Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

She laughs. “No.”

  “I think I’ve been jumping from place to place thinking that I’m supposed to find the perfect life for myself, that it’s out there somewhere and I have to find it. And it has to be just so. You know?”

  “I know that you’ve always been searching for something, yeah,” Gabby says. “I always assumed you’d know it when you found it.”

  “I don’t know, I’m starting to think maybe you just pick a place and stay there. You pick a career and do it. You pick a person and commit to him.”

  “I think as long as you’re happy and you’re doing something good with your life, it really doesn’t matter whether you went out and found the perfect thing or you chose what you knew you could make work for you.”

  “Doesn’t it scare you?” I ask her. “To think that you might have gone in the wrong direction? And missed the life you were destined for?”

  Gabby thinks about it, taking my question seriously. “Not really,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because life’s short? And you just kind of have to get on with it.”

  “So should I move to London or not?” I ask her.

  She smiles. “Oh, I see where this is going. If you want to go to London, you should. But that’s as much as you’ll get from me. I don’t want you to go. I want you to stay here. It rains a lot there. You know, for what it’s worth.”

  I laugh at her. “OK, fair enough. We have a bigger problem than London anyway.”

  “We do?”

  “We’re lost,” I say.

  Gabby looks left and then right. She can see what I see. All the hallways look the same. We’re in no-man’s-land.

  “We’re not near the vending machines?” she asks.

  “Hell if I know,” I say. “I have no idea where we are.”

  “OK,” she says, taking hold of my chair. “Let’s try to get ourselves out of this mess.”

  Gabby insisted on going to work today. I tried to persuade her to stay home, not to put extra pressure on herself, but she said that the only way she could feel remotely normal was to go to work.

  Ethan called me twice yesterday, and I didn’t call him back. I texted him telling him that I couldn’t talk. I fell asleep last night knowing I’d have to face him today. I mean, if I keep avoiding him, he’ll know something is up.

  So I woke up this morning, resolved to work this out. I called Ethan and asked if he was free tonight. He told me to come by his place at around seven.

  Which means I have the rest of the day to call Michael. I want to have answers for Ethan’s questions when he asks. I want to have all of my ducks in a row. And this is a big duck.

  I take a shower. I take Charlemagne for a walk. I stare at my computer, reading the Internet for what feels like hours. When it’s six o’clock in New York, when I know Michael will be leaving work, I pick up my phone. I sit down on my bed and dial.

  It rings.

  And rings.

  And rings.

  And then it goes to voice mail.

  On some level, I’m relieved. Because I don’t want to have to have this conversation at all.

  “Hi, Michael. It’s Hannah. Call me back when you have a minute. We have something we need to talk about. OK, ’bye.”

  I throw myself backward onto the bed. My pulse is racing. I start thinking of what I’ll do if he never calls me back. I start imagining that maybe he will make this decision for me. Maybe I’ll call him a few times, leave a few messages, and he will just never call back. And I will know that I tried to do the right thing but was unable to. I could live with that.

  My phone rings.

  “Hannah,” he says, the moment I say hello. His voice is stern, almost angry. “We’re done. You said so yourself. You can’t call me. I finally have things back on track with my family. I’m not going to mess that up again.”

  “Michael,” I say to him. “Just hold on one minute, OK?” Now I’m pissed.

  “OK,” he says.

  “I’m pregnant,” I tell him finally.

  He’s so quiet I think the line has gone dead. “I’ll call you back in three minutes,” he says, and then he hangs up.

  I pace around the room. I feel a flutter in my stomach.

  The phone rings again.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “OK, so what do we do?” he asks. I can hear that he’s in a closed space. His voice is echoing. He sounds as if he’s in a bathroom.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “I can’t leave my wife and children,” he says adamantly.

  “I’m not asking you to,” I tell him. I hate this conversation. I have been working to put this behind me, and now I’m right back in the middle of it.

  “So what are you saying?” he asks.

  “I’m not saying anything except that I thought you should know. It seemed wrong not to tell you.”

  “I can’t do this,” he says. “I made a mistake, being with you. I can see that now. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have done it. It was a mistake. Jill knows what I did. We’re finally in a good place. I love my children. I cannot let anything ruin that.”

  “I’m not asking anything of you,” I say to him. “That’s the truth. I just thought you should know.”

  “OK,” he says. He is quiet for a moment and then, timidly, asks me what he’s probably wanted to ask me since I brought this up. “Have you considered . . . not having the baby?”

  “If you’re going to ask me to have an abortion, Michael, you should at least say the word.” Such a coward.

  “Have you considered having an abortion?” he asks.

  “No,” I tell him. “I’m not considering having an abortion.”

  “What about adoption?”

  “Why do you care?” I ask him. “I’m having the baby. I’m not asking for your money or your attention or support, OK?”

  “OK,” he says. “But I don’t know how I feel about having a baby out there.”

  These are the sorts of things that people should really be thinking about before they have sex, but I’m one to talk.

  “Well, then, step up to the plate and deal with it or don’t,” I say. “That’s your business.”

  “I suppose it’s no different from donating sperm,” he says. He’s not talking to me. He’s talking to himself. But you know what? I don’t want him to help me raise this baby, and he doesn’t want to help me. Clearly, he’s just looking to absolve himself of any guilt or responsibility, and if that’s what it takes to make this simple, then I will help him do just that.

  “Think of it like that,” I tell him. “You donated sperm.”

  “Right,” he says. “That’s all it is.”

  I want to tell him he’s a complete ass. But I don’t. I let him tell himself whatever he needs to. I know that this baby could ruin his family. I don’t want that. That’s the truth. I don’t want to break up a family, regardless of who is right and wrong. And I don’t need him. And I’m not sure that my child is better off having him around. He hasn’t shown himself to be a very good man.

  “OK,” I say.

  “OK,” he says.

  Just as I am about to get off the phone, I say one thing, for my unborn kid. “If you ever change your mind, you can call me. If you want to meet the baby. And I hope that if he or she wants to meet you one day, you’ll be open to it.”

  “No,” he says.

  His answer jars me. “What?”

  “No,” he says again. “You are making the choice to have this baby. I do not want you to have it. If you have it, you have to deal with the child not having a father. I’m not going to live my life knowing that any day a kid could show up.”

  “Classy” is all I say.

  “I have to protect what I already have,” he says. “Are we done here?”

  “Yeah,” I tell him. “We’re done.”

  We are lost in the maternity ward, and we can’t seem to find our way out. First, we were stuck in the delivery department. Now w
e’re outside the nursery.

  The last thing I want to do right now is look at beautiful, precious babies. But I notice Gabby is no longer behind me. She’s staring.

  “We are going to start trying soon,” she says. She’s not even looking at me. She’s looking at the babies.

  “What are we going to start trying to do?”

  She looks at me as if I’m so stupid I’m embarrassing her. “No, Mark and I. We’re going to try to have a baby.”

  “You want to have a kid?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I was going to ask what you thought when you got here, but I didn’t get a chance before the accident, and . . . and then, when you woke up . . .”

  “Right,” I say. I don’t want her to say it out loud. The inference is enough. “But you think you’re ready? That’s so exciting!” My own ambivalence about a baby doesn’t, for a minute, take away from the joy of her having one. “A little half Gabby, half Mark,” I add. “Wow!”

  “I know. It’s a really exciting thought. Super scary, too. But really exciting.”

  “So you’ll be . . . doing the ol’ . . . actually, is there even a popular euphemism for trying to have a baby?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But yes, we’ll be doing the ol’ . . .”

  “Wow,” I say again. “I just can’t believe that we are old enough to the point where you’re going to actually try to get pregnant.”

  “I know,” she says. “You spend your whole life learning how not to get pregnant, and then, one day, you suddenly have to reverse all of that training.”

  “Well, this is awesome,” I say. “You and Mark are so good together. You’re going to be great parents.”

  “Thank you,” she says, and squeezes my shoulder.

  A nurse comes up to us. “Which one are you visiting?” she asks.

  “Oh, no,” Gabby says. “Sorry. We are just lost. Can you point us back to general surgery?”

  “Down the hall, take your first right, then your second left. You’ll see a vending machine. Follow that hall to the end, take a left . . .” The directions go on and on. Clearly, I took us much farther away than I meant to.

  “OK,” Gabby says. “Thank you.” She turns to me. “Let’s go.”

  We go past what looks like a neonatal unit, maybe intensive care. And then we go through double doors and find ourselves in the children’s ward.

  “I don’t think this is the right way,” I say.

  “She said there was a left up here somewhere . . .”

  I look over at the nurses and then peek through the windows as we move farther down the hall. It’s mostly toddlers and elementary-school-age kids. I see a few teenagers. Almost all of them are in hospital beds, hooked up to machines, as I have been. A lot of them wear stockings or caps. It occurs to me that they are covering their bald heads.

  “OK,” Gabby says. “You’re right. We’re lost.”

  I pull over to the side of the hallway.

  “I’m just going to go ask a nurse for a map,” Gabby says.

  “OK,” I say.

  From my vantage point, I can see into one room with two kids in it. The kids are talking. Two preteen girls in separate beds. A doctor is standing to the side, talking to a set of parents. Both parents look confused and distraught. The doctor leaves. As he does, I can see there is a nurse standing with them. The nurse starts to leave, too, and the parents catch her at the door. They are close enough to me now that I can make out the conversation.

  “What did all of that mean?” the mom says.

  The nurse speaks gently. “As Dr. Mackenzie said, it’s a bone cancer mostly found in adolescents. It can sometimes occur in families. It’s rare, but possible, that multiple siblings may develop it. That’s why he wants to see your younger daughter, too. Just to be sure.”

  The mom starts crying. The dad rubs her back. “OK, thank you,” the dad says.

  The nurse doesn’t leave then, though. She stays. “Sophia is a fighter. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. And Dr. Mackenzie is an exceptional pediatric oncologist. I mean, exceptional. If it was my daughter here—my daughter is eight, her name is Madeleine—I’m telling you, I’d be doing exactly what you are doing. I’d put her in the hands of Dr. Mackenzie.”

  “Thank you,” the mom says. “Thanks.”

  The nurse nods. “If you need anything, if you have any questions, just page me. I’ll answer any I can, and if I can’t”—she looks them in the eye, assuring them—“I will get Dr. Mackenzie to explain. In simple terms, if he can manage it,” she says, making a joke.

  The dad smiles. The mom, I notice, has stopped crying.

  They end their conversation just as Gabby comes back with the map. Both Gabby and the nurse can now tell I’ve been eavesdropping. I quickly look away, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve been caught.

  Gabby pushes my chair down the hallway.

  “I can do it,” I say. I take the wheels. When we are far enough away, I ask her, “Was that the kids’ cancer ward?”

  “It says ‘Pediatric Oncology Department,’ ” she says. “So yeah.”

  I don’t say anything for a moment, and neither does she.

  “We’re actually not that far from your room,” she says. “I just missed a left.”

  “Being a nurse . . . seems like a hard job. But fulfilling,” I say.

  “My dad has always said it’s the nurses who provide the care,” she says. “I always thought it was kind of a cheesy double entendre, but his point always made sense.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, he could just say, ‘Nurses might not be the ones who cure you, but they certainly make you feel better.’ ”

  Gabby laughs. “Tell him that, will you? Maybe he’ll use that one from now on.”

  I don’t know what you’re supposed to wear to tell your new boyfriend, who used to be your ex-boyfriend and is the man you are pretty much convinced is the love of your life, that you are having a baby with another man.

  I decide on jeans and a gray sweater.

  I brush my hair so many times it develops a shine to it, and then I put it up in my very best high bun.

  Before I head out the door, I offer, one more time, to stay home with Charlemagne and Gabby.

  “Oh, no,” Gabby says. “Absolutely not.”

  “But I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she says. “I mean, you know, I won’t be fine. That was a lie. But I’ll be fine in the sense that I’m not going to burn the house down or anything. I’ll be just as sad when you get back. If it’s any consolation.”

  “It is not,” I say. I take my hand off the doorknob. I really don’t feel good about leaving her by herself. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “Who’s alone?” she says. “I have Charlemagne. The two of us are going to watch television until our eyes fall out of our heads and then go to sleep. We might take an Ambien.” She corrects herself. “I mean, I might take an Ambien.” She continues to look at me. “Just to be clear,” she says, “I’m not going to drug the dog.”

  “I’m staying,” I say.

  “You’re going. Don’t use me as an excuse to avoid your own problems. You and I have a lot of adjusting to do, and it’s better for everyone if we know where things stand with Ethan as soon as possible.”

  She’s right. Of course she’s right.

  “The new you tackles life head-on, remember?” she says. “The new you doesn’t run from her problems.”

  “Ugh,” I say, opening the front door. “I hate the new me.”

  Gabby smiles as I head out. It is the first smile I’ve seen in two days. “I’m proud of the new you,” she says.

  I thank her and walk out the door.

  It’s ten to seven when I park my car outside Ethan’s apartment. It took me three times around the block before I found a spot, but then I saw a car pulling out of a space right in front of his place. I was both frustrated and thrilled at the experience. I suddenly wonder what driving in Los Ang
eles will be like with a child. Will it take me a half hour getting in and out of the car because I’ll never truly figure out how to hook up a car seat? Will I have to circle the block over and over accompanied by the soothing sounds of a baby crying? Oh, God. I can’t do this.

  I have to do this.

  What do you do when you have to do something you can’t do?

  I get out of the car and shut my door. I breathe in sharply, and then I breathe out slowly.

  Life is just a series of breaths in and out. All I really have to do in this world is breathe in and then breathe out, in succession, until I die. I can do that. I can breathe in and out.

  I knock on Ethan’s door, and he opens it wearing an apron that says “Mr. Good Lookin’ Is Cookin.” It has a picture of a stick-figure man with a spatula.

  I can’t do this.

  “Hey, you,” he says. He grabs me in his arms, tightly, and I wonder if it’s too tight for the baby. I don’t know the first thing about being pregnant! I don’t know anything about being a mom. What am I doing? This is all going to end in a terrible disaster. I am Hurricane Hannah, and everything I touch turns to shit.

  “I missed you,” he tells me. “Isn’t that ridiculous? I can’t go one day not seeing you, after years without you.”

  I smile at him. “I know what you mean.”

  He leads me into the kitchen. “I know we mentioned going out to dinner, but I decided to make you a proper meal.”

  “Oh, wow,” I say, trying to muster up enthusiasm, but I’m not sure I’m doing a good job.

  “I Googled some recipes at work and just got home from the store a few minutes before you got here. What you’re looking at is chicken sopa seca.” He pronounces it with an affected Spanish accent. He is silly and sweet and sincere, and I decide, right this second, that I’m not going to tell him tonight.

  I love him. And I think I have always loved him. And I’m going to lose him. And just for tonight, I want to experience how it feels to be his, to be loved by him, to believe that this is the beginning of something.

  Because I’m pretty sure it’s the end.

  Just like that, I become the version of myself that I was just two days ago. I am Hannah Martin, a woman who has no idea that she is pregnant, no idea that she is about to lose the one thing she might have wanted her entire adult life.