Romance in the Rain

by Anthology

  Chase ran up to the window and plastered his nose against it. “Kitty!” he exclaimed. “She a big one.”

  He knocked again, but there was still no answer. JD took Chase by the hand and led him around to the studio. The interior was dark; the door locked with an old bicycle padlock. “She’s not home, little man,” JD told his nephew.

  “I want to play with the kitty.”

  “I know you do. We’ll come back another time.”

  Chase’s face set in a scowl, but he followed JD back to the beach, in the direction of the car.

  “How about we get you an ice cream cone before going home?” JD made the suggestion in an effort to bribe Chase out of his bad mood, but Chase’s scowl got even deeper, until it was more a caricature than the real thing. He was enjoying his bad mood and intended to hold onto it as long as possible. Which, JD knew, for an almost-three-year-old meant about 90 seconds.

  As they rounded the corner, JD saw Maya at the water’s edge, head bowed. She bent down and picked something up before continuing to walk slowly, scanning the ground before her. JD let go of Chase’s hand. “Hey buddy, want to play for a few minutes before we go back home?” Chase nodded and ran toward the water. Maya looked up, startled, as the boy began to zigzag up and down the beach, shrieking with excitement as the little incoming waves sucked greedily at his feet, trying to pull him out with them.

  Her amused smile vanished when she noticed JD approaching. As he drew closer, he saw she had been gathering sea glass and held the smooth chips in the palm of her hand.

  Maya glanced at JD, and then at the boy. Her eyes met his in a question. “What are you doing here?”

  The sight of her filled him with longing and confusion. “We came to walk on the beach. I stopped by your place to see if I could pick up some tools I left in the studio…”

  Maya inclined her head to indicate Chase. “Who’s the boy?”

  JD wondered whether she thought Chase was his. “My nephew, Chase.”

  She nodded. “He’s cute. I’ll open up the studio so you can get your stuff.”

  She began to move toward the house. JD stepped in front of her, blocking her way. “I’ve missed you.”

  Her face colored but she refused to meet his gaze.

  “You don’t owe me anything, Maya. But an explanation would be nice. I think I deserve that much, don’t you?”

  She bit her lip and finally looked up. “You do, and much more.” Her eyes filled with tears. “JD, I… I did something that I’m not proud of. Before I got to know you. When you were nothing to me but the friend of an ex-boyfriend.”

  He remembered their conversation in bed, the night before she asked him to leave. Her concern over the ‘bad thing’ she had done. A certain hopefulness pervaded him. Perhaps Maya was in trouble with the law and had cut him out of her life because of something completely unrelated to him. If that were the case, he could help her. They could get through it, together. “What did you do? Steal something?”

  She nodded. “Yes. From you.” The tears spilled over.

  He’d never seen her cry before and it hurt him to see her in pain, even though it was caused by some intangible harm she had apparently done him.

  He touched her shoulder. “So you took something. I don’t even know what it was. Just give it back and it’ll be fine. I’m not going to press charges or hold a grudge.”

  “I can’t give it back,” Maya whispered. She tipped her hand and the sea glass fell onto the sand in a shimmer of light. She placed both hands over her belly. “It’s a part of me, now.”

  JD stepped back. He felt as though someone had just injected his body with a horse-syringe full of Novocain. Through the numbness, he struggled to focus, to respond. Maya was still talking, her lips moving, but the words were as insensible and indistinct as the roar of the ocean.

  He forced himself to pay attention.

  “… after Parker left I decided I wasn’t going to waste any more time trying to find the right guy. I was going to do it on my own. When you showed up, it was like a sign. And you were so sweet, so helpful and kind, and so… attractive.” She paused, took a deep breath. “I didn’t really believe it would happen like that, the very first time. I found out a few weeks later, the morning after we…”

  “…had sex the second time,” JD filled in for her.

  She nodded. “I was a week late, so I bought a test and took it in the bathroom. That’s when I knew for sure.”

  “You told me you were on the pill.”

  She blushed. “For what it’s worth, I used a diaphragm the second time. I didn’t mean to trap you. I acted on impulse, one time.”

  JD stared at her, speechless.

  “I’m sorry,” Maya continued. “I don’t expect you to forgive me. I promise I’ll never ask for anything from you. You don’t have to be involved at all. But I am going to keep this baby.”

  Her shutting him out, not from her life, but also from the life of their unborn child, cracked through the numbness like a rock through glass, releasing a flood of pure defensive rage. JD clenched his fists. When he spoke, his voice was harsh and guttural. “You never gave a damn about me. I was your sperm donor. You used me and threw me out when you got what you wanted.” The hurt beneath the anger rose up like a hidden undertow, threatening to engulf him. “How could you do that, Maya? Do you think I’m not human? That I don’t feel?”

  “I do care about you. I made a mistake. But I can’t undo anything that’s happened. And even though I know it was wrong, very, very wrong, I wanted it so bad…”

  “You’d do it all over again, wouldn’t you?”

  Maya hung her head.

  He felt sick to his stomach. She was a cold woman—cold, calculating and mercenary.

  “Chase!” he called out. “Come on, we’re leaving.”

  Chase came meekly over to JD and looked up at him with wide brown eyes. “No kitty?” he asked, sadly, as though he already knew the answer.

  “Not today,” JD said. “How about a shoulder-carry?” He hefted Chase up into his arms and helped the boy scramble onto his shoulders.

  Maya looked at him as though wanting to say more. Her face was drained of color. There was no telltale bump under her peasant blouse. JD wondered when she’d begin to show. He turned away and trudged through the sand toward the car. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be around to see it.

  Chapter 6

  JD,

  You asked me whether I would do this all over again, and I didn’t answer. The truth is, if I had it to do over again, knowing what I know now, I would act differently. If I had known that I would start to have feelings for you, and that they would be returned, I would have waited. I would have had faith that everything would work itself out in time. But I’m not religious. I thought I had to take what I wanted from the universe because it was cruel and miserly and there was no other way.

  You opened my eyes to another possibility; a vision of the road not taken. I wish I could have walked that road with you.

  —Maya

  JD didn’t see the email that had come in at 2 a.m. until he was on his half-hour lunch break at Emerald City Woodworks. He sat on a bench placed against the outside wall of the shop, in a little alley that separated it from the car repair business next door, and stared at the words on the tiny screen of his cell phone, reading them over and over. A week had passed since he’d left Maya on the beach outside her house. Since then, not a day—hell, hardly an hour—had gone by when he hadn’t thought of her and the baby. The nights were even worse.

  He wished there were someone he could talk to. But Stacy and Michael were so busy, and he hated to reveal any of his problems to his brother. Although Michael had been surprisingly supportive, he still wasn’t sure he could trust him. It was hard to let go of that old sibling rivalry. His parents, bless their hearts, were not the people to approach with a problem of this nature. His mother, always emotional, would surely break down and start crying helplessly. His father, who was old-fashione
d, would probably suggest that he ‘do the right thing’ and marry the girl. If only it were that easy.

  JD thought of Maya, walking on the beach, the wind blowing her hair into wild tangles around her face. Sitting at her potter’s wheel, oblivious to everything but the clay transforming under her hands from base matter into something both beautiful and functional. He thought about lying in her bed the second time they made love—the way she traced lazy spirals on his stomach and smiled like the cat who ate the canary.

  Maya didn’t want or need a man. Hell, JD wasn’t even sure that she liked men, except for one thing. If he were to ask her to marry him, she’d probably laugh in his face. All the same, she’d admitted she cared for him; that she wished she could have done things differently. What did she mean by that? Did she wish she had asked JD for his consent before trying to get pregnant? He would have said no. He wouldn’t have agreed unless he could be sure that Maya was ‘the one,’ and that she felt the same way about him. And even then, he would have liked to wait, to enjoy time for them together as a couple before introducing another person into their lives. And yes, he would have liked to get married first. Perhaps his father wasn’t the only old-fashioned one in the family.

  No matter which way he turned it, he couldn’t get the pieces to fit. He loved Maya, or at least he had thought he loved her, but she had deceived him. He missed her terribly, but he was also so angry with her that he never wanted to see her again. He felt betrayed, and yet he knew that Maya, whether or not she realized it, was the one who would bear the brunt of the repercussions for the choice she had made. How did she plan to raise a child on her own? She barely made enough money to get by as it was. How would she pay for childcare, food and clothing for a helpless little baby? How could she keep working? He knew from being around Chase how demanding little kids could be and how they ran you ragged. Taking care of a young child was hard work, even without the addition of a paying job.

  Even though Maya had made it clear she didn’t expect him to help support her or the child, JD couldn’t help feeling responsible for the wellbeing of the wriggling, embryonic proto-human growing inside her. After all, it was his DNA pulsing through that little creature. His own flesh and blood.

  Too agitated to sit any more, JD got up. Before heading back to work, he kicked the wall, hard, stubbing his toe even through his thick leather work boot. He yelped in pain and hopped up and down, clutching his injured foot in one hand. His cell phone dropped and the back came off, sending the battery flying. At least he wouldn’t have to look at Maya’s message anymore.

  Diana and Marco Cabral, JD’s new neighbors, were having a party. Mariachi music blasted from their open windows, filling the entire apartment complex with its jaunty, brassy sound. JD put a pillow over his head but it did nothing to shut out the racket. To his credit, Marco had come over earlier in the day to invite him to the party, but JD suspected that was only so that he’d be less likely to complain about their violation of the 10 p.m. noise curfew. He had gone over earlier in the evening, drank a Corona and tried out his Spanish on some of the cute Latina girls. But he wasn’t in a partying mood and had stayed less than an hour.

  Giving up on sleep, he went into the kitchen, fixed himself a bowl of cereal and settled down in front of the TV. Stacy and Michael had given him their boxy old tube TV, which had been sitting in their basement since they upgraded to a 65-inch flat screen. Mechanically spooning milk and cereal into his mouth, he stared at the screen as a B-list actress who looked vaguely familiar smoothed some kind of revitalizing, clinically tested youth serum on her shapely legs and cooed about how ‘amazing’ it was. Her voice was low and husky, and she looked straight at the camera as though she were speaking directly to him. At Maya’s he had never missed having a TV. It was as though the empty space on the wall opposite the couch was a blank slate on which their imaginations could play out. Several times they had sat there after dinner talking together. Maya liked writers that JD thought of as very male—chauvinistic, even—like Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski. JD was a fan of metafiction writers Italo Calvino, Jasper Fforde, and Kurt Vonnegut, none of whom Maya had read until he’d introduced them to her. She’d borrowed his copy of Calvino’s “If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler,” and he’d enjoyed watching it entrance her and drive her crazy in turn.

  “You’re pretty smart, for a carpenter,” she’d said to him more than once. Now he wondered whether her interest in his book and her teasing compliments had been a sham; merely a way to ingratiate herself with him. But Maya was so beautiful, so smart and resourceful. JD was sure that she could have slept with a different guy every night of the week if she’d wanted to. Instead, she had chosen him to be her baby-daddy. That had to count for something.

  The noise of the TV intruded on his thoughts and he turned it off, watching the actress shrink to the size of a pinhead and disappear.

  Stacy rose on tiptoes to pick a cluster of blackberries. JD reached up and pulled the cane down to her level. She smiled at him. “Thanks.”

  “The meal was great. Thanks for inviting me over. Now that I’m in my bachelor pad it’s usually milk and cereal for dinner.”

  “I hope you don’t mind helping me pick the berries for dessert.”

  “Not at all. I think Michael got the short end of the stick tonight.”

  Michael was putting Chase to bed. The boy was overtired and had melted down in a shrieking, foot-stomping temper tantrum when told he had to have a bath. After ordering Michael to deal with him, Stacy had escaped into the garden, taking JD with her.

  “You’re a great help. I can never reach the high-up ones on my own.”

  “De nada.”

  “I can see living in your new place is improving your Spanish.”

  “Si, senora. It’s kind of a total immersion experience.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “It’s fun, you know. Like living in a foreign country. There’s this gang of about ten or twelve kids who play in the courtyard outside my window every night after dinner, riding their bikes, bouncing balls, playing tag and hide-and-seek.” He pulled several berries off the bush and put them into the bowl Stacy was holding.

  “We miss you around here,” Stacy said. “You’re so good with Chase. He adores you.”

  “He’s a great kid.”

  “He said you went to visit a girl with a cat last time you took him out.”

  JD stiffened and shot Stacy an anxious look, but she didn’t seem mad, just curious. “Was that the girl you were staying with before you came here?”

  “Yup. I left some tools over there. Went back to get them.”

  He kept picking berries for another minute until he noticed that Stacy was standing with a hand on her hip, staring at him.

  “What happened between you two?” she asked.

  “What do you mean? Nothing.”

  “You’re a lousy liar, JD.”

  Stacy obviously had a woman’s intuition about these things. JD thought he had managed to conceal the fact that something serious had gone down between himself and Maya, but clearly he hadn’t done a very good job.

  He hesitated only a moment before deciding to confide in Stacy. He had to tell someone; he felt as though he were a carbonated soda can that had been shaken violently and that he would burst if he couldn’t unburden himself soon. Stacy, with her sympathetic smile and her nurturing ways, was really the only person he felt comfortable enough with to reveal the truth to. He knew that she wouldn’t say anything to Michael if he asked her not to.

  “We had a thing; an affair—whatever you want to call it,” he said. “Then she kicked me out without any explanation. Last week, when I took Chase over there to get my tools, I found out why.” He took a deep breath. “She’s pregnant.”

  The smile disappeared from Stacy’s lips. “Oh my God.”

  “We didn’t use protection, because she told me she was on the pill.”

  “She told you? You mean she wasn’t?”

  “She
lied. She wanted a kid, and when I showed up, she figured she better make the most of it.” He shrugged. “Apparently it happened on the very first try. So now it looks like I’m going to be a dad, whether I like it or not.”

  “I’m sorry. How unfair.”

  “I don’t think she wants me in her life at all. Not even for child support. My role is to be the absent father. This shadowy figure the kid will never know.”

  “Are you sure she doesn’t want you around? Did she actually flat-out tell you that?”

  “Not in so many words. She did say that she doesn’t expect anything from me. On the other hand, she wrote me this email where she said she wished she’d done things differently. Wished we could travel a different path together. I don’t know what she meant by that.”

  Stacy was silent for a while, steadily picking berries until the bowl was almost full. “It sounds like she’s put the ball in your court. What do you want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “I thought I did, or at least, that I was falling in love with her. But she lied to me.”

  “And you don’t want to be with someone who isn’t always honest.”

  She pronounced this as a statement rather than a question. All the same, it drew JD up short. He’d never really considered it before. How important was total honesty to him? One of the things that had drawn him to Maya in the first place was the sense of mystery surrounding her; the conviction he had that no matter how much time he spent in her company there would always be something new to discover. Still, he did resent being used. He resented not being given any say in the matter.

  “Are you upset because she lied to you?” Stacy asked. “Or because she’s having your baby and you don’t want to be a parent? Or both?”