Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

"The what?"

"Or Bangkok, or Sing Sing, or one of those flus . . . Anyway, it's nothing to do with charity. He wants this baby more than anything."

Fiona peered into her face. She said, "And he's building a ... ?"

"He's building a cradle. A beautiful one, with a hood," Maggie said. If it turned out not to have a hood she could always say she had been mistaken.

Fiona's sister scurried alongside them, her heels clicking busily. She said, "Fiona, if you don't get back in there this instant I am washing my hands of this whole affair, I tell you. Fiona, they have scheduled you!"

And the picketers milled uncertainly a few feet behind. Fiona's wrist was smooth and impossibly thin, like a stalk of bamboo. Maggie released it, reluctantly, in order to open the car door. "Climb in," she said. "Buzz off," she told the picketers. And to the sister she said, "Nice meeting you."

The picketers dropped back. One said, "Now look, uh . . ."

"We have constitutional permission to do this, I'll have you know,"

Maggie said. The woman looked confused.

"I hunt up a clinic," Fiona's sister said, "I take her to be tested. I make the appointment, I sacrifice a perfectly good day off when I could have gone to Ocean City with my boyfriend-"

"You could still do that," Maggie said, checking her watch.

She hurried around to the driver's side, fearful that Fiona would try to escape, but when she got in, Fiona was sitting there limply with her head tipped back and her eyes closed. Her sister bent in through the open window. "Fiona, just tell me this much," she said. "If Jesse Moran was so hot for this baby, how come it wasn't him who came down here to fetch you?"

Fiona raised her lids and looked over at Maggie. "Well, he tried," Maggie told her. "He's been trying for days, you know he has, but somehow you're always at cross-purposes."

Fiona closed her eyes again. Maggie started the car and drove off.

The strange part was that having won-at least temporarily-she didn't feel a bit triumphant. Just worn out. And slightly confused, to tell the truth. How was it things had ended up this way, when all along she'd been telling Jesse he was nowhere near old enough? Oh, Lord. What had she gone and done? She glanced secretly at Fiona. Fiona's skin seemed slick, almost glazed. "Are you feeling ill?" Maggie asked her.

"I believe I might upchuck," Fiona said, barely moving her lips.

"You want me to stop the car?"

"Let's just get there."

Maggie drove more carefully, as if transporting a basket of eggs.

In front of the house she parked, got out, and came around to help Fiona from her seat. Fiona was a dead weight. She leaned heavily against Maggie. But she had a young smell-fresh-ironed cotton and those sugary beginner cosmetics you find in dime stores-and that gave Maggie some reassurance. Oh, this girl was not bad at heart!,She was barely older than Daisy; she was an ordinary, open-face child bewildered by what had happened to her.

They crossed the sidewalk slowly and climbed the steps to the porch.

Their shoes made a hollow sound on the floorboards. "Sit here," Maggie said, and she helped Fiona into the chair where she herself had sat all yesterday afternoon. "You need the air," she said. "Take deep, deep breaths. I'm going to go find Jesse."

Fiona closed her eyes.

Inside, the rooms were cool and dark. Maggie climbed the stairs to Jesse's room and knocked on his door. She poked her head in. "Jesse?" she said.

"Mmf."

His window shades were lowered so she could barely make out the shapes of the furniture. His bed was a tangle of twisted sheets. "Jesse, I've brought Fiona," she said. "Could you come down to the porch?"

"Huh?"

"Could you come down to the porch and talk with Fiona?"

He stirred a little and raised his head, so she knew she could leave him.

She went back downstairs and into the kitchen, where she poured a glass of iced tea from a pitcher in the refrigerator. She put the glass on a china plate, encircled it with saltine crackers, and carried it out to Fiona. "Here," she said. "Take little bites of these saltines. Take tiny sips of tea."

Fiona was already looking better, sitting upright now in her chair, and she said, "Thank you," when Maggie laid the plate on her knees. She nibbled at a corner of a cracker. Maggie settled in a rocker next to her.

"When I was expecting Daisy," Maggie said, "I lived on tea and saltines for two solid months. It's a wonder we didn't both get malnutrition. I was so sick with Daisy I thought I would die, but with Jesse I never had a moment's discomfort. Isn't that funny? You'd think it would have been the other way around."

Fiona set down her cracker. ' 'I should've stayed at the clinic," she said.

"Oh, honey," Maggie said. She felt suddenly depressed. She had an instantaneous, chillingly clear vision of how Ira's face would look when he learned what she had done. "Fiona, it's not too late," she said.

"You're only here to discuss it all, right? You're not committed to a thing." Although even as she spoke she saw the clinic receding steadily.

This was something like rushing toward a jump rope, she imagined. Miss that split second where entry is possible and you've flubbed up everything. She reached out and touched Fiona's arm. "And after all," she said, "you do love each other, don't you? Don't you love each other?"

"Yes, but maybe if we got married he would start to hold it against me,"

Fiona said. "I mean, he's a lead singer! He'll probably want to go to England or Australia or some such after he gets famous. And meanwhile, his band has just barely started earning any money. Where would we live?

How would we work this?"

"At first you could live here with us," Maggie said.

' 'Then in November you can move to an apartment Jesse knows about in Waverly. Jesse has it all figured out."

Fiona stared toward the street. "If I had stayed on at the clinic everything would be over by now," she said after a minute.

"Oh, Fiona. Please. Oh, tell me I didn't do wrong!" Maggie said. She looked around for Jesse. What was keeping him? It shouldn't be up to her to carry on this courtship. "Wait here," she said. She got up and hurried into the house. "Jesse!" she cried. But he didn't answer, and she heard the shower running. That boy would insist on showering first if the house were on fire, she thought. She ran upstairs and pounded on the bathroom door. "Jesse, are you coming?" she called.

He cut the water off. "What?" he said.

"Come out, I tell you!"

No answer. But she heard the shower curtain screech across the rod.

She went into his bedroom and snapped up both window shades. She wanted to find his Dr. Spock book. It would serve as a kind of selling point till he came downstairs; or at least it would provide a topic of conversation. But she couldn't find it-just dirty clothes, French-fry cartons, records left out of their jackets. She looked for the cradle plans then. What would they be-blueprints? Not a sign of them. Well, of course, he'd have taken them to the basement, where Ira kept his tools.

She tore back down the stairs, calling toward the porch as she passed, "He's on his way!" (She could picture Fiona getting up and leaving.) Through the kitchen, down a set of narrow wooden steps, over to Ira's workbench. No plans there, either. Ira's tools hung neatly on the backboard, each matching its own painted outline-a sure sign Jesse had not been near them. On the workbench itself were two squares of sandpaper and a sheaf of doweling rods still bound together by rubber bands, part of a drying rack that Ira had promised to build into a corner of the back porch. She seized the doweling rods and raced back up the basement steps. "Look," she told Fiona, slamming out the screen door. "Jesse's cradle."