Chapter 21
Once they’d checked in at the hotel and taken showers, Will and Rachel were ready to head back out for dinner as the preamble to Work of Art and the sterile needle with his name on it. That the tattoo had been relegated to the role of secondary stressor came as a surprise given that he had indeed embellished a bit when he’d claimed he’d “totally watched” at his last flu shot. It had been more of a one-eye-opened-one-eye-closed peek.
However, after you’d started down that road, the whole Am-I-destroying-my-marriage-now-by-trying-to-save-it-in-the-future? debate had a way of dominating your thoughts.
They’d picked the Italian restaurant on Main Street where they had celebrated both the one- and two-year anniversaries of their dating. It had been almost a 15-minute walk, and anywhere else, they may have opted to drive so as not to get sweaty all over again. But it was Ann Arbor, their place, and they wanted to soak it in while they had the chance. Especially since the structure where they’d parked the car was like a third of the way there, anyway.
They’d been rewarded for their decision with a leisurely stroll in the warm but far from oppressive evening air. There was a little bit of a wait for a table at the restaurant, but they passed it sitting outside, watching the traffic, and reminiscing about the dinners they’d had there before and about college more generally.
“I don’t think we were quite so matchy-matchy back then,” Rachel observed, reconsidering their respective attire. She’d gone with a green blouse and khaki shorts, he with a green polo and shorts in the same shade of khaki, though they were looser and longer. She also had on flip-flops, and he couldn’t imagine getting a tattoo in anything other than closed-toed shoes.
“Your neckline is frillier,” Will said. “And your legs look better than mine.”
“Mmm, not from where I’m sitting,” she said, giving his thigh a squeeze and filling him with some extra confidence that he would try to hold on to for the rest of the night.
But it had dissipated again by the time they were digging into their appetizer, and Will had an urge to come clean about something. Anything. Just not the big thing until he had the tattoo.
“How do I tell her what kind of type I want?” he asked over a piece of bruschetta.
“You mean the font?”
“Yeah. But am I allowed to say font at a tattoo place?”
Rachel scrunched her nose in confusion. “What else would you say?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. But font feels like what a guy who has no clue what he’s talking about would say.”
“You’re overthinking it again.” She picked up a roasted tomato that had fallen on her plate and popped it in her mouth. “Just tell her if you want a serif or sans serif.”
“A who now in the what where?” In reality, he knew what these were (more or less), but playing dumb about it felt fun and safe at a moment when he was trying to harvest calm inside himself.
Rachel had been about to take a drink of her water, but she put it back down. “How did you marry a graphic designer without knowing the difference between a serif and sans serif font?”
“Last week I had to explain to someone that two-step authentication wasn’t a dance move. I’ve had my hands full.”
“A serif font,” Rachel said with a smirk, “is one that has those little lines attached to the ends of the bigger lines. Sans serif doesn’t have the little lines.”
“What a technically robust definition. I don’t know how I missed it.”
“You’re the worst.” She was returning his I love you from the big rock in Mackinac, and it made him chuckle. She took her drink of water. “Okay,” she said after she swallowed, “can you picture the difference between, like, Times New Roman and Arial?”
Will looked up toward the ceiling and thought for a second. “Yeah.”
“Times New Roman is serif, and Arial is sans serif.”
“Oh. Okay. In that case, I definitely want sans serif. Probably just Arial, actually.”
“Good choice. Nice clean lines for a date.”
From there, their conversation switched back to a call Rachel had had with her mom while Will was in the shower. They had talked about it some while walking to dinner, and Rachel wasn’t done venting over how what had started out as her mother ostensibly checking in “just to say hi” quickly gave way to asking whether her daughter had read that article about the moms quitting their jobs and if Rachel had given any more thought to doing the same.
“Why can’t they understand that that’s not me?” she asked as the server put their entrées down in front of them. “Ooh, that looks great, thank you,” she said, momentarily shifting her attention to her risotto.
“Thanks,” Will said over his eggplant Parmesan. “Also, why is she asking you that while you’re on vacation?” he added once they were alone again.
“I swear to God, now that I’m having a baby, suddenly every one of my decisions is of pressing concern in the Armas house. I’m starting to miss them not paying attention to me. Did you know she actually said to me, ‘Well, it’s not like you’d be walking away from Wall Street’?”
It wasn’t just frustration as Rachel told him this. It was hurt, too, and Will sensed the purpose in what he’d been trying to do with Creative Vices all over again.
“It’s just such an insult to how great you are at what you do and how much you love doing it,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks, babe.” She looked down at her plate. “I mean, it’s not like I want to work at the university forever. She and my dad are just so—this is just so typical for the two of them.”
Will thought of the job in LA and all the glorious distance it would put between them and his in-laws, the buffer it would give Rachel with her parents, the opportunity it would bring to show what she could do. It was almost like a do-over for New York.
They finished dinner, and then they had gelato for dessert, but they still had some time to kill. Down the street, there was a branch of the M Den, a local chain of apparel stores that specialized in University of Michigan gear, so they decided to browse for a bit before walking back for Will’s sort-of appointment. It was fortuitous, really, given how recently he had been projectile-vomited on. He’d saved his favorite tee, but he was pretty sure he’d never be able to look at it the same, and this was a great opportunity to pick out a new one.
The university’s colors were maize and blue, the former of which being a bright shade of yellow that had always made Will feel like a human highlighter when it was anything more than an accent. Since they’d gone over on the fudge budget, he was committed to buying only one shirt, and he had it narrowed down to two dark-blue options: one with a cool old-school drawing of the mascot, a wolverine, and another with University of Michigan written crisply and plainly in a serif font (it looked better on a shirt).
“What do you think?” Rachel asked as he was putting the one with the wolverine back. She’d been in a different part of the store, and he hadn’t noticed her until she was next to him, seeking his opinion on the maize Future Wolverine onesie she was holding up.
“Uh,” he said, caught off guard.
“I thought it would only be fitting if this were the first piece of clothing we got. It’s three to six months, so it will be a little bit before we can use it, but it’s the smallest size they have.”
Will’s mind started to spin. Discussing Rachel’s mom being weird about her wanting to keep working after the baby was born was both abstract and familiar, an issue for future Will and Rachel that represented a wholly predictable attitude from his mother-in-law.
But this onesie, in this store—this was concrete.
If he’d worried painting the nursery could be a jinx, buying clothes for a six-month-old before the baby had even been born seemed like it would be jabbing an index finger in karma’s eye. Or maybe it wasn’t buying this one item specifically. But this one would open the door to more clothes, which would open the door to bottles and car seats and toys and who knew what else. Which of course they would need. But the sooner they started that process, the more they’d have to lose if it all went wrong. Were they just supposed to act like that wasn’t within the realm of possibility? That it wouldn’t shatter their entire world?
And on the subject of jinxes and karma and omens, was lying the way he had—no matter how well-intentioned—and introducing that into their marriage while she was pregnant the pretext for something awful that would be coming their way as a result?
Thinking that they and their baby could be punished for actions wholly unrelated to prenatal health was the height of irrationality. Will knew that. But standing there, half-formed ideas whipping through his mind at dizzying speeds, the room seeming like it might start to spin, he felt like he’d found himself on a ride that he couldn’t get off.
And yet all Rachel was suggesting they do was buy a onesie—a onesie, for crying out loud—so reacting with anything close to what was going through his head at that moment would make him hate himself even more than he did for panicking in the first place.
“I’m not sure about the color,” he said, grateful that he could direct his doubts into something far less consequential. “Maize is a tough hang.”
“They had blue too. And you know, that would probably hide stains better anyway.”
“Also true.”
“Okay, I’m going to go switch them. Meet me at the register?”
Splitting back up gave Will a chance to regroup, and by the time they were walking out of the M Den, he had mostly moved on, which was to say he had stuffed the anxiety back down as far as he could. He was still quieter than he’d been on the walk to the restaurant, though, listening to Rachel tell stories about herself and her series of roommates and thinking about how young the two of them had been when they met there. College simultaneously felt like a lifetime ago and last week.
However, there was nothing like the ding of the bell on the door welcoming them back to Work of Art Tattoos and Piercing to snap him back to the present. Clarissa looked up from the ramen she was finishing behind the front desk and smiled.
“Sorry, we’re a little early,” Will said, doing his best to sound chill.
This was it. They were here.
“No worries,” Clarissa said as she set her bowl aside. “It’s actually good. My last appointment had to reschedule, so I’ve just been sitting around trying to resist the urge to close up early and go smoke with my roommate. Her boyfriend gets the best weed.”
Will shifted nervously, his explanation of the Doritos multiverse still fresh in his mind. “Uh, but you’re not, like, high right now, are you?”
“Oh, no way. I’d lose my license. Plus I learned the consequences of that the hard way.”
She walked around the desk and extended her right arm, bare under her blue tank top and overalls, and directed their eyes to what appeared to be some sort of brown-and-yellow bird. Rachel and Will both squinted at it, trying to decipher what exactly they were looking at.
“I’m guessing that’s not a gigantic pigeon,” Rachel ventured.
“It was supposed to be a griffin—you know, half eagle, half lion? The guy who did it for me claimed he did his best work while stoned, and I was sleeping with him at the time and dumb enough to believe it.”
Will found her candor comforting in its own way, and both she and Rachel laughed, but he stuck with an empathetic nod just in case. No point in accidentally insulting the person he was counting on not to turn his 2-19-12 into an amorphous centipede or something.
“So what kind of font are we thinking for this date?” Clarissa asked, hopping back behind her computer. Rachel elbowed him below the desk’s wood counter at the word font. “What was it again? February nineteenth, 2012?”
“Yeah, good memory,” he said. “And I was just thinking, like, Arial.”
“Gotcha,” Clarissa said. Her fingers flicked over the keyboard, and a few seconds later, the printer against the wall behind her came to life. She went over to it and retrieved the piece of paper it spit out and walked it back to him.
“If we’re doing the inside of your wrist, I’d suggest something around this size,” she said. He had been about to remind her that he wanted it written in numbers and hyphens, but she had already done that. For someone counting the minutes until she’d be glassy eyed, eating Cheetos on her couch, Clarissa was reassuringly detail oriented.
“Yeah, that’s perfect,” Will said.
“Cool. Just let me get the stencil set up, and we’ll be good to go. I’ll meet you over at the station on the left.”
He turned to Rachel. “You’re coming with, right? Back there, I mean?” He was always going to ask her, but this was about more than moral support for getting the tattoo now. He wanted them to share this entire experience before he told her what was going on—which he’d decided he would do immediately once it was over, while he was still in the chair.
“Of course,” Rachel said.
“Thanks, babe.”
“Besides, I need to document this moment for future generations,” she said, waving her phone at him.
Will got himself situated in the chair, which was of the rolling, swivel variety. It looked like it had been salvaged from an office-surplus warehouse and immediately gave the proceedings a less ceremonious vibe than he’d envisioned. There was a table at one of the other stations, similar to what Rachel had lain on when she’d gotten hers, so he guessed his was the seating arrangement for people with only the least ambitious tattoo goals.
He caught a glimpse of the needle still in its packaging and decided he was okay with aiming low in that regard.
“So just FYI, I’m going to look at you and not at my wrist the entire time there’s a needle present,” he said to Rachel quietly enough so Clarissa wouldn’t hear.
“Well, this certainly bodes well if I end up needing an epidural.”
Clarissa came over and started setting up, asking Will to put his arm on the little rectangular table to his right, with his palm facing up so she could see the inside of his wrist. She explained that she was going to first wash the area with soap and then shave it with a razor before using petroleum jelly to transfer the design on the stencil to his skin.
“I forgot to ask,” she said while she was shaving. “Which way do you want the numbers to face?”
He had to think for a second. “I guess I’ve been picturing them as towards me? Like, right side up when I’m looking at them?”
“Okay. And I’m happy to do that. But you should know it is considered upside down from a tattooing perspective. Is that all right with you?”
He didn’t know how it could possibly matter if his tattoo was technically facing the wrong way, but it wasn’t like he could ask for a redo if he changed his mind, which wasn’t in the best place to be taking on additional, nonpotentially life-altering decisions, anyway. He looked to Rachel, who already had the camera raised for a photo. She gave him a subtle thumbs-up to let him know that he wasn’t on the verge of making any graver a mistake than he had in hopping in the chair to begin with.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Will said to Clarissa.
“Cool. I just didn’t want you to leave here and have someone claim your tattoo artist didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Well, don’t tell anyone, but I don’t exactly roll with a tattoo-savvy crowd in the IT department,” he said, which made her laugh. That relaxed him a bit.
“I don’t know,” Clarissa said, finishing the application of petroleum jelly and looking at Rachel. “I love yours. Both the quote and the lettering itself. It’s beautiful.”
“Thanks,” Rachel said. “It’s actually in my own handwriting.”
“She’s an artist,” Will said, at which Rachel did her best not to roll her eyes.
“Wow,” Clarissa said. “Have you thought about getting any more?”
“I think I want to do one on my other arm. But I’m pregnant, so sometime after I have the baby.”
“Hey, congratulations!” Clarissa said to the two of them, and then backtracked. “Sorry,” she said to Will. “I shouldn’t just assume you’re the dad.”
“No, no problem—you’re right. In fact,” he added, settling into what he was doing a little more and flashing Rachel an I-know-you’re-going-to-hate-this grin, “the date in this tattoo I’m getting is the day she says she knew she was going to marry me.”
“Okay, we don’t have to start telling everyone that story,” she said, uncharacteristically blushing.
“You two are adorable,” Clarissa said. “And speaking of the date, how does that look?”
In the talk about Rachel’s tattoo and pregnancy, Will hadn’t noticed that Clarissa had transferred the design to a spot several inches below his wrist. It looked like a real tattoo, and he briefly entertained the thought of just never washing that part of his body ever again. Despite the obvious appeal, it seemed pretty impractical.
And seeing the numbers there, even in draft form, he knew there was no turning back.
“Looks good,” he said, making sure he sounded steady and overcorrecting a little too much, such that the words came out an octave too deep. Clarissa then made a point of showing him the needle was brand new as she removed it from the package and told him to make sure that if he ever got another tattoo, the person giving it to him did the same. He would’ve laughed at the idea of doing this again if the sight of her opening the needle hadn’t caused his stomach to turn over and make the eggplant do a backflip, snatching the fake gravitas from his voice in the process.
“I’m just gonna ...,” he said, trailing off and indicating with his left hand that he’d be looking away now.
“Not a big fan of needles, huh?” Clarissa asked, prepping the ink.
Will stared straight ahead at Rachel, who was grabbing a shot of the design on his arm before Clarissa started to work. “You could say that,” he said.
“It’ll be over before you know it,” she said.
He was about to respond “I hope so” or “No worries” or “Please—be gentle,” but before he could, the angry buzz of the tattoo machine cut him off.
The needle stabbed his skin, and he winced as it sank in. But it was more the anticipation than any pain. It surprised him how much it felt like getting a normal, run-of-the-mill shot. He guessed he’d just assumed it would be much worse. So that was a positive development.
That positivity lasted a solid minute to 70 seconds.
Because unlike a shot in the bland surroundings of a doctor’s office, the pressure didn’t let up, Clarissa slowly pulling the tip through his epidermis like she was navigating the world’s most confusing stick shift transmission under the watchful gaze of a flaming-skull-tattoo poster.
On the plus side, it was doing a hell of a job of keeping him focused on what was happening then and not what would be happening in a few minutes.
“Breathe,” Rachel mouthed at him, and only then did he realize he had been holding his breath since the machine had turned on.
Will took a deep one and tried to listen to what Rachel and Clarissa were talking about. It sounded like Clarissa had also studied art, and she was asking Rachel about Georgia O’Keeffe.
“You’re doing great,” Clarissa said to him when Rachel had finished telling her about the time she went to the O’Keeffe museum in New Mexico. “We’re already halfway done.”
At that, he perked up a little. Halfway done? Really?
He was doing this. He, Will Easterly, was getting a tattoo. One commemorating the date the only woman he’d ever loved, the one standing here with him now, knew she wanted to be with him for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t like getting one of their wedding photos etched in full color across his back. But it was something.
And honestly, it didn’t hurt that bad. Not even when he’d been forgetting to breathe, if he really thought about it. Sure, if he were getting something bigger or more detailed, he could imagine how it would grow increasingly intense the longer he sat there. But he was already halfway done—heck, more than halfway done by now—and the first word that would come to mind when describing the sensation currently coursing through his arm wouldn’t be painful. It would be weird.
This he could handle. And at the recognition of that, he felt the confidence Rachel had brought out in him outside the restaurant coming back. He was going to be a dad. A dad with a tattoo that Rachel Armas had picked for him. Nobody else. They were meant to be, and what he was about to tell her would only prove that again.
“All right,” Clarissa said, “just have to do that last two, and we’ll be all set. Still doing good?”
“Surprisingly, yes,” Will said, turning to look at her for the first time since the ink had started flowing. “This isn’t nearly as bad as I ...”
Halfway through saying how bad it wasn’t, Will saw the needle in his arm.
It was the last thing he saw before he passed out.