“What did I say?” he asked nervously.
Olivia shook her head. How would she ever handle a baby? Babies had things like colic, cradle cap, clubfoot, lazy eyes. Babies shit all over themselves and cried all night. What had she been thinking?
“I must be crazy,” she finally managed to say.
Jake was kneeling beside her now.
“I do this, too, you know,” he told her. “Lose it, I mean. I never lost someone the way you did. But my ex-wife and my daughter moved to Australia. Can you believe that? I think it’s the farthest place they could have moved to. But my ex-wife married an Australian doctor and they moved to Perth. When it snows here, they’re at the beach. Do you know that their Santa’s sleigh is pulled by kangaroos? They might as well have moved to Mars.”
Something in what he said—or maybe it was how he said it—told Olivia that he understood, that perhaps he was the first person who did.
“When they first moved,” Jake said, “I immediately told my girlfriend that I wanted to get married and have a baby. ‘Why wait?’ I said. But it was just to have something. A replacement family, I guess. By that time, we’d been divorced several years, but we had joint custody. I mean, Gillian was with me three nights a week. How do you continue that when she’s halfway around the world?”
“Did you do it?” Olivia asked him.
“Have another baby?” He shook his head. “Thank God. We actually tried. What I had instead was a total breakdown. I flew out there, to Perth, and tried to live there. I even tried to win my ex-wife back. What a disaster. Look,” he said, “all I’m saying is that maybe, just maybe, adopting this baby isn’t what you think.”
“I’m thirty-seven years old,” Olivia said, “and the love of my life is dead, and who knows when or if I’ll get married again. Who knows what my life is going to be like from now on.”
“No one,” Jake said.
“This girl,” Olivia told him, “I think someone sent her to me.”
“Who sent her?” he asked gently.
But Olivia only shrugged and looked down at the floor.
Jake stood, handed her a box of Kleenex. “Bring her in. I’ll get the forms ready. Make sure the father isn’t going to stake some kind of paternal claim.”
For the rest of the day, she wondered why what stuck in her mind the most about him was the word girlfriend, the way Jake had said it.
When Olivia saw Winnie step off the train, her heart lurched as if she’d spotted a lover. There was her friend, dressed in black Capri pants and a scoop-neck black shirt, and underneath it a little watermelon of a baby, tight and round and perfect. She was wearing one of Olivia’s hats: Columbine. She walked like a New Yorker, arrogant, sure, fast.
Olivia ran to her, forgetting to close the car door behind her.
“You look wonderful,” Olivia said after they’d hugged and examined each other.
“I look like hell,” Winnie said. She ran her fingers through her hair, even though it was cut short, just the way Olivia always imagined her doing when they were on the phone. “The sleek profile for fall,” Winnie explained. “Of course, it means paying extra close attention to other details—the tweezed eyebrows, the straight eyeliner. Does it sound like copy from You?”
“Naturally,” Olivia said.
Winnie spun around. “Twenty-three pounds and counting. But the thing to do, afterward, is Pilates. We just did this whole piece on it. The equipment looks like some form of medieval torture, but if you need toning, it’s the only way to go. Meanwhile,” Winnie said, peering closely into Olivia’s face, “you look incredible. Or at least good. Which is a step up from the last time I saw you. Several steps up. I would almost accuse you of being in love, if I didn’t know better.”
“What does love get you? A house in Rhinebeck?” Olivia said, guiding her toward the car, unwilling to let go of her arm. “I could have warned you. You fall in love and you do crazy things.”
“I actually make recipes from Laurel’s Kitchen. Can you believe it? That’s another thing. Jeff’s a vegetarian.” Winnie sighed. “A vegetarian investment banker. Isn’t that incredibly oxymoronic?”
They stopped in front of Olivia’s car. “Wonderfully oxymoronic,” Olivia said as Winnie patted the hood of the car affectionately. She didn’t hate Winnie at all. She adored her.
“It still runs?” Winnie was saying. “What does it have, a million miles?”
“One hundred and eighty-seven thousand,” Olivia said.
“And you can just leave your car door open around here and no one takes it?”
“I don’t know about that,” Olivia said, sliding into the car.
When Winnie finally got herself arranged inside, Olivia sat without moving, taking in her friend’s smells, her presence.
“God,” Olivia said finally. “You’re really here.”
“I’ve been a total shit, haven’t I?” Winnie said. “Not coming for so long. Me, me, me, me.”