Nikki stood over them.
“What are you imagining?” she asked Ruby.
Why did they always have to go first? But of course Ruby had already come up with a lie.
“The beach at sunrise,” she said. “Before it gets crowded, you know? It smells like seaweed, but not in a bad way. And like salt. I like that part of the morning.”
It sounded convincing enough for Nikki to coo, “Wonderful.”
Someone else thought of a forest; another person chose a meadow. Olivia closed her own eyes, willing to let a peaceful image in. But it was that damn Jake Maxwell who worked his way inside her head, pressing against her eyelids. Jake Maxwell shirtless, in cutoffs, standing at his door and letting her in. She opened her eyes and Ruby was staring at her all funny.
“What?” Olivia said. But Ruby shook her head, closed her eyes again, and went back to her beach.
Before they left, they were asked to choose a focal point, something to take with them to the hospital and stare at when things got rough.
“Something,” Nikki explained, “that will keep you focused.”
The others chose quilts and sonogram pictures and a wedding photograph.
Ruby took Olivia’s hand and whispered, “I choose you. When I start to lose it, before the drugs kick in, I’ll just look at your face and that will get me through.”
When they got home, Ruby announced that she needed to be alone. She had to call Ben and get him to agree to sign the parental consent form. “Then we’ll fax it to him and everything will be settled,” she said. Her voice had taken on a weary seriousness.
Satisfied, Olivia decided that Ruby was determined to do it. She drove to Mia Bambina, the specialty baby store in town. There, she turned herself over to a woman named Mara, who assured her that they carried everything she would need for the first few months of her baby’s life.
Mara helped her choose blankets, tiny things called “onesies,” baby bottles with balloons and the ABCs on them, a black-and-white mobile, booties and hats and a hand-knit sweater, and all of the Winnie-the-Pooh characters in miniature soft stuffed animals sitting in a plush blue honey jar.
“If you have any black baby clothes,” Olivia said, grinning, thinking of how pleased Ruby would be, “I’ll take them.”
Mara added those to the pile, too: tiny black leggings and high-tops and turtlenecks.
“It’s really wonderful, isn’t it?” Mara said as she wrapped all of the items in tissue paper. “We get a lot of people in here preparing for an adoption.” She smiled warmly at Olivia. “You and your husband must be pretty excited.”
“Thank God for adoption,” Olivia told Mara, because that was exactly what she felt. Thank God for adoption and thank God for Ruby.
The colorful bags with Mia Bambina emblazoned across the front filled the trunk. Olivia stopped at the A&P and bought two cases of formula and a case of Pampers. When she got in her car to drive back home, the faint sweet smell of babies filled the air. The sun was bright and hot, and Olivia began to hum an old Jackson Browne song as her car hugged the curves on the windy scenic route. Her hands beat out the rhythm on the steering wheel. No lullabies for her baby, she decided. She would hum him Beatles songs, and Simon and Garfunkel, and all of those Jackson Browne, Van Morrison, and Bruce Springsteen tunes from her college days. She would teach him to dance the twist, the swim, the monkey. Olivia saw herself with a little boy who looked like David, the same curly brown hair and straight nose, the two of them twisting across the hardwood floors of her apartment on Bethune Street, with the stereo turned up too loud, and both of them grinning and sweaty.
Around the next curve, the sun was so bright that she was blinded for an instant; and in that instant, she heard a small thump beneath her car. She had run over something. Olivia pulled over, beyond the shoulder, onto the scratchy grass that grew there. Trembling, she got out of the car.
It’s just a paper bag, she told herself. A bag with empty beer cans in it.
She saw those all the time, tossed from car windows onto the side of the road.