Read Online It Will Come to Me by Emily Fox Gordon - Free Book Online

whether either of these would attain hurricane status and whether either might pose any threat to south Texas. “But look. Lookie here,” he went on, pointing to a whorled swelling off the coast of Africa. “That's Tropical Depression Three formin’ up there, gettin’ ready to get in line.”
    As she drank her coffee she watched the dawn pick out the details of the backyard, the humanoid limbs of the crepe myrtles, the sagging garage they still meant to convert someday into a study for Ben, the sun-scorched patches on the lawn. The lights in the house across the way went on and she settled back in the chaise to watch the yuppie breakfast scene she'd been monitoring for the past ten years. The cast of characters consisted of two tall blond parents, three rangy blond children, and an ever changing nanny. She'd never met this family, never even seen them outside of this view, but she'd made as thorough a study of the children as was possible, considering that she couldn't quite make out their faces. She remembered two from the time they were toddlers and the youngest as an infant. The parents she knew only as slender bending figures in the periphery of the picture, the father in pale-green surgeon's scrubs and the mother in a narrow skirt and blazer, leaning down to distribute goodbye kisses. Many years back, when the children were small, she'd felt an automatic stab of disapproval at these daily leave-takings. In recent years she'd come to acknowledge that she was in no position to pronounce judgment.
    The nanny attrition had sped up recently; two had come and gone in the last year. Ruth knew why. The eldest blond child was a preteen now, and his transformation from child to adolescent was well under way. She saw it in the abject hostility of his slumpand the way he turned his body away from his siblings. In her mind's eye she could picture the look on his face—that princely contempt disguising queasy panic, as though it had just occurred to him that perhaps it was he and not the world that was the source of some smell he couldn't get out of his nostrils. It was Isaac's expression, the one she first noticed when he was ten or eleven.
    She kept a group of framed photographs on the table beside the chaise. Here he was a few minutes after delivery, a pugilistic-looking newborn with a squashed nose. His face was covered with livid purple and yellow blotches; he squinted hard under the delivery-room lights and hunched his shoulders like a miniature ogre. “It's Chuck Wepner,” was Ben's remark, addressed to a young intern, one of a group of five or six clustered around the delivery table as the dripping, wailing, mucus-smeared baby, umbilicus just severed, was laid on Ruth's chest.
    “Who?”
    “Chuck Wepner,” said Ben. “The Bayonne Bleeder. A heavyweight from the seventies.” Ben was wearing regulation scrubs and paper turban. He'd taken out his camera, but for the moment seemed disinclined to use it. This was the first Ruth had seen of him in a while; he'd been pushed far back in the crowd of onlookers during the delivery.
    “He's Isaac,” Ruth announced. Nobody seemed to hear her. She propped herself on her elbows and took a look at the baby. On his slimy cheek, she noticed, was an adult-sized pimple with a hard white pustule at its center. “He already has a pimple?” she asked the nurse who was taking her blood pressure as another nurse lifted Isaac away to be washed and weighed. “Oh, that's
real
normal,” said the nurse in a soothing-nurse voice. “Maybe he'sprecocious,” said Ruth, but this seemed to go past her. “What do you think of your son, Professor?” asked the other nurse. “Ten pounds, six ounces. Here, hold him.” Ben took the howling, tightly swaddled Isaac in two spread hands, as if receiving a football. “You don't need to be scared of him,” said the nurse.
    The newborn Isaac was not pretty. Nor was he friendly. He went rigid with rage and shook his fists when he was hungry, and he