Louisa Meets Bear Read Free

in the pamphlet, was scheduled for two days later. Don’t eat anything that morning. If the cramping and bleeding continue for longer than three days, immediately contact your doctor. Bring payment in full in CASH .
    Miriam and her premed boyfriend disappeared into Miriam’s room. I flopped down on the couch in the suite living room, the pamphlets perched on my stomach, my arm sweeping the floor for distraction. Then, in one of those coincidences that seem too fantastical to be true but that determine more of our lives than we would like to think (years later, when the evolutionary biologists would rewrite Darwin, moving randomness from background to fore, I knew from my own minuscule experience in the stream of evolution that they were right to give chance marquee billing), I picked up one of Miriam’s boyfriend’s books, dropped in a heap on the floor.
    Perhaps it was not, in fact, as creepily uncanny as it seemed. Perhaps I had registered subliminally that it was a human biology text—not an accident when my hand landed on that book rather than the paperback of Machiavelli’s The Prince or the organic chemistry text between which it was sandwiched.
    Flipping pages, I reached the chapter on embryonic development. Seven color pictures showed the fetus at various stages. In the eleven-week photo, the fetus rested on its back in an orb that looked like the sun. Little hands played with a nose. A black eye stared out from the page. At three months, I read, the fetus is the size of a mouse.
    I sat up. I felt queasy. They were going to vacuum something the size of a mouse out of my belly and into a bottle labeled medical waste?
    The bed creaked in Miriam’s room. Miriam, I feebly called. Can you come here? Please come.
    *   *   *
    When I started to bleed in my fifth month, the doctor I’d been seeing in New Haven ordered bed rest. I really should insist on a bedpan, he told me, but I’ll let you get up to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, flat on your back. I withdrew from the spring semester, and the deans, encouraged by Benita Frosch, in whom I never confided the paternity of my baby but who must have suspected, granted me a leave of absence.
    Miriam packed my things, and my brother and his roommate Tom, a theater kid from New York whom I’d had a bit of a crush on but realizing that he knew everything about my situation could now hardly look in the eye, loaded my things into my brother’s car. Good luck, Lizzy, Tom said after my brother had settled me into the back seat with a pillow. He gave me a little salute and then a deep bow.
    Jay and my father carried my boxes to my old room. Although we had talked about what I might do when the baby came—my father had arranged for a possible adoption, the cousins of one of his partners, a nice childless couple from the city, the husband a Yale graduate too, as though that somehow linked us in one big family, just an option, my father said, careful not to push me, you’ll have up until the delivery to decide—this newest flat-on-my-back twist had come too quickly for me to think further than getting home.
    We ate dinner, the three of us, in my room: me lying down with my dishes on a bed tray, my brother and father on chairs with their plates on their laps.
    What the hell are you going to do on Monday? Jay asked. Who’s going to bring you food while Dad’s at work?
    I looked helplessly at my father. I imagined him leaving a bowl of food by my bed.
    My father cleared his throat. Afterward I thought maybe his eyes were damp. Your mother, he said. Your mother’s coming home.
    *   *   *
    Although my mother had known that Jackie was eighteen and black, one of the few black families in the largely Puerto Rican neighborhood, my mother was, she would tell me (I was by then in my eighth month), taken aback at the sight of the girl—tall, with big arms and broad hips, a burnished Rubens, all