The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (46 page)

The doctor says she’s doing fine, just to give him one nice, steady push, and she does that, and then there is a whoosh, and suddenly he has a baby in his hands, a rosy-grayish baby with tiny little fists by her face and a circle of dark, damp hair and a bunch of white creamy stuff all over her. Then Rosie, who is shivering, can see him stroking the baby’s back, and then the baby lets out a cry. A dim, lovely cry, not scared, just
I’m here
.

“An announcement from Beanie,” says Jonathan in awe, and Rosie loves him for this, and she starts to cry and she sees that his eyes are filled with tears, too, as he takes her hand.

In fact, she loves everyone there. Tears are streaming down Rosie’s face, and they hand her the baby, who is now beautiful and pink as can be with those wide, amazed eyes
and little rosebud mouth, and she lies next to Rosie’s bare skin, and Rosie cuddles her close, the damp warmth and weight of her, and she drinks in those big, curious, bottomless eyes that stare intelligently back into her own. She has all the required parts—the fingers and the toes, the sweet little arms and thighs. A tiny little butt, and amazing fingernails. Fingernails! She didn’t know there would be fingernails, looking like they’d been freshly manicured.

“I’m your mommy,” she says, and just saying that chokes her up.

“Aww,” says the nurse. “Did you guys have to try for a long time to get pregnant?”

Jonathan and Rosie look at each other and smile. Rosie realizes she doesn’t want to tell the story about the forgotten condom anymore. “Actually,” she says, “we’re fertility champions. One try.”

Jonathan keeps his hands behind his back, leaning in to stare at the baby. His eyes are glassy.

“Look what we did,” she says. “Are you happy?”

He nods and says that labor was just about ten hours, really good for a first baby. Pretty soon he’s moved down to the end of the table and he’s talking to the doctor about the Internet’s information on lengths of labor and deliveries, and then somehow he veers into talking about the museum and how not nearly enough people know about it yet, and that’s when a nurse interrupts and points Jonathan back up to Rosie, which is where he should have been all along. Rosie isn’t mad; she laughs as he lumbers back up, and the nurse catches her eye and laughs, too.

“Men, in the delivery room,” the nurse whispers to her later. “Mostly good, sometimes not. One guy we had to send over to fix the plumbing in the corner because he couldn’t handle it.”

But Rosie is in such a haze of love and relief and expansiveness. She is shaking with joy, with pleasure and relief, even as her eyes keep filling up with tears. Jonathan is just nervous, that’s all, and she is slammed with love. That’s what this is like.

“You should call your mother,” she says to Jonathan. “Call your brothers. Oh, and Greta and Joe, so they can call the others! People have to be told.”

“Can’t she be just ours for a little longer?” he says.

“Yes,” she says to him and smiles. “Yes, she can. Of course.”

She wishes for a moment that she could put everyone in suspended animation, in some kind of bubble perhaps, and she could call Tony. He needs to know. But of course there is no way. Around her, the medical workers keep doing everything they’re supposed to, getting her ready to be admitted to her room, and weighing and measuring and counting the parts on the baby, smiling and chatting and welcoming her and Jonathan to the world of parenthood. No, everything is going exactly as it should, and she has to be swept along in the flow. No looking back to Tony, who is the past.

They go home the next day, which seems insane. Rosie feels as though she has spent more time in line at the grocery store than she spent in this hospital.

“Can’t I stay a little longer? Maybe I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she says.

“You’re fine,” says the nurse. “The baby’s nursing, you’re all peeing, and that means you’re good to go.”

“I can’t believe they’re letting us leave with her,” Jonathan
says. He spent the night in Rosie’s room with her and the baby. “Please tell me that while I was sleeping they made you pass a test for this and that you qualified.”

“None. Nothing,” she says. “Apparently they give babies out to just anybody.”

When he goes to use the bathroom, she can’t help it: she takes out her cell phone and punches in Tony’s number. It rings four times and then goes to voice mail, and she whispers, “Don’t call me back. Baby’s here. Leaving hospital. Everything’s amazing.” Which is all she has time for before Jonathan comes back into the room.

He sighs and says, “Well, I guess this is it, then. If they say we’re authorized to be parents, then I guess we can’t argue with them. We have to go home.”

Actually, though, she thinks later, there were a few things they might have mentioned before they put the three of them out on the street.

They covered the belly button thing falling off and the fact that babies cry sometimes for no reason whatsoever, and that breast-feeding hurts at first but it doesn’t mean you’re inadequate or that you should stop. But could somebody—Greta? Anyone?—have taken a moment out to describe the crushing weight of the love she’d feel for this baby, the way her heart would almost hurt with all that love? Sometimes in the first days, sitting by the crib and watching little Serena sleeping, she tries to recall ever knowing this kind of gripping feeling, and no, there has been nothing like it. It’s got to be dangerous, all this heart overload. No wonder Soapie tried to protect her from it. No wonder Greta wouldn’t ever let her pick up the newborn Sandrine. She sits and strokes the little shell-like ear, the soft cheek, the little button of a nose. It’s as though she’s been born again herself, some new raw part of her emerging from the wreckage of her grief and her longing.

It makes her want to cry, how close she came to missing out on this.

She and Jonathan move through the first few days, sleep-deprived and stunned. He is excellent at keeping people away. He won’t let Andres and Judith Schultz drop by with their baby gift, and he avoids the nice condo dwellers who smile at him in the bright sunny passageways and politely inquire about the new baby. Greta says this is a good thing and is exactly what he should be doing: using his handy Y chromosome to protect his woman and the baby from marauders, but she argues that he really does need to let Rosie talk to her old friends on the phone. She doesn’t need to be deprived of
everyone
.

He also makes dinner, mostly his specialty items: hamburgers made with Worcestershire sauce, blueberry pancakes, grilled cheese sandwiches, and baked potatoes with broccoli and cheddar cheese. You can go a long way on that food, he tells her. Many, if not all, of the four food groups are represented there.

The baby, however, terrifies him. He gingerly holds her in his outstretched arms, as if she’s made of the thin porcelain they used to make antique teacups out of, and when he gazes at her, he looks like someone who’s fallen hopelessly in love but secretly hopes the authorities will come soon and tell him to cease and desist.

Mostly he tries to hand the baby back to Rosie. “I don’t know how to do this,” he says.

“Pretend she’s a cup. Pretend her head is a thousand-year-old cup, and you’ll be fine,” she tells him, but he says the cups never look at him like he’s incompetent, the way this baby does. She
knows
, he says.

One night after they’ve collapsed into bed, his disembodied
voice comes out of the darkness, rough and whispery: “So is this really what you wanted?”

“Yes,” she says slowly.

“But are we doing it right? I mean—God, Rosie, she’s going to need people who are competent. What’s going to happen when she needs to learn to ride a bike, or when somebody doesn’t take her to the prom, and she’s crying? What about all that?”

“I think we have some time,” she says, but then she thinks,
Yeah, what about all that?
And her heart starts beating so hard that it’s like the time she took Sudafed and then drank two cups of coffee. And then she starts to cry—huge, great, gulping sobs, for Serena’s bad luck in being born to them and for the prom date that won’t materialize and the fact that they waited until they were beyond the age of competence for this stuff—holy God, they’ll be in their
sixties
when the prom date doesn’t show up! Senior citizens! How are they going to be able to fix anything for her and make it all right? She cannot stop crying.

Jonathan holds her, he says, “Shhh, shhh,” and he says, “Do you want me to call someone?” and then he gets up and turns on the light and says, “Could I bring you an antihistamine or something so you can try to fall asleep?” She shakes her head, unable to even form words, and when she can’t stop crying, he finally falls to his knees beside the bed and says, “Rosie, you are scaring me more than anything ever has. Are you going to be crazy from now on and leave me to raise this baby by myself? You have to tell me.”

His expression is so dire that it actually makes her laugh. She’s laughing and sobbing at the same time. Finally she’s able to catch her breath enough to say to him, “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m just postpartum.” She tries to wipe the snot and
tears off her face with her hands, and he stares at her in abject fear, so frozen he’s unable even to get a tissue.

Then he whispers, “I can’t do this. Please, for God’s sake, tell me that you have some maternal instincts that are going to make this okay.”

When Beanie is five days old, Jonathan goes back to work. Rosie can tell that he can’t wait to get out of the house. He’s
thrilled
. And as soon as he’s out of the door, she walks around and around the apartment, holding Beanie on her shoulder and bouncing her, and then—what the hell—she grabs her cell phone and calls Tony.

“I can’t believe you didn’t call me before now,” he says. “Have I been dying here, or what? I finally had to call Greta just to get the details.”

“Well, good, I’m glad you did. I tried to call you from the hospital. You didn’t pick up.”

Silence. “I do occasionally get into the shower, but I was told I couldn’t call back.”

“Yes. Sorry about that.”

“So it went well, I take it.” His voice is still a little stiff. He’s annoyed, she can tell.

“Really, Tony,” she says, “how could you have ever thought I could get away to call you again? How was that going to work? Jonathan would have had a fit.”

“Would he?”

“Yes. He’s no dummy. He knows stuff is going on.”

“But that’s just it. Nothing
is
going on,” says Tony. “Of
course
I’d be interested. It’d be weird if I didn’t care, wouldn’t it? I mean, I went through the whole pregnancy
with you, didn’t I? Would any reasoning person declaim that I wouldn’t want to know the outcome?”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Don’t make me start crying, okay? I feel guilty enough.”

“All right. For God’s sake, don’t cry. Tell me everything. Every detail. What did you name her?”

“Beanie.”

“You did
not
name that child Beanie.”

“Okay. Serena Sophia.”

“Beautiful,” he says.

“Jonathan says it’s two doomed names, so we call her Beanie.”

“Eh. She’ll refuge them.”

“Thank you. That’s what I thought, too. She’ll take these names and cure them.”

“The only better name would have been Toni, with an I. But I suppose you couldn’t do that.”