Eleven Hours Read Online Free Page B

were seeing doctors, getting tests, figuring out what the matter was. Senior year: driving to chemo appointments, trying to cook food her mother would find palatable, managing the paperwork to get her her disability payments. Her mother insisting that Lore apply to college, Lore refusing. Then her mother back at work at the taxi dispatcher’s and Lore starting at Stuyvesant College, fifteen miles away. The relapse, more chemo, more treatment, more pain, more bureaucracy. Lore got her classwork done and managed to stay in school, but she never found the time to make friends, and finally it was as if she’d lost the knack of it. Four years of her mother’s illness contracted around her and squeezed her into a different shape, so that she became detached and careful, a provisional sort of person, someone who did not believe in the day after next. Then her mother was truly better, but Lore stayed close by and kept her heart free, afraid to be spirited away by some love affair or ambitious impulse—because What If?
    It is coming again. The pain is signaling from a distance, beginning to press her. Lore struggles up to her hands and knees, Franckline steadying her as she rises ponderously above her own weight. “Now yell,” says Franckline. Lore takes a deep breath and holds her mouth open in a large O, to give the sound the biggest possible exit. The breath, the O, causes words to appear in her mind, and the words are Fuck you . Fuck who? It doesn’t matter. She breathes air deep into her belly, makes an O, and her mind agrees: Fuck you . She propels from her mouth a great moan that grows louder as the pain builds. When she runs out of moan she inhales again and pushes out a new voice stronger than before. Fuck you and you and you . Fuck you, fuck everyone. Fuck you all, fuck off, you millionfold little fuckers. The sound she is making is so loud that it stops up her ears. The moan and the pain run side by side, both tenacious, both insistent, but finally the pain begins to drop off and Lore lets the moan slacken a bit, too: a jog now, a trot, a walk, and then both sound and pain come to a stop.
    A moment passes. Then another. Lore lifts her head. Franckline has stepped aside and is looking at her with a smile, impressed. Their eyes meet. Franckline starts to laugh heartily, and Lore laughs too.
    The monitoring belt has gone on and off, on and off. It is past noon. Franckline spends time in other rooms and takes her lunch, leftovers from the pork dish Bernard made last night. He is not a man to avoid the kitchen. He gets home earlier in the evening than she does, and he likes to have it smelling of meat and vegetables by the time she arrives.
    Franckline nibbles at her dish. Every bite carries a taste of rancid oil, although she knows everything in their house is fresh. It’s her, her changed body chemistry. It is time to tell Bernard about the baby. This girl in room 7, so solitary, so wary, seems a sort of warning. Franckline should not become like that, a person too shut up in herself, too frightened and proud to share her pain. There is a side of her, she knows, that gravitates in that direction, toward that pride, that aloneness. At first she had told herself she would speak to Bernard at the end of the first trimester, when the earliest risks would be over; then she wanted one more week to be sure, and now two more than that have gone by. It is wrong to keep Bernard out. But it is so terrible to speak. It is in the later weeks that the worst dangers will come: her water breaking too early, preterm labor, deformity leading to death in the womb. If she tells Bernard about the child, only to lose it, she will feel as if she has once again stolen from him the life that he should be having with her, and that he could be having with someone else. Does he sometimes regret—in a pause at his office, or while speaking to his mother on the phone—approaching a skinny and scared girl of eighteen