In the living room, he sat across from Olivia, at a safe distance.
Although they were facing each other, they managed not to look at each other.
They sat that way for some time, before Jake cleared his throat and said, “The wall? In the kitchen?”
“It helped,” she said.
“Are those bugs on it?”
“Coffee,” she said. “From Guatemala. It’s a long story.”
He nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “I can’t wait to hear all of your long stories.” He smiled. “Don’t worry. I have a few myself.”
The idea of that, of beginning again from nothing, made Olivia feel tired.
“Sometimes,” Jake said, “I get to New York on business. Or to visit friends.”
“Would this be you and Patricia?” Olivia asked him.
“This would be just me.”
She waited.
“I could visit you in New York, one of those times. Maybe.”
This is how you start, she thought. “Yes,” Olivia said.
“I didn’t mean to take advantage of you,” he said.
Olivia laughed. “Whoa,” she said. “I meant to take advantage of you. What I didn’t mean to do was actually like you.”
“Oh?” he said. “You like me?”
Olivia sighed. “I like you.”
“That’s good to hear.”
When he left, Olivia leaned against the screen door and looked out into the darkness. But there were so many stars, the darkness was not even that dark.
Olivia decided that it was time to go. One week after Ruby left, Olivia started to pack up. She took all of the baby clothes, the blankets and toys, and the formula and diapers and put them in boxes. She would give them all to Winnie and Aida. Already, Winnie had Fed-Exed pictures of the baby, all bloody and new, then cleaned up and sleeping, then looking right at the camera, frightened. Olivia studied the photographs, searching the scrunched-up face for something she could not name, expecting to feel jealous or sad or defeated. But she felt nothing except amused at this child of Winnie’s.
She sat at her kitchen table and stared at the wall, considering adding to it. But she had nothing to add, she realized.
She said to herself, “I am a widow. I am a woman on her way home. I am scared.”
Olivia looked at her suitcases, at the boxes of baby things.
She tried to imagine herself with a newborn baby right now. But she couldn’t. For a moment, Olivia thought Ruby had actually done her a favor by keeping this baby; she just did it all wrong. Olivia stretched out her arms and began an awkward dance, a solo jitterbug to a Van Morrison tune that she hummed in her head.
She did not know how long she did that, humming and dancing by herself, before someone spoke.
“I leave you for one week and you go completely bonkers,” Ruby said.
Olivia stopped dancing, not really expecting to see Ruby standing there.
But she was. She was standing in the doorway, still pregnant.
“You hate me, huh?” Ruby said.
“I don’t hate you,” Olivia told her, and it was the truest thing she could say.
“I couldn’t just leave like that. I had to come back. To explain. At first, I thought that Ben would just change his mind. I mean, all along he was the one talking about Bali, about us keeping the baby and raising it free on an island. So that morning, I hadn’t slept at all, and I decided I had to see him. I mean, what is love if it isn’t this?” She cradled her stomach. “Oh,” she said, “I took a hundred dollars from your purse.”
“You did?” Olivia said.
“I figured you wouldn’t mind. I mean, you wouldn’t want me pregnant and hitchhiking, right? I bought a train ticket, and it took forever to get up there, to that camp. How was I supposed to know it was the last weekend before the thing shut down? Everybody had gotten pretty cozy up there over the summer. So I come waddling in, and there’s Ben in his tennis whites, sitting under a tree with Cindy, some skinny blonde who goes to Vassar or something. ‘It just happened,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with her or anything.’ She taught swimming. What a pair, huh?”
Olivia expected Ruby to cry, but the girl was past that; she was all cried out.
“I never trusted him,” Olivia said.
“You were right. He’s a total asshole. He’s like ‘Don’t you think you’d better go back and have the baby?’ He was scared shitless I’d have it right there in front of Cindy. That I’d embarrass him or something. At least my father had the balls to be there when I was born. I mean, he had his problems, but he was there. He saw me all covered with birth guck, and you know what he said? He said I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.” She took a deep breath. “But Ben, he wants nothing to do with me or the baby. He made that clear. In fact, his father is going to send me a big fat check to make sure we stay out of his life for good.”