The Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

they all so calm?
    “Do what the officer says, Stewie.” That was Brigid. She was unusually quiet, like she was telling him something in code. Something so smart it was practically a secret language. He was crying. “You have no choice, Stewie,” she said. “He’ll arrest you.”
    “No, he won’t.” Marty woke up again. Now he was disgusted. This shit had to stop. “What are you, Brigid? Insane? What is this, Stew? This is not the time to be a wiseass. Look, we’re on your side, so be on our side. Do what the cop says. Tell the guy what happened. What happened? The guy touched you? Just tell him and no one will ever bring it up again.”
    “I can’t explain it.”
    “What do you mean, you can’t explain it.”
    It had been years since Stewie had looked into his father’s eyes and seen anything but avoidance. He was overwhelmed by love for his father. He wanted his father to be a father, to do the right thing.

    “I’m wrong, Dad.”
    “Wrong? Do you know how to take care of yourself? Do you want to be out on the street? I’ll show you wrong.”
    “Marty, we can’t send him out on his own.”
    “Mr. and Mrs. Mulcahey.” Bart was tired now. He had other things to do. “I have the arrest report. I know what was going on in that washroom. Stew, you want me to tell your parents exactly what you’ve been doing? Do you want me to tell your principal and guidance counselor? Do you want this on your transcript? Do you want everyone at school to know? Or do you want to co-operate?”
    Marty was pasty. He felt faint. This was too much pressure, too much stress. He wanted to flee, but he just sat there, like he was supposed to. He acted responsibly like everyone wanted him to.
    “Okay,” Stew said, trying not to start crying again.
    “Good boy.” Kevin Bart rustled Stew’s hair. It was comforting. “It’s the only way out. Now everyone sit down. I’ve got my pen. You talk and I’ll write. Okay, Stew, start from the beginning.”

5
    Eva spent the next purgatorial hour on a pay phone in the clinic’s waiting room. Her insurance company’s voice mail system was engineered to trigger psychotic episodes. There was no way to speak to a real person. Every avenue led to an endless Hold . It gave Eva plenty of time to worry, and plenty of time to look at the other women crying into phones or waiting for their various stages of prognosis. Most of these sister worriers were older. Rarely these days was Eva the youngest person in any room. But today was an exception. Was this to be her future: anxiety dressed as inevitability? After a certain age, of course, no disaster is a complete surprise.
    She thought about calling Mary at work, but why make her worry? What good would it do? Mary was afraid of doctors, hospitals, medicine, and the deterioration of the body. Calling would make Mary so worried and upset that she wouldn’t be able to word-process efficiently, so she would be trapped inadequately and helplessly at work. Why do that to her? It would help nothing.
    Like most of the others in the waiting room, Eva was starting to feel that her situation was hopeless. There was clearly no person at the other end of the phone line. If a real person should ever answer, they would be impatient, mumbling, uninformed, surly, and paid five dollars an hour. The insurance company made clear their contempt by the cold barrage of abusive pop music and repetitious lying, automated, cheery statements falsely promising that an operator would be with her shortly . Who invented voicemail, automatic holds, and mandatory telephonic Muzak? All three were bad ideas.

    Eva hung up, defeated, and sat down on the waiting room bench. The men who controlled this insurance company had created a system that was unworkable. She wondered if they did it on purpose.
    “Eva?”
    She looked, and there, nursing one infant and with another in her arms, was Adrianna Hopstein, an old friend from college twenty years before.
    “Oh my God,” Eva