Free Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon

have to drive her to the midwife’s office the next day.
    She did not present the matter as a request; she merely said, “You’ll have to drive me to see Dorothy.” They were on the way home from the doctor’s office. Cara had her cellular telephone and her Filofax out and was busy rearranging the things the accident had forced her to rearrange. “The appointment’s at nine.”
    Richard looked over at his wife. There was a large bandage taped to her face, and her left eye had swollen almost shut. He had a tube of antibiotic ointment in the pocket of his denim jacket, a sheaf of fresh bandages, and a printed sheet of care instructions he was to follow for the next three days. Ordinarily, he supposed, a man cared for his pregnant wife both out of a sense of love and duty and because it was a way to share between them the weight of a burden mutually imposed. The last of these did not apply in their situation. The first had gotten lost somewhere between a shady bend in the trail under the gum trees at the north end of Lake Hollywood and the cold tile of the men’s room at Santa Anita. All that remained now was duty. He had been transformed from Cara’s husband into her houseboy, tending to all her needs and requests without reference to emotion, a silent, inscrutable shadow.
    “What do you even need a midwife for?” he snapped. “You have a doctor.”
    “I told you all this,” Cara said mildly, on hold with a hypnotist who prepared women for the pain of birth. “Midwives stay with you. They stroke you and massage you and talk to you. They put everything they have into trying to make sure you have the baby naturally. No C-section. No episiotomy. No drugs.”
    “No drugs.” His voice dropped an octave, and though she didn’t see it she knew he was rolling his eyes. “I would have thought the drugs would be an incentive to you.”
    Cara smiled, then winced. “I like drugs that make you feel something, Richie. These ones they give you just make you feel nothing. I want to feel the baby come. I want to be able to push him out.”
    “What do you mean, ‘him’? Did they tell you the sex? I thought they couldn’t tell.”
    “They couldn’t. I … I don’t know why I said ‘him.’ Maybe I just … everyone says, I mean, you know, old ladies and whatever, they say I’m carrying high …”
    Her voice trembled, and she drew in a sharp breath. They had come to the intersection, at the corner of Sunset and Poinsettia, where four hours earlier the bat-winged black hearse had plowed into Cara’s car. Involuntarily she closed her eyes, tensing her shoulders. The muscles there were tender from her having braced herself against the impact of the crash. She cried out. Then she laughed. She was alive, and the crescent mass of her body, the cage of sturdy bones cushioned with fat, filled with the bag of bloody seawater, had done its job. The baby was alive, too.
    “This is the corner, huh?”
    “I had lunch at Authentic. I was coming up Poinsettia.”
    It had been Richard who discovered this classic West Hollywood shortcut, skirting the northbound traffic and stoplights of La Brea Avenue, within a few weeks of their marriage and arrival in Los Angeles. They had lived then in a tiny one-bedroom bungalow around the corner from Pink’s. The garage was rented out to a palmist who claimed to have once warned Bob Crane to mend his wild ways. The front porch had been overwhelmed years before by a salmon pink bougainvillea, and a disheveled palm tree murmured in the backyard, battering the roof at night with inedible nuts. It had been fall, the only season in Southern California that made any lasting claim on the emotions. The sunlight was intermittent and wistful as retrospection, bringing the city into sharper focus while at the same time softening its contours. In the afternoons there was a smoky tinge of eastern, autumnal regret in the air, which they only later learned was yearly blown down from raging wildfires in the