Free That Night by Alice McDermott Page A

the afternoon or find her still in the kitchen, Jake’s dark head just under the red ash of her cigarette, his cheeks covered with ice cream or cookie crumbs, when I came in from the Everse’s pool. In those days, they spent an hour or two on the phone each evening too, talking in low voices that made my father look over his paper to ask me, “They’ve been together all afternoon, what have they got to talk about?” as if, being female, I would understand.
    They talked about conception. Headstands and Epsom salts and vinegar douches that would not only guarantee a baby but a baby boy. They told their life stories. Leela, it seemed, had been married once before. (My mother sharing the news with me on various weekday evenings as she made dinner in much the same way some other lonely woman might have shared it with a bird or a dog, not expecting either response or comprehension, her eyes bright only with the pleasure of repeating what she had heard.) That first marriage had ended precisely because she had not been able to conceive. It was neither of their faults, they were told. It was simply that the atmosphere of her particular womb was inhospitable to his particular seed: an unlucky and insurmountable problem of chemistry. Leela herself had been willing to accept the verdict, had contacted a few adoption agencies and begun sending long chatty letters and eight dollars a month to an orphan in Indonesia, but apparently her husband had been determined to prove the doctors right and, out of nowhere, said my mother, after nine years of marriage, asked for a divorce so he could marry another woman.
    My mother slammed pots and let the water in the sink run violently.
    Forget all that had come before, she said-wielding a serrated knife like a machete—forget the years of their courtship, their big hotel wedding, their first apartment, the hundreds of beds she’d made for him and shirts she’d washed and meals she’d cooked. Forget the head stands and baking-soda baths, the painful and intricate advice, not to mention the humiliating questions, of the pharmacist in her old neighborhood, who had used his white lab coat and mortar and pestle to give credence to the foolish formulas the women themselves brought him: hot-water douches and citrus diets and intercourse performed with your head and throat hanging from the side of the bed. Forget what she had once confided to her husband, believing they were forever bound: if I fail at this, I am neither male nor female; I cannot know my worth. Forget especially that he brought that confidence with him to his new marriage and his young wife.
    She’d been barren three years into her own second marriage, already moved into her house down the block, when she finally conceived Jake. She knew, of course, the first time she held him with something like a clear head that he wasn’t right, and she momentarily recalled, as the doctor explained, what another had said about her inhospitable womb. But she remembered, too, my mother said, what it had been like to have no child at all.
    On the night of the fight, the night Rick came to claim her, Leela had followed her husband farther than most of the other women had done. She was just in front of the Sunshines’ driveway when she stopped to put her hands to her mouth. She wore a white scarf around her bleached blond hair, wore it tied into a bow at her crown because even then, when she had grown chunky and was no longer young, she wanted to look like the GI’s dream of Betty Grable. She wore white shorts, a turquoise top that was ringed with perspiration. She called to her husband as the other women were doing, not moving any closer, not making any other gesture to retrieve him, but seeing, no doubt, as the other women saw, the sharp black edge of the hoe he’d lifted as he ran, the threat that had suddenly transformed the night.
    And then, just as the first police car arrived and the boys began to retreat, she turned (God only knows, she