Chapter 22
22
Rain had started at nightfall, and it was still rattling against the high windows that sealed in the humidity. The air was warm in the enclosed space of the basement, thickly scented with feminine perfume and styling products. Tom had pulled Rosie halfway into his lap and draped himself around her in the corner of the cracked white leather sectional couch that now faced the karaoke stage. His chin rested on her shoulder and his palm on one of her bare knees, round and pink below the hem of the cotton dress she’d changed into halfway through the evening. He was happy, and also a little drunk.
Tom couldn’t keep up with both Rose and Ximena’s conversation to his left and the parade of earnestly terrible karaoke singers up on the stage, so he was attempting neither, simply enjoying his rare feeling of accomplishment. The renovated basement was a nice space. He’d carried in most of the furnishings. He’d performed capably on the piano—“Watermelon Sugar,” “Cruel Summer,” and “Peaches” ( You are hilarious, but don’t do three songs about oral sex while my parents are here )—so Rosie might now look forward to many similar evenings, tucked into his side as was right and proper. His life was all in order for once.
Rosie turned her head and shot him a slightly apprehensive look, and it took Tom a moment to realize that her conversation with Ximena had turned to Ximena’s favorite subject: the baby. Tom immediately schooled his features into the appropriate attitude of benign interest. Acting squeamish about Ximena’s deeply considered plans with respect to breast pumps and babywearing would likely dislodge Rosie from his lap, if not his life.
“—only take two weeks off, probably, which sucks, but at least Luísa gets three months at her firm,” Ximena continued.
Having satisfied herself that Tom didn’t object to the subject, Rosie turned back to Ximena. And why would he object? He and Rosie were supposed to be on their fifth kid by now under the original plan. He’d always wanted kids. And if, like Ximena had suggested, Rosie’s biological clock was ticking, it was his ally in his campaign to win her back. It made him feel a little ruthless to think about it that way, but he’d take all the advantages he could get.
“They’re making you come back two weeks after your first baby?” Rosie asked, scandalized.
Ximena shrugged. “I was lucky they didn’t recast me. Probably would have if Lú’s dad weren’t putting up so much of the funding. So I’ll perform right up till my water breaks. In the middle of the Sunday matinee, probably.”
“I think portraying Berta as nine months pregnant and still dating two different men is a baller move, actually,” Tom put in, because the play had few features to recommend it, and a heavily pregnant Ximena swaggering around the stage as a famed seducer of virgins was going to lead to some interesting reviews. “I think you should wear the baby onstage when you come back. Get them some Equity credits.”
“And the casting director is throwing me a baby shower on the Eataly rooftop, so there’s that, at least,” Ximena said, disregarding Tom’s half-serious suggestion. She looked at Rosie, then Tom, then back at Rosie. “You should come,” she said to Rosie.
Tom held his breath, but Rosie easily pulled out her phone to add the details to her agenda.
Ximena did the same, holding her phone next to Rosie’s to add her to the invitation.
“Oh, you’ve got your rehearsal schedule already?” Rosie asked, looking at the other woman’s screen.
“Yeah, found out yesterday. All the way through opening night,” Ximena said, pointing at the entries on her calendar.
“Do you mind if I add myself to those?” Rosie asked.
Ximena shook her head and passed Rosie her phone.
“Give me your phone too,” Rosie said, absently tapping Tom’s knee. He moved to comply before he’d really thought about it.
“Wait, why?” he asked when his brain caught up.
“Don’t you want me to know your rehearsal and performance schedule?” Rosie asked patiently. “I’ll add us both.”
“I do, but—”
On the one hand, this was great news, if Rosie was thinking that they’d be seeing each other so much that she’d need to know his schedule. On the other, making her responsible for his entire life was one of the things he’d caught hell for last time around.
“I can do it,” he muttered, taking all of the phones out of Rosie’s hands. The looks both women gave him were unimpressed, but neither stopped him.
Feeling very conspicuous, Tom went through Ximena’s calendar, adding himself and Rosie as invitees where appropriate.
Was this how she imagined their life? That she was still going to have to make sure he did laundry and went to work and made it to his friends’ baby showers like when he was twenty-two? No wonder she was still skittish on the whole concept.
“Wait, how come Boyd’s invited to the baby shower and I’m not?” Tom demanded when he made it far enough into May and opened the item to invite Rosie. “You told me it was girls only. I would have come.” Tom did good baby shower gifts. He brought onesies with funny expressions on them if the pregnancy had been planned, or big boxes of diapers, if it had not.
Ximena hesitated, scanning the room as though checking who was in earshot, but all the girls were clustered up around the stage and the karaoke machine. Boyd was sitting alone at the other end of the bar, scrolling through a hookup app. As far as Tom knew, Boyd hadn’t gotten laid since arriving on the island, and the other man might actually die if nobody paid attention to him soon.
“Boyd’s mother is flying out for the shower,” Ximena eventually said. “And he’s bringing her.”
“Why’s Boyd’s mother coming?” Tom asked, even more confused.
Ximena paused again. Then she gestured with both hands at her round stomach.
“What?” Tom said.
Ximena raised her eyebrows in exasperation. She pointed again at her bump, then shot her eyes at Boyd.
“Oh my God,” Tom said, catching on. “Ew?”
“Shut up. You are in no position to ‘ew’ me,” Ximena retorted, crossing her arms.
“ You slept with Boyd?” Tom whispered heatedly, leaning behind Rosie to make an appalled face at Ximena. He couldn’t immediately identify the source of his outrage; it wasn’t that he was now one degree away from Ximena, sexually speaking, because if he got exercised about his friends sleeping with each other, he’d have a lot fewer friends, but more that…Boyd! Of all men in the whole world, Boyd?
“Jesus, no. This was a medical procedure,” Ximena whispered back.
Somehow, that didn’t even make him feel better.
“Pretty sure you don’t get an opinion on this one, Tomasz,” Rosie said. She swiveled to give him a cautioning tilt of her eyebrow, and Tom tensed, considering whether she was right.
No. He still had an opinion.
“Boyd!” he said again, covertly gesturing at the man, who was drinking his vodka neat to maximize his alcohol-to-carb ratio.
“You think we could explain to our kid why we chose some random broke pathology intern when we could have had Boyd? A movie superhero?” she asked.
“Why would you even think you could have Boyd?” Tom demanded.
“He saw me going through my clinic’s donor catalog last year and asked if I’d rather have a known donor. Lú and I talked about it, and we decided we liked the idea.”
“No, and I get that, but—” Tom struggled with it. “Okay, sure, your kids will probably be happy if they look like Boyd. But you’re really going to raise kids with him? Boyd with the frog venom? Boyd with the car crashes?” Boyd, who somehow got endless forgiveness for his screwups?
Ximena shrugged. “It’s not like he’s moving in with us. He said he’ll make sure to show up at Christmas and for birthday parties, and that’ll be nice for the kiddo, but he’s not going to co-parent. He doesn’t want to be a dad dad, which is why he’s donating instead of having his own kids—”
“I mean, it makes sense,” Rosie said, frowning at an unconvinced Tom. “That’s the kind of setup you want. Adrian said he’d be my donor if I hit thirty-five and I was still single, but can you even imagine him in the same room as a screaming baby?”
“What?” Tom said, head snapping back like he’d taken a hit to the face.
Rosie froze. “Wait, he didn’t tell you about that?”
“No.” No, his best friend had not cleared with him a plan to knock up his wife.
She shifted uncomfortably, expression turning a little guilty. “Well, I turned him down.”
“Of course you did,” Tom said, trying to calm his heart rate by repeating that important fact. Though it was bad enough that there was some alternate universe in which Rosie had a passel of snobby redheaded cherubs. He hoped the Tom in that universe had been long ago hit by a bus and did not have to mail darkest-timeline Rosie baby shower gifts and pretend to be happy for her. God, the terrible turn his life had nearly taken.
“This was before he was dating Caroline, anyway, but I never wanted to have kids without a partner,” Rosie clarified, as though this was the chief reason she wasn’t having babies with Adrian.
Tom squeezed Rosie’s knee as hard as he dared, willing Ximena to look away from this tense moment.
“Of course you’re not having them without a partner,” he said intently. Why wouldn’t you be having them with me?
Rosie stilled, blinking.
“Um,” she said, apparently realizing that this subject had gone from awkward to painful for everyone involved. “That’s a…really serious conversation. For us to have later.”
“We can have it whenever you want,” Tom said.
The comfortable, celebratory mood of a few moments earlier had dissipated, leaving now-familiar expressions of exasperation on Ximena’s face and vulnerability on Rosie’s.
“Tom,” she said, trying to pitch her voice in an undertone. “Let’s figure out first whether you want to see me when your theater schedule picks back up before we think about adding a baby to the mix.” She took the pile of phones back from him and reopened the calendar app.
As he had not realized that Rosie was at all concerned about that, or considered that to be an open question, Tom sat back heavily. Rehearsals had crept up on him, and he hadn’t counted the days until he needed to go back to New York, but he’d assumed that if he managed not to mess anything else up before they got there, then on their return they’d just…be together. Their lives would recover from their decade-long divergence and fit together like the final pieces of a Lego model.
“It wouldn’t matter if the ghost of Stephen Sondheim cast me as a lead in his new musical, Rosie, I’m not going to be too busy—” he began to say, but Snow Wolf clattered down the basement stairs and waved her arms at the room.
“We need more pots,” she announced. “There are leaks all over the bunk room.”
“New leaks?” Rosie asked, looking out the basement window at the pouring rain. “Oh crap.”
She bounced up and out of Tom’s lap and headed toward the stairs. Tom hadn’t noticed, but most of the fangirls had vanished from the basement along with Boyd.
With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Tom followed Rosie up to the third floor.
Snow Wolf and the Great Puffin had tried to contain the water in a variety of pots and pans, but there was a puddle on the freshly refinished wood floor by one of the windows, and there was water dripping straight through a light fixture on the highest beam of the slanted room. The ceiling bore two spreading damp spots.
Rosie covered her cheeks with her hands and took in the scene with dismay.
“Oh crap,” she said again. “The wind must have dislodged the tarps. Or there’s just too much water…” She spun, trying to decide what they could possibly do in the middle of the rainstorm.
“I’ll get some towels,” Tom volunteered, even as a sludgy feeling of failure began to sink in.
Rosie nodded anxiously, gaze still flicking from disaster to disaster. “When is the roof going to be done?” she asked, already moving to pick up a nearly full basin.
Tom swallowed. This had happened over and over again. This moment of cold sweat, when he realized he’d put things off too long. Wile E. Coyote looks down and realizes there’s no runway left, plus he’s tied an anvil to his ankle.
“So, I haven’t actually found anyone who can repair the roof yet,” Tom said.
Ximena winced, and even some of the girls—probably the ones who’d be sleeping in this wet room tonight—turned to look at him accusatorially. Rosie stiffened her shoulders.
“What, really?” she said, and Tom wasn’t sure it was better that she looked surprised that he hadn’t managed it.
“I did call a bunch of them,” Tom said. “And two companies came out. But the insurance estimate doesn’t pay enough to fully replace the roof, and—”
“Can’t they just repair it?” Rosie asked, brow furrowing.
“I’m sure someone could, I just—nobody has said yes yet. When I’ve asked.”
Rosie closed her eyes, disappointment playing across her features. They’d been out here two months now. They were leaving in two weeks. And Tom still hadn’t handled the roof even though he’d said he would.
Rosie swept her hands back from her face, pressing curls flat as she thought, probably, about how Tom was still an unreliable flake after all these years. Tom wished devoutly that the earth would open and let him fall into a pit.
“Okay, okay,” she finally muttered. “I’ll deal with the roofers tomorrow. Can everyone else just help me clean up as best we can tonight?”
“No, seriously, I will do it before I leave,” Tom said, suddenly concerned that this would be the screwup that led to him eating pudding cups alone in the nursing home on Christmas Eve fifty years from now while Rosie and her redheaded descendants feasted on roast goose somewhere else, probably in a building that had a fucking roof .
She shook her head, not meeting his eyes. “It’s fine. You’ve done plenty. I should have stayed on top of the contractors too.”
Tom’s throat tightened, because he didn’t want Rosie to let him off the hook, even if he was tripping over her low expectations.
“I will get to it,” he reiterated, grabbing a pot at random.
Rosie tilted her chin back, partly in resignation, partly because of a new droplet that had just struck her in the face. The nor’easter was rattling the ancient windows and pulling entirely new leaks from the battered roof.
“Can you and Boyd grab one of the planters from the garden shed?” she finally asked. “I think we’ll need at least one big basin if this keeps up.”
“Where is Boyd?” Ximena asked, looking around the room.
As though in response, Tom heard a loud thud on the roof, louder than the surrounding clatter of rain and the snap of tarps coming loose in the wind. Like a very big, very reckless raccoon.
“Uh, he was going to see if he could hammer some of the shingles down and stop the leaks,” Snow Wolf said, flapping her palms in distress.
“In the middle of a lightning storm?” Rosie demanded, wheeling on her.
“Oh my God, didn’t you write a fic where he was hit by lightning?” the Great Puffin whispered to Snow Wolf, who gasped and covered her mouth.
Tom went to the window over the second-floor addition, looking down at the short section of composite-shingled roof. The main roof sloped sharply down on this side of the building, low enough that someone determined and not very bright could climb it. That was probably how Boyd had made his way up.
Tom opened the window, admitting a blast of wind and early-spring rain.
“Boyd!” he shouted with half his body hanging out the frame. “Boyd, you goddamn squirrel-infested sack of nuts! Get down! Get off the roof.”
Tom thought he heard the other man call back, but he couldn’t make out the words.
Ximena was dialing on her phone, even though it probably wasn’t a good idea for Boyd to answer during the storm, and he was unlikely to hear it over the deluge.
Tom looked out the window again. Then he sighed and started taking off his jacket. Fuck his life.
“No, Tom,” Rosie said when he put his hands on the lower edge of the window. She grabbed him by the upper arm and held on, big blue eyes fixed anxiously on his face. “This is a Florida Man thing. I’m calling Florida Man on this. You promised no more Florida Man shit.”
Tom apologetically shrugged her hands off, because that was true, but it wasn’t like he could just let Boyd fall off the roof. There were a lot of loose shingles, and the tarps weren’t very secure either.
And wasn’t it all his fault too? That the roof wasn’t done and that Boyd was even out there to begin with. She ought to be hoping he did slip and put them out of their misery.
He got his feet square on the addition roof and gripped the window frame to figure out his next step.
Rosie leaned out as though she intended to follow him.
“I’m the only one who’s sober and not pregnant. I should go,” she said.
Tom snorted, because there was no way in hell he was letting Rosie jump for the third-floor roof.
“Not a chance. I only get one Rosie,” he told her, wincing as the words left his mouth. He only got one, and he couldn’t blame a single other person but himself if he didn’t have her anymore.
When he made his way to the crest of the roof, he found Boyd happily hammering down corners of a loose tarp while lightning crackled in the distance. Even though he was yelling for Boyd to stop as he crawled across the slope of the roof, the other man didn’t look up until Tom was just a few feet away, and even then his expression only shifted to a genial, puzzled Oh hey, you’re here too?
Tom opened his mouth to inform Boyd of the list of barnyard creatures that made up his probable ancestry, mind already moving on to what explanation he could give to Rosie about his roofing delinquencies, when a shingle that his left knee rested on abruptly broke loose. Tom made a grab for a nearby tarp to steady himself, but it ripped free as well.
Boyd lunged for his hand, but Tom was already sliding uncontrollably down the steep bank of the roof. It felt inevitable, not shocking. Of course this happened. What else had he expected? He heard the short, awful sound of Rosie’s scream over the storm and had just enough time to think, She’s going to kill me if I survive , and then he was falling.