The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (18 page)

But it would have been so nice to believe in her words,
she wants to tell him. This had been her fantasy, too, that one day she would simply be approached by a woman stepping out of the crowd—and why not the cashier at Kohl’s?—and the woman would smile at her and say, “Hi, Rosie, I’m your mama. I’ve been trying to find you for years.”

When she gets back to the room, though, Soapie has forgotten all about it.

Instead, she flutters her gnarled, big-knuckled hands over the bedspread, as if she’s trying to scoop up words and use them. She’s smiling, but it’s not her real smile. It’s as though somebody else is behind her eyes, somebody vague and uncertain.

Rosie sits next to her, holding her hand, long into the night, watching the flicker of the television set, and waiting for another bulletin about her mother. Tony and George come for a visit, pat everyone’s hands, say nice things, and leave. But Soapie just dozes, wakes up, and dozes again. So Rosie waits.

A woman is beaming and telling the television audience that she was forty-five when she had her twins. In vitro, but it all worked out fine. Easy C-section delivery, normal babies, everything perfect. Two adorable, towheaded moppets come out from behind the curtain, and the audience roars its approval and leaps to its feet. The mom’s face has broken into a million sunshine beams, and the host of the show, an Asian woman, dabs at her eyes.

Rosie, tearing up, too, wishes the television had a button that allowed you to get a true close-up. She needs to see
if the woman is exhausted. Can you see pain and suffering in her eyes, or is she really, truly happy that she had these babies? Maybe if Rosie Googles her name, she’ll find that the woman keeps a blog where she reveals the
real
truth:
My life is a living hell. I cry day and night, and my husband wants to leave me
.

Jonathan calls on her cell phone, and she takes the phone outside and down to the cafeteria to talk to him. It is midafternoon, and she, George, and Tony had been playing Scrabble in Soapie’s room, but Rosie is glad to get away. It kills her to see the blank, pleasant look on Soapie’s face as she watches them play without even once insisting that she wants to join in. So much territory has been lost. Rosie even misses Soapie’s cheating and the way she used to knock the board over if she hated her letters.

“Hullo,” Jonathan says. “So here’s the latest. You know those little cards that museums have that tell you all the historical features you’re looking at?”

“The what?” She squints at the sun coming through the atrium windows. Around her, people in scrubs are carrying trays to tables.

“The cards. Did you ever really notice those?”

“Oh. Yeah. I guess so.”

“I’m spending my days writing those now. I love this job!”

“Well,” she says. “That’s nice.” She feels queasy from all the food smells around her, so she sits down in an orange plastic chair and contemplates the crumbs left on the table.

“This is really going to be a freaking teacup museum!”

“That’s great,” she says. “I already knew it was going to be a museum.”

She means that she knew it was a museum because she’s heard little else from him for two months now—from the middle of May until now, nearly the end of July—but he takes
it to mean that she’s always believed in him and the teacups. He thanks her for that.

Then she tells him about Soapie’s broken hip and the low sodium, and how it looks like she’ll have a long stint in rehab. He listens and then says that he knows this is hard, but it’s the way things are going to go. Sad to say, but she’s not long for this world, most likely.

“I’ll tell her you said hello and sent your best,” she says coldly.

“No, no. Did that sound awful on my part? I didn’t mean it to. But, babe, she’s nearly ninety. People don’t last much longer than that, especially when they have a broken hip. Me, I’d be thrilled to get to that age.”

“So you’re saying she should be so busy being grateful she got old that she shouldn’t feel bad that she hurts and that she’s confined to bed all the time and can’t live her life?”

“I’m just
saying
that it’s
realistic
to think—” he starts, and then he sighs and stops talking. “I’m sorry. I’m being horrible, aren’t I? This is your grandmother, and she’s suffering. Please tell her I love her and I hope she gets better.”

She’s taken off guard. “Well, okay, I will,” she says.

“I’m working on not being such a negative asshole,” he says cheerfully. “Public relations 101: don’t tell people they should be happy with their lot in life when they’re not.”

“Well—”

“Like next time, when you and I go to get married? Even if there are a thousand teacups in a flood in Texas, and even if they all need saving—I’m going to get married to you
before
I go to pick up the teacups.”

“Ha,” she says.

“And, if you sprain your ankle, I won’t say that you can just wear any old shoes to get married in when you wanted your red boots,” he says.

She’s quiet.

“Even if I don’t see the point of the red boots, they mean something to you, and I should accept that.”

“Have you figured anything out about the oven?” she teases.

“No. A dirty oven is an abomination and is worth nothing.”

For one tiny moment, perhaps a fourth of a nanosecond, she toys with the idea of telling him about the pregnancy, but then she knows it would be the wrong thing. She has to just do what she needs to do, she has to endure the fear and the dread all by herself; she doesn’t think she could bear hearing his panicky voice, the resounding
NO
he reserves for anything that might be risky.

“I really do love you,” he says before they hang up.

“Me, too, you,” she says, which is what they always used to say to each other, back when he used to refer to the two of them as a couple known as “Rosiethan.”

They were like Bennifer or Brangelina, he had said.

But that was a long time ago. He probably doesn’t even remember.

Little losses everywhere. And some too big to even imagine.

“Okay, let’s review,” says Tony on Thursday night, the night before the “procedure” itself. She had seen the doctor the week before and had the pregnancy confirmed and the date set for the abortion. And now she just has to get through one more night of waiting.

It’s beastly hot outside, and Tony’s just come home from
fertilizing the rosebushes of everybody Soapie knows, he says. He’s taken a shower and put on nonsweaty clothing and come back downstairs with his hair all slicked down and his Red Sox cap on backward as usual. Rosie is frightened and anxious—no, she’s
beyond
frightened and anxious. She’s become mentally ill, sitting there huddled in the living room, with only one lamp on, and even that one lamp giving off only the most depressing, pale puddle of light. He gets a bag of potato chips and brings it in and holds it out to her.

She shakes her head.

“No, you gotta eat salt. If what happened to your grandmother has taught us anything, it’s that salt is very important.”

She doesn’t think that salt intake has anything to do with what’s wrong with Soapie, but potato chips are good, so she takes a handful and he goes and sits down on the ottoman across from her and watches her. He has a way of sitting with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands dangling down, and his back hunched over that makes him look as though he’s about to be spring-loaded into the air.

“God, it’s dark in here,” he says. “Can I turn on another light?”

“I don’t care.”

He doesn’t move. “Ohhhh. You’re having a really hard time, huh?”

“I’m scared out of my mind.”

“Yeah. Listen, about that, can we just have a quick review of the facts as we now know them? Could we do that?”

“What facts?”

“The fact that you are currently pregnant, for one. And second, you’re hormonal as all hell while you try to make the hardest decision of your life.”

“I made the decision, and it wasn’t that hard.”

“Did you? I wonder,” he says. “I think you have a whole lot of mixed feelings, and I think you should know that if you want the baby, it’s not too late.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” she says. “If things were different, if I were younger, if I were married, if I hadn’t been so screwed up in childhood, if I’d saved up more money …”

“That’s just the fear talking.”

“Well, so what? The fear is real. Just give it up, Tony. I don’t know how to do it. When other little girls were playing house and rocking baby dolls, you know what I was doing? I was holding séances and trying to talk to my dead mother. I didn’t want to have a baby. I wanted to
be
the baby.
I
wanted to be the one being taken care of.”

“Maybe you have to give yourself some credit for taking care of
yourself,”
he says.

“But I didn’t. Look at me! My life is a mess. I tripped and hurt my ankle so I left the man I love, all so I could stay here with Soapie, who
then
got seriously hurt because I wasn’t home and watching out for her, because I was out with my
friends
trying to have some fun, which I did not deserve to have anyway—and then I find out that because I was so stupid, I got pregnant,
and
all my friends with kids all have regular, great lives, and I never even owned a house, or a new car even. I don’t do things the right way, don’t you get it? I need somebody competent to move into my brain and take over. I need a brain transplant at the very least.”

“Whoa. If I could just interrupt for a minute, I’d like to say that you do not need a brain transplant. That guy left
you
. Maybe it’s just me, but I myself would not have gone to California leaving behind the woman I love who couldn’t come with me right then for whatever reason. The guy’s a moron.”

“I made him go. Also, he’d rented the truck already.”

“
And
I don’t think your job was ever to keep your grandmother from falling down every single time,” he says. “How you gonna do that, huh?”

“But I wasn’t even here—and I stayed behind specifically so I could keep an eye on her, and then I wasn’t here when she needed me the most. She could have bled to death here.”

“So all this means in your head that you can’t have a baby? Are you some kind of superhero that you always gotta save everybody all the damn time?” He shakes his head. “You think anybody on earth knows more about it than you do? People figure it out as they go along. Nobody’s got some magic ability to know what they’re gonna do.”

“But I’m old. My eggs are probably like those dried-up eggs you’d buy from Ocean State Job Lot in the bargain bin.”

“Lots of people are old when they have a baby. And sometimes they’re too young, or too broke, or too busy, or too sick. But they do it, and sometimes it works out great.”

“How old are you?” she says.

“I’m thirty-three.”

“Well, see, there you go. I’m forty-four, and when my baby is fifteen years old, I’ll be sixty.”

“Yeah, you will.”

“And Jonathan and I agreed we wouldn’t have children.”

“Yeah, that, too.”

“And when Greta had her first baby, she wouldn’t even let me go near the kid by myself, because everybody could see that I dropped things all the time. My best friend, and
she
even knows I don’t know what I’m doing.”

He puts his head in his hands and then takes off his cap and rubs his hair up and down, like he’s trying to remove something that’s stuck to it. When he stops, he just looks at
her. “Greta is sorry about that. You don’t drop things. You take care of things.”

“You don’t even know Greta.”

“But I know you.”

She starts to cry. “I can’t do it, Tony. I have a bad track record. I do break things. Jonathan wouldn’t even let me hold his teacups, and then he met Andres Schultz, and he let him take them out of the boxes first thing. Ten minutes in our apartment, and Andres is holding the teacups.”

“Rosie, you are making me so tired. Let’s get some dinner so you can shut up while you’re filling your pie hole. I’m not trying to talk you into anything. Okay?”

“Okay, but you are ignoring the fact that babies have breakable parts, and then they grow up and they can get ruined so easily,” she says. She gets up and follows him into the kitchen. “People can be mean just by accident, and then there are bullies who are mean on purpose, and you said it yourself—there’s no way to protect people and keep them safe. And why do I want to do that to somebody else? I would just be so hopeful that this little kid could have a good life, and I couldn’t stand it if anybody hurt it. And
everybody
would hurt it, Tony. You know that’s true. Look at your own little boy, how he can’t be with you, and you don’t get to see him grow up every single day. How do you bear it, Tony, when something bad happens to him and you’re not there to help him? How does
he
bear it? How do you let him have a broken heart about it?”