Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

She and Ira tried to keep their own storms private, but no doubt Jesse overheard at least a little. Or maybe he just sensed how they felt; for more and more, as he entered his teens, it was to Maggie that he offered his few crumbs of conversation, while he grew steadily more distant from Ira. By the time he told her about the baby, Maggie felt fairly distant from Ira herself. They'd been through too many arguments, rehashed the subject of Jesse too many thousand times. It wasn't merely her promise that kept Maggie from telling Ira about the baby; it was battle fatigue.

Ira would hit the roof! And rightly so, of course.

But she thought of how Jesse had nudged her lips with the soup spoon, coaxing her to eat. Sometimes, at the height of her fever, she had wakened to hear thin, sad, faraway music emerging from the earphones on his head, and she had been convinced that they were the sounds of his innermost thoughts made clear to her at long last.

Monday morning she went to work as usual at seven but begged off sick at a quarter till nine and drove to Whitside Avenue. The clinic was a remodeled store of some kind, with a curtained plate-glass window. She spotted it first not by its street number but by the knot of picketers outside. There were three women, several children, and a small, dapper man. THIS CLINIC MURDERS THE INNOCENT, one sign said, and another showed a blown-up photo of a beautiful smiling baby with GIVE HER A CHANCE printed in white across her mop of black curls. Maggie parked in front of an insurance agency next door. The picketers glanced over at her and then went back to watching the clinic.

A car drew up and a girl in jeans got out, followed by a young boy. The girl bent to say something to the driver, after which she waved and the car moved on. The couple walked briskly toward the clinic, while the picketers swarmed around them. "God sees what you're about to do!" one woman called, and another blocked the girl's path, but she veered away. "Where is your conscience?" the man shouted after her.

She and the boy vanished behind the door. The picketers straggled back to their places. They were discussing something heatedly; they appeared to be disagreeing. Maggie had the impression that some of them felt they should have been more forceful.

A few minutes later, a woman alighted from a taxi. She was maybe Maggie's age, very well dressed and all by herself. The picketers seemed to feel they had to make up for past defeats. They circled her; they had so much to say that it came to Maggie's ears as a garble of bee sounds. They pressed pamphlets on her. The largest of the women put an arm around her shoulders. The patient, if that was what she was, cried, "Let go of me!"

and jabbed an elbow into the picketer's rib cage. Then she was gone too.

The picketer bent over-in pain, Maggie thought at first, but she was merely lifting one of the children. They returned to their original positions. In this heat, they moved so slowly that their indignation looked striven-for and counterfeit.

Maggie rooted through her purse for a piece of paper to fan herself with.

She would have liked to get out of the car, but then where would she stand? Alongside the picketers?

Footsteps approached, a double set, and she glanced up to see Fiona and a slightly older girl, who must have been her sister.

She had worried she wouldn't recognize Fiona, having caught sight of her only the once. But she knew her right off-the long fair hair, the pale face with nothing yet written upon it. She wore jeans and a bright, shrimp-pink

T-shirt. As it happened, Maggie had a prejudice against shrimp pink. She thought it was lower-class. (Oh, how strange it was to remember now that she had once viewed Fiona as lower-class! She had imagined there was something cheap and gimcrack about her; she had mistrusted the bland pallor of her face, and she had suspected that her sister's too-heavy makeup concealed the same unhealthy complexion. Pure narrow-mindedness!

Maggie could admit that now, having come to see Fiona's good points.) At any rate, she got out of the car. She walked over to them and said, "Fiona?"

The sister murmured, "Told you they'd try something." She must have thought Maggie was a picketer. And Fiona walked on, eyelids lowered so they were two white crescents.

"Fiona, I'm Jesse's mother," Maggie said.

Fiona slowed and looked at her. The sister came to a stop.

"I won't interfere if you're certain you know what you're doing," Maggie said, "but, Fiona, have you considered every angle?"

"Not all that many to consider," the sister said bluntly. "She's seventeen years old."

Fiona allowed herself to be led away then, still gazing at Maggie over her shoulder.

"Have you talked about it with Jesse?" Maggie asked. She ran after them.

"Jesse wants this baby! He told me so."

The sister called back, "Is he going to bear it? Is he going to walk it at night and change its diapers?"

"Yes, he is!" Maggie said. "Well, not bear it, of course ..."

They had reached the picketers by now. A woman held out one of the pamphlets. On the front was a color photo of an unborn baby who seemed a good deal past the embryo stage, in fact almost ready to be delivered. Fiona shrank away.

"Leave her alone," Maggie told the woman. She said, "Fiona, Jesse really cares about you. You have to believe me."

"I have seen enough of Jesse Moran to last me a lifetime," the sister said. She shoved past a fat woman with two toddlers and an infant in a sling.

"You're just saying that because you have- him cast in this certain role," Maggie told her, "this rock-band member who got your little sister pregnant. But it's not so simple! It's not so cut-and-dried! He bought a Dr. Spock book-did he mention that, Fiona? He's already researched pacifiers and he thinks you ought to breastfeed."

The fat woman said to Fiona, ' 'All the angels in heaven are crying over you."

"Listen," Maggie told the woman. "Just because you've got too many children is no reason to wish the same trouble on other people."

"The angels call it murder," the woman said.

Fiona flinched. Maggie said, "Can't you see you're upsetting her?" They had reached the door of the clinic now, but the dapper little man was barring their way. "Get out of here," Maggie told him. "Fiona! Just think it over! That's all I ask of you."

The man held his ground, which gave Fiona time to turn to Maggie. She looked a little teary. "Jesse doesn't care," she said.

"Of course he cares!"

"He says to me, 'Don't worry, Fiona, I won't let you down.' Like I am some kind of obligation! Some charitable cause!"

"He didn't mean it that way. You're misreading him. He honestly wants to marry you."

"And live on what money?" the sister asked. She had a braying, unpleasant voice, much deeper than Fiona's. "He doesn't even have a decent-paying job."

"He's getting one! Computers! Opportunity for advancement!" Maggie said.

She was forced to speak so telegraphically because Fiona's sister had somehow cleared the door of picketers and was tugging it open. A woman held a postcard in front of Fiona's face: the curly-haired baby again.

Maggie batted it aside. "At least come home with me so you and Jesse can talk it over," she told Fiona. "That won't commit you to anything."

Fiona hesitated. Her sister said, "For God's sake, Fiona," but Maggie seized her advantage. She took Fiona by the wrist and led her back through the crowd, keeping up a steady stream of encouragement. "He says he's building a cradle; he's already got the plans. It's enough to break your heart. Leave her alone, dammit! Do I have to call the police? Who gave you the right to pester us?"

"Who gave her the right to murder her baby?" a woman called.

"She has every right in the world! Fiona, this is a natural-born caretaker we're talking about here. You should have seen him during the Hong Kong flu."