A Happy Catastrophe

by Dawson, Maddie

  We don’t talk, but after a bit he soaps my body and his touch is silky and sure. He bends his head down and kisses my shoulder and I laugh because he’s taken in a mouthful of bubbles. I twist around and fashion them into a beard for him and then kiss him on the mouth, which fills my own mouth with bubbles, too.

  Afterward, we stumble our way to bed, sleepy and calm at last, and he pulls me to him, and we make love very carefully—like we’re making up for something hard that we might not be able to recover from. He is so loving and sweet, so warm and familiar.

  At the crucial point, he reaches over to get a condom, as usual. I admit that I had entertained a tiny bit of hope that maybe he would skip it, but nope. I close my eyes and try not to be disappointed. It’s okay.

  It’s not until we’re all done and he’s getting himself all put back together, that he turns to me with a shocked look on his face. “It broke,” he says. His eyes are wide.

  “What broke?”

  “The condom. It’s completely ripped.”

  I get up on one elbow. “Are you kidding me? It broke?”

  “Oh my God. Did you do this? Is this some of the Marnie magic at work here?”

  “You think I have powers over latex?”

  “Marnie,” he says. “I think you have powers over everything. I haven’t yet seen the thing that you don’t seem to know how to control.”

  He flops down on the pillow. And I’m relieved to see that he’s laughing, even though it’s not altogether a happy laugh. “You are a minx of the highest order,” he says. “And oh my God, if we end up with a baby because of this . . .”

  I sock him in the arm. “If we get a baby from this, it’ll just mean that there was a baby out there who was waiting for us to agree to be its parents, and it saw a way to make that happen, and it will be this wonderful, magical baby that was supposed to come to us.”

  “Marnie.”

  “What?”

  “Could you just . . . not? Please.”

  Long after he’s asleep, I lie perfectly still for a long time, and I have to admit it: I am watching the full moon through the wavy glass in the window, and I am visualizing all the little sperms energetically swimming toward my hopeful, patient little ovum, who is no doubt jumping up and down and cheering them on. “You did it!” she’s yelling. “You broke through! Hurry! We’ve got so much work to do! I’m going to get right to it, drawing up the blueprints for some arms and legs and a heartbeat. But first—implantation, here we come!”

  The universe has so many tricks up its sleeve.

  And now—well, I just hold up my hand toward the ceiling, where there might be the slightest little bit of mist forming up in the highest corner. Is it Blix, smiling down on us? Blix, who knew from the beginning that we were supposed to be together.

  She had a mantra she lent me. I pinch my fingers and say it over and over again:

  Whatever happens, love that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PATRICK

  It’s nine o’clock in the morning, and Patrick, who has been awake since four thirty, is in the living room, busily hyperventilating. The front door just closed behind Marnie, who was tripping off to the flower shop practically singing, swishing her long skirt, leaning down to kiss his coffee-soaked lips, ruffling his hair, kissing his nose and the tops of his ears. The whole happy dance bit.

  He should perhaps go look for a paper bag to breathe into before he falls over on the floor.

  Did he just get her pregnant? He did, didn’t he? It would be just his luck. He should write a letter to the condom company. You should be ashamed of yourselves, making such a stupid, flimsy latex product. Where is your pride in your work? Do you care nothing for those of us who should not be permitted to reproduce?

  Instead, he just sits there, his head in his hands. Patrick, he thinks. You are the world’s biggest idiot. She wants a baby, and, dude, you know she’s going to MAGIC the whole world until she gets one.

  Oh God, he is so doomed. He loves her so much, but he is not, and never has been, fatherhood material. He has never once looked over at a baby and thought, Wow, I wish I’d made that kid! How do I get me some of those toothless, drooly kisses? How fun would it be to see if I could get by on four hours of sleep every night for the next eighteen years?

  But he’s watched as she flirts and coos over babies in public and rhapsodizes about the ones who come into her shop. He once listened, mystified, while she described a scene of a baby rubbing a banana into his own ear. She was laughing so hard she could barely even get the story out. So what kind of denial had he been living in, thinking that this subject would never come up? That she’d never look at him across a table with her big eyes and her trembly voice and beg him to have a baby with her? That he’d never have that uncomfortable moment of telling her no?

  That then a condom wouldn’t break that same night?

  He looks over at Bedford and Roy, her dog and his cat, who are curled up together on the rug, having their usual midmorning nap. They’ve forged an unlikely friendship since Patrick moved upstairs to live with Marnie; they even have their own Instagram fans for their interspecies cuddling, @BedfordlovesRoy. But cute as they are, it has to be noted that they have been abject failures as baby substitutes.

  “Guys,” he tells them. “I’d like to believe that you really tried, but I’m afraid you didn’t even come close.” Roy doesn’t bother to respond, of course, but Bedford wags his tail. “Nope. Don’t bother wagging now. None of us has done enough to keep her from wanting a kid. Not a single one of us.”

  He rubs his face, hard. He needs to get hold of himself. Go take a shower, stop drinking coffee, switch to water, and get himself to work. Work might take his mind off this situation, if he ever did any of it, that is. He’s supposed to be turning himself into a painter, now that the fire ended his career as a sculptor. At least that’s the plan. He hasn’t been able to do much. He sucks at painting, is the truth of it.

  He and Marnie even converted one of the apartments into a studio for him last year when he decided he was mentally well enough to do art again. Not sculpture, because of the damage to his hands. But he should be able to paint. Marnie made that decision for him, really. She eased out the tenants who were living there—they needed to be on their own anyway, she said—and then the two of them cleaned out the rooms and repainted the walls and installed shelves for his supplies. Art tables appeared. Easels. Lighting. A studio futon. It was his own space, with the perfect light coming in from the north-facing windows.

  Nothing, nothing, like the studio from before.

  The studio of the fire.

  Anneliese briefly rises up in his head, as she does whenever he thinks of anything having to do with that day. He sees her tilting her face up, catching the light, smiling at him playfully.

  Not screaming today, as she usually is when she shows up.

  He wonders briefly if he and Anneliese had ever talked about having a child. He doesn’t think so. They were young though, so maybe it simply hadn’t occurred to them yet. Maybe it would have eventually come up. And, you know what, maybe he could have been a father back then if that’s what she’d wanted.

  But now. No. There are a million airtight reasons he doesn’t want a child, reasons that any person possessing a shred of sanity would agree with.

  Number one: He looks scary. Children shrink from him. One of his eyes looks like it was installed crooked from the factory, and besides that, the skin on his face is stretched out and shiny, the result of the thirteen surgeries he had. His mouth is crooked. His jaw isn’t symmetrical anymore.

  And number two: Even if the baby eventually got used to the wonky look of him (which he assumes it would because people can get used to anything), he’d have to go out in public all the damn time, at first to push the baby carriage because he’s pretty sure the law requires that people air out babies from time to time, and then the next thing you know, he’d be hauling himself to playgrounds, and every damn day he’d have to endure scenes
like the one in the park yesterday, when he took down both a toddler and a baby with his freakish appearance.

  Number three—and this may be the worst of all—the well-meaning public. God, he hates this one, when he gets used as the example for the lesson on “Why It’s Important to Be Polite to the Abnormal.” (Or what’s the politically correct term now? Atypical? That’s probably it. Atypical.) He can envision his own child’s well-meaning young teacher saying in a sweet singsong to her class of monsters: “Now, children, Mr. Delaney can’t help it that he looks butt-ugly and is so very atypical. But we, the beautiful, need to be polite to him, because he’s still a human being. We have to be tolerant and pretend he’s like us.”

  No, no, no, no, and NO.

  Of course Marnie doesn’t get any of this. She calls him luminous. She says no one sees him the way he sees himself. She says he doesn’t even know what he really looks like, that he’s beautiful, which of course is a crock of shit, some lie she tells because she loves him, and frankly he could spend a thousand years and still not figure out how that even happened, that she started loving him. Apparently Blix’s matchmaking had something to do with it; Marnie believes that Blix, who rented the downstairs apartment to him long before she’d even heard of Marnie, somehow arranged the whole romance between them. He’s never been sure he believed in all that. But whatever. Doesn’t matter now. He’s in love with her. He’s become comfortable with being part of a couple again.

  Oddly enough, they don’t really have that much in common. She has about ten times the number of emotions he has, for one thing—she cries and laughs and sighs and smiles and yawns and complains and leaps up off the couch and performs impromptu dances—and each emotion catches him by surprise as it comes careening in. Who has the energy to feel that many feelings?

  The truth is, when he’s around Marnie, he can mostly shut out Anneliese’s screaming in his head. He can even get himself to almost believe in the narrative of the culture: that everybody has some tragic thing to carry, and that you’re supposed to take your tragedy and drag it deep into the compost pile of your heart, where it can eventually germinate and allow something new in you to be born. Besides that, he also knows that he came back to life, and that Blix and then Marnie carried him most of that distance.

  But—here’s the thing—he has come as far into life as he can come. He cannot go farther. The baby thing—no, no. No. Absolutely not.

  Because what he knows but what she doesn’t seem to get is that deep down he is still broken. He watched his girlfriend die in front of him, and he knew then and he still knows that it was his fault.

  He lives this every day—the sound of the explosion, the way Anneliese was immediately engulfed in flames, and he remembers staring at her, his mind trying to put it all together, and then time slowing down, and him running and running toward her, holding his arms out to catch her, and she was screaming—he could see her screaming rather than hear her—and she was lit up, her long black hair was now only a flame, and he remembers noticing that he was on fire, too, even though he couldn’t feel anything, and then he fell and squares of black filled in his field of vision, replacing the bright orange ball of light that burned into his eyeballs.

  No one will say this—not the doctors, not the fire officials, not the therapists who tried to help him—but he knows he should have stopped it from happening, that he simply wasn’t paying attention when he should have been. Why didn’t he notice the smell of gas? Why wasn’t he the one who got up that day to make the coffee, the one who turned on the burner that lit the spark that caused the explosion? Most mornings he did the coffee while she set up her easel, but this one day, the day when it mattered most, where was he? Across the room, doing some stupid task he doesn’t remember for a sculpture that would never get made.

  So he has to live with Anneliese’s screams. It’s the price he owes for what he did.

  There’s something worse. He knows he should have called her parents—Grace and Kerwin Cunningham are two of the finest people he ever met, and he was there when their daughter died, and he hasn’t been able to face them. He was in a coma at the time of Anneliese’s funeral. He received a note from Grace while he was in the hospital, a few shattered and heartbroken sentences. She didn’t say it had been his fault, but he knows she must think so.

  Just about eight years ago now, and every day is another day he’s doing the wrong thing by hiding. He keeps their cell phone number folded up in a box with things he’s moved from place to place. A couple of times he’s punched in two numbers, maybe three, and then hung up.

  And now there is this woman in his life who sees sparkles, and for whom every story is a love story. He has to be very, very careful not to risk his entire heart again. He loves her, but he has to hold something back. He could lose her, too.

  His phone dings, and he leans over and picks it up.

  It’s Marnie texting him.

  OMG! I have seen 15 babies just since I left the house. FIFTEEN ADORABLE BABY HUMANS.

  He is reasonably sure this isn’t an over-the-top number, not in Brooklyn on a summer day. Instead of answering, he sighs and googles “How often do condoms break?”

  Google instantly replies that studies show somewhere between eight-tenths of 1 percent and 40 percent of men report condom breakage at some point in their lives.

  Very helpful statistic, Google. Why did you even bother?

  He types in: “And can you get pregnant if the condom breaks?”

  Google says of course you can. What are you, some kind of dunce? Don’t you know anything?

  Okay, so Google didn’t say that last part, but he can picture it chuckling at the hopelessness of the question.

  Bedford comes over with one of Patrick’s sneakers and drops it onto his stomach. Time for a walk.

  “Today,” he tells Bedford as they head out the front door, “we are enacting a new policy. We are not going to the park, and we are not going near any children.”

  A text dings. Marnie.

  Also, Patrick, just FYI. I now think we are undergoing an INVASION OF INFANTS. There must be a store somewhere handing them out. #BabiesRule #HereComeTheTots #EvenTwins.

  He stops by a lamppost and types: You may be in a scene from Night of the Living Dead with babies as the zombies. You should run. Proven fact: they WILL eat your brains.

  “Actually,” he informs Bedford, who wags his tale in agreement, “they already have eaten her brains.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARNIE

  You know how it is when you get a new car, and suddenly every car you see zooming down the road is the very brand you just bought?

  Well, that’s what is happening to me with babies today.

  I’m on my way to work, and I swear there are babies everywhere: spilling out of strollers, being cuddled in front carriers and backpacks, riding along freestyle on their mamas’ hips—and several are even perched on top of men’s shoulders and are using their fathers’ skulls as makeshift bongo drums. Oh, I can just see Patrick with a baby on his shoulders. Both of them smiling down at me, the baby grinning toothlessly and reaching down to grab his daddy’s ears, while Patrick laughs.

  This calls for another text.

  It’s got to be some kind of sign, all these babies, I write. Just saw #16. Cutest one yet!

  This shows that the universe is obviously on the side of me having a kid. First, it destroyed a perfectly adequate condom, and now it’s throwing me into the paths of all the cutest babies and parents.

  As soon as I walk into Best Buds, Kat, my business partner, looks up from the counter where she is cutting the dead stems off of yesterday’s flowers and says, “Oh my God! Look at you. He went for it, didn’t he? You look radiant! I’ll bet you’re probably already pregnant!”

  I give her a big smile and do a little shimmy. Kat and I had spent the day before practicing my speech for Patrick, which she was sure was going to go just fine. “Amazingly enough,” I tell her, “I just might be.”


  “See? I told you, didn’t I? He wants a kid as much as you do.”

  “Welllll,” I say. I put my purse down in the cubby under the counter, first taking my phone out and slipping it into my pocket for when Patrick texts me. We write to each other all day long. “Actually, he thinks it’s an insane idea. In fact, he said no.”

  “He said no?” She tilts her head, adjusts her smile wattage downward. “Then how are you possibly pregnant? Did you find some other dude overnight or something?”

  “Perhaps you’ve heard of condom failure.”

  “Noooo! Get out of here. That did not happen.”

  “Oh, but yes.”

  She stands there staring at me. “I have never been so in awe of you as I am at this moment.”

  I laugh. “Why? I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Of course you did. Marnie! I would bet my whole month’s salary on your ability to somehow manifest a condom breaking. I’ve watched you up close. I know your powers.” She smiles and lowers her voice, even though there is no one else around to overhear her. “Also, that’s how I got pregnant with Jazz. Though not intentionally, of course. But the condom did break.”

  “Really,” I say. “I did not intentionally break the condom. But it is possible that there’s some baby out there wanting to be born, and that that’s who broke it.”

  “Thank you for not saying that the universe broke it,” she says.

  Kat is my age, but she already has two adorable middle schoolers, Jazz and Tish, who spend half a week with her and half a week with their dad, who is remarried and lives on the Upper West Side. She started working here last year when she dropped by the shop one day and noticed that I might not be using, shall we say, all the best business practices. I was bungling several important tasks of owning a business, like for instance, billing, ordering, paying bills, knowing how to get the right people for maintenance, and figuring out taxes, just to name a few things right off the top. I was also a little bit flaky with the flowers, which a lot of people think may be Job One when you’re a florist.