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

their daughter – that he could hardly see the road. The nurse said you couldn’t be sure so early, but yes, it did look kind of like a girl.
    ‘Laura?’ he suggested, idling at a traffic light. ‘Leona? Lucy?’
    ‘We’ll see,’ said Margaret, smiling. And then, ‘The light’s changed.’
    As the time went by, he bloomed. It was no hardship, he found, to be patient with a pushy new guy at work. When Margaret’s strange uncle who picked his nose came to town, they put him up on the sofa bed for a whole week. Prayer was easy; he’d never had so much to say.
    Margaret, on the other hand, was getting more wired by the month. She wouldn’t let her forty-third birthday be celebrated in any way, not even dinner out, not so much as a bunch of flowers or a card. The bigger she grew, the more substantial their future seemed to him, and the less she seemed able to believe in it. He wondered if she was frightened about the birth; it did seem to him a terrible prospect, and he cracked a joke about how the human race would soon die out if women were as cowardly as men.
    Margaret didn’t laugh.
    ‘You’ll have to trust God, hon,’ he said, a little nervously, as he knew the word made her twitch, but it was the only one he could think of.
    She laughed then, and said, ‘I’ve never even met him.’
    He had a feeling everything would be better once they were a family. With Laura coming to church with him every week, first in one of those slings on his chest, and then in her little black patent shoes, surely Margaret wouldn’t want to be left behind. It made sense that once she saw how good Jesus had been to them, she’d understand all the rest of it.
    Meanwhile, she didn’t understand the slightest thing he said. She was always taking offence. She thought he was looking for sex when he was just as happy stroking her belly. She said the baby kept kicking her in the ribs. One day he was playing chase-the-foot when Margaret shoved him so hard he fell off the bed.
    When he got to his feet, she was laughing in that appalled way of hers. ‘Oh, I’m such a bitch these days,’ she said between snorts. ‘I’m so sorry, honey, I’m so sorry. I’m scared, you know?’
    ‘Of the birth?’
    ‘No, moron,’ said Margaret, still laughing. ‘Scared it won’t happen.’
    He could tell she was an inch away from tears so he lay down beside her.
    San Francisco should be levelled to the ground, he thought, when his mother called to tell him about her knee. It was only a little fall, but she’d rolled about twenty feet down the sidewalk till she landed against a fire hydrant.
    He knew he should be there to take her home from the hospital. If there was ever a time to be a good son, this was it. But he rested his ear on Margaret’s drum of a belly and couldn’t lift it away.
    ‘Get out of here,’ she said, pretty gently. ‘Those bastards owe you two weeks of vacation.’
    ‘Not now.’
    ‘Yes, now. Get out of my hair for a while. It’ll be a good three months before this baby lifts a finger.’
    So here he was, back on the coast. By the time he passed the Oregon state line he was breathing easier, and the farther he drove, the more peaceful he felt. He took his time; he saw all the places he and Margaret had missed on their truncated honey moon. He could feel the horizon curving around him like a hand.
    It was then he started writing again. Just on beaches, at first. There was a little cove beside a lighthouse, washed clean as a slate by the morning tide. There was one small girl picking up shells on the waterline, and her family sunbathing farther up the beach. He stood staring out to sea, and all at once he knew what to write.
JESUS IS THE WAY, he put, in letters so big and clear they could probably be seen from a low plane. All the time he was marking them with the toe of his shoe, he was thinking of the surprise people would get when they wandered down the beach that afternoon. That’s how you did it: by surprise. Minds