The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (42 page)

She laughs.

“Yeah, so there’s that. Just so you know. I’m coming around.”

“I know you are.”

“I love you. Who knows? Maybe I’m going to go buy a baby name book tonight.”

When she hangs up, she thinks it’s lovely how hard he is trying, and that she’ll be happy to see him again—just not yet. Not yet.

“Tony,” she says later that night.

“Hmmm?” He’s drowsing next to her in bed after painting her toenails, which she can no longer begin to reach. He made them a nice lavender color, he said. She insists she can’t see them.

“Do you think we’re having an affair?”

“Don’t know.”

“Because an affair usually means that one or both of the people is married. So I think we get off on a technicality, and we’re not.”

“But you’re engaged,” he says. “Wouldn’t you say that counts?”

“Yeah.” She sighs. “I guess it does.”

“Do you want this to be an affair?”

“I don’t know. The word is kind of sordid, isn’t it?”

“Sorted? Sorted into what?”

She hauls herself up close to him on the pillow. “Also, Jonathan bought a crib. Sold one of his collections and bought a crib. So there’s that.”

“Wow. He’s aces.”

“I think if I have to fill out a questionnaire about whether I’ve had an affair, I’ll say no, with an asterisk. And then if I have to explain, I’ll say I enjoyed a Peace Corps of the heart.”

He lifts his head up. “What kind of questionnaire makes you answer that?”

“You know. The kind you give yourself. When you think of all you did in life.”

“I’ve never given myself a questionnaire.”

“I know. I like that about you. You just do stuff. I’ve always got to think about it, analyze it, give it a name, and figure out why I did it.”

“So, if I may ask you: what does the crib have to do with the affair?”

“Who said it did?”

“Well, you told me both at the same time. So I think it does.”

“Hmmm. It makes it more … wicked?”

“It makes you feel guilty because a man is buying a crib for your baby, and you’re here in bed with me.”

“No!” she says. “Not at all. The guilt isn’t in that direction. Amazingly enough. I’m feeling guilty because one day in about a week, I’m going to say good-bye to you, and it’s going to be the hardest thing I ever did, because you are going to be here all alone, and I am at least going to have a man with a crib and then a new baby.”

They lie there for a moment, looking at each other. Then he says, “I’ll still have Milo, you know.”

The next morning, she fixes Soapie her favorite breakfast: a cup of green tea and a poached egg, a cinnamon roll, and a glass of Coke—yes, it’s the breakfast of somebody who doesn’t care anymore what makes sense—and she takes it into the den, where Soapie is in her recliner, her fleece throw over her lap. She’s staring out the window, watching the birds at the feeder.

“The cinnamon roll has all the sugar on one side, and none on the other,” says Soapie slowly. She’s staring at the roll as if it’s a curiously defective piece of art, not something to eat.

“Huh. Want me to spread it around a bit?”

“No. I don’t really care.”

Later Rosie will both want to remember and want to forget this day, but for now she sits perched on the side of the couch watching her grandmother’s face, and then looking down at the cinnamon roll, with its sugar perfectly centered all around the roll. Not defective. As soon as she gets Soapie fed, and when George comes down, she is going to go back upstairs and crawl back into bed with Tony.

“And the coffee is too hot.”

“There isn’t any coffee,” Rosie says. “It’s green tea, but I can put an ice cube in it.”

“Do I even like green tea?”

“You do. At least you said you do.”

“Green tea is a hoax. It’s that stuff they pick up after—using that machine thing? The mower?”

Rosie laughs. “A hoax tea made of grass clippings? It does taste that way sometimes,” she agrees. But Soapie is already looking at the cardinals at the feeder and tilting her head toward them, smiling. They talk about the birds—how the male and the female take turns pecking at the seeds, while the greedy squirrels sit on the ground, eating the husks that fall. Every now and then, one of the squirrels gets frustrated with waiting and figures a way to shimmy up the pole, using pure animal magic to scare the birds away and get the seeds.

The snow is crusted up on the pine tree branches. Soapie sees it. Then she says something Rosie can’t really hear, about Ruth the editor. Then something about Serena’s doll when she was a little girl. She loved that doll. A pair of sunglasses that Soapie used to have, with rhinestones in the corners. Cat glasses, someone called them.

“I don’t … want … today. Not the grass apple, not cinnamon roll.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Where’s George?”

“He’s upstairs.”

“Coffee? And no hot.” She puts a trembling hand to her head, squints.

“Sure. Do you want me to call George?”

Soapie doesn’t answer. She stares out the window.

“I’ll get him.” Rosie goes to the stairs and calls up, “George? George, you decent?”

He doesn’t answer right away, and then she hears the shower go on.

She goes back into the kitchen and calls back to Soapie, “I think he’s in the shower. Did you want me to bring you an ice cube?” There’s no answer, so she puts a piece of bread into the toaster for herself, and goes back into the den. Soapie is sitting in the same position as she was before, her head just slightly turned toward the window.

Rosie says, “He’s in the shower,” and goes over to her grandmother. “Soapie?”

There’s no answer.

She reaches over and touches her. “Soapie?” and that’s when she realizes that her grandmother is dead.

She puts her hand to her own chest.

Dead. Gone, just like that. Just sitting there in the chair, just the same as she was, only somehow … dead. So this can really happen, Rosie thinks, amazed: you can die suddenly, with no fanfare; as you’re sitting watching the outside, you can just make your exit, your heart beating its last, your last breath coming without any warning. A stroke, a heart attack—some interior explosion had stopped everything, and she is sitting there with her head leaning back against the cushion, her hair flowing out from its bun, her blue eyes staring straight ahead, her mouth slightly open.

Rosie softly cries out, “Oh!” And starts to cry. It’s a few
days before the scheduled nursing home move. That’s what she thinks of first, and then once she finishes thinking that thought, she thinks,
Well, good for you, Soapie. You never
did
intend to go to the nursing home, did you? You beat that deadline
. Which is a crazy thing to think, but there you go.

It all went so fast. Wasn’t that what Soapie had said, the night of the meltdown and the dancing?

It’s over. The person who had stayed with her throughout is gone, and it all went so fast. She reaches over and strokes her grandmother’s hand, holds it to her cheek and waits in that moment of in-between she knows so well, that moment when you wait just to see if the tears are going to come and how awful they’re going to feel.

Jonathan, as the fiancé of the bereaved, flies in the next evening, and she goes to pick him up at the airport. Outwardly, to the other passengers and their friends and families, she thinks that she probably doesn’t look like someone who has just lost a whole part of herself. She has lost not only her grandmother, but she’s lost the Peace Corps of the heart, and yet she probably looks like somebody who has everything to live for, heavy and careful with pregnancy. Her brown hair falls over her pale skin, and she is wearing light pink lipstick and a billowing maternity coat. She is waiting and then she is being spotted and kissed and hugged by a handsome man, a man who hurries toward her and tips her face up to his.

On the walk through the terminal, he tells her that January is one of the most common months for people to die. He Googled this fact. Then he tells her that, speaking just for himself, this death—regrettable but also inevitable, surely she will agree—is actually perfect timing because now she can come back with him before time runs out for her to be able to fly on an airplane. He tells her he misses her terribly and then says that San Diego is beautiful at this time of year. He bets she won’t even miss Connecticut at all.

They are walking through the terminal at Bradley International Airport in Hartford, and she is thinking that the overheated air is too dry and thin, that it actually hurts on her skin. Jonathan keeps looking at her. And then even in public, he stops walking and hugs her.

“You’re even bigger than you were three weeks ago,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s the idea, I guess.”

“Are you uncomfortable? All that extra blood volume weighing you down?” He says this while they’re waiting to cross the street to get to her car in short-term parking. It’s snowing lightly, and the flakes landing on his padded parka shoulders are like little stars. People are walking by, having conversations about their lives and where they parked the car and whether it will still be snowing when they get to Vermont, and all the ordinary things people talk about. Some people smile at her. They are thinking,
New baby
. They are thinking:
A couple reunited
.

But she is nearly eight months pregnant, and her story has come unraveled all of a sudden.

“What’s the matter?” he says.

“I just miss her,” she says.

“I thought we were talking pregnancy symptoms,” he says.

“Those are okay. Manageable,” she says. “It’s Soapie.”

“Look, she was a difficult woman, and just be glad you survived her,” he says. The light changes, they cross the street. He hoists his duffel bag into the car trunk when they get there, and he comes around to the passenger side and asks her for the keys so he can let her in. He’ll drive, he says.

She wonders what would happen if she just told him what’s been going on. If she could make him understand what she’s needed, and then what she’s taken for herself. Maybe he even has a right to know. Maybe it’s the kind of truth—like her mother’s suicide—that hurts but that, even so, has to be known by all affected parties.

She waits to see if she says anything, but then she’s not surprised to see that she doesn’t mention it.

“If there’s a silver lining,” he’s saying, “it’s that this way now we can go back together. I can help you pack up the rest of the house, if needed, after the funeral, and then we can fly together. I was worried about you having to do all that packing and then flying by yourself.”

She can’t tell him. It would needlessly hurt him.

“Yeah, okay,” she says. She closes her eyes and leans back against the seat. He turns on the radio after a while.

Tony told her this morning that he was going to go back to his apartment.

“Our two weeks,” she had said.

“We had what we needed,” he said. “Most people don’t get that much.”

When she gets back to the house, she knows George will be gone, too. It’s as though everybody fled, knowing that Jonathan was coming back into the picture, as if they’d only been serving as a placeholder for him all along. The house will be huge and lonely with just her and Jonathan there to fill it up.

Here’s where we made the spinach lasagna that time, here’s where we stood when I found out I was pregnant, here’s where I found Soapie on the floor for the first time, here’s where Tony and I made meatball sub love …

That night at dinner, Jonathan takes her hand across the table and looks into her eyes. “I’m very sorry,” he says. “If anything I’ve said has sounded like I don’t know what a huge loss this is for you, I’m truly sorry. I know that you and Soapie loved each other.”

She tears up.

“And I’m here to help you in any way I can,” he says. “I shouldn’t have rushed into talking about how you’ll come back with me. I mean, I hope you will. But I know you’ve got a lot of stuff to process. This can’t be easy.”

She wipes her eyes on her napkin. “I just didn’t see it coming,” she says. “She was eating her breakfast and complaining about everything, and I went back into the kitchen, and when I came back in the living room, she was just … dead. Gone.”