She doesn’t want him to explain why he’s having an affair. She knows he felt claustrophobic in her presence. That he’d quietly disassociated from the future they had together, stitch by stitch, an undoing, while he tried so very hard to convince her otherwise. That he lay awake at night feeling sorry for himself, like a petulant child who couldn’t have the one thing he wanted. The one thing he felt owed. And while Whitney wouldn’t give him that one thing, there’s no doubt in Rebecca’s mind that being with her made his childless fate easier to live with. Rebecca soured his life; Whitney was a neutralizer. She made being with Rebecca bearable.
Or maybe it was just animalistic. An attraction to a woman with reproductive organs that worked. The mother he can fuck.
Her moan escalates. The pain climbs ruthlessly, ravaging every inch of her back. There are hands on her now, hands that aren’t Ben’s. There’s a blood pressure cuff around her arm. The heaviness between her legs feels threatening now, like a soggy paper bag about to rip, and she knows what happens next.
“I’m done,” she whispers to Ben. “I won’t do it anymore.”
He kneels at her head and takes her hand, presses his forehead on hers.
“We don’t have to give up on a baby,” he says to her softly. “We don’t have to lose hope. I was wrong. Let’s get through this, let’s go back to the fertility—”
“I mean I’m done doing this, with you. I won’t do it anymore, with you.”
He’s confused. He looks at the nurse who is back with a heating bag. She tells Rebecca there’s a bed coming free in a few minutes.
“You’re upset and in pain, let’s just get you—”
“You started fucking her in November,” she says. “When you told me you didn’t want us to try for a baby anymore. That’s what changed, wasn’t it?”
Ben sits back. His eyes move to her belly. “You can’t possibly understand how much I love you, how much I want—”
“Go home and clear out your things. Leave me the car and your set of house keys.”
She squeezes her eyes closed again. He’s quiet. She rolls from the bench, stabilizing herself on all fours. The nurse rubs between her shoulders. She says she’ll walk with her, that they’ll get the IV going right away. Come. She helps to steady her as she stands and guides her toward the hall of beds.
And then Rebecca starts to feel what she was waiting for. A growl of strength. Like she could reach inside herself and carry the sleeping baby out in the safe, warm palm of her hand. Like she is a mother.
63
Whitney
Jacob takes her hand and walks her to the front door. He bends to pick something up.
A paper airplane made from a piece of yellow notepad paper. Something is written in tidy cursive between the fold in the center.
How’d I do? Not bad for an old lady.
I’ll be waiting for you.
Yours, Mara
Whitney turns to Mara’s house, expecting her and Albert to be there as they always are in the evenings. But nobody. And the lights are all off.
She moves into the entryway and looks through the kitchen, into the backyard. The emptiness of the house is striking.
She makes her way closer to the back windows and sees the grass.
It happens all over again in her mind.
The thwack of his head.
She wants to run back to the car, to the driver’s seat, peel down Harlow Street, across the city, back to him. Blow every red light. Take the stairs to his floor three at a time so that her thighs catch fire.
Jacob takes her to the bottom step of the staircase and helps her sit. He puts their things one by one on the kitchen counter, the duffel bag, his watch, his keys. The paper airplane. He seems measured, methodical. He empties his pockets.
“Oh. Right. I forgot I brought these for you. To the hospital.” He opens his hand. Her wedding rings. She stares at them. “You weren’t wearing them Wednesday night.”
It isn’t a question. He doesn’t ask why. Her heart pounds. He pours them both a glass of water very slowly. He lifts one in her direction and they both watch her hand tremble as she reaches for it.
“Listen,” Jacob says. “I’ve been thinking. That thing Louisa told me on the phone yesterday. About how upset Xavi was on Wednesday after Chloe treated him like shit at school. Do you remember I told you about it this afternoon?”
Whitney remembers, although she doesn’t acknowledge it. Is this about Chloe? Blair had asked her at the hospital. And of course it had been, in a way; Chloe, the ideal daughter for the perfect mother. The measures none of them could live up to.
“I think we need to say something to the social workers,” he continues. “And to whoever else asks. That he was having a tough go socially at school, and then his best friend in the world basically said he should kill himself. In front of everyone.”
Whitney inhales sharply through her nose. Kill himself. Why is he saying those words aloud to her? She thinks of what Xavier wrote on his bedroom wall. Of the things she has said to him. Threatened him with.
“Jacob. Have you been upstairs yet, to his room? Since it happened?”
“I can’t go in there.”
She watches him refill his glass of water, the tap stream thin, nearly a drip, like every move they make right now must be careful. Everything they say.
“Why haven’t you asked me, Jacob?”
“Asked you what?”
“ASKED ME WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?” Her glass spins across the floor and the puddle of water grows between them. She stands, shaking her head, her face crumpling as she cries. “You haven’t asked because you don’t trust that I have nothing to do with it. You don’t believe I wouldn’t hurt him, despite how desperately you want to. You’re terrified of the truth, you always have been. So what does that leave us with? A freak accident in the middle of the night that nobody else will believe? A suicide we pin on a little girl, whose mother is a fucking martyr? Other women don’t like me enough, Jacob, they don’t think I’m worth protecting. I’ve been too selfish. I’ve missed too much. I’ve let them hear me scream at him!” She catches her breath, the shame of that September afternoon swamping her all over again. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “I’m not like them. Don’t you understand that?”
Jacob’s hands are on his hips. He doesn’t look away from the water seeping closer to his feet.
“Were you watching me in his hospital room earlier today? Were you testing me?”
His eyebrows furrow. He shakes his head. “What are you talking about?”
They stare at each other. Daring each other. What are each of them willing to live with?
He looks away first.
She knows the conversation is done, because the alternative, the truth about what she’s done, and what he really thinks of her, is too painful for them both.
“I’m going to run you a bath,” he says.
She waits until he’s at the top of the stairs before she lies across the bottom step.
She can get them out of this house, off this street, out of this city, and they can all start again. She’ll take a leave from the company, step aside for a while. She’ll find a way to live with herself after what she’s done to them all. For what she’s nearly destroyed.
But Jacob is right. She does need a plan. Because if Xavier wakes up, he might remember what happened Wednesday night. And she cannot lose them. She cannot let this life explode.
She sobs into her hands. She shouldn’t have left Xavier. She should have fought to stay by his side. What if, at this very moment, he can sense she’s gone? What if he finally opens his eyes and he’s alone? She needs him to see her there. She imagines the ring of strange faces hanging over him, his small hands ripping the catheter from his penis, yanking at the tape on his skin and the intravenous in his arm. Nurses running to restrain him. It’s visceral, the commotion of the room thumping in her now.
She hears Jacob turn off the faucet upstairs, and she wipes her nose on her sleeve. She’ll have the bath quickly and change her clothes. And then she’ll get back to Xavier. There is a tickle of nausea in her that comes from nowhere, and she thinks of how empty her stomach has been, of how she’d needed to feel deprived as she sat by his side. But the nausea rises again and it’s stronger this time.
It reminds her of something: her pregnancies. She lifts her thumb up under her shirt to touch her left nipple beside her racing heart, and it’s only then that she feels the unmistakable sensitivity. Time does not register for her anymore, and so there is no use in counting through the weeks, the months, that have passed since she has bled. The times she has let each of them come inside her. She knows. And the knowing stuns her.
She realizes then that Jacob’s phone is vibrating on the kitchen counter while she is trying to process what she has let happen. The buzz stops. The hospital, it could have been the hospital. They said they’d call if anything was urgent. And then their home phone rings from the kitchen, and the noise confuses her, it is nearly unrecognizable. Nobody ever calls them at home. Her legs barely carry her to the handset, but she gets there, and she answers.
It is Dr. Menlo.
She hears Jacob running down the stairs. She turns her back to him, she hurries through the kitchen to the backyard, clutching the receiver so he can’t take it away from her, so she can be the one to hear the words.
“Is he gone? He can’t be gone, I need him! Tell me now!”
Jacob is telling her to stop. He is shushing her. He is wrestling the phone from her hand, but she shoves him away as hard as she can, she presses it to her ear.
She falls to the grass.
Xavier is awake. And he is crying for his mother.
WEDNESDAY