The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel

by Dawson, Maddie

  “I don’t care. What I want to say is, the time has come to invite Milo to come and stay with us.” She stops walking.

  “Stay with us? Are you crazy? Annie and Dena are never going to go for that,” he says.

  “For a weekend,” she says. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll like having some time to themselves.”

  “They’ll say no.”

  “I’m on to you,” she says. “You’re a wimpasaurus of the highest order if you continue to let Dena keep you from getting to bring your kid down here to visit us. You are no threat to Dena and Annie’s relationship, and it’s time they let your kid out of their sight.”

  “Wimpasaurus?” he says. “Did you really just call Superman a wimpasaurus?”

  “I believe I did, Mr. Clark Kent. Give me your phone,” she says. “Come on. Punch in Annie’s number and hand me your phone.”

  “Rosie, Dena is a freaking child life specialist. She knows stuff. And also I don’t want to hurt them.”

  “Tony, you are three thousand kinds of a nice guy. We get that about you. Now give me the phone. This is too important.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “I have no idea. I’m going to explain that I’m also a nice person, and that everything will be okay. I’m going to talk in my teacher voice, maybe. Just give me the phone, and then disappear. Go buy some popcorn.”

  He punches the number into the phone, and then he hands it to her. And goes outside. She can see him pacing in front of the theater, hands jammed in his pockets, walking back and forth amid the teenagers, looking over at her with a hopeful grin every now and then.

  “Annie?” she says. “This is Rosie Kelley. You don’t know me …”

  [nineteen]

  Milo comes the next Saturday, and he is adorable—with Tony’s glossy dark hair and huge brown eyes and a smattering of Annie-given freckles across his nose. He looks both sturdy and frail somehow, Rosie thinks, in his khaki pants and blue striped polo shirt. He clambers into the back of her Honda, where Tony has put his booster seat. She admires his SpongeBob Band-Aid, but he brushes off the compliment.

  “This is a baby Band-Aid,” he says. “I hafta take it off before I go to school on Monday.”

  “Why?”

  “Kids laugh.”

  “Oh,” she says. “That’s too bad.”

  He shrugs. There are more important matters to discuss, apparently. “Did you know that you can make diamonds out of peanut butter?” he says. “My mom says you can’t, but this guy at school says his uncle did it.”

  “Huh,” she says to him. “No, I didn’t know that.”

  She also didn’t know there was going to be a conversation about childhood cruelty followed immediately by a science exam right off the bat. Also, there seems to be another kind of exam going on, too: how to get the damn car seat installed in her car. She is leaning over him, stretched beyond all comprehension, reaching so hard her belly is far into the backseat—why, why, why does she have a two-door?—to thread the seat belt into the little plastic slots of the car seat, which would be difficult enough for any normal nongymnast to do, but is nearly impossible for a normal nongymnast who’s also twenty weeks pregnant. Plus, Milo, already in the car seat, is about two inches from her face, and is studying her solemnly, disconcertingly. He breathes through his mouth, directing a stream of little boy-breath as well as the smell of his pancakes-and-bacon breakfast right at her.

  “Are you my dad’s girlfriend?” he asks.

  “No,” she says. “We’re just housemates.”

  “Housemates? What the heck is that?”

  “We’re friends, and we live in the same house.”

  “Did you know he used to live at my house?”

  “I did know that.” She smiles at him, and he looks back at her solemnly.

  “Now I live with Mommy and Dena. S’posed to be two mommies.”

  “Nice,” she says.

  He shrugs. “It’s okay. But Rachel says you can’t really have two mommies. Only one person can be your mommy, and one person can be your daddy. That’s the way it is.”

  Now biology and ethics.

  She looks out the back window of the car. Tony is standing on the lawn, his old lawn, talking to Annie. His body language says things are going about as awkwardly as possible: he’s got his thumbs tucked in his armpits, and he’s rocking tensely back and forth on his heels, going so far back he looks as though he could easily topple over onto the walkway in a moment. Annie, who has short, spiky black hair, is wearing a purple tank top, jeans, unlaced combat boots, a yellow lace scarf, and about four intriguing string necklaces with shiny rocks on them. She has her arms folded across her chest. She keeps turning and glancing back at the house, a cute little Cape painted lavender, looking at it with such regret and fear that it’s as if she expects that it’s going to possibly blow up.

  Rosie knows from the five—yes, five—phone calls she’s had with her this week that it’s because Dena, the expert in all things child-related, never really did think it was a completely good idea for Milo to go off with them.

  She’s just ultracareful, Annie had said. It’s on account of her work—she just knows too much about childhood trauma and confusion. Also—she had lowered her voice and laughed as if she and Rosie were conspirators—Dena just doesn’t get male energy. She claims half the planet has testosterone poisoning, whereas Annie likes men and gets along with them just fine. “When Milo and Tony really get going with all the roughhousing and stuff, she just gets really annoyed,” she says. “It’s not her fault. She grew up with sisters.”

  “So she’ll get to have a weekend alone with you,” Rosie had said. “That should be wonderful for you guys.”

  “Well,” Annie had said. “Yeah.”

  “You’ll have fun, I bet,” said Rosie. “And I promise that Milo will have fun, too.”

  Annie had laughed nervously. “But not too much fun, or he won’t want to come back! Just kidding!”

  Milo is swinging his legs and watching her. “His uncle did it in the microwave,” he says. It takes Rosie a moment to realize that they are back to talking about making diamonds from peanut butter.

  The seat belt finally allows itself to be threaded into the proper holes, and she is able, through superhuman strength—thank you, second-trimester adrenaline!—and a bit of grunting, to snap it into place. Milo is, for the moment, safe. She straightens up and bumps her head on the roof of the car. He is still staring at her.

  “We could get a microwave oven and try to make diamonds,” he says. “We could see if it works.”

  Tony is motioning to her. “Annie wants to know if Milo is going to need his bathing suit.”

  “That is not what I said,” Annie says. “I said that I hoped you weren’t going to take him swimming because Dena thinks that one of us has to be with him when he swims since sometimes he can try to go too far out in the water,” she says. “And he tries to look like he can swim, so sometimes the lifeguards might think he’s safe when he isn’t.”

  “Jesus Christ, Annie, I’m not going to let my kid drown.”

  “I know, I know. I didn’t say you were,” she says in a low voice. “Come on, Tony. She didn’t want me to allow this, you know, so I’d appreciate it if you could just take it easy and follow our rules this time.”

  “He’s my kid,” says Tony.

  “I know, I know. It’s crazy. Just whatever you do, bring him back on time. Let’s not scare her. Could you just do that? Please? Rosie?”

  Actually, Rosie hadn’t planned to be a part of this weekend at all. But Annie had said she had to assure Dena that Rosie was coming along, too. At one point, perhaps in phone conversation number four, Annie, who has a surprisingly high, thin voice, had actually laughed her tinkly-sounding laugh and said that Dena is always paranoid that Tony is going to try to take Milo away—as a way of getting Annie to come back to him. “Ha ha ha—kidnapping. I mean, WTF?” she says.

  “Kidnapping?” Rosie had said. “T
ony?”

  “I know, I know. It’s crazy,” said Annie. “But I think it’s because she and I got together—you know, from cheating. We were both married, and all four of us were best friends, and then over time she and I sorta kinda realized we didn’t love those guys that way, and then we knew we loved each other, and it was all messy and complicated. And when you do that—well, the price you pay is that you always know the other person is capable of doing that. Of breaking somebody’s heart. And the next one could be yours.”

  “But here’s what I don’t get. Why does she think Tony would take Milo away from you?” Rosie asked. “First of all, he’s not like that. And second, it seemed like what he really wanted was for all of you to live there together. He didn’t try then to get you to come back, did he?”

  Annie lowered her voice and said, “Rosie, I don’t know if you know this, but Tony spies on us. We see his truck all over the place.”

  Rosie said, “If he’s in Fairfield, isn’t it possible he’s working there? I don’t think he’s spying on you.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter what you and I think. Dena thinks he’s about to make a play for me and Milo, and that’s why I needed to assure her that you’re a good person who won’t let him do anything like that. I told her you were his—well, his girlfriend now.”

  Oh! “Well, but I’m so much older than he is. If Dena ever sees me, she’ll know that can’t possibly be true,” Rosie said. “Plus, the fact is, I’m five months pregnant.”

  “Tony loves pregnancy,” Annie had said. “Dena will totally believe that. He’s like a pregnancy groupie or something.”

  It starts to rain, so they go to Kid City, an indoor amusement park with room after room filled with toys and instruments and slides. Kids, trailed by their parents, are running in the hallways and hiding in all the little nooks and structures, picking Velcro apples from painted-on apple trees, driving cars and spaceships, going through mazes, playing with marbles. The place even smells like little kids, Rosie thinks: sweaty and warm and yeasty, like soap and paste and sunlight.

  Milo runs around the music room, banging on percussion instruments, and then he takes them to the space room and he drives the spaceship, and then prances off to a place where Ping-Pong balls are floating in midair, suspended on air currents.

  Rosie watches all the people loaded down with backpacks and diaper bags and strollers with a new interest. She is going to be that woman over there, the one wearing a front pack and hurrying with a baby into the restroom. Or the one whose daughter has just flung herself to the ground because she heard it was time to leave. She might be—no, she will be, she can feel it—she’ll be the woman over there who is alone with her shy, ostracized, sniffling little kid who can’t get any of the other kids to play with him and so is trying to bury his head in his mother’s neck, like maybe that’s the pathway back to the womb.

  Oh my God. Can she do this? Does she know what to say to a child? Her eyes swerve over to Tony, who is kneeling down next to Milo, listening and smiling at something Milo is saying—and just the way Milo is resting his hands on Tony’s face, the way he mashes his nose up against Tony’s—she wants to run over and start taking notes. Press nose against child’s cheek. Smile reassuringly. Give pat on back.

  “It’s okay,” Tony is saying.

  Say it’s okay.

  She’s grateful when finally, hours later it seems, Tony beckons her over and they go to the pretend diner, where she can sit down. Milo insists on serving them a lunch of plastic food: eggplant, watermelon, a rubberized fried egg, and a chicken leg.

  “Wait, wait, does this stuff even go together? Plastic eggplant hurts my feelings,” Tony says. He turns to Rosie to explain as Milo starts to giggle. “One time when Milo was two, we served him oatmeal for breakfast, and he said that oatmeal hurt his feelings.”

  Milo laughs.

  “Not me, I’ll eat anything,” says Rosie. “Oatmeal, the plastic eggplants … you name it.”

  Tony looks at her closely. “Wow. I think we’ve got to get you some real lunch,” he says. “We should go.”

  “But I don’t want to go yet!” says Milo.

  Tony smiles at him, and says to him in a low voice, “Nah, you know what? This lady we brought with us? You know something about her? She’s gonna have a baby, and that makes ladies really, really hungry. And I think if we don’t feed her soon, she’s gonna start eating this plastic food, and then we’ll be in real trouble.”

  But Milo looks sad, and so Rosie says, “No, no. Really, Tony. I can totally wait. Let him play.”

  Milo heads off to the room where kids run a pretend fish factory. It’s intense in there, little kids running around with baskets of rubber fish, looking like they’re all corporate-raider CEOs dealing with union bosses as well as fish thieves and the board of health.

  “Come here for a minute,” says Tony in her ear, and he takes her by the hand down the hallway into an empty little room with a window seat, where kids could look at books—if they weren’t all busy sharpening their skills of being ruthless capitalists in the next room, that is.

  He gives her a funny smile, and then he pulls her over to him and wraps his arms around her and looks down into her eyes. And then he kisses her. His mouth is warm and insistent on hers, and she feels herself buckle, as if she’d never had a first kiss before. She puts her arms around his neck, and she kisses him back. That’s the most surprising, remarkable thing, she thinks, the way she’s just willing to let herself slide right into this with no fight to her at all. But in her own defense, it has been so long since anybody has kissed her, and she has been watching him for so many days and weeks—his arms, his hands, the way his hair flops. His eyes. Oh God … and she has such rampaging pregnancy hormones.

  When he releases her, he laughs a little and says, “Wow. I hope you’re not mad at me, but I just had to do that.”

  She is looking up. “I—” but then she’s not sure what words she had arranged to show up after that first one. She wants to reach over and touch his lips with her fingers. But he’s pulling away.

  “Shh,” he says. “I know all the reasons that was a bad idea. You don’t have to tell me.”

  It’s crazy, but if it were up to her, she’d close the door of the book nook and start ripping off his clothes. How long would they have before the Kid City authorities would come barging in and make them stop? He smiles gently, like he can read her mind, and reaches down and touches her nose with his forefinger.

  “Hmm. My goodness, enough kissing for you,” he says, and laughs. “We have to go get the kid.”

  Luckily she’s still got her wits about her and can recognize reality when it asserts itself. This was just fatherly exuberance, nothing more. Really, who would be hot for a woman in her sixth month of pregnancy, anyway? This was just gratitude to her for making the phone calls that made this day happen. He grins at her and takes her hand and Milo’s and they head for the car. Milo is talking sixty miles a second, about how when he grows up he’s going to invent a special meatball, and inside the meatball will be all the pasta and sauce.

  “I could totally go for that meatball right this minute,” she tells him.

  Maybe it’s the mention of the meatball, or maybe it’s because she’s sitting down in the car after walking so much, but once they’re riding again, the baby starts kicking and doing somersaults. She thinks for a minute that she’ll tell Tony, but she knows what would happen. He would swerve over to the side of the road and start feeling her up, and be just as joyful as anyone could possibly be. He would beam at her, and invite Milo to join in—and it’s just not right.

  She has got to get it through her skull that Tony is not her person. She’s having this baby by herself, and there are going to be a lot of things that she is going to be experiencing alone. Someday this little girl is going to take her first steps and say her first words, and chances are, Rosie is going to be the only one there to witness that, too, and she needs to get used to it.

 
Was that what it had been like for her mother, too?

  She puts her hand over her abdomen and just rests while, inside her, Serena the Bean turns somersault after somersault. She has no idea.

  Once they get home, she takes Milo on a tour of the house. He immediately seems to know it’s a house meant for kids to slide down the banister and to throw as many objects as possible down the laundry chute and then race downstairs to the laundry room to see where they land. He is stunned—stunned—by the claw feet on the upstairs bathtub, as well as the window seat in the dining room and the fireplace in the guest room.

  When he gets to the kitchen, though, he elbows Rosie as they’re standing in front of the counter. He points to the microwave and whispers, “That’s where we could make our diamonds.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “But a kid did it with his uncle. Don’t you want a diamond?”

  She does not really want a diamond, as a matter of fact, and she really doesn’t want a diamond that she makes in the microwave, but looking at him makes her laugh. She says she’ll think about it and watches his face darken.

  “That means no,” he says.

  “How do you know it means no?” she says. “Maybe it means that I am really going to think about it. Anyway, why don’t you ask your dad?”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t do it,” Milo says.

  Tony comes down just then, having liberated a tent from the attic. He and Milo are planning to sleep in the yard like the manly men they are. “What wouldn’t I do?” he says.

  “Nothing,” says Milo, and he gives Rosie a meaningful look.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  They cook hamburgers and hot dogs outside on the grill after Tony gets the tent put up, and Soapie and George come out, too, and they all eat at the picnic table, even though it’s slightly late in the year for this, and Tony ends up running inside and fetching everybody’s sweatshirts.

  Soapie, weak and frail, keeps getting confused about who Milo is and has to have Tony’s marital situation explained to her over and over again. Milo tells Soapie that he has two mommies, except that you can’t really have two mommies, you can only have one.