Love and Other Natural Disasters (34 page)

"Here's to nepotism." She
raised her bottle of sparkling water to Charlie, then took a long swallow.

"I guess I mean, it's not the
worst idea he's ever had."

"How are
you doing with everything?"

"Not bad. Olivia's day care
provider seems great, and she says Olivia's making a normal transition. I was
so relieved, just hearing the word 'normal.' I can tell Jacob wishes Charlie
was still here with us, but he doesn't seem angry with me about him going. I
think Charlie explained it to him really well, told it to him like a bedtime
story, where an uncle who loves his nephew very much has to go on a journey so
he can be a better person. Jacob has Charlie's cell phone number, he carries it
in his backpack, and Charlie said he can call anytime. They've already spoken
twice since he left. Jacob is looking forward to the next chapter in the
story."

There was sadness in Lil's face as
she listened, but she only nodded. "What about Jon?" she asked.

"I'm feeling weirdly at peace
about Jon. It's like, if he gives us another chance, that's great; if he
doesn't, I gave it all I had. I took my best shot. Well, I was prepared to take
my best shot."

"I'll cross my fingers for
you."

"Yesterday I was in line at
the supermarket, and this woman was talking on her cell phone really loudly.
She was saying how her new boyfriend was such a great catch. She said it like
three times."

"She sounds annoying."
Lil proffered her water to me, and I took a long swallow.

"She was. But I used to say
that about Jon, maybe not three times in a row or so loud that strangers could
hear me. But I thought it."

"As if we can catch anybody.
You catch a cold, you don't catch
a
guy." She shook her head, blond
ponytail swaying gracefully down her back. "You can find them, but you
can't catch them, no matter what your mother told you."

"You don't want to know what
my mother told me."

"But you wouldn't really want
to catch them, would you? That term always makes me think of when I was a kid
and I'd catch fireflies in glass jars."

"Wouldn't they die?" I
asked.

"You poke holes in the lid,
and you let them go eventually. But anyway, I think catching a guy sounds like
that. You know, trapping someone so he can spend a lifetime forced to blink
just for you."

"Ah, if you love someone, set
him free, right?"

"That's one way to do
it."

Jacob and Luke came running up to
us. "We want to get ice cream. Can we get ice cream?" Luke asked. He
looked imploringly at Lil, while Jacob cast the same look my way.

"When I'm done talking to
Jacob's mom. Why don't you guys go on that spinning-wheel thingy over
there?" She gestured.

"We did that last time,"
Jacob said.

"And you had fun last
time." She waved her hand. "Go on, give it a whirl. Shoo."

After a minute more of enervated
protest, they did. I always enjoyed Lil's laissez-faire parenting style, and
that Luke seemed to understand she was allowed to have a life outside of him. The
kids were now spinning happily, but I figured we had another seven minutes,
tops.

"So what's your gut feeling?
Is Jon flying back to you or not?" she asked.

"I'm really not sure. What's
amazing is that I spent so long not realizing he had the free will to leave
anytime he wanted. I guess I just thought he was locked in. But it's never
really locked in. I mean, you think saying 'I love you' is going to do it; then
you think getting married is going to do it; and surely, having kids should do
it. But nothing does."

"And thank God for that.
Because when you think it's locked in, you get lazy."

"I guess we did. Take our sex
life, for instance."

Lil nodded knowingly. "That's
how you end up with a Laney, all right."

"But he wasn't having sex with
Laney."

"I bet he was having fantasies
about her, though."

I knew he had, but even now, I
hated thinking of it. "Yeah, yeah, our sex life was a problem."

"Do you mean to tell me you're
just now realizing that sex is important in a relationship?"

"I guess I am."

"Well, who was going to tell
you? Really, you just had to pick it up in the streets."

We were both laughing as Jacob and
Luke made their way back to us.

There was a Post-it in
Dyan's
handwriting on my computer a few days later:
Have
you forgotten the question?
Then she'd listed a few classes and times. They
corresponded to my top two career choices, the ones ranked above public health.
Elementary Nutrition started at four-thirty.

Before I could come up with a
reason not to go, I dialed Lil's number to see if she could watch Jacob that
afternoon. I'd have some time to kill before the class, and had a good idea of
how to spend it.

"So I kind of figured it was
over, but it's good of you to make it official," Ray said.

We were sitting in his empty
classroom, side by side, in chair/desk combos. The night we'd spent together
was just fresh enough that I was glad to have the arm of the desk between us.
On the dry erase board, he'd drawn a diagram about community outreach, and I
kept looking at it whenever his gaze on mine felt too intense.

"It's not like I didn't enjoy
myself," I said. I turned toward the board.

"Oh, I could tell," he
said.

"Jon and I might try
again."

He nodded, unsurprised.

"You were right, I'm still in
love with him."

"Then it's good that you're
trying again. Pull out all the stops, that's what I say."

"I don't actually know what's
going to happen. He's still deciding whether he wants to try again."

Ray shifted so that he was looking
at me directly. "Are you ending things with me, or asking me to convince you
not to end them? I just like to be clear."

"As of right now, I'm a free
agent, I can do whatever I want. Like I said, Jon's still thinking things over.
But if I put my energy into you, it's energy that's not going into Jon. Which
was why Laney was so toxic."

"So you're ending
things."

"So I'm ending things."

"Fair enough."

"There's something else I
wanted to tell you," I said. Then I hesitated. I could see that Ray wanted
to get going. He wasn't meant to be my friend, at least not yet. He'd done me a
lot of good, and, as he would say, that was good enough.

"What's that?"

"If I remember, I'll come
back," I said.

What I almost told Ray was I'd been
thinking a lot about what he'd said, why I was so angry with Jon, how far back
it went. I kept recalling one moment.

I was already crying from his
marriage proposal, and I just kept crying when I saw the pregnancy test. Jon
thought they were tears of happiness—I guess he hoped they were—and I tried to
let him know otherwise, but it seemed like he wouldn't hear it. "We're so
young," I said.

"We have our whole lives ahead
of us," he said. "And now we're going to have a baby."

I wanted to feel his enthusiasm; I
wanted to follow him anywhere. It was ironic that Jon later became the one who
wasn't listened to, because that night, it was me. I was trying to say I
couldn't do what he wanted me to do, but he wouldn't hear it.

I wonder now if Jon hadn't been so
forceful, so convinced that we were doing the right thing by going ahead with
the pregnancy, what would have happened. I think of my dream about Lavender,
and I suspect I couldn't have gone through with an abortion. If Jon had gone
back and forth with me, if he'd just wavered awhile, if I'd owned the decision
to have Jacob, would I still have this anger inside me about the road not
taken?

I liked to think of myself as being
without regrets. Rationally, I knew they were useless. But I was a person with
a thousand "what-ifs." The funny thing is that if you follow your
what-ifs back far enough, they become someone else's: What if my mother had
been impregnated by someone who actually gave a damn? What if my father had
stepped up and decided to be a better man once he knew he was having a kid?
That's when you realize just how foolish it is to retrace your steps when all you
can really do is take a good, hard look around and walk forward.

I wasn't the tattoo type, but if I
had been, I'd have an anklet that read: this is your life, so now what?

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

“Testing one, two, three," Jon
said through the answering machine. His playful tone wasn't fully masking his
nervousness. "I'm sitting here with a wedding invitation for Tamara and
Clayton. Can you believe how fast these kids grow up? And I'm thinking that it
would be pretty strange to attend a wedding stag in my own childhood backyard.
And it would be even stranger to be there with anyone but you. Tragic, really.

"Louise thinks our best shot
would involve a whole lot of work, asking a lot of tough questions, and being
brutally (and I mean, brutally) honest with each other. About the only thing
scarier than that is the thought of losing you forever. So I want to try this.
If you do, too—"

"I'm here," I said.

Tamara got her wish: a small
affair, a slip dress, no veil, no place cards, me as her only bridesmaid. She
floated down the aisle, orchids in her hair, beaming all the while. Sylvia had
declined the invitation, but I saw her peering from an upstairs window. I could
have sworn she was smiling. I smiled back, but I couldn't tell if she saw me.

For the newlyweds' first dance, the
band played "Wonderful Tonight." Jon and I had never liked it much;
Tamara had always adored it. (Was it that line about brushing long blond hair
that sold her and alienated me?) Clayton took Tamara's hand and led her to the
clearing everyone understood to be the dance floor. I watched for a minute,
then wandered to the edge of the yard.

It was twilight, and while the Bay
Area isn't known for its sunsets, Tamara had lucked out. We all had. There were
swatches of purple and violet surrounding the usual dusky pink. In the
distance, the Bay Bridge was partially obscured by the fog of a San Francisco
summer, while the Golden Gate was just a faint memory. Below, courtesy of the
quickly darkening sky, the water was indigo and appeared motionless, but I knew
that was just my vantage point. Everything rushes on. And I'd later tell Lil
how the lights in the Berkeley houses spread out before me were like fireflies.
I allowed myself a private smile before turning back toward the party.

Jon and Jacob were waltzing
together, mocking the serious romantic intent of the song neither of us cared
for, as other dancers held each other close and took the song as written. I
continued to smile, only it was public now, as Jon caught my eye. He smiled,
too, and held out his hand, beckoning. There were still so many questions to be
answered, but somehow that made it even better to be chosen. I stepped forward,
the night finally at my back.