Free That Night by Alice McDermott

sister would indeed arrive, and twice the delicate thing she and my father had managed to form broke without warning. I came home from school to find she was in the hospital for the evening. I was awakened one night by the sound of her voice: every light in the house seemed to be burning, and I found her sitting on the edge of her bed, already in her coat and shoes, waiting for my father to retrieve the fetus from the bathroom.
    (Even now in her pleasant and irresponsible retirement, she can say without hesitation how old those children would be today and just where in school or marriage and their careers they might be, had they lived. Even now I’m surprised by the precision and the detail with which she has imagined their lives, and I’m forced to make such calculations of my own.)
    That summer, my mother was past forty and in her quest to conceive had begun to resort to what I can think of now only as a kind of voodoo.
    Each night she would run hot water into the bathtub before she went to bed and then, when their lovemaking was over, trot from the bedroom to the bath to soak for an hour or two in a solution of Epsom salts or baking soda or whatever powder or potion the other women had advised. Often, my father would go in to keep her company. He would turn down the toilet seat and sit there in his bathrobe, his voice made hollow by the water and the tiles. Sometimes he would read to her from one of her magazines, stories of married women triumphing over various domestic difficulties, reviving their husband’s love, re winning their children’s affections, escorting their friends through innumerable tribulations.
    In the morning, I would find these magazines on the edge of the tub or the back of the toilet, folded over to the last page and buckled here and there by the dampness, as if the end of each story had been wept over. I would reread them myself to fill in what part I hadn’t heard the night before, either because my father’s voice had grown too soft or my mother had swished the water too loudly or I had simply fallen asleep before I’d caught the resolution.
    In these stories, the women who longed for children got them, usually just as the longing itself had been nearly obscured by something else: a death, a birthday party, an adoption, as if the longing itself had been the culprit. I suppose the message was that too blatant a desire to manipulate your own life was unseemly. I suppose my mother never caught on.
    One early morning not many days before the night he came for her, I woke to a kind of drumming sound: hard soft, hard soft—long interval—hard soft In the hallway I passed by my parents’ room and through the partly opened door saw my mother attempting a head stand at the foot of their bed. Her head was pressed firmly against the mattress and her hands gripped the spread as if she would tear it, her pale legs kicked up again and again, flailing like arms beneath her white nightgown, one foot hitting the floor each time she was drawn inevitably back to the earth.
    I probably would have laughed, rushed in to join them (probably would have offered some good advice), were it not for the serious and determined way in which she tried again and again to raise herself. Were it not for the solemn and somewhat bemused look on my father’s face as he watched her from his pillow.
    I later learned that it was Leela, Jake’s mother, who had advised these acrobatics (meant, of course, to get the sperm moving more swiftly toward its mark). That same summer she and my mother were involved in one of those brief yet intense bouts of friendship the women in our neighborhood so often experienced. They had gotten to talking in the supermarket one morning and for a good number of weeks after were suddenly inseparable. I would smell the smoke from their cigarettes and hear Jake’s thick voice as I dressed in the morning. I would see Leela, with Jake on her lap, ride past in my mother’s car as I played outside in