The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel

by Dawson, Maddie

  She doesn’t know why she didn’t realize this before. He doesn’t need her and the baby. He doesn’t even require more of a life than the one he’s got. She reaches over and touches his arm, and he snuffles something from sleep and turns toward her. She lies down, plopping her stomach into place. The bed shakes and he opens his eyes, looking frightened. “Oh,” he mumbles. “Christ. I thought this was another earthquake.”

  “No. It was just me. Moving. That’s what it’s like when I move lately.”

  “Ha.” He laughs and turns over, away from her. “You two keep it down over there, will you?”

  “Jonathan,” she says. “Do you ever think your heart isn’t big enough for a baby?”

  After a moment, he rolls onto his back and looks at her.

  “Oh my God,” he says. “Have you been awake stewing about stuff all night?”

  “No,” she says. “But I really want to know.”

  “My heart is fine,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “We have to talk.”

  He groans. “Ohhhh. You’re saying this because I didn’t want to have sex with you last night. Because tonight I thought everything went great … You came, didn’t you?”

  “That’s not what this is about,” she says. She reminds him about the little girl with the blueberry in the diner, and about the times when their friends with kids have needed them to babysit and Jonathan has never wanted to go. “Our lives,” she says “are going to get so much bigger than they are now, and I know you’re not with me on it. I always try to pretend that you are, but you’re really not, and now I’m so scared because I’m going to be doing this all by myself and trying to pull you along, and I can’t. I can’t make it interesting for you, or compete with the teacups or the museum. I can’t even compete with Andres Schultz.”

  “You don’t have to compete with Andres Schultz, believe me,” he says, and laughs uncomfortably.

  “Don’t laugh at this. It’s real. We haven’t lived together for seven months, and every single thing about us has changed. I don’t think we even know each other anymore.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he says. “You’re giving me the ‘we don’t even know each other anymore’ speech? Please. Come on. Can’t we just go back to sleep and talk about this in the morning?”

  “Why did you call me up and tell me you wanted to be with me and the baby?” she says, and leans over and turns on the light. He blinks and puts his hands over his face. “What were you thinking this was going to be like?”

  “Okaaaay,” he says, and sighs. “So I guess we are going to have this conversation now.” He sits up and rubs his hands over his face. His voice sounds miserable. “I told you I wanted to be with you because I missed you. You and I have been with each other for nearly sixteen years, and you’re the one who knows me best, and who keeps me going, and I love you.” He turns and looks at her, and his face is full of feeling. “And mostly I realized, being away, that everything was just emptier and sadder without you there. Every day there were things that happened that I wanted to tell you about, but you weren’t with me anymore.”

  She looks at him. “That’s it?”

  “What do you mean, ‘that’s it’? That’s what love is,” he says. “And I strongly believe that once we live together again, everything’s going to be fine. Our feelings are the same.” Then he takes her hand and looks at her closely. “At least mine are. Don’t you still love me?”

  “Of course I do,” she says, but then she tells him that even before all this museum stuff came up, she had always hoped he’d find his way back to being creative again, and how she felt the teacups just sapped his energy and took him from being a potter to being some kind of Internet wonk. “Just today, you’ve checked your phone about eleven thousand times—and those are just the times I saw. When you went to the bathroom, you probably added another five thousand to the total.”

  “I did. Five thousand more at least. So what? Rosie, I’m a businessman now. Don’t you get it? Does that mean you can’t still love me?”

  “I do love you, but I need you to open yourself up.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” he says, “look what’s been thrown at me. I haven’t been here with you for all this pregnancy stuff. I’m new at it. You’ve got all those maternal instincts kicking in for you, but I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m trying.”

  “You’re not trying. You couldn’t make conversation with Soapie and George, you couldn’t even touch me. How are we supposed to make everything good again when you’re just so bound up?”

  “You’ve got to let up on me. I’m not Tony.”

  She can tell her face has changed expression by the way the world tilts just a little bit.

  Luckily he’s not watching her. He’s reaching over to look at his phone to check the time. “Yeah, Joe told me everything that’s going on. That there’s this guy who has the hots for you, even though you’re … clearly spoken for, from the obvious look of you.”

  “He has nothing to do with this,” she says. “This is between you and me.”

  “Joe says he’s got a kid and some kind of crazy domestic life with his wife going rogue on him. So I get it: that’s the attraction here. He’s already got a kid, so he can be the big man around here. But it’s not fair of you to compare me to him, when I’m new at this.” He looks at her. “You don’t have feelings for him, do you?”

  “No, of course not,” she says quickly. “I’m trying so hard to make things work with you, but when you act like you can’t touch me and you act so uncomfortable around me, what am I supposed to think?”

  He sighs. “It’s going to take time,” he says. “Look. You may think I’m not good about thinking about the baby, but you don’t care one bit about the museum either, and you don’t see me complaining about that. How can you care about it, when it’s all so new?” He pulls her to him and kisses the top of her head.

  “What are you talking about? You tell me every single detail of the museum,” she says.

  “So then you should tell me everything,” he says grimly. “No detail is too small. I want to know all about your pregnancy. Every minute of it. And if I get bored or grossed out, call me on it. Yell at me. Make me be a part of things.”

  “Make you?” she says.

  “Yes. I love you, you crazy. And I’m this kid’s father.”

  “All right,” she says. “But, Jonathan, I have to ask you a very, very serious question, and your answer to this is going to determine everything. That’s why I’m warning you in advance. Will you come to the Lamaze class with me?”

  He blinks. Yes, okay, he’ll come. And then: “And what is Lamaze again?”

  And so this is how it happens that she attends the final Lamaze class with yet a third person. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to go to the third class the week before; she wasn’t about to call Tony to ask him to take her, and Greta was tied up once again. She’s sure the other smug couples look at her and think she can’t even manage to get one person committed to her.

  There is Jonathan, giant Jonathan, curled up in Starla Jones’s living room with the pillows and the tennis balls and the other husbands and the even-more-pregnant-than-ever women, with their larger-than-ever bellies. One woman, it is reported, has already had her baby, and the class applauds at the news.

  Starla has what they all want (everyone but Jonathan, that is): she has the facts about the birth. “She was in labor fourteen hours. First sign was the expulsion of the mucus plug, and then her water broke all over the bed, and she and her husband got up and they walked through the streets while she did stage one breathing … at the hospital, four centimeters … fetal heartbeat slowing … then by transition …”

  Rosie looks over at Jonathan and sees him fanning himself. He gives her a wavery smile. He doesn’t blanch even when they start talking about tightening the pelvic muscles. When they describe the rare complication of baby poop in the amniotic fluid, he looks forward, smiling bravely.


  “So what did you think?” she asks him on the way home. He did well through the whole class, even chatting up the other husbands and carrying the pillows. She was proud of him. He was also by far the handsomest of the fathers, and the tallest. He looked artistic and debonair, not scared out of his mind.

  “I’ve been thinking. There’s one question I have for you,” he says.

  “Yes?”

  “Why do you think Tony moved out so suddenly? Was it because he didn’t want to meet me?”

  She stares at him. “Oh, who knows? I thought you might have a question about Lamaze, about the childbirth process, Jonathan. That’s what we were there for.”

  “I think he didn’t want me to see how he feels about you,” he says. “Joe says he’s pretty far gone on you, really.”

  “Joe’s clueless most of the time,” she says. “Just ask Greta.”

  “Well, I think we should invite him for Christmas. I’ve decided I want to get a look at this guy.”

  “We are not inviting him for Christmas,” she says. “He has a child, remember, and he’ll be spending Christmas in Fairfield, I’m sure …”

  But then, wouldn’t you know, Tony shows up anyway, and everything unravels, in the way it seems to Rosie that holidays are always just waiting to do. They love unraveling more than anything.

  [twenty-six]

  On Christmas morning, sitting next to the tree with a fire blazing away in the fireplace and coffee percolating in the kitchen, Jonathan gives her a silver ring inscribed with their initials, with a space for another initial—for the baby’s name, he explains. “This jeweler I met in California made it,” he says, and smiles at her, and she feels herself melting a bit. He was actually thinking about them—the family they’re making—when he bought her present. She puts her hands up to his face and kisses him.

  She’d been thinking of their family when she bought his present, too: some original editions of Winnie the Pooh that she’d found on eBay, and a book of poems about fatherhood.

  She puts the ring on her finger, but it’s way too small. “This is it, the end of the line,” she said. “Now even my fingers have gotten fat.”

  “Your ring finger will go back to its regular size,” Jonathan said, as if he’d ever had any clue about what size her regular ring finger might have been. “If not, you can always wear it as a pinky ring.”

  “This isn’t a wedding ring, is it?” says Soapie from the couch, and George smiles and pats her on the arm to quiet her.

  “Well, it could be, I suppose,” says Jonathan. “But for our purposes now, I’d have to say no. We’re holding off on that.”

  That’s when the doorbell rings. Rosie is closest, so she unfolds herself with only a slight degree of difficulty and answers it. And there stand Tony and Milo on the doorstep, holding a bag of presents. Her breath goes a little jagged. Milo is jumping up and down, on his usual imaginary pogo stick, and Tony is squinting, looking past her into the hallway. He’s got three wrapped presents under his arm, one of them a giant box.

  “Oh!” she says. “Wow. Merry Christmas.”

  “Hi,” says Tony. “Merry Christmas. Just wanted to say hello and bring you some gifts.” He shuffles about a little bit, ruffles Milo’s hair, and doesn’t meet her eyes. “So. Everybody in the living room?”

  She steps aside. “Yes. Come in. Soapie is going to be so glad to see you.” In a low voice, she says to him, “I have some presents for you guys, too, but really, you couldn’t have warned me?”

  “I like the element of surprise,” he whispers. “Where is the father-to-be? Living room? He behaving?”

  “I brought the diamond to show you! I brought the diamond to show you!” Milo says about five thousand times in a row. She leans down and hugs him and admires the diamond, and he tells her about Christmas at his mom’s, how he got a bike and a helmet. And then he says how his dad picked him up, and they decided to come over, and and … Tony shrugs and looks at her with a beaming smile.

  Her chest gets so tight she’s sure she’s going to stop breathing, but she leads them into the living room, and Soapie, next to George on the couch, starts making cooing noises and flapping her hands. “Our Tony!” she says. “And the diamond boy!”

  Rosie makes the necessary introductions, and Jonathan gets up out of the easy chair and greets Tony. And as they shake hands, she sees such a naked delight in his eyes when he sizes up the competition and realizes that he’s the taller of the two. Advantage: Jonathan.

  But Tony, unabashed at being shorter, keeps pumping Jonathan’s arm, talking loudly (just a shade too loudly perhaps) about how happy he is to finally get to meet him. After all this time! Too bad you’ve had to miss so much of the exciting developments here, eh? Yeah? Doesn’t she look wonderful? Congratulations, man.

  Jonathan looks over at Rosie, as though seeing her for the first time. She does, she does, he says. He shakes Milo’s hand, too, for good measure, just because Milo is standing directly in front of him with his hand outstretched. He doesn’t see, of course, that Milo is really trying to show him a peanut butter diamond. Rosie has to point that out.

  “We made this, me and Rosie and Dad,” says Milo, when Jonathan finally notices. “It’s from peanut butter. Not many people know that you can make a diamond from peanut butter, but you use a microwave, and that’s what we did, me and my dad and Rosie.”

  Jonathan looks suitably baffled that this object is a diamond, but before he can say anything, Tony says, “I hear you’re in teacups, man,” and George gets up and hurries off to make drinks. Alcohol may be needed, he says. Jonathan mumbles something about the number of teacups he is currently showcasing, and Tony says he personally just uses teacups to drink out of, but he can’t wait to see a whole museum of them. Maybe someday, eh?

  Soapie explains to Milo that they’re really in Paris, France, today, and when he asks why, Soapie looks up at Rosie blankly. “Why are we doing this?”

  Rosie is grateful to have a reason not to watch the two men, who now seem to be emotionally circling each other like prizefighters. “I don’t know,” she whispers to Soapie and Milo. “It just seemed like a good idea.”

  “Because we like Paris, and we couldn’t go. I think that’s the reason,” says Soapie. “We’re pretending.”

  Jonathan has now gone to his comfort zone—numbers—and is giving some powerful mathematical data, such as how many ancient teacups he hopes to have by the end of the year, and the number of visitors the museum has had thus far, and how much it costs to buy a ticket to the museum.

  Tony, always a master of subtlety, reaches over and ruffles Milo’s hair and says children are a blessing that just can’t be underestimated. “You’re not gonna believe how it changes you, man,” he says. “Just the getting ready alone—it lets you be part of a whole chain of humans. The preparation now, that’s of parliament importance.”

  “Parliament?” says Jonathan, and Rosie flees to the kitchen.

  “Oh my God. How did my life get to this?” she asks George.

  He laughs. “I think you should relax and enjoy it,” he says. “How many pregnant women get a day when two men are having a pissing contest over them?”

  From the living room she can hear Jonathan saying, “Yes, we have an apartment, and Rosie is going to decorate it when she gets to California.” And Tony is saying, “Really? She’s going to do that and give birth all in the same few weeks?” And Jonathan says, “Man, you know her. She would have hated anything I picked out. Believe me, this is best. Even if it doesn’t get done, at least it won’t be stuff she’ll yell at me for buying.”

  She eases herself down into the nearest chair and does her Lamaze breathing. They don’t tell you in the course that it’s going to be good for so many things in life.

  Jonathan says, on the way to the airport two days later, “Well, I’m not so worried about you and Tony anymore.”

  “Good,” she says.

  “He’s not at all what I pictured, from what Joe said
. You know?”

  “No?” she says.

  “No. I mean, I think when I heard he was Italian, I pictured a kind of Italian stud, I think. This guy—I don’t know—he’s short and not really much of an intellect, you know? I mean, he’s nice enough and all that. And that kid of his. What chance has he got, with the home situation he has?”

  “Please,” she says. “We don’t know—”

  “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. What do we know?” He looks out the window of the car. “Anyway, we got ourselves on track, didn’t we?” He takes her hand across the seat. “We got a lot of things established.”

  “It was great,” she says.

  “Only casualty was the ring not fitting. But it still might, once you get that bundle of joy off the front of you.”

  She smiles and looks at her pinky where the ring is.

  “So are we all right?”

  “Us? Sure.”

  “No problems? We’ve survived the long separation, haven’t we?”

  “Yes,” she says. She switches lanes, gets into the fast lane.

  “But I noticed we don’t do that love-you-me-too-you thing anymore, do we?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll start it up when we get back together.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure we will.”

  “And you’re going to get the rest of the house packed up, and get it sold, and come to California once Soapie is settled in?”

  “Yes.” She closes her eyes. So much to do, so many fraught things lying ahead of her.

  “You can do it, you know,” he says. “You don’t have any doubts, do you?”

  “No. I’m fine. I know I can do it. It’s just going to be … hard. Saying good-bye to Soapie and all.”

  “But you know it’s the right … well,” he says, stopping himself. He looks out the car window for a moment, and she can feel him trying to come up with the right thing to say. “Hard stuff, but then we’ll be together. And you’re going to love San Diego. I just know you will.” He leans over and squeezes her arm. “I love you, you do know that?”