"I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I was about Greg and Carol. And Mickey too." -
"Well," she said simply, "Mickey was a good man, and Greg and Carol were my closest friends."
"How is Ed?"
"Well, Ed's got the use of both his arms again. Not like before, but pretty much. Ellen Mae is a lot better too. She's up in Anadarko now...
"How is Jerry doing? Is Jerry here?"
"No. He's at The University. I'm expecting him." She glanced at her watch. "You want some lunch? I'm making tacos, it's easy."
"I'll help," Alex said.
THEY DRIFTED INTO Juanita's cramped and ancient kitchen. Sylvia stayed on the couch. Alex winced as he heard her deftly fire up the TV with a remote. She began methodically combing through Austin's eight hundred available channels, with repeated dabs of her thumb.
He moved beside the electric range and watched the taco mix bubbling in a pan. The top of Juanita's stove was liberally spattered with orange grease. Jane shook some garlic salt at the taco mix, as if trying to choke it into submission. His sister had to be the worst cook in the world.
"You gotta make allowances for Sylvia," he said quietly. "She's not real good with other people, just kind of shy."
"I'm just touched that you would bring your girlfriend along to meet me, Alex."
"I'd kind of like it, if you and she could get along. She's kind of important to me. The most important woman in my life, really."
"That serious, huh?" -
"I don't have a lot of room to judge there," he said. "I met her on the nets, in a genetic-disorder support group. Sylvia's good on nets. People like Sylvia and me, people who've been through a lot of sickness when young, it tends to narrow our social skills. She had kind of an autism thing, she's had a hard time of life. But she's all rewoven now, and she's okay underneath."
"Boy, it really is that serious," Jane said.
"How is Jerry? Are you getting along?"
"You really want to know?"
"Yes, really."
"He's different. I'm different. We're a lot different than we were a year ago." She looked at him hard, and he could see it there behind her eyes, waiting to pour out.
"Tell me," he said.
"Well, it's since the baby... . Alex, he's really good with the baby. The baby really got through to him, he's so good with his little son. It's like... he's really good when he has someone he doesn't have to reason with. He's so patient and kind with that little kid, it's really amazing."
"How about you, though?"
"Us? We get along. We don't even have to get along. We're stuck here in this dinky little house, but you wouldn't know it. He's got his little office here with the virching stuff and his university link, and I've got my net-rig in the back in the baby's room, and he does his thing, and I do my thing, and we do our together-thing, and it works out okay, it really does."
"What are you working on these days, exactly?"
"Net-stuff. The usual. Well, not the usual. Mommy net-stuff. The kind of stuff you can do with one hand, while you're wiping warm spit off your forearm." Jane laughed, and poked at her taco mix with a wooden spoon. "Anyway, that data we got-the stuff you recorded when the stream broke down on us? That made itqn three final release disks! We got money for-that. Pretty good money. We bought this house with it."
"Alex, this isn't a big house, I know that, but it's a stand-alone in a really prized area. I've even got a real garden in the backyard, you should see it. And you wouldn't believe the neighborhood politicals here in Austin, they are really fierce. You can walk to campus, and play with your kid right in the parks, anytime day or night, and it's a really pretty area, and it's really safe too. The crime rate is very low here, and you never see a structure hit, never. It's a real enclave here, it's a mega-good place for a little baby to live."
"Can I see the baby?"
"Oh! Sure! Let me turn this down."
She shut down the stove and led him into the back room. The nursery. The nursery was the first room in the house that actually struck him as a place where Juanita lived. The nursery looked like a room where an intelligent and hyperactive woman with design training had spent a long time thinking hard about exactly how things should look. It was like a big jewel box for a baby, it was like some monster bassinet in shades of fuzzy-cuddly midnight blue. It was the kind of room that created in Alex the instant urge to flee.
Juanita bent over the antique, hand-stripped, repainted wooden crib and looked in on her child. Alex had never seen quite that expression on her face before, but he recognized it. He recognized it as the place where all Juanita's raw ferocity had gone. All that steamy energy she'd always had, had been sucked into that all-encompassing Madonna look.
She was actually talking baby talk to the infant. Genuine oogly-googly sounds without enough consonant8 m them. Then she lifted the child up in its little trailing baby dress and handed him over.
The kid's hairless little noggin was in a little gray skullcap, kind of like a stuffed baked mushroom. Alex was no connoisseur of infants, but even he could tell that his little nephew-Michael Gregory Mulcahey-was not an attractive child. It was hard to tell, with the baby's squashed, cartilaginous little face, but he seemed to have the worst features of both his parents: Juanita's square jaw and Mulcahey's odd, bull-like forehead.
"Gosh, he's really cute," Alex said. The child reacted with a fitful look and vigorous kicking. There was nothing wrong with the infant's legs. The kid had legs like a centaur.
"You can't believe it, can you?" Jane said, and smiled.
"No. Not really. I mean, not until now."
"Neither could I. I think of all the times I almost took that abortifacient thing, you know. I actually put that pill u~side my mouth once. I was gonna swallow it, and my period was gonna come back, and Jerry and me were gonna be exactly the same, and everything was going to be extremely lifelike. And if I didn't eat that pill, then the consequences were gonna be unimaginable and extremely grave! And I chose consequences, Alex, I did it all on purpose, just like I knew what I was doing. And now I have this little stranger in my life. Only he's not a little stranger at all. He's my baby."
"I 5CC."
"I love my baby, Alex. I don't just sort of love him, I really love my baby, I love him desperately, we both do. We dote on him. I want to have another baby."
"Really."
"Childbirth's not that bad. It's really interesting. I kind of liked childbirth actually. It felt really intense and important."
"I guess it would," Alex said. "I want Sylvia to see my nephew."
JANE FOLLOWED HER brother back to the living room. He carried the child as if Michael Gregory was a wet bag full of live frogs. The strange girl peeled her reptile gaze from the television, and her eyes shot from the baby, to Alex, to Jane, to the baby again, and then to Jane once more, with a look of such dark and curdled envy and hatred that Jane felt stunned.
"He's really cute," the girl said. "Thanks."
"That's a nice hat he's got too." "Thank you, Sylvia."
"That's okay." She started watching TV again.
Jane carried the baby back to the nursery and put him down. He'd just had his feeding. The baby was good about being handled. He liked to save his most energetic screamings for about 3 A.M.
"I guess her reaction seemed strange," Alex said. "But babies are kind of a funny topic for women with genetic disorders."
"She really wanted to see the baby, though. She said she did."
"It's okay. Sylvia is fine."
"Did you have the baby scanned for disorders?"