Chapter 14 #2
“Devin doesn’t get it at all,” Bonnie says, and my knuckles go white around the steering wheel.
“I’m so worried about her, Bea. The way she can hardly talk about her sister.
She thinks the idea of a new baby in the family is preventing me from closure, and I keep telling her that I don’t want closure from my own child.
I can’t have her here anymore, but I can have everything else I feel. ”
“Devin is . . . Is Devin angry at me, Bonnie?”
The slight catch in her breath is unmistakable. “Oh, sweetie, I should not have said anything. Devin isn’t angry at you. She’s angry at the universe, and she’s not handling it well. Please forget I said anything.”
I don’t forget it at all. Not for the rest of my drive home, or loading into Silas’s truck, or on the short drive to the Point, where he’s backed us into a spot and set us up with a pair of low-slung chairs and a folding table in the bed, tucked inside the shelter of his camper shell. I haven’t forgotten it one bit.
I know I’m being a lackluster dinner partner, distracted and bland. But I can’t stop recalling Devin’s face when I first told her and Bonnie about Merritt’s eggs and what she wanted me to do with them. The thing I didn’t want to believe was the anger that was blatantly there.
Even before that, trying to understand Devin and Merritt’s dynamic when we were kids.
As the older sister, Devin had seemed entirely too cool and unapproachable to me, and could oscillate between being Merritt’s worst enemy and her biggest idol.
One minute they’d be best friends just like we were, then cut to hurling the most volatile insults at one another the next, to total apathy in another.
Sometimes, especially toward the end, I got the sense that Devin felt I’d encroached on her rightful duties as Merritt’s sister.
I was the emergency contact. I’d taken her to treatment more.
I’d run her to the hospital whenever she inevitably got sick.
In some ways, Merritt and I were closer, I think, but in many other ways, this had just come down to logistics.
Devin was a dental hygienist with two kids. I had the ability to drop everything.
But to think she’s angry at me for this? For wanting something her sister wanted?
I’m distracted by the anger pulling at me when I think of it.
“—thought about getting naked and painting my whole body green. Channeling Shrek in an interpretive dance. Probably set it to Dave Matthews, right? It’s usually Dave Matthews. Hootie & the Blowfish could be interesting” blows through the fog clouding my mind.
“What?!” I squawk at Silas.
“About time. I was running out of ideas.” He lifts the wine bottle on the table between us and tips it in offering.
“What could you have possibly been brainstorming?” I ask, then nod at the wine. I texted the after-hours number Francine gave me to make sure it was okay. “Sure, I’ll take some more.”
“A wedding gift for Sage and Fisher,” he says. He refills my plastic cup before replenishing his own, his long legs stretched out in front of him, a plate of food balanced on a thigh.
“Just what all newlyweds need,” I say, “trauma. Also, if you’re already in that vein as far as the music goes, the only correct song to set that to would be something off the soundtrack. Counting Crows? Smash Mouth?”
He smiles genially, shoveling some salad into his face. Peaches and burrata over arugula, drizzled with a balsamic vinaigrette. I might’ve been lost in the swirl of my own thoughts, but I surfaced enough to be impressed with everything he’d packed.
The sun has dipped below the edge of the horizon, but there’s still too much light left in the sky for many stars to shine through.
We won’t be able to get the best views until after midnight, anyway, so Silas had the forethought to throw a couple of roll-out mattress pads and sleeping bags in case I need to get a few hours of sleep beforehand.
“Love that you’ve got the Shrek soundtrack memorized. You’re so smart, Ruby,” he says.
“Aw. And you’re so pretty, Si.” He’s as sharp as a tack, too, and we both know it.
He smiles with all his teeth and goes back to his salad. “So, what’s up? What’s on your mind? You’ve been far away.”
“IVF,” I say. Which is vague, but true, even if it’s also burying the lede. I think I’ve still got a few tender spots when it comes to worrying over other people’s opinions on what I’m doing, though, and sharing more of their objections feels like it might give them legitimacy.
“I know the basics, but tell me the details of it,” he says. “IVF. How it all works.”
“It’s a whole lot of womanly stuff, Silas,” I tell him, chuckling wryly. “And hormones.”
“I love womanly stuff,” he says. “I love women. Huge fan of their hormones. They’ve been very kind to me in the past.”
Telling him about it effectively distracts me from my distraction. He’s undeniably fascinated by the process, asking pertinent questions at every turn. Especially when it comes to the timing aspect, he’s an avid listener.
“Have you seen The Martian?” he asks, his head turning my way. He’s all blues in the darker light now, but I can still make out the contours of the moonlit half of his face. The glimmer of his eyes and the hollows of his dimples. “As in the movie.”
“Is there one who walks among us? And no, I haven’t seen it.”
“I’ve got a few suspicions,” he says. “We should watch it soon.” The flash of his smile. And I love how we can do that. Juggle two conversations at once.
“Space terrifies me.”
His eyes round. “You’re kidding. You?” he says. “Why didn’t you say anything? We’re here trying to see something in space.”
I nod, laughing sleepily. “It’s not the same.
My feet are still indirectly connected to the earth.
If I jump, I’ll come back down, you know?
It’s when I try to conceptualize being in it.
All that vast nothingness, without any control, it’s .
. . it’s beyond my comprehension. Even the rules of physics are different up there,” I say.
“I saw Gravity in the theater and projectile-vomited blue Slurpee.” I shiver all over just thinking about it again.
Silas deftly passes me a blanket. “Okay then, forget that, we won’t watch it.
The book is better, anyway. My point is, there’s this one part when Matt Damon is spinning around in space, right?
So, he has to be rescued. Has to puncture the hand in his suit to create air thrusts, then whirl himself through the air, catch himself in this gold ribbon thing, then be caught by another astronaut, and it’s like—like a million things all need to go exactly right, simultaneously, all for one moment to work.
All to be taken back into his ship.” His eyes are alight.
“Everything you just described reminded me of that.”
And yet, despite using my biggest phobia as the stage for this metaphor, and despite how daunting it sounds, the way he’s described this makes it sound miraculous, too. A feat of impressive, complicated science, and wondrous. Beautiful, even.
Babies are made in all sorts of ways. Mine, I hope, will be made out of miraculous science and enduring love. And that’s enough for me to stop worrying about Devin for the time being.
Silas clears our debris and takes the empty bottle of wine to the parking lot can, and we finish our meal with chocolate chip cookies from the container he packed.
I’m not sure how long we sit there, listening to the waves sigh and crash, but eventually, my head gets heavy against the back of my chair, and my eyes flutter closed.
“Here,” Silas says, deep voice ricocheting around the metal shell. “Lie down and rest. I’ll wake you up when it’s time. I’ve got an alarm in case I drift off, too.”
We fold up the chairs and settle into our separate pads. And I know I’m already living in the man’s house, but there is something so intimate about watching him toe off his boots and shimmy himself into his sleeping bag that I force myself to look away. It feels too big in its mundanity.
It doesn’t occur to me until I’m warm and languid with sleep that I, once again, completely forgot to give him Zoeie’s number. I’d rather not ruminate on the psychological implications of this, so I pull out my phone and share her contact with him before I can forget again.
He pulls his phone out and gives the glowing screen a frown. “Don’t like how her name is spelled,” he mutters, distaste heavy in his voice.
“That is not a real problem, Silas,” I chastise, despite the devil on my shoulder hissing, Drop it, idiot!
I see his mouth twist in the shadows. “Are you sure she wasn’t interested in Micah?”
“I double-checked again today,” I grumble. My jaw cracks through a yawn. “She said the smiling one seemed interested.”
“All because I smiled?”
I manage to find his stare. “Welcome to what it’s like to be a woman. And no, it’s because you’re you, Silas.”
This has him grinning again. A flash of white cutting through the dark. “You mean something about me calls to some primordial response in you?”
“Yes. A gag reflex.”
“C’mon, Marshall. You can’t tee me up like that. All the jokes about making you gag are low-hanging fruit. I think I really need you to explain it to me. What is it that’s so moving about me?”
I close my eyes and burrow into my covers. “And I think you just want me to stroke your ego.”
“Worth a try,” he says, his shrug rustling the blankets.
“I bet Zoeie would be glad to stroke you however you’d like.”
I feel, rather than see, him stiffen.
“Why are you hung up on this?” he asks, voice dangerously gentle.
I don’t know. My mouth seems to be acting autonomously. Maybe it’s the dark that makes it feel safe to be unfiltered. Either way, the subject matter kicks up my second wind.