by Noir, Roxie
He’s still got a dry-erase marker in one hand, both sleeves rolled up, and he runs that hand through his hair, ruffling it slightly.
“Well, everyone knows how easy it is to get lost in a discussion of calculus,” he deadpans, his voice teasing as he looks at the whiteboard again. “If you’re not careful, poof, there goes your whole weekend.”
“It should come with a warning label,” I agree.
“Do you have any questions? I’ll leave this up here for a moment, but I actually need to leave,” he says, capping the marker and putting it back into the tray.
“Where are you going?” I ask, casually, copying the last equation from the board into my notebook.
“Home,” he says, moving behind his desk and grabbing a pile of papers. “Well, not home. My mom’s house, for the weekend.”
Then he pauses, the stack of papers held in one hand, and considers me for a beat.
“Charlie had the baby,” he says, and a smile takes over his face slowly, from the inside out.
It’s the first time either of us has alluded to the four hours we spent together in a car, and it’s a relief, pure and simple. Pretending that the kiss didn’t happen is hard enough; pretending that I don’t know him as well as I do would be impossible.
“I thought she wasn’t due for another week?” I say, keeping my voice down.
“She was about ten days early,” he says, maneuvering the stack into a manila folder. “Though I’ve since learned that anything between thirty-eight and forty-two weeks is considered a perfectly normal length for a human pregnancy.”
“Have you met him yet?” I ask, putting my notebook away, slinging my bag onto my shoulder. “You said it was a boy, right?”
It’s oddly heavy, and after a moment, I remember why.
“I went up last weekend,” he says, then glances at the door. There’s silence in the hall, and after a moment, Caleb smiles. “I’ve got pictures. Want to see?”
I just laugh.
“Of course I want to see, I’m human,” I tell him. “We’re genetically programmed to be attracted to babies. Not like that! I just mean attracted in a regular way. Humans like looking at human babies. In studies people always look at pictures of babies for much longer than anything else, even sexual pictures of other adults.”
I am not making this better. I am not making this better at all.
I think Caleb is laughing at me, scrolling through something on his phone.
“It activates the reward center in our brain,” I go on, for some reason. “Some scientists actually think that it’s the reason that we’ve selectively bred domestic animals to be cuter —”
He holds his phone out to me. On the screen is a picture of him, wearing a plaid shirt, holding a brand-new infant swaddled in a blanket.
I feel like my whole body turns to jello, right there and then. One second I’m a person and the next I’m a melting pile of goop, and I don’t even entirely understand why.
I wasn’t expecting it. I’ve seen babies before, even tiny ones, but this picture in particular has activated some deep, instinctual part of my brain that I didn’t know was there.
“Oh my God, Caleb,” I whisper. “He’s adorable.”
I tell myself it’s just the baby. It’s a very cute baby, and my over-the-top reaction has nothing at all to do with the person holding the baby.
“Yeah, he’s pretty cool,” he says, looking down at his phone indulgently. “We hung out for a little while. Here, you can take that.”
He hands me the phone, then goes back to putting papers into a briefcase.
“Are there more?” I ask, suddenly awkward.
People don’t hand other people their phones. Everyone’s got something they don’t want found — dating apps, naked pictures, a really embarrassing playlist.
I wonder if Caleb has those things. If he just handed me his phone, does he want me to see them? Does he not mind if I see them? Has he simply never taken a naked selfie?
Sometimes a phone is just a phone, I remind myself.
“I took about a hundred,” he says, grabbing another stack. “You can just flip through.”
I’m tentative at first, but I go ahead and look through the pictures, shot after shot of various people holding the baby, who seems to be mostly asleep.
However, one thing becomes clear very quickly: Caleb’s brothers are all hot. There are four of them, they all held this baby, and all five of them are handsome beyond reason.
It’s astonishing, really.
“That’s Seth,” he says, his voice rumbling over my shoulder. “and then that’s Levi lurking over in the corner.”
I wouldn’t say that Levi is lurking. I’d say that he’s standing normally, hands in his pockets, attractively looking toward something off-camera.
“What’s his name?” I ask, still staring at the picture.
“The baby?”
I shoot Caleb a look over my shoulder.
“No, this year’s Nobel Prize winner,” I say. “Yes, the baby.”
He’s laughing at himself, the strap of his briefcase over his shoulder, a rakish smile on his face.
“Thomas,” he says.
I look back at Thomas, this time in his dad’s arms.
“That feels like a big name for a small baby,” I say.
Caleb’s quiet for a moment, and I wonder if I’ve said the wrong thing again.
“He’s named after our dad,” he says, his voice quiet as he looks at the picture of his brother and his nephew that I’m still holding.
It hits me like a bolt from the blue: his father is dead.
I look at the tiny, scrunchy face in the picture and it all falls into place. We talked for four hours straight, and he didn’t mention his father once. He’s not in any of these pictures. The way he reacted when I told him about my mom, holding me without saying a word, letting me cry into his shirt in a gas station parking lot. Suddenly, it all adds up.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, the words out before I think to get confirmation.
“About the name?” he teases, voice still soft, his eyes still on the picture. “It’s not so bad.”
“No,” I say, flustered, wondering if I just read this all wrong, if I’m being really weird for no reason. “It’s a good name, I mean about... aren’t babies usually named after...”
Don’t say dead people. Do not say dead people.
He turns and looks at me, a sudden realization coming over his face when he sees the look on mine.
“The dead?” he asks, eyebrows raised.
“That’s what I’m sorry about, not the name,” I say, still floundering. “Unless he’s alive and I’ve really messed up my social cues, which does definitely happen sometimes, so maybe your dad is alive and really excited and not in any of the pictures for some reason? It’s a good name. I like it. Strong. Solid.”
Stop. Talking.
“I thought I’d mentioned it,” he says, and runs one hand through his hair, a hint of an embarrassed smile on his face. “Yeah, he’s dead. Car crash. I was ten.”
I gasp, one hand over my mouth. It’s more dramatic than I mean to be but I can’t help it.
“That’s so young,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” he says, simply, then reaches for his phone, slides it back into his pocket. “I should get going, I think everyone else has gone home.”
“Actually, wait,” I say, reaching into my bag. “One more thing.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Caleb
I never know how to talk about my father. All these years and I’ve never quite understood how people think I should react about it. Do they expect me to gnash my teeth and weep? Open my heart to them about how much it sucked to lose my father as a kid?
Am I supposed to say nah, it’s fine, everything is perfect now?
Because the truth is that it’s complicated. It’s thorny. It’s been eighteen years and somehow, my father’s death is still reaching through time and grabbing
at my ankles with ugly, bony fingers, but it’s also been eighteen years, and that’s a long time.
“I wanted to say a proper thank you for giving me a ride to Norfolk,” Thalia says, and she pulls a bottle from her bag, holding it by the neck. “It was really kind of you. And it really meant a lot. And I’m sorry that I probably ruined that shirt, and just… thank you.”
I reach out and take the bottle of wine. There’s a ribbon around the neck, a folded notecard hanging from it.
“You’re welcome,” I say, and it feels too formal. I shift the wine bottle to my other hand. It’s a cabernet from 2015, a howling wolf on the label, and I remember our conversation that night, before she got the phone call.
“You didn’t have to,” I say, trying something else, but it also feels wrong in my mouth.
What I want to say is that I’m glad that, by some miracle, I was there when she got the call. I want to say that, despite the awful circumstances, the time we spent in the car might have been the best four hours of my year.
I want to tell her how desperately I wish she wasn’t an undergraduate. I want to tell her that I’d drive her again in a heartbeat, that I didn’t do it for thanks but because I like her and I wanted her to be okay.
“I know, but I wanted to,” she says. “And also, politeness and manners are the glue that hold society together.”
“I thought the glue that held society together was little white lies,” I say.
“We went to different finishing schools, then,” Thalia laughs. “What are they teaching you down here?”
“Mostly how to fix things with nothing but duct tape and fishing line while drunk on Bud Light,” I say, putting an extra twang into my accent. “It’s my understanding that the girls took a course in making flowerbeds out of tractor tires.”
“Practical,” she says, grinning. “Probably more practical than learning to curtsey or waltz.”
“You know those things?” I ask, opening my briefcase and finding a spot for the wine.
“I had to learn before my quince,” she says. “I’d need a refresher before I met the Queen, though. And I’ve got no clue how you make a tire into a flowerbed.”
“Fill it with dirt, then plant flowers,” I say.
“If you ever get tired of math, you could teach redneck finishing school,” she laughs.
I nod at the door, then follow her as she walks for it.
“I’ll consider it my backup plan,” I say, as I close the door behind us.
The hall is still lit but completely quiet, every other door long-since closed. Most nights there’s still someone here until late, but tonight’s Friday, so they’re all gone.
Yet again, I’ve found myself alone with Thalia. I don’t know how it keeps happening. It shouldn’t keep happening. I should be making sure that it doesn’t, but here we are.
“Can I walk you home?” I ask, checking that my office door is locked.
The question comes out of my mouth without me meaning to ask. It’s habit, borne of being mostly raised by my mother: I offer to walk women home, to see them to their cars, make sure they get where they’re going.
“I’m just going next door, to the Crown,” she says, pointing toward the library, though she doesn’t meet my eyes.
“On a Friday night?”
“I’ve got calculus homework to do,” she laughs, but she still doesn’t look at me. We walk through the empty hallway, down the stairs, toward the side entrance nearest the library, talking about nothing.
“You don’t have to walk me to the library, you know,” she says once we’re out of the math building, walking down the sidewalk between the two buildings.
“I’m going this way anyway,” I lie.
“I don’t think I’m going to meet a grisly end in the next five hundred feet,” she says, glancing down the sidewalk, dotted with other students. “And if I do, there’ll be witnesses.”
“You object to my presence?” I ask, dryly, both hands in my pockets as we go up a short set of stairs.
“No, just afraid I’m making your route home inefficient,” she says.
Another hundred feet, and then we’re there at the steps of the Crowninshield Library — aka The Crown — named after some colonial-era bigwig who probably donated a lot of money.
“I guess I trust you from here,” I tell her.
Thalia rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling.
“If I require assistance getting into the elevator I’ll call you,” she teases.
“Is this where I curtsey?”
“Thanks for the homework help,” she says. “And sorry I took your whole evening.”
“It was nothing,” I say, and I mean it. I’d teach her math all night if she wanted. “Come back if you’ve got more questions.”
“Sure,” she says.
We say goodbye. I turn away, something warm and fuzzy still glowing in the center of my body.
I haven’t gotten two steps before Thalia calls my name, and I turn back.
She’s still standing where she was, rooted to the spot, both hands on the strap of her bag. She’s holding her breath, lips slightly parted, like there’s something on the tip of her tongue.
“Thalia?” I say after a moment, stepping forward, but it breaks the spell. She blinks and breathes and her body relaxes and she looks away, then smiles.
“Nothing. See you Monday,” she tells me, then turns and climbs the steps into the library.
* * *
“How many onesies can an infant own?” Seth asks, holding up a tiny white garment.
“I suppose that depends on the wealth of the infant and the number of available onesies for purchase in the world,” I tell him. “But it’s a finite number, albeit a large one.”
Seth folds it in half, then carefully places it on one of the several piles next to him.
“The correct answer is so fucking many,” he says, half to himself. “And there’s another pile. How is there another pile?”
“We can switch if you want,” I offer.
We’re sitting on the floor of Daniel and Charlie’s living room. Next to Seth are three separate laundry baskets along with a pile of clean laundry, and in front of me is a mess of plastic and metal pieces that claim to be an infant swing.
On one hand, the swing does have instructions.
On the other, they’re a garbled mess that barely counts as English. I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes and I’ve put pieces together and then taken them apart about seventeen times.
“I’d rather fold laundry and complain about it,” he says, grabbing another onesie.
“Delightful,” I say, staring down at the instructions. They’re telling me to fit together a piece that looks like a fire hydrant, sort of, with a piece that looks a little like the letter F, only none of the pieces I have look anything like the drawing in the booklet and also, I’m starting to hate everything.
“Just wing it,” Seth says. “You’ve got a Ph.D., for crying out loud, it’s just a baby swing.”
“I can’t wing this,” I object.
“Of course you can,” he says, folding. “What could go wrong?”
“The swing falls apart and Thomas gets hurt?” I say, looking over at him, a piece in each hand. “There’s no speed control, so the swing launches him across the room and toward certain doom? I can’t be responsible for a baby launch, Seth.”
He grins.
“I’ll tell Daniel that I suggested it. We’ll share blame,” he says.
“You say that like you think I’ve forgotten The Skateboard Incident.”
“If you haven’t, you should have.”
“Never,” I tell my older brother, leaning over the useless instruction booklet again. “Never.”
I flip a page, carefully consider a few pieces, and then fit two of them together. It appears to be the right choice, though I honestly have no idea. I’ve never put a baby swing together before.
It’s closing in on ten o’clock Friday night, and the four peopl
e who actually live here are all asleep for now, which is probably a small miracle. Seth and I did the dishes and cleaned, and now we’re trying to accomplish a few more things before heading back to his place for the night.
“Are you really going to not tell me who you took to the hospital last weekend?” he asks, lifting a piece of fabric from the pile. “Also, what is this?”
I snap one more piece onto the first two and look over. He’s holding up something that’s blue with white clouds and looks like a wide T with a pocket at the bottom. I tilt my head, studying it.
“A baby hat?” I guess. “Maybe that part is a chin strap?”
“You mean the wings? These things?” he says, wiggling them. “They’re huge.”
“I don’t know,” I protest. “Thomas has a lot of hats.”
“Tell me who,” he says.
“Just a friend,” I say, turning back to the instructions.
Seth just sighs.
“If it were a friend, you’d tell me who,” he says. “Remember when you lost your virginity to Christine Schmidt your junior year and I drove you to buy more condoms and never told anyone? I’ve still never told anyone.”
“I can buy my own condoms now,” I say, dryly.
“And are you?” he asks, snapping a towel.
I decline to answer.
“If you won’t tell me, it’s someone I know,” he goes on, talking mostly to himself. “An ex you don’t want us to know you’re back with?”
I stop what I’m doing and look over at him.
“What?” he asks after a moment.
“Are you seriously asking me that question?” I say.
“We’re friends.”
“Is that why you’ve been celibate since she moved back?”
He freezes for a moment, holding a crib sheet with sleeping bears on it up, like he’s contemplating it. Then he puts it down, folds it, folds it again with the kind of exacting, studied movements that mean I just got to him.
“Who told you that?” he asks.
“It didn’t take a genius to figure it out,” I say, snapping another part onto the swing.