The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (45 page)

“Well … hell,
yeah
!” he says.

“Get this. Their idea of interesting is to photograph their lunch and put it on Facebook.”

“Oh wow, do you think the world can handle a photo of my grilled cheese and arugula sandwich?”

Oh, she loves this. The sound of his voice, even the way he eats those stupid sandwiches. She’d forgotten about his unlikely sandwiches. Let’s see, she says, there was the peanut butter and olive sandwich, and wasn’t there something with tomato sauce and something else?

“Raw onion,” he says. “As you well remember. And sometimes I added Spam.”

“Please,” she says. “I’m pregnant. I have a delicate constitution.”

“How’s Beanie the prizefighter fetus?”

“Still working out. Yesterday I’m positive she was doing lunges and squats. Today she’s taking a break. She must know I’m painting her room.”

She walks around the apartment while she talks to him, holding the phone close to her ear, laughing and talking. A half hour goes by. Forty-five minutes. She starts dinner, still on the phone. She tells him she’s bigger than a house now, that her new doctor thinks she should be induced if she goes more than ten minutes beyond her due date, and also she
can barely fit behind the wheel of the car anymore, and he insists she send him a photo of herself with her phone, and so she makes a face in the picture and pokes her belly out, and then he sends one of himself making the same face and with his flat belly thrust toward her.

Before they hang up, he says, “It’s just good to talk to you. I’m glad you’re fine. J-man okay?”

“He’s good,” she says. “Yeah, everything is great.”

“That’s wonderful.”

They don’t say they’ll keep in touch. They just click off, and that’s that.

“Okay, let me explain the importance to you of the cleansing breaths,” he says the next day. He has called her. “Because I think you’ve taken this part of labor and delivery way too cavalantly.”

“Too
what
?” She falls over, she is laughing so hard.

“I’ll just wait until you’re finished laughing at me.”

“I’ll
never
be finished laughing at you.”

“Maybe a cleansing breath would be helpful to you right now.”

Two days later:

“Milo told Annie he wants to live with me. I guess things aren’t so great over there. He feels shut out.”

“Jesus. What did Annie do?”

“Let’s just say I’m looking for a bigger place.”

“For you and him or for all of you together once again?”

Long silence. “Is it possible for you to go and wash out your mouth with dish deterrent? I am not living with those women ever again.”

“Did you say dish
deterrent
?”

“See how nice I am to you? I give you these things just so you can use them to make fun of me.”

“Yeah, you’re a prince. Listen, I know this phone call is all about you and your problems and not about mine, but can you tell me one more time how to do the cleansing breaths?”

“What is
up
with you with this breathing? Am I going to have to fly out there and birth this baby with you?”

“Would you please?”

A week later:

“Tomorrow is the due date. So if I don’t go into labor … yikes. I go to labor prison.”

“You will.”

“Can you promise?”

“Send me another picture of you, and I’ll do a magic spell on it.”

“Okay.”

“Also, that woman at Edge of the Woods. The one you tried to fix me up with. She had her baby two days ago.”

“Ah. Leila. How nice. So are you two dating, or what?”

“Yeah, that’s right. We’re getting married next week. Her goon of a boyfriend said if I can get the two mommies to join us, we can all make a nice happy family.”

“Nice one.”

“Oh. And I saw George. He’s aged about a hundred years, but he says he’s fine.”

“Oh, Jonathan’s coming in. Gotta go. I’ll call you on the other side of the delivery.”

“Yeah. And listen, good luck. Okay? Cleansing breaths … one, two, three … that’s all there is to it. It centers you. That’s why! Okay, I’ll hang up. Bye. I … I love you!”

She says, “Yes. Good-bye.”

She wakes up in a puddle, having dreamed that she was jumping in a lake. It’s 4:33 in the morning, and she’s not in a lake after all; her water has broken. She lies there, soggy, smiling in the darkness, feeling a thrill that she decides is 70 percent excited/happy and 28 percent terrified, and probably 2 percent undecided. It’s her due date, and this is one prompt little baby.

She reaches over and nudges Jonathan. It’s time, she tells him, and he instantly springs awake. He’s done his reading, has crammed for the final exam, he told her last night. He’s ready.

“Okayyyy,” he says. “So she’s decided to be a nocturnal sort. And a wet one! It’s going to be this way, is it?” He leans over and turns on the lamp and gets his glasses and looks at her through his sleep-encrusted eyes. “So. You’re really going to do this thing, huh?”

“I think at this point I don’t have much choice.” Then a contraction hits her, and she says, “Aaughhh.”

“That’s a funny look you just got on your face,” he says.

“I think I have to breathe.”

“Wait. I should get up and run around the room and pack a bag and stub my toe on the bed, shouldn’t I? Isn’t it my right as an almost-father?”

“Please,” she says. “Don’t make jokes, and don’t do Dick Van Dyke. Can’t we be calm? Where are the lollipops and tennis balls?”

Another contraction hits. Now she sees what she’s up against, and this is just the early stage. She pulls herself up and remembers that there’s a remedy for this pain. She takes a long, slow, deep breath—and after the contraction is over, she takes off her wet nightgown, and Jonathan pulls the mattress off the bed and removes the sheets. She breathes through the next contractions in the bathtub. He puts on the CD of Paul Cardall they’d chosen for its piano music, soothing and calm.

“Can you light some candles so we can—oh my God!”

“Breathe,” he says. He’s getting it. “So much better to breathe than to say
oh my God
.”

“You have to help! You’re supposed to be guiding me! Do you even know about the cleansing breaths?” she says, her eyes closed. The light is too bright, bright like the pain. “I have to do … cleansing breaths.”

“Sure. Those are breaths you’re doing in the bathtub,” he says.

“Go stub your toe on the bed, why don’t you?”

“That’s not very nice.”

When they get to the hospital, the nurse checks her and says she’s four centimeters dilated—four out of ten. Best not to get in the bed at this stage, the nurse says. Why don’t they walk? So she and Jonathan walk through the corridor on the labor and delivery floor, going back and forth again and again. The nurses seem to find them amusing, and Rosie can only imagine how they must seem—like the oldest couple giving birth ever to be seen in San Diego. She’s bent over and moaning, and Jonathan, the befuddled labor coach,
looks like an absentminded professor with his glasses on the end of his nose, and his graying buzz cut and polo shirt. He has to keep flipping through the cheat sheets, and she has to keep pointing things out to him between the contractions. He forgot, he says mournfully, to brush up on the stages of labor. “What’s transition again?” he whispers to her.

Still, she’s okay. She doesn’t ask for an epidural, which seems to surprise the nurses. For a first-timer, they tell her, she’s doing Very Well. And she’s making progress. With each new exam, they tell her she’s dilating more and more.

At about seven centimeters, though, her labor slows inexplicably. “What if the two of you get in the whirlpool bath?” the nurse asks, and Jonathan blanches. But he gets in with her, in his underwear, and Rosie lies back against him, breathing with him through the contractions. And sure enough, when she gets out, labor picks up in intensity.

She’s in transition, the toughest part, the nurse tells Jonathan. Rosie, dazzled with pain, hears the nurse showing him how he could use the tennis balls to rub her back, and he’s laughing as he says, “Oh,
this
is what those were for?” If she didn’t hurt so much, she would ask him if he honestly thought they’d be playing catch in the labor room.

He turns on some music for her and gets her lollipops. But it’s too late for those. She tells him she’s scared, but she can barely get the words out because the contractions are coming so fast now. The edges of the room seem bright with shards of pain.

“You’re doing great,” he says, but he looks bewildered and overtired. They forgot to pack him anything to eat, and now it’s way past lunchtime. The nurse urges him to go to the candy machine, but he won’t go. Rosie closes her eyes, says, “Hee hee heee hee,” to stop the world.

“I have to stay here,” she hears him say. “I haven’t been
much help during the pregnancy. I think that I didn’t even see her enough that my testosterone levels went down enough. I probably still have, like, at least ninety-five percent of what I started with.”

It’s all crazy at the end, the way these things are. Pushing and urging and promises made, the calm voice of the doctor instructing her when to push and when to breathe, Jonathan mopping her forehead, someone else supporting her back. She refuses the mirror at first, doesn’t want to see anything gory, even though the nurse says she shouldn’t miss this. So she looks—this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment, after all—and she sees the baby’s head emerging, little black squiggly lines of damp hair. Everything feels surreal, like the world is going in and out of focus.