February Read Online Free Page A

speak blandly when he wanted to make fun of her. He could be dry. She was not screaming. But she would try to speak more softly.
    I’m in the Singapore airport trying to get myself an espresso, he said.
    Helen heard a cash-register drawer snap closed. John had been all over the world on business. Tasmania was the most recent place. Meetings in Melbourne and then an adventure vacation in Tasmania. Some outdoorsy package. If you go all that way you want to take a few days, see the place, he had explained to her.
    And now you’re on your way home? Helen asked.
    . . . . .
    There’s a Baby Coming, November 2008
    TWO DAYS AGO I was feeding peanuts to a wallaby, John told his mother. Now I’m in the Singapore airport.
    He had been reaching into his pocket to pay for the espresso and he’d pulled out a candy wrapper and wondered how it got there. A purple wrapper with an illustration of a comic-book princess brandishing her hand—on her hand was a giant ring she wanted someone to kiss—and John thought of the wallaby nursing its baby. How the mother wallaby had seemed both lulled and dangerous as the baby nuzzled at her teats. The mother had rocked and swayed while the little one suckled. Splotches of scouring light had fallen through the rainforest onto the hard-packed earth and boulders.
    There had been a Japanese girl beside him, maybe eight or nine years old, in a yellow sundress. Her parents were a little farther down the path. John could hear their voices through the leaves. The little girl reached out to pat the baby wallaby and the mother wallaby hissed. Drawing back her lips to reveal mottled gums and yellow teeth. John put a hand on the child’s shoulder. Shadows flickered across the ground like the raggedy end of a film in an old projector; there was a rush of wind high up, a shuddering light.
    He’d made the little girl take a few steps back, his eyes on the wallabies. They were animals no bigger than mid-sized dogs and appeared to be as innocuous as teddy bears, springing up and down the trail. But they were not cute; they were wild—maybe rabid, for all he knew.
    John was sure the mother wallaby would pounce and tear out the little girl’s throat. Big eyes with thick, feminine eyelashes. John looked the mother wallaby in the eye, but if there was intelligence in the animal—something he could bargain with—John did not see it. The eyes were amber, a splintering of darks and lights, browns, rusts, golds, and devoid of anything other than dumb instinct. The mother shivered. The muscular tail thwacked a bush. Then the baby sneezed. Ker-chew . It rubbed both paws over its nose, eyes shut, a headshake, a clownish unclogging of water droplets and snot and mother’s milk that startled them all, put things right, and both wallabies leapt through the underbrush and were gone. The little girl rolled her shoulder to release it from John’s grip. Then she was running up the path away from him, her straight black hair flicking from left to right.
    It was a five-hour hike to Wineglass Bay, and how white the sand of that beach had appeared when seen from the lookout above. And that’s when John’s cellphone rang.
    They were a small crowd of tourists on the lookout platform. The sibilant shuck-shucking of cameras, the crescendo of surf from far below. It had been a hard climb, and now an eerie solemnity fell over the group. They felt mounting awe, and the inevitable dip from awe to irritation. What did any of them have in their ordinary lives that could measure up to the stark virginity of that beach? They’d seen signs down on the beach requesting that they not remove the seashells.
    It seemed to John that the parents of the Japanese girl were bickering. They hardly spoke to each other once they reached the summit of the hike, and when they did speak their words were horked out, guttural and crisp, spat in the direction of their shoes. The mother lowered a pair of redrimmed sunglasses from her hair and crossed her