Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue Read Free Book Online Page B

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 leveled 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 honeymoon. 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. J E S U S is T H E W A Y , 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 were like mussels: You shouldn't try to force them open; it was better to catch them at an idle moment and slip inside.
    He was just finishing the Y when he noticed the little girl's mother. She was standing at a distance, reading the words upside down. When his eyes met hers, she grabbed the child's hand and hurried back up the beach.
    It gave him an odd feeling, as if she thought he was some kind of pervert or something. But you couldn't expect people to understand if they hadn't gone down their road to Damascus yet. That's all he wanted: to give people a glimpse of it, to throw strangers a split second of the joy that was filling him up these days so he hardly needed to eat except for a bag of grapes in the car.
    Whenever he got a surge of happiness, he wanted to ring Margaret, but she'd said the sound of the phone was getting on her nerves these days, and he knew she needed a break from him, so he sent her postcards instead. He told her things he'd never thought to mention before. "Did you know you are the most beautiful woman in the world?" he wrote on a picture of a glacial lake, and "I love you more every day," on a shot of a leaping salmon.
    Words were pouring out of him. He was a bit shocked with himself, the day he wrote on a wall outside Portland. He hadn't done a thing like that since he was a kid. But this wall already said D O N T M E S W I T H T H E M O F O B O Y Z , L O L A S U C K S D I C K , and M E N U 4 E V E R '03, so he felt he could only improve it by adding J E S U S S A V E S with a little can of white spray paint he got at the corner hardware store.
    Then, when he was walking through a grove of old-growth redwoods the next afternoon, his heart started to knock like a rattle. The forest was bigger than the biggest cathedral, but humans had had no share in the building. He felt like an insect. The trees were wider than he was tall, and taller than anything; all he could hear