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Show Motherlunge a novel 44 With my head tucked down I felt the wind on the side part on top of my head. Our store-window reflections hurried next to us, mine a half step behind Pavia's and revealing the slightly twisting and cramped gait of a race walker. "Nervous?" I asked. Pavia ducked into a doorway and I followed. We crossed the lobby and went into an open elevator, Pavia unwinding the scarf and holding the door open for me with one expensive boot. I got in and she punched the button for the eleventh floor. The OB's office waiting room was painted in the greens and lavenders favored by the aromatherapy industry. Framed children's drawings had been mounted above every third chair along the edges of the room. A half-dozen women of child-bearing age-randomized, controlled-looked up at us as we came in, checked out our outfits, then went back to their magazines. While Pavia checked in, I picked up the magazine on the table next to me. On the cover, a new mom, looking jazzed, pressed her nose into her newborn's stunned and wizened face. And when my sister rejoined me-sitting down heavily next to me, minus a clipboard of new-patient papers-I surprised myself: "You've been here before, haven't you?" I asked. I said it in the arch way of female detectives on TV, all of them single and difficult to aniuse. "Last spring," Pavia admitted. She took the magazine lying on my lap and ran her hand over the cover. "This mom looks like she's gonna eat him, poor kid," she observed. "So yeah. I was here last spring. I was pregnant, and then I wasn't." She began flipping the pages of the magazine. "Miscarriage." "You were still with Jack?" |