Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

When he got back to the room he stood with his fingers on the door handle. It was cold and dry and gave him a static shock when he grasped it. Through the door he heard Cara say, “Fuck,” with a calmness that frightened him. He let go of the handle.

There was a squeaking of rubber soles, rapid and intent. Dorothy Pendleton was hurrying along the corridor toward him. She had pulled a set of rose surgical scrubs over her street clothes. They fit her badly across the chest and one laundry-marked shirttail dangled free of the waistband. As Dorothy hurried toward him she was pinning her hair up behind her head, scattering bobby pins as she came.

“You did it,” she said. “Good for you.”

Richard was surprised to find that he was glad to see Dorothy. She looked intent but not flustered, rosy-cheeked, wide-awake. She gave off a pleasant smell of sugary coffee. Over one shoulder she carried a big leather sack covered in a worn patchwork of scraps of old kilims. He noticed, wedged in among the tubes of jojoba oil and the medical instruments, a rolled copy of Racing Form.

“Yeah, well, I’m just glad, you know, that my sperm finally came in handy for something,” he said.

She nodded, then leaned into the door. “Good sperm,” she said. She could see that he needed something from her, a word of wisdom from the midwife, a pair of hands to yank him breech first and hypoxic back into the dazzle and clamor of the world. But she had already wasted enough of her attention on him, and she reached for the handle of the door.

Then she noticed the twenty-dollar cardboard camera dangling from his hand. For some reason it touched her that he had found himself a camera to hide behind.

She stopped. She looked at him. She put a finger to his chest. “My father was a sheriff in Bowie County, Texas,” she said.

He took a step backward, gazing down at the finger. Then he looked up again.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning get your ass into that room, deputy.” She pushed open the door.

The first thing they heard was the rapid beating of the baby’s heart through the fetal monitor. It filled the room with its simple news, echoing like a hammer on tin.

“You’re just in time,” said the labor nurse. “It’s crowning.”

“Dorothy. Richie.” Cara’s head lolled toward them, her cheeks streaked with tears and damp locks of hair, her eyes red, her face swollen and bruised looking. It was the face she had worn after the attack at Lake Hollywood, dazed with pain, seeking out his eyes. “Where did you go?” she asked him. She sounded angry. “Where did you go?”

Sheepishly he held up the camera.

“Jesus! Don’t go away again!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. A dark circle of hair had appeared between her legs, surrounded by the fiery pink ring of her straining labia. “I’m sorry!”

“Get him scrubbed,” Dorothy said to the nurse. “He’s catching the baby.”

“What?” said Richard. He felt he ought to reassure Cara. “Not really.”

“Really,” said Dorothy. “Get scrubbed.”

The nurse traded places with Dorothy at the foot of the bed, and took Richard by the elbow. She tugged the shrink-wrapped camera from his grasp.

“Why don’t you give that to me?” she said. “You go get scrubbed.”

“I washed my hands before,” Richard said, panicking a little.

“That’s good,” said Dorothy. “Now you can do it again.”

Richard washed his hands in brown soap that stung the nostrils, then turned back to the room. Dorothy had her hand on the bed’s controls, raising its back, helping Cara into a more upright position. Cara whispered something.

“What’s that, honey?” said Dorothy.

“I said Richard I’m sorry too.”

“What are you sorry about?” Dorothy said. “Good God.”

“Everything,” Cara said. And then, “Oh.”

She growled and hummed, snapping her head from side to side. She hissed short whistling jets of air through her teeth. Dorothy glanced at the monitor. “Big one,” she said. “Here we go.”

She waved Richard over to her side. Richard hesitated.

Cara gripped the side rails of the bed. Her neck arched backward. A humming arose deep inside her chest and grew higher in pitch as it made its way upward until it burst as a short cry, ragged and harsh, from her lips.

“Whoop!” said Dorothy, drawing back her arms. “A stargazer! Hi, there!” She turned again to Richard, her hands cupped around something smeary and purple that was protruding from Cara’s body. “Come on, move it. See this.”

Richard approached the bed, and saw that Dorothy balanced the baby’s head between her broad palms. It had a thick black shock of hair. Its eyes were wide open, large and dark, pupils invisible, staring directly, Richard felt, at him. There was no bleariness, or swelling of the lower eyelids. No one, Richard felt, had ever quite looked at him this way, without emotion, without judgment. The consciousness of a great and irrevocable event came over him; ten months’ worth of dread and longing filled him in a single unbearable rush. Disastrous things had happened to him in his life; at other times, stretching far back into the interminable afternoons of his boyhood, he had experienced a sense of buoyant calm that did not seem entirely without foundation in the nature of things. Nothing awaited him in the days to come but the same uneven progression of disaster and contentment. And all those moments, past and future, seemed to him to be concentrated in that small, dark, pupilless gaze.

Dorothy worked her fingers in alongside the baby’s shoulders. Her movements were brusque, sure, and indelicate. They reminded Richard of a cook’s, or a potter’s. She took a deep breath, glanced at Cara, and then gave the baby a twist, turning it ninety degrees.

“Now,” she said. “Give me your hands.”

“But you don’t really catch them, do you?” he said. “That’s just a figure of speech.”

“Don’t you wish,” said Dorothy. “Now get in there.”

She dragged him into her place, and stepped back. She took hold of his wrists and laid his hands on the baby’s head. It was sticky and warm against his fingers.

“Just wait for the next contraction, Dad. Here it comes.”

He waited, looking down at the baby’s head, and then Cara grunted, and some final chain or stem binding the baby to her womb seemed to snap. With a soft slurping sound the entire child came squirting out into Richard’s hands. Almost without thinking, he caught it. The nurse and Dorothy cheered. Cara started to cry. The baby’s skin was the color of skimmed milk, smeared, glistening, flecked with bits of dark red. Its shoulders and back were covered in a faint down, matted and slick. It worked its tiny jaw, snorting and snuffling hungrily at the sharp first mouthfuls of air.

“What is it?” Cara said. “Is it a boy?”

“Wow,” said Richard, holding the baby up to show Cara. “Check this out.”

Dorothy nodded. “You have a son, Cara,” she said. She took the baby from Richard, and laid him on the collapsed tent of Cara’s belly. Cara opened her eyes. “A big old hairy son.”

Richard went around to stand beside his wife. He leaned in until his cheek was pressed against hers. They studied the wolfman’s boy, and he regarded them.

“Do you think he’s funny-looking?” Richard said doubtfully. Then the nurse snapped a picture of the three of them, and they looked at her, blinking, blinded by the flash.

“Beautiful,” said the nurse.

SHE WAS THE TYPE of girl that Green always noticed right away: too thin, dressed wrong, foulmouthed, already drunk and laughing too loud — a shimmying funnel of dust, lightning, and uprooted houses working its way across the room. She had coarse dyed-black hair worn chopped off at the jawline, a wide mouth painted the color of a grape Tootsie Pop, brilliant teeth, pointy black boots, black stockings, and a crinkly black dress that showed off exactly too much of her shoulders and breasts. It was a few seconds, standing in Emily Klein’s living room, shaking hands all around, before Green realized that he knew the girl. And then one moment more of erotic doubt, mingled with a pleasant sense of trouble, before he recognized her. She spotted him. Green hooked an arm around his young daughter’s waist, hoisted her into the air, and turned back toward the door.