Free Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead Page A

it as a rejection if she moves away. “No, I don’t.”
    “You do. Look, if you don’t want another one, you should at least say so.”
    “How can you be sure you want another one?”
    He nudges her off him, not roughly but with an apologetic grimace. “You’re sitting on Sandy’s cake. I just am. I see us with another. I liked having sisters.”
    “God, a girl.” Joan sits cross-legged, one of her knees against his thigh, and picks at her fingernails. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to risk all the things that can go wrong. Everything would be different if we had another. Why take the chance? Why mess with something that’s working?”
    “No,” Jacob says, excited, lifting onto his elbows. “No, you have to be biologically brave. It’s in our nature to take that chance. I understand the fear, but I don’t think fear should be enough to stop us.”
    “You’re not the one who has to be pregnant and give birth. You don’t have to push another person out of yourself. I hear women say they forget all about birth as soon as it’s over, but I didn’t. I don’t know why nobody seems to take birth into account when they think about having a baby.”
    “A few stretch marks aren’t the end of the world, Joan.”
    “I’m not ready.”
    After a moment, he pulls her down beside him, her head on his shoulder. “I wish you wanted one.”
    “I know.”
    After another silence, he sets his glasses on the nightstand and switches off the light. In the dark, lying against his body as though it were a gently respiring bolster, she imagines she can feel his thoughts coming through his skin like a fever. She feels his disappointment, his accusatory argument that she had been willing to trick him into conceiving a baby when he was young and unprepared but now that he has spent five years proving himself as a husband and father, she is unmoved by his desire for another. She feels him criticizing her vanity, rejecting her concern for her body as unjustified, even pathetic, now that she doesn’t perform. She feels his sadness that the family he imagined isn’t to be. She feels his love grow less dense around her, like fog lifting.
    But, really, all she can feel is his breathing. It strikes her as strange that two people lying quietly in the dark, remote in their thoughts, locked away in their bodies, have everything necessary to make a third person who will, barring tragedy, lie quietly throughdarknesses long after they are dead. She had excused herself from Jacob’s love when they were teenagers because she was young and unprepared, a luxury she hadn’t granted him. But now she is his, they are each other’s, and for him to be unhappy, to love her less, is intolerable.
    “There’s still time,” she says. “I need a little more time.”
    Under her ear, she feels a pulse in his shoulder. That his heart has begun to pound with hope makes hers pound with fear. She should give him what he wants. She will, just not quite yet.
    “When?” he says.
    “Soon.”
    He shifts to lie squarely on her. She touches his face. In the early days, his weight had felt oppressive, suffocating, but now the burden of him is comforting. “I can live with soon,” he says.
    She doesn’t want to have to say anything else. She pulls his head down and meets his mouth with hers.

AUGUST 1984—DISNEYLAND
    M ERLIN TILTS A LONG FINGER OVER THE HEADS OF CHILDREN AND parents, over mouse ears and Peter Pan hats, through the strings of their balloons, and, in his booming wizard voice, bids Tim approach the stone and remove the sword. All the children raising their hands, straining to show their worthiness, subside in disappointment that a grown-up has been chosen. Tim squeezes through the ranks of families and goes to stand beside Merlin. He strikes a silly body-builder pose.
    “Valiant knight,” says Merlin, opening his arms to show off his robe’s voluminous purple sleeves, “are you the one we seek? Do you possess the strength to