No one will say this—not the doctors, not the fire officials, not the therapists who tried to help him—but he knows he should have stopped it from happening, that he simply wasn’t paying attention when he should have been. Why didn’t he notice the smell of gas? Why wasn’t he the one who got up that day to make the coffee, the one who turned on the burner that lit the spark that caused the explosion? Most mornings he did the coffee while she set up her easel, but this one day, the day when it mattered most, where was he? Across the room, doing some stupid task he doesn’t remember for a sculpture that would never get made.
So he has to live with Anneliese’s screams. It’s the price he owes for what he did.
There’s something worse. He knows he should have called her parents—Grace and Kerwin Cunningham are two of the finest people he ever met, and he was there when their daughter died, and he hasn’t been able to face them. He was in a coma at the time of Anneliese’s funeral. He received a note from Grace while he was in the hospital, a few shattered and heartbroken sentences. She didn’t say it had been his fault, but he knows she must think so.
Just about eight years ago now, and every day is another day he’s doing the wrong thing by hiding. He keeps their cell phone number folded up in a box with things he’s moved from place to place. A couple of times he’s punched in two numbers, maybe three, and then hung up.
And now there is this woman in his life who sees sparkles, and for whom every story is a love story. He has to be very, very careful not to risk his entire heart again. He loves her, but he has to hold something back. He could lose her, too.
His phone dings, and he leans over and picks it up.
It’s Marnie texting him.
OMG! I have seen 15 babies just since I left the house. FIFTEEN ADORABLE BABY HUMANS.
He is reasonably sure this isn’t an over-the-top number, not in Brooklyn on a summer day. Instead of answering, he sighs and googles “How often do condoms break?”
Google instantly replies that studies show somewhere between eight-tenths of 1 percent and 40 percent of men report condom breakage at some point in their lives.
Very helpful statistic, Google. Why did you even bother?
He types in: “And can you get pregnant if the condom breaks?”
Google says of course you can. What are you, some kind of dunce? Don’t you know anything?
Okay, so Google didn’t say that last part, but he can picture it chuckling at the hopelessness of the question.
Bedford comes over with one of Patrick’s sneakers and drops it onto his stomach. Time for a walk.
“Today,” he tells Bedford as they head out the front door, “we are enacting a new policy. We are not going to the park, and we are not going near any children.”
A text dings. Marnie.
Also, Patrick, just FYI. I now think we are undergoing an INVASION OF INFANTS. There must be a store somewhere handing them out. #BabiesRule #HereComeTheTots #EvenTwins.
He stops by a lamppost and types: You may be in a scene from Night of the Living Dead with babies as the zombies. You should run. Proven fact: they WILL eat your brains.
“Actually,” he informs Bedford, who wags his tale in agreement, “they already have eaten her brains.”
CHAPTER THREE
MARNIE
You know how it is when you get a new car, and suddenly every car you see zooming down the road is the very brand you just bought?
Well, that’s what is happening to me with babies today.
I’m on my way to work, and I swear there are babies everywhere: spilling out of strollers, being cuddled in front carriers and backpacks, riding along freestyle on their mamas’ hips—and several are even perched on top of men’s shoulders and are using their fathers’ skulls as makeshift bongo drums. Oh, I can just see Patrick with a baby on his shoulders. Both of them smiling down at me, the baby grinning toothlessly and reaching down to grab his daddy’s ears, while Patrick laughs.
This calls for another text.
It’s got to be some kind of sign, all these babies, I write. Just saw #16. Cutest one yet!
This shows that the universe is obviously on the side of me having a kid. First, it destroyed a perfectly adequate condom, and now it’s throwing me into the paths of all the cutest babies and parents.
As soon as I walk into Best Buds, Kat, my business partner, looks up from the counter where she is cutting the dead stems off of yesterday’s flowers and says, “Oh my God! Look at you. He went for it, didn’t he? You look radiant! I’ll bet you’re probably already pregnant!”
I give her a big smile and do a little shimmy. Kat and I had spent the day before practicing my speech for Patrick, which she was sure was going to go just fine. “Amazingly enough,” I tell her, “I just might be.”
“See? I told you, didn’t I? He wants a kid as much as you do.”
“Welllll,” I say. I put my purse down in the cubby under the counter, first taking my phone out and slipping it into my pocket for when Patrick texts me. We write to each other all day long. “Actually, he thinks it’s an insane idea. In fact, he said no.”
“He said no?” She tilts her head, adjusts her smile wattage downward. “Then how are you possibly pregnant? Did you find some other dude overnight or something?”
“Perhaps you’ve heard of condom failure.”
“Noooo! Get out of here. That did not happen.”
“Oh, but yes.”
She stands there staring at me. “I have never been so in awe of you as I am at this moment.”
I laugh. “Why? I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Of course you did. Marnie! I would bet my whole month’s salary on your ability to somehow manifest a condom breaking. I’ve watched you up close. I know your powers.” She smiles and lowers her voice, even though there is no one else around to overhear her. “Also, that’s how I got pregnant with Jazz. Though not intentionally, of course. But the condom did break.”
“Really,” I say. “I did not intentionally break the condom. But it is possible that there’s some baby out there wanting to be born, and that that’s who broke it.”
“Thank you for not saying that the universe broke it,” she says.
Kat is my age, but she already has two adorable middle schoolers, Jazz and Tish, who spend half a week with her and half a week with their dad, who is remarried and lives on the Upper West Side. She started working here last year when she dropped by the shop one day and noticed that I might not be using, shall we say, all the best business practices. I was bungling several important tasks of owning a business, like for instance, billing, ordering, paying bills, knowing how to get the right people for maintenance, and figuring out taxes, just to name a few things right off the top. I was also a little bit flaky with the flowers, which a lot of people think may be Job One when you’re a florist.
But that’s just it. I like the flowers just fine; they’re pretty, and they please people and give them an excuse to drop in. Sometimes the flowers even make us some money. But make no mistake: I’m here for the community. I love the people who seem to gravitate here, hanging out telling their stories, laughing, eating, juggling oranges, drinking tea, polishing their toenails, practicing their marriage proposals or their job interviews, writing books, writing notes to people they love—and I don’t much care whether they need a bouquet or not. I’ve turned the back room into kind of a salon for them—I put in thick lavender carpet, painted the walls white, strung some fairy lights, and bought a soft, squishy rose-colored sectional sofa and a wicker desk, some beanbag chairs, candles, bookshelves, and about a million pillows.