Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  “Get down here,” said Nordell. “Hold this poor child’s hand.”

  Richard slid off the table and knelt beside Cara. He took her warm fingers in his own.

  “Stay with me, Richie,” Cara said.

  “All right,” said Richard. “Okay.”

  While Nordell hastily wrapped Richard’s finger in gauze and tape, a wheelchair was brought for Cara. She was rolled off to admissions, her purse balanced on her knees. When Richard caught up to her a volunteer was just wheeling her into the elevator.

  “Where are we going?” Richard said.

  “To labor and delivery,” said the volunteer, an older man with hearing aids, his shirt pocket bulging with the outline of a pack of cigarettes. “Fourth floor. Didn’t you take the tour?”

  Richard shook his head.

  “This isn’t our hospital,” Cara said. “We took the tour at Cedars.”

  “I wish I had,” Richard said, surprising himself.

  When the labor triage nurse examined Cara, she found her to be a hundred percent effaced and nearly eight centimeters dilated.

  “Whoa,” she said. “Let’s go have you this baby.”

  “Here?” Cara said, knowing she sounded childish. “But I …”

  “But nothing,” said the nurse. “You can have the next one at Cedars.”

  Cara was hurried into an algae-green gown and rolled down to what she and the nurse both referred to as an LDR. This was a good-sized room that had been decorated to resemble a junior suite in an airport hotel, pale gray and lavender, oak-laminate furniture, posters on the walls tranquilly advertising past seasons of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. There was a hospital smell of air-conditioning, however, and so much diagnostic equipment crowded around the bed, so many wires and booms and monitors, that the room felt cramped, and the effect of pseudoluxury was spoiled. With all the gear and cables looming over Cara, the room looked to Richard like nothing so much as a soundstage.

  “We forgot to bring a camera,” he said. “I should shoot this, shouldn’t I?”

  “There’s a vending machine on two,” said the labor nurse, raising Cara’s legs up toward her chest, spreading them apart. The outer lips were swollen and darkened to a tobacco-stain brown, gashed pink in the middle, bright as bubble gum. “It has things like combs and toothpaste. I think it might have the kind of camera you throw away.”

  “Do I have time?”

  “Probably. But you never know.”

  “Cara, do you want pictures of this? Should I go? I’ll be right back. Cara?”

  Cara didn’t answer. She had slipped off into the world of her contractions, eyes shut, head rolled back, brow luminous with pain and concentration like the brow of Christ in a Crucifixion scene.

  The nurse had lost interest in Richard and the camera question. She had hold of one of Cara’s hands in one of hers, and was stroking Cara’s hair with the other. Their faces were close together, and the nurse was whispering something. Cara nodded, and bit her lip, and barked out an angry laugh. Richard stood there. He felt he ought to be helping Cara, but the nurse seemed to have everything under control. There was nothing for him to do and no room beside the bed.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  He got lost on his way down to the second floor, and then when he reached two he got lost again trying to find the vending machine. It stood humming in a corridor outside the cafeteria, beside the men’s room. Within its tall panel of glass doors, a carousel rotated when you pressed a button. It was well stocked with toiletry and sanitary items, along with a few games and novelties for bored children. There was one camera left. Richard fed a twenty-dollar bill into the machine and received no change.

  When he got back to the room he stood with his fingers on the door handle. It was cold and dry and gave him a static shock when he grasped it. Through the door he heard Cara say, “Fuck,” with a calmness that frightened him. He let go of the handle.

  There was a squeaking of rubber soles, rapid and intent. Dorothy Pendleton was hurrying along the corridor toward him. She had pulled a set of rose surgical scrubs over her street clothes. They fit her badly across the chest and one laundry-marked shirttail dangled free of the waistband. As Dorothy hurried toward him she was pinning her hair up behind her head, scattering bobby pins as she came.

  “You did it,” she said. “Good for you.”

  Richard was surprised to find that he was glad to see Dorothy. She looked intent but not flustered, rosy-cheeked, wide-awake. She gave off a pleasant smell of sugary coffee. Over one shoulder she carried a big leather sack covered in a worn patchwork of scraps of old kilims. He noticed, wedged in among the tubes of jojoba oil and the medical instruments, a rolled copy of Racing Form.

  “Yeah, well, I’m just glad, you know, that my sperm finally came in handy for something,” he said.

  She nodded, then leaned into the door. “Good sperm,” she said. She could see that he needed something from her, a word of wisdom from the midwife, a pair of hands to yank him breech first and hypoxic back into the dazzle and clamor of the world. But she had already wasted enough of her attention on him, and she reached for the handle of the door.

  Then she noticed the twenty-dollar cardboard camera dangling from his hand. For some reason it touched her that he had found himself a camera to hide behind.

  She stopped. She looked at him. She put a finger to his chest. “My father was a sheriff in Bowie County, Texas,” she said.

  He took a step backward, gazing down at the finger. Then he looked up again.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning get your ass into that room, deputy.” She pushed open the door.

  The first thing they heard was the rapid beating of the baby’s heart through the fetal monitor. It filled the room with its simple news, echoing like a hammer on tin.

  “You’re just in time,” said the labor nurse. “It’s crowning.”

  “Dorothy. Richie.” Cara’s head lolled toward them, her cheeks streaked with tears and damp locks of hair, her eyes red, her face swollen and bruised looking. It was the face she had worn after the attack at Lake Hollywood, dazed with pain, seeking out his eyes. “Where did you go?” she asked him. She sounded angry. “Where did you go?”

  Sheepishly he held up the camera.

  “Jesus! Don’t go away again!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. A dark circle of hair had appeared between her legs, surrounded by the fiery pink ring of her straining labia. “I’m sorry!”

  “Get him scrubbed,” Dorothy said to the nurse. “He’s catching the baby.”

  “What?” said Richard. He felt he ought to reassure Cara. “Not really.”

  “Really,” said Dorothy. “Get scrubbed.”

  The nurse traded places with Dorothy at the foot of the bed, and took Richard by the elbow. She tugged the shrink-wrapped camera from his grasp.

  “Why don’t you give that to me?” she said. “You go get scrubbed.”

  “I washed my hands before,” Richard said, panicking a little.

  “That’s good,” said Dorothy. “Now you can do it again.”

  Richard washed his hands in brown soap that stung the nostrils, then turned back to the room. Dorothy had her hand on the bed’s controls, raising its back, helping Cara into a more upright position. Cara whispered something.

  “What’s that, honey?” said Dorothy.

  “I said Richard I’m sorry too.”

  “What are you sorry about?” Dorothy said. “Good God.”

  “Everything,” Cara said. And then, “Oh.”

  She growled and hummed, snapping her head from side to side. She hissed short whistling jets of air through her teeth. Dorothy glanced at the monitor. “Big one,” she said. “Here we go.”

  She waved Richard over to her side. Richard hesitated.

  Cara gripped the side rails of the bed. Her neck arched backward. A humming arose deep inside her chest and grew higher in pitch as it made its way upward until it burst as a short cry
, ragged and harsh, from her lips.

  “Whoop!” said Dorothy, drawing back her arms. “A stargazer! Hi, there!” She turned again to Richard, her hands cupped around something smeary and purple that was protruding from Cara’s body. “Come on, move it. See this.”

  Richard approached the bed, and saw that Dorothy balanced the baby’s head between her broad palms. It had a thick black shock of hair. Its eyes were wide open, large and dark, pupils invisible, staring directly, Richard felt, at him. There was no bleariness, or swelling of the lower eyelids. No one, Richard felt, had ever quite looked at him this way, without emotion, without judgment. The consciousness of a great and irrevocable event came over him; ten months’ worth of dread and longing filled him in a single unbearable rush. Disastrous things had happened to him in his life; at other times, stretching far back into the interminable afternoons of his boyhood, he had experienced a sense of buoyant calm that did not seem entirely without foundation in the nature of things. Nothing awaited him in the days to come but the same uneven progression of disaster and contentment. And all those moments, past and future, seemed to him to be concentrated in that small, dark, pupilless gaze.

  Dorothy worked her fingers in alongside the baby’s shoulders. Her movements were brusque, sure, and indelicate. They reminded Richard of a cook’s, or a potter’s. She took a deep breath, glanced at Cara, and then gave the baby a twist, turning it ninety degrees.

  “Now,” she said. “Give me your hands.”

  “But you don’t really catch them, do you?” he said. “That’s just a figure of speech.”

  “Don’t you wish,” said Dorothy. “Now get in there.”

  She dragged him into her place, and stepped back. She took hold of his wrists and laid his hands on the baby’s head. It was sticky and warm against his fingers.

  “Just wait for the next contraction, Dad. Here it comes.”

  He waited, looking down at the baby’s head, and then Cara grunted, and some final chain or stem binding the baby to her womb seemed to snap. With a soft slurping sound the entire child came squirting out into Richard’s hands. Almost without thinking, he caught it. The nurse and Dorothy cheered. Cara started to cry. The baby’s skin was the color of skimmed milk, smeared, glistening, flecked with bits of dark red. Its shoulders and back were covered in a faint down, matted and slick. It worked its tiny jaw, snorting and snuffling hungrily at the sharp first mouthfuls of air.

  “What is it?” Cara said. “Is it a boy?”

  “Wow,” said Richard, holding the baby up to show Cara. “Check this out.”

  Dorothy nodded. “You have a son, Cara,” she said. She took the baby from Richard, and laid him on the collapsed tent of Cara’s belly. Cara opened her eyes. “A big old hairy son.”

  Richard went around to stand beside his wife. He leaned in until his cheek was pressed against hers. They studied the wolfman’s boy, and he regarded them.

  “Do you think he’s funny-looking?” Richard said doubtfully. Then the nurse snapped a picture of the three of them, and they looked at her, blinking, blinded by the flash.

  “Beautiful,” said the nurse.

  Green’s Book

  SHE WAS THE TYPE of girl that Green always noticed right away: too thin, dressed wrong, foulmouthed, already drunk and laughing too loud—a shimmying funnel of dust, lightning, and uprooted houses working its way across the room. She had coarse dyed-black hair worn chopped off at the jawline, a wide mouth painted the color of a grape Tootsie Pop, brilliant teeth, pointy black boots, black stockings, and a crinkly black dress that showed off exactly too much of her shoulders and breasts. It was a few seconds, standing in Emily Klein’s living room, shaking hands all around, before Green realized that he knew the girl. And then one moment more of erotic doubt, mingled with a pleasant sense of trouble, before he recognized her. She spotted him. Green hooked an arm around his young daughter’s waist, hoisted her into the air, and turned back toward the door.

  “I left something in the trunk,” he told Emily Klein. He fled down the front steps with his squirming burden, looking for all the world like a man who was stealing a child. He stepped back out into the afternoon. The light of a Washington summer, of his earliest childhood, spilled over the dilapidated lawns and trees of the Kleins’ neighborhood, rippling and golden and rank as a pool of gasoline. Green hurried toward his car.

  “Put me down!” Jocelyn cried. “You’re mooshing my new dress.”

  “Sorry,” said Green, as if he had bumped a passerby. He was not listening to his daughter’s protests.

  “Daddy!” It was a cry of fury—choked, deeply offended—such as Jocelyn rarely expressed to Green. The heel of her shoe glanced sharply off his cheekbone. That was when he realized that she had been kicking him the whole way out to the street. No doubt he had made a spectacle of them both.

  They reached Green’s car, a new black German sedan with a turbocharged engine. Green stopped, his cheek stinging. He turned the little girl over and set her on her feet. Her cheeks were bright red, her breathing frantic. Green realized that in his haste to flee the woman in the Kleins’ living room he had been constricting the very wind out of his daughter's lungs.

  “I’ll fix your dress,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the house. “I’m sorry.”

  The dress was a gray-and-white seersucker dirndl, appliquéd on the bib with a basket of blue asters, worn over a stiff white blouse trimmed at the collar with crocheted lace. The shoes, also new, were patent T-straps, liquid and black as the pupil of an eye. Jocelyn’s legs, their pudgy thighs the only trace that now remained of a rather corpulent babyhood, Green had stuffed carefully into a pair of white tights. When Green exercised his rights of visitation—one weekend a month, three weeks during the summer—he dressed her with surprising care and according to outmoded notions of proper feminine attire that horrified his former wife but that, for reasons he chose not to examine, Green found he could not suppress.

  Green knelt in front of Jocelyn and tugged down on the hem of her skirt, smoothing it with one hand. He hiked the waistband of the tights, lifting his daughter a full half inch off the ground, and held her suspended until her skinny little bottom—she was just out of diapers—sank back snugly into place. He straightened her lacy collar, setting it to lie flat on her heaving chest. Jocelyn observed these attentions with an air of approval and of being very conscious of her decision to forgive her father for his bad behavior.

  “I can feel my heart,” she told him. She pressed a dimpled hand against the basket of blue asters. The presence of her heart in her chest had come to her attention only within the last week. Its activities, when they became palpable, were still an accidental enchantment that startled and delighted her, like the metallic blur of a hummingbird at the window or the sound of her mother’s voice emerging from Green’s answering machine.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “It’s beading.” She had mangled his explanation of the circulatory system and must, he thought, see the production of her blood as an amusing inward pastime of her body in moments of exertion, an endless stringing of bright red beads. “Where are we going?”

  “Daddy has to get something out of the trunk.”

  “What?”

  “Something.”

  “Is it a surprise?”

  “I don’t know. It might be.”

  “A surprise for me? Is it a toy?”

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t a toy.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Jocelyn, please. It isn’t anything.”

  In the trunk of his car, when he opened it, along with his overnight bag, Jocelyn’s pink plastic suitcase, and a zippered case of compact discs, was an implausible crate of grapefruit he had bought five weeks ago, on a briefer than fleeting impulse, at a roadside stand near his home in Fort Lauderdale, then forgotten until two days earlier as he loaded up for the drive north. Green ran a hand through his hair; there was enough sweat on his forehead to slick back and hold the thinni
ng strands in place. He tried to decide just how idiotic he would look struggling into the Kleins’ house with a crate full of shriveled Indian River grapefruit. Now that they were safely out on the street again, he considered the possible consequences of their simply splitting. Caryn, his ex-wife, who lived in Philadelphia, was not expecting Jocelyn for another two days. Green had accepted an invitation to stay with the Kleins, but now that seemed impossible. He had always wanted to go out to Chincoteague and take a look at those half-feral ponies from the Marguerite Henry books; maybe Jocelyn would like that. At any rate, he was certain his absence from Seth Klein’s graduation party could not possibly make a great deal of difference to Seth, who hadn’t seen Green since he was a very little boy and even then had not evinced any great interest in Green. Green burned his forehead for an instant on the black roof of his car. Go, he told himself.