No, it was something deeper and more selfish, more craven than fury, which had to Aviva’s ear a notion of scourging, of refining fire. Aviva was hurt. And her anger was the especial, bitter anger of the indicted. Gwen was breaking their partnership, renouncing their shared calling, for reasons that Aviva could not dismiss without doing violence to certain inconvenient and embarrassing facts about the nature and demographics of their practice, about the paradoxical taint of the boutique that hung over modern midwifery, a profession that had at one time, not long ago, confined its ministrations to poor and to rural women. Aviva was annoyed—though this annoyance was also not uncontaminated by consciousness of those fucking facts—by the deft and ruthless mau-mauing to which Gwen had, with perfect justification, subjected the hapless review panel. And that in spite—or because—of Gwen having saved their asses by so doing.
“She is not happy,” Nat said. “She doesn’t know where Archy is, that’s one. Two, no way is she ever letting that fuckhead Lazar lay one hand on her, quote unquote. Three, get your ass down there, please, as fast as you can. She needs you, Aviva. She says she’s not going to have the baby without you there to catch it.”
“How sweet.”
“I’m just the messenger. And I better get back to her. I don’t think Julie is a whole lot of support.”
“Julie?”
“He’s with us. He’s kind of—”
“How did that happen?”
Again a mild facial paralysis, a narrative dystonia slackened his features. “I picked him up,” he said. “Uh, on the way.”
“What the fuck is going on, Nat? No, forget it. I’ll kill you later.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Later works for me.”
“Good. Now. Tell Gwen—”
“Aviva?”
It was Audrey, standing in the corridor making a tentative little handwringing gesture, her head inclined toward the door of Rain’s LDR. “She says she wants to push.”
“Ho-kay,” Aviva said. She gave Nat a push of her own, fingers to his sternum, rocking him back a step or two. “Tell her I’ll be there as fast as I can. You help her get settled, see her into a room, all right? Make yourself useful. Play the dad. Think you can do that?”
“I think I can fake it,” Nat said.
“Meantime, where the fuck is Archy?”
“I’ve been trying him, he doesn’t answer.”
“Try sending one of those text-message things.”
“What is that, I don’t know what that is.”
“I don’t, either. Ask Julie.”
“Aviva?” Audrey said, venturing closer in her tone toward accusatory.
“I have to get back to Rain,” Aviva said. “Go. Tell Gwen I’ll be there soon.”
“What if you get hung up, though?” Nat said. “They send in Lazar, I think she’s going to fucking bite his head off.”
“It’s a hospital,” Aviva said. “They can sew it back on.”
“I think I would have to say, ‘Mirror, Mirror’,” Julie said.
“The beard,” Gwen agreed vaguely as another contraction gathered out there in the gulf of pain on whose shore she was planted like a low-lying town, levees buckling under the advancing wave. She had put Julie’s hand against her stomach during the last one, let him feel the skin turn from upholstery to plate. “Spock with a beard.”
“The beard is, like, even more stylish nowadays than it was back then,” Julie said. “Goatees are in.”
She had instructed him to distract her, though he suspected that she didn’t mean it, that she was not capable of being distracted from her purpose today. The contractions took up all of Gwen’s attention. Each one became, as it arose, the object of intense study. But Julie was trying his best, even though, for his part, he was feeling, if anything, too distracted. Knowing he ought to be there, totally there, for Gwen, at least until his father got back or, better, until his mother showed up. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Titus, wondering where he was, where he might choose to run, if he was ever coming back. The elusive Titus, a cat burglar rappelling down the sheer wall of Julie’s life. Fugitive as a passing aspiration, one of those daydreams that you knew, even as you daydreamed it, would take more money, more luck, more coolness than you could ever hope to have.
“Keep talking Trek,” Gwen instructed him softly, holding herself still, her eyes closed, possibly keeping some kind of internal count, even though Julie, with his watch, was faithfully tracking the contractions’ frequency and duration on the back of an envelope he had found in her car. “It’s helping. Also I think it was more of a Van Dyck.”
“Okay,” Julie said, unsticking his legs from the vinyl seat of the LDR’s armchair. He turned around to face Gwen, holding her moist left hand in his right one. Gwen was lying on the bed in Archy’s old Xavier McDaniel T-shirt and a clean pair of leggings she had sent Julie into her house to retrieve on the way here. She had allowed herself to be hooked to the fetal monitor, but she refused to change into a gown as a way of proving her determination not to have this baby until Aviva was free and there was no need for the nurses to page Paul Lazar. “Also, the Captain’s Woman, on that one?”
“Oh, you like that.” The soft voice, studious, a librarian of pain running her finger down some endless index of burning. “Do you.”
“She’s, I don’t know. I guess she’s pretty kick-ass.”
Not saying that whenever he watched that episode, which he first remembered seeing with Gwen the night his parents went out to see Almost Famous, he liked to imagine that he was the Captain’s Woman, stalking the quarters of the evil Kirk with her bare midriff and her Tantalus Field, waiting for the captain to return to her arms, her lips, to the retro-future 1960s starship bed with the red sparkle-mesh bedsheets.
Forty-nine seconds went by in silence, and then she opened her eyes again. Julie wrote down the time and duration on the back of the envelope, which had been sent to Gwen by the law firm of Leopold, Valsalva & Rubin and which Gwen had not bothered to open. It bore a serious and, Julie would have thought, urgent aspect.
“Over,” she said, swallowing, licking her lips. A last little fizz of pain in her eyes. Julie could see it dying away, like Sally Kellerman in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” when the psionic fire went out of her.
“You okay?” he said.
“I am fine. If Lazar comes in here, I will not be fine. You will have to kill him.”
“I can do that.”
“You will have to be my Captain’s Woman, hit him with that Tantalus Field.”
“Dude is toast.”
She took hold of his hands in hers. “You are a good boy, Julius Jaffe,” she told him. “Your momma raised you right.”
“Thank you.”
“That must have been a weird, weird scene over there at that motel this morning.”
“It was insane. I don’t know what was happening. I don’t get what the deal is.”
“Who were the guys?”
“I don’t know, they work for, you know, Mr. Flowers, they have the suits, so they look kind of like Black Muslims, only with bling, and neckties, not bow ties.”
“Yes. Yeah.”
“I don’t know, it’s some kind of thing between him and Luther. Mr. Flowers and Luther. From back a long time ago, when Archy was little.”
“Archy didn’t tell you what it’s about?”
“No. He just said he would take care of it.”
Gwen bit her lower lip, not in pain, and shook her head once turning away from Julie. He was about to reassure her that Archy was coming, that he would come as soon as he heard that she had gone into labor. It occurred to him, however, that this might not be true. Julie had no idea what kind of situation Archy had walked into. The dudes from the funeral home went around armed and were probably dangerous, even if the big one, Bank, had proved surprisingly vulnerable to assault with a wooden katana.
“Titus, he’s the one ought to be in the emergency room,” Gw
en said. “He was hurt, huh? I did the wrong thing, I should not have let him go. That was wrong. I don’t know where my head was. I guess I was feeling kind of crazy.”
“He had a bloody nose, but he was okay. He is pretty, like, tough.” Julie feeling a rush of gratitude toward Gwen for affording him an excuse to talk about Titus. “I think he lived in some pretty, you know, not so great places? Like where he was living here? Across the street from Mr. Jones.”
“I heard about that.”
“They treated him like shit.”
“Language, Julius.”
“It was a nightmare.”
“You like him, don’t you?”
“He’s my friend.”
Vulcan mind meld, Julie looking at her face could read her thought: Something you never really had before. “What did he ever say about me?”
“He . . . I don’t know. Probably he’s a little afraid of you. I know he, I mean, I could tell he was kind of, like, kind of excited about this.”
“The baby.”
“Yeah. His brother. He said you told him it was a boy.”
“It is. He is.”
“Yeah, he seemed excited. I bet if he knew you were going into labor, he wouldn’t have run away.”
“Huh,” Gwen said, and at first Julius took it for an expression of mild interest, Gwen registering a minor gain in information on a subject she formerly had known little about. Then the sound deepened and transformed and drew itself into a moan, huuuuuuuuh, and he saw that another contraction was coming on.
Julie heard the rattle of Gwen’s file in the rack outside. He stood up just as the door opened and a lean, pale doctor with a stubbly scalp stuck his head into the room. He wore blue scrubs and a stethoscope necklace.
“Seven minutes apart!” Julie reported, holding up the envelope. “Seven minutes!”
“Seven minutes!” the doctor echoed. “Is that English time or metric?”
Julie lost himself in a fascinated confusion over this concept, the year divided into ten months, the month into ten weeks, the week into ten days. No, that would be too many days.
Gwen had closed her eyes; Julie was not even sure she had seen the doctor. “Not you,” she said, her voice so soft it was barely audible. “No fucking way.”
Lazar glanced at Julie, trying to enlist him with a look. Julie returned his most basilisk stare, willing it to vaporize the doctor into a shimmering Tantalus mist.
“Who’s your friend, huh?” Lazar said to Gwen. He took a look at the fetal monitor, tried to take hold of Gwen’s wrist. “You having one right now?”
She yanked her hand free. “No,” Gwen said. “I’m fine. The baby’s fine. There’s no sign of distress. I can wait until Aviva gets here.”
Then the contraction rolled in over Gwen, and she was swept up in it, swept away. Julie felt himself, Lazar, the hospital, vanish from her thoughts. Lazar stood there watching her. His eyes had looked dead before, exhausted, but now Julie saw a quickness there, an alertness, almost, Julie would have said, a sense of adventure. Lazar waited and waited, glancing at the monitor display. When Gwen opened her eyes again, he said, “Tell you what I’ll do. And this is all I’ll do. Ms. Shanks, you can wait for your partner, hang out here and labor, I’ll be only too happy to stay out of your way. But the instant we see one little blip of what I feel to be evidence of fetal distress, I am going in and getting that baby. Period. Got it?”
Gwen only nodded.
Lazar seemed to hesitate, on the point of saying something more. But he just jotted a few notes in her file and walked out.
“I’m sorry,” Julie said, “I didn’t kill him.”
“That’s all right,” Gwen said. “There’s time. I think there’s time. I wish my mom were here.”
She started to cry about her mom a little bit. She said she missed her father and her brothers, all of them back in D.C. and Philly. Julie gave her a tissue, then a second. His father came in holding a rattling cup of ice.
“Aviva’ll be here as soon as she can,” he announced. “Probably any minute. Also, I brought ice.”
“Bless you,” Gwen said.
He handed her the plastic cup, and she crunched thoughtfully. Eyes aswim, staring at Julie in a way that made him worry he might start to cry, too. She was feeling sorry either for herself, having a baby three thousand miles from her family, or for him.
“You know where to look for Titus?” she said at last, around a mouthful of ice.
“Maybe,” Julie said, drafting a thesis almost immediately. “Maybe I might.”
“Go on and find him, then,” she said. “This baby is going to want his brother.”
“I don’t know you,” said the little old Chinese lady. “Why I would know your friend?”
“No reason,” Julie said. “But—”
“He’s my student?”
“No. But like I said. He keeps his bike here. So I—”
“You think I’m deaf?”
“No.”
“Because you talking so loud.”
“I—”
“Deaf, old, Chinese, and stupid. That what you think?”
“No.” Julie took a deep breath. Start again. “Hello,” he said. He held out his hand. “My name is Julius Jaffe.” He took out the cards from his wallet, shuffled through them. Found one, an old one, that identified him as OCCULT RESEARCHER. Passed it to her. She read the proffered text, frowned, took another look at him, betraying neither skepticism nor interest.
“My friend Titus,” he said, “hid his bicycle behind your Dumpster, in the, uh, honeysuckle bush? He has to hide it there because, okay, when he was living in Mrs. Wiggins’s house? Around the corner on Forty-second? Stuff kept happening to his bike. I guess there’s a lot of people living there?”
“Miss Wiggins.” He could tell that she knew which house he meant. “Okay.”
“Like one time somebody took it and, like, rode it. And they broke it. And another time somebody sold it to buy drugs, and Titus had to steal it back. So he started hiding it back there because, I mean, there’s so much honeysuckle. You can’t see it. And because I am looking for him, to tell him that his baby brother is being born right now—”
“Loudness,” she cautioned him. “Volume.”
“I was going to see if he’s at Mrs. Wiggins’s. So I looked, and his bike is in the bushes. But then I thought, I don’t know. That maybe he might be here.”
“Here?” She shook her head, looking closer to smiling than he had yet seen her. “Not here.”
“I mean, you don’t know. He could have sneaked in. Titus has skills.”
“Look at me, occult investigator,” she said. “You think because I am old, stupid, deaf, and Chinese, some boy can sneak and hide in my house and I don’t know it?”
“No,” he guessed.
“You must be a really lousy occult investigator.”
“Kind of.”
“I think ghosts are laughing at you.”
“Probably.”
“No ghost here,” she said. “Your friend went to his house. Go look there, tell him, ‘Little brother is coming.’ ”
“Yeah, but what about,” lowering his voice, glancing up and down Telegraph, “that room you have?”
“No room.”
“No, the, like, secret bedroom? The door that’s hidden behind a poster of Bruce Lee? Where Gwen was staying. Gwen Shanks.”
She blinked and handed him back his card. “No ghost. No ghost room. Good luck. Goodbye.”
Julie thought about trying to slip past this annoying old person. Run upstairs, take a look for himself in the room that was behind the Bruce Lee door. He turned away, dropped his board to the sidewalk, stepped onto the deck. Hesitating, trying out a different kind of move.
“Oh, uh, you taught Luther Stallings, right?” he said. “From the movies. My friend, Titus? He’s Luther Stallings’s grandson.”
She came out in her gray gi and black sandals, skinny and featherweight with the walk of a younger person. �
��Let me see this ghost bicycle,” she said.
Julie led her around the side of the building to the parking area. They crunched across the gravel over to the Dumpster. He pushed aside tangles of honeysuckle, covered in flowers like a scattering of buttered popcorn. The heavy fragrance of the flowers mingled with the rancid atmosphere of the Dumpster. Before Julie could help or prevent her, she grabbed the handlebars of Titus’s bicycle, tugged it out of the tangling vines with surprising ease. She seemed to regard the bike’s presence as something of an offense, but there was also, Julie thought, a touch of puzzlement; even, possibly, of wonder. She looked sidelong at a small, square window at the top of the building—it was open, though there was no obvious way to climb up to it—then back down at the bicycle.
“Weird bike,” she said.
“It’s called a fixie?” Julie said. “No brakes. No gears. You just pedal it. When you want to stop, you have to pedal the other way.”
She climbed on the seat, gripping the handlebars, pedaled forward slushing through the gravel, fingers fluttering to find hand brakes that were not there. She slammed backward on the pedals, stopped, ground forward till she hit sidewalk. For three seconds she wobbled on the bike like a kid fresh from training wheels, a frail knot of bone, tendon, and gray silk. By the fourth second, she had figured out how to pedal backward, weaving away heedless down the sidewalk without looking over her shoulder. She disappeared behind a high fence. Ten seconds later, she reappeared, pedaling forward, and gestured curtly with one hand, master of the fixie now and for all time. “Come on,” she said.
“Come on, where?”
“Miss Wiggins. Look for your friend. Mr. Occult Investigator, scared of ghost house. That’s why you come here first. Talking about some lamebrain idea, a fourteen-year-old boy could sneak into the Bruce Lee Institute and I don’t know about it. You came here because you are afraid to go there. Right or wrong?”
“Right,” Julie said. “Basically. But seriously, Titus does have skills.”
“Insult me one more time,” she said, “I don’t go with you.”
He got on his skateboard and they set off, the lady tearing down the sidewalk with such impossible energy, such abandon, that Julie could not keep up. She stopped and waited for him, gesturing toward her shoulder with her chin. He took hold of it. It was rope and bone.
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