The Night of the Fall
She slams her coffee onto his bedside table as she stares at the wall. There’s just enough light coming in from the hallway to read it.
I DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR SON ANYMORE
The words hold her throat. Her eyes well with tears too quickly for her to swallow everything down. She feels Xavier watching her, she feels his fear. He is waiting for her to explode. They both are.
But the anger isn’t there like it always is. She feels weak. And empty.
He has exhausted her for ten years with how much he has needed of her and wanted of her. And now he understands what she always has, it’s written there on his wall: she will never be enough for him.
“Get me your wallet,” she tells him.
He is still. She yanks open his top drawer where he keeps his small canvas wallet with the bit of money he’s collected from birthdays and the tooth fairy. She finds it under his socks and throws it at him in his bed. “You’re paying to have this wall repainted.”
Xavier slowly pulls back the covers and sits up. He takes out the paper bills and coins. Whitney holds out her hand. But he looks her in the eyes; he is looking for the flame. Waiting for the match to catch. He throws the money at her feet. He lies back down.
“You don’t want to be my son?” she says, pausing. Testing herself. “Then I’m leaving you. And I’m never coming back. You don’t have a mother anymore.”
She holds her breath, the words ringing in her ears. She doesn’t expect his chin to quiver like it does. He rolls away to face the window. She scoops the money from the floor and leaves his room.
Her chest pounds. She leans her back against the closed door. I’m leaving. I’m leaving. It’s the first time she’s said anything like that. An acknowledgment of the possibility that she could. That she has the choice.
But the only difference between her and a mother who leaves, if there’s much of a difference at all, is that Whitney already knows there’s no relief in having left. Not if her son is in the world, existing without her. He will never not be wrapped around her conscience, infiltrating her dreams, an endless feed of shame. Instead, she’s learned to be absent when she is near. She has the ability to stare through the children, see their lips move while she nods her head, she can be elsewhere and she can be there. She is an illusion. But she has never left.
She should tell him she didn’t mean it, she thinks, she should go back in to comfort him before he falls asleep. She is tired of failing him. The cruelest part of motherhood is that she has made him the way he is, every frustrating part of him. She is the source of everything that troubles him, she is the reason he’s lonely even when she’s there. She presses her hands to her cheeks. She doesn’t want to be crying.
But there’s a heavy thump against the door and then a shatter on the hardwood floor. The scent of coffee hits her nose, and then her heels begin to feel wet. And just like that, the anger wallops her again.
* * *
? ? ?
An hour and a half later, she wakes up with the pages of her presentation on her chest—she hadn’t meant to fall asleep. She has the sense of something strange, an electricity in her, as though her dream had carried a current. What had she been thinking of, in just a short nap? In fragments she can’t place with any sense of time or space, she is dragging him by the hair across the grass. He is screaming, begging for her to stop, but she is so consumed by the rush of this, by the sexual pulse she is feeling (Had she reached down to touch herself in her sleep? Had it felt that real?), that she cannot let go of him.
She wipes her hand across her eyes and wants it all to go away. The fight with Xavier. The horrible dream. She stares at the time glowing on her phone. It’s 10:45 p.m.
Still no response from Jacob in London. He’s read her last six messages.
She’s uneasy about his silence.
She should have canceled. To be safe. She still could.
But she runs the shower.
Afterward, she puts on a navy silk robe that falls just above her knees. She listens outside the kids’ rooms to make sure they’re all asleep.
She pours less than half a glass of wine.
Outside in the backyard it’s still damp and humid, and she puts the dry cushions on the patio furniture. She scrolls through news headlines on her phone and is about to take a first sip of the wine, when she feels hands touch her shoulders.
His breath hits her neck. He reaches his hand lower, to her breast, and he strums her nipple with his thumb. She likes when he doesn’t want to talk first, when he comes ready for her. She puts her head back against the chair and she doesn’t want to pause, but they have to go to the shed. That’s where they do this, every time, Whitney bent over with her elbows on the steel shelf after she’s swept away the plastic pails and the miniature dump trucks. She says to him quietly, let’s go to our spot, but he pushes her down again, he tells her he wants to fuck her outside tonight. In the expensive outdoor chair with the wide wicker arms.
“Someone might see us out here,” she whispers to him. And as she says the words, she gets wetter, and feels his finger slip inside her.
She arches, she wants him deeper. She slips off the robe. She wants to be on top of him now. She pulls his sweatshirt over his head, wiggles his pants from his legs. She sits on his cock, facing away from him, and he reaches around to feel everything he wants to touch. The clouds move fast and the moonlight comes back, and she wants to be seen by him. She orders him to kneel in front of her. She likes to feel on display, exposed, ripe. She gets lost in what happens next, she disappears into herself.
She doesn’t realize the sound she’s making until his hand is over her mouth, the reverberation of her pleasure cut like a wire. She can taste herself on the roughness of his palm. He pulls her head back and the moon feels bright against her lids.
“Mom, stop!”
Her eyes open.
And she sees Xavier at his bedroom window above. He’s watching them.
Ben shoves her off his erection and turns himself away from the house. Whitney scrambles on her hands and knees for her robe. The wine spills, the glass spins across the concrete.
“What do we do? Fuck.” Ben fumbles with his belt.
“Shut up,” Whitney hisses. She ties her robe. She cannot look up. She can feel Xavier there, unmoved from the open window. “You need to leave right now.”
She moves out of Xavier’s view, holds herself up against the glass door to the kitchen, and she tries to get more air into her lungs. He’ll tell Jacob, he’ll tell everyone. Their lives will fall apart over this. Why the hell was he awake?
“Mom!”
She wants to yell for him to shut up.
“BEN?” he calls. He is looking for them. She sees his shadow grow longer, he is leaning out the window.
She squeezes her eyes closed. She thinks of how she’d spread herself for Ben to see her in the moonlight. Of how ferociously she’d licked him, how she’d spread his cum over her like finger paint, the vulgar words she’d said. Of how long Xavier might have been watching.
“MOM!”
He sounds angry now, or panicked, she isn’t sure. She should rush upstairs to comfort him, to hold him and say she is so sorry. Convince him that what he saw isn’t what he thinks it is. But he’ll know. This will smolder between them for the rest of their lives. She’s been fighting against the mother she’s supposed to be since the day Xavier was born, and now she can see she was never going to win.
“MOM! BEN!”
She slips through the back door to hide from him, leans over the marble island, and tries to find a way out of the panic, but she cannot. Her mouth fills with saliva and she might be sick. She needs to think of what to do next. What to say.
“MOM, are you still out there? Did you already leave?”
He thinks she’s leaving him, like she said she would. He believed her. Why had she said that?
She turns around to face her reflection in the glass door.
And that’s when she hears it.
The faint thwack of his body against the ground.
She steps slowly to the glass door and slides it open with a trembling hand.
He looks dead.
There isn’t any space inside her for panic or fear or any sensation at all. She kneels at his head in the damp grass and feels underneath for blood on his scalp. But there is nothing. She cups his face in her hands, and she lifts the lids of his eyes with her shaking thumbs. See that I’m right here, she begs, reach up for me! But he doesn’t move. She pulls him in. She wants him back inside her again, the only place he was ever safe from her.