Ruby (23 page)

“It’s hard to believe he died the day after this,” Olivia said, looking down at a picture of David in khaki shorts, shirtless, standing in front of the house.

She touched that picture, too, her fingers remembering the feel of his ribs and skin and muscle, the way his hair grew coarser as it crept down his belly. And then she remembered all of it: the citrus smell he seemed to carry on him, the dimple in his chin, the lightning bolt–shaped scar that ran across one knee. If only she could remember the exact pitch of his voice, the rise and fall of his laugh, she would have him back again, even for this small moment.

“Olivia?” Winnie said, her voice soft.

Olivia closed her eyes, lost herself in these sensual memories. She ached for him, all of her, the way a person who has lost an arm or leg claims they feel pain in that missing limb. She imagined—no, she actually felt—the particular way it was to be in his arms, how her head settled in the crook between his shoulder and chest, that smell—limes, or orange blossoms?

“Olivia?” Winnie said again, louder.

Olivia wasn’t crying, but she trembled; all of her was trembling.

“Good idea,” he’d said. But it had been the worst idea she’d ever had.

Winnie and Ruby wrapped their arms around her, held her as close as they could. But she did not fit against them the way she had with David. She could not stop trembling for a very long time.

There was a storm that night.

Olivia listened to the trees scrape the windows, to the waves pounding the beach, to the wind howling. Beside her, Winnie slept, curled up in a tight ball, snoring. She heard Ruby snoring across the hall.

When lightning scratched the sky, Olivia got up. She was sore, as if she had been hurt somehow, bruised. Barefoot, she walked around the house, pacing, searching for something that she could not possibly find. Then more lightning flashes, and she saw all of her hats, left on the lawn to dry, sitting there, soaked.

Olivia ran outside, into the rain, and picked them up, crushing them to her.

“Happy birthday, man,” said a voice from the driveway.

It had that California accent that Olivia loved so much. She ran toward it.

“Oh, darling. I’m drunk and wet and lost without him,” Rex said, swaying before her in his leather jacket and faded jeans. “But I had to come. Took a bus all the way from Boston. Left the lighting to my assistant and drank an entire bottle of tequila. Well,” he said, rain dripping from his chin, “not quite an entire bottle.”

He held up what was left and Olivia took it from him.

“Have I ever been so glad to see you, Rex?” Olivia said.

She put the hats in her car and then sat on the wet grass in the rain with David’s best friend and drank a hot, heavy swallow, then another.

“Remember your cat? Arthur?” Rex said. He draped one arm over Olivia’s shoulder. “Now that was a cat.”

Olivia raised the bottle. “To Arthur,” she said.

Except for Winnie, there was no one she would like to be here with more than Rex. Happy, on her way to drunk, she sighed and leaned against him.

“To David,” Rex said.

They both took a drink and then sat watching the storm recede.

“I kept telling myself that when I got here, he’d be waiting. That all of this dead stuff was a joke,” Rex said.

“Don’t make me cry, okay? Promise me?” Olivia said.

“Shit, honey, I can’t promise you that.”

“Then let’s go walk on the beach.”

“A plan!” Rex said. “I always liked that about you.”

He pulled another bottle of tequila from his duffel bag and they walked arm in arm down the grassy slope to the beach. But they couldn’t get too far; they were too tired, too drunk. So they sat and watched the waves, not talking. Later, Olivia wondered if she had been surprised when Rex leaned over and kissed her or if she had known as soon as she saw him standing on her lawn that they would get to that point.

His face was scratchy from needing a shave. He tasted sour. But his kisses felt good, almost familiar, and she let him kiss her for what seemed a long time. She let him kiss her until she knew that if they didn’t stop, they would make love on this beach, both searching for David in the other. She knew that they wouldn’t find him.

Olivia pulled back and said, “Now I know.”

“Do you?”

“I know what it’s like to kiss my husband’s best friend.”

“Oh, honey,” Rex said, “I’m drunk and sad.”

Olivia stood and took off her wet shirt and shorts, pulling Rex to his drunken feet.

“Last one in is a rotten egg,” she said, and ran naked into the cold ocean. She heard the thump of Rex’s footsteps as he ran behind her, but she didn’t turn around or wait. Instead, she plunged in, headfirst, into the first wave that swept above her. She rode it into shore, until she felt sand in her mouth. David would be laughing to think she and Rex had made out, drunk on tequila, on the beach.

Floating, letting the waves carry her, Olivia stared hard at the starless sky; storm clouds still hung there, blue-black above her.

“Happy birthday,” she said into the salt air.

Somewhere beside her, she heard Rex say the same thing.

It was Winnie who insisted on taking Ruby with them to dinner. The three of them went to Providence, to the Pot au Feu, where Amy insisted Julia Child liked to eat. Winnie did bring a short black dress and high-heeled Mary Janes for Olivia. She even remembered the black panty hose. “God knows, I can’t wear them,” she said, tossing everything at Olivia. They sprayed themselves with Winnie’s too-expensive perfume and lathered pale lipstick on their lips.

So that by the time they arrived, and climbed the steps past the happily noisy bistro to the more expensive upstairs salon—“Go upstairs,” Amy had told Olivia. “Treat yourself”—Olivia felt like a new version of her old self. I am a person who can still look sexy, she thought. I am a person who carries sadness inside. Rex was gone before any of them woke up, and in a way it felt like a dream to Olivia that he had been there at all.

But those few kisses had awakened something in her. She surprised herself by smiling back at a middle-aged businessman who had smiled at her approvingly when she walked in.

Over salad Ruby said, “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten in such a fancy place.” Her voice was hushed, as if she were in church.

In this low lighting, her face looked less bloated and blotchy and more radiant, the way women wore pregnancy in movies. The way Winnie wore it. Ruby had borrowed Winnie’s black Capri pants, the waistband under her large belly, and one of David’s shirts. With her hair in a rhinestone barrette—also Winnie’s—and the pale lipstick, it was obvious to Olivia the pretty girl Ruby had been when Ben first saw her. The pretty girl she would be again in just a few weeks.

“Do you think David knows we’re here?” Olivia asked, her voice as hushed and reverent as Ruby’s. “Do you think he knows we’re celebrating his birthday?”

“Absolutely,” Ruby said. “No question. I think he’s like this big thing—a soul or whatever—and that he’s all around us, watching and grinning. Like a blob of positive energy.”

“That sounds like something David might have said,” Olivia said.

“You know what Ben says, the asshole?” Ruby said. “He says people are made of dreams and bones. Of course, he’s an Aquarius,” she added, as if that explained everything.

“No offense,” Winnie told her, “but that’s from a song. A kid’s song about planting a garden.”

Ruby blinked, startled. “You’re kidding. He stole that? From a kid’s song?”

“Well,” Winnie said. “It is in a song.”

“Maybe he never heard the song,” Ruby said hopefully.

After their dinners arrived, after Ruby gasped at how beautiful it all was and said that she had never tasted anything so spectacular, after Ruby made Olivia promise that she would bring Sage here, too—“You’ll come to the beach house weekends and bring him here for special occasions, right?” she said, dreamy-eyed, and Olivia said, “Even for not so special occasions”—after they’d eaten and ordered creme brûlée because it was David’s favorite dessert, Winnie said: “I think he’s up there celebrating his birthday, too.” She pointed to the ceiling and beyond. “What was David’s favorite thing in the whole world?” she asked. “That’s what you get to do in heaven on your birthday, I think. Your most favorite thing.”

Olivia smiled and sipped her wine. Then he is here, she thought, raising her wineglass slightly, because what she knew was that David’s most favorite thing was her.

O
LIVIA LOOKED AT
the room full of pregnant women, all clutching their partners’ hands, and was relieved that she and Ruby were not the only pair of women. In fact, of the ten pregnant women, four of them had female partners. She took comfort in this, as if she was part of a club of sorts. She took comfort, too, in the way that Ruby clutched her hand. “This makes it so real,” Ruby said to her.

Ruby was wide-eyed, staring openly at the other bulging stomachs, the odd shapes they took. Olivia noticed, too. When her sister, Amy, was pregnant with Matthew, their mother used to point out pregnant women in stores and restaurants and describe how they were carrying: “all in the front,” she’d say, or “low around the hips.” Olivia had not really paid attention then, but now she saw what her mother meant. Right across from her was a woman shaped like a barrel, then another who appeared to be straining over her high breasts and belly.

Although all of the pregnant women had attempted to look cute, with wide sleeveless blouses or maternity T-shirts, everything in baby colors—mint green or pale pink—and baby designs—rocking horses and bunny rabbits—they still looked hot and uncomfortable and too big for their bodies. Olivia peeked at Ruby, who was still carefully checking out the others, even muttering under her breath. At least in David’s black T-shirt and the stretch pants Winnie had left behind for her, Ruby looked less ridiculous than some of these women, even though her belly sometimes poked out, revealing a band of stretched flesh. Olivia was proud of her, and she gave Ruby’s sweaty hand a little squeeze.

The class that was about to begin, the one they were all waiting for so nervously, was named the Planned-Birth Class, which sounded ridiculous, especially considering that Ruby’s pregnancy, at least, was so unplanned. From the looks of the other young girl who sat in the corner chewing a hunk of hair and gripping her mother’s hand tightly enough to leave marks, there were other people here with equally unplanned pregnancies.

When the instructor arrived, everybody gasped a little. Maybe they, like she and Ruby, had expected an Earth Mother type, someone with long, unruly hair, unshaved legs, a gypsy skirt. Someone who looked like she’d had several babies at home in Oregon or Vermont, who would share a chant or odd birthing position that would make all of this easier. “Her name,” Ruby had said on the ride over, “will be Sarah—with an
h.
Or something else biblical. Naomi, maybe.”

Instead, the instructor was tall and thin—the word
lithe
came to mind—with stylishly short blond hair, a deep tan, and bright blue eyes. She had on a hot-pink Lycra minidress and high-heeled sandals.

“Hi,” she said, in such a bubbly voice that everyone eyed one another. They were big and hot and uncomfortable, these women. She sounded more like a flight attendant than a birthing teacher. “I’m Nikki, the instructor. It looks like you’re all in the right place.”

Even though everyone laughed politely, there was hostility in the air.

Nikki took off her sandals and sat down on one of the soft sofas. All of the pregnant women had rejected them. “Too hard to get out of,” Ruby had explained.

Ruby narrowed her eyes suspiciously at Nikki, who seemed to bounce into and out of the sofa with great ease before finally settling in its center.

“Okay,” Nikki said in her perky voice, “So who am I? I’ve taught this class for three years.” Then she added, “I’m an R.N. Studying to be a midwife.”

“Excuse me,” said a woman who looked older than Olivia. She had wiry salt-and-pepper hair, oversized glasses, and a stomach that was so oblong, it looked as if her baby were actually lying sideways. “I would feel more comfortable with someone who’s had real experience.”

Nikki kept grinning. “I’ve taught this very class for three years.”

“No,” the woman insisted, “I mean someone who has gone through this herself. Someone who’s had children.”

“Yes!” said another woman, this one as short and square as a Jeep. “Me, too.” Her husband had grease under his nails and in the lines of his hands, a mechanic’s hands.

Nikki smiled broadly, showing all of her dazzling white teeth. “Believe me,” she said, “I’ve been through this, too. I have three children, all delivered without any pain medication at all.”

As a group, everyone looked at her tiny body and then down at their own, miserably.

“Of course, you can get pain medication if you choose,” Nikki was saying. “But I think we can work on ways that will make that unnecessary. Breathing. Creative visualization. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

No one was really paying attention. The hostility in the air thickened. They all hated Nikki, that was for certain.

“I want my Sarah,” Ruby told Olivia as they filled out information cards. “Not Pamela Lee.”

“In a way, this is good,” Olivia said. “She represents something to look forward to.”

“I never looked like that before I got knocked up,” Ruby blurted, and across the room someone snickered.

Then Ruby added, “I think she’s lying. I don’t think she’s ever had a kid.”

“That would be unethical,” Olivia whispered.

“Ha!” Ruby said. “You think people aren’t unethical.”

They both watched Nikki leave the room to get a VCR; they were going to watch a film of real births.

“Maybe she’s all they could get,” Ruby said, worried. “I don’t even think she’s a nurse. Not a real one. She’s probably a nurse like my mother. An L.P.N.” Then she added, “A bedpan cleaner.”

Olivia had been so willing to accept Nikki’s credentials. Why would Ruby doubt the woman?

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Olivia said. But now Ruby had caused her to doubt this. How do you get to be fifteen and so wary of everything, of everyone? Olivia wondered.