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Here are five things Theresa used to believe in:
1. God.
2. Mama, Arturo, safety in family.
3. Herself, sometimes.
4. Everything will work out okay in the end.
5. Ryan.
She could laugh now, when she thinks about it.
*
Theresa likes to make lists. Sometimes, they’re necessary ones, and those are the lists that she uses nice paper for - well, what she thinks of as ‘nice paper’, anyway, white lined tablets with a border of etched flowers at the top and thick vines trailing down the sides. It’s not gift card stock or anything, but it’s pretty and it’s inexpensive enough that she doesn’t feel like she’s being extravagant.
That’s the paper for writing down Things To Do Today, This Week’s Grocery List, and Emergency Phone Numbers. The last one is sort of indulgent, because there’s really only two numbers to put up - Mom’s House, and Ryan’s Cell, both of which she has memorized, anyway. She adds 911 on the third line, just to round it out.
Anybody who needs to write out ‘911’ to remember it probably doesn’t deserve the ambulance they’d send, but she writes it, anyway, and tacks the list to the side of the refrigerator with a fraying piece of Scotch tape.
There’s other lists Theresa makes, though. Those are the ones she scrawls onto scraps torn from brown paper grocery bags or the back of receipts from the pharmacy where she goes to pick up her prenatal vitamins. Other times, she lists them in her head. Books To Read. Countries To Visit.
She’s making coffee one morning for Ryan, before he wakes up, and finds herself writing out Potential Baby Names on a stray filter. When she reads it over ten minutes later, nausea grips her belly and her throat burns sour in a way that has nothing to do with morning sickness. Her hands are cold when she tears it into little pieces and throws it into the garbage can.
Dreams about London and other far off cities seem more realistic than this baby does sometimes, even when she feels the waistline of her jeans swelling and tightening and pressing deeper grooves into her skin every day.
She imagines herself walking through a fog in London, getting smaller and smaller until she disappears inside of it. Which is morbid, but even when she’s shaking her head and firmly telling herself to get a grip, she can see it.
The bright California sunshine hurts her eyes lately. You can’t hide from anything in that.
Fog feels like it would be safer, cooler, and she’s so tired of all this heat and sweating through her sheets every night. She dreams of open spaces. Before she got pregnant, she never used to want to travel.
But that was before.
*
Here are five things Theresa believes in now:
1. Pray all you want. Nobody’s listening.
2. ‘Family’ is not an all-encompassing word that means they'll always be there when you need them.
3. Her ability to screw things up is truly epic.
4. ‘Working out okay’ and ‘being happy’ are two completely separate things.
5. Ryan.
For Ryan’s sake, she wishes he was the only thing on that list that had changed. If he was less dependable, he’d be less miserable.
*
She hasn’t let Ryan share her bed since they moved into a tiny, cramped apartment that’s only three blocks away from where she used to live with Eddie. She can’t decide if that’s the wrong or the right thing to do.
For awhile, she figured it was the right thing. For the first couple of weeks, they skirted around each other like strangers instead of people who've more or less been together since they were five, all ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when they had to speak at all and carefully timing their showers to make sure the other person would have enough hot water. Sex was the last thing on either of their minds.
Theresa isn't sure that she's in love with Ryan; she knows that Ryan isn’t in love with her. This is duty, obligation, friendship, a thousand things besides love, and she never realized until now how much being an obligation could hurt.
Sometimes, she thinks it’d be easier to be alone. They both deserve something better, but this is what they have.
What was she expecting, though? That he’d be thrilled to leave his family and his girlfriend and his life to play daddy to a baby that probably isn’t even his?
But he did leave his family and his girlfriend and his life to play daddy to a baby that probably isn’t even his. He leaves for the construction site early every morning and comes home late every night. He looks tired and defeated, except for the moments when he looks angry and frustrated enough to put his fist through a wall.
He always goes out to smoke at those times, but she watches him from the window in her bedroom. She watches him stand out on the curb with his fist curled around a pack of Marlboros and squinting up into the setting sun. She remembers he told her that he quit, and she feels a deep, inexplicable sorrow in her gut every time she sees him turn his head to blow perfect smoke rings down into the gutter.
Those are the times when she thinks that she should be sleeping with him. He gave up so much for her. He should at least be getting laid on a regular basis to compensate for some of that.
Theresa’s not Marissa, though. She won’t use sex as currency, not as a reward for good behavior or a thank you or a plea for him to love her. Ryan always comes back in and gives her faint smiles and light kisses on the forehead. She fixes dinner, and they eat and make small talk, and later at night, she lies in her bed, looking at her hard, rounded belly and listening to him jerking off on the foldout couch in the living room, where he sleeps.
Ryan’s quiet and discreet, but she knows what he sounds like. Knows the little hitch in his breath and the sharp squeak of the rusty springs in the secondhand foldout. She slows her breathing down and listens to hear if he ever chokes out a name when he comes.
He never does.
*
Here are five people Theresa thinks Ryan could potentially be thinking of while jerking off:
1. Marissa.
2. Theresa herself, although she thinks it’s pretty unlikely.
3. The twentysomething blonde stripper that lives in the upstairs apartment, who flashes her cleavage at Ryan every time they pass in the hallway.
4. Kirsten's sister, the pretty one whose name Theresa can't remember.
5. Keira Knightley.
*
Ryan breaks the phone after Sandy calls to tell him about Seth’s departure.
To Sandy’s credit, he hadn’t let Ryan know right away - he’d waited exactly two weeks before calling. Theresa understands why, although she’s pretty sure that Ryan doesn’t.
He and Kirsten wouldn’t have wanted to worry Ryan, because that’s just who they are. They would have waited until they’d talked extensively with the marina and the Coast Guard, until they'd done everything else in their power to bring Seth safely home before Ryan would have even known he was missing. They would spare him that worry if they could, call him later and tell him, “Seth ran off, but it’s okay, it’s fine, he’s safe and he’s home now.”
But Sandy had waited exactly two weeks days. Seth’s not coming home until he’s good and ready, and she can imagine the defeat in Sandy’s eyes.
If Theresa still prayed, she’d light a candle.
This is her fault. It’s one more consequence that she hadn’t even considered, that maybe Seth could need Ryan just as much as she did.
She’s standing over the sink in the kitchen, eating a sugarless lime Jell-O cup and two Kosher dill pickles. Her cravings haven’t come for certain tasting foods, but they’ve come for colors, and the theme of this week is green.
She thinks maybe this baby is planning on being the next Picasso, and she’s dreading the Blue Period. Blueberries make her sick to her stomach, blue cheese is revolting.
She hopes the next phrase is orange and thinks about peaches and the really good grilled cheese sandwiches Ryan makes.
Ryan’s sitting at the table, hunched over a box of cereal with sleepy eyes, he's cautiously teasing her about the pickles. He’s being careful, not wanting to step over the new, fragile boundaries they’ve drawn out, ones that have never existed between them before, but she’s still so grateful he’s trying to get them back to normal.
When the phone rings, he stands up to answer it, and when his tone changes, when she figures out what the conversation is about, she tries to think of purple foods and still can’t block it out.
She’s surprised when Ryan bids Sandy a calm goodbye and rests the phone gently back in its cradle.
She’s less surprised when he reaches out three seconds later and neatly yanks it off the wall, leaving wires dangling and shards of plaster raining down onto the tile floor. He throws the phone across the kitchen, his eyes wide and his breathing heavy, but when she tries to go to him, he shrugs her touch off and storms out the door of the apartment. That's the Ryan she's most familiar with, that's the Ryan she knows.
Theresa watches him go, then turns to the sink and wets a clump of paper towels. She kneels down and cleans the plaster off the floor slowly, painstakingly. She wraps the phone up in a folded Ralph’s grocery bag because Ryan won’t want to see it when he comes back. But they need a phone for emergencies, and maybe she can figure out how to fix it.
Before Arturo went to jail, he taught her everything he knew about wiring and the insides of machine. She can hotwire a car as well as any of Arturo’s boys and she knows how make a broken washing machine last another two weeks with a bobby pin and a paper clip.
The phone shouldn’t be much different.
When she spreads it out on the kitchen counter to piece it back together, though, her throat aches and she wants to do nothing more than lie down on her bed. So she wraps it back up and hides it her closet, figuring they can coast on Ryan's cell for a little while. Sandy and Kirsten are still paying the bill on that; she and Ryan both pretend to have forgotten, because it's one less thing.
*
Here are five things Theresa knows how to fix:
1. Washing machines.
2. Dishwashers.
3. Busted carburetors.
4. Leaky refrigerators.
5. Torn clothes.
She’d trade all of them in for just one clue to how to she could begin fixing Ryan.
*
He doesn’t get home until three in the morning. Theresa’s lying on her back in bed like she always does, looking at the ceiling and missing the sound of him through the wall.
But he comes to her room this time. The lights are off and his shadow leaps up, huge against the wall. Her heart skips a couple of beats, because for a second, it looks like Eddie’s shadow, and Eddie still doesn’t know she’s pregnant. It’s a miracle that she’s hid it from him this long.
She slides up on her elbows and hits the lamp next to her bed, chasing the shadows away.
Ryan’s jacket is dirty and he smells like smoke. His eyes are red and swollen, like he’s been crying. The last time Theresa saw him cry was when they were eleven and Dawn’s boyfriend of the month twisted his arm too hard behind his back. He’d come over to her house, and Arturo's mouth thinned out. He didn't say a word, just took Ryan out back and taught him how to break a hold and throw a punch.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough, and after that, Ryan never cried again.
Ryan’s just standing there, looking at her helplessly, looking eleven years old again, and this time, she knows exactly what to do.
“Come here,” she tells him, and it’s an order, not a request.
He does.
He sits beside her on the bed, and she gathers him into her arms, just holding him. All the everything he’s been carrying on his shoulders, all the invisible barriers they’ve kept between them melt away into the background as Ryan hides his face in the space just above her breasts and breathes.
Theresa runs her fingers through his hair as he mumbles words into her skin, words like ‘scared’ and ‘need’, ‘ocean’ and ‘fucking idiot’. He slides further down her body until he’s curled into a little ball, his head resting in her lap and his tears are running hot as they drop onto the thighs of her pajamas.
He’s trying to tell her everything, but all he can get out are choked syllables.
She still understands. She’s always understood when it’s him, and she hates herself for not seeing how deep his hurt really ran until right now.
“Oh, Ryan,” she whispers. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so so sorry.”
He strokes her belly with two careful fingers, and she gasps like he’s burned her until his palm covers the rest of the curve. “No. I made my own choice,” he tells her, his voice hoarse and too old. “No apologies.”
“Ryan - ”
“No,” he says, finally meeting her eyes. “No more. This is now, understand? If I keep dwelling on it, it’s gonna kill me.”
“This is now,” she whispers. “This is now.”
When he leans up to kiss her, she lets him. He presses her back into the sheets, slips her top up and her pajama pants down, and they fuck slowly and quietly. When he comes, he hides his face in her shoulder, and she can’t tell if it’s sweat or tears dampening his face.
But his eyes are clear when he hovers over her afterwards, making sure he didn’t hurt the baby. He spoons up behind her and kisses her shoulder.
“The Cohens want us to come to Newport for the Fourth of July,” he whispers. “I said we’d go. Is that okay?”
“It’ll be nice to see them again,” she murmurs.
Her bedroom is their bedroom after that, and they can talk to each other like normal.
*
Here are five things in her closet Theresa rejects for the Fourth:
1. An old white halter top and jeans.
2. A sea green knee length skirt and the matching shirt.
3. Her favorite printed butterfly top with a lavender skirt.
4. The pale blue sundress that her mother made for her.
5. Sneakers of any kind.
They’re going to Newport. Deep down, she knows it doesn’t matter what she wears. It’ll still be the wrong choice.
*
It’s been five months now, and she’s too far along to fit into any of her old clothes, so Theresa splurges to buy an embroidered red dress from a real maternity store instead of thrifting. She looks beautiful in it, and she loves the dress, but when she looks at herself in the mirror, all she can see is her rounded stomach.
She imagines the look in Kirsten and Sandy’s eyes when they see her with Ryan, when they see that this pregnancy is all too real.
She really, really wishes she and Ryan were just watching the municipal fireworks from the roof of her mother’s house with some Coronas, like they did last summer. Not that she could partake in the Coronas anymore, but still.
If Ryan’s nervous, he hides it well. He’s wearing a black shirt and a pair of nice pants that she imagines Kirsten bought for him. He runs a hand through the loose curls falling down her back, lifting them and tossing them around before giving her a smile and ringing the bell.
“We’re gonna be okay,” he tells her, and she knows he means it.
At least they’re a ‘we’ again, a unified front, not two strangers who just happen to be sharing an apartment. She wishes that they’d worked it out under different circumstances, and it’s not as if she’ll be thanking Seth the next time she sees him, but she’s still grateful.
And it really is nice to see the Cohens again. Kirsten greets her with a warm hug, Sandy gives her a kiss on the cheek. They way they look at Ryan, the way Sandy keeps beaming at him and the way Kirsten keeps squeezing his upper arm, makes her think he should have come back to visit long ago.
She vows to make him come back and see them more often. She’s already deprived them of one son this summer (because it’s her fault Seth left, it is and she knows it, even if Ryan won’t say.)
She won’t take both of them.
Everything is perfect and quiet and nice for awhile. Sandy’s busy working the grill, and the smell of barbecued chicken and roasting corn makes Theresa breathe deep. She thinks she can almost feel the baby squirming around at that smell, which makes her smile. Ryan goes to help Sandy, and she and Kirsten kick their shoes off and sit by the pool, mineral water for her and chilled white wine for Kirsten.
“Is Ryan happy?” Kirsten asks her, and Theresa looks over to where he’s standing at the grill, laughing at something Sandy’s saying. He looks younger than he has in weeks.
“He’s okay, I guess. We both are,” Theresa tells Kirsten. She’s happy that she’s not lying.
Theresa presses her hands to her stomach, splashes her feet in the pool. Ryan looks over at them, and she blows him a kiss, which he pretends to catch.
Then the Nichols show up while they’re eating dinner. Kirsten springs to her feet, sliding her sling-backs on. Sandy scowls down at his chicken, stabbing it with a fork while Kirsten greets Julie, Caleb, and Marissa warmly, but it’s obvious that she wasn’t expecting them to show.
Caleb, to his credit, doesn’t seem like he cares one way or the other. “Good to have one grandson who understands familial responsibilities,” he grumbles, thumps Ryan on the back, and then reaches for the potato salad. Nobody looks more surprised by that than Ryan does, but he chokes out a ‘thank you, sir’ and takes Theresa’s hand.
Julie is coolly polite, chattering about the fabulous spa she discovered in Palisades last weekend and not making direct eye contact with either of them.
Marissa, being Marissa, doesn’t handle it well and doesn't try. She freezes when she sees Ryan, her eyes narrow as she looks at Theresa’s stomach. Theresa feels her own palm turning clammy in Ryan’s tight grip.
But Marissa just mutters a hello, a cursory inquiry about the baby, then focuses all her attention on speaking to Ryan in soft, private tones. Theresa excuses herself to the bathroom. Maybe she’s being a coward, but she just - she can’t deal with this right now, she can’t deal with Marissa and the way she’s looking across the table at Ryan with big, wounded eyes.
Ryan comes to find her fifteen minutes later and finds her sitting on the lip of the bathtub, shredding toilet paper between her fingers.
“How’s Marissa doing?” she asks.
“Drinking again.”
“How can you - ”
“I lived with Dawn Atwood for sixteen years,” he tells her wryly. “She’s drinking again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let’s go.”
“What?”
Ryan doesn’t exactly smile, but the corners of his lips edge up a little bit. “Sandy gave me the nod. He gets it. Let’s just get out of here.”
Theresa stands up and drops the shredded paper into a wastebasket. “We’ll come back,” she tells him.
“Yeah. When it’s not so…” he says. She nods; no reason to finish that sentence.
"Let's haul ass," she agrees, and they do.
They make it back to Chino just in time to watch the fireworks explode overhead. They scramble up to the top floor of the building, holding hands and laughing, and for a moment, they’re just teenagers again.
For a moment, Theresa looks at Ryan, and when Ryan looks at Theresa, she can see the shape of the life they're going to make. She can see the shape of happiness, the potential of it flexing out, unfolding. She still doesn't know if they're in love, exactly, she knows this is not the way she always dreamed that love would look when it found her.
But this is a kind of love, she knows, and it's a good kind. There's love here regardless of its right name, so much of it, and it's enough. They can make this enough. They both know how to work with what they have and this is dependability and kindness, it's deep affection and respect, it's what you can only feel for the person who's been your best friend since you were five, your first friend and first kiss and first fuck, and those are things they can build their lives on.
Later that night, Theresa sneaks out of bed and tears a piece of nice paper off the pad in the kitchen. On it, she prints out the list of Potential Baby Names from last month.
She tapes that to the fridge, too.
*
Here are five names Theresa considers for their baby:
1. Eva.
2. James.
3. Regina.
4. Eric.
5. Kirsten.
She thinks if it’s a girl, she probably won’t have to twist Ryan’s arm too hard to convince him that the last one is perfect.
*
Eddie gets the address of their apartment from her mother.
He comes over in the middle of the afternoon. It’s a Saturday, broiling hot outside, and Theresa’s lower back and ankles are killing her as she carries a bag of groceries up the stairs.
Eddie’s waiting for her at the very top. He drops the flowers he’s carrying when he sees her belly peering out from under the edges of her white tee shirt. After that, she can’t think in specifics.
She remembers his shock.
She remembers telling him she’s living with Ryan, that Ryan is the father, the rage that fills his eyes and lines his face.
She remembers the fight starting, escalating, their voices getting louder and louder.
She remembers him taking her by the shoulders and shaking her, hard.
She remembers dropping the groceries, the sound of eggs breaking against the cement steps and the gallon of milk bursting wetly open.
And she remembers slipping backwards. The look of sudden horror on Eddie’s face. The moment where her brain evens out and she very clearly thinks I am falling down a flight of stairs and I am five and a half months pregnant.
After that, there’s nothing.
*
Here are five dreams Theresa has:
1. She’s eating a hot dog on a stick at the same time as she’s surfing on a curling, cresting wave. It’s kind of a tough balancing feat, but she pulls it off.
2. A little girl is crying somewhere, but when Theresa reaches out to take her hand, she gets farther and farther away.
3. She’s on a catamaran with Marissa, sailing to Tahiti. When she asks Marissa to borrow the suntan lotion, Marissa turns into Seth and he scowls at her, he throws the tube at her head.
4. Every candle is lit in her church and God is the woman in the front pew, old and bent over rosary beads. She tries to scream, “IS THIS PART OF YOUR VAST ETERNAL FUCKING PLAN?” but all she can do is whisper, “Help me oh please oh God help me" but the old woman never looks up from her rosary.
5. She’s in the worst pain she’s ever known in her life. Something is spilling out of her, something she didn’t even know she wanted to keep in, and she’s crying and moaning and she HURTS.
In her dream, Ryan is screaming with her. Ryan is hysterical, out of control. She hears him bellow, “I’m going to kill that motherfucking son of a bitch, do you hear me? I don’t CARE if I go back to jail, I’m going to kill him! She could have fucking DIED - ”
“She needs you to be a man, Ryan, do you understand me? She needs you to be better than that!”
It sounds like Sandy’s voice, and she wonders if she’s still dreaming, swimming through it and thinking no, we're not better than anything.
She can’t be sure if it’s real when she sees Ryan slam his fist into the wall. When she sees Sandy pull him into a tight hug and hold Ryan’s struggling, thrashing body until he collapses. Until he lets Sandy hold him up.
*
Theresa wakes up in the hospital the next morning. Ryan is asleep in a chair next to her bed, their fingers twined together. She hears the beeps and blips of the heart monitor and she knows without looking that it’s only monitoring one heartbeat.
Nobody has to tell her that the baby is gone.
She squeezes Ryan’s hand, and he blinks sleepily, waking up slowly. “Hi,” she mumbles. Her tongue feels too heavy and her mouth tastes like she hasn’t brushed her teeth in a week.
“How’re you feeling?” he asks.
“Like I had a miscarriage,” she tells him flatly, and he winces like she’s struck him.
She wonders if she’s being punished for never really wanting this baby at all. She wasn’t ready to be a mother, or to do this, but it was still so much a part of her, and now…
She won’t cry. She’s not crying. Maybe only a little.
And Ryan just takes her in his arms and lets her. Maybe Sandy was right, if it was real. Maybe she needs him here and holding her so much more than she could ever need him killing Eddie to prove something.
She clings to him and sobs into his chest until her body starts to hurt again.
She lost the baby. She’s going to lose Ryan, too, he’ll go home to Newport, Sandy and Kirsten and maybe now…
“I’m here, Theresa,” he whispers against her hair. “I’m here. I'm with you."
She decides to worry about the future when it gets there. For now, they’ll just be Ryan and Theresa. They will live in this pain together, like they’ve always done.
She won't need a list to follow the steps.