As suddenly as they had come to her, NPR and Sheryl Lamont vanished. Olivia shook her head from side to side to reclaim them. She walked in small circles, hoping to move closer to them. But she found just static. When she fiddled with the dial, only the soft-rock station came through, Bette Midler singing “From a Distance” loud and clear.
Angry, Olivia turned off the radio and slid the headphones off her ears. She began to jog back in the direction of her house. Who was this Sheryl Lamont to come up with freezing sperm like that? She sounded young and uneducated; how had she gotten the idea? What about Winnie and all of Olivia’s other supposedly savvy friends in Manhattan? They’d never heard of it. What about Olivia’s mother, who found seemingly endless articles in Reader’s Digest about how to grieve but none about freezing sperm?
She should be having David’s baby, Olivia decided. Like stupid Sheryl Lamont. Two weeks before David died, they had decided to start trying to get pregnant. Like all of their decisions, it was spontaneous and surprising.
They were in their small yard, it, too, surrounded by fat blue hydrangeas and an old stone wall. David was grilling salmon and Olivia was stretched out on a chaise lounge, painting her toenails baby blue, the polish a gift from Winnie. She did not know what waited ahead for them in only two weeks’ time. If she had, she would have looked up at him while they talked. She would have studied his back and arms as he brushed olive oil on the fish and placed it on the grill. She would have memorized how he looked from this angle, too: across a small yard on a late-summer evening, with the sun almost completely gone, the white Christmas lights they’d strung twinkling in the hedges, citronella candles beginning to spill light on the dimming day. But no. She had not looked up. She had taken his presence there beside her for granted and simply watched the small brush move across the smooth surfaces of her toenails, smearing baby blue.
David had said, “Should we eat the salmon first and then go inside and make a baby? Or should we just go inside?”
“Whoa, baby,” she said. “A baby?” Because not knowing what lay ahead, she could be flippant.
“It came to me just now,” David said, “that a little girl who looked just like you would be a very fine thing.”
“‘I don’t know nothin’ about birthin’ babies,’” Olivia said, fanning her toes to help the polish dry. Between each toe sat a cotton ball, tipped with baby blue. She stretched her feet out and shook them.
“You know I hate that movie,” David said.
“You know I hate that movie,” Olivia said. Her heart was beating a little too fast, the way it did when she knew something was coming: her birthday present, a trip, a kiss. A baby, she thought.
“Also,” David said, “a little boy who looked just like me would be a fine thing, too.”
Olivia frowned at him. “Don’t say ‘also’ and ‘too’ in the same sentence.”
“Save me from redundancy,” he said, dropping to his knees on the damp grass at her baby blue—polished feet. She opened her legs and he rested his head between them.
She should have studied him more carefully from this angle: his chin tilted up at her that way, his curls sparser than they looked upright, his teeth long and white and even.
But instead, Olivia did math.
“You know,” she said, “if my biology of the female reproductive system is right, today would be a perfect day—”
“For banana fish?” he murmured into her thighs, where his tongue was making neat little circles.
“They are like fish, aren’t they?” Olivia said. “Little fish swimming around inside a person.”
His tongue had worked its way beyond her thigh, past the hem of her madras short shorts.
“Ah,” Olivia said, her mind filled with thoughts of happiness and fish and David’s tongue exactly where it was.
“So should we have dinner first and then go inside?” he said.
“Fuck dinner,” Olivia said. “And who needs to go inside?”
He had caught her on the phone in the kitchen the next morning telling Winnie.
“We have,” Olivia had said. “We’ve gone completely mad.”
He had read somewhere that the best way to conceive was to have lots of sex. They did. All weekend. By the next weekend, Olivia thought she felt funny. Not sick exactly, but different.
“Do you think we actually did it?” she’d asked him that Saturday night back in Rhode Island.
“Of course we did it. We are blessed,” he said. He had exactly ten days to live.
The next Saturday, Winnie and her new boyfriend, Lou, and Rex and Magnolia all arrived from the city to spend Labor Day weekend. All day, Olivia pulled David into the bathroom to help her search for traces of her period. But there were none. She stopped drinking the blender drinks that Rex concocted. She put her feet up. On Sunday morning, she told Winnie.
“Maybe you’re just late?” Winnie asked.