The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (40 page)

She goes into the bedroom and takes out her cell phone and calls a cab. And then she goes to the kitchen, where Goldie has her hands plunged into a sink full of soapy water while she’s talking to Leena, who is leaning against the counter and smiling.

“Listen,” says Rosie in a low voice. “I don’t want to make a big deal of this, but I’ve really got to go. I’m so exhausted. I just get so tired now at the end of the pregnancy …”

“Oh, my dear!” says Goldie, and she turns off the running water and grabs for a dish towel. “Let me drive you!”

“No, no, no,” says Rosie. “I called a cab, and I don’t want anyone to know. I just want to leave quietly and not interrupt the party. I’m actually fine, just really tired.”

“But wait. You came with Tony, didn’t you? We should tell him …”

“No!” says Rosie, and something in her tone of voice makes both women just stop talking and stare at her. “No, it’s fine. Let him have a good time. He’s always having to quit doing fun things because of me.”

And then she just leaves, even though Goldie and Leena are bustling around her, packing up snacks and treats, suggesting alternatives for her. But she just kisses them both,
closes her eyes, touches her fingers to her lips and blows them a kiss, and slips out the back door into the night, where a warm cab is mercifully waiting in the driveway. She turns off her cell phone and gets in. It hurts—everything—hurts so much. And the worst of it is that she has no right to feel anything that she’s feeling.

She belongs to Jonathan, and he is patiently waiting for her so they can start their lives as parents.

She’s riding on a motorcycle with her hair all tangled up and blowing behind her, and she knows she’s not supposed to be doing this—it’s so unsafe to ride a motorcycle with an unborn baby on her
back
, but she’s doing it anyway, because there’s a fire where she’s coming from, and she’s got to get herself and the baby to safety. People are chasing her, telling her to stop, and she wants to turn and explain to them that she has to keep moving, don’t they see the danger, but for now she’s just got to keep going. She feels the baby kicking her, but somehow the baby has moved back to the front of her, thank heavens, only it’s kicking hard, making a noise with each kick like somebody knocking on something solid, and now it’s also talking to her. “Rosie! Rosie, can I come in?”

“Come
in
?” she wants to say to it. “But you’re already in!”

And then she opens her eyes in the darkness, and sees that the moon has made a parallelogram of silver on her bed. Her mouth feels thick, like her tongue doesn’t really fit in there anymore. And she’s not on a motorcycle, and that’s not the baby talking to her. It’s Tony. She can’t think of anything to do but get out of bed, make him stop talking in the hallway.

She opens her bedroom door, and there he is. The hall light is on behind him. He smells like snow and the outside and cookies. He just stares at her. “What the hell—?”

“What are you
doing
?” she says. She leans against the door jamb and starts to cry.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” he says angrily. “Why couldn’t you have told me you were leaving the party?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Like you cared anyway.”

His eyes widen. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw you. You were dancing and laughing—”

“I was dancing
and
laughing?” He looks at her closely. “Oh, Rosie, Rosie! Are you sure? Not just dancing, but laughing, too?”

She glares at him. He doesn’t even see that the blackness is filling her up.

“Listen, I expected to take you
home
. I didn’t realize I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone else while I was there.”

“That’s not it. Don’t be mean.”

“Well, what the hell? I go looking for you, and Goldie tells me that you’d left an hour ago. You couldn’t have even told me you needed to leave? Do you know how freaking worried I was?”

“Oh, that’s interesting right there. It took you an hour to realize I’d left?”

He shrugs at her.

“Forget it. I had to get out of there. And you didn’t seem like you’d miss me much.”

“What are you talking about? I called you like a million times.”

“I turned off my phone.”

“I see that. But why did you do that?”

“Just go away, Tony Cavaletti. It’s not any of your business why I do what I do. And it never was any of your
business, and I’m going to move to California soon anyway, and you and I aren’t going to see each other ever again, which is good. I can’t take it anymore.”

“Wait,” he says. “You can’t take what?”

“So just go away.”

“I will, but first you have to tell me what this is about.”

“No, I don’t. Just go.”

“I’m not going.”

She gathers herself up and yells as loudly as she can, “Get out of here!”

There’s a bump of some sort from Soapie’s bedroom, and then silence.

“Go! Go! Go!” she says. By now she’s crying so hard that she can’t see anything through the snot and the tears, except then she sees his face up close to hers, and he wraps his arms around her, and holds her to his chest. He guides her back into her bedroom and closes the door, and then just stands there holding her against him. His kisses, when they come, are so soft against her hair, and she can feel his heart thumping underneath his sweater—that nice red sweater that he wore on Christmas, which is obviously his best holiday attire, and she knows he dressed up tonight for her shower, too, and knowing that for some reason makes her want to run and scream and tear her clothes and kick the wall and throw the china out the window.

He doesn’t say
What’s the matter
, or
You’ve got to stop this now
, or
Just try to calm down
, or any of that stuff. She would bite him if he did, she knows she would. It’s just enough that she’s letting him hold her. If he so much as tightened his grip, she thinks she would start screaming again. But he doesn’t.

She says, “I don’t want you to love other people while I’m right there. All right?”

He kisses the top of her head. “You were jealous?” he says.

“No. Yes.”

“I don’t know why, but I find that kind of sweet.”

“Shut up. Can you just get me a tissue, and then will you lie down with me?”

He nods and walks her over to the dresser, where he leans over and grabs her a tissue, and then he walks her over to the bed, and they lie down. She feels him kick off his boots, hears them land on the floor with two thunks. She can tell by the sound that they landed and then fell over. The sheet is cool, and she tries to pull the blanket up over them, but it won’t come. Her heart hurts at that. He reaches down and untangles it and it falls over them so softly, with a poof of air. There’s a bright moon in the window—the same moon that was there the night he camped down below with Milo—and she stares at his face close to hers. She runs her finger along his jawline, feels his heartbeat just where his jawline meets that soft indentation, that unprotected little spot beneath his ear, soft and pulsing. He is perfectly made, full of life, and she is so broken and crazy right now, all jagged, red-hot edges.

“My mother killed herself,” she whispers, and places her fingers over his mouth.

Don’t say it’s okay. It’s not okay
.

“When I was three. She couldn’t stand being away from my father, raising me without him, so she left me,” she says. Her voice is very steady. “Stupid me, I believed all these years that somehow a building happened to fall on her head. But really she took her own life. She left me.”

He is quiet, kissing her fingers.

“I don’t know who I am,” she whispers. “I’m the person that everyone leaves, and I don’t know why. I’m not enough.”

“Oh, Rosie,” he says. “No, no, no. You are enough. You are beautiful and good—”

“Only Soapie has stayed,” she says. “Isn’t that ironic? The one person who stayed yelled at me all the time and didn’t share things with me, and lied to me about my mother.”

She takes her hand away from his face while she’s talking and starts unbuttoning her flannel pajama shirt without taking her eyes off his. He blinks in the silence. She says, “Help me take this off,” and he does, and when it’s gone, she presses against him. “I want to touch your skin,” she says, and lifts his sweater. He takes it all the way off, which means that he has to sit up for a moment, and she closes her eyes against the wretched aloneness when he leaves her for that moment, but then he is back, and there are their two bodies, skin to skin. He leans down and puts his mouth on her breasts, kisses her collarbone, strokes her shoulders.

This
, she thinks.
Now
.

She’s kind of terrified that in a moment he’s going to start asking her questions, like
Are you sure
, and
What are we getting ourselves into here
, and (the worst one of all)
Is this just because you’re upset?

But he just keeps kissing her slowly, his whole body a question:
Here? And here?

Yes.

Pants are next, tougher to manage. Her leggings need to be tugged, but he is up for the challenge, and then he takes off his jeans. She hears his keys jingling when he drops them on the floor. He kneels beside her and runs his warm, soft, big hands all over her, those hands she’s been staring at for months and wanting to feel touching her everywhere.

She feels beautiful underneath his touch, not ungainly, not swollen. Everywhere he touches her makes her body breathe its way into him. She reaches down and feels him respond to her. She’d forgotten what a rush of feeling all this could be, and when he enters her, first making sure she’s in
the right position so it won’t hurt her, she throws her arms around his neck and stops remembering anything else.

There is then the holy darkness moving in her. He looks into her eyes and she feels the shuddering build throughout her body, the heat spreading everywhere. He holds her as she loses her mind, kisses her face, buries himself in her hair. And then, afterward, they lie together, holding on just as tightly.

“Oh, my goodness,” she says when she can speak. She starts to cry again. He kisses her along her jawline, all the way along up to her hairline, and then down the other side, and then he takes care of the collarbone and both her arms down to every single metacarpal.

“Tomorrow,” she says, “I don’t want us to have a conversation about what all this means. Okay? Don’t say tomorrow that we shouldn’t have done this. And please don’t try to get me to talk about my mother, not yet. Just hold me. And if this seems like a lot of commands and rules and instructions, I’m sorry. It’s just that I got broken today.”

“No, you’re not broken,” he says, and kisses her hair. “You’re the real, perfect, beautiful you right now. And I love you.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t use the word
love
,” she says.

“I know I’m not that good with the words and all, but I don’t think there’s another one that does it justice.”

“So we won’t use words. That’s better anyway.”

He is a gift she is giving herself. A time out of time. And why not? Can’t you just have a time of wow? An interlude that has nothing to do with your so-called
real life
(she does the air quotes for herself) but is just a break from all that ordinary, rotten stuff?

Of course you can. She’s going to do the right thing eventually. She’s committed to all things that are good and important and citizenly in this world, and by God she is going to be an upstanding, ethical human being, and a
mother
and a
wife
, but not just yet.

For now, she is allowing herself a little vacation from what her real life is going to be, that’s all. Nothing serious. She doesn’t even have to feel guilty about it. What did the Cole Porter song say about this—something about “a bell that now and then rings”? Yes! This is a bell that has been unrung too long, and now that she is forty-four goddamned years old, it has finally started clanging away to anyone who will listen to it. But she knows all too well that it will go silent again.

Sometimes in that first week, watching Tony Cavaletti sleeping beside her, she knows exactly what he means to her. He is merely an infatuation, just somebody funny and fun and gorgeous and kind and gentle, and God knows he seems to have her number when it comes to sex—and what is so bad about having this in her life right now on a temporary, consenting-adults basis?

And then there are the other times. Times she gets a jolt right through the cerebral cortex, when she can’t look at his eyes looking back at her, or feel his hand touching hers, or hear the lovely, funny way he has of mispronouncing words, without wanting to just drag him off someplace forever. It sounds so ridiculous, but it’s as though his body is a magnet, and when she’s anywhere near him, she has to be even closer. She has never been like this before. She didn’t even
know
about this. She is in love, silly and ridiculous, crazy-mad love—the kind that everyone knows, from literature and the movies, is going to end badly.

Well, but she has outsmarted that. It’s going to end all right, but she knows exactly when. And it’s not going to end because of despair or a huge fight or any of those other endings you read about in Shakespeare or watch on soap operas: your duels and your middle-of-the-night recriminations. It won’t be heartbreak. It will be clean and simple, an inexorable path toward parting, known full well from the beginning.