting room. She can see the uncertainty, the lift in his eyebrows, the slack of his jaw that’s meant to make him look innocent. Like he has nothing to apologize for, nothing but leaving her in the kitchen when he should have stayed. When he should have put his hands on the sphere of their baby and said something about wanting them both.
She walks past him to the registration desk and digs for identification in her bag. When they’re done with her at the plexiglass window—Miscarriage. Yes, I’m sure. No, I’m not twenty weeks yet. No allergies—she lies down in the first empty row of seats. Her eyes can’t be open anymore. She breathes through the next wave of pain and then hisses out through her teeth. There’s relief, for a moment, but she knows it’s going to end, the pressure is starting between her legs, and there’s a red occupied sign on the bathroom door ten feet away.
“Mara told me you’d be here,” he says. She feels his weight on the seat cushion next to her. She feels his hand on her ankle. “I shouldn’t have left like that. I’m so sorry.”
The pain is back quickly. She hums, long, droning stretches.
“I left because I was scared, and I was shocked. But the second you told me, I knew I wanted this baby too.”
She can only chuckle. Delirium. She wiggles her legs, tries to find relief in moving differently. Like jiggling a crying baby, this crying baby, four months from now. She keeps her eyes closed. She listens, eager to hear the click of the bathroom door. Below, she has the sensation of opening. She knows she should walk to triage, tell the nurse she needs a bed, but it doesn’t matter to her right now where it happens, it doesn’t matter if she squats on the waiting room floor while the seven people there turn away, hide their eyes from what comes out.
There was a question on the fertility clinic paperwork they each had to fill out last year. Why is it important for you to have biological children? He had turned to her. How did you answer this one? She’d shrugged, she’d been staring blankly at the question, too, thinking it wasn’t fair they had to articulate this when millions of other parents didn’t. To see how their facial features morphed together? Because it’s a natural thing that humans of a reproductive age are supposed to want? They’d never talked about why they wanted a baby, they had only talked about if they wanted a baby. He’d put a line through the answer box, a protest. She’d looked at his paper and then did the same on hers.