She made sure Ruby was still outside; then she called information in Westchester.
There was no John Adams in Bedford Hills, New York.
For days after Rachel left, Ruby ignored Olivia. If Olivia walked in on her in bed while Ruby was playing music on her Walkman, the headphones on her stomach, Ruby pretended not to notice her standing there. Another time, Olivia heard her in the bathtub, the water sloshing and Ruby whispering, “Sage, Sage, can you hear me?” “I can hear you,” Olivia shouted through the locked door. Then the bathroom grew silent.
On Thursday afternoon, Olivia chopped plum tomatoes and fresh basil, boiled water for pasta. She hummed, then stopped. The basil was bright green, pungent. The tomatoes spilled seeds across the counter. She had been humming a Beatles song, “Eight Days a Week.” Olivia took all of this in: the food, the song she’d been humming, the stillness of the midsummer-afternoon air, the hushed sound of water boiling on the stove.
She stood there like that for what seemed like a long time. Then she went back to cooking, to humming.
At four o’clock, Olivia took a glass of lemonade out to Ruby, who was in her usual spot on a chaise longue in the far corner of the yard. She opened her eyes when Olivia’s shadow fell across her face.
“You’re blocking my sun,” Ruby said.
Olivia didn’t move. She held out the glass of lemonade, which Ruby took, reluctantly.
“Excuse me for asking,” Olivia said. “But what’s going on here?”
“Rachel says it’s unethical, what you’re doing,” Ruby said.
“Rachel says? What does she know about anything?”
“She’s totally cool,” Ruby said. “She says I can come and live in San Francisco if I want. She says I can bring Sage. We can both live there. We can be a family, a real family. You know, someone walking by, some kid, could look in at us and see a mother and a baby. They could see them together and think, I wish I had what they have.”
Olivia swallowed hard, but the lump of anger in her throat stayed put.
“You know what’s in San Francisco?” Ruby asked, as if it was a demand.
She sat up, spreading her legs to make a place for her belly to rest.
“The Gap is in San Francisco,” Ruby said.
“The Gap?”
Ruby nodded. “That’s right. I can get a job there. In corporate headquarters. I could invent colors or something. Like they don’t have red; they have mango. You know what flax is?”
Before Olivia could answer, Ruby said, “It’s beige! I’ve already got a whole bunch thought up.”
“Wait a minute,” Olivia said. “The Gap is not going to hire a fifteen-year-old high school dropout to name their colors. Did Rachel say that? Because it’s preposterous.”
“Rachel said I could go to a special school they’ve got in San Francisco that lets teenaged mothers get their high school diplomas at night and weekends, so I could work at the Gap and do something really interesting.”
“Like name colors? That’s not even a job,” Olivia said. Damn Rachel. Damn that do-gooder, that meddler, that asshole.
“It is too a job,” Ruby said, her face red from sun and anger. “They have a bazillion jobs that are totally cool. Like I could think up baby-clothes ideas. I’ll have a baby, right?”
At this, Olivia’s heart lurched. She sat down on the scratchy grass to try to stay on balance.
“So I could think of ways to make baby clothes easier. Or hipper. Like already I was thinking how you never see babies in black. Black is the coolest color, and they always put babies in like pink or yellow or something. I already have ideas for a whole line of black baby clothes.”
“Tons of babies wear black, Ruby,” Olivia said.
“Like who?”
“Like every baby in New York City, for starters.”
Ruby rolled her eyes in that annoying adolescent way of hers. “That’s not even the point. The point is, I have all these options. You never gave me any options. It was just like, I’ll feed you and take you to the doctor and you give me your baby. Plain and simple. But it isn’t so simple, you know. Giving up something like a baby. I mean, this kid is inside my stomach. He’s part of me. Rachel sent me this book that has all these pictures from like when it’s just a fertilized egg, and how it changes into a person. I mean,” Ruby said, “it’s a fucking miracle.”
“What about Ben?” Olivia said, desperate. She wished she could shake Rachel, hard. “What about Bali?”
“Ben is like totally pissed off because I was so willing to throw our baby away—”
“Throw it away?” Olivia said, too loudly. “I want this baby. Giving it to me is not throwing it away.”
Ruby jumped up and hovered over Olivia, her belly large and intimidating, ugly blue veins crisscrossing her legs like a map of back roads.
“Stop calling my baby ‘it’! This is a person, not an it!” Ruby shouted. “Call him Sage,” Ruby said, her voice softer.