After This by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online

a heel—surely
it was a heel here on her left side—press against her skin and then
dart away, going under, before she could quite gauge its shape.
     
It was possible it had something to do with the ocean, all this
activity. Something to do with the salt scent of it on the air and on the
wind. The tug of some ancient memory—didn’t they say life began in
the sea—or maybe some dawning hope that the what-do-youcall-it, the fluid the baby now floated in (which someone had told her
was also precisely as salty as the ocean), was a tributary, not merely a
pool.
     
She ran her palms over her taut belly, soothing the poor thing,
even as a swift kick under her ribs nearly took her breath away. Or
maybe, she thought, it was the hurricane down south, agitating water
everywhere—in oceans and bays, dog bowls and cisterns, in the bellies
of pregnant women all up and down the coast.
     
Mary Keane smiled and looked around because the thought
amused her, although she knew that in another minute she would not
be able to retrace it clearly enough to retell.
     
Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying
flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him, and Annie
had followed her single soldier up the dune to a grassy patch where
the wind whipped her dark hair and the blowing sand made her
squint, even as her lips kept moving—now a conversation between her
little army man and a headless creature formed by the two fingers of
her right hand. But Michael was out of sight.
     
She waited. Were it not for the ballast of her big belly, she would
casually stand, stretch a bit, casually stretch her neck until she got a
glimpse of him. Casually because her husband said she worried too
much, fretted too much, and would eventually infect their boys with
her fearfulness—had, perhaps, already, in Jacob’s case, infected them
with her fearfulness. So she waited, trusting, but feeling, too, the pinsand-needles prick of blown sand on her cheek and her forearm (was
the wind changing?) until, sure enough, there was the top of his head,
the tip of his plastic machine gun, just over the next dune.
     
She resisted calling to him, telling him to come closer. Her
husband was asleep beside her. She could hear the way he pursed his
lips with each breath, something like the soft sound of the football
against their palms (although it was softer still), something like the
thud of the ocean as it punctuated the rise and fall of the wind. He
deserved the rest, poor man. They were alone on the beach. They were
perfectly safe.
     
Michael’s head crested the dune again. Then his shoulders, the
rump of his blue jeans, the short barrel of his machine gun. He was
crawling on his belly along the top of the dune, crushing the sea grass,
filling his shirt and the pockets of his pants with sand. She would have
to remember to shake him out before he got into the car.
     
Down the path through the dunes she could see the pale expanse
of beach and then the place where it gave way to sky. She leaned
forward a little, toward it, resting the bulk of the baby on the edge of
her thighs. It was possible that the sky was darker, out there, to the
east. It was possible that they would catch some part of the southern
storm. She had an image of her unborn child, its head up under her
heart, its ear pressed to the wall of her flesh, treading water with the
flutter of its small legs, listening. It would hear the echo of the waves,
the whistle of the wind, the rise and fall of its father’s breath as his
lips opened and touched closed.
     
Mary Keane was more than certain (she would have said) that this
was her last pregnancy. These the last weeks she would live with the
toss and tumble of a child in her belly, with the unseen future a real
presence inside her; the unseen future actual flesh and blood inside
her, not, as it was for the rest of the population and would be for her
again once this child was