Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon Page A

unconcerned but looking grave. “But I’m going out on a limb.”
    Cara nodded. She pulled on the loose-waisted black trousers from CP Shades and the matching black blouse that she had been wearing for the past two weeks, even though two of the buttons were hanging loose. She stuffed her feet into her ragged black espadrilles. She tugged the headband from her head, shook out her hair, then fitted the headband back into place. She sighed, and nodded again. She looked at her watch. Then she burst into tears.
    “I don’t want to be induced,” she said. “If they induce me I’m going to need drugs.”
    “Not necessarily.”
    “And then I’ll probably end up with a C-section.”
    “There’s no reason to think so.”
    “This started out as something I had no control over, Dorothy. I don’t want it to end like that.”
    “Everything starts out that way, dear,” said Dorothy. “Ends that way, too.”
    “Not this.”
    Dorothy put her arm around Cara and they sat there, side by side on the examining table. Dorothy relied on her corporeal solidity and steady nerves to comfort patients, and was not inclined to soothing words. She said nothing for several minutes.
    “Go home,” she said at last. “Call your husband. Tell him you need his prostaglandins.”
    “Richie?” Cara said. “But he …he can’t. He won’t.”
    “Tell him this is his big chance,” Dorothy said. “I imagine it’s been a long time.”
    “Ten months,” said Cara. “At least. I mean unless he’s been with somebody else.”
    “Call him,” Dorothy said. “He’ll come.”
    Richard had moved out of the house when Cara was in her thirty-fifth week. As from the beginning of their troubles, there had been no decisive moment of rupture, no rhetorical firefight, no decision taken on Richard’s part at all. He had merely spent longer and longer periods away from home, rising well before dawn to take his morning run around the reservoir where the first line of the epitaph of their marriage had been written, and arriving home at night long after Cara had gone to sleep. In week thirty-four he had received an offer to film a commercial in Seattle. The shoot was scheduled for eight days. Richard had never come home. On Cara’s due date, he had telephoned to say that he was back in L.A., staying at his older brother Matthew’s up in Camarillo. He and Matthew had not gotten along as children, and in adulthood had once gone seven and a half years without speaking. That Richie had turned to him now for help filled Cara with belated pity for her husband. He was sleeping in a semiconverted garage behind Matthew’s house, which he shared with Matthew’s disaffected teenage son Jeremy.
    “He doesn’t get home till pretty late, Aunt Cara,” Jeremy told her when she called that afternoon from the doctor’s office. “Like one or two.”
    “Can I call that late?”
    “Fuck yeah. Hey, did you have your baby?”
    “I’m trying,” Cara said. “Please ask him to call me.”
    “Sure thing.”
    “No matter how late it is.”
    She went to Las Carnitas for dinner. Strolling mariachis entered and serenaded her in her magic shroud of solitude and girth. She stared down at her plate and ate a tenth of the food upon it. She went home and spent a few hours cutting out articles from American Baby, and ordering baby merchandise from telephone catalogs in the amount of five hundred and twelve dollars. At ten o’clock she set her alarm clock for one-thirty and went to bed. At one o’clock she was wakened from a light uneasy sleep by a dream in which a shadowy, hirsute creature, bipedal and stooped, whom even within the dream itself she knew to be intended as a figure of or stand-in for Derrick James Cooper, mounted a plump guitarrón, smashing it against the ground. Cara shot up, garlic on her breath, heart racing, listening to the fading echoes in her body of the twanging of some great inner string.
    The telephone rang.
    “What’s the matter, Cara?”