The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel

by Dawson, Maddie

  They’re stopped at a red light and she sighs and looks out the window at the line of cars waiting through the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through, and then at two women walking down the street, and she is suddenly, horribly certain that something is going to be wrong with this baby and that she was a fool to think it could be otherwise. She is trying to trick nature somehow, having this kid when she is too old and too broke and too messed up. They are going to poke it with a needle, and then they are going to find out some terrible disease it has, something that will consign it to a life of unspeakable horror and pain. And then she will have to sit there and say quietly, “I still want the baby. It’s my baby,” while they look at her pityingly.

  She has always been the wrong sort of person—unmotherable, ungrateful for even the smallest morsels of human feeling thrown her way, always needing more, more, more. She has been greedy for love, and now she has done the greediest thing of all, asked for another human being to come to earth, one who will have to love her, even though it might live a wretched existence, twisted, painful, unable to walk or talk or grow brain cells. She takes in a ragged breath.

  “I see what you’re doing over there,” Tony says. “You there, being so quiet.”

  “But what if the baby is all messed up?”

  “The baby’s not messed up. Don’t even worry about that.”

  “But once you ask the question, ‘Is the baby messed up?’ then you have to wait for the answer. Did you think of that?”

  “It’s gonna be fine. We’ll wait. It’s fine.”

  “Tony,” she says, “for God’s sake, will you call Annie and tell her that Milo has to come and stay with you?”

  “Why is it,” he says calmly, “that when you’re anxious about your own stuff, you always go back to worrying about my life?”

  “Your life is so … fixable,” she says.

  “No. Your life is fixable,” he says.

  When they get there, Tony doesn’t even ask if he can come in with her. After the nurse calls her name, he just stands up and walks down the hall with her, and then throughout the procedure he stands by her head and holds on to her hand. Funny that no one asks who he is, or why he’s there. After a while, two doctors come in, and one of them smears gel on her belly and then hooks her up to the ultrasound machine, and on the screen there’s a little blurry picture of a lima bean, with parts that the doctors and the nurse and Tony point out to her, as if anyone could recognize that this is the head, these are the little vertebrae, and this now is the heart, this beating thing.

  “Look at the ribs, Mom, and here’s the heart,” says the doctor, and she tries. She really tries. This is another thing that might be wrong with her, that she can’t even recognize her own baby’s body parts. Just the thing that’s round and in profile—that’s surely the head, isn’t it? She doesn’t want to ask, in case they think she’s already unfit.

  And then she really sees it: the beating thing, giving off its fast little pulses.

  “Oh!” she says, and the room sways a little bit, and Tony squeezes her hand and leans down next to her face and smiles with her at the screen. It’s more intimate than sex, his being there this way. He wipes at his eyes with his free hand and then laughs in embarrassment when she sees him.

  “I’m just like this,” he says. “Don’t mind me.”

  But she is crying, too.

  The second doctor, the one who wields the needle, peers at the ultrasound, and the first doctor puts a little mark on Rosie’s stomach, right near her belly button, and then the other guy sticks the needle in and draws out some fluid. Rosie closes her eyes, but it doesn’t hurt, not really. Just a pinprick, and a little bit of a cramping sensation. They told her that might happen.

  And then it’s over. After a few minutes, they unhook her and wipe all the gel off her belly, and Tony lets go of her hand.

  “Now, Dad,” says the doctor, “make sure she rests for the rest of the day, and call us if there are any complications. Everything looks good from here. And we’ll have the results in about a week or so.”

  Rosie says, startled, “Oh, he’s not the dad! Goodness. He’s just a friend.”

  Tony says quietly, “I’ll make sure she rests.” He puts his arm around her shoulders while they walk out to the parking lot. “Did you see how cute that little baby is?”

  “It reminded me of a bean,” she says.

  “Little Beanie,” he says. “With little sprouts for arms and legs. And a classic, classic profile.”

  It’s a terrible, no good, very bad night. She keeps feeling as though the end of the world has happened, and that she has to stay awake to keep the zombies from reaching the house or something. Also she has a bit of spotting, which sends her into a full-blown panic, and she’s got slight cramps, both of which she was told might happen and that she was not to worry. Just keep calm and carry on. Call if it goes on too long. Of course, no one knows what “too long” means. Fifteen minutes? Fifteen days?

  So she’s up and walking at 2:20 in the morning, and that’s when Tony comes out of his room and says to her, “Oh my God. What can we do to help you get some sleep?”

  “I’m bleeding.”

  “Just spotting?” he says. “Or more?”

  He knows the word spotting. She can’t believe that.

  “Spotting,” she says.

  “They said this might happen. I don’t think you’re losing the baby. That little bean was in there pretty good if you ask me.”

  “But how do we know?” she says. “I’ve never been here before. I don’t know what’s supposed to be happening. And I went on the Internet, and it said—”

  “No, no, no. No Internet,” he says. “That’s the sure-fire way to get yourself all full of agita. I’ll stay with you. Let me just get my pillow and blanket and I’ll come in with you.”

  She thinks that probably isn’t a good idea, but her cup of chamomile tea hasn’t helped, and neither has tossing and turning in bed. So she goes back to bed and pulls the covers up around her, and he comes in and puts his pillow and blanket on the floor next to her bed.

  “That can’t be very comfortable,” she says.

  “It’s fine.”

  “If you want, you could get up here. I could scootch over, and there’d be room.”

  “No,” he says. “I’m fine.”

  But then the next night, the spotting is still going on, and so he sleeps there again. And then, without even asking, he comes the next night, bringing with him a blow-up mattress that he places next to her bed. When on the fourth night, she nearly trips over it when she gets up to pee, he moves it to the foot of the bed. But then he hits his head on the legs of the desk, and besides that, it’s pathetic to have a grown man sleeping on the floor, so the next night, she says he should sleep on the bed with her.

  And then—well, the next week is the hardest week of all, waiting for the results to come, and so every night they fall asleep on her bed, lying side by side, and when she wakes up in the middle of the night, she’s startled to see that he’s still there. And then, as she’s turning over trying to get comfortable, she feels something fluttering inside her, and so of course she wakes him up.

  “Tony, Tony. Something’s happening. Either there’s a colony of butterflies flicking me, or Beanie moved,” she says.

  He moves up close to her. She thinks she is going to stop breathing altogether when he puts his soft, sleep-warmed hands on her bare skin, closing his eyes while he waits.

  He laughs softly. “Ah, now I remember about babies on the inside,” he says. “They come to a complete halt when they think you’re waiting for them.”

  “Well,” she says after a while. “I guess it’s gone back to sleep. And so should we.”

  She gets up and goes to the bathroom, and when she comes back, he’s returned to his own room. She stands there for a moment, looking around the room, which suddenly feels so empty, and then she climbs back into bed.

  The doctor’s office calls the next day, and the wo
man on the phone says she has good news. The baby has no chromosomal abnormalities.

  Rosie feels herself come back to life in a way she didn’t even know was possible.

  “Would you like to know the sex?” the nurse asks.

  “Yes,” she says, barely able to breathe.

  “You’re having a girl.”

  A daughter! She has to sit down then on the floor with her head on her knees. This clump of cells has decided which gender it wants to be. And it picked such a good one.

  She’s going to name her Serena, she thinks. Serena the Bean.

  [seventeen]

  The next Tuesday afternoon, two months after Soapie had her fall and when Rosie is nearly eighteen weeks pregnant, Soapie gets sprung by the rehab center. It’s not that she’s healed or anything. Her sodium levels are very nearly normal, and she’s been through lots of occupational and physical therapy, but it’s undeniable that she’s lost a lot of ground, the doctor says. This is just as good as it’s going to get.

  “You don’t break your hip at this age and go live in a rehab place and expect to bounce back to where you were before,” he tells Rosie. “It’s possible she’s having some more small strokes, or that the sodium problem left its mark. She is eighty-eight.” There will be good days and bad days, and the bad days will soon outnumber the good by far. He gives Rosie the laundry list of disabilities plaguing her: macular degeneration, some evidence of liver damage. Osteoporosis certainly, arthritis. Weak heart. A bit of emphysema. Dementia, worse at some times than others.

  “In other words, she’s giving out,” says Rosie, and he says, “Exactly. It’s what happens to the human organism, unfortunately.”

  When she goes to bring Soapie back home, she finds her in the lobby, dressed in her lavender workout suit, sitting primly on a wingback chair with suitcases stacked around her. This is where she’s insisted on waiting, docile and smooth, like anybody’s darling grandmother, her hands folded in her lap. She’s wearing lipstick and rouge, and even her drawn-on eyebrows seem to be in the right spots, which has not always been the case. Her white hair is swept up the way she has worn it all her life, except for this recent period when she’s been in the hospital, when it spread out across the pillow in a thin, wild, defiant tangle, like the wind had been whipping across her bed. Rosie would work on it some days, urging a comb through its knots and brambles while she sprayed it with a detangling solution.

  Rosie smiles at her. “You look—you look kind of wonderful,” she says. “Your hair—”

  Soapie smiles, almost wincing. “They sent over a beautician,” she says. “You’re a very nice lady, but you’re no hairdresser. Here, let’s get my things and get out of this place. I can’t take it here one more second.”

  “Do we have some signing-out stuff to do first?”

  “No. Let’s just go.”

  But then a nurse in blue scrubs is hurrying over, waving some papers, and sure enough, there’s a little bit more to it than that. Soapie purses her lips, stares off at an elderly couple who are making their way to the French doors out to a courtyard.

  The nurse, whose name tag reads Lorraine, hands Rosie a whole pile of papers to sign, and Rosie flips through them, signing and taking back responsibility for her grandmother once more, saying she understands about the medications, follow-up visits to the physician, et cetera.

  “I guess you saw I have a walker now,” says Soapie. “A contraption.”

  Of course Rosie has been watching Soapie use the walker for weeks now.

  “Yes, Mrs. Baldwin-Kelley, and we want you to use it,” Lorraine says loudly and slowly, as if she’s talking to a kindergartener. “Much, much safer that way.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” says Soapie. “At home, where there’s carpet, I expect I won’t.”

  “Well, we think it’s always a good idea,” says the nurse.

  “Well, I hate the goddamned thing.”

  Rosie brings the car around to the little turnout by the glass entry doors and loads the suitcases into the trunk, while Lorraine helps Soapie inch her way over to the car. The walker is a gleaming red thing, the kind with a seat. Soapie pushes it in front of her almost defiantly as if she’s planning to fling it off away into traffic, but Rosie notices that she does seem to lean on it.

  “I think I got a little crazier in there, being around crazy people,” Soapie says, once they’ve gotten her settled and buckled into the front seat, with the walker folded and put in the back. Rosie starts the car and edges it through the turnaround, out past the welcome sign with its cheerful little daisies.

  “You know, that can happen, don’t you?” Soapie says. “Catching crazy. Take me to Burger King. I’ve been craving a Whopper for five months. Is that how long I’ve been in there?”

  “No, not nearly. Does it seem that long?”

  “I don’t know time anymore. Let’s just go eat burgers and be happy I got out before I went completely bonkers.”

  So Rosie drives to Burger King, and Soapie eats her hamburger in the car in the parking lot under a shady tree, insisting that they share the cardboard container of fries.

  “You’re putting on weight,” Soapie says.

  “Am I?” She feels herself flush a little, but then Soapie doesn’t seem interested in pursuing that. Instead she crumples up the wrapper of her hamburger and wipes her chin with it. She pushes away the napkin that Rosie scrambles to offer, and then she says, “This is as good a time as any to have the talk I’ve been wanting to have with you. It’s good we’re not at the house when we do it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of those men we seem to have there. Why do we have men now, do you suppose? We didn’t always have men.”

  “I don’t know. I thought we kind of liked them.”

  “What’s the young one’s name again?”

  “Tony.”

  “And do you remember just how we got him?”

  “Ah, I believe you hired him to come pour your gin and tonics.”

  “Oh, right.” Soapie swallows, looks out the window, and sighs. “Okay, listen to me good because I made a paper for you. Of my wishes.”

  “You made a paper of wishes?” Somehow this sounds so nice, like something a child might create, and yet Rosie knows it’s not going to be good.

  “Yes. Here it is.” With difficulty Soapie reaches down in the pocket of her sweatshirt and pulls out a lined piece of paper, folded into eighths.

  “Did you want me to read it?”

  “No. I’ll read it to you. We’re going to discuss.”

  Rosie can see that the first word on the paper, written in a spidery script, is Death.

  “First order of things: I am dying now, Rosie,” Soapie says.

  This conversation again? Rosie stares out the windshield at the oil change place just on the other side of the parking lot. A man is getting out of his car, and the attendant is rushing over with a clipboard. Just beyond that, there’s a Walgreen’s, and the sign with its big red letters is advertising Tylenol for sale, and bottled water. All the parked cars in that lot are silver. What were the chances of that?

  She drags her eyes back to Soapie’s face. There’s a buzzing sound from somewhere. Soapie is saying, “So in six months I want to go into one of those places, a home.”

  “What are you talking about? You just got out of one, and you hated it.”

  “You have to listen. In six months, I want to go back in there. And in the mean—”

  “But this isn’t what you ever said you wanted. Not one time.”

  “Will you just listen to me? This is a new plan. I’m doing medium fine now, but it’s not going to last, and I know it. I’m not going to be able to take care of myself forever, and I know that now. I saw myself dead in there, you know.”

  “You saw yourself … dead?”

  “I couldn’t tell what was now and what was then, and I didn’t know people anymore, and I was just … locked away somewhere in my head. That’s dead, if you ask me.”

&n
bsp; “Oh, Soapie.”

  “Maybe I’m like … George’s … wife.”

  “Louise? No, she has Alzheimer’s. You don’t have Alzheimer’s. You just forget things sometimes.” Rosie reaches over and strokes her grandmother’s arm.

  “But I wouldn’t know if I did, now would I?” She pulls her arm away and waits, looks at Rosie steadily, head-on. “I wouldn’t know when the time came. Did George tell you that he came, and I thought he was Eddie, my husband? Eddie, right?”

  “Yeah, well, that was when your sodium was too low—”

  “George is nothing like Eddie. And I sat right there and called him Eddie for one whole day, and I actually thought he was Eddie. Dead Eddie! And the point is—what was the point? You’ve made me lose it again. Just be quiet and let me finish.” She stares out the window, takes a listless sip of her Coke. Rosie can see her mouth muscles twitching; a rivulet of Coke runs down her chin. There are tiny black hairs around Soapie’s mouth, hairs she’s never noticed before. “So. Anyway. I now see the wis—the wis, the good, in going where they look after you. I don’t want to be alone with the stove. I think I’ve got only a little while left. End of the year is what I’m thinking. In January I want to go to a nursing home.”

  “But, Soapie, honey, I’m going to stay with you. You don’t have to be alone. Let’s get you home and settled in, and—”

  Soapie frowns. “No, damn it. Why won’t you let me tell you the best part?”

  “There’s a best part to this?”

  Soapie waits, tapping her hands against her polyester pants, closing her eyes while she summons the words up from the depths. “You and I—we have the fall. Before I go to the home.” She turns to Rosie, and her eyes are almost wet with need, with begging. “So let’s go to Paris, just you and me. We’ll sell the house and then go and live in Paris until it’s time for me to come back and go into the home. We’ll travel all over France and have ourselves a time! George and I went there on our honeymoon, you know.”