Free A Guide to Being Born: Stories by Ramona Ausubel Page B

his shirt stuck on a pile of seaweed—he noticed that, along with the tiny raised bumps of cold, the skin on his chest looked like a checkerboard or a grid.
    He called Annie. He was shivering and his breaths were short. He explained the problem and they met in the hospital parking lot. He wore a winter coat and a pair of pajama pants he found in the trunk. She sat him on the hood of his old Datsun and he pulled his shirt up to reveal six perfect squares separated by half-inch-deep channels.
    “Well,” Annie said carefully, “there does not appear to be any redness or irritation.” This was a practiced voice, a parenthood-ready voice. “It doesn’t look broken,” she added, optimistically.
    “Nope, it doesn’t look broken,” he agreed. She swished her hand up and back, feeling the ridges.
    •   •   •
     
    THEY WAITED FOR TWO HOURS in the emergency room, where they read all the homemaking magazines.
    “What did you eat?” Annie wanted to know.
    “You think this is food related? You think this is from some bad chicken?” Ben snapped.
    “It’s from something.” She opened her magazine and paged loudly.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    She nodded. “You look like someone’s ready to build a city on you. Property lines all set to go.”
    The nurse who finally called them in gave the battery of tests very slowly, glancing up at Ben’s new feature every second or so, nervously. She fetched the doctor without bothering to make cheerful small talk. They could hear her on the other side of the curtain: “He has moats . . . He has squares.”
    The doctor had the nurse take a picture of him posing with the couple. In it, he made a serious face. A magazine-cover face. But he had no advice, only a tall pile of referrals. In the coming weeks, Ben and Annie scheduled appointments with the heart doctor, the dermatologist, the orthopedist, the cancer specialist, even the ear, nose and throat guy.
    Annie woke up the following morning with her arm over her husband’s side and she felt, extending out from his body, a warm, hollow box that seemed to be attached to Ben’s chest. She screamed. She probably woke the baby, swimming in her pool of warm body fluid. She definitely woke her husband, who looked down at his chest and saw a section of it sticking out, a drawer. He sat up. He was barely awake, right out of a dream about an escape from a pack of dogs. He closed the skinless bone drawer with some difficulty, as it was quite stiff. In order to open it again, Ben needed his nails since it had no knob. None of these actions hurt. Ben looked up at his wife in her blue flannel nightgown. She was staring at him with wet eyes. “Look” was all he said.
    •   •   •
     
    BEN AND ANNIE packed up for a medical appointment in the afternoon, but it was one they already had: the ob-gyn, for Annie. While her feet were up in the stirrups, she asked the doctor if she had ever happened to see someone with a drawer coming out of his chest. The doctor did not answer, because she thought it was the beginning of a joke.
    “Have you?” Annie asked again.
    “No, why?” the doctor said, waiting for the punch line. But Annie just started to cry.
    The waiting room was empty except for Ben, who had unbuttoned his shirt and sat there opening and closing his drawer. He had a small butter knife, taken from the dish rack this morning, to help him get it started until his fingers could fit inside and pull. He was smiling, running his fingers around the rim of his polished new cavern.
    Ben reached over to the magazine table and picked up a pamphlet about STDs. He read through it and tore out a picture of a happy couple who were STD-free since they had been careful and followed the pamphlet’s directions. In the picture, the man was wearing a bulky cable-knit sweater and was giving the girl a piggyback ride. Her brown hair streamed behind her and they were both laughing in a clean, sexually responsible way. Ben folded the