Olivia stood and took off her wet shirt and shorts, pulling Rex to his drunken feet.
“Last one in is a rotten egg,” she said, and ran naked into the cold ocean. She heard the thump of Rex’s footsteps as he ran behind her, but she didn’t turn around or wait. Instead, she plunged in, headfirst, into the first wave that swept above her. She rode it into shore, until she felt sand in her mouth. David would be laughing to think she and Rex had made out, drunk on tequila, on the beach.
Floating, letting the waves carry her, Olivia stared hard at the starless sky; storm clouds still hung there, blue-black above her.
“Happy birthday,” she said into the salt air.
Somewhere beside her, she heard Rex say the same thing.
It was Winnie who insisted on taking Ruby with them to dinner. The three of them went to Providence, to the Pot au Feu, where Amy insisted Julia Child liked to eat. Winnie did bring a short black dress and high-heeled Mary Janes for Olivia. She even remembered the black panty hose. “God knows, I can’t wear them,” she said, tossing everything at Olivia. They sprayed themselves with Winnie’s too-expensive perfume and lathered pale lipstick on their lips.
So that by the time they arrived, and climbed the steps past the happily noisy bistro to the more expensive upstairs salon—“Go upstairs,” Amy had told Olivia. “Treat yourself”—Olivia felt like a new version of her old self. I am a person who can still look sexy, she thought. I am a person who carries sadness inside. Rex was gone before any of them woke up, and in a way it felt like a dream to Olivia that he had been there at all.
But those few kisses had awakened something in her. She surprised herself by smiling back at a middle-aged businessman who had smiled at her approvingly when she walked in.
Over salad Ruby said, “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten in such a fancy place.” Her voice was hushed, as if she were in church.
In this low lighting, her face looked less bloated and blotchy and more radiant, the way women wore pregnancy in movies. The way Winnie wore it. Ruby had borrowed Winnie’s black Capri pants, the waistband under her large belly, and one of David’s shirts. With her hair in a rhinestone barrette—also Winnie’s—and the pale lipstick, it was obvious to Olivia the pretty girl Ruby had been when Ben first saw her. The pretty girl she would be again in just a few weeks.
“Do you think David knows we’re here?” Olivia asked, her voice as hushed and reverent as Ruby’s. “Do you think he knows we’re celebrating his birthday?”
“Absolutely,” Ruby said. “No question. I think he’s like this big thing—a soul or whatever—and that he’s all around us, watching and grinning. Like a blob of positive energy.”
“That sounds like something David might have said,” Olivia said.
“You know what Ben says, the asshole?” Ruby said. “He says people are made of dreams and bones. Of course, he’s an Aquarius,” she added, as if that explained everything.
“No offense,” Winnie told her, “but that’s from a song. A kid’s song about planting a garden.”
Ruby blinked, startled. “You’re kidding. He stole that? From a kid’s song?”
“Well,” Winnie said. “It is in a song.”
“Maybe he never heard the song,” Ruby said hopefully.
After their dinners arrived, after Ruby gasped at how beautiful it all was and said that she had never tasted anything so spectacular, after Ruby made Olivia promise that she would bring Sage here, too—“You’ll come to the beach house weekends and bring him here for special occasions, right?” she said, dreamy-eyed, and Olivia said, “Even for not so special occasions”—after they’d eaten and ordered creme br?lée because it was David’s favorite dessert, Winnie said: “I think he’s up there celebrating his birthday, too.” She pointed to the ceiling and beyond. “What was David’s favorite thing in the whole world?” she asked. “That’s what you get to do in heaven on your birthday, I think. Your most favorite thing.”
Olivia smiled and sipped her wine. Then he is here, she thought, raising her wineglass slightly, because what she knew was that David’s most favorite thing was her.
chapter nine
Milagros