February Read Online Free PDF

then it was stuck to his other shoe.
    John, his mother said.
    She says she’s having a baby, John said.
    Who says? his mother asked.
    A woman, John said. Who I slept with.
    Whom, his mother said. She was half asleep.
    With whom I slept, John said. He bent and removed the candy wrapper from his shoe and looked hard at it. The princess in the illustration had an oversize, threatening grin and the print below was in Japanese. He slid the wrapper through a vent in the air conditioner built into the ledge under the window. The wrapper rattled violently and was sucked from his fingers to become trapped in some flickering gadget inside the ledge. It created a low, sick whir deep down in the cogs.
    My God, his mother said.
    The shock in his mother’s voice sent a shiver through John. He could see her sitting up in bed. That silly mask she wore pushed up on her forehead, her hair mashed flat on one side. Out on the landing strip several men in white suits were sauntering towards the plane. One of them was holding a wand lit fluorescent orange, and he turned towards John and waved it slowly back and forth. Who was the man waving at? It seemed to be a warning from a dream: Get out of the way . The plane was bearing down on the man with the wand, its white wings tinted pink with sunlight. The orange wand swished through the moist heat, back and forth, and then the man ducked his head and trotted out of view.
    What did you say to her, John? his mother asked. The sun was as red as any sun he’d ever seen. Tropical pollution made it redder. The sun was shedding its beauty in spurts and jolts. The palm trees at the edge of the landing strip looked as if they were scrubbing the sky.
    John had said to Jane Downey: Why didn’t you get an abortion?
    It was the first thing he’d said. Did that make him a bad guy? He had said it knowing it was too late for an abortion. He had said it knowing it was a useless thing to say.
    And Jane Downey had hung up on him. There was just the platform and the giant boulders and the pale yellow dress of the Japanese child and the red candy ring catching the light.
    It was uncanny: a woman so far away with his child in her womb. John had believed her, of course. He knew the world could be this way: A stranger might call you to account, wreck your life.
    The Singapore sun bored into his skull and he was in the clutches of full-blown bafflement. Dazzled by how wrong it seemed. He had been wronged, and maybe he was wrong too, but his mother might absolve him. Everything around him—the chrome and black-vinyl furniture, the silver carpet, the white espresso cup—was stained red, a creeping blush.
    On the platform overlooking Wineglass Bay John had glanced away from the little girl when Jane Downey announced she was pregnant, and he saw that the little girl’s parents were making out. The man’s hand under his wife’s shirt, the shirt bunched over the man’s wrist, the small of the woman’s back. Her black, black hair cut in a straight line hanging just below her shoulder blades. John could make out the woman’s panties through her tight white pants. The elastic on her panties, a lurid pink, rode up over the top of the low-slung waistband of her pants, cutting into the cheeks of her bum and making a voluptuous dent on her bare hip. The parents had not been fighting. They had been aching to touch. The air on the platform had blown in from Antarctica and it was the purest, cleanest air in the world. It made everything look too sharp. John had gasped. Then he’d blurted into the phone: Why didn’t you have an abortion?
    He wanted his mother to say that the pregnancy must be the result of an elaborate trick. Especially since he had been generous with laughter and good feeling and even money; he’d bought Jane an expensive necklace after a long discussion with the artisan who had fashioned it. Hardened volcanic lava, chunks of it. The kiss-off present, he’d admitted to himself on the platform in Tasmania.