Deadline Read Free

world that would make me give up?’
    â€˜Jesus Christ !’
    â€˜You finally get the picture, doc?’
    â€˜Are you serious?’
    â€˜Deadly.’
    â€˜I’m … I’m … I don’t know …’
    â€˜Like, blown away?’
    â€˜Doesn’t do it justice.’
    I felt suddenly giddy, the night spinning about me. Overjoyed. No, I didn’t really have a word for this thrill, this rush of anticipation.
    â€˜How long have you known?’ I asked.
    â€˜Since this afternoon.’
    â€˜And you waited –’
    â€˜It wasn’t easy, believe me,’ she said. ‘I wanted the right moment.’ She nestled against my body. ‘Hold me.’
    I thought of the fetus inside her, small and unformed, floating in its own cloistered reality. A child! Dear God. I tried to accustom myself to the shock of this knowledge, absorb this new fact into my scheme of the world. I understood one thing: Nothing would ever be the same again. The entire pattern of my existence had assumed an entirely new shape in the matter of a few seconds.
    She said, ‘According to Marv Sweetzer, ETA’s mid-January. I swear, Marv couldn’t have been more pleased if he’d fathered this child himself. Loaded me down with a pile of pamphlets – dos and don’ts, drink this, avoid that, take these vitamins, remember to get exercise, you want to make sure you don’t get stretch-marks, on and on.’
    â€˜And you promised to be good?’ I said.
    â€˜Oh, I promised to be a saint, Jerry. And I will be.’
    I pictured Sondra in Marv Sweetzer’s office in Beverly Hills, Marv announcing her test results. You and Jerry hit the spot, Sondra. I knew Marv well, and how he operated. He was the essence of kindness and practicality.
    ETA January. Six months away. I couldn’t help myself – I went down on my knees and lifted her purple silk dress up to her waist and laid the side of my face against her stomach, even though I knew it was too early to feel any movement. I just wanted to be close to the baby. We’d longed for a child, and we’d worked at it, trying our luck on the roulette wheel of reproduction – charts on the bedroom wall, computer calculations of her cycles, the difficult math of ovulation, my sperm count, fertility tests.
    I was forty-three years of age, six years older than my wife, and we were aware of our clocks running a little too fast.
    Life had been generous to us: I was successful in my profession, and Sondra made a good income as a marketing exec for LaBrea Records. And only one thing had been missing.
    The notion of a baby – now it engulfed me. I thought of the purity of a new life amidst the dreck of the city, and briefly my mind drifted from the elevated redwood deck, plunging down to where the hot night alleys were fetid dead-ends, and doorways were filled with the disenfranchised and the socially crippled. I imagined hearing the whispers of lunatics and addicts and the sound of a wine bottle smashing or a clip thrust inside an automatic. We’d have to move from here, and I was glad.
    We’d live in a small town beyond the toxic reaches of LA, a place of good schools and clean neighborhoods where you could raise a child in safety. A place of the kind you saw on pictorial calendars or postcards, or in coffee-table books about Americana, one of the friendly little towns that still existed out there like persistent myths.
    I felt Sondra’s hand against the back of my neck.
    â€˜Make love to me,’ she said. ‘Right here.’
    I drew her down to the deck carefully. She’d always been precious to me, but now even more so, if such a thing were possible. My wife. My love … My family.
    Jerry and Sondra Lomax and child. Two became three.
    I listened to the quickened sound of her breathing and, glancing at her, saw her lips part and her eyelids flicker. The shampoo she used was suggestive of