I put down my glass of water and pop the cheesecake into my mouth. I scoot over to the corner of the room, where I see Carl, Tina, Gabby, and Jesse talking.
“Carl, he seems great. Henry, I mean. You should hire him. For sure. Gabby, I love you. Happy birthday. If you’ll excuse Ethan and me, we have to go home.”
Gabby and Tina give me a hug. Ethan shakes hands with Carl and Jesse.
Ethan and I walk out the front door. It started to rain sometime during the evening. I’m chilly, and Ethan takes off his jacket and puts it around my shoulders.
“We could stay up all night, you know,” he says, teasing me. “Or we could have sex once, turn on the TV, and fall asleep peacefully.”
I laugh. “That last one sounds great,” I say.
I get into the car, and I am overwhelmed by gratitude.
If there are an infinite number of universes, I don’t know how I got so lucky as to end up in this one.
Maybe there are other lives for me out there, but I can’t imagine being as happy in any of them as I am right now, today.
I have to think that while I may exist in other universes, none is as good as this.
Gabby hates surprises, but I couldn’t persuade Carl and Tina to go about this any other way, and I wasn’t going to be the one who told her. So here we are, at her thirty-second birthday, me, Henry, and fifty of her closest friends, huddled in her parents’ living room, completely in the dark.
We hear her parents’ car pull into the driveway. I give one last warning to everyone to be quiet when I see their headlights go out.
I hear them walk up to the door.
I see the door open.
I turn on the lights, and the entire room of us yells, “Surprise!” just as we are supposed to.
Gabby’s eyes go wide. She’s genuinely terrified for a moment. And then she turns immediately into Jesse’s chest. He laughs, holding her.
“Happy birthday!” he says, and then he spins her back around to look at all of us.
The living room is full of beautiful decorations. Champagne flutes and Moët. A dessert bar. Henry and I went all over Los Angeles today to find linen tablecloths to match the décor. Henry loves Gabby. Would do anything for her.
Gabby makes her way to me first. “Are you mad?” I ask as she hugs me. “I toyed with the idea of telling you.”
She pulls away from me. You can tell from her face that she’s still startled. “No,” she says. “I’m not mad. Overwhelmed, maybe. I’m sort of shocked that between you and Jesse, no one let it slip.”
“We made a pact,” I tell her. “Not to say anything. It was really important to your parents.”
“They did all this?” she says.
I nod. “All their idea.”
“Happy birthday,” Henry says. He hands her a glass of champagne. She takes it and gives him a hug.
“And I suppose you won’t be having any?” Gabby says, looking at my belly. I’m seven months pregnant. It’s a girl. We’re naming her Isabella, after Henry’s sister. Gabby doesn’t know that we’ve talked about naming her Isabella Gabrielle, after her.
“Nope,” I say. “But I’ll be drinking with you in spirit. Have you seen the Flints?” I ask her. “They are . . .” I look around until I find them in the back, waving at her and talking to Jesse. She’s already moving toward them.
I watch her as she hugs her soon-to-be in-laws. They love her—that much is clear.
“Well done, kiddo,” Carl says to me. “I wasn’t sure you’d be able to pull it off.”
“I’m not great with keeping secrets,” I tell him. “But I figured this was an important one. So . . . ta-da!” I lift my hands up in the air, as if I’ve performed a magic trick.
Carl looks at my hands and then at Henry. “You let your wife attend parties without a wedding ring, son?”
Henry laughs. “You can get into that with her,” he says. “I don’t tell her what to do.”
“I had to take it off,” I tell Carl, defending myself. “My fingers are the size of sausages.”
Carl shakes his head, teasing me. “Not even married a year, and already she’s coming up with reasons to take off the ring. Tsk-tsk.”
“You’re right. I’m liable to run off at any minute,” I say, pointing down to my belly.
Carl laughs, and Tina fights her way through the crowd to talk to us.
“Look at you. About to be a mother and a nurse,” she says, by way of hello.
I will finish my nursing degree in a year or so, but that seems like a lifetime from now. All I can think about these days is the baby I’m about to have.
“I’m starting to get nervous about juggling it all when the baby comes,” I tell her. “I mean, I know I can do it. Plenty of women do it. I think I’m just anxious about everything changing.”
“You’re gonna be great,” Tina says, smiling at me.
“How many times do I have to ask you to come back and work for me once you’re done with school?” Carl says.
“I don’t want you to feel like you have to offer me a nursing spot,” I say. “I want to earn it on my own.”
“I’d give you the shirt off my back if you needed it,” Carl says. “But that’s not why I’m offering you a job.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. I think you’re going to be a great nurse, and I want you at my office.”
“Plus, this little baby girl is the closest thing we’ve got to a grandchild,” Tina says. “I’d like to keep you as close by as possible.”
“Everybody wants access to the kid,” Henry says.
“When you two have been married as long as we have,” Carl tells him, “and your children are grown, and you’re bored as hell, you’re gonna want access to grandkids, too. Trust me. Do you know how much television I watch? It’s shameful. I need a distraction.”
Gabby and Jesse come back and join us.
“What are we talking about?” Gabby asks.
“Grandchildren,” Tina says, looking at Gabby and Jesse with intent.
“Oh, no!” Jesse jokes. “Gabby, turn away slowly, and maybe they won’t see us.”
Gabby mimes trying to leave, but Tina pulls her and Jesse back.
“Hannah and Henry seem to have found a way to have a baby,” Tina says. “And I’m not getting any younger. It wouldn’t kill you to try.”
“Tina,” Jesse says, “I promise you, the minute your daughter and I are happily wed, it will be the first thing on my To Do list.”
Ethan and Ella join us. They must have just come through the door.
“Sorry we’re late,” Ella says. “I was stuck at work, and you know how it is! Happy birthday!” she says to Gabby. She hugs her and then turns to Ethan, who hugs Gabby and smiles. He shakes Henry’s hand, gives Jesse a pat on the back, and then hugs me.
“We did bring a present,” Ethan says. “To make up for it.”
It’s a box of Godiva chocolates. The moment I see them, I want to shove them all into my mouth. I figure I can take them from Gabby later if I really want them. Or get some of my own. I know that if I say I want them, Henry will stop on the way home. He always gets me any food I want, at any time of night. He says that’s his job. He says it’s the least he can do. “You carry the baby. I’ll get the food.” His morning breath is terrible, and he’s cheap as hell, but I feel like the luckiest woman in the entire world.
The party goes on, all of us hopping from person to person, talking and sharing stories about Gabby. Just when the party seems to hit its peak, someone asks Jesse to tell the story of how he and Gabby met. Slowly but surely, everyone quiets down to listen in. Jesse stands at the base of the fireplace so he can be seen and heard by everyone. I asked him his height once. He’s five-foot-six.
“First day of geometry class. Tenth grade. I look to the front of the classroom and see the prettiest girl I’ve ever laid eyes on.” Jesse has told this story about nine thousand times, and each time starts the same. “Although Gabby would say that’s not the
first thing that I should have noticed about her.” He looks over at her, and she smiles. “But you’d have to notice it about her. She was gorgeous. And, to my delight, she was also short. So I figured I had a shot.”
The whole crowd laughs.
“But I didn’t ask her out, because I was a chicken. Three weeks into school, another girl asked me out, and I said yes, because when you’re fifteen and a girl asks you out, you say yes.”
The crowd laughs again.
“Jessica and I dated all through high school, and we broke up senior year. So what do I do? I go right out and find Gabby and ask her out. And we have this great date. And then the next morning, my ex-girlfriend calls me, and she wants to get back together. And . . . long story short, I married Jessica. Anyway, eventually, Jessica and I split up. We had to split up. We weren’t right for each other. And once I could see that, there was no turning back. So we divorced. And then, a few years later, I get a Facebook request from Gabby Hudson. The Gabby Hudson.”
That’s my favorite part. The part where he calls her the Gabby Hudson.
“And I get way ahead of myself, and I start Facebook-stalking her and wondering if she’s single and if she’d ever date me, and yada yada yada, the next thing I know, we’re at lunch on the beach in Santa Monica. She refused to let me pay and said going dutch was the most appropriate thing to do. And we started walking back to my car, and I didn’t tell her this then, because I knew it would freak her out, but I felt like I finally understood why people get married again. You get your heart broken, you fail at marriage, you’re not sure you’ll ever be up for it a second time. And then it all clicks into place, and you see that you failed the first time because you picked the wrong person. And now the right person is standing in front of you. So I waited the appropriate amount of months of dating, and then I told her how I felt. And she said she felt the same way. And now we’re getting married. And I’m the luckiest guy alive.”
That’s usually the end of his story, but he keeps talking.
“I was reading a book about the cosmos recently,” he says, and then he looks around and goes, “Hold on, trust me, this relates.”
The crowd laughs again.
“And I was reading about different theories about the universe. I was really taken with this theory that some very credible physicists believe in called the multiverse theory. And it states that everything that is possible happens. That means that when you flip a quarter, it comes down heads and tails. Not heads or tails. Every time you flip a coin and it comes up heads, you are merely in the universe where the coin came up heads. There is another version of you out there, created the second the quarter flipped, who saw it come up tails. Every second of every day, the world is splitting further and further into an infinite number of parallel universes, where everything that could happen is happening. There are millions, trillions, or quadrillions, I guess, of different versions of ourselves living out the consequences of our choices. What I’m getting at here is that I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices and they led me somewhere else, led me to someone else.” He looks at Gabby. “And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn’t end up with you.”
Maybe it’s the moment. Maybe it’s the hormones. But I start crying. Gabby catches my eye, and I can see that she’s teary, too. Jesse is done speaking, but no one can turn away. Everyone is staring at Gabby. I know I should do something, but I’m not sure what to do.
“Way to make the rest of us look bad,” Henry says loudly.
The crowd laughs and disperses. I look at him, and he wipes the tears from my eyes.
“I love you as much as that show-off loves her,” he jokes. “I just didn’t watch the same Nova special.”
“I know,” I tell him. “I know.” Because I do know. “Do you think that theory is true?” I ask Henry. “Do you think there are versions of us out there who never met?”
“Maybe one where you didn’t get into an accident and you ended up married to a cinnamon roll chef?” he says.
“Everything that is possible happens . . .”
“Do you wish you were married to a cinnamon roll chef?”
“I certainly wish you were better at making cinnamon rolls,” I say. “But no, this universe is OK with me.”
“You sure? We can try to defy space and time and go find another for you.”
“No,” I tell him. “I like this one. I like you. And her.” I point to my belly. “And Gabby. And Jesse. And Carl and Tina. I’m excited to get my nursing degree. And I’m OK with the fact that sometimes when it rains, my hip aches. Yeah,” I say. “I think I’ll stay.”
“OK,” he says, kissing me. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
He slips off to the bathroom, and I start to head toward Gabby and Tina, standing by the mini-cheesecakes. I’m mostly interested in the mini-cheesecakes, but I am stopped in place behind a linebacker of a man. I ask him to move, but he doesn’t hear me. I am about to give up.
“Sir,” I hear from behind me. “Can she get through?”
The linebacker and I both turn around to see Ethan standing there.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the linebacker says. “I’m a glutton for cheesecake. When I’m in front of it, everything around me is a blur.”
I laugh and fumble through. Ethan steps up with me.
“Six months now?” he asks. He takes a piece of banana cream pie.
“Seven,” I say, taking a piece of cheesecake.
“What is this? No cinnamon rolls for you?”
“It is a nighttime party,” I say. “So it’s OK. But I’ve been eating them pretty much nonstop lately. Henry says you can smell cinnamon in my hair.”
Ethan laughs. “I believe it. I’m sure I told you that after we broke up, I couldn’t smell a cinnamon roll without getting depressed.”
“You never told me that,” I say, laughing. “How long did that last? Until Thanksgiving break?”
He laughs back. “Fair enough,” he says. “It is true, though.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have broken up with me, then,” I tell him.
He guffaws. “You broke up with me, OK?”
“Oh, please,” I say. “Go sell it to somebody else.”
“Well,” he says, “whoever broke up with whom, my heart was broken.”
“Ditto,” I tell him.
“Yeah?” he says, as if this information makes him feel better.
“Are you kidding? I didn’t sleep with anyone else for years afterward, because I kept thinking of you. I bet you can’t say the same.”
He laughs. “No,” he says. “I definitely slept with people. But that’s . . . that didn’t mean anything.”
“I always thought we’d get back together at some point,” I say. “It’s funny how the teenage brain works.”
He shrugs, eating his pie. “Not that funny. I thought it, too. From time to time. I almost . . .”
“What?” I ask.
“When you came back to L.A., right before the accident, I thought maybe . . .”
I think back to that time. That was a rough period. I kept a happy face through all of it. I tried really hard to keep it together, but looking at it now, I think of how heartbreaking it all was. I think of the baby I lost, and I wonder if . . . I wonder if I had to lose that baby to get to where I am now. I wonder if I had to lose that baby to have this one.
“I think I thought maybe, too,” I say.
“Just didn’t work out that way, I guess,” he says.
“I guess not.” I see Henry coming back from the bathroom. I see him stop and talk to Carl. He loves Carl. If we could have a bronze bust of Carl in our living room, he’d do it. “Who knows?” I tell Ethan. “If Jesse’s theory is right, about the universes, maybe there’s one out there where we figured out a way to make it work.”
Ethan laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “Maybe.” He lifts his pie as if to make a toast. I lift my cheesecake to meet it. “Maybe in another life,” he says.<
br />
I smile at him and leave him by the dessert table.
I miss my husband.
He’s now standing in a circle with Gabby, Jesse, Carl, and Tina. I join them.
“I see you found the cheesecake,” Gabby says.
“The pregnant lady always finds the cheesecake,” I tell her. “You know that.”
Henry moves closer to me as he continues to talk to Carl. He puts his arm around me. He gives me a squeeze. He opens his mouth wide, and I smile at him. I feed him the cheesecake.
It’s on his face.
“I love you,” he says with his mouth full. I can barely make out the words individually. But there’s no doubt what he said. He kisses me on the forehead and grazes his hand against my belly.
One Saturday night in my late twenties, I was hit by a car, and that accident led me to marry my night nurse. If that’s not fate, I don’t know what is.
So I have to think that while I may exist in other universes, none of them are as sweet as this.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am fortunate enough to have more than one Gabby in my life, and for that I am grateful every day. Thank you to Erin Fricker, Julia Furlan, Sara Arrington, and Tamara Hunter for being such phenomenal people and close friends. This book is dedicated to you, because your friendship has kept me going at times when I wasn’t sure I could take another step. And to Bea Arthur, Andy Bauch, Katie Brydon, Emily Giorgio, Jesse Hill, Phillip Jordan, Tim Paulik, Ryan Powers, Jess Reynoso, Ashley and Colin Rodger, Jason Stamey, Kate Sullivan, and all the rest of my incredibly supportive and wonderful friends, I am so lucky to know all of you and have you in my life.
To Carly Watters, the world’s most wonderful agent, I often thank the fates (or mere chance) for bringing me to your blog back in 2012 and driving me to query you. That I got so lucky as to be repped by someone I like so much is either the very definition of destiny or a wonderful coincidence. I am equally thankful to Brad Mendelsohn and Rich Green. Thank you, Brad, for understanding me and getting my work the way you do, and Rich, I’m so excited about what we’ve done.
Greer Hendricks, it’s impossible to imagine a universe where you are any more lovely. Thank you for being such a pleasure to talk to and for being so incredibly good at what you do. My work could not be in better hands. The same goes to Sarah Cantin, Tory Lowy, and the rest of the Atria team.
Maybe in Another Life Page 27