Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“As a matter of fact I am never wrong about that,” Dorothy said. “Or so very rarely that it’s the same as always being right.”

“And?”

Dorothy put her right hand on Cara’s belly. She was carrying high, which tradition said meant the baby was a boy, but this had nothing to do with Dorothy’s feeling that the child was unquestionably male. It was just a feeling. There was nothing mystical to Dorothy about it.

“That’s a little boy. A son.”

Richard shook his head, face pinched, and let out a soft, hopeless gust of air through his teeth. He pulled Cara to her feet, and handed her her purse.

“Son of the monster,” he said. “Wolfman Junior.”

“I have been wrong once or twice,” Dorothy said softly, reaching for his hand.

He eluded her grasp once more.

“I’m sort of hoping for a girl,” he said.

“Girls are great,” said Dorothy.

Cara was due on the fifth of May. When the baby had not come by the twelfth, she went down to Melrose to see Dorothy, who palpated her abdomen, massaged her perineum with jojoba oil, and told her to double the dose of a vile tincture of black and blue cohosh which Cara had been taking for the past week.

“How long will you let me go?” Cara said.

“It’s not going to be an issue,” Dorothy said.

“But if it is. How long?”

“I can’t let you go much past two weeks. But don’t worry about it. You’re seventy-five percent effaced. Everything is nice and soft in there. You aren’t going to go any two weeks.”

On the fifteenth of May and again on the seventeenth, Cara and a friend drove into Laurel Canyon to dine at a restaurant whose house salad was locally reputed to contain a mystery leaf that sent women into labor. On the eighteenth, Dorothy met Cara at the office of her OB in West Hollywood. A nonstress test was performed. The condition of her amniotic sac and its contents was evaluated. The doctor was tight-lipped throughout, and his manner toward Dorothy Cara found sardonic and cold. She guessed that they had had words before Cara’s arrival or were awaiting her departure before doing so. As he left to see his next patient, the doctor advised Cara to schedule an induction for the next day.

“We don’t want that baby to get much bigger.”

He went out.

“I can get you two more days,” said Dorothy, sounding dry and unconcerned but looking grave. “But I’m going out on a limb.”

Cara nodded. She pulled on the loose-waisted black trousers from CP Shades and the matching black blouse that she had been wearing for the past two weeks, even though two of the buttons were hanging loose. She stuffed her feet into her ragged black espadrilles. She tugged the headband from her head, shook out her hair, then fitted the headband back into place. She sighed, and nodded again. She looked at her watch. Then she burst into tears.

“I don’t want to be induced,” she said. “If they induce me I’m going to need drugs.”

“Not necessarily.”

“And then I’ll probably end up with a C-section.”

“There’s no reason to think so.”

“This started out as something I had no control over, Dorothy. I don’t want it to end like that.”

“Everything starts out that way, dear,” said Dorothy. “Ends that way, too.”

“Not this.”

Dorothy put her arm around Cara and they sat there, side by side on the examining table. Dorothy relied on her corporeal solidity and steady nerves to comfort patients, and was not inclined to soothing words. She said nothing for several minutes.

“Go home,” she said at last. “Call your husband. Tell him you need his prostaglandins.”

“Richie?” Cara said. “But he …he can’t. He won’t.”

“Tell him this is his big chance,” Dorothy said. “I imagine it’s been a long time.”

“Ten months,” said Cara. “At least. I mean unless he’s been with somebody else.”

“Call him,” Dorothy said. “He’ll come.”

Richard had moved out of the house when Cara was in her thirty-fifth week. As from the beginning of their troubles, there had been no decisive moment of rupture, no rhetorical firefight, no decision taken on Richard’s part at all. He had merely spent longer and longer periods away from home, rising well before dawn to take his morning run around the reservoir where the first line of the epitaph of their marriage had been written, and arriving home at night long after Cara had gone to sleep. In week thirty-four he had received an offer to film a commercial in Seattle. The shoot was scheduled for eight days. Richard had never come home. On Cara’s due date, he had telephoned to say that he was back in L.A., staying at his older brother Matthew’s up in Camarillo. He and Matthew had not gotten along as children, and in adulthood had once gone seven and a half years without speaking. That Richie had turned to him now for help filled Cara with belated pity for her husband. He was sleeping in a semiconverted garage behind Matthew’s house, which he shared with Matthew’s disaffected teenage son Jeremy.

“He doesn’t get home till pretty late, Aunt Cara,” Jeremy told her when she called that afternoon from the doctor’s office. “Like one or two.”

“Can I call that late?”

“Fuck yeah. Hey, did you have your baby?”

“I’m trying,” Cara said. “Please ask him to call me.”

“Sure thing.”

“No matter how late it is.”

She went to Las Carnitas for dinner. Strolling mariachis entered and serenaded her in her magic shroud of solitude and girth. She stared down at her plate and ate a tenth of the food upon it. She went home and spent a few hours cutting out articles from American Baby, and ordering baby merchandise from telephone catalogs in the amount of five hundred and twelve dollars. At ten o’clock she set her alarm clock for one-thirty and went to bed. At one o’clock she was wakened from a light uneasy sleep by a dream in which a shadowy, hirsute creature, bipedal and stooped, whom even within the dream itself she knew to be intended as a figure of or stand-in for Derrick James Cooper, mounted a plump guitarrón, smashing it against the ground. Cara shot up, garlic on her breath, heart racing, listening to the fading echoes in her body of the twanging of some great inner string.

The telephone rang.

“What’s the matter, Cara?” Richard said, for the five thousandth time. His voice was soft and creased with fatigue. “Are you all right?”

“Richie,” she said, though this was not what she had intended to say to him. “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“No, I … Richie, I don’t want to do this without you.”

“Are you having the baby? Are you in labor now?”

“I don’t know. I might be. I just felt something. Richie, can’t you come over?”

“I’ll be there in an hour,” he said. “Hold on.”

Over the next hour Cara waited for a reverberation or renewal of the twinge that had awakened her. She felt strange; her back ached, and her stomach was agitated and sour. She chewed a Gaviscon and lay propped up on the bed, listening for the sound of Richard’s car. He arrived exactly an hour after he had hung up the telephone, dressed in ripped blue jeans and a bulging, ill-shaped, liver-colored sweater she had knit for him in the early days of their marriage.

“Anything?” he said.

She shook her head, and started to cry again. He went over to her and, as he had so many times in the last year, held her, a little stiffly, as though afraid of contact with her belly, patting her back, murmuring that everything would be fine.

“No it won’t, Richie. They’re going to have to cut me open. I know they will. It started off violent. I guess it has to end violent.”