“Well, see, there you go. I’m forty-four, and when my baby is fifteen years old, I’ll be sixty.”
“Yeah, you will.”
“And Jonathan and I agreed we wouldn’t have children.”
“Yeah, that, too.”
“And when Greta had her first baby, she wouldn’t even let me go near the kid by myself, because everybody could see that I dropped things all the time. My best friend, and she even knows I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He puts his head in his hands and then takes off his cap and rubs his hair up and down, like he’s trying to remove something that’s stuck to it. When he stops, he just looks at her. “Greta is sorry about that. You don’t drop things. You take care of things.”
“You don’t even know Greta.”
“But I know you.”
She starts to cry. “I can’t do it, Tony. I have a bad track record. I do break things. Jonathan wouldn’t even let me hold his teacups, and then he met Andres Schultz, and he let him take them out of the boxes first thing. Ten minutes in our apartment, and Andres is holding the teacups.”
“Rosie, you are making me so tired. Let’s get some dinner so you can shut up while you’re filling your pie hole. I’m not trying to talk you into anything. Okay?”
“Okay, but you are ignoring the fact that babies have breakable parts, and then they grow up and they can get ruined so easily,” she says. She gets up and follows him into the kitchen. “People can be mean just by accident, and then there are bullies who are mean on purpose, and you said it yourself—there’s no way to protect people and keep them safe. And why do I want to do that to somebody else? I would just be so hopeful that this little kid could have a good life, and I couldn’t stand it if anybody hurt it. And everybody would hurt it, Tony. You know that’s true. Look at your own little boy, how he can’t be with you, and you don’t get to see him grow up every single day. How do you bear it, Tony, when something bad happens to him and you’re not there to help him? How does he bear it? How do you let him have a broken heart about it?”
And then she does shut up because when she looks up, Tony Cavaletti is crying. Oh my God. She is so mean and hopeless that she’s made Tony Cavaletti cry.
They barely talk after that, and once she gets in bed, she can’t sleep at all. She keeps turning over in bed and then getting up and going to the window and looking out. She can hear Tony rattling around in his room, and she hovers outside his door, wondering if she should go in and apologize. But what if it’s just the wind making all that noise, and she ends up waking him up? She is a terrible person, and life is too hard, and probably this clump of cells she’s carrying, if it has any consciousness at all, is so grateful not to have to go any further into life with her as its caretaker.
“Look, I’ve gotta tell you something,” Tony says the next morning. They’re in the kitchen, and he’s making coffee and not looking at her. “Maybe this isn’t the time to bring this up, but I want you to know that Milo is fine. His heart isn’t broken.”
“Okay. I’m sorry I said that. I don’t know anyth—”
“No,” he says, and his voice sounds hoarse, like it’s all clotted up in his throat. “You do know stuff, but you don’t know this. His heart is not broken. It’s not as bad as I’ve made it out to be,” he says. He won’t look right at her, and his voice sounds as though he’s reading from a speech. “He is loved, which is a lot more than you can say for a lot of kids. His heart is not broken. In case you have become misled by things I have told you, which I should not have done.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said that.” Criminy, he’s now said the kid’s heart isn’t broken three times in barely thirty seconds. She doesn’t dare tell him how unconvincing he sounds. “So where are you working today?” she says. Neutral subject.
“And now I need to tell you something that I didn’t want to get into, just so you know,” he says, taking a deep breath. “The reason—the reason that my ex-wife won’t take me back is that she’s gay. Okay? That’s why we’re not together. Because she’s in a committed relationship with another woman. So. Now you know.”
“Oh,” she says. Somehow this was the last thing she had expected to hear. “Oh, well, then.” Then she says, “Oh, so it’s that woman, then? The one I saw?”
He nods and pours himself a cup of coffee, not looking at Rosie. “Yes, that one. Which is cool. It’s fine to be gay. Only it might have been a little better if maybe she knew that before she got married to me, you know what I mean?” He tries to pull off a smile, and fails. “Listen, do you want a cup of this, too?”
“No, thank you. I can’t have anything by mouth this morning.”
“Oh, of course you can’t,” he says. “Here I am going on about all this stuff, and we’ve got to get going.”
“I’m taking myself.”
“You can’t take yourself. Didn’t they tell you anything that day at the clinic?” She’s looking at him blankly, so he taps his forehead and says quietly, “You can’t drive home, remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says. “I can’t, can I?” She smacks her forehead.
“So you should get your things together, because I think if you’re supposed to be there at nine, we should leave.”
“Okay. Well … thank you. I feel bad you have to do this, though.”
“Don’t think anything. No problem.”
When they get in his truck, he says, “It would be very nice of you, and I would consider it a personal favor on my behalf, if you would please not give me that it-sucks-to-be-you look, okay? That’s what you’re thinking, and I hate when people feel sorry for me. My wife and her partner are nice people, I like them, and I’m used to it by now.” He turns the key, and the engine roars to life, like a warning to her to be quiet. Motors are in charge now.
“Okay,” she says, studying him and trying to figure out how to change her facial expression. There are a million questions that come up in her head, and most of them would probably hurt his feelings, so she says, “You know, Tony, this is very nice of you, but you can drop me off, and I can call Greta to come and pick me up.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see,” he says. “You do know that everybody else there is gonna have a person with them, don’t you?”
“No, really,” she says. “This is my punishment. Going through it by myself.”
“Rosie, you are a piece of work, do you know that? That’s not how this works—there’s no punishment.”
It’s gray and drizzly and he drives his red pickup truck along the wet roads with one hand resting on the top of the steering wheel. She’s surprised how clean the truck is. There’s a kid’s booster seat jammed in the back behind the passenger seat, tilted on its side. He taps on the steering wheel and then turns on the radio and turns it off again with a big sigh.
“Both Annie and Dena are excellent mamas,” he says after a while. “They’re good people, and they take good care of Milo.”
“Sure,” she says. “That is good.”
“And what you don’t know is, I stayed around as long as I could,” he says. “I thought I could stay with them forever. Hell, when they … when they came out, and when I saw it was real, I even let Dena move in with us, and I stayed in the house with them, all three of us, just so’s I could be—well, so’s I could be in their lives. We all lived together. For a whole year. Crazy, huh?”
“So … was your wife then—like, kinda with both of you?”
He looks startled. “What? No! Of course not. She was with Dena.”
She can’t seem to help herself. “Wow. You lived in the house with them, while they were lovers? What are you, a masochist or something? You just had to leave your bedroom and go sleep in the other bedroom by yourself?”
“Well, yeah. Pretty much.” He puts on his turn signal and slows to a stop at a red light and doesn’t look at her. “I didn’t let myself think about it. I just had to be there for Milo,” he says, and then clears his throat. “A lotta people don�
�t know that you can just turn your brain off when you need to.”
“You can’t just stop your thoughts.”
“I was Superman,” he says quietly. She’s surprised by how firm he sounds. “You just want something else bad enough that you forget about the bad parts. I wanted to be there for Milo when he woke up in the morning and when he went to bed at night, and I wanted to take him to the playground after he came home from preschool. I wanted to see the backs of those little knees going up the stairs at bedtime, and I wanted him to know my mom’s pasta sauce, and not just on special occasions, but on weekdays. Annie can’t make sauce for shit.”
“So, who is this other woman? Dena? Did you know her before? Not that it’s any of my business.”
“Nah, it’s okay.” He sighs. “She and Brian were our best friends. We all used to do stuff together, go camping and to clubs. Couple friends, you know. And then one day—well, Annie and Dena, they just sit us down and tell me and Brian that it’s all changed. They’re in love. They want to be together.”
“Jesus. What did Brian do?”
“He waited it out some, but then he split after a while. Went to D.C. and met somebody else. He and Dena didn’t have kids. That made it easier.” He turns and looks at her. “You think I’m crazy, I know, or some kind of wimp. But I said to myself every friggin’ day, ‘Annie is now like a sister to me, Annie is now like a sister to me,’ so that I wouldn’t go all apeshit. Anybody can control their thoughts. You just have to remind yourself of what’s important. What’s really important. I wanted her to be happy. That’s what loving somebody is. It’s not just the easy parts.”
She looks out the window, through the raindrops dotting the window, watches one little drop make its way all the way down to the bottom. She clears her throat and then says, “But, Jesus, Tony, I mean, why didn’t you just take Milo and leave? Maybe you could have gotten custody.”
“Now see, I’m sorry, but that’s a very nonparent thing to say,” he says. “If you had a kid, I bet you’d think different. How you wanna break the hearts of three people just to get what you want? She couldn’t help how she felt. So I’m gonna take her kid away? For what? She’s a good mom. She’s a great mom. I wasn’t gonna fight her.”
She shakes her head. “You sound like you’re running for sainthood.”
“Well,” he says. “I just had the right priorities. We all worked on raising him. I kept the cars running, we all cooked together, and we all got along, and we kept the kid happy together. I can’t describe why it worked. They’re nice people. I’m nice. We liked each other.”
“Also, you’re Superman,” she says. “So what happened? Why aren’t you still there, Clark Kent?”
“Well, the Kryptonite came,” he says. “Dena—mind you, the one that’s not Milo’s mom—she takes me aside one day and she says to me that she and Annie are getting kinda serious. They want to see who they are as a family, but they can’t very well do that if the ex-husband is there, being his understanding, fabulous self.”
“She said that—your fabulous self?”
He pulls into the parking lot of the clinic. The lot is full, but she’s relieved to see that no one is picketing out there today. She watches a young woman walk quickly to the door with her head down, trailed by an older woman, probably her mother.
He turns off the engine and looks down at his hands. “Yeah. She meant it, too. I was—I am—fabulous to her and to both of them. I get it. I get them, I swear to God. I’m not in any way trying to break them up. And so when she asked me to just leave the situation, to give them their shot, just for a while, I could see it. She cried, I cried, we all cried. They says to me they need this, to be on their own for a while. I’m the ex-husband and the father. When you look at it that way, it is crazy that I was there at all. You know? And they deserved their shot to be their own family, and not to have somebody looking on while they figure stuff out, being the know-it-all.”
“But how can they ask you to leave? Wasn’t it your house?”
“Nah. It was Annie’s father’s house. He left it to her.”
“Why didn’t you just get joint custody?”
“Well,” he says. “Dena’s a child expert, a psychology type, and she says that when children go through a big change, they can get confused. It was confusing for Milo that his mom and dad didn’t sleep in the same room, she says, and he was always asking them questions, like why didn’t Dena just leave? And so … well, she said I needed to give them time to … well, to be the main family, so that he’d see it that way.”
They get out of the truck, and as they walk to the door of the clinic, he says, “Think about it. Maybe she’s right. And anyway, what good does it do for me to fight her? I need them to be good to my kid. She actually said my Y chromosome was getting in the way.”
“Well, Milo has a Y chromosome, too, and I’ll bet it misses having yours around for company.”
“It’s not forever, you know,” he says. “When they’re all settled …”
“You’d go back?” she says. “You’re kidding.”
His tone is sharper than it had been. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, Rosie. It’s life. It’s unpredictable. You of all people know that.”
By then, they’re at the door. He pulls open the glass door, and once they’re inside, she squares her shoulders and goes over to check in at the little glass window in front of the desk, smiling so they will be nice to her. Yes, all her paperwork is done. Yes, she understands that they’re running a little bit behind this morning. The receptionist motions to the roomful of women—and Tony was right, everybody seems to have a companion. People are perched on the chairs, either texting or reading magazines, or staring into space, or huddled together, talking in low voices. It’s a tense place. Tony has already found two seats in the far corner and is sitting down with a magazine, and he motions her over. He could be her boyfriend, she realizes; everyone here must think that he’s the unlucky, unhappy father. She almost feels compelled to make an announcement: No, it’s not him. He would never do this if it were his own baby.
She goes and sits down next to him and whispers, “So are they letting you see him, at least?”
He leans toward her, so close she can smell his aftershave. “I can see him once a week for four hours at their house. That’s the agreement.”
“Once a week? You’ve gone from living there with him to seeing him once a week for four hours?” she says too loudly, and then puts her hand over her mouth when everyone looks up at her. “Why did you ever agree to that?” she whispers.
“It makes things more stable, Dena says.”
“This isn’t right. How do you stay away?”
The nurse comes to the door and calls the first names of four women—Ainsley, Tina, Mary, and Heather C.—and everyone tries not to watch as the four of them get up, hoist their bags over their shoulders, and are admitted into the other room.
Tony looks over at her and whispers, “I don’t. Some days after work I drive to Fairfield when his day camp lets out, and I watch him in the playground with the other kids. Sometimes I have to hide because I see Annie or Dena go and pick him up. But on the days he goes to a babysitter after camp, I call him on my cell phone. He doesn’t know that I’m just outside in the car, and that I can see him talking to me through the window of the babysitter’s house.”
“This is breaking my heart,” she says.
“Well, I just thought you should know,” Tony says. “This is why I’m Superman.”
The nurse is back at the door. “Heather W., Brittany, Heather B., and … Rosie,” she says. Rosie stands up, and her heart immediately starts beating faster. Her palms feel clammy.
“Just so you know,” he says, “you could be Superman, too. Just don’t make the mistake of giving up before the Kryptonite even gets here for you.”
[fourteen]
The nurse leads her to another waiting area and tells her to get undressed and put on the gown, open in the front, and that so
meone will be in to get her soon.
“We’re running a little bit behind,” she says.
Twenty long minutes pass before time surrenders and officially starts to go backward.
Rosie sits there, in the airless, windowless changing room, which some sadist has painted a claustrophobic bubble-gum pink and stacked high with outdated People magazines.
After twenty-one minutes, her phone beeps. She reaches over and answers it, and it’s Soapie, who says in a quavery voice, “Are you Rosie?”
“Soapie, wow! You’re able to use the phone?”
“Are you Rosie?”
She stands up, feeling herself smiling all over. “Yes! I am Rosie. I’m so glad to hear your voice. How are you?”
But Soapie is all business. “When you come today, will you bring me my photograph album? The doctor here thinks I need to relearn my relatives so I can come home.” Her voice sounds stilted, each word enunciated just so.
“You need to relearn relatives?” says Rosie. She almost laughs. There are no relatives to be relearned, she wants to say. Soapie doesn’t have any people, just this one on the phone.
We’re the only two people we’re related to, she says. But yes, she’ll bring photos of George and Tony, and maybe even Helen Benson’s peonies. And maybe the photo of Serena from the bottom desk drawer.
And as soon as she clicks the phone closed, she sits there for a moment. Then she stands up, puts on her clothes, folds up the little gown very neatly, places it on the chair, and walks out into the hallway. Nobody’s there; they’re all behind closed doors, and she can hear voices, encouraging, chatting, giving directions, and the hiss of machines, a buzzing noise, and she just walks quickly away, her arms down by her sides, walks down the hall, and then out through the waiting room.
She doesn’t stop at the receptionist’s desk, because no one is there anyway, and why wait to talk to somebody who just might say, “Oh, no, you can’t go! You signed up for this, and now you really have to go through with it!” Would they say that? She can’t be sure. She’ll write them a nice note tomorrow, thanking them, and explain that she simply changed her mind.
The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel Page 14