Free Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens Page A

their laps and then throwing themselves back, flinging their long hair behind them. The women lean and laugh, their mouths enormous, open, glistening things, their shoe heels pointed as skewers.
    Franckline pushes at the volume button and the conversation rises into the room.
    â€œâ€¦ tried to make the tacos …”
    â€œâ€¦ food poisoning! He said he’ll never trust me again …”
    (And then male laughter: haw haw haw haw haw .)
    Lore is staring moodily at the screen, as if wounded by the banter of the women and the host egging it on. Franckline wonders if she ought to find another channel, but they will all be the same: laughter and loud voices, guns and car chases, at best a religious lecture. Merchandise spinning on a platform. Perhaps that would be all right: earrings and bracelets nestled in gray velvet, glinting in the bright TV lights. Sometimes, in the evening, tired from work, Franckline watches Home Shopping Network or QVC with the sound turned low. If you know you are never going to buy anything, it can be soothing to watch the glittering items offered one after the other. You probably enjoy them for nearly as long as the people who buy them do. Bernard believes that the television for anything but the news and the financial reports is a waste of time, and occasionally Franckline has to fix him with a look and say that perhaps he doesn’t ever need waste and forgetfulness but that she, at least for tonight, does.
    â€œâ€¦ a tattoo where ? …”
    â€œâ€¦ no, darling, I won’t show you …”
    ( Haw haw haw haw haw ! )
    Nineteen minutes since Lore’s last contraction. Franckline feels a pulsing in her groin—not quite a pain, perhaps, or, yes, a pain. Is she imagining pain into being by fearing it? At the library in Flatbush, on the computers there, she has looked at the images of bicornate uteruses, pinkly meaty, split like a wishbone. The two petal-like chambers, the gestational sac residing in one. Her baby is growing in the left chamber. The hospital doctors say there’s a reasonable chance the chamber will expand enough to allow the baby to grow to term, especially since Franckline has already borne a full-term child, but they don’t want to make promises. She can’t help at times picturing the child running out of room, the head pushing against the uterine wall, or the cervix giving way and the unfinished life spilling out.
    Snow falls outside the window, not heavy, not light, steady and wet-looking, small splatters of moisture rather than neat dry flecks. The evening she met Bernard he spoke of snow, the delicate, floating wonder of it, and the tall hills that stayed on the ground for weeks and did not disappear. They were at his mother’s table. Bernard had found her on the steps of the Port-au-Prince Cathedral, where she sat, footsore and very hungry, having wandered for hours in the city. She had lasted six months at home, trying not to see her lost baby in the face of every child. She had wept so compulsively, so unendingly, that even her aunt Thérèse, her favorite, who always indulged her, slapped her and said it was time to behave herself, to stop spitting at fate. She would have another child, many more, Tante Thérèse told her, at the right time, but Franckline wondered who would take her as his woman in her disgrace. Her value had been greatly reduced. Would she be made to join with someone she hated, who disgusted her? And in any case the thought of more children did nothing to numb the ache; it was that child, the silent child, the one she had come to know so well over the months she had carried him—his kicks and hiccups and slumbers—that she longed for. That child would never be born again, not in that body, on that day. She had been meant to be ashamed of him but he had been immune to her shame, had been something great and new and clean, for all the days he had lived.
    She left home one day in