She must have been pacing because her voice grew fainter and then indecipherable as she moved away from him and then louder as she moved back and crossed the doorway of his study again.
“I know I should have gotten up and taken out my diaphragm and used more contraceptive gel,” she was saying. “But Graham was so eager, and I didn’t want to break the mood. Also, I sort of thought, my eggs are so old and his sperm is probably pretty slow by now—it just seemed so unlikely!”
Graham’s face was suddenly scorching, as though he had thrust his head through the trapdoor of a smokehouse. He could not have been more embarrassed if he’d appeared naked in front of the Origami Club.
Relax, he told himself. Audra was speaking to her gynecologist. It was probably nothing the man hadn’t heard before.
“So I knew at the moment that it was fairly unwise,” Audra said. “But I thought everything would probably be just fine.”
That was pretty much her theory of life, Graham thought—this belief that everything would be just fine. He wondered how often that actually turned out to be true for her. He would guess at most—at most—half the time.
Audra paced out of his hearing again, and he tried perfunctorily to compose an email. But he was listening for her footsteps, and sure enough, she came back along the hall and into his study.
“You won’t believe this,” she said, collapsing into a leather armchair, “but they’re out of the office! Until Thursday! Because of Easter! I wanted to say, ‘You think people don’t have pregnancy scares on major holidays? You think you can just close up shop and leave all your patients sweating and anxious?’?”
Graham frowned. “So you didn’t speak to Dr. Medowski?”
“No, I just told you,” she said impatiently. “The office was closed.”
“So who were you talking to?”
“Some woman at the answering service,” Audra said.
The answering service! Graham’s face felt hot again.
“She said Dr. Medowski is playing golf in Florida, which I can’t help feeling is sort of frivolous, but I guess he couldn’t know I was suddenly going to need him,” Audra said, and she sighed.
Graham studied her. If she really was pregnant, it agreed with her. She looked pretty—pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, her wavy auburn hair like a hint of autumn color. He remembered suddenly how she’d looked in the months after Matthew was born. Her face had been thin, with too-prominent cheekbones, and her hair had grown dry and brittle, as though motherhood were draining her of all vitality.
“Lorelei says that the doctor would probably tell me to wait anyway,” Audra said.
“Lorelei knows, too?” Graham asked.
“Yes, I stopped by her apartment on my way back from taking Matthew to the bus,” Audra said. “We talked about how terrible it is that you spend so much of your life hoping you’re not pregnant. Like this time in college when Lorelei had a one-night stand with the guy who lived in the apartment below us. He was handsome but he had this very distinct unibrow. Lorelei and I used to call him Bert because of that. So, anyway, after the one-night stand, Lorelei said she had these very vivid dreams about being in a delivery room and the doctor holding up a baby with Bert brows. And even after she knew she wasn’t pregnant, she would have, not nightmares, I guess—more like bad daydreams—where she took little Bert home to her family and they were all like ‘But his eyebrows! Where did they come from?’?”
Graham closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair. He thought that, really, Journey was right: it just goes on and on and on and on.
—
Graham had been developing a theory lately that the parents of kids with Asperger’s also had Asperger’s, only less pronounced. A milder Asperger’s. The seeds of Asperger’s. And he’d certainly met enough parents of special-needs kids to know.
Of all the dozens of special-needs kids’ parents he knew, one parent of every couple always seemed a bit odd, a bit eccentric, a bit Aspergery. One parent would be unable to pick up on social signals—say, for instance, not understanding that Graham’s putting on his pajamas and brushing his teeth was a signal the evening was drawing to a close and they should go home. The father of a friend of Matthew’s named Lucas used to actually follow Graham and Audra out to their car and keep talking while they drove away. Graham had always been worried about running over the man’s foot. Another man had seemed unable to process that he and Graham drove the same make and model of car but that Graham’s was a different color. “It’s not blue?” the man had said more than once. “I want it to be blue, like mine.”
One woman, the mother of a small boy named Jack, used to respond to anything other than a direct question by saying, “Well, that’s news to me.” You could say “I’m going to pick up Matthew at six” or “Jack ate some cupcakes”—it didn’t matter. She would say, “Well, that’s news to me.” The first time she did it, Graham thought maybe Jack wasn’t supposed to eat cupcakes, or maybe Jack didn’t like cupcakes as a rule, but it quickly became clear that this was her all-purpose response to any remark. Graham wondered why she’d settled on that particular statement, because it didn’t seem like it would apply to all that many situations. Perhaps it had started as some sort of sports-related thing with her husband: “The Giants are on tonight.” “Well, that’s news to me.” “The Mets won!” “Well, that’s news to me.”
And food! Dear God. Graham had never met such finicky adults. The kids, sure, he expected that—nothing spicy or exotic or oddly textured went over well with children. But the parents were just as bad, and full of exacting standards—steak was supposed to be medium-rare, pasta was supposed to be spaghetti, chicken was supposed to be white meat, ice cream was supposed to be vanilla. “Soup is supposed to be hot,” one man had said accusingly when Graham served gazpacho. (That was back in the early days, before he truly appreciated the magnitude of the problem—back when he still experimented and hoped for the best.)
One woman had said, “This salad has so many vegetables!” in a soft, startled voice, and Graham had thought at the time that she meant it had too many greens and not enough delicious, high-calorie things like bacon and candied walnuts. But looking back on it now, he thought it was more likely she meant it had too many ingredients. She probably wanted just two: iceberg lettuce and beefsteak tomatoes.