Alligator - Lisa Moore [10]
She’d served David a martini with a twist during happy hour at the bar he’d been drinking in since he’d turned nineteen. Then she put her fingers over her mouth as if to hold the words back. They’d known each other since high school.
What’s wrong? he’d asked. She told him about the pregnancy, working her wedding ring off her finger as she spoke. She came out from behind the bar and went into the bathroom and he heard the toilet flush and she was out again without the ring. When she asked him to attend the birth he’d blushed deeply.
We’re friends, right? she’d asked. He said he would be honoured.
Beverly was attending the prenatal class alone, having broken up with her lover the weekend before discovering she was pregnant. She could not consider abortion; she had been overtaken, swiftly, with a passion for the idea of a baby. The pregnancy heightened her senses, gave her extra glow, softened her. She became more graceful and deliberate.
She’d told the father, a tepid Catholic lawyer who lived with his mother, over lunch, downtown.
He’d scrunched his napkin into a tight ball and raised his fist and released the napkin. They both watched it unscrunch on the table. The napkin opened like a flower blooming in a time-lapse film.
How could you let this happen? he’d hissed. What she’d imagined to be gentleness — his quiet, unassuming demeanour — had been complacency. Tepid, and given to petulance, she decided. She waited for what she knew was coming. She watched the thought light up his face with rude, desperate hope.
Are you sure it’s mine? he’d said. His voice was weak. Hardly a whisper.
She had thought to include him out of a sense of obligation. She was astonished and relieved to discover he was terrified about what she would demand.
David had made jokes throughout the prenatal classes, brought the barmaid tea during the break, waited while she took the first sip, consulted, and then trotted back to the cafeteria to get her more milk or sugar. He misted up while watching the videos of births, and rubbed the barmaid’s belly with vigour when the lights snapped back on, as if he couldn’t wait to get started.
Many of the men kept their eyes riveted to the floor, Beverly said, but David was watching intently, along with all the women. She found herself in the lineup behind him at the Tim Hortons counter one evening. They spoke about the rain and traffic and then Beverly’s eyes flew open from a kick in her belly — a look of undiluted awe spread over her face — and David fell in love for the first time in his life.
Your mother was so damn beautiful, he’d often said to Colleen. Colleen loved him with a loyalty that kept her from asking too many questions about her real father. They had met several times and he seemed elderly and foreign. She thought of it this way: David had chosen her.
COLLEEN
THERE HAD BEEN a stomach virus going around Grade 1 just before Christmas when Colleen was six. While sitting in the shopping cart that was hooked into the wheelchair Colleen felt a mild altering taking place inside her. She could not have said what she was afraid of; the woman’s red rubber boots were too bright and childish.
Colleen’s stepfather died suddenly of an aneurysm when she was thirteen. At the funeral home she’d heard a man say, He went down like a ton of bricks. The death, when it came, was obdurate and biting; it just was.
The fear she felt in the mall on that day was magnified by the noise and a nascent fever. The Christmas bulbs were swaying, moved by a mysterious internal breeze near the rafters. When she remembers it, she feels the dangerous, oozing seepage, the disintegration of the membrane between adulthood and childhood.
She would soon know things she was too young to know. The woman in the wheelchair twisted her head around and shouted, For the loving honour of Christ. The green lights of her sweater cast a reflection of jiggling dots on her neck.
The engine of the trapped chair roared and there was a faint tinge of burning metal in the air. Colleen’s mother rattled her cart savagely, trying to knock