After I Do

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “I suppose I’m going to get stuck with Uncle Fletcher?” Rachel says.

  I look at her. The look on my face is an apology and a plea.

  “Fine,” she says. “Everyone has a life event but me. So I’ll just go watch Grandma with Uncle Fletcher.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “When the baby is born, please come get me. Please? Ryan? Will you come get me? Switch with me or something?”

  “Absolutely,” he says.

  “I’ll go with you,” Mom says to Rachel. “Keep us posted, please,” she says to Ryan and me.

  “OK,” I say. “You got it.”

  “If she wakes up,” Ryan chimes in, “tell her I’m here?”

  “Are you kidding?” Mom says. “I don’t know if we could keep the news in if we tried!”

  Ryan smiles as I hit the elevator down button, and then I hit the up button. I don’t know where we’re going.

  “Mom?” I call out.

  She turns around.

  “What floor?”

  “Five.”

  The down elevator dings. It’s here. Here we go. We have been chosen to ring in the future.

  It turns out that ringing in the future is not like New Year’s Eve when you can count down from ten until the ball drops. Ringing in the future is a lot of waiting. It’s a lot of sitting in uncomfortable chairs and walking back and forth to the vending machine. It’s a lot of checking regularly with Charlie but not staying in the room itself.

  “She’s at three centimeters,” Charlie says, when we find their room. He’s talking to us while looking at Natalie, and it’s clear he assumes we are Mom.

  “You OK, Natalie?” I ask. She looks like crap. I mean, she looks beautiful, because beautiful people are beautiful even when they look like crap, but all the signs for looking like crap are there. Her hair is disheveled, her face is flushed. She’s clearly been crying. And yet, somehow, she’s entirely happy.

  “Yep,” she says. “I’m good. Just don’t ask me during a contraction.” She looks up at me and sees a strange man standing beside me. Admittedly, I should have thought about the fact that Ryan is a stranger and Natalie is in a hospital gown on a bed with stirrups.

  “Uh . . .” she says, looking at him.

  Charlie follows her eyes and turns around. His face lights up as if a lightbulb has just gone on above his head. “Ryan!” He steps up, dropping Natalie’s hand, and gives Ryan a bro hug. There is a lot of back patting.

  “Hey, Charlie!” Ryan says. When they are done hugging, Charlie stands next to him, and Ryan keeps his hand on Charlie’s shoulder for a just a second longer than a friend would. They are closer than friends. Charlie starts to introduce Ryan to Natalie, but she starts cringing and gasping for air. Charlie runs to her. He’s so quick it looks instinctual. This is a guy my mom has to beg to help with the dishes, but the minute Natalie is in pain, he’s there. He’s supporting her. Helping her. Being there for her.

  “Can I do anything?” I ask. I am hesitant to offer ice chips again, but she did say that they were appropriate for labor. “Ice chips?”

  Natalie laughs for a moment through her pain. It is, perhaps, the best laugh I’ve ever gotten in my entire life.

  “Yeah,” Charlie says, his hand being squeezed. “Ice chips.”

  Ryan and I leave to find some. The nurse tells us there is an ice machine at the end of a very long hall. We start walking.

  “So I read about this guy David,” Ryan says. “Is David still a . . . still a thing?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “No, not a thing.”

  “I want to kill him,” Ryan says, smiling. It’s a dangerous smile. “You know that, right? I’ve wanted to kill him for months. I sometimes dream about it. Notice I didn’t call them nightmares.” Our shoes squeak on the hospital floor.

  “I’m not too fond of Emily, either,” I say. For the first time in months, I allow myself to feel the rage I had when I found out he was seeing other women. I can feel it once again, the way it rises to the surface like a flotation device. The way it keeps bouncing back no matter how hard you push it down.

  “Emily never held a candle to you,” he says, when we finally get to the ice machine.

  I grab a cup and put it underneath the machine. I could say more. I could ask more. But I decide to leave it at that. The machine grumbles, but it spits nothing out. Ryan slams the side of it, throwing his whole body against it. Chips start to flow out into the cup.

  We walk back to Charlie and Natalie’s room and hand Charlie the ice chips. He thanks us, and even though Natalie appears to no longer be in pain, I figure it’s best if Ryan and I go to the waiting room.

  “You’ll come get us if you need anything?” I ask Charlie, and he nods.

  Ryan makes a fist and gives Charlie a pound. “Good luck,” he says.

  The waiting room is mostly empty, save for a new grandparent or two. So we take a seat in the middle by the wall. Sometimes we talk about a lot of things. Sometimes we don’t say anything. Sometimes we are quiet for a long time, and then the conversation takes off again when one of us says something like “I can’t believe you don’t like Persian food” or “I can’t believe you bought me that beard trimmer to get me to shave my pubes. Definitely the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever read. I read that, and I literally walked straight into the bathroom and trimmed them.” Ryan smiles, laughing. He gives a fake shiver. “Mortifying.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I honestly did not think you would ever read that.”

  “No, but it’s good I did, right? A little pinch of embarrassment at first, but now I know. And henceforth my nether regions will be squeaky clean.”

  I look down at the ground. The hospital carpet is a pattern of diamonds. Diamond after diamond after diamond. I unfocus my eyes a bit and realize that if you look at it a different way, it’s a large series of Xs. Or Ws.

  “I think if I’ve learned anything about how to . . . fix this,” I say, “it’s that I really need to work on telling you what I want.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Same here. That’s a big one for me. I was just going along with what I thought you wanted all the time, and after a while, I think I just grew pissed off about it.”

  “Yeah,” I say, nodding my head. “I assumed that the way to be a good partner to you was compliance.”

  “Yes!” he says, eager in agreement.

  “And so I never asked for the things I needed.”

  “You expected me to know them.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “And when you didn’t know them, or you didn’t guess them, I just assumed you didn’t care. That I didn’t matter. That you were choosing you over me.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” he says. “Imagine if I had just told you I hate international food.”

  “Right!” I say. “I don’t even care that much about eating Persian food or Greek food or Vietnamese. I really don’t. I only ever cared about having dinner with you.”

  “So that’s one of the things we have to do better, Lauren. We have to. We have to be honest.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “No,” Ryan says, turning toward me, grabbing my hand, looking me in the eye. “Brutal honesty. It’s OK to hurt me. It’s OK to hurt my feelings. It’s OK to embarrass me. As long as you do it from love. Nothing you could ever say out of love could hurt as much as it did to look into your eyes and see that you couldn’t stand me anymore. I would rather be told to shave my pubes a thousand times than have you look at me the way you had been.”

  I want to roll around on the floor with him. I want to smell his hair. I want to kiss his neck. I want to sneak into one of those doctor “on call” rooms they have on soap operas and make love to him on the bunk beds. I want to show him what I have missed. Show him what he has missed. Show him what I have learned. I want to lose sight of where I end and he
begins.

  And we will do that. I know that. But I also have to remember that this is the beginning of the solution. This is the part where we do the work to fix our marriage.

  “I love you,” I say, my voice quivering. My muscles relaxing. My eyes filling with tears.

  “I love you, too,” he says, his voice breaking into a cry. It’s a controlled cry. His tears barely make their way over the edge of his eyelid.

  He kisses me.

  And it is now that I understand the true value of the past ten months.

  Sure, I have learned things about myself. I’ve learned what I want in bed. I’ve learned to ask for what I need. I’ve learned that love and romance don’t have to be the same thing. I’ve learned that not everyone wants one or the other. I’ve learned that what you need and what you want are both equally important in love. I’ve learned a lot. But I could have learned these things with Ryan by my side. I could have sought out these lessons with him instead of away from him. No, the true value of this year isn’t that I’ve learned ways to fix my marriage. The value of this year has been that I finally want to fix my marriage.

  I have the energy to do it. I have the passion to do it. I have the drive. And I believe.

  I want my marriage to work. I want it to work so bad that I feel it deep in my bones. I know the sun will rise tomorrow if I fail. I know that I can live with myself if we don’t make it. But I want it. I want it so bad.

  “So you’ll stayed married to me?” Ryan asks. It has the weight and vulnerability of when he asked me to marry him, all those years ago.

  I smile. “Yes,” I say. “Yes!”

  He grabs me and kisses me. He holds me. “She said yes!” he says to the waiting room. The few people in here just look at us and smile politely.

  “I feel so good right now. I feel alive for the first time in years,” he says. “I feel like I could conquer the world.”

  I kiss him. I kiss him again. He’s so cute. And he’s so handsome. And he’s so smart. And funny. And charming. I don’t know how I stopped seeing all of that.

  “I never lost faith,” he says. “I mean, in the back of my mind, I always hoped. You know that game people play in the car, when you see a car with one headlight out, you make a wish as you—”

  “Flick the roof and say ‘Pididdle,’” I say.

  He nods. “I’ve only ever wished for one thing. Each time.”

  “Me?”

  “Us.”

  “Even this whole year?”

  “Every time.”

  We need each other. Whatever that means. We complement each other. We have great potential to make each other better. I was the one who had the strength to be honest about what we were doing to each other. I was the one who was brave enough to break this thing in half in the hopes of putting it back together. But when I lost faith, he’s the one who had enough for both of us.

  Ryan takes his hand out of mine for the first time in hours. He leans back and puts his arm around me. He pulls me in to him. The arms of the chairs make it slightly uncomfortable, and yet it is entirely comforting. I let my head sink into the crook of his armpit. I breathe in, sighing. He smells. He smells like Ryan. A scent pleasing in its familiarity and yet repulsive in its odor.

  “Ugh,” I say, not backing away. “You need to wear deodorant. Have you forgotten to keep yourself deodorized?”

  “Smell it, baby girl,” he says in an overly manly voice. “That’s the smell of a man.”

  “The smell of a man is Old Spice,” I say. “Let’s invest in some.”

  That’s when my grandmother dies. I mean, I can’t be sure. I don’t hear about it for another ten minutes. But when I do hear about it, they say it happened ten minutes ago. So I’m pretty sure it happened as I sat here, smelling Ryan’s armpit, telling him to use deodorant.

  It was supposed to happen after the baby was born. Or when I was with her. Or as she held my hand and told me the meaning of life. It wasn’t supposed to happen when I was laughing with Ryan about Old Spice.

  Some people love that about life, that it’s unpredictable and unruly. I hate it. I hate that it doesn’t have the common decency to wait for a profound moment to take something from you. It doesn’t care that you just want one picture of your grandmother holding her great-grandchild. It just doesn’t care.

  • • •

  My mom is crying when I get to Grandma’s room. Fletcher is hugging her. Rachel is sitting in a chair by herself, head in her hands. Mom asked the nurses to move Grandma’s body. It’s gone by the time I get there. Thank fortune for small favors. I couldn’t have handled that. I simply don’t have it in me.

  But the empty bed is hard enough. How can you miss someone so much already? My mind is full of all the things I didn’t say. It doesn’t matter how much I did say. There was still so much left to say. I want to tell her that I love her. That I will always remember her. That I am happy for her. That I believe she will find Grandpa.

  Mom tells me that she told Grandma that Ryan was here. “I told her that he was with you, that he was taking care of you. To be honest, I couldn’t tell if she heard me. But I think she did.”

  We all discuss plans, and we cry in one another’s arms. After a while, after we have squeezed too many tears out of our eyes, my mother tells us we need to “buck up.”

  “Chins up, people! Look alert! It’s a big day for Charlie, OK? A big day for all of us. Grandma would not want this to be a day of sorrow. A baby is coming.”

  Rachel and I nod, drying our tears with tissues. Ryan has his hands on both of our shoulders.

  “Fletch, you can stay here and take care of the details, right?”

  Fletcher nods. He isn’t crying in front of us, and I get the distinct impression that he’s looking forward to being alone so that he can.

  “And you come find me down on the fifth floor when you’re ready.”

  My mom claps her hands together like a football coach, as if this is the state championship and we’re down by six.

  “We can do this!” she says. “There is plenty of time to think about Grandma, but right now, we need to be here for Charlie. We need to push this out of our minds and think about the beautiful little baby that’s coming.”

  Rachel and I nod again.

  “Yeah, coach!” Ryan says, giving my mom a high-five.

  She looks at him, stunned, for a moment and then laughs. “For Charlie!” she cheers.

  “For Charlie!” the three of us say, and Fletcher joins in at the last minute.

  “I’ll check in on you soon,” my mom says to Fletcher, and then we all break for the elevator. When it comes, when we get in, when Rachel pushes the button for the fifth floor, when I feel the elevator drop, all I can think is that my mom has lost her mother today, and she’s not crying. She’s fighting to make this day right for her son. For her grandchild. Look at the things we are capable of in the name of the people we love.

  Jonathan Louis Spencer is born at 1:04 A.M. on June 2. He weighs eight pounds, six ounces. He has a full head of dark hair. He has a squooshed face. He sort of looks like Natalie. If someone squooshed her face.

  By sometime around nine in the morning, we’ve all held him. The nurse has taken him and brought him back, and now Jonathan rests in my mother’s arms. She is rocking back and forth. Natalie is half-asleep in the hospital bed.

  Charlie looks at me, proud papa written all over his face. “I’ve only known him for eight hours,” he says to me, sitting in a chair, staring straight ahead at his baby boy. “But I could never leave him.”

  I grab his hand.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Charlie says, shaking his head. “How our dad could have left. It doesn’t make any sense, Lauren.”

  “I know,” I say.

  Charlie looks at me. “No, you don’t,” he says. It’s not accusatory. It’s not pointed
. He is merely telling me that there is an experience in this world that he understands more intimately than I do. He’s letting me know that as much as I think I get it, there is a world of love out there, a world of deep, unending, unconditional dedication that I know not of.

  “You’re right,” I say. “I don’t yet.”

  “I’ve never loved anything like this,” he says, shaking his head again. He looks at Natalie, and he starts to cry. “And Natalie,” he says. “She gave it to me.”

  My brother may not have been in love with Natalie when he asked her to marry him or when he decided to move back here. He may not have been in love with her when he brought his things into her house and started to make a life with her. But somewhere along the way, he learned to do it. Maybe it happened at 1:03 or 1:04 or 1:05 this morning. But there’s no doubt it happened. You can see it in his eyes. He loves this woman.

  “I’m proud of you, Charlie,” Ryan says, patting him on the back. “I’m so happy for you.”

  Charlie closes his eyes, holding in the tears that want to fall onto his cheeks. “I’m gonna do this,” Charlie says. He opens his eyes. He’s not talking to me. He’s not talking to Ryan. He’s not talking to Rachel or Natalie or my mom. He’s talking to Jonathan.

  “We know you are,” my mom says. She’s not answering for herself. She’s answering for all of us. She’s answering for Jonathan.

  I look at Jonathan’s face. How can something so squooshed be so beautiful?

  I look at Ryan, and I can tell what he’s thinking. We can do this, too, one day. Not today. Probably not next year. But we can do this one day. Ryan squeezes my hand. Rachel sees it, and she smiles at me.

  It’s a good day. My mom, Charlie, Natalie, Jonathan, Rachel, Ryan, even me—we made this a good day.

  “Wait,” I say. “Is Louis for Lois?”

  Natalie laughs. “It wasn’t, but it is now!”

  Charlie starts laughing, and so does my mom. If Charlie and my mom are laughing, then I’m right. It’s a good day.