He was older now, he thought with a thud, than Danny had ever managed to become.
Rita was laughing at something Curt had said, unconsciously cradling the bulge of her baby as she leaned back against the bar. Daphne was humming along with the jukebox. “Madonna,” she broke off to tell Ian.
“Pardon?”
“ ‘Like a Prayer.’ ”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The song, Ian.”
“Oh.”
He took a gulp from his glass. (This seltzer smelled like wet dog.) “So anyhow,” he said to Daphne, “where did you and Curt meet?”
“At work,” she said.
Daphne had a job now at a place called Trips Unlimited. Ian said, “He’s a travel agent?”
“No, no, he came in to reserve a flight. By profession he’s an inventor.”
“An inventor.”
“He’s got this one invention: a Leaf Paw. This sort of claw-type contraption you hold in your left hand to scoop up the leaves you’re raking. We think it’s going to make him rich.”
Ian glanced over at Rita, hoping she’d heard. (They often considered the same things funny.) But Rita was staring fixedly across the room. He followed her eyes and saw a small, pretty girl in a Danzig T-shirt playing the Black Knight 2000 machine. An old friend, maybe? But when he turned back to ask, he realized Rita’s stare was unfocused. It was the glazed and inward stare of someone listening to faraway music. He said, “Rita?”
“Excuse me,” she said abruptly. She stood and made her way through the crowd, disappearing behind the door marked LADIES.
Ian and Daphne looked at each other. “Think I should go after her?” Daphne asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Well, she’s probably okay.”
Although he was nowhere near as confident as he sounded.
They fell silent. Even Curt seemed to know better than to try and make small talk. Now Ian noticed the noise in this place — the laughter and clinking glassware and the hubbub from the pinball machines, which whanged and burbled and barked instructions in metallic, hollow voices. Everyone was so carefree! Two stools over, a young woman with long hair as dark as Rita’s nonchalantly swung her pink-and-turquoise mountain-climbing shoes. A young man in a red jacket and a straight blond ponytail passed her one of the beers he’d just paid for. The jukebox had stopped playing, but some people in a booth were singing “Happy Birthday.”
Then Rita was back, white-faced. All three of them stood up. She told Ian, “I’m bleeding.”
He swallowed.
Curt was the first to react. He said, “I’ll get the check. You three head out to the car,” and he dropped a set of keys into Ian’s palm.
Ian had forgotten that they’d driven here in Curt’s Volvo. “Let’s go,” he said. He shepherded Rita toward the door. Daphne followed with their wraps. When they reached the sidewalk he stopped to help Rita into her jacket. She shook her head, but he could hear how her teeth were chattering. “Put it on,” he told her, and she submitted, allowing him to bully her arms into the sleeves.
Curt caught up with them as Ian was unlocking the car door. “Which hospital?” he asked, sliding behind the wheel, and he started the engine in one smooth motion. He drove as if he’d dealt with such crises often, swooping dexterously from lane to lane and barely slowing for red lights before proceeding through them. Meanwhile Ian held both of Rita’s hands in his. Her teeth were still chattering and he wondered if she was in shock.
At the Emergency Room entrance, Curt pulled up behind an ambulance. Ian hustled Rita out of the backseat and took her inside to a woman at a long green counter. “She’s bleeding,” he told the woman.
“How much?” she asked.
Instantly, he felt reassured. It appeared there were degrees to this; they shouldn’t automatically assume the worst. Rita said, “Not a whole lot.”
The woman called for a nurse, and Rita was led away while Ian stayed behind to fill out forms. Insurance company, date of birth … He answered hurriedly, scrawling across the dotted lines. When he was almost finished, Daphne and Curt came in from parking the car. “They’ve taken her somewhere,” he told them. He asked Daphne, “Do you know her mother’s maiden name?”
“Make one up,” Daphne said. She looked around at the faded green walls, the elderly black man half asleep on a molded plastic chair. “Not bad,” she said. “Usually this place is packed.”
How often did she come here, anyway? And Curt, standing behind her, said, “Lord, yes, there’ve been times I’ve waited six and seven hours.”
“Well, we might have a wait this evening, too,” Ian said. “Maybe you should both go home.”
“I’m staying,” Daphne told him.
“Yes, but,” Ian said. He slid the form across the counter to the woman. He said, “But, um, I’d really rather you go. To tell the truth.”
He could see she felt hurt. She said, “Oh.”
“I just want to … concentrate on this. All right?” he asked.
“I could concentrate too,” she said.
But Curt touched her sleeve and said, “Come on, Daph. I’m sure he’ll call as soon as he has anything to tell you.”
When he led her away, Ian felt overwhelmingly grateful. He felt he might even love the boy.
Rita lay on a stretcher in an enclosure formed by white curtains. No one had come to examine her yet, she said, but they’d phoned her doctor. She wore a withered blue hospital gown, and a white sheet covered her legs and rose gently over the mound of her stomach. Ian settled on a stool beside the stretcher. He picked up her hand, which felt warmer now and slightly moist. She curled her fingers tightly around his.
“Remember our wedding night?” she asked him.
“Yes, of course.”
“Remember in the hotel? I came out of the bathroom in my nightgown and you were sitting on the edge of the bed, touching two fingers to your forehead. I thought you were nervous about making love.”
“Well, I was,” he said.
“You were praying.”
“Well, that too.”
“You were shy about saying your bedtime prayers in front of me and so you pretended you were just sort of thinking.”
“I was worried I would look like one of those show-off Christians,” he said. “But still I wanted to, um, I felt I ought to—”
“Could you pray now?” she asked him.
“Now?”
“Could you pray for the baby?”
“Honey, I’ve been praying ever since we left the bar,” he said.
Really his prayers had been for Rita. He had fixed her firmly, fiercely to this planet and held her there with all his strength. But he had prayed not only for her health but for her happiness, and so in a sense he supposed you could say that he’d prayed for the baby as well.
She spent one night in the hospital but was released the following morning, still pregnant, with orders to lie flat until her due date. At first this seemed easy. She would do anything, she said, anything at all. She would stand on her head for two months, if it helped her hang onto this baby. But she had always been the athletic, go-getter type, and books didn’t interest her and TV made her restless. So every evening when Ian came home from work he found the radio blaring, and Rita on the telephone, and the kitchen bustling with women fixing tidbits to tempt her appetite as if she were a delicate invalid. Which, of course, she wasn’t. “I don’t care if it takes major surgery!” she’d be shouting into the phone. “You get those moldy old magazines away from her!” (She was talking to Dennis or Lionel — one of her poor frazzled assistants.) Her hair flared rebelliously out of its braid and her shirtsleeves hiked up on her arms; nothing could induce her to spend the day in her bathrobe. And constantly she leapt to her feet on one pretext or another, while everybody cried, “Stop! Wait!” holding out their hands as if to catch the infant they imagined she would let drop.