There was no relief in the heat, and Ruby stayed inside in her underwear, in front of a fan, miserable and uncomfortable, cranky.
“I can’t breathe,” she moaned, trying to adjust the baby inside her, to move it out from under her rib cage with her fingers.
She pushed away all food except for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, the smooth variety.
“There’s no room in here for anything else,” Ruby said.
But Olivia made her red currant iced tea and tortellini with pesto sauce, Nikki’s suggestions for natural ways to induce labor.
“I can’t,” Ruby said, and pushed away the food, the tea.
Sometimes, Olivia came home from her morning jog and found Ruby in a bathtub of cold water, the skin of her stomach so stretched that Olivia saw whorls and patterns on it, like blown-up fingerprints, like the blots on Rorschach tests. Ruby’s breasts drooped the way Olivia remembered her grandmother’s doing, resting ugly on her belly, the nipples dark brown and swollen, the breasts themselves covered with puffy blue veins. They leaked, too, a thin, clear liquid, like tears.
“No wonder Ben doesn’t love me anymore,” Ruby said one morning when Olivia came home sweaty and aching, to find her in the tub, crying. “Look at me. I’m so disgusting.”
“You’re not,” Olivia said, kneeling beside the bathtub. She thought, Only two more days. Only two more days of this.
“Oh please. I look down and I get so freaked out,” Ruby said, lifting her arms to indicate her body, all of it. “Once I broke my leg. I was in fifth grade and I fell down our front steps. Just stumbled really. And my leg broke. It was so weird. I had to wear a cast up to here”—she indicated somewhere under the water—“for like seven weeks. About halfway through, it got really itchy. I thought I was going to lose my mind, you know? And then it even started to smell kind of funky. I kept pretending it was happening to somebody else, all that pain and the itching and the smell. But this is even worse. And I can’t escape it. I mean, I can’t breathe, I can’t sleep. And it’s so hot.”
“I know,” Olivia said.
She thought of herself this way—pregnant and uncomfortable. What would David do? she wondered. He would wash her hair and rub her back and give her ice cubes to rub on her neck. So that was what she did. Olivia washed Ruby’s hair with the shampoo that smelled like rum. She put ice cubes in the bathtub. She read Green Eggs and Ham out loud to Ruby, because Winnie said that hearing rhymes made babies smarter. For a little while, Ruby felt better.
Olivia agreed to go out to dinner with her parents and her sister. They wanted to talk her out of this. She wanted them to be ready for the baby. She left the number of the restaurant all over the house—by the telephone, beside the bathtub, next to Ruby’s bed. Then she put on a new dress, a long flowered one with buttons down the front, and met her family at the Spanish restaurant on the ocean.
They ordered calamari as an appetizer, and before it came, Amy began to talk.
“I see a pattern of irrational behavior,” she said. “This is just one more thing.”
“What irrational behavior?” Olivia said. “I didn’t kill my husband. He just died. And that is the only irrational thing I can think of in my life.”
“How about eloping with someone you hardly knew?” Amy said. “How about dressing your cat up in doll clothes? How about a million nutty things you did your whole life?”
“I’m finally taking charge of my life again,” Olivia said, her head reeling from Amy’s accusations. How could her sister see marrying David as foolish when it had been the smartest thing Olivia had done? “I finally see a future for myself,” Olivia added.
Amy lowered her voice. “Is that what sleeping with Jake was all about? Taking charge?”
“Did he tell you that?” Olivia said.
“He didn’t have to,” Amy said. “It’s so obvious.”
Their mother interrupted. “Girls! I don’t want to hear this kind of talk. Olivia, I can’t believe that you are having sex with men at this point in your life. You are supposedly grief-stricken.”
“Supposedly!” Olivia said.
But her mother waved her hands dismissively. “I don’t want to discuss morals with my thirty-seven-year-old daughter. The point is that you shouldn’t make any big decisions for a while yet. If in six months or a year you still feel like you want a baby, adopt one then. It hasn’t even been a year, Olivia.”
Olivia recognized this advice from the articles her mother clipped from magazines for her.
“It will be a year,” Olivia said. “In one week.”
“The point is, you need to get past each season without him,” her mother continued. “Every landmark. Christmas and anniversaries and birthdays.”