Only Children Read Online Free Page B

doesn’t look like me. She’d need one hell of a dowry.”
    “Oh, Bear.” Nina sighed, hurt by his cynicism. “If she looks like you, she’ll be beautiful. Six feet tall, beautiful skin.”
    “Brown eyes?”
    “She’ll have my eyes,” Nina said firmly, her blue eyes widening with conviction.
    Eric laughed, pleased he had wrung this little admission of vanity. “Only a one-in-four-chance,” he warned, shaking his finger at her.
    “It’ll come through.”
    “Will you love this baby if it doesn’t?”
    “What do you mean?” she protested.
    “I don’t know. I just hope—for its sake—that it’s got blue eyes.”
    “That’s not funny,” she said, turning from him to look balefully at the television. Her thick brown hair shifted off her back, fell across her shoulder, and exposed the pale white freckled skin of her neck.
    “I was kidding, for chrissakes.”
    “I don’t feel like joking right now,” Nina answered in a faint voice. “Ugh,” she groaned, a hand reaching for her back.
    Wearily, Eric planted his fist there and pressed. Hard. Pushing, pushing, pushing. Hoping he could get the little bugger to come out already. To end the fantasy and begin the reality.
    “E LEVATE THE BLADDER ,” she heard Stein say. Peter winced. He tried to mask his reaction, but a flicker of queasy disgust peeped through-Diane felt weird about their poking around her insides like shoppers at a sale counter, but only intellectually. She couldn’t picture—even to scare herself—what they were doing. And this abstracted relationship to the birth of her son was a relief. She had worried she wouldn’t be up to natural childbirth, that like some scared kid on the first day of battle, she’d panic and flee, only to be dragged, crying, back to the front—humiliation following cowardice.
    Instead, this seemed almost queenly. Her husband, the doctors, and the nurses attendant on her various parts, the heavy painful lower half of her body whisked away to a numbed dimension.
    “Here he is!” Stein said. She strained her neck and caught a glimpse (above the tented blue sheet rising from her chest) of a slimy bald head. “Clip. All right.”
    The baby cried. Not the bloodcurdling scream she expected, but a feeble squeak of protest, a kitten startled from sleep.
    Stein, his eyes warmer, bigger, and kinder than she had ever seen them, approached with her son. Stein’s hand, covered by a transparent rubber glove, encompassed the whole of baby’s skull; the fingertips spread beyond, petals open, cradling the blossom within.
    “Let’s say hello to Mama and then we’ll check you out,” Stein said to the creature—it was too much of a miniature, too strangely animate, too wet to be called anything else—and then laid it in between her swollen breasts. One of the nurses—also beaming with tranquil joy—raised Diane’s head so she could look at the face.
    “Hello,” said a voice at her side. She was surprised to find it belonged to Peter; she had almost forgotten he was there. Peter leaned in, his hand covering baby’s tiny, furiously clenched fist. By comparison, Peter’s hand looked gigantic and terrible.
    “Easy,” she said involuntarily.
    “I’m barely touching him,” Peter complained.
    She looked at the face. It was unreal—the skin translucent (hardly protecting the blue-green veins beneath), fine hairs everywhere, the lips full, brilliantly red against their pale surroundings. Baby’s legs and arms cringed and yearned, as if finding the open air harsh— a mute appeal for cushions and warmth.
    “Hello, Byron,” Peter said to the baby, using the name he had urged over her plaintive objections. Too pretentious, too odd (the potential nickname—By?—sounded like a description of sexual confusion), and besides, Diane had never read Byron. (Wasn’t he a sexist pig?) But Peter had, especially in adolescence, and he made no attempt to pretend it was simply a love for the name itself. “It’ll guarantee