The room was small and square, and a night-light glowed on the wall above a baby’s crib. Mary stepped inside. The air was warm and sweet, like clean laundry. She saw a bureau and a changing table, and a bookshelf with toys-dinosaurs and trucks, a baseball glove, the kinds of things a boy would like. What was she doing in here? And yet she could not remove herself; the urge to remain was irresistible, as if she were soaking in a bath. She stood another moment, tasting the air, then approached the crib where the little boy was sleeping.
It was then that she saw the blinking baby monitor on the bureau. Mary’s heart froze with panic, but it was too late-she had been detected. She heard footsteps running up the stairs, and then a voice, slicing through the darkness.
“What are you doing in there?”
It was the woman who had served them dinner. She pushed past Mary into the room, placing herself between Mary and the crib.
“I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I was looking for the bathroom. Nobody was downstairs.”
“I thought you left,” the woman said sternly. “It says private, you know. Private means something to most people.”
The baby had begun to fuss in its crib. The woman turned away from Mary and bent over the railings to lift him into her arms. It was then that Mary saw that it wasn’t a baby at all, but a much older child-a boy in Barney pajamas, perhaps as old as five. His eyes were closed, but his mouth, which was large and wet, twisted with his soft cries. He laid his head over her shoulder; his bare feet hung nearly to the woman’s knees and made a series of jerky movements. Mary noticed things in the room she somehow had not seen before: a tiny wheelchair parked beside the bureau, a white box with tubes and dials that looked medical, a shiny chrome stand for an IV. Even the crib was different-much larger, like a raised bed with bars.
The woman smoothed the child’s hair. “Mummy’s here,” she cooed. “No bad dreams, no bad dreams.”
Mary stood in the doorway. “I truly am sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to wake him.”
“He’s deaf.” The woman looked at Mary then, fixing her with a firm gaze. “It’s not even words he hears, just a vibration.”
Outside, O’Neil was waiting in the Toyota, the engine idling. He was gripping the wheel tightly, as if he couldn’t wait to drive away.
“All set,” she said.
He looked at her as if he was about to speak, then put the car in gear. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime,” O’Neil said.
In the early morning, before O’Neil was awake, Mary rose from bed, seized by a turbulent nausea, and went to the bathroom to vomit. She managed to do this quietly, then rinsed her mouth out and returned to bed. But when the two of them awoke later, she found that the feeling had not passed.
“It’s that goddamn restaurant,” O’Neil fumed. “Pansy salad. And that awful soup. What the hell was that all about?”
They had planned to visit the cemetery that morning, but agreed this was now impossible, and O’Neil left the motel to find muffins and tea for Mary, to put something on her stomach before they attempted the drive back to Philadelphia. At the window Mary watched the car pull away, then put on her coat and walked into town. She had seen the clinic the day before, near the gallery where they had looked at pots; the sign had said it was open for Sunday walk-ins from nine to twelve o’clock.
The door was open and the lights were on, but the waiting room was empty. Mary sat down and thumbed through a needlework magazine, and a few minutes later a woman appeared, wearing a white coat and stethoscope.
“Ah,” she said, seeing Mary. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“Are you the doctor?”
The woman, who had short gray hair and a handsome heart-shaped face, held up the disk of her stethoscope and looked at it in mock surprise. “Now, who put this stethoscope on me?”
The doctor led Mary into an examining room, where Mary told her about the pansies and the soup while the doctor took her temperature and blood pressure and asked her about the pain. She eased Mary back on the paper-lined table and pressed her bare stomach here and there. Her fingers were pale and slender, yet eased into Mary’s flesh with surprising force.
The doctor stepped back. “Well, I don’t think it’s food poisoning.”
“The meal was strange but I’d have to agree.”
“I’ve eaten there. The duck is really what’s special.” The doctor furrowed her brow at Mary. “How late are you?”
“Ten days, give or take.”
“Have you ever been pregnant before?”
“Not in many years,” Mary said. “Has it changed?”
From a cabinet of supplies the doctor removed a square pink box with a picture of a daisy and handed it to Mary. Inside were a small specimen cup and a plastic wand, like an undersized thermometer, wrapped in cellophane.
Mary held up her bare wrist. “I don’t have a watch.”
The doctor unclasped her own-a Timex, with three hearts forming the first three links of the band on either side of the face-and showed Mary to the rest room. Mary squatted over the toilet and held the cup between her legs until she had filled it, and placed it on the toilet tank. The instructions on the box said the test would take three minutes, but the instant Mary dipped the wand into the cup, a turquoise ribbon shot up the blotter paper and filled the little window, resolving into a tiny cross. She counted off three minutes with the watch, waiting to see if there was some mistake and the blue cross would be retracted. When it wasn’t, she dumped the cup into the toilet, wrapped the wand in tissue paper to show O’Neil, and returned to the office.
“These tests are pretty accurate,” the doctor said, scribbling on a prescription pad, “but they’re not the real thing, so when you get home, you should go see your gynecologist.”
“Somebody told me this was going to happen,” Mary said.
“Well, they knew something.” The doctor put her watch back on. “If you don’t mind my asking, is this good news for you?”
Mary fingered the wand in her pocket. “It’s what I wanted,” she said.
On the way back to the motel Mary stopped at a Rexall to fill her prescription. It was an old-style drugstore with a lunch counter, and the air smelled of wet clothing and fried eggs. An entire aisle of the store was devoted to baby products-fat packages of diapers, cans of powdered formula, rattles and teething toys and little spoons with kittens or puppies on the handles, all sealed in plastic-and Mary paused to look it over, this vast, hopeful inventory she had never paid any attention to. She believed it was important now to stand before it-she felt as if she had achieved some final homecoming-and when she handed her prescription to the druggist, an old man with a shuffling step who took the paper from her without comment, he, like the wall of diapers and the well-worn light of the store’s interior and the lunch counter with its pies and cakes under elevated domes of glass, seemed somehow inevitable, like a figure from a dream she’d once had years ago.
The druggist handed the prescription to her in a stapled package, his face broadening with a smile. “Congratulations,” he said.
Mary thanked him, bought a carton of milk at the lunch counter, and stepped outside. O’Neil would be back at the motel, pacing with worry. Where had she gone off to? Had she gotten so sick she couldn’t wait for the muffins and the tea? Why hadn’t she left him a note? The air had warmed; a pale and ghostly snow was falling all around. Standing by the door, Mary opened the druggist’s package, which contained a bottle of prenatal vitamins. They were large orange pills that smelled like fish food, and the directions said to take one daily. The bottle contained forty pills, and the prescription could be refilled five times, for a total of two hundred-the number of days until the baby was born. Two hundred days, Mary thought, and removed her mittens to take the first pill, tipping her face into the falling snow and using the milk to wash it down.