I stood in the shade with my back up against the building, taking deep breaths and feeling a little better with each one.
“What’s the matter?”
I opened my eyes and saw Max standing there.
“You were practically running out the door,” he said, walking up to me and putting his hands on my arms.
“I just didn’t feel well for a minute. But I’m feeling better now.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know.” I described the symptoms to him, and as I ticked off each one, it hit me. And I think it hit Max, too, judging by the look on his face.
We stared at each other for a moment, until finally he said, “I’ll get Liz to run to the drugstore — ”
“No, don’t.” I didn’t want an assistant doing that. “I’ll go myself.”
“I’m going with you.”
. . . . .
“Liv, I’ve seen every inch of you.”
“Not like this,” I shouted back.
I was in the bathroom at our house, and Max was standing right outside the closed door. On the way home, we didn’t discuss how the procedure would go down. Instead, he was comforting me because by then my freak-out levels had reached a lifetime high. When we got inside the house I went to the bathroom and closed the door.
“I’m just peeing, Max.”
“We’ve been in the bathroom together before when you’ve done that.”
“It takes about three to five minutes for the results to show up. Just give me a second.”
I don’t know what it was, exactly, but I just didn’t feel like having him watch me pee on that little stick.
He jiggled the door handle again.
“Still locked,” I said. “One second…”
“I’ll pee on one, too, if that makes you more comfortable.”
I was nervous, for sure, but our conversation brought a little bit of comic relief to the moment.
“Done,” I said, pulling my underwear up, my skirt down, and opening the door. “You can watch me wash my hands.”
We stood there for a few moments, observing the indicator on the test stick.
When the result finally showed up, we both stared at it for a few moments, and then Max took me in his arms.
. . . . .
“So,” Max said, as he drove us to our favorite Italian restaurant for dinner. “Who are we going to tell first?”
“That’s not going to happen for a while.”
He glanced over at me. “Why?”
“Because,” I said, “I haven’t even had the first doctor visit yet, and we just found out I’m pregnant about two hours ago. I’m going to do what my sister did: wait. Lots of people don’t tell everyone right away. You know, just to make sure everything’s okay.”
I watched as his face turned serious.
“Relax,” I said. “I think everything’s going to be fine. It’s kind of routine to wait, actually. And, Max?”
“Yeah.”
“You know you’re going about fifteen miles under the speed limit, right?”
He broke a smile, reached out, and put his hand on my knee. I put my hand on his.
“I’m just being careful,” he said.
He only sped up a little.
FOURTEEN
I was running on the beach one morning when the music stopped pumping through my earbuds because I was getting a call. It was Grace.
“Krystal had a girl.”
“That’s great.”
“Why are you out of breath?”
“I was running,” I said. “How’s Krystal’s baby?”
“She’s fine. No sign of any trouble.”
It went unspoken, but we were referring to the possibility of Krystal’s baby having problems related to Krystal’s drug use. The timing told us everything would probably be okay, but you never know.
I had slowed down to a walk and when I got back to the steps that lead from the beach up to our house, I sat down on the first one and stretched. “So what’s the name?”
“Ginger. I’ll send you a picture of her. Wait until you see this red hair.”
Off in the distance, a guy worked a kite in the wind. A few people were surfing, but having little luck due to the unusually calm waves. Gulls skittered where the waves broke, looking for lunch, and oddly reminding me I needed to do the same.
As I sat on the wooden steps leading up from the beach to our house, there was a heaviness in my gut that had nothing to do with being pregnant. It was guilt. I was keeping some of the biggest developments in my life from Grace, probably the one person on the planet — other than Max, of course — who I wanted to know about this. But I had good reason to keep it to myself as long as I could. It was the same situation as the marriage — I knew what I wanted in life and I knew I was strong enough to have it; but there were a few unfortunate but temporary casualties along the way.
We exchanged some small talk for a few minutes before I told her I needed to get ready, grab something to eat, and get to the office.
Later, I showed the picture of Krystal’s baby to Max.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“She really is. She looks just like Krystal.”
We were at the offices of OliviMax, watching dailies from the shoot. It was a part of the movie industry that I found fascinating, mostly because of how raw the footage was. I looked forward to watching it go from that to a highly-produced and stylized final version, complete with different angles edited in the shot and whatever background music we selected for the various scenes.
“Do you want a girl or a boy?” I asked him.
He looked at me with a straight face. “Why? Can you control that?”
“Yes, actually I can,” I joked back.
He took my hand, lifted it to his face, kissed it and said, “Surprise me.”
. . . . .
Max and I met Carl, Loralei, Anthony and Monica for dinner at Dan Tana’s restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. I had been there a few times and really loved the food, but not so much the gaggle of paparazzi hanging out on the sidewalks. This was one of several celebrity hot spots, so the photogs were drawn to it like sharks to chum.
The good thing — as always — was that those who recognized and wanted to shoot Max were always immediately drawn away from him the second an on-screen Hollywood star showed up.
I once mentioned to Max when we were going in that a couple of them seemed truly interested in his work, asking about his next project and really sounding like they followed his career.