felt extraneous and found excuses to wander, purchasing water bottles and Trident sugarless gum. His terror of hospitals caused him to urinate frequently. He became familiar with the men’s room, and the other expectant fathers wearing baseball caps who appeared considerably less frightened than he was. It seemed to him that even the natal unit smelled of death. Behind a closed door a woman sobbed; Reese tried not to speculate about the cause of her grief.
Roberta began to vomit. Fortunately, the pain was also intensifying for the financial planner. Cam Phibbs located an anaesthetist to give her an epidural then suggested that Roberta have one too while they had her, the anaesthetist, in the room. By this time, Roberta was wailing in pain and had lost all interest in natural childbirth and the sporty, tanned hairiness of Cam Phibbs. Reese averted his eyes as they poked the large needle into her spine. He asked the financial planner’s husband, who’d just arrived off a plane, if he could turn down their portable CD player. Reese had been forced to listen to country western music for several hours and felt that at any moment he might terminate the box. The financial planner’s husband grudgingly reduced the volume by a fraction. Garth Brooks began belting out another tune. “Isn’t he screwing some hussy?” Reese inquired.
“I beg your pardon,” the financial planner’s husband said.
“All those songs about loving his wife, being faithful and all that, and there’s Garth out screwing some hussy.”
Roberta began gesturing frantically at Reese. “What is it?” he asked.
“Don’t cause a scene,” she whispered hoarsely.
“You want to hear this?”
“I don’t want a scene.”
Twelve hours later, Reese was fastening the strings of surgical scrubs, tucking his hair into an elasticized cap, and slipping paper booties over his shoes. He was no longer of this world. Sleep deprivation and country western music had bludgeoned rational thought. As instructed he followed the nurse into a delivery room so harshly lit it seemed smoky. Roberta, as far as he could make out, had also lost contact with planet Earth. She had the glazed eyes of the dying and he feared he would soon be without her and the baby. He couldn’t imagine raising Derek on his own, the silent meals, the relentless void. “No,” he protested.
“No?” the nurse asked, bustling around trays of what looked like tools of death.
“Nothing.”
She didn’t give him a second glance, had no time for his emotional blurting. “Stand by her head,” she ordered.
By rote he urged his wife to breathe in, breathe out, push, as he’d been taught to do in Lamaze class, but he could see that he was only irritating her, that if she weren’t preoccupied with torturous pain she’d have told him to bite it. The nurse continued to reduce the anaesthetic. “You have to feel it to know when to push,” she advised. Within minutes Roberta was screaming. Reese could only watch as violent contortions gripped her. The tennis player, his frizzy hair stuffed into a bulbous surgical cap, became violent as well, crouching between Roberta’s legs and barking commands. In exasperation, it seemed, he lifted a pair of surgical forceps, thrust them into her, and began wrenching them back and forth. “She’s not a tennis ball!” Reese shouted, picturing an irate Phibbs on the court, slamming his racket into the ground. But then the forceps clanked to the floor and Phibbs stood up with a tiny, purple creature in his hands. Its hair and skin were smeared with fluid, its limbs and head hung lifeless. The neonatal team, shrouded in orange, whisked it away and suddenly it was just them again, Roberta and Reese not holding hands while Cam Phibbs stitched the tear from her rectum to her vagina. “It’s just a precaution,” he advised, regarding the abrupt departure of their baby. “It’s a girl. She’ll probably be fine.”
Roberta began crying, bereft of pain and baby. Reese tried to reach her across the equipment but it was awkward. And she didn’t want him, he could tell. She wouldn’t look at him, covered her eyes, forcing her tears to spill around her fingers. They wheeled her back to the room vacated by the financial planner and husband. Reese turned off the CD player and put his arms around his wife. She felt coiled, as though at any instant she could strike. “It’ll be alright,” he said. “It’s just a precaution.”
“Go fuck yourself,” she said and began to heave sobs he’d never heard before; sobs full of despair and longing that humbled him, that made him resolve to buy many hundred-dollar knives.
He was in the corridor finding ice for her hemorrhoids when the baby was returned. Clara, to his amazement, was no longer purple and knew what to do with her mother’s breast, unlike Derek who’d had to be coached. Roberta didn’t smile at Reese but she formed a peace sign with her fingers. Reese kissed her palm. All would be well. That’s what he thought.
He checks his messages again. Roberta still hasn’t returned his call.
“Testosterone gel,” Sterling says. “I’m telling you, you got to try this stuff, it’s like my cock don’t know how to quit.”
Sterling paces beside Reese, trying to brainstorm a new angle on yet another campaign for a childhood illness. “This one attacks the lungs, right?” he offers. “So why don’t we say something like with every breath they take, kind of tie it in with that Police song, you know the one ...?” He begins to sing the song. “My ex loved that one.” He eats more pizza-flavoured popcorn, tosses a kernel into the air then catches it. Reese’s office smells of pizza. “She wants me to loan her some money. I said, ‘Get serious.’ She says her dogs are freakin’ out because she has to keep the house clean for the realtors, says the dogs shit on the floor because it’s so clean, it stresses them out. Not my problem, I told her.”
Reese is trying to convince himself that Roberta is not ignoring him, that shortly she will call and apologize for her abrupt departure and insist that he take the kids for the weekend.
Sterling waves a newspaper at him. “This is some deal John Travolta’s got going, parking his jumbo jet outside his place. It’s like a small airport only it’s got a swimming pool plus eight bedrooms. What’s he need a jumbo for would be my question. Guess he gets off flying big jets.”
Reese has been offering free advice to an environmental group in Alberta who can’t afford a dialler and who are trying to prevent an oil corporation’s development of a wetlands for a relatively small amount of oil. The current government has amended the regulation that prohibited screwing with the wetlands — a unique area that covers less than 1 percent of the province. Once gone, there will be no more endangered plant species, no more migratory bird habitat, no more oxygen. But John Travolta will be flying big jets.
Serge Hollyduke shoves an envelope at him. “You’ve got to sign for this.”
“What is it?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“Did I not ask you not to use that word?” Sterling says.
“I don’t use it around the callers.”
“Don’t use it, period. Capisc?”
Reese signs the courier’s form and looks at the envelope’s letterhead. Babb & Hodge, Barristers and Solicitors.
“Somebody suing you?” Sterling asks, tossing a kernel into the air but failing to catch it. It lands on Reese’s desk, bounces into his glass of Evian, and begins to swell. “What’s up, boyo? Bad news?”
Reese has opened the letter and has tried to read beyond “your wife has retained us to act as her lawyer” but the words blur and breathing has become difficult.
“Easy, boyo. It’s the wife, isn’t it? What’d I tell ya? Take action, my man, or you’ll be out on the street.”
Reese leans over the letter, narrowing his eyes to improve focus, he must focus. Roberta has told Babb & Hodge that she is concerned because Clara has been acting “strangely,” has taken to turning her dolls over and “sticking things up their bottoms.” What is she talking about?! In their last meeting with the cat-obsessed