“No,” Ben whispered to her. “Don’t say it like that. You are so beautiful like this. With our baby.”
“Anyway,” Ruby said after they nuzzled some more, “he comes up to me and asks me if I want to get high and, like, would Jamie mind, and I crack up because Jamie is so not my type, except he always has good drugs. And so I say, ‘I don’t think he’ll mind,’ and we take a walk to that park in Providence—the one with that big statue of Roger Williams?—where you can look out and see the whole city. The statehouse was all lit up and everything. You know that statehouse has like the third-largest unsupported dome in the whole world? Ben told me that. He should be on Jeopardy, honest to God.” She beamed at Ben before she continued. “Anyway, it’s really beautiful there. And we get high and I make him say all his poems again. And then he asks me if I’ll come back with him, to his room, and I say Yeah—”
“You don’t have to tell her everything,” Ben said.
“Anyway,” Ruby said, “that was back in September—”
“The last day of summer,” Ben said, locking his fingers into hers.
“And we’ve been together ever since.”
It was not an especially beautiful story; there were the drugs and the fact that Ruby was only fifteen years old. But at the end, Olivia was crying. Because she knew what that felt like, to be together ever since. She believed in so little these days. But she guessed she still believed in this: love that will never end. Such a stupid thing to believe in. But she did.
She was crying and she said, “Okay. Okay. He can stay.”
Of course Olivia couldn’t sleep.
She gave them her room, her bed, and went into Ruby’s room, the nursery. Curled up on the cot there, she heard the murmur of their voices. Then she heard their breathing, heavy, ragged. They were making love. Olivia knew she should cover her ears, but she didn’t. She listened. Her own breath caught as theirs escalated. “This is sick,” she said out loud. Embarrassed, she went downstairs.
She wrote:
Dear Amanda, I hope you are not still on Prozac, because I don’t think it’s good to stay on it too long. Amanda, I wish you had taken the shortcut, too. You see, he wanted to come back to bed that morning and I was sleepy, so I told him to go jogging instead. So I sent him there, to that road, that curve, but if you had taken the shortcut, he would have come around that corner fine. Amanda, we are both to blame.
Olivia almost sent that one. But how do you tell a nineteen-year-old girl she really is guilty? Especially when you know who’s really to blame.
Without even thinking, she called Winnie in Rhinebeck.
“Insomnia,” she said when Winnie sleepily answered.
“I won’t even ask what time it is,” Winnie said.
Olivia thought of all the things she could say, but only one made sense. “I miss him,” Olivia said.
“I know, sweetie.”
Olivia was crying again. She wondered if the crying would ever stop. She’d read that a woman was born with all the eggs she’ll ever have; maybe the same was true with tears. Maybe she would run out soon.
“I want him back,” Olivia finally managed to say.
“Of course you do,” Winnie said. “I know you do.”
“You’re the only one who knows it’s my fault—”
“You’ve got to stop that,” Winnie said. “How many times did you send him off and nothing happened? We don’t remember those times, though.”
“You know what?” Olivia said. “Fuck him for dying. Just fuck him.”
“It was so stupid of him to die like that,” Winnie said.
“I mean, why didn’t he see that one stupid car? All the times he jogged in his life and he saw cars and trucks and dogs and all sorts of dangerous things, right?”
“Right.”
“But he doesn’t see this one stupid car. And that girl doesn’t see him.”
“You know,” Winnie said, “they say with plane crashes, a series of things have to go wrong. And they do. A whole bunch of things go wrong and the plane crashes. That one in Bosnia? There was bad weather and pilot error and even a broken beacon.”
Olivia wondered what series of errors had happened to David. A glare of sunlight, a car going just a little too fast.
“Why didn’t he just pay attention?” she said finally. “Or jog a foot closer to the woods? Half a foot?”
“I don’t know,” Winnie said.
Olivia’s crying was slowing down. She thought she could stretch out right there on the kitchen floor and go to sleep. “Just fuck him,” she said.
“Yes,” Winnie said.
“Oh, Winnie,” she said, “why didn’t I just let him in bed that morning? Why did I send him away?”
Instead of answering, Winnie said, “I was thinking of coming to visit you.”
“Really? But what about Jeff? What about Rhinebeck?”
She heard Winnie take a deep breath.