Chapter 18
“Come on, Linda. Come on, Linda,” Arthur grunted in hushed tones, standing out in the hallway of the apartment building so as not to wake Wren, building to a hoarse, frantic whisper-scream now: “Linda!!”
A door across the hall cracked open and an elderly woman looked out through the crack with a single eyeball, the knife she was wielding poking through just under the chain lock.
“For the last time, Mrs. Flynn. I live here. I’ve lived across from you for years. I help you carry in your groceries every week.” No reaction. Really? Arthur thought. “I’m not here to rob you!”
The lady paused, then slowly closed the door without removing the suspicion from her face.
Mrs. Flynn only ever seemed to recognize him when she needed assistance, and she was big on buying canned goods and jugs of water, as if the zombie apocalypse might occur before she keeled over from natural causes.
Those grocery bags were never light. When she wasn’t exploiting Arthur for manual labor, he got side-eye and the knife.
The phone kept ringing.
It had only been a few days, but it had all happened so fast with the house, the Needle.
Almost immediately after his adrenaline-fueled call to Linda Kellerman, to his complete shock, the sellers had accepted his offer.
Shock, because he’d gone in with a total lowball.
It was almost insulting, really, how low the offer was.
He briefly considered the seller—for some reason he imagined a silhouetted man in a suit like the Banker from Deal or No Deal—tracking him down to give him a gloved slap in the face for such a show of disrespect.
In reality, the lower offer was a hedge.
Though he was feeling confident the moment he made the call to Linda to put in the bid—he was still triumphantly covered in fake cobwebbing, after all—he figured it would probably get rejected and he could be proud of himself for making an attempt without having to suffer any real consequences.
Win-win. Sort of.
After his conversation with Wren the other night, though, the consequences were suddenly looming over him, and they were big and they were scary.
Once the offer was accepted, things moved even faster.
Linda scheduled an inspection, which came back completely clean, and Arthur even agreed to a shortened due diligence period.
Linda had thought it would make their offer more attractive, and she was right.
For his part, Arthur was worried if he had too long to think it over, he’d end up backing out, like always.
Ripping it off like a Band-Aid seemed like a good idea at the time.
The only problem was…he’d been thinking a lot about what Wren had said the other night.
He didn’t want to lie to her, hide this from her anymore, and most of all, make this huge life decision behind her back.
She’d never forgive him for that. But more than anything, he’d been thinking that maybe she was actually right.
In all his excitement to finally go after his dreams, he never stopped to consider that maybe he was going after the wrong one.
Worse still, his window to back out without losing a serious chunk of their, primarily his, savings was closing fast. He only had a few days to make up his mind.
And Linda Kellerman wasn’t answering the phone.
He tried one more time, getting her annoyingly chipper voicemail once again. “Linda, it’s Arthur. Please call me, OK? Please. ASAP. That’s as soon as possible. If it’s not too much trouble, of course. No worries if not. But please, soon. K. Bye.”
Over the last few days, Arthur and Wren had crammed a lot in. Slips of paper were crumpled on both their bedside tables, little balls of them lying around like they’d had an epic Chinese carryout feast and eaten their body weight in fortune cookies.
Arthur had ordered a Cameo video from blink-182’s Tom DeLonge, in which Wren’s childhood hero had discussed alien life forms and made dick jokes for forty-five seconds straight, all for the low, low price of ninety-five dollars.
It was probably the closest they could realistically get to fulfilling her lifelong dream of meeting her idol.
And at the behest of the jar, and with Wren creating an excellent “pregnant lady in distress” diversion, he’d snuck onto the set of an unknown movie filming near the Inner Harbor and tried to place himself in the shot, nearly falling into the murky water while staring at someone he swore was Scarlett Johansson. (It wasn’t. But maybe it was.)
The jar had other plans for Wren. Indeed, she learned to tie a bow tie.
She’d said it had nothing on wearing heels in the misery department, but it had frustrated her to the point of hurtling the thing on the ground and trying to stomp it to death, like a venomous snake that had somehow fallen from the ceiling.
In the end, it looked surprisingly adorable tied around her neck.
She could have been the fifth member of Panic!
At the Disco. Then she had concocted a frothy mixture in a jar called a “sourdough starter” and been extremely unsettled about the way Arthur talked about it, like a living thing, a pet.
But she couldn’t deny that the promise of fresh-baked bread literally at their fingertips was extremely enticing.
Arthur did a set of completely improvised stand-up comedy at a local open mic night. It consisted mostly of knock-knock jokes until he tried a little crowd work using burns he’d overheard from his students. The manager proudly told him it was the fastest he’d ever seen anyone get booed offstage.
Wren had read the entirety of Moby Dick in a single day—the audiobook, that is, set at 2.5× speed. When Arthur asked her what she thought of it, all she could say was, “The narrator was a little chipmunky for my taste.”
All of that and the baby still wasn’t here. Wren was beginning to get a little offended, like maybe she was doing something wrong. But Arthur assured her that she’d just made such a nice home for the little bugger that it didn’t want to leave.
On the plus side, it meant they could definitely go to Charlie’s wedding that weekend.
Arthur wasn’t necessarily looking forward to another visit to the aquarium, not after everything that had happened.
He’d avoided it for years, even citing a made-up puffin allergy to get out of a school trip.
But Wren needed to be there for her friend, and he needed to be there for Wren.
That was the least he could do now. So that would be a promise kept.
Arthur slipped quietly back into bed, his heart still racing. Predictably, Wren stirred immediately, sensing his presence.
“Hi,” she said groggily.
“Hi,” he said, smiling.
She looked around with sleepy, squinty eyes and got her bearings.
“Where is it?”
She was looking for the jar.
“You’re sure you want to keep going? Being me hasn’t been too boring for you?” Arthur said.
“On the contrary,” she said, sitting up. “I think me with a little bit of you is a perfect combination. And vice versa.”
He had to agree. Being just a little bit more like Wren had done wonders for him so far. He was sleeping better, for a start, not waking up with new worries every couple of hours.
Well, at least it had worked for a while.
“If only there were some way we could take the best parts of both of us and combine them into one person. It’d be the coolest person ever,” she joked.
“One of the great unsolved mysteries of science,” he said, shaking his head.
She laughed and gave him a playful shove.
He leaned down and gave her belly a good morning kiss, then leaned up and gave her mouth an even better one.
“Sorry, morning breath,” he said, pulling back.
She’d always been sensitive to it, even more so during the pregnancy, once likening it to egg salad that had been pulled from the belly of a large tuna.
“Morning breath is a completely natural biological process, whereby saliva breaks down small food particles, which combined with dry mouth creates an unpleasant odor,” she said in a nasal voice.
“Is that supposed to be what I would say? I don’t sound like that. I’m not a…wordy scientist.”
“What I’m trying to say,” she said in her normal tone, “is give me one more. But no tongue.”
He did as he was told.
“Now, are you ready for the jar?” she repeated.
He nodded. “On your nightstand. Behind the world’s largest water bottle.”
She’d recently bought herself one of those impossibly tall water bottles with lines marking how much she should drink by different points in the day.
Drink half by noon, three quarters by dinner…
He loved to see her well hydrated, but the damn thing never fit into any of their cupholders, and it was so imposing that Ferdie was legitimately frightened of it.
Sure enough, the jar was hiding behind the monstrosity.
“Only one left,” Wren said, rattling it around in her hands. “No pressure or anything.”
She was right. There was one lone slip of paper, folded awkwardly in not quite half, lying limply on the bottom of the glass jar. How had they gotten through so much of their lists? Where had this pregnancy gone? By in a flash was where.
Arthur reached his hand in, pulled it out, and looked.
“It’s…blank.”
“What? Let me see.”
He handed it over. She stared at it in disbelief.
“Must be a leftover clipping from when you cut up the lists,” Arthur said.
“But that can’t be it,” she said. “There was more. I know there was more.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t remember,” she said, rubbing her temples. “My brain is completely giving out on me.”