Alice McDermott - After This

She could feel her own heart under the softness of her breast, beating against her folded hands as she knelt, anticipating it, the best weekend of her life, losing count of what prayer she was on, or how it was, here in St. Gabriel’s, that her thoughts had wandered so pleasurably and so far. She raised her eyes. In the past few months, statues had been added to the altar, a recognizable Joseph and Mary, a formidable Saint Gabriel, blond and fine-featured, kneeling on one knee. It was what the parishioners had wanted, realistic statues, easily identifiable. She blessed herself and rose and slipped out of the pew, suddenly struck by the conviction that she was going to have the happiest life. And then she paused and knelt again to say a prayer to Jacob, who had once sat beside her, here in this place, to thank him for it.

Her baby began, as she reckoned it, sometime during the first cold days of that autumn. She pictured it forming like the far-off swirl of some distant galaxy in the darkness of her womb, more blood than flesh, and then, perhaps by Christmas, more flesh than blood. Because she had always been so thin, no one was surprised to find she had begun to fill out, and because the winter uniform meant wool skirt and soft blouse and V-neck sweater, if you wished, under the blue blazer, because Pauline had shown her years ago how to adjust a hem and open a seam, she had no worry all through the winter that she would have to tell anyone yet. Not Gregory or her parents or the teachers at school. Gregory had midterms just after the first of the year and then the weather turned bad, so he was spending fewer weekends home. With only a vague idea of what next year would be like, she told her parents she’d decided she’d rather go to college nearby and applied only to Malloy and St. John’s. On Saturdays she drove herself to the library and spent long hours in the overheated rooms studying biology books and medical texts, Dr. Spock and Our Bodies, Ourselves, but mostly the lovely full-color photos from an old Life magazine that showed a fetus floating like a spacewalker in the limitless universe of a uterus, a thin and otherworldly baby crooking an arm, sucking a thumb, lifting a snub nose and a dark, an ancient, eye to the top of the page. Breathing slowly, with a sleeper’s rhythm, she placed one hand on her waist and touched Gregory’s ring with the other, leaning over these pictures. The best afternoons were the ones when a cold rain, or a sleet, or a bit of snow fell from a colorless sky and hit the library windows, making her believe this deep winter would never end.

In her prayers she sometimes said, “What you could do for me, what you could do for me, is let this winter never end.”

It was only the birth itself that frightened her. In health class that fall, they’d been shown a film: a hospital birth, the woman red-faced and panting, her pale, raised knees, more blood and less privacy than any of them had imagined. A scalpel moving in for what they called the episiotomy (“It won’t appease me,” was the joke later). Girls with their hands over their mouths stumbled from the room. All week long, as the film was shown to each class, green-faced students could be found lined up on the floor in the hallways, slumped against the walls like wounded soldiers in trenches. Later, there was talk of a conspiracy: moral injunctions having failed, the powers that be at Mary Immaculate Academy were merely trying to terrify them into chastity. “Too late,” the more troublesome and popular girls had said, laughing, Clare now among them. “Try not to think about it.”

In the library, bent over the amber-tinted photographs of a baby coming into life, she could manage not to think about it: the pain she was headed for in eight, then seven, then six months’ time, the humiliation of bare knees raised, body convulsed, nothing appeased. In the warmth and quiet of the library-the smell of books, the rustle of newspapers, the occasional voice of a child-she thought instead of the life that was forming, not just the baby’s life but the life of nights in bed beside him and the mornings she would wake with him at her side.

She set the weekend of daylight savings, the beginning of spring, for the time to shake herself out of her lovely stupor and face the world. She told Gregory on the phone on Saturday, and he cursed softly, the way he did when he made a wrong turn while driving or left his wallet in his other pants, cursing himself and his own stupidity. “What do you want to do?” he said, finally. “What is there?” she said, not really a question, and he cursed again.

She made her way into Pauline’s room that night, touched her gently on the hip and then sat on the edge of Michael’s bed. With her sister gone, she no longer troubled to give the excuse that she had to sleep here because Annie was reading. She was certain Pauline never bought it anyway. She came in here because it was where Jacob had slept all the years he was home, even in the years before she was born, and there was comfort in looking into the same darkness he had known, guessing at the shapes beneath the same shadows. She sat on Michael’s bed. This was the hour, she guessed, that they were meant to spring forward. The hour erased out of time from this night until the one in the fall, when it would be restored again. As good a time as any, she thought, to plan with a bit more precision just what she wanted to do.

She told her mother the next night, the first Sunday evening when there was still light left after dinner. They had finished eating, her father and Pauline had left the table, and she watched her mother’s mouth draw down crookedly, searing a line through her chin.

Her mother slapped her and then burst into tears and Clare’s pain and astonishment were so great she could barely catch her breath. She put her face in her hands, awoken, at last, from the winter’s spell. She said, through her own tears, “A grandchild for you,” but even she heard how ridiculous this was, something spoken out of the illogic of a long dream.

Her mother’s tears brought her father in from the living room and he stood in the doorway with his hand to his bald head as Mary Keane told him, crying, “She’s pregnant.” Looking at neither her husband nor her child, she said, to the air, it seemed, “How much more can I take?”

Her father limped to the phone on the wall. “What’s the number?” he said and Clare had a silly impulse to say 911. “The Josephs,” her father said. “Greg’s parents. What’s their phone number?”

Weakly, she said, “No, Daddy,” but her mother was up already, rummaging through a drawer for her phone book. She read the number out loud as her father dialed. In his business voice he asked to speak to Gregory’s father. But he had only begun the conversation (“It seems your boy,” he said) when his face twisted into a terrible mask and her mother had to take the phone.

Clare bowed her head and put her arms over her widening waist. There was nothing to be done, she knew, because the future was already here, inside her-she had already begun to feel the baby stir-and the thought seemed to trump everything else, her mother’s now steady voice, her father’s muffled tears, which were not for her, she knew even then, but for Jacob, at long last. The sun had begun to set and the kitchen was darkening, an hour later than it would have just yesterday. Her cheek still stung from where her mother had slapped her. The baby moved, as if waving a thin arm at her from that once-distant galaxy, now a single star, a sun (a son, she thought) well within her sight, warm. When she looked up, Pauline was standing in the kitchen doorway, her hand on the frame and something in her mouth, perhaps a butterscotch or a hard candy pushed behind her teeth. Clare got up and stood beside her, and, as she had been doing all her life, lifted and held the old woman’s hand as if Pauline herself had offered it.