Did he just get her pregnant? He did, didn’t he? It would be just his luck. He should write a letter to the condom company. You should be ashamed of yourselves, making such a stupid, flimsy latex product. Where is your pride in your work? Do you care nothing for those of us who should not be permitted to reproduce?
Instead, he just sits there, his head in his hands. Patrick, he thinks. You are the world’s biggest idiot. She wants a baby, and, dude, you know she’s going to MAGIC the whole world until she gets one.
Oh God, he is so doomed. He loves her so much, but he is not, and never has been, fatherhood material. He has never once looked over at a baby and thought, Wow, I wish I’d made that kid! How do I get me some of those toothless, drooly kisses? How fun would it be to see if I could get by on four hours of sleep every night for the next eighteen years?
But he’s watched as she flirts and coos over babies in public and rhapsodizes about the ones who come into her shop. He once listened, mystified, while she described a scene of a baby rubbing a banana into his own ear. She was laughing so hard she could barely even get the story out. So what kind of denial had he been living in, thinking that this subject would never come up? That she’d never look at him across a table with her big eyes and her trembly voice and beg him to have a baby with her? That he’d never have that uncomfortable moment of telling her no?
That then a condom wouldn’t break that same night?
He looks over at Bedford and Roy, her dog and his cat, who are curled up together on the rug, having their usual midmorning nap. They’ve forged an unlikely friendship since Patrick moved upstairs to live with Marnie; they even have their own Instagram fans for their interspecies cuddling, @BedfordlovesRoy. But cute as they are, it has to be noted that they have been abject failures as baby substitutes.
“Guys,” he tells them. “I’d like to believe that you really tried, but I’m afraid you didn’t even come close.” Roy doesn’t bother to respond, of course, but Bedford wags his tail. “Nope. Don’t bother wagging now. None of us has done enough to keep her from wanting a kid. Not a single one of us.”
He rubs his face, hard. He needs to get hold of himself. Go take a shower, stop drinking coffee, switch to water, and get himself to work. Work might take his mind off this situation, if he ever did any of it, that is. He’s supposed to be turning himself into a painter, now that the fire ended his career as a sculptor. At least that’s the plan. He hasn’t been able to do much. He sucks at painting, is the truth of it.
He and Marnie even converted one of the apartments into a studio for him last year when he decided he was mentally well enough to do art again. Not sculpture, because of the damage to his hands. But he should be able to paint. Marnie made that decision for him, really. She eased out the tenants who were living there—they needed to be on their own anyway, she said—and then the two of them cleaned out the rooms and repainted the walls and installed shelves for his supplies. Art tables appeared. Easels. Lighting. A studio futon. It was his own space, with the perfect light coming in from the north-facing windows.
Nothing, nothing, like the studio from before.
The studio of the fire.
Anneliese briefly rises up in his head, as she does whenever he thinks of anything having to do with that day. He sees her tilting her face up, catching the light, smiling at him playfully.
Not screaming today, as she usually is when she shows up.
He wonders briefly if he and Anneliese had ever talked about having a child. He doesn’t think so. They were young though, so maybe it simply hadn’t occurred to them yet. Maybe it would have eventually come up. And, you know what, maybe he could have been a father back then if that’s what she’d wanted.
But now. No. There are a million airtight reasons he doesn’t want a child, reasons that any person possessing a shred of sanity would agree with.
Number one: He looks scary. Children shrink from him. One of his eyes looks like it was installed crooked from the factory, and besides that, the skin on his face is stretched out and shiny, the result of the thirteen surgeries he had. His mouth is crooked. His jaw isn’t symmetrical anymore.
And number two: Even if the baby eventually got used to the wonky look of him (which he assumes it would because people can get used to anything), he’d have to go out in public all the damn time, at first to push the baby carriage because he’s pretty sure the law requires that people air out babies from time to time, and then the next thing you know, he’d be hauling himself to playgrounds, and every damn day he’d have to endure scenes like the one in the park yesterday, when he took down both a toddler and a baby with his freakish appearance.
Number three—and this may be the worst of all—the well-meaning public. God, he hates this one, when he gets used as the example for the lesson on “Why It’s Important to Be Polite to the Abnormal.” (Or what’s the politically correct term now? Atypical? That’s probably it. Atypical.) He can envision his own child’s well-meaning young teacher saying in a sweet singsong to her class of monsters: “Now, children, Mr. Delaney can’t help it that he looks butt-ugly and is so very atypical. But we, the beautiful, need to be polite to him, because he’s still a human being. We have to be tolerant and pretend he’s like us.”
No, no, no, no, and NO.
Of course Marnie doesn’t get any of this. She calls him luminous. She says no one sees him the way he sees himself. She says he doesn’t even know what he really looks like, that he’s beautiful, which of course is a crock of shit, some lie she tells because she loves him, and frankly he could spend a thousand years and still not figure out how that even happened, that she started loving him. Apparently Blix’s matchmaking had something to do with it; Marnie believes that Blix, who rented the downstairs apartment to him long before she’d even heard of Marnie, somehow arranged the whole romance between them. He’s never been sure he believed in all that. But whatever. Doesn’t matter now. He’s in love with her. He’s become comfortable with being part of a couple again.
Oddly enough, they don’t really have that much in common. She has about ten times the number of emotions he has, for one thing—she cries and laughs and sighs and smiles and yawns and complains and leaps up off the couch and performs impromptu dances—and each emotion catches him by surprise as it comes careening in. Who has the energy to feel that many feelings?
The truth is, when he’s around Marnie, he can mostly shut out Anneliese’s screaming in his head. He can even get himself to almost believe in the narrative of the culture: that everybody has some tragic thing to carry, and that you’re supposed to take your tragedy and drag it deep into the compost pile of your heart, where it can eventually germinate and allow something new in you to be born. Besides that, he also knows that he came back to life, and that Blix and then Marnie carried him most of that distance.
But—here’s the thing—he has come as far into life as he can come. He cannot go farther. The baby thing—no, no. No. Absolutely not.
Because what he knows but what she doesn’t seem to get is that deep down he is still broken. He watched his girlfriend die in front of him, and he knew then and he still knows that it was his fault.
He lives this every day—the sound of the explosion, the way Anneliese was immediately engulfed in flames, and he remembers staring at her, his mind trying to put it all together, and then time slowing down, and him running and running toward her, holding his arms out to catch her, and she was screaming—he could see her screaming rather than hear her—and she was lit up, her long black hair was now only a flame, and he remembers noticing that he was on fire, too, even though he couldn’t feel anything, and then he fell and squares of black filled in his field of vision, replacing the bright orange ball of light that burned into his eyeballs.