Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“Are you sure? How can you tell?”

“I could hear it in your voice, dear.”

“But I wasn’t talking.” Though now as she said this she could hear an echo of her voice a moment earlier, saying, Okay … okay … okay.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Dorothy said.

When Cara found Richard, he was being seen by a physician’s assistant, a large, portly black man whose tag read COLEY but who introduced himself as Nordell. Nordell’s hair was elaborately braided and beaded. His hands were manicured and painted with French tips. He was pretending to find Richard attractive, or pretending to pretend. His hand was steady, and his sutures marched across Richard’s swollen fingertip as orderly as a line of ants. Richard looked pale and worried. He was pretending to be amused by Nordell.

“Don’t worry, girlfriend, I already gave him plenty of shit for you,” Nordell told Cara when she walked into the examination room. “Cutting his hand when you’re about to have a baby. I said, boyfriend, this is not your opera.”

“He has a lot of nerve,” said Cara.

“My goodness, look at you. You are big. How do you even fit behind the wheel of your car?”

Richard laughed.

“You be quiet.” Nordell pricked another hole in Richard’s finger, then tugged the thread through on its hook. “When are you due?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Uh-huh.” He scowled at Richard. “Like she don’t already have enough to worry about without you sticking your finger on a damn X-Acto knife.”

Richard laughed again. He looked like he was about to be sick.

“You all got a name picked out?”

“Not yet.”

“Know what you’re having?”

“We don’t,” said Cara. “The baby’s legs were always in the way. But Richard would like a girl.”

Richard looked at her. He had noticed when she came into the room that her face had altered, that the freckled pallor and fatigue of recent weeks had given way to a flush and a giddy luster in her eye that might have been happiness or apprehension.

“Come on,” said Nordell. “Don’t you want to have a son to grow up just like you?”

“That would be nice,” Richard said.

Cara closed her eyes. Her hands crawled across her belly. She sank down to the floor, rocking on her heels. Nordell set down his suturing clamp and peeled off his gloves. He lowered himself to the floor beside Cara and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Come on, honey, I know you been taking those breathing lessons. So breathe. Come on.”

“Oh, Richie.”

Richard sat on the table, watching Cara go into labor. He had not attended any but the first of the labor and delivery classes and had not the faintest idea of what was expected of him or what it now behooved him to do. This was true not just of the process of parturition but of all the duties and grand minutiae of fatherhood itself. The rape, the conception, the growing of the placenta, the nurturing and sheltering of the child in darkness, in its hammock of woven blood vessels, fed on secret broth — all of these had gone on with no involvement on his part. Until now he had taken the simple, unalterable fact of this rather brutally to heart. In this way he had managed to prevent the usual doubts and questions of the prospective father from arising in his mind. For a time, it was true, he had maintained a weak hope that the baby would be a girl. Vaguely he had envisioned a pair of skinny legs in pink high-topped sneakers, crooked upside down over a horizontal bar, a tumbling hem conveniently obscuring the face. When Dorothy had so confidently pronounced the baby a boy, however, Richard had actually felt a kind of black relief. At that moment, the child had effectively ceased to exist for him: it was merely the son of Cara’s rapist, its blood snarled by the same abrading bramble of chromosomes. In all the last ten months he had never once imagined balancing an entire human being on his forearm, never pondered the depths and puzzles of his relationship to his own father, never suffered the nightly clutch of fear for the future that haunts a man while his pregnant wife lies beside him with her heavy breath rattling in her throat. Now that the hour of birth was at hand he had no idea what to do with himself.

“Get down here,” said Nordell. “Hold this poor child’s hand.”

Richard slid off the table and knelt beside Cara. He took her warm fingers in his own.

“Stay with me, Richie,” Cara said.

“All right,” said Richard. “Okay.”

While Nordell hastily wrapped Richard’s finger in gauze and tape, a wheelchair was brought for Cara. She was rolled off to admissions, her purse balanced on her knees. When Richard caught up to her a volunteer was just wheeling her into the elevator.

“Where are we going?” Richard said.

“To labor and delivery,” said the volunteer, an older man with hearing aids, his shirt pocket bulging with the outline of a pack of cigarettes. “Fourth floor. Didn’t you take the tour?”

Richard shook his head.

“This isn’t our hospital,” Cara said. “We took the tour at Cedars.”

“I wish I had,” Richard said, surprising himself.

When the labor triage nurse examined Cara, she found her to be a hundred percent effaced and nearly eight centimeters dilated.

“Whoa,” she said. “Let’s go have you this baby.”

“Here?” Cara said, knowing she sounded childish. “But I …”

“But nothing,” said the nurse. “You can have the next one at Cedars.”

Cara was hurried into an algae-green gown and rolled down to what she and the nurse both referred to as an LDR. This was a good-sized room that had been decorated to resemble a junior suite in an airport hotel, pale gray and lavender, oak-laminate furniture, posters on the walls tranquilly advertising past seasons of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. There was a hospital smell of air-conditioning, however, and so much diagnostic equipment crowded around the bed, so many wires and booms and monitors, that the room felt cramped, and the effect of pseudoluxury was spoiled. With all the gear and cables looming over Cara, the room looked to Richard like nothing so much as a soundstage.

“We forgot to bring a camera,” he said. “I should shoot this, shouldn’t I?”

“There’s a vending machine on two,” said the labor nurse, raising Cara’s legs up toward her chest, spreading them apart. The outer lips were swollen and darkened to a tobacco-stain brown, gashed pink in the middle, bright as bubble gum. “It has things like combs and toothpaste. I think it might have the kind of camera you throw away.”

“Do I have time?”

“Probably. But you never know.”

“Cara, do you want pictures of this? Should I go? I’ll be right back. Cara?”

Cara didn’t answer. She had slipped off into the world of her contractions, eyes shut, head rolled back, brow luminous with pain and concentration like the brow of Christ in a Crucifixion scene.

The nurse had lost interest in Richard and the camera question. She had hold of one of Cara’s hands in one of hers, and was stroking Cara’s hair with the other. Their faces were close together, and the nurse was whispering something. Cara nodded, and bit her lip, and barked out an angry laugh. Richard stood there. He felt he ought to be helping Cara, but the nurse seemed to have everything under control. There was nothing for him to do and no room beside the bed.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

He got lost on his way down to the second floor, and then when he reached two he got lost again trying to find the vending machine. It stood humming in a corridor outside the cafeteria, beside the men’s room. Within its tall panel of glass doors, a carousel rotated when you pressed a button. It was well stocked with toiletry and sanitary items, along with a few games and novelties for bored children. There was one camera left. Richard fed a twenty-dollar bill into the machine and received no change.