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Joe felt as if he’d touched a fallen power line, a huge jolt cracking through him like a bullwhip. Even though he was sitting down, he could feel himself stagger a little. Then he pulled himself together and instinctively gathered Laurel into his arms.

“You can,” he told Laurel. “You can do it.”

“Joe.” He was close enough to feel her lips move under his, an almost delicious rippling sensation that caused his heart to rock. “I never … stopped. Loving you. Please … I’m sorry. I … I didn’t mean to lie to Annie. It’s just that … I … wanted it to be yours … our baby. Do you hate me?”

“No, Laurey, I could never hate you.” He stroked her hair, which felt damp and hot. What did he feel?

He didn’t know, couldn’t sort out all the emotions Laurel summoned up in him. In love with her? No. But what he did feel was certainly more than brotherly affection.

“I didn’t love him,” she panted. “Jess. He was just … somebody.” She moaned. “He doesn’t know … about the baby. I … didn’t tell him.”

“Were you afraid he’d let you down?” Joe remembered that morning on the library steps with Caryn, and felt a coldness about his heart. He touched Laurel’s cheek, freeing a strand of hair stuck to her mouth.

“No. He …” She broke off, pulling at his shirt.

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“He’s … not like that. He would have helped. I just… wanted …” She gasped, and her mouth dragged down in a horrible grimace. “It’s coming! Joe! I can feel it!”

“The ambulance …“he started to say, as if this birth were something she could put on hold. But it was going to happen, he realized, whether the ambulance was here or not.

Jesus. They hadn’t covered this in Lamaze. What should he do? In the movies, the doctor or midwife always told the man to boil water. But what were you supposed to do with the water once it boiled?

Sweat poured from him in rivulets, running into his collar, misting into half-moons on his eyeglass lenses. He’d felt this way once, in high school, before the qualifying heat for the four-hundred-yard dash in the tri-state finals. He remembered toeing up at the mark, his heart jackhammering, sweat pooling inside his running shoes, making his toes slimy and his soles itch.

But now, he couldn’t remember how fast he’d run that day, or even if he’d made it to the finals. All he remembered was that endless agony before the starting gun went off.

Where is that ambulance? It should be here by now. Goddamn it, what do they think this is, a sprained ankle here?

But glancing at his watch Joe saw that only four minutes had elapsed since he’d spoken to Dr. Epstein.

Laurel screamed. Blood had rushed up into her face, turning it a dark crimson. He realized that now she had to be pushing …

Christ, what if the baby was turned around or something? What if she started to bleed?

Inside his skull he felt pressure building up. A sound like crashing surf roared in his ears. He ran into the bathroom, and snatched a clean towel from the rack. Returning to Laurel’s side, he placed it under her hips. He didn’t know what else to do.

“It’s okay,” he heard a calm stranger speak. “Push if you have to.”

“GOD!”

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With the first push, water gushed from between her legs. He’d heard that this was supposed to happen; but actually seeing it came as a big shock. In the midst of kneeling at the foot of the bed in order to see what was happening, he froze.

The bed was soaked, along with the towel. But there was no time now to boil water or hunt for a fresh towel or even to sneeze. Between Laurel’s hiked knees, he spied a dark wet circle … the baby’s head. He grew dizzy, momentarily disoriented, as if a part of him was standing at a distance from all this, high up, watching himself watch this unfolding miracle. Could God have observed the creation of the world this way? The dark circle widened. He could hear Laurel grunting as she pushed again … then again … another mighty push. He saw his arms stretch out, as if from a universe away, hands cupped to receive the infant’s head as it slowly burrowed into the world, slick and dark and pointed. But something was wrong … the baby seemed stuck, its shoulders jammed somehow. Now he could see blood oozing onto the folded towel beneath Laurel. Jesus.

Joe’s panic mounted. Suppose the cord was wrapped the wrong way and was holding it back? What if Laurel was hemorrhaging? He dimly remembered something in a film they’d seen in Lamaze class about the baby needing at this point to be rotated a bit. Carefully, as carefully as if this child were a butterfly cupped in his palms, Joe turned the baby until he felt its shoulders loosen and finally slide free. Now came a long soapy torso, a pair of rumpled red legs. Joe let his breath out with a whistling rush.

With one hand supporting the infant’s head, Joe cradled the Lilliputian knobs of its buttocks, and cried: “A boy … and, look, he’s peeing!”

A stream of urine arched from a penis not even as wide as Joe’s little finger. The baby gave a choked, startled cry … then began to wail, thrashing his arms and legs like a beginning swimmer dropped into the deep end of the pool by mistake. Blood streaked his face and torso. Joe, looking down at Laurel, saw that the blood that had so panicked him a moment ago was from a tear the baby

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must have made pushing his way out. He felt relief sweep through him. She’d need a few stitches, but it didn’t look as if she was in any danger of bleeding to death.

Joe felt the weirdly distorted dimension he’d been in shrink back to normal. Suddenly, he was back in the real world. With Laurel lying there, panting, exhausted … and he, holding this brand-new human being who, when he was just a bulge under Laurel’s loose-fitting shirts, Joe hadn’t really thought of as a person, an actual baby. Now, feeling the infant’s tiny wet body squirm in his hands, the little boy he somehow managed to bring unharmed into this world, he was so thrilled that he started to laugh. Then, seemingly for no reason, he began to cry. He saw that Laurel, too, was laughing, and had tears streaming down her face.

Joe looked down at the baby boy in his arms, tied to Laurel by its ropey cord-a startling turquoise that wasn’t at all ugly or repulsive, as he’d imagined these things were-and for maybe the first time in all his thirty-two years, he felt connected to something larger than himself. To God? The mysteries of the universe? No, smaller than that … a heartbeat, a new life, a measure of grace.

Best of all, he’d been given this chance to prove to himself that he would have been there for Caryn, too, if she’d lived. Where he would go from here he didn’t exactly know. All he knew was this: Joe Dougherty is the kind of man who can be counted on.

The baby had stopped crying. A pair of indigo eyes stared fixedly into his, and a tiny, mottled hand locked about his finger. Joe felt a rush of unexpected joy that nearly knocked him over.

Before he was even aware he’d thought of it, Joe found himself saying, “Adam. His name is Adam.”

!

39ป

EILEEN GOUDGE

\/al stood in the lobby of St. Vincent’s Hospital, V and asked the bullet-eyed black lady behind the reception desk which room Laurel Carrera was in.

While she riffled through her alphabetized index cards, he glanced around, taking in the blacks and spicks waiting around on the benches, the green vinyl floor tiles scuffed by countless pairs of shoes. Jesus, what a dump. What was he even doing here? His little girl, all grown up, a mother herself now, and he was probably the last person she’d want to see. Hadn’t she made it clear how she felt about him all those years ago when she took off into the night without so much as a kiss-my-foot?

No Laurel Carrera listed, Big Mama behind the desk told him. “Sorry, mister.”

Shit. He rubbed his chin, feeling its scratchiness and remembering he hadn’t shaved. Could she be listed under a married name?

So what if she is? Any way you slice it, she won’t want to see you, so why don’t you just turn around right now and get the hell out? In seven years, not one letter or phone call, not even a frigging postcard. If he hadn’t seen that article in the L.A. Times magazine on Annie’s chocolate shop, he wouldn’t have known either of them were still alive.

But he’d come all this way, blowing his last hundred on a low-fare red-eye to New York. Dammit, he couldn’t just walk away.

“What about Laurel Cobb,” A long shot, but worth a try.

Big Mama thumbed her card index and then looked up at him quizzically. “Third floor. Room 322.”

Val tried to swallow, but his mouth felt dry as an old sock … and tasted just about as bad as one, from all

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the coffees he’d drunk. It was close to noon, but he’d been up practically the whole night, and the night before that—five hours from LAX, plus one more circling La Guardia in heavy fog before the plane could land. And the whole time, he hadn’t shut his eyes once. Thinking about Laurel. Wondering what she’d look like, if she’d be glad to see him.

The taxi in from Queens had taken forever, crawling through the fog and bumper-to-bumper traffic. The driver was an Arab … goddamn Mohammed-something, weird screechy music on the radio, and the guy couldn’t even speak English. Val had had to repeat the address of Annie’s shop three times. And when he finally got there, he’d had to wait around outside in the cold all day and well into the evening, until Annie finally emerged. Seeing her in her stylish coat and paisley scarf, he’d wanted to confront her, smash his fists into her, but he’d held himself back, knowing that if he did that she’d make it twice as hard for him to get to Laurel. Trailing half a block behind, he’d followed her down into the subway, where she’d taken a train to Twenty-third and Seventh. A couple of blocks away, she turned into the lobby of a brick apartment building. Did she live here, or was she just visiting someone? After a few minutes, he’d gone inside to check the intercom directory. Finding her name-A. COBB-he’d felt a surge of triumph. Finally, finally, things were starting to go his way.

He’d pressed the buzzer marked “SUPERINTENDENT.” A baggy-cheeked middle-aged lady with a wet mop slung over her shoulder, probably the super’s wife, opened the vestibule door. When he asked about Laurel, if she lived here with her sister, the lady’s tired eyes lit up.

“Oh, you missed all the excitement,” she told him. “Yesterday, it was, around suppertime. They carried her down on a stretcher … white as a sheet, she was, the baby lying on her belly, cord still attached and everything. Well, it was something.”

Val had started, feeling as shocked as if he’d walked into a pane of glass he hadn’t known was there. Baby?

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Christ, Laurel couldn’t be much more than a baby herself.

The super’s wife directed him to St. Vincent’s, on Seventh Avenue and Twelfth Street. On the way over, Val had a chance to let the idea of Laurel’s being a mother sink in. But it still didn’t feel right. They’d left him out of everything. It was as if he’d been cheated somehow.

Now, riding the elevator up to the third floor, Val was hit by it—he had been swindled. If Laurel hadn’t run away, the past seven years might’ve been so different. He’d have had a kid to look up to him, make him feel like he was somebody. And with Laurel to buy food and clothes for and keep a roof over her head, he was sure he could’ve wangled that trust money out of the bank. And instead of having to take shit from know-nothing bosses and stand in line to collect unemployment checks, he’d have been on easy street.

If it hadn’t been for Rudy … well, Val didn’t like to think where he’d be without his brother, old Rudy spotting him whenever he got really desperate, which lately seemed to be happening more and more.

Three-twenty-two turned out to be at the end of the corridor, last one on the right. The door was propped open. There were two beds inside, but one was empty. In the other, a slender woman sat propped up with pillows, her long blond hair tied back in a loose ponytail. She was staring out the window and didn’t see him, so he had time for a good long look at her.

Laurel? That grownup young woman, his little girl?

His heart seemed to stop, and the air around him felt heavy, still as fog. He remembered he still had on the slacks and raw-silk blazer he’d worn on the plane, which were now messy and wrinkled. Jesus, she was going to think he was some kind of a bum.

She was wearing one of those hospital gowns that tied in back, and her face was clean of any makeup. Even so, he thought she looked like a movie star. No, more like one of those folk singers, girls with long hair and long fingers and voices that rippled like cool water. Not all of them were beautiful, but she was … the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. The way the light hit the curve of

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her cheek, he could’ve sworn it was shining from within her. And those eyes … Eve’s eyes … God, a man could be blinded by those eyes.

“Laurel? Baby?” He managed a thready whisper, and took a step inside.

She turned, and even in the movement of her head as it swivelled on her long neck, he could see how graceful she was, like a ballet dancer. She’s mine. I made her. He felt stronger, more confident. She was his, a part of his flesh, his blood, like his arm or his leg. How could she reject him?

She stared at him, her eyes huge and uncomprehending. Then recognition dawned, and the blood drained from her face. Her mouth dropped open.

“Val?” she croaked. “God, it is you.” She clapped both hands over her mouth, and spoke through white fingers that dragged at her cheeks. “But you … you’re … I thought you were … dead.”

Now Val felt himself reel. “Dead? Jesus. Where did you hear that?” He’d played a million scenarios in his head, but never this one.

“Uncle Rudy t-told me you that you’d d-died that night we r-ran away. That Annie-” She gulped. She was shivering as if he’d thrown open a window and let in a blast of freezing air. “H-he m-made me p-promise not to t-tell anyone.”

Rudy? Rudy had told her that? Val felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him, a dull ache spreading through him. But why? Why would Rudy do a thing like that?