Melissa Senate (18 page)

Stella reached into her little embroidered pink purse, pulled out the Star Quality mint, and chucked it in a trash can.

That night, while Stella read
The Girlfriends’ Guide To Pregnancy
in the lobby so she could catch the mime show again, I found my lithograph and sat down to call Tom. I wanted to tell him about Eric Miller and Michael Roberts. I wasn’t sure if he’d let me talk, let me ramble on about myself that way, but Tom was my best friend, the person I lived with, and I needed to talk to him.

My cell phone rang just as I was searching my tote bag for it.

Nick McDermott.

“It’s been a week and I haven’t heard from you,” he said, his voice having its usual effect on my body. “So how about this: I’ll fly down to Las Vegas, like tonight, and we’ll go to one of those crazy chapels and get married. If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, we can say we tried.”

Huh?
“You mean like get a quickie annulment to go with our quickie ceremony and quickie marriage?”

I expected the “I’m kidding, Ruby” but it didn’t come.

“So what do you say, Ms. Miller?”

He was serious? Really serious? Lunch three times a week and the occasional after-school movie and one night in bed, and he was ready to marry me? “Nick, that’s very romantic, but—”

“No buts, Ruby. I think I’m in love with you. And I think you’re in love with me. But you’re engaged to someone else.”

I am engaged to my best friend. A man who does make the earth move for me, emotionally and physically. A man who’s been there for me through those thick thicks and those thin thins.

A little test. “Nick, did you know that my great-grand-mother, Zelda, will likely move in with me in the next year? And her boyfriend, Harold, too. I’m a package deal.”

Silence for a second, then he said, “Well, we don’t have to live together right away. I mean, when it comes right down to it, Rubes, we really don’t know each other at all. We can just take it day by day.”

“Take our marriage day by day?”

“Isn’t that really the best way to handle everything?” he said.

A few months ago I told Tom that Zelda would probably need to come live with us for good in about six months. The assisted living center was costing her a fortune, and she said she wanted to spend her money more recklessly on fun with Harold and to spoil me and Stella. Tom immediately asked whether she’d be more comfortable in our room or if he should start working on making the guest room more elderly-friendly. That was Tom.

This was Nick. “Besides,” he added, “we can’t very well make love day and night with Great-Grandma Zelda walking around.”

“I suppose not,” I said.

“So, I’ll meet you at your hotel tomorrow. We’ll have a midnight ceremony and come back hitched. That’ll be crazy. Crazy enough to actually work.”

Somewhere in that gorgeous body of his I think he meant well, that this high-school proposal was coming from his heart. I’d put him off, then he gallantly came to get his girl, then I rebuffed him and hadn’t been in touch since. So he was suddenly proposing—a Hollywood marriage of sorts. Without knowing the answers to any of the questions you should ask before marrying.

Just like that, it was gone. The crush I’d had on Nick Noah McDermott for two and a half years was gone. Because Nick had turned the fantasy into reality and the reality was lacking. Tom was the real fantasy. A forever man.

Stella had been right.

I hadn’t needed a gun to my head. I’d needed the right question. From the
wrong
guy.

Three times I picked up my cell phone and three times I put it back down.
Call Tom,
I told myself. But this hesitance was new; this
feeling
was new. And the feeling seemed to be…fear. Nerves. Anxiety. A panic attack in the making.

“Ironic that Tom’s causing all these butterflies,” Stella said over dinner in our room that night. Though it was our last night in Las Vegas, we couldn’t bear one more meal out, one more waiter, one more bill. We each lay on our beds, on our stomach, our dinners on trays. The TV was on for once, tuned to VH1, but if the network still aired
Where Are They Now?
it wasn’t on today.

I pushed around spinach leaves in my salad. “I’m so afraid to call him, but why?”

“Maybe you’re afraid he’s going to break up with you,” she said. “Tell you it’s too late?”

“No way,” I said. “This isn’t a deal breaker for Tom. God, Stella, even if I told him I slept with Nick, to either get him out of my system or to find out how I felt, I don’t think Tom would break up with me. I think he’d let me find my way. If not to him, so be it. If to him, all the better.”

“All the better? Why?”

“Because then I’d be choosing him for the right reasons.”

Stella took a bite of her herb-encrusted salmon and then cut a piece for me, which meant it was delicious. “So take advantage of the time and space,” she said. “When you’re ready to call him, you will.”

“But I thought it was between him and Nick. And now I’ve exorcised Nick. He’s gone.”

And he was. It was as though a sticky clear film had been lifted from my chest. Where I once felt such longing, I now felt bittersweet tenderness. Nick was my friend, had always been just my friend. I had a feeling that relationship would be easy to repair.

Earlier on the phone he’d said he was a romantic and that he’d rush across the country if I said the word. I had no doubt he would. I had no doubt he’d carry me in his arms to the craziest wedding chapel, too. All on a big romantic high with nothing to back it up, nothing to support it. No questions, no answers.

“It was never between Tom and Nick, Ruby. It was just always about you. And now you need to ask yourself if you really want to marry Tom Truby.”

I looked at my ring, my beautiful, twinkling ring, my mother’s ring. It looked so right on my finger. But it suddenly felt very tight.

I
T WAS HARD TO SAY GOODBYE TO THE CAR, BUT NOT SO HARD THAT
Stella was willing to drive three thousand miles across country again. We hadn’t driven at all in Las Vegas, except to head for the airport. And now we were going home. Well, Stella was going home, and I was tagging along for a day or two. Regardless of what happened with Tom, I would (eventually) be going home to a full house, to a great-grandmother a few miles away, to a job come September, to a life in full swing. Stella would be returning to an empty apartment and the unknown.

The plan was to help her figure out where to put a nursery in her tiny one-bedroom apartment, make a list of what she needed, do some preliminary baby-proofing, and get her started on her new life-to-be as a mother, and a single mother, at that. In a couple of weeks, she’d fly up for our birthdays so that Grammy Zelda could partake (Grammy was especially big on milestones), and then I’d do the traveling for the foreseeable future.

We sat at the gate, flipping through our magazines,
The New Yorker, Portland, Lucky, Vanity Fair,
and
People,
which I could never resist. We had a five-hour flight awaiting us and another half hour to go on these hard orange seats.

A woman with a baby attached to her chest via a Baby Björn asked Stella if the seat next to her was free. Stella moved her pile of magazines, and the woman smiled and thanked her. All we could see of the baby was the tufts of pale fuzz on its head.

Stella stared at the little head. “I’m due in December,” she told the woman. “And nervous.”

The woman laughed. “I’m still nervous. But it’s great,” she added, gently rubbing the material at the baby’s back. “Everything you hear about motherhood is true, including that it completely changes your life.”

“In a good way?” Stella asked.

She nodded. “In the best way.” She waved at a man approaching with an infant car seat and two carry-on bags over his shoulder. “There’s my husband,” she said, standing. “Forget all the crap those books say you have to buy. All a new mother needs is a good husband. Someone to carry the car seat, you know?”

Stella’s face fell, but the woman didn’t notice; she was already on the people mover with her helpmeet.

“So you’ll carry the car seat,” I told her, slinging my arm around her shoulder. “I am woman, hear me roar, right?”

“I guess,” she said, grabbing the
People
and loudly flipping pages.

“You’re going to be a really good mother, Stella.”

She closed the magazine and looked at me with Face Reader concentration. “Are you just saying that? I really want to know.”

“I’m not just saying that. You are going to be great. You will make Mom proud, Stella.”

Tears glistened in her eyes. “It must have been so hard for her. But she did it with twins. And we were no day at the beach.
I
was no day at the beach, I should say.”

“Is a day at the beach ever easy? There’s parking, then lugging all your stuff, then remembering where you parked, then finding a good spot, then getting sand kicked at you, then listening to kids shriek, and getting stung by a jellyfish, then finding sand in your lunch, then getting sunburned and having to schlep all the way back to the car for the sunscreen, but forgetting the keys and—”

“I get the point,” she said with a smile.

“Mom did it, and so many women do it. Yeah, it helps to have someone to carry the car seat or take one of the 3:00 a.m. feedings. But you already have all you need to take good care of your baby.”

“All I need? I have nothing on any of the lists in any of the books I read. I don’t even know how to change a diaper.”

“You have what you need, Stella,” I said, squeezing her hand. “Meaning, you’ve got what it takes.”

“Oh,” she said, her face brightening, then lighting to full-out beam. “Thank you, Ruby. I hate getting all ushy-gushy, but that means a lot coming from a sancti-sister like you.”

“I love a backhanded thanks,” I said, swatting her head with
People.

Her cell phone rang. It was the first time since she’d picked me up in the red convertible.

“Yes, this is Stella Miller,” she said. “Yeah, yes, uh-huh, right. What? Omigod, you’re kidding me! That’s awesome. Yes, I would.” She gave her address and then hung up and turned to me, all smiles. “You will never guess who that was.”

“Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes? You’ve won a million dollars?”

“I wish. It was that baby-faced cop from Iowa. What was the name of that town? Isley? Anyway, my copy of
What To Expect When You’re Expecting
turned up in a stolen car and thanks to your inscription, Baby Face remembered us.”

“So he’s sending it to you?”

“After the trial. It’s evidence apparently. He said he might not have bothered sending the book but he thought I might want back the ‘very special’ bookmark.”

I smiled. “Do you?”

“Let’s just put it where it belongs, in Mom’s hope chest.”

“I second that.”

“My cosmetics bag and malt balls weren’t with the book.” She smiled. “Baby Face said, ‘See, Mrs. Miller, you can definitely know
what to expect
from the Isley PD. Justice.’ He really emphasized the
what to expect.
I’ll bet he couldn’t wait to make that little joke.”

I laughed. “Did he really call you Mrs.?”

She nodded. “It sounded so weird. Me, Mrs. Miller.”

“I know. Most of the kids at BLA call me Mrs. Miller. They figure if I’m a grown-up, I must be married.”

Our flight was finally called, but as we were neither first class nor requiring extra help, we still had a while to go in the orange seats with our magazines.

“Ruby, if you do marry Tom, are you going to change your name?”

“I don’t know. I was always so attached to Miller because it was my only connection to our father. But now holding on to that doesn’t seem so important anymore.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You know, I’ve come to like the sounds of Ruby Truby. There is something very rhythmic, very musical about it.”

Which meant big sister Stella was giving her blessing.

Every time I flew into New York City, I dreaded the sight of the skyline. It always reminded me of where we’d come from, that once we’d been a family of four. I would think of my mother, a native New Yorker, packing us up and moving us to a strange new land for a fresh start with no associations. I always thought that staying in Maine was honoring my mother’s bravery, her choices and decisions. Once, I’d asked her if it bothered her that Stella ran right back to New York the minute she could. She’d said she didn’t mind a bit, that losing Silas very likely sent Stella seeking comfort from the place where her family had been intact.

Meanwhile, a stranger named Michael Roberts, living and breathing across the country, was someone I used to call Daddy. As our plane bumped down on the runway at JFK, I thought less of the old and more of the new. New York City was Stella’s home, the home of my future niece or nephew. That was my association now.

And she had one tiny piece of it. Stella’s Upper West Side apartment was small, around four hundred square feet. Including the bedroom. It wasn’t a luxury building with a doorman, but it did have an elevator.

“I suppose even if it didn’t,” she said, as the doors pinged open in the lobby, “I would still manage fine without the helpful husband since I’m only on the second floor. And one of the great things about living in New York is that supermarkets deliver. The drugstores deliver. And Buy Buy Baby delivers.”

She’d painted since I’d last visited. Instead of the usual dingy off-white of rentals, the walls were a soft pale-yellow, the decor an inviting, cozy Morocco-meets-flea market. Under a painting of Stella on a living-room wall was a pretty white wooden cradle with a tiny white quilt inside.

“I found it at a flea market,” she said. “It’s fun to wonder what other babies were rocked in it. Maybe Bono’s or David Beckham’s.”

I smiled. “You never know.”

“That’s for sure,” she said.

We spent the rest of the evening on her sofa, making lists. Headers such as What The Baby Needs, which included everything from a crib to diapers, from a nasal aspirator to a baby bathtub. Then there was What Stella Needs, down to the Baby Björn and Lamaze class.

“Can I do Lamaze alone?” she asked, tossing her pad on the coffee table and resting her feet on it. “I think you’re supposed to have a partner. But who would be my partner? I have some friends, but not a best friend who’d do that.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “Me. I’ll be your partner. I’ll fly down for the weekly class, and then a couple of weeks before your due date, I’ll come stay with you.”

She bit her lip, which was often her way to stop herself from crying. “I would really appreciate that, Ruby.”

I squeezed her hand. “That’s what twin sisters are for.”

“Good twin sisters.” She let out a sigh and sipped her herbal tea. “God, I’m so jealous of you.”

“Me? You’re jealous of me? What the hell for?”

“You’ve just got it so together. Including Tom, Ruby. I realize now that I had that wrong. I mean, I’ve always gone for Nick types, you know? The bad boy. The unattainable who I had to prove to myself and everyone I could get. But no one can really ever get that guy.”

I nodded. “I think you’re right about that. Nick proposed, but proposed what? Basically a divorce!”

She laughed. “Yeah. And Tom proposed forever. A life. A family. A future. The whole shebang, white picket fence and all. And you’ve never been afraid to say yes to that. To want it. To think you can really have that kind of life.”

“You always said that life was a bore,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, it’s really boring to come home to someone who loves you. To someone you can trust. To someone who cares if you’re late or sick or need help with something.” I could see tears in her eyes. “I’ve been such an idiot, Ruby. I’ve totally had it wrong. You were right before, Tom wasn’t the safety net at all.
Nick
was. Because Nick
was
total fantasy. From start to finish. And it’s easy to love a fantasy, right? Desiring only the unattainable can keep a person pretty busy. And unattainable herself.”

I stared at my sister, this insightful creature who only a few weeks ago seemed like a
Star Trek
alien to me. She was right. Absolutely right.

“And as long as you were in love with Nick,” she said, as though thinking out loud, “you couldn’t really love Tom, couldn’t really commit fully to him. That kept Tom at arm’s length. Safe. Am I on target?”

“Bull’s-eye,” I said, pretty darn impressed. “How did you get to be so smart, anyway? I’m the one who went to the Ivy League college.”

She smiled. “School of life, babe. I’ve been using men and one-night stands as safety nets since Silas. I just didn’t really connect the dots.”

I knew all about not connecting the dots.

Stella had been getting a pillow and a blanket for me for the past twenty minutes. “Stella?” I went into the bedroom, and she was passed out cold on her bed, her head at the foot-board.

The radiator cover across from her bed was lined with photographs, Stella and me, Stella and our mother, Stella and me and our mother. And Stella and Silas, arm in arm, at the beach. Soon there would be one of Stella and a baby named Silas or Clarissa.

Earlier that evening, when we’d been in the bedroom with a measuring tape to figure out where the crib would fit best, I’d noticed a photograph I’d seen many times before, of the Miller family at the beach, me on my mother’s shoulders, and Stella up on our father’s shoulders, all of us squinting and smiling.

That photograph was now gone. I liked that she’d rearranged the others to fill up its place instead of leaving the hole. That told me she was well aware that a new photograph of a new family couldn’t and wouldn’t be a replacement for what was lost, what had been, but was a testament to life going on, moving forward, ever changing.

Since Stella was lying on top of her comforter, I went into her closet and found the spare blanket and draped it over her, then shut the light and closed the door. In the living room, I lay down on the sofa, putting a square pillow under my head and spreading out the chenille throw on top of me. I reached for my cell phone and pressed in Tom’s number.

“I miss you,” he said. “And I’m really, really, really angry at you.”

“I know. And I have a lot to tell you, a lot to apologize for. But right now I want you to know that I’ve figured out some very important
stuff,
for lack of a better word. Stuff I didn’t even know
was
stuff.”

“I’ve always known you have stuff, Ruby. It’s one of the reasons I thought going off into the wilderness with Stella was such a good idea.”

“And it was. Want to know what I figured out?”

“Yup,” he said, and it was as though he were right there in the room, snuggled with me on the couch, his warm, intelligent blue eyes intent on me.

“I figured out that it’s always been you, Tom, right from the get-go. From day one at BLA. I thought I had some kind of big crush on Nick, but it turned out I was just using that crush to keep you at enough of an internal distance. To protect myself, just in case. Just in case you left.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“I believe that now. I trust in that. I guess I never really did before.”

“So I guess you’ll have to let down the BLA heartbreaker. That might be a first.”

“Actually, I already did. But you know what? I’ll bet it’s not the first time.”

“Probably not,” Tom said.

I suddenly knew that it was true. That Nick had been hurt before, somewhere along the way, and he wasn’t ready to free fall. He’d come close with me, he’d taken a step. And when the right woman crossed paths with him, he’d be ready to give her all of himself. She’d be one lucky woman.