Chapter 2
Nine Months Before Delivery
It is their first night out since the horror-movie nightmare in the bathroom, red-brown spatter on the matte porcelain floor tiles, Rebecca curled up against the bathtub, sobbing, Mark at a loss, Maddy in the doorway, stimming, the whole house, their whole life, wildly dysregulated.
Rebecca is wearing a little black dress and heels, and it’s been so long since she’s applied makeup that she can feel it on her face. Putting herself together to go out felt mournful and exhausting, but this is what she needs to do as a woman and a wife and a mother and a person who is still alive.
They are at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge for cocktails, and Rebecca has already made the requisite joke about Mark’s pants matching the environment, and they’ve ordered the fancy-pants cocktails they can suddenly afford, and the lull has now arrived, the lonely black space of their loss in the midst of all the laughter and tinkling of silverware and piano keys.
At booths and tables all around them, confidence is on peacock display.
Dagger slits in sequined dresses. Hollywood agent types in slick suits, mouths rat-a-tatting like machine guns.
Well-padded European men luxuriating in velour casual wear, slurping oysters with second wives who are indiscernible from high-class call girls.
It comes on first as heat beneath the bridge of her nose and a quiver in her throat, and then Rebecca is crying quietly. She dabs at her eyes with the black linen napkin the waiter had produced for her to preempt unseemly white lint against her dress.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”
Mark rubs the back of her neck. His eyes are pouched from lack of sleep. He looks far wearier than his forty-two years, and she feels that this, like everything else, is her fault.
She lowers her face as their drinks arrive in a flourish to sit untouched on the cocktail table before them.
Mark lowers his hand, and they sit side by side, unsure what to say. The whole outing feels at once carnival-foolish. They marinate for a minute in regret over their choice of environment, and then he says, “Maybe we should get the check?”
“Okay, yeah,” Rebecca says, fumbling out her phone. “And I just want to check on Maddy.”
Maddy is with her favorite babysitter, and she doesn’t need checking, but Rebecca cannot help it.
Once you realize that you live in a world where a baby can die inside your body, everything feels unsafe.
When their little family of three was on its way to becoming a quartet, the future seemed unbounded, safe, full of hope.
Now tomorrow feels thwarted and every tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow after that.
“She’s fine,” Mark says. “It’s good for her to go an evening without touching base.”
Rebecca cradles her phone, the number of Maddy’s emergency cell already called up on the screen, tempting.
She knows that the urge to call is for herself, not for Maddy.
She knows, too, that it won’t allay her anxiety; it’ll just ingrain the habit of checking-checking-checking.
And that she is transferring her grief over the miscarriage into concern about her living child, which is unfair to Maddy and stultifying for herself.
If only understanding something could alleviate the underlying compulsion.
But no, Rebecca is aware and incapable at the same time.
Is she becoming the Devouring Mother she studied in cultural anthropology in college, so desperate to shield her vulnerable child that she’d rather swallow her up than sacrifice her to an uncaring world?
She goes for a half measure, calling up the teddy bear nanny-cam app.
There Maddy is, frog-sitting on the foam tiles in her bedroom, wearing her noise-canceling headphones and finishing her Lego giraffe.
Babysitter June lies on Maddy’s bed with her legs up the wall and her head dangling backward off the mattress, watching her phone upside down. All quiet on the home front.
Rebecca slips her phone back inside the ridiculous pink wristlet that looked so fetching displayed on the underlit boutique shelf.
Now it seems like a prop. Her stomach is a swirling black hole, eating itself from the inside.
She thinks of Maddy’s wide eyes, the way she cries after school when Sydney and the other Mean Girls play their Mean Girl games, how she never understands why she doesn’t fit in, why kids revel in petty cruelties, why psychosomatic stomachaches land her with the school nurse three days of the week.
“What if . . . ?”
“What, Beccs?”
“What if I’d watched her food better? All organic or—I don’t know—only farm to table?
There’s forever chemicals in everything—bottled water, plastic wrap.
Hormones in the meat and chicken, milk and eggs.
I could’ve done homemade baby food, spread out her vaccinations.
It’s like everything’s trying to poison us, our kids.
Big food, big tech, Big Pharma. Her meds—she’s on so many meds, and meds for the side effects of her meds, and she’s just a baby still, just seven, and maybe we—I don’t know, I love her more than anything, and she’s perfect, but what if . . .”
Mark’s head inclines slightly in that graceful manner he has. “No,” he says gently. “Maddy is Maddy. And thank God for that. We couldn’t have done anything different. It’s not your fault.”
She swipes at her eyes angrily. Her mascara is no-run, a prophylactic measure she’d been wise to take.
She knows she is spiraling, that she is not in real time, that grief is speaking through her, using her like a puppet.
“I could’ve eaten better. And the beach, Santa Monica, the water quality . . .”
“We have to live in the world, Beccs. We live in the real world.”
“We could’ve moved to the country or something, less toxins, pollutants.” She is talking nonsense, but she cannot stop. Her hand has slid down to her stomach, and when she speaks again, her voice comes as a whisper: “What if I did something to cause this too?”
“Oh, Beccs. Oh, no, honey. No, no, no.”
He leans to her, and she nuzzles into his neck.
He smells like sage and cedar—the soap she bought for him on a day trip to Ojai—and for the thousandth time this week she thanks the universe for delivering him to her.
Though they have plenty of blessings, she wants nothing more than a chance to rest, a break from her rabbiting mind. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“But I’m all cry-y like I get. And we’re supposed to be on a date.”
“We’re grieving, Beccs. This is what this date looks like.” He reaches for his cocktail, a penicillin. The waft of peat reaching her nose smells like Band-Aids. He offers his glass in a toast. “One sip,” he says, “and we’ll call it a night.”
Her gin and tonic fills a ridiculous balloon glass, augmented with sprigs and peppercorn. It looks like a witch’s cauldron. They clink their glasses, sip, set them down.
Two tables over, a woman brays laughter, throwing back her head, vixen-red tresses parting to reveal a milk white throat. Her manicured fingertips trawl along her décolletage, drawing focus even in Rebecca’s peripheral vision.
Rebecca feels frumpy and ordinary, a child playing dress-up. She cannot wait to leave here, to be home in bed in her jammies, lying on Mark’s chest.
He gestures for the check.
“Mark?”
Rebecca’s stomach clutches.
The woman has called over to their table.
That voice, velvety and familiar.
“Mark and Rebecca?”
The squeak of chairs shoving out, a couple rising. Rebecca feels that heat again beneath her face and for a terrible instant thinks she might just break down and start sobbing.
Alexa de Grasse. And her husband, Derek, Mark’s big boss.
At the holiday party last year at Soho House, Alexa drank too many cosmos and tried to make out with Mark on the rooftop garden in front of half the marketing department.
Though Derek brushed the incident off, covering with aggressive affability, he has never forgiven Mark for it.
Given that Derek is the founder, CEO, and self-proclaimed visionary, while Mark is one of three chief product officers clinging to the C-suite by their fingernails, that adds an undertow to an already-strained dynamic.
And now here they are, the de Grasses, pulling up chairs to their table. The pianist has taken a break from the sleek Steinway grand, and the semisilence feels intrusive, an acoustic spotlight glare fixed on their table.
“Well, well, well,” Derek says, grinning big as he sinks into his seat. “Look who the cat dragged in.”
Alexa descends into a chair with a balletic swing of hips, fold of legs, tuck of hem beneath the thighs. Her champagne flute, narrow like her waist, effervesces. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes a touch wild. It is not her first glass.
“Surprising to see you two here,” Alexa says in something of a purr. Her bitter perfume is less an aroma than a flick to the nose.
“Oh?” Mark says, “Why’s that?”
“It’s not a bad thing. Just, you two always struck me more as homebody types.”
“Not far off the mark,” Rebecca says, leaning in. “In fact, we were just—”
“C’mon. It’s Saturday night, and the mood is right.” Derek signals the waiter, arm shooting up, fingers just shy of a snap.
Saturday night, sure, but Sunday is Rebecca’s chore day—laundry and grocery shopping, making lunch, cleaning Bao-Bao’s cage, coordinating pickups and drop-offs and appointments, preparing for the week.
She wishes that she could clone herself, that there were two of her to perform the daily tasks that suck away all her hours, tasks that shouldn’t feel nearly as draining as they do.
Then she could have time to—time to what?
Read on the sofa? Go to a matinee? Finally call her estranged mother?
Something, anything to reclaim that full-of-life college girl she seems to have lost somewhere along the way.