Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue Read Free Book Online Page A

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 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 offense. She thought he was looking for sex when he was just as happy stroking her belly. She said the baby kept