The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel

by Dawson, Maddie

  “I do.”

  “Hey, did you find a doctor in California yet?”

  “My doctor has contacted one.”

  “So all is good on that front.”

  “Yes.”

  “One thing we haven’t really talked about much. I’ll still have to work a lot of hours. But we can handle that, can’t we? You’re going to be plenty busy with nursing and … all that.”

  “Sure,” she says. Then she has one of those moments when she can’t quite believe how her life is going to change. She’s going to have a family. She’ll be able to flip her hair and toss off sentences that start with “Oh, yes, well, my daughter …”

  “It’s going to be okay,” he’s saying. “You’ll have the baby and I’ll have the museum. Funny how we didn’t ever need a baby or a museum either, for that matter, but it’s going to work out for us. We both got something that’ll keep us busy.”

  Is that the way it is?

  “I might have needed a baby and just didn’t know it,” she says.

  “I have to break all the rules and ask you out on a date,” says Tony on the telephone a week later.

  “What rules are these?”

  “The rules I made for myself, that I am going to stop throwing myself at you,” he says.

  “And where is this date taking us?”

  “First tell me if you like surprises.”

  “I’d have to say no.”

  “Okay, then, we’re going to a party at somebody’s house, and it’s really a baby shower for you, and so I’ve been told I have to make you come.”

  She laughs. “Oh, God. Is this one of Greta’s productions?”

  “No. I don’t believe so. This is from your students.”

  “My students?”

  “Yeah. Carmen and Tomas called me.” He explains that it’s being held at Goldie’s condominium, and all the students are coming, and so are her friends, just possibly anybody she’s ever spoken to for longer than three minutes through her whole life. And he would have kept it a surprise; he himself loves surprises, but he figured there was a good chance she might not come if he didn’t let her know in advance. So could she please look surprised?

  Okay, yes, she can.

  So, Friday night. Eight p.m. sharp.

  He’ll pick her up.

  “Practice in the mirror,” he says. “If they find out I told you, I’m a dead man.”

  “Want to hear something kind of crazy—something you never expected to hear me say?” Rosie asks Soapie on Friday afternoon. They are in the den, next to the big windows that overlook the backyard. It’s a gray, threatening-snow sort of day, and George has gone over to see Louise before the snow comes, he says.

  “What did you say?” asks Soapie. She reaches down and picks up the grilled cheese sandwich Rosie has made her. It’s been one of her extraordinarily good days. She’s had an appetite, and she’s been focused. They watched The View together all the way through, and Soapie laughed at all the funny parts. Usually she gets upset when the women are all talking at once, but today even that didn’t bother her. It’s been the kind of day that gives Rosie hope that the transition to the nursing home won’t be so hard on her—and even though that date is fast approaching, she still can’t picture it herself, how she’s ever going to be able to simply walk away. Best not to dwell on all that.

  “My friends are throwing me a baby shower tonight,” she says. “Wanna come, too?”

  It’s a joke, because of course Soapie can’t come to something like that. But she tilts her head, as if she’s thinking about it. Funny how even two months ago, the news of a baby shower would have sent her off on some diatribe about outdated, sexist social customs for women. Now, she just smiles benignly and says in a small voice, “You look like her, you know. The way she would have looked if she’d gotten older.”

  The light, coming through the big windows, is filtered. It looks soft, almost pearly gray. Rosie stops, takes a deep breath, as though this were a moment that could skitter away like a frightened animal if she weren’t careful.

  “Who?” she says. “My mom?”

  “Yes. It makes sense, I guess. That you’d be like her. Here, put my Coke here on the table, will you?”

  Rosie moves the glass from the tray to the table next to her grandmother. Soapie is tracing her index finger on the brocade of the arm of the chair. “Lately when I sit here in the afternoons, I think about her.”

  “Really?”

  Soapie leans forward and says in a loud whisper, “Don’t tell George, but she talks to me sometimes. Come and sit by me. I want to tell you something.”

  Rosie smiles and pulls the armchair over, sits down, and looks at her grandmother. “Does that feel good, getting to sense her presence again?”

  She sees her grandmother swallow, with difficulty. Her eyes, which seem clearer today, drift over to the window and then come to land on Rosie’s face. There’s an urgency in them. She swallows again. “Ahh, Rosie. After all these years, I think I know now why she did it. Hold my hand.”

  “Why she did what?” But it’s so weird, the fact that she suddenly knows what Soapie is going to say, how the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

  Soapie sighs. “Why she killed herself. I know why. I remember now.”

  “But she didn’t kill herself. A building fell on her,” says Rosie, but even as she’s saying it, she suddenly knows that building story can’t possibly be true. What were the chances of a piece of a building falling on a woman? It is one of those things that has never made any sense. Why hadn’t she ever stopped to think about that before? It’s not true. It never was true.

  Ka-boom.

  Soapie looks at her sadly. For a long moment, she doesn’t speak, and Rosie holds her breath. A piece of herself has run away and is hiding. She can feel the shock in her fingertips. Maybe she doesn’t want to know.

  “No. No building, sweetie.” Soapie’s eyes are on her, piercing but kind.

  Rosie closes her eyes. “Tell me,” she says. Her voice is tinny.

  “She wanted him too much, and he said he wasn’t coming back,” Soapie is saying, but there’s a ringing sound in Rosie’s ears. She can barely hear. “She was here with you and me, and he was up in Canada somewhere and this is the part I just remembered. He wrote her a letter and said he didn’t want her and he didn’t want a family. He changed his mind, Rosie, and it just killed her.”

  “But what about me?” she hears herself say. “Didn’t she want to be with me?”

  “She just went crazy. It felt like she forgot who she was.”

  “But I was just a little girl, and she loved me, you said.”

  “Nothing was enough.” Soapie looks out the window. “Nothing was going to help. I tried to get her to go talk to somebody and get some help, but all she wanted to do was try to track him down in Canada. Which was impossible, of course.”

  But what about me? Rosie wants to shout. You said! You said she loved me. Any mother loves her child and doesn’t want to leave her that way.

  When she finds her voice, she says, “But you … why did you tell me about the building? Why did you lie to me?”

  “You were too little to know,” she says. “Who’s going to tell a baby what really happened?”

  “I haven’t been a baby for a very long time,” says Rosie. “You let me go on thinking that that’s how she died. Why didn’t you ever tell me the truth?” She can feel her voice rising. She feels like that little child again, smothered in not-knowing, sitting in the stuffy, stale-smelling den, missing her mother so much that her whole body trembles with the longing for her. She starts to shake. “All those years you wouldn’t ever let me talk about her, and the whole time you’re letting me believe this lie.”

  Soapie is quiet a long time. Rosie watches her hands worrying with the fringe on her blanket, pulling and tugging at it. Finally she says, “I know it was bad to lie to you. But I wanted to protect you, I guess, and I couldn’t think up a better story. If I said she was
sick, you’d want to know all about the disease, and if I said she got killed in a car accident, you’d be scared of cars always.”

  “But a building,” Rosie says again.

  Soapie’s voice is irritated now. “Oh, who cares about that? The point is that love can be so destructive. My beautiful, beautiful daughter gave up everything for that stupid boy she loved, a useless, careless boy, and look at the lives that one act wrecked. Look what he took from all of us! I hated him then, but now I guess I don’t have the energy to hate him anymore. I don’t even know if he’s alive. But I let him ruin our lives, Rosie.”

  Rosie wraps her arms around her stomach, as if she needs to protect the baby from this.

  She watches Soapie’s hands flutter up to her face. Rosie hears herself say, “It’s okay. You did what you needed to do,” but anyone could hear that she’s speaking from very far away.

  No building fell. No piece of masonry. You can go back to feeling good about the laws of physics.

  No cruel trick of fate. No Coke with a friend in the city for a girls’ day out.

  Oh, but acceptance is going to be harder than this. She knows that when she gets up and goes to the bathroom, when she forces herself to move her arms and legs. No, this is going to be hard knowledge to have. Her mother chose to die when she had Rosie to live for, to care for. It’s not the lie or the fact that love can hurt—she’s known that for some time. It’s that she, her three-year-old, innocent self, couldn’t save her mother; that Serena, who never showed up at any séance, never heeded any call, walked toward death on purpose. And how is Rosie supposed to live with that?

  She stares at herself in the bathroom mirror, sees this new knowledge in her eyes that look almost smoky from the hurt they hold. It’s a different mother she holds inside herself now.

  When she goes back to the living room, she watches Soapie’s hand, with its large veins, its thick nails yellowed in places, the liver spots thrown randomly across her mottled skin, trembling as it reaches for the glass of Coke. Just as she grasps the glass, there’s a little twitch of her nerves, and the glass falls on the carpet and spills Coke all over the place.

  “How did she do it?” Rosie asks quietly as she’s scrubbing the carpet.

  There’s such a long silence that she thinks Soapie didn’t really hear her. “Pills,” she says at last. “She swallowed a whole bottle of pills.”

  “And where was I?”

  “With me.”

  “I wish I didn’t know. I wish you didn’t tell me.”

  Soapie looks at her sadly. “I know. I wish I didn’t have to tell you either.”

  “Maybe I should have never known. Why did you tell me now?”

  “Sometimes we have to know things just because they’re true. And you can handle it now. We both can. It had a hold on us long enough.”

  Her grandmother sounds so tired, and it is so sad and dark in that room. Rosie gets up and turns on the lights and wraps her arms around herself. The snow has started outside now, and the heater hasn’t kicked on in a long time. She goes and turns up the thermostat. It’s good to keep moving. She notices that she keeps folding her arms across her chest.

  She will have to stand off to the side of this story, where she’s stood for so many years now, the place where her mother is just a shadowy figure who doesn’t really, truly matter in any kind of daily, real way. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed, except that where your mother was one kind of victim, now you know she’s another, and it’s worse. You think your heart has broken, but it hasn’t really broken—not any more than it already was. You just notice it because it’s got one extra crack in it right now. But that’s so the light gets in. Somebody said that: the light comes through the broken places.

  [twenty-seven]

  The last thing she wants is to go to the baby shower. What a stupid idea: a party on this of all nights.

  But if she doesn’t go, she would have to make up some excuse. And then, worse, she would have to stay home with Soapie and George. So she drags herself upstairs and puts on her best red maternity dress. It looks like something you could buy at L.L. Bean and invite a family of four to move into with you, but she doesn’t care. It also probably brings out her reddened eyes. She doesn’t care about that either. She knots her hair up in a twist and sticks a sprig of holly in it, and then she practices her surprised face. She hopes it’s not going to be one of those parties when people jump out and yell, “Surprise!” That’s ridiculous. Who would jump out and scare a pregnant woman?

  And how is it that it feels as though her mother died just today? But it does. She has to shake out everything she’s ever known, touch all those objects once again, think of this woman whose life had become so unbearable that she took a bottle of pills.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Tony says on the way over to the party, which is in Branford by the water. Who would have thought that Goldie would live by the water? She seems like somebody who would live in the sort of village-y neighborhood where people danced outside in the square and brought each other covered dishes.

  “That’s because I look like Clifford, the Big Red Dog. My dress speaks volumes tonight, so I don’t have to.”

  “Wow. A child’s toy reference. Somebody’s been studying for parenthood, I see.”

  “Tony. I think everybody who’s conscious knows Clifford.”

  He turns into the condo complex, where there’s hardly anyplace left to park. “Are you going to look really surprised?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Let me see.”

  She makes her mouth go round.

  “No, that’s like rigor mortis.” He gazes at her, and she thinks that if he didn’t have such good manners, he might tell her she looks tired or weepy or whatever she looks like, which she knows is not good. But he doesn’t. He says, “You look pretty tonight. Although you also look like you might burst into tears.” She almost tells him then, but she doesn’t. He looks at her for a long moment and then says, “I’m looking forward to this party. I haven’t been to a party in ages—unless you count Thanksgiving.”

  “I just hope I don’t fall asleep on the rug,” she says. Or start weeping into the punch bowl.

  And then she doesn’t, of course. The place is filled up with people she knows and loves—all her students and then her usual friends, all of whom look perfectly happy to be there and non-shocked that she’s walking in with a non-Jonathan man. Perhaps Joe and Greta have warned them that Tony is her handler these days. That’s what Greta called him the last time they spoke about the Lamaze classes: “Oh, well, Tony can be your temporary handler.”

  There are bright lights and a punch bowl with red punch, and music playing. There is an endearing pile of presents wrapped in pink wrapping paper—all for her. There are a lot of people she doesn’t know, too—Goldie’s sons and their wives, and her single daughter, Alessandra, and Alessandra’s friends—and some folks from the condo. The music is loud, and everybody is dressed up and dancing. It’s the kind of party where the food is everywhere, so people cluster in all kinds of spots.

  She dances—first with Leo, her dapper older student, and then with Joe, who tells her that this time next year her new child will be teething and crawling about. Then he looks stricken and says, “Oh my God, but it’s hitting me. Greta and I won’t be there to see her, will we? She’s going to grow up a California girl,” and she feels a pang. But it’s just one pang, and she adds it to the pile of pangs she’s already experienced today. The pile is getting quite large.

  Head up. Keep smiling.

  Greta moves over to her side. “Okay, so what’s wrong?” she says.

  Her eyes fill with tears.

  “Oh, I know. Moving away, Soapie, all your students being so kind, the fact that you’re going to miss me so bad you can’t even fathom it …”

  “Worse.”

  Greta steers her into the bathroom and closes the door and hands her a wad of tissues from the vanity. “Tell me.” />
  “It—it’s the worst. My mother killed herself. Soapie told me today.”

  “Oh, baby! Oh, honey!” Greta wraps her arms around her and sways with her, but Rosie can’t get comfortable, really, with her belly in between them, and she pulls herself loose.

  “All those times, Greta! All those séances we did, remember that? And the times we wanted to be her, and then she had just left me that way! Just threw me away, like I was nothing. How did she think I was going to turn out okay after that?”

  “Oh, baby, it wasn’t about you. I don’t know the facts, but I know that she wasn’t thinking when she did that. She must have been so depressed, so unhappy to … to do that.”

  “But I was her baby!”

  Greta’s eyes are black with shock, but then she does what she has always done: she shifts gears into social worker mode, and takes Rosie by the arm over to the sink and runs cold water and gives her a wet washcloth. “Here, wash your eyes. And then listen to me, because this is important. This doesn’t change anything about your life. Not really.”

  “But it does!”

  “No. You’re grown up. You’re not that child anymore. Your parents were of a time when the whole world felt crazy. There was a war on, and there was all this political upheaval and turmoil, and so few options for people who didn’t believe in the war. And your father got caught in that, and he did what he needed to do to save himself. And maybe he did or maybe he didn’t love your mother enough. But whatever, it doesn’t matter. Because you are fine. You grew up, and now you’re going to have your own baby, and you’re going to mother yourself in the process.”

  “But what if I’m crazy, too? I think I am. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re not. You’re as solid as they come. You’re going to go and live with Jonathan and have your life now. It’s all okay.”

  But that’s so easy for Greta to say, Greta who has a perfectly good, sane mother who stuck around and helped her kids in every way she could. And then Greta, armed with all that unconditional love, grew up and married a nice man who also stuck around and made babies with her. How can she ever understand what it means to have this hole inside, this huge shadow that is suddenly gaining on Rosie and threatening to swallow all the light that’s near her?