Where I Want To Be

by Maryam Diaab

  “Why do you sound so depressed? It’s a baby, Massai. You’ve always wanted children,” she said, coming to sit next to him on the stairs.

  “Not like this.”

  “We can get married, Massai. Be a real family, a stable family.”

  Massai looked at Eva as if she had just grown two heads.

  “There is no way we’re getting married. I thought I made it clear four days ago that we are over.”

  “Don’t say that, Massai. Don’t you want your child growing up in an environment where the parents are in love with each other?”

  “You can’t make me love you, Eva.”

  “You still love me or you wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

  “I asked her to marry me, Eva. The woman I’ve been seeing is probably at home planning our wedding right now.”

  “What? You asked her to marry you? I’ve been here with you for over a year, and what have you asked me to do besides have sex?”

  “You are not what I was looking for long-term. I thought so in the beginning, but you changed somewhere along the way.”

  “Are you serious? Then why have I been sticking around for so long?”

  “Are you asking me or yourself? As far as I know, you are in it for the money and nothing else. I have tried to work out our problems time and time again, but you always have something more important to do. You stay out all night, sleep around on me and spend all my money. Eva, you are not the kind of woman I want to grow old with.”

  “And she is? Someone you met a few months ago?”

  “Look, I don’t have to explain myself or my decisions to you. Alexis and I are getting married.”

  “So where does that leave me? Where does that leave our baby?”

  “Child support and joint custody.”

  “That’s not what you want for your child and you know it. Why don’t we just talk about this and try to work it out? We can come to a decision that will be best for everyone involved.”

  “There is nothing to talk about. I’m done talking. I’ll get you a place until you get back on your feet. After the baby is born, I’ll pay child support and have custody during the off-season.”

  “You mean to tell me that I can’t live here? Not even sleep in one of the guestrooms?”

  “You heard what I said.”

  “Don’t you think it would be best if we were all under the same roof?”

  “Didn’t I say I’m getting married? What, you think you’re supposed to live here with my wife and me? You’re crazy!”

  “Well, how do you think your little fiancée will feel when you have to tell her your ex will be in labor about the same time you’ll be saying ‘I do’?”

  Massai thought about it and knew instinctively that Alexis would not be happy with the entire situation. “This is a nightmare,” he said quietly, holding his head in his hands.

  “No, it’s not, Massai. This baby is giving us an opportunity to fix what’s wrong in our relationship.”

  “A baby is not crazy glue, Eva.”

  “But a baby is a new beginning.”

  His mind flashed back to the three days he and Alexis had spent together. He felt an impulse to call her at that very moment and suggest running away together, elope to an exotic Caribbean island. But he knew that wasn’t his reality. He was being forced to deal with what was in front of him, and he was almost certain that as soon as he told her about the baby all the happy moments they had shared would become distant memories.

  26

  THE DAILY GRIND

  In the three weeks since Alexis had agreed to marry Massai, her wedding plans were in full swing. She had already chosen both ceremony and reception sites in New Orleans, and had even booked a caterer who would be preparing Creole-style cuisine for the occasion. Alexis appreciated Massai letting her plan each and every detail. Whenever she sought his opinion his answer was always the same: “What you want is what I want.”

  Alexis was saddened that Morgan and Claire were not around to help her as the three friends had always planned, but she knew better than anyone that things and people often changed. When she talked to Massai about it, he urged her to call her friends and make up and to explain to them why she was hurt. But her stubborn streak would not allow her to do that.

  “What are you doing here?” Alexis exclaimed, running across her half-decorated classroom and into Massai’s waiting arms.

  She had been back to work for two weeks and she was already feeling fatigued. The principal had a steady stream of new speakers coming in to discuss lesson planning, instruction and classroom management. While Alexis appreciated their efforts, she often felt as if she was back at Tennessee State University during her undergraduate years. These activities, plus getting her classroom ready, took a toll, and she went home every afternoon feeling as if she had just taught a roomful of overactive children.

  “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow,” she said, planting kisses all over his face. Every weekend Massai arrived with a smile, and they would spend his entire stay at her apartment watching movies and making love. The more he visited, the more difficult it became for him to leave. Alexis found herself counting the days between each visit.

  “I know, but there is something I wanted to talk to you about, and I really couldn’t wait any longer.”

  Alexis noticed that he was more subdued than usual but told herself he was probably just tired from the plane ride to Detroit.

  “Well, if I had known I would have taken off work, or at least asked to leave a little early.”

  “It’s cool, baby. I’ll just help you around here until it’s time for you to leave.”

  She kissed him again and then bounced over to her black metal desk. “I want to hear what you have to talk to me about, but first let me show you what I found in this Martha Stewart Weddings magazine.” Alexis picked up the thick periodical and flipped to the page with a sticky note stuck to it. “Look at this cake, Massai. Isn’t it beautiful? I thought we could have something like this, but in our colors.”

  He looked over her shoulder and sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, concerned. She closed the magazine and returned it back to her desk.

  “It’ll have to wait until we get to your place,” he said, looking as if he was in physical pain.

  “No, if it’s bothering you this much, then we should talk about it now. I’m sure it can’t be that bad,” she said, kissing him again.

  Massai stared at her for the longest time before saying anything. To Alexis it seemed that he was studying her—taking a mental picture and creating a memory. He finally spoke.

  “I think we should postpone the wedding.” His voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Why, Massai?” she asked, her eyes welling with tears before she had the chance to hold them.

  “Don’t cry.”

  “Well, I’m upset. Is there something I did?”

  “Of course not. I just don’t think now is the best time to be planning a wedding.”

  “You said the sooner the better,” Alexis quickly reminded him, wiping away the tears making their way down her cheeks.

  “I said that before—”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I found out that Eva was pregnant.”

  Alexis had never felt pain so intense. Her mouth moved but no sound came out. Her heart felt as if it had been ripped from her chest and was being stomped on by a giant.

  “What?” she asked, hoping and praying that she had misunderstood some part of what he just said.

  “Eva is about eleven weeks pregnant.”

  “And the baby is yours?”

  He nodded.

  All of a sudden, the tears stopped and she found the strength she desperately needed. How he answered her next question would determine her course of action.

  “How long have you known, Massai?”

  His mouth opened and closed. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, finally sitting in one of the student
chairs.

  “How long, Massai?” Alexis asked again although from analyzing his reaction, she believed she already knew the answer.

  “I found out when I got back from Detroit after we decided to get married. She was waiting for me when I got back home.”

  Her breathing quickened, and though she tried to remain calm, her body began trembling with rage. “You’ve been here to see me three times since then.”

  “I know, and every single time I’ve wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how.”

  “So you thought the best idea would be for you to wait until the wedding plans were damned near finished and I was at work? You thought this would be the perfect time?” she asked sarcastically.

  “No, Alexis, I didn’t want to tell you like this.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said, holding her throbbing head in her hands.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “How about explaining how you could come here weekend after weekend, sleep with me and be completely aware that your ex-girlfriend was lying up in your house pregnant. You didn’t say one word, Massai. You just let me walk around as if everything was normal.”

  “I’m sorry,” he pleaded, standing up and walking towards her.

  “Stop!” Alexis ordered, holding her hands straight out. “Do not come near me.”

  “Don’t act like that.”

  “Don’t you tell me how to act. You’ve made a fool of me. Stupid me, sitting up in here picking out cakes and bridesmaids dresses and bragging to my coworkers about how good you are to me. And all the while I’m totally clueless that Eva is in New Orleans picking out cribs and strollers.”

  “I’m sorry,” Massai repeated.

  “Hell, yeah, you’re sorry. You’re a coward, and you are sorry!” Alexis saw the pain in Massai’s eyes but refused to acknowledge it; his pain could not compare to her own.

  “You want to postpone the wedding, but for how long, Massai? As long as it will take for Eva to connive her way back into your bed? I bet she’s not even pregnant, but you’re just too stupid to realize it. I’m not going to wait for the shit to hit the fan. Forget postponing the wedding. As far as I’m concerned, the shit is cancelled!”

  “That’s not what I want, Alexis.”

  Alexis went over to her desk, stacked her wedding magazines and loudly dumped them into the wastebasket. The tears returned, but her intense anger refused to subside.

  “I love you, Alexis,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, yeah, you love me? Well, isn’t this a great way to show it? You, on the other hand, make me sick. I hate you.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yes, I do. I wish I had never met you. I should have listened to my conscience and stayed away from you in the first place. I knew you would hurt me, and I knew I couldn’t take any more pain. You came to my sister’s wedding, you met my family and you made me love you. You gave me this.” Alexis snatched off the engagement ring in disgust. “You can take this shit back,” she said, throwing the ring with all her strength and hitting Massai in the chest.

  “No, this is yours. I want you to keep it,” he said, picking up the ring from the floor.

  “Keep it for what? As a reminder of how you lied to me and strung me along these past few weeks? I don’t think so. Why don’t you give it to your baby’s mama, or better yet, use it for diaper money.”

  “I don’t want what we have to end.”

  “Well, you should have thought about that before you lied to me.”

  “Alexis, take the ring.”

  “Hell, no,” she said, slapping his outstretched hand away. “I don’t want the ring and I don’t want you. Get out of my room and my life.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Massai said stubbornly.

  “Oh, yes you are,” Alexis said pushing him in his chest with all her might, trying to force him out of the doorway, but he wouldn’t budge.

  “I want to talk to you about our future,” he said calmly.

  “There is no future for the two of us. Now get out or I’m going to call school security.”

  “Fine. Do what you have to do, but I’m not leaving.”

  She was bluffing; there was no school security. “Okay stay, but you’ll be here talking to yourself.”

  She picked up her bag and stalked from the classroom, leaving him standing alone. Looking straight ahead, she hurried down the long main corridor of the school. Alexis heard the curious whispers and saw the looks from her coworkers but wasn’t prepared or inclined to stop and offer any explanation. The tears streaming down her face were none of their business. Never once did she look back and check to see if Massai was coming behind her, even though she desperately wanted to.

  27

  DESPAIR

  “What’s going on, Massai?”

  “What do you want?” he asked Malik, who was towering over him.

  “I want to know why you’ve been locked in your office watching In Living Color reruns for the past week.”

  “Who told you that?” His voice was unusually raspy and cracked because he hadn’t been using it. Malik was the first person he had spoken to—other than Alexis’s voicemail service—in seven days.

  “Eva told me. She called this morning and said that she couldn’t get you to come out of here.”

  “I’ll come out when I’m ready.”

  “Why are you in here?”

  “Because I like it in here; it’s quiet. I have a little refrigerator, a bathroom. What else do I need?”

  “You need to talk to someone. You know what happened to Tom Hanks in Castaway. Have you named your basketball yet?” Malik asked, trying to inject some humor into a very strange situation. “I’ve never known you to lock yourself in a room for days at a time,” he said, sitting down next to Massai on the peanut-butter-colored couch. Malik saw the sparkling engagement ring resting on a brown wooden coaster on the coffee table. He picked it up, bouncing it in his palm. “Isn’t this the ring you bought Alexis?”

  Massai nodded without looking at him. His eyes were glued to Damon Wayans and David Alan Greir performing a “Men on Film” skit. “She gave it back to me; broke up with me last week.” He laughed when Damon Wayans’s character awarded three snaps in Z formation to a movie.

  “Why would she break up with you? I thought you guys were planning the wedding for New Year’s Eve?”

  “I told her that we should postpone the wedding, and that Eva is pregnant. She just flipped out and started screaming that we were over.”

  “So that’s why you’re in here?”

  “I’m in here because if I go out there and see Eva I’m going to hurt her. She’s the reason I lost Alexis.”

  “Is she?” Malik asked.

  “Yeah, talking all this pregnancy shit. I think she’s trying to run some kind of game on me.”

  “So you don’t think she’s really pregnant?”

  “You know what, Malik?” he said, for the first time turning away from the fifty-inch flat screen television mounted on the wall of his office. “I really don’t know what to think. But I do know that something about her story isn’t right, and now Alexis won’t even talk to me…”

  “That may be true, but you can’t just lock yourself in your office and act like all this isn’t happening.”

  “When is the last time you worked out?”

  Massai, now watching “Fire Marshall Bill”, pointed to the corner where a treadmill and weight benches were set up.

  “That’s great and all, but you need to at least go to your court once a day and do some shooting drills,” Malik scolded.

  “Don’t tell me what I need to do. My game is none of your concern.”

  “Fine. You’re right, but that doesn’t change the fact that you still need to get out of this room.” Malik stood up and began walking to the door, fully expecting Massai to soon follow.

  “Is Eva here?”

  “No, she said something about going to a baby store to look at crib
s.”

  Massai frowned slightly but didn’t comment. He left his office for the first time in a week, and upon stepping into the sunlit hall, immediately smelled the difference between the stale smelling office and the clean, fresh-smelling main floor.

  “So what are your plans?” Malik asked when they reached the kitchen. “How will you find out if the baby is yours or not?”

  “I can’t until she gets further along. Then she can get an amniocentesis.”

  “What are you going to do until then?”

  “Try to get Alexis back; that’s the only thing I can do.”

  “Don’t beg. Women do not want a man who begs. Just tell her how it is and let her decide for herself, and if she still doesn’t want to be with you, then it wasn’t meant to be.”

  * * *

  Alexis rolled over in bed and listened to her phone ring for the fifth time that morning. Even though she had unplugged the phone next to her bed so she couldn’t hear it ringing, she had forgotten about the other two in her apartment. Someone was calling every hour on the hour like clockwork, and though she had not checked her voicemail, she was sure the calls were from Massai.

  Never in her life had Alexis been so depressed or withdrawn, but with no man and no friends, she had good reason to be. Work was an afterthought as far as she was concerned, and while she was supposed to go in every day this week to finish organizing her room and prepare her lessons for Monday morning, she just couldn’t find the strength. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had consumed a full meal. For days she had been eating bowls of Frosted Flakes cereal, washed down with jelly jars of red Kool-Aid.

  Reaching down, she plugged her bedroom phone back in and pressed the code to listen to her voicemail messages.

  “Alexis, this is Claire. I just wanted to call and tell you that I think you are acting ridiculous. Morgan and I are just concerned about what you and Massai are getting ready to do. It’s been three weeks; I hope you will call me back. I’m at work.”

  She pressed seven to delete and felt a twinge of regret. She missed her friends, and it was times like these that she needed them the most. She wanted to call and apologize for the way she had overreacted at the restaurant, but pride wouldn’t allow her fingers to dial. How could she call and tell Claire and Morgan that they were right? She had moved too fast with Massai, and now she was paying the price.