Maybe in Another Life (22 page)

She brings it over, and I skooch myself closer to the edge of the bed.

“Can you pull the railing down?” I ask her. “It’s that button there, and then you just press down.”

She’s got it.

“Now, just move the wheelchair to the side, just to the . . . yeah.”

I swing my legs down off the bed.

“Sorry, one last thing. Can you just grab me around my waist? I can do this. I just need a little bit of help.”

She grabs me under my arms. “Ready?” she says.

“Yep!” I say, and at the same time Gabby lifts me, I push myself up.

It’s not graceful. It’s actually quite painful, very noisy, and I end up with my ass half hanging out of my gown, but I’m in the seat. I’m mobile.

“Can you . . .” I say, gesturing toward the half of my gown.

“Oh, right,” Gabby says, and she moves it as I try to lift myself just a little to get situated.

“Thanks,” I say. “Now, can you take my morphine bag and put it on my chair here?”

She does.

“Ready?” I ask her.

“Ready,” she says.

“Oh!” I say, right before I start to push. “Do you have dollar bills?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I think I have one or two. Why, are we going to a strip club?”

I laugh as she grabs her purse.

And then we are off.

I see Deanna in the hallway, and she tells me not to go too far. I lead us down the hallway and to the right, just as Henry led me the other day.

“Do you have a favorite movie?” I ask Gabby. If I had to guess, I’d say her favorite movie is
When Harry Met Sally . . .

“
When Harry Met Sally . . .
” she says. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know what my favorite movie is,” I say.

“Why does that matter? Lots of people don’t have a favorite movie.”

“But, like, even for the purposes of the conversation, I can’t just
pick
one. I can’t just decide on a movie to say is my favorite.”

“I hope it isn’t news to you that you’re indecisive.”

I laugh. “Henry says that you don’t need
the
answer. You just need
an
answer.”

“Henry, Henry, Henry,” Gabby says, laughing at me. We come to an intersection in the hallway, and I veer left. I’m pretty sure the vending machines are to the left.

“Hardy-har-har, but I’m asking an honest question,” I tell her. I’m still pushing myself down the hall. I’ve still got the strength to keep going.

“What are you actually asking me?”

“Do you think it’s true that you don’t need the perfect answer but just, you know,
an
answer?”

“To your favorite movie, yes. But sometimes there is only one answer. So I don’t think this is a universal philosophy.”

“Like what?”

“Like who you marry, for one. That’s the biggest example that comes to mind.”

“You think there is only one person for everyone?”

“You don’t?”
The way she asks me this, it’s as if it has never occurred to her that I might not. I might as well have said, “You think we’re breathing oxygen?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I know I did think that at one time. But . . . I’m not sure anymore.”

“Oh,” she says. “I guess I never considered the alternative. I just assumed, you know, God or fate or life or whatever you want to call it leads you to the person you were meant to be with.”

“That’s how you feel about Mark?”

“I think Mark is the person life led me to, yeah. He’s the only one for me. If I thought there was someone else better suited for me, why would I have married him? You know? I married him because he’s the one.”

“So he’s your soul mate?”

She thinks about it. “Yes? I mean, yeah. I guess you’d say that’s a soul mate.”

“What if you two end up getting divorced?”

“Why would you say a thing like that?”

“I’m just asking a hypothetical. If there is only one person for everyone, what happens when soul mates can’t make it work?”

“If you can’t make it work, you aren’t soul mates,” she tells me.

I hear her out. I get it. It makes sense. If you believe in fate, if you believe something is pushing you toward your destiny, that would include the person you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life with. I get it.

“But not cities,” I say.

“Huh?”

“You don’t have to find the perfect city to live in. You just have to find one that will work.”

“Right,” she says.

“So I can just pick one and leave it at that,” I say. “I don’t have to test them all out until something clicks.”

She laughs. “No.”

“I think I’ve been jumping from place to place thinking that I’m supposed to find the perfect life for myself, that it’s out there somewhere and I have to find it. And it has to be
just so
. You know?”

“I know that you’ve always been searching for something, yeah,” Gabby says. “I always assumed you’d know it when you found it.”

“I don’t know,
I’m starting to think maybe you just pick a place and stay there. You pick a career and do it. You pick a person and commit to him.”

“I think as long as you’re happy and you’re doing something good with your life, it really doesn’t matter whether you went out and found the perfect thing or you chose what you knew you could make work for you.”

“Doesn’t it scare you?” I ask her. “To think that you might have gone in the wrong direction? And missed the life you were destined for?”

Gabby thinks about it, taking my question seriously. “Not really,” she says.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess because life’s short? And you just kind of have to get on with it.”

“So should I move to London or not?” I ask her.

She smiles. “Oh, I see where this is going. If you want to go to London, you should. But that’s as much as you’ll get from me. I don’t want you to go. I want you to stay here. It rains a lot there. You know, for what it’s worth.”

I laugh at her. “OK, fair enough. We have a bigger problem than London anyway.”

“We do?”

“We’re lost,” I say.

Gabby looks left and then right. She can see what I see. All the hallways look the same. We’re in no-man’s-land.

“We’re not near the vending machines?” she asks.

“Hell if I know,” I say. “I have no idea where we are.”

“OK,” she says, taking hold of my chair. “Let’s try to get ourselves out of this mess.”

G
abby insisted on going to work today. I tried to persuade her to stay home, not to put extra pressure on herself, but she said that the only way she could feel remotely normal was to go to work.

Ethan called me twice yesterday, and I didn’t call him back. I texted him telling him that I couldn’t talk. I fell asleep last night knowing I’d have to face him today. I mean, if I keep avoiding him, he’ll know something is up.

So I woke up this morning, resolved to work this out. I called Ethan and asked if he was free tonight. He told me to come by his place at around seven.

Which means I have the rest of the day to call Michael. I want to have answers for Ethan’s questions when he asks. I want to have all of my ducks in a row. And this is a big duck.

I take a shower. I take Charlemagne for a walk. I stare at my computer, reading the Internet for what feels like hours. When it’s six o’clock in New York, when I know Michael will be leaving work, I pick up my phone. I sit down on my bed and dial.

It rings.

And rings.

And rings.

And then it goes to voice mail.

On some level, I’m relieved. Because I don’t want to have to have this conversation at all.

“Hi, Michael. It’s Hannah. Call me back when you have a minute. We have something we need to talk about. OK, ’bye.”

I throw myself backward onto the bed. My pulse is racing. I start thinking of what I’ll do if he never calls me back. I start imagining that maybe he will make this decision
for
me. Maybe I’ll call him a few times, leave a few messages, and he will just never call back. And I will know that I tried to do the right thing but was unable to. I could live with that.

My phone rings.

“Hannah,” he says, the moment I say hello. His voice is stern, almost angry. “We’re done. You said so yourself. You can’t call me. I finally have things back on track with my family. I’m not going to mess that up again.”

“Michael,” I say to him. “Just hold on one minute, OK?” Now I’m pissed.

“OK,” he says.

“I’m pregnant,” I tell him finally.

He’s so quiet I think the line has gone dead. “I’ll call you back in three minutes,” he says, and then he hangs up.

I pace around the room. I feel a flutter in my stomach.

The phone rings again.

“Hi,” I say.

“OK, so what do we do?” he asks. I can hear that he’s in a closed space. His voice is echoing. He sounds as if he’s in a bathroom.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I can’t leave my wife and children,” he says adamantly.

“I’m not asking you to,” I tell him. I hate this conversation. I have been working to put this behind me, and now I’m right back in the middle of it.

“So what are you saying?” he asks.

“I’m not saying anything except that I thought you should know. It seemed wrong not to tell you.”

“I can’t do this,” he says. “I made a mistake, being with you. I can see that now. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have done it. It was a mistake. Jill knows what I did. We’re finally in a good place. I love my children. I cannot let anything ruin that.”

“I’m not asking anything of you,” I say to him. “That’s the truth. I just thought you should know.”

“OK,” he says. He is quiet for a moment and then, timidly, asks me what he’s probably wanted to ask me since I brought this up. “Have you considered . . . not having the baby?”

“If you’re going to ask me to have an abortion, Michael, you should at least say the word.” Such a coward.

“Have you considered having an abortion?” he asks.

“No,” I tell him. “I’m not considering having an abortion.”

“What about adoption?”

“Why do you care?” I ask him. “I’m having the baby. I’m not asking for your money or your attention or support, OK?”

“OK,” he says. “But I don’t know how I feel about having a baby out there.”

These are the sorts of things that people should really be thinking about before they have sex, but I’m one to talk.

“Well, then, step up to the plate and deal with it or don’t,” I say. “That’s your business.”

“I suppose it’s no different from donating sperm,” he says. He’s not talking to me. He’s talking to himself. But you know what? I don’t want him to help me raise this baby, and he doesn’t want to help me. Clearly, he’s just looking to absolve himself of any guilt or responsibility, and if that’s what it takes to make this simple, then I will help him do just that.

“Think of it like that,” I tell him. “You donated sperm.”

“Right,” he says. “That’s all it is.”

I want to tell him he’s a complete ass. But I don’t. I let him tell himself whatever he needs to. I know that this baby could ruin his family. I don’t want that. That’s the truth. I don’t want to break up a family, regardless of who is right and wrong. And I don’t need him. And I’m not sure that my child is better off having him around. He hasn’t shown himself to be a very good man.

“OK,” I say.

“OK,” he says.

Just as I am about to get off the phone, I say one thing, for my unborn kid. “If you ever change your mind, you can call me. If you want to meet the baby. And I hope that if he or she wants to meet you one day, you’ll be open to it.”

“No,” he says.

His answer jars me. “What?”

“No,” he says again. “You are making the choice to have this baby. I do not want you to have it. If you have it, you have to deal with the child not having a father. I’m not going to live my life knowing that any day a kid could show up.”

“Classy” is all I say.

“I have to protect what I already have,” he says. “Are we done here?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “We’re done.”

W
e are lost in the maternity ward, and we can’t seem to find our way out. First, we were stuck in the delivery department. Now we’re outside the nursery.

The last thing I want to do right now is look at beautiful, precious babies. But I notice Gabby is no longer behind me. She’s staring.

“We are going to start trying soon,” she says. She’s not even looking at me. She’s looking at the babies.

“What are we going to start trying to do?”

She looks at me as if I’m so stupid I’m embarrassing her. “No, Mark and I. We’re going to try to have a baby.”

“You want to have a kid?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I was going to ask what you thought when you got here, but I didn’t get a chance before the accident, and . . . and then, when you woke up . . .”

“Right,” I say. I don’t want her to say it out loud. The inference is enough. “But you think you’re ready? That’s so exciting!” My own ambivalence about a baby doesn’t, for a minute, take away from the joy of her having one. “A little half Gabby, half Mark,” I add. “Wow!”

“I know. It’s a really exciting thought. Super scary, too. But really exciting.”

“So you’ll be . . . doing the ol’ . . . actually, is there even a popular euphemism for trying to have a baby?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “But yes, we’ll be doing the ol’ . . .”

“Wow,” I say again. “I just can’t believe that we are old enough to
the point where you’re going to actually
try
to get pregnant.”

“I know,” she says. “You spend your whole life learning how
not
to get pregnant, and then, one day, you suddenly have to reverse all of that training.”

“Well, this is awesome,” I say. “You and Mark are so good together. You’re going to be great parents.”

“Thank you,” she says, and squeezes my shoulder.

A nurse comes up to us. “Which one are you visiting?” she asks.

“Oh, no,” Gabby says. “Sorry. We are just lost. Can you point us back to general surgery?”

“Down the hall, take your first right, then your second left. You’ll see a vending machine. Follow that hall to the end, take a left . . .” The directions go on and on. Clearly, I took us much farther away than I meant to.