Sober pregnant Ruby was different. We talked about Milo for the first time in years. Ruby had never blamed me, and I wept with relief. She urged me to get back out there and live my life. I was grateful that my sister had seen the light, and that we were able to reconnect. She sounded like an adult for the first time. She still planned an acting career. Mom was going to be doing a lot of childcare, but she was a young grandma at forty-nine, and I think she relished the role. I went back to Boston feeling like a burden had lifted off my shoulders.
Ruby’s baby was born on 1 June 2006. It was going to be a whole new life for her. I wondered if she realized what she was getting herself into. Mom always came over to Boston twice a year to see me, but Ruby never came. I told Ruby I hoped she would come with Mom and the baby next time. She made no promises.
In the new year of 2007, I realized how lonely I was. Boyfriends had come and gone, but I didn’t trust any of them for long enough to build a lasting relationship. College had kept me busy, and now I had moved to New York City and was interningat Schoolroom, an educational imprint of a bigger publisher, Watling and Harris. It wasn’t anything close to the type of job I wanted but it was a start. My job was demanding and demeaning and included everything from photocopying and printing documents to collecting the senior editor’s dry-cleaning. With Dad’s help, I rented a tiny apartment in Brooklyn.
I had not wanted a relationship because I didn’t think I deserved one. But Ruby had told me there were trustworthy guys out there, and I guess if she could say it, it must be true. Most of my friends had coupled up and were married with kids or had kids on the way. I’d kissed a few frogs but none of them had turned out to be princes.
I noodled around on the dating websites to see who was out there. My work girlfriends Larissa and Dawn and I tried speed dating and Match.com with some hilarious and some troubling results. I met one man who was upfront by the third date about the fact that he needed to get married and have a baby on the way within the next six months to inherit a quarter of a million dollars. He said he’d give me ten per cent but that we had to stay married for five years before we officially divorced as per the terms of the will. We could put the baby up for adoption as soon as he got the money. He could not understand why I didn’t swoon into his arms. He upped his offer to twenty per cent. I deleted his number and blocked his calls.
I had a few months emailing and texting losers and time-wasters, a lot of whom wanted to show me photos of their dicks – as if any woman would be persuaded into a date by a photo of a penis. My friends and I laughed at these, stupid, ugly and offensive at the same time. I will never understand why men do this.
I thought I had found the perfect guy after a few dates with a charming self-described Christian man, particularly well-groomed and a terrific kisser, who never wanted me to go back tohis place or he to mine. On the fourth date, I asked him bluntly if he was gay. His shoulders drooped and he begged me to keep his secret. I played along for six months because he was fun and I met his family on one occasion who declared me ‘adorable’, but after the ‘dinner with the folks’ I had to tell him that I could no longer keep up the lie. I stayed friends with Cisco and his real partner, Chad. I regularly had them to lunch with Aunt Rachel, when she came to the city.
Then there was the mild-mannered divorcee. He was interesting when you got him talking but cripplingly shy; it took an hour on each date to get him to loosen up. We liked the same music and went to see Prince and Usher. He was an awesome dancer. He was surprisingly skilled in the bedroom department too. I liked him. And then, after three months, he vanished. My calls, texts and emails were not returned. He dropped me like a sack of lobsters. In fact, I never saw him again. I still wonder what happened to him.
One morning, in the office, there was a letter waiting for me, postmarked Boston. I recognized the typewritten envelope. I wasn’t hard to find. My name was on the publisher’s website.
You think running away to New York is the solution? I’ll always find you. I don’t know whose DNA they found but it certainly wasn’t Milo’s. You know that.
Margie would get tired of this eventually.
28
Ruby
In the last month of pregnancy, I had moved back into Mom’s apartment. It seemed like I would yoyo between Mom’s and Grandma’s forever. The last trimester had been tough-going. Back in March I had decided to build an extension on Grandma’s house, and Olivia, who had been doing set design in my year in college, offered to project manage it for me. When Dad learned I was pregnant, he’d suggested I would need more room and offered to pay for it.
In the beginning, the builders wouldn’t take Olivia or me seriously, and spoke down to us, but they hadn’t reckoned with the rage of a pregnant woman who needed completion by the time the baby was four months old. I was going to stay with Mom until then. I got stuck in with painting and decorating to earn their respect. And Olivia made them aware of who was boss. The back of the house was going to be one large kitchen-diner with folding doors, which would open out to the deck, and we’d also have a new guest bathroom and shower upstairs as well as an en suite bathroom off my bedroom, which doubled in size. The combi boiler would live in the attic. The bedroom that had been my uncle’s was going to be the nursery, and Mom’s childhood bedroom housed my exercise bike and boxes of books. I hadn’t decided what it should be yet.
I went into labour at an AA meeting on 1 June 2006.The only person I knew well at that meeting was Jack. I sat as far away from him as possible. I felt the first contraction like a rolling wave down my belly but it wasn’t too bad and I assumed it was a Braxton Hicks cramp, which I’d been warned about. My obstetrician said most people got them and, unless they were coming twenty minutes apart, I was not to go to the maternity hospital. I was prepared, though, I had been carrying my hospital bag in the trunk of my car for a few weeks. I took a deep breath, and the lady beside me asked if I was okay. I didn’t want to disrupt the meeting and assured her I was fine. The next contraction came twenty minutes later. This was a little sharper, and I gasped and held my belly. I saw Jack roll his eyes. Was I in labour? I didn’t want to interrupt the woman who was sharing about how she had been able to turn her life around.
When the next contraction came ten minutes later, and the pressure whooshed down the valley of my groin, I knew that my baby was knocking at my pelvic door. I stood up and apologized, and tried to leave the room discreetly as my waters broke. I was mortified; my pregnancy jeans were soaked through. The whole meeting was abandoned quickly and people were talking about ambulances, but I didn’t want a fuss. ‘Do you know anyone here?’ asked the woman I’d been sitting next to.
‘No, but I’ll be fine. I’ll drive myself – it’s not far to Holles Street.’
Jack appeared beside me. ‘Give me your keys, Ruby, I’ll drive. You’ll never be able to park.’ I was surprised. But there was a look of genuine concern on his face, and right at this moment wasn’t the time to quibble about whether he was insured to drive my car.
Outside, I heaved myself into the passenger seat and noted that he’d put his jacket down on the seat so it didn’t get wet. I was about to thank him when another wave gripped me and this one was vicious. Everyone from the meeting was crowdedaround. ‘Close the door,’ he shouted as I reeled back from the pain. As soon as it was shut, we shot out of the car park and on to the road. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I’m not used to driving an automatic. Fucking Americans.’
There wasn’t much conversation between us on the way. He told me to call the hospital and to call the father. I didn’t feel I owed him an explanation and, in between huffing and puffing and screaming in pain, I called the hospital, told them I was five minutes away and that the contractions were three minutes apart. Then I called Mom and asked her to meet me there. She was with Grandma, and said she’d be there as soon as she could. Jack overheard all this and glanced across at me before he ran another red light. He dropped me off at the hospital entrance and came around and helped me out of the car. I walked in by myself. The orderly at the door on a smoke break took one look at me and said, ‘That baby’s not waiting around.’ He wasn’t wrong.
Eight minutes later, the midwife asked me for ‘one last big push’, and Lucy was born, punching the air and mewling as soon as her tiny body slipped through the birth canal. It had been eight minutes of acute agony, but once I saw her, I no longer felt anything but love. She was perfect. I didn’t want to let her go when the nurses tried to take her away to check her vitals and clean her up, while the midwife stayed with me as I still had to push out the placenta. They eased her out of my arms, and they had never felt emptier. Mom wasn’t there, Erin wasn’t there. I felt entirely alone as all the medics focused on my baby. I could see her over the other side of the delivery suite. The placenta pushed its way out of me and then a flurry of people came around me to clean me up and make sure I was okay.
A nurse came in and said, ‘Daddy’s here. He had trouble parking the car. Shall we let him in?’ I was confused. Had Dad flown in coincidentally on the same day I’d given birth? I wantedto see him. I nodded enthusiastically. But it was Jack who arrived at my side.
‘I lied,’ he whispered. ‘I told them I was the dad. I didn’t want you to be on your own.’
Just then, the nurse returned and put the baby back into my arms.
‘Wow,’ said Jack. ‘She’s beautiful and so tiny.’ Her little scrunched-up face miaowed like a tiger cub. Jack was leaning over, and she reached up and grabbed his finger. ‘My God,’ he whispered, and I looked at him. His eyes were shining and his whole face softened. And then I looked at my daughter again. She would melt the most hardened of hearts.
29
Erin
I was still friends with Cisco, who had recently broken up with Chad. We were both single, though I was more single than Cisco. He had regular dates and hook-ups. I asked him if he knew any decent straight guys and he set me up on a date with his cousin Fabian, who had broken up with his fiancée six months previously. ‘Not a rebounder, thank you very much,’ I said, but Cisco insisted that Fabian was over Natasha and ready to dip his toe into the dating pool again.
Fabian was an unusual-looking man, with a low forehead and madly bushy eyebrows, but the widest smile and perfect teeth. He was a tiny bit on the short side, but I didn’t mind that. He had longish dark hair and a great sense of humour. He was a high school English teacher and rented a tiny studio in Greenwich Village. He also had a second job, teaching deaf kids how to swim. Dad was heavily hinting that I should settle down and start a family. I wasn’t too sure. I liked my independence, and I was now an assistant editor, which was more satisfying than interning. I earned peanuts but I finally got to work on some copy. I hoped to move to their fiction imprint, but it seemed like so did every other assistant in New York.
