Six Weeks

His phone lit up on his knee. LINDEN HOUSE.

Jose turned it face down. It buzzed against his leg four more times, then stopped.

"Is that work?" Camille asked.

"Wrong number."

She nodded and went back to the clipboard. She'd filled in the forms in her small, upright hand, no corrections. Across the waiting room a woman in a Lakers sweatshirt was rocking a sleeping infant with her foot, the car seat swinging in short arcs. A television in the corner showed a cooking program with the sound off.

"Camille Vale?"

A nurse in purple scrubs held the door. Camille stood, tucked the clipboard under her arm, and looked at Jose. She didn't say *come.* She looked at his hands.

He followed her in.

The room was colder than the waiting area. There was a paper-covered table, a monitor on an arm, a box of gloves on the wall. Camille sat on the edge of the table with her shoes dangling and the paper crackling under her. Jose stayed by the door. Above him the ceiling tiles ran in neat rows with little holes in them, and he counted them without meaning to. Forty-two, six by seven.

"Dr. Anand will be right in," the nurse said. She was gone before he could find a place to put his coat.

"You can sit," Camille said.

"I'm all right."

"Jose."

He sat on the rolling stool. It was lower than it looked. He had to put his elbows on his knees.

The doctor was a small woman with gray at the temples and a voice like someone reading to a child. She shook Jose's hand first, which he noticed, then Camille's. She had Camille's chart open on a tablet.

"Congratulations, both of you. We'll confirm it properly, but the blood work agrees with your home tests." She turned to Camille. "Remind me of your last period."

"The fourth of September."

"And you're sure."

"I keep a calendar."

"I don't doubt it." Dr. Anand smiled. "Then by dates you're six weeks and two days. Let's have a look."

Jose did the arithmetic before he could stop himself. The wedding was the nineteenth of September. He subtracted. He counted on his thumb against his knee, the way he did on site, and the number came out where it came out.

It would fit. That was the thing. Everything fit.

"Lie back for me," the doctor said.

The gel was warm. Camille took in a short breath through her nose when the wand touched her and didn't let it out. The monitor above the table flickered with gray static, and then a dark oval came up in the middle of it, and a smaller shape inside the oval, no bigger than a grain of rice.

"There," Dr. Anand said. She tilted the screen toward them. "See the little flicker? Right there."

Jose looked.

A pale point, in a dark field, going on and off. On and off. Fast.

"That's the heartbeat," the doctor said. "A hundred and ten. Exactly where we want it."

Nobody spoke. The machine hummed. Jose realized he was holding the edge of the stool.

Camille had put her free hand over her mouth. She wasn't making any sound. Tears ran straight back from the corners of her eyes into her hair, one after the other, and she let them.

"Would you like to hear it?" Dr. Anand asked.

"Yes," Camille said, through her fingers.

A soft, hurried sound filled the room. A tiny, relentless galloping, like something running in the next apartment.

Jose looked at the ceiling. Forty-two tiles. He counted them again.

Camille's hand came out and found his. She didn't squeeze. She laid her palm on the back of his hand and let it rest there, a little damp, and kept her eyes on the screen.

"I wanted to tell you at the right moment," she said afterward, in the corridor. "I'm sorry it came out like this."

A nurse passed with a cart. They stood against the wall to let her by. Camille held the paper printout in both hands, the little gray picture, a white grain in a black room.

"Say something," she said.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"I mean." He took the printout from her because she'd offered it. Held it by the edge. "When did you know?"

"Nine days ago. I took three tests. I didn't believe the first two." She laughed once, a thin sound. "I wanted to be sure before I said it. I know how it looks."

"How does it look?"

"You tell me."

He studied her face. There was nothing in it. There was a woman who had been crying and had stopped and was waiting for him to decide who she was.

"I'm not asking you to come home," Camille said. "I want to be clear about that. I'm asking you to be at the appointments. That's all."

"That's not all."

"It could be."

"I'll come home," he heard himself say. "For the practicalities. The lease, the, there's a lot of, there's paperwork." He lifted the printout an inch. "Until we know more."

"Until we know what?"

"I don't know. What it is."

"It's a baby, Jose."

"I know."

"The guest room's made up," she said. "If you'd rather."

He said, "I'd rather."

She nodded. She took her coat from the hook on the wall and put it on, slowly, one sleeve and then the other, and when she turned around her face had gone smooth again.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out in the hallway. One voicemail, six minutes old. Linden House.

He didn't listen to it.

---

The body shop was closed. Jose climbed the outside stairs in the dark and knocked on the door at the top, and after a moment Rainer opened it with a dish towel in his hand.

"You look like hell," Rainer said.

"I have to tell you something."

"Come in."

The room smelled of burnt coffee. A laptop sat open on the table next to a legal pad covered in Rainer's cramped handwriting, names, phone numbers, a drawing of what looked like a floor plan. He turned the screen face down as Jose came in. It was done lightly, in passing, the way you shut a drawer.

"What's that?"

"Work." Rainer dried his hands. "Sit."

"I'll stand."

"You always do."

Jose took the printout out of his pocket, and for a second he couldn't think what to do with it. He put it on the table between the laptop and the pad. Rainer looked down at the gray picture and the small white grain and didn't touch it.

"Six weeks," Jose said. "Camille's pregnant."

The dish towel stopped moving.

"The doctor confirmed it today. I was there."

"Congratulations."

"Don't."

"What would you like me to say?"

"I don't know."

Rainer put the towel down on the counter and folded it in thirds. He lined up the edge with the edge of the sink. Jose watched him do it. There was no reason for the towel to be that straight.

"Six weeks," Rainer said. "So the wedding."

"The nineteenth. Or around it."

"Is it yours?"

Jose's whole body went still. It was a small thing, a hitch, and he knew Rainer had seen it, because Rainer's eyes had moved, just once, to his hands.

"Don't ask me that."

"I'm asking what you're asking yourself."

"I'm not asking myself anything."

"You counted on your fingers on the way up the stairs. I could hear you." Rainer's voice was very level. "You've been counting for three hours."

"She showed me the heartbeat."

"People show you things."

"Rainer."

"I'm not saying it isn't." He turned. His face had the careful blankness it had on the night Jose had found him in the bar, a surface held in place by effort. "I'm saying I'd want to know. If it were me. That's all."

"If it were you."

"If it were me and the child was mine and she was the kind of woman who could stand in a room with me and say what she said Wednesday." He stopped.

"What did she say Wednesday?"

Nothing moved in Rainer's face.

"What Wednesday?"

"Nothing. I mean." He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the stitches. "I mean it doesn't matter. It was a thing. It doesn't matter anymore."

"Rainer, did you see her?"

"I'm saying go home, Jose."

"It's temporary. I'm going for a few weeks. The practicalities. The appointments." He heard how it sounded and couldn't make it sound different. "I'm not choosing anything."

"No." Rainer opened the door. The cold came in off the stairs. "Everyone's temporary."

"That isn't fair."

"It's six weeks and a heartbeat. I'm not going to compete with it." He said it mildly. "Go on. She'll be waiting up."

Jose stood in the doorway for a moment. He had the strangest thought, that if he reached out and put his hand against Rainer's chest, he would feel something under the shirt going very fast.

He didn't. He left the printout on the table and took the stairs two at a time.

In the cab he sat with his hands between his knees and watched the road signs. The driver had a radio going, low. Somewhere past the bridge his phone buzzed against his thigh, and he took it out.

*Rainer: You're choosing the quiet again.*

He read it. Then he read it again, and his thumb hovered above the keyboard, and he found he'd already typed the first word of a reply and couldn't remember what the rest of the sentence was going to be.

He locked the phone. The cab went on toward the apartment, past the lit windows, past a lamp that someone had left on in an empty room.