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He can’t think of anythingThere are dark depressions under her eyes, like thumbprints on her white face She tells hioes immediately to the closet where he keeps theat the bottles and thinking Aspirin would increase the bleeding, if she’s still he, which is likely froer, he tells hio; it would have been extremely small even at six months She is so malnourished, he could have predicted toxemia, even placenta abruptio He continues to stare into the closet, tapping a finger against his chin He can’t even give her Percodan-it contains aspirin De What? He wishes he could give her a shot of Pitocin, but doesn’t see how he can

He returns to the kitchen and hands her the pills with a glass of water Four pills, two yellow and two blue, when she’s only asked for aspirin, but she ss the up from her books This much she’ll take from him This is the full measure of love he is qualified to dispense

He bends down again over the developer bath, his face so near the cheives up its soul to him as it lies in the pan, like someone drowned at the bottom of a pool It’s still the sa for is the luminous quality that water has, even dark water seen from a distance There is a surface on it he just can’t draw out of these dry shadows

He straightens up, his eyes still running, and pats his pockets for his handkerchief He locates it finally in the wrong pocket and blows his nose He has raph in every possible way, and none of it has yielded what he wants He sees now that the problem isn’t in the development; the initial conception was a mistake He fails in the darkrooive up, but he does For once he lets go of the need to work his will He clicks off the old red dwarf and turns on the bright overhead light, and the unfixed prints lying in the bath all darken to black It doesn’t e can’t be corrected

Chapter 14

COSIMA

14 Day of the Dead

On the last Monday of October Rita Cardenalschool, this was her last day, and if anybody wanted her fetal pig they could have it, it was good as new

We’d plowed right through the ani to look at in the way of protozoans We’d iven due attention to the arew more elaborate with each field trip and was now called the Frog Club Med There were fern pally did high-i Noere up to exploring the inner mysteries of an unborn mammal, which had to be purchased mail order

But Rita hadn’t had the stos considered She was expecting twins She said she was dropping out because she felt too tired to get her homework done; I feared for these children’s future

Rita wore about half a dozen earrings in one ear and had a tough-cookie attitude, and I liked her She’d been a good student She seened to her fate, in that uniquely teenage way of looking at life, as if the whole production were a thing inflicted on young people by sorownups with bad fashion sense I was disappointed but unsurprised to lose Rita I’d been watching her jeans get tight The pregnancy dropout rate in Grace ay ahead of e hazard Rita was a statistic On Tuesday Ian unscheduled unit on birth control

The reaction in the ranks was equal parts eested orgies in study hall There was soot to the visual aids "Look, there’s nothing funny about a condohter "It’s a piece of equipment with a practical purpose, like a" Only the ies calove," I said, settling for the cliche I turned from the blackboard and narrowedis funny, you should see the ridiculous-looking piece of equipuys widened their eyes at each other but shut up I was getting the hang of this

"Miss," said Raymo They’d never learned to call me Codi