Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle by Emma Donoghue Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t answer, and he thought she was still asleep, till he saw the line of her jaw. Then she said, ‘For god’s sake.’
    Exactly, he was tempted to say, but didn’t.
    In the morning he woke up to find her packing.
    He stared at her knotted hands, ramming two pairs of his socks into a corner. ‘Who was it,’ Margaret asked, ‘just remind me who was it who talked me out of it all those other times?’
    ‘You were never sure—,’ he began.
    ‘That’s right, I wasn’t sure, but you sure were.’ A little bead of spit on her lip caught the sunlight. She plucked up another pair of socks but didn’t put them in the bag. ‘Who was it always told me it would be madness to go off the Pill? Who was it said we’d lose all our freedom, tie ourselves down?’
    His throat felt like it was full of wadding. He cleared it. ‘Guess everybody gets tied down one way or another.’
    Margaret’s hands were jammed into the pockets of her silky dressing gown; her nails were stretching the seams. ‘Who was it kept saying he wasn’t ready?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said, nearly whispering. ‘I don’t know who that guy was.’ There was a silence so complete he could hear the chambermaid vacuuming at the other end of the motel. ‘But I’m different now.’
    ‘You can say that again.’ She stared at him; her eyes were hard as hazelnuts. ‘You’re on another planet.’
    ‘I’m finally ready,’ he pleaded.
    ‘Oh yeah?’ Her voice was bigger than the room. ‘Well, I’m forty-two, so you and your friend Jesus can go to hell.’
    It took them two days to drive home. Awhile before they stopped for a burger on the first day he thought Margaret was crying, but she was looking out the window so he couldn’t be sure. At the motel he called his mother and told her there’d been an emergency at work and he’d been called back. She’d always been able to tell when he was lying, but she didn’t say so.
    When they pulled into their driveway at the end of the second day, Margaret laid her hand on his thigh and said, ‘OK.’
    He wasn’t sure what it meant. Pax? Or, this marriage is over?
    ‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s give it a shot.’
    She got pregnant twice before the end of the year, which he took as a good sign. The first one made it to two months, the second to five. That one was a boy. He made the nurse give him the little body, for burial. Quite a few people from the Church of Jesus Our Lord turned up, though Margaret didn’t come back with them for the chicken supper afterwards, which everybody said was understandable.
    The strange thing was that he had known the boy wouldn’t make it to term. At the funeral it was like there was cotton wool round his heart, keeping the pain at bay. He and Margaret were going to have a girl; he just knew it.
    He didn’t mind waiting a little while longer so Margaret could build her strength up before trying again. It felt strange to be buying rubbers – in a drugstore in the next town, so no one from the church would see him – but he thought Jesus probably wouldn’t have a word to say about it, under the circumstances.
    On Christmas Eve he asked Margaret to come to church with him, just for once. On the way home she said, ‘One last shot, OK?’ as if she were talking about pinball.
    That night as he came his legs shook like bowstrings. His mind swam inside her. He could almost see the egg, glowing at the end of the dark tube; he registered the shock when the single chosen sperm, blindly butting, felt the membrane give way and seal him in.
    The next day he started making a list of girls’ names. He kept the list in the glove compartment so as not to annoy Margaret, who didn’t believe in counting chickens.
    Nothing happened till March, when Margaret started throwing up her Cheerios and smiling at strangers. ‘Third time lucky,’ he told her on the way home from the ultrasound. His head was so full of a single image – the tiny curled chipmunk that was going to be