Free After This by Alice McDermott Page A

She felt with some certainty that it would have been to
Tony’s advantage if they’d had at least one other son. (She had in
mind the man’s strong hand on the back of the boy’s neck.) It
benefited a child, she thought, to be forgotten once in a while. Lost in
the shuffle (she would have said), benignly neglected. It reminded
them they were not the center of the universe simply because they
were loved by their parents. How many children, when you came right
down to it (she would have said), were not loved by their parents?
Never mind if the love was skillful or adept.
     
She picked up Jacob’s school jacket and the box of toy soldiers
that had been left on the floor of the hall, but the effort sent a pain up
her back—like a crack through plaster—and drained the blood from
her head. She leaned heavily against the front door, put her hand on
the doorknob and although her husband had said nothing of his vision
of the black coach wet with rain, she caught a glimpse of it herself in
that second between the moment she closed her eyes and the next one
when she began a Hail Mary. The amniotic fluid was like something
sun-warmed against her leg. It quickly soaked her terry-cloth slipper
and then pooled on the linoleum at her feet. Her heel skidded in it a
little as she slowly let go of the doorknob and carefully—a reluctant
skater on a pond—got herself across the hallway, onto the living-room
carpet, and across the living room, a slug’s trail of dark water behind
her, and onto the couch. She still held Jacob’s coat in her hand and she
threw it over the cushions before she eased herself down, praying all
the while the formal prayer that held off both hope and dread, as well
as any speculation about what to do next. She must have said a dozen
of them—it only occurred to her after about the seventh or eighth that
she should have been counting them off on her fingers—when the first
cramp seized her and then she threw the prayers aside as if they had
been vain attempts to speak in her high-school French. Oh look, she
said. Don’t let this happen. Come on. Be reasonable.
     
Long before the fireman pounded at the door (or was it an angel,
or a banshee, or the ghost of the other Jacob?), she had listened to the
rise and fall of the wind outside. Long before her husband had woken
and asked her, Who could that be? she had seen—in the silent
anticipation between each long gust, in the fear that rose as the sound
grew more terrible each time, as if edging toward something
unbearable—the parallel between the rise and fall of the storm and the
rhythm of labor. Now, as the labor began, it was the storm she
recalled. The thrash of wind and trees and the quiet terror that had
kept her flat in her bed, wide awake, anticipating disaster but unable
to rise to avert it—or to shake her husband, to call for help. There was
only silence now, in the small living room. There was a baby doll and a
stack of comic books in one of the chairs, a Wiffle ball beneath it. The
boys’ board game with its scattered pieces was still on the rug, and
there was a pale layer of dust over the hifi and the end tables. She
wondered if the pregnancy had turned her slothful or if the room was
always in some state of disorder and she was only, momentarily,
seeing it clearly. Vaguely, she could hear the voices of the children in
the side yard, climbing through the downed tree. It seemed to her (the
pain rising again, third time) that they were not so much calling words
as shining small silver lights into her ears. The gentle flash of a child’s
voice—was it Jacob?—appearing here and there through the more
general silence and the nausea of the clutching pain.
     
The phone was in the kitchen, and when she got herself up she
would call her husband first, in his office. And then the operator to
send an ambulance. And then one of the neighbors to come and watch
the children. And then Pauline, who had promised