THE GIFT

The premonitions started not long after Shell took one of those home pregnancy tests—plus you are, minus you’re not—and sure enough, it was plus. But instead of the bright and shiny happy couples that inhabit the TV commercials for such products, we were in the mildewed bathroom, confronted with our sagging, shrugging selves in the mirror, yelling at each other and calling for a redo.

“Don’t we have another test somewhere?” Shell demanded to know. Her eyes were as wide and as open as I’d ever seen them, and once again she held up the little tube thing to the light. One of the bathroom bulbs had burned out and hadn’t been replaced.

“No, we don’t,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

I didn’t answer right away. Because I wasn’t sure. That’s a good solid rule of thumb, especially for men, but also women, too, I guess: never answer right away if you’re not sure of something. You might get in trouble later.

“No,” I admitted at some point.

“Then check, why don’t you.”

I checked. Nothing in the medicine cabinet but floss and tweezers and rust.

“Okay then,” said Shell, who had already gnawed away part of one fingernail and was diligently working on a second. “Let’s do this. Let’s go to the store and get another one. Best two out of three. We drive to the store—no, you drive to the store and I stay here and work on another pee sample.”

She hiked up her skirt, began to squat.

“Look,” I started, then stopped. I was on the verge of going off on Shell, how she can’t handle the dramatic, make-or-break moments of life, but I ceased. I desisted. Now wasn’t the time.

“Let’s be calm and try and look at this rationally,” I advised, aiming for the reassuring tone of a sedate, lab-coated scientist; I would have stroked my beard if I’d had one.

“Take a step back,” I thoughtfully continued. “Deep breath. Get some perspective. I mean really, think about it—how scientific can it be if you can buy the goddamn thing at Thrifty’s?”

Shell, however, was not swayed.

“Ninety-seven percent,” she countered. “Ninety-seven percent accuracy rate. Those are pretty good, like, odds.”

“Says who?”

“Says Johnson & Johnson, says so right here on the box.” Shell retrieved the soothingly colored package from the trash can and flattened it against my chest, evidence. “What are we going to do, Rick?” she raged.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m thinking. We need to think about this.”

And on and on. With each passing minute, the tiny bathroom seemed to get tinier and tinier. Stuff was accumulating in there. Eventually it got to the point where the two of us couldn’t breathe or speak. At last Shell stormed out and cracked open a bottle of peppermint schnapps that I hadn’t even known we had, and then proceeded to pour it down the kitchen sink when she remembered that she was ninety-seven percent sure she was pregnant. All in all, then, not exactly a glossy Kodak moment suitable for framing, I admit. Not exactly a scene you’d want to share when your kid asks about the first time you became aware of the miracle that it is/was his/her existence. And so you see: how the lying, the revising of the past, begins.

At the time we’d been living together off and on (and off) for close to a year (a year!), with the usual ups and downs and periods of unremarkable in-betweens. Hardly a stable situation, though, what with our tempers and suspicions and precarious employment, not to mention Shell’s semi-seeing this other guy, Ramón Something, and me still spending way too much time at El Torito’s happy hour. But finally, late one night after the home pregnancy test standoff and after one of our famous reconciliatory lays and while passing a soggy post-coital pint of Ben and Jerry’s back and forth, Shell and I vetoed an abortion and agreed to try to really make it work this time. Really. We were both pushing thirty and vaguely wondering what would become of ourselves if we stayed single for much longer. Friends were either married or heavily coupled, or in the process of getting heavily coupled. Birth announcements and shower invitations arrived in the mail with an alarming regularity. Life was happening. It seemed like it was time—or that time would soon pass us by if we didn’t take some kind of appropriate action.

Our lives jumped into warp speed after that. We made promises, consolidated our CDs and books, ordered return address stickers with both our names. No longer did we close the door when doing our respective business in the bathroom. We even got married. For the kid. For the future—our future. That’s the way it was now. A whole new way of thinking would be required. As for the wedding itself, well, it was a quickie affair, there’s no other way to put it. Shell broke one of her heels and had to go down the aisle barefoot. Her mother cried. Shell cried. Most everyone got too drunk, including the sunglasses-wearing D.J., “Funk Master Doug,” which led to grumbling and complaints about everything, most notably the anorexic food portions and the lack of air conditioning. Marlon, my best man, a friend from high school who still lived at home and sold historical Time-Life videos on the phone, gave a speech that sounded like it was in Russian. After ten minutes someone told him to shut up. Then Marlon cried. One of the flower girls found a dead bug in her scalloped potatoes.

For the honeymoon we drove seven hours to the Grand Canyon, stepped out of the car, looked at it, unimpressed, it’s a giant hole in the ground. On the way out we stopped in a gift shop, figuring we should probably buy a key chain or something to commemorate the occasion, and Shell found this one book called Death on the Rim, which was all about how people fall into it, the canyon, or are pushed, murdered, usually by a husband or a wife. Apparently the Grand Canyon was a good spot to get rid of an unwanted spouse. Happened all the time. Shell rattled off the grim statistics as we climbed into the car, having settled on a shot glass as our one and only purchase. Then it was seven more hours of desert and numbing flatness and we were back in our apartment in San Diego. That was when Shell had the first major premonition, on the drive home, somewhere near Barstow: my sister’s kid Nathan was a fish. More specifically, he was a fish out of water who couldn’t breathe and was struggling for life.

When we got home there was a message on the answering machine. Shell’s cat Hiccup had pissed all over the sofa again, and as I picked him up to show him the error of his free-form urinating ways, Shell hit the button and we heard my sister frantically rambling like she used to do back when she was more or less permanently coked out and dating this ex-pro football player no one had ever heard of. She ranted about Nathan and how he almost died and he was having this fit and he couldn’t breathe and it was fucking horrible and she was freaking out but had enough sense to call 9-1-1 and the ambulance came and he was okay now, he was in the hospital, he was okay, but he was an epileptic, did we know what that meant? And if we didn’t just for our own information it had to do with the nervous system, and she’d never thought of herself as religious but now she was wondering if she was, and maybe I should get checked out or something because she was pretty sure it was hereditary—epilepsy, that is, not religion.

“So he was squirming like a fish,” Shell said, pretending that the familiar cloud of cat piss hanging in the air wasn’t really there. “It was a seizure. That’s what it was. That’s what I saw.”

Hiccup bolted out of my hands and disappeared down the dark hallway, defiant in that universal defiant-cat way. On the kitchen table there was mail, bills, newspapers—obligations I didn’t want to deal with yet. It was our honeymoon, after all.

“What’s this?”

The landlady, Mrs. Tokuda, had slipped an envelope under the door. I recognized her handwriting immediately, the kind of pristine schoolgirl penmanship that doesn’t seem humanly possible. We’re too flawed, too damaged of a species for such perfection.

“What’s it say?” asked Shell.

“Don’t you know?”

“I’m predicting bad news.”

I opened it. The letter said that due to rising maintenance costs our rent would be increased the following month. And P.S.: Congratulations! Have a happy marriage and wonderful life together! Mrs. Tokuda added several more exclamation points for emphasis. She was a sweet, tiny, almost miniature woman who as a child had been put in one of those Japanese internment camps during World War II. Somewhere in Wyoming, I think. Whenever she raised the rent or took a long time to fix the toilet it was always hard to get mad or make a fuss.

“Right again,” I confirmed.

“Maybe I should go on TV,” Shell said.

“Maybe.”

“I got the tits.”

“You sure do. We could make money off those tits. They’re professional, you know.”

Then Shell stared at the empty living room wall, that prominent space where we’d always meant to hang something, uh, prominent. It was one of our greatest failures as a couple, that space, and we’d stopped talking about it. What she was thinking now, I didn’t know. She looked a little lost, like she might have walked into the wrong apartment by mistake. But also maybe almost happy, staring like that. The slightest, smallest hint of a smile. The world in repose, awaiting her next move. I didn’t want to say anything to break the spell or whatever it was.

“Let’s call Lydia tomorrow,” she said. “It sounds like Nathan’s all right. It’s late. I’m exhausted. I’m not even going to shower. I smell like Taco Bell.”

The wedding, the marathon drive, the fast food—it had all caught up to us. Like an old married couple, we helped each other into the bedroom, kicked Hiccup off the bed, and laid down, too tired for sex, too tired to talk or even acknowledge this momentous event: our first night at home as husband and wife. We slept in until noon, swearing that we’d stay in bed all day, talking about room service and what we’d order if we could: poached eggs, sourdough toast, bacon, coffee, lots of coffee, mimosas. But by two o’clock or so we were up and about. Let’s face it: Life doesn’t stop like you sometimes wish it would. Not for us, not for anybody. Anyway, Shell jumped in the shower. I searched the fridge and cabinets for food, found nothing remotely edible except creamed corn and frozen taquitos, then admitted defeat as the hunter-gatherer of the household. I called for a pizza. Shell started doing her nails and a crossword, her hair still wet and smelling of that expensive herbal shampoo she uses even though she keeps saying we can’t afford it. I got the money ready for the pizza, plus the coupon. The TV was on, too. We were married. There was paperwork, documentation. And yet nothing much seemed to have changed.

In the beginning it was mostly simple things: weather, football games, movie endings, celebrity breakups, when the phone was about to ring, who would stop by unexpectedly. Apparently being pregnant led to some sort of superior form of Zen consciousness. That was Shell’s theory. She was on a higher frequency now. Mother frequency. But then, when she began throwing up and getting depressed and all grumped out, she’d have her doubts. This was hell. This was torture and fuck you all. That meant me.

Still the premonitions continued. She predicted that Hiccup would get sick. Two days later he was practically unconscious. We rushed him to the vet. After four hundred dollars of tests, we learned that he had advanced diabetes (which explained all the pissing) and would require insulin shots for the rest of his life. No more than a week later, Shell was boiling spaghetti, humming some doo-wop song about being true to your guy no matter what, and she said our neighbor Phil was in pain. The next day we saw Phil weeping by the swamp-like swimming pool (which everyone in the building was afraid to use, for pretty obvious reasons), saying that the frozen yogurt company he worked for had gone belly-up, Chapter 11. “No one eats frozen yogurt anymore,” he wailed in a street preacher’s urgent rasp. His breath smelled of beer and bad nachos. It was probably ninety degrees, noon, and he sat sprawled out in a neglected chaise lounge fully clothed, sweating like Shaquille O’Neal in the final minutes of the fourth quarter. Redness bloomed around his cheeks and forehead. “Remember frozen yogurt? Remember how it almost tasted as good as ice cream? It was revolutionary, man. But people don’t remember. They just don’t remember a goddamned thing.” We consoled Phil as best we could, convincing him to go inside before he became too sunburned.

Back in the apartment, Shell said, “I think I’m onto something here.”

Those first months of the pregnancy we settled into what I guess was our new routine. Every day we checked Shell’s stomach for signs of the baby, searching like archaeologists for any evidence of the mysterious life growing below, and yes, we did all that stupid stuff like talking to the baby and playing classical music to make it a genius. Winter came, which in San Diego isn’t winter at all. It’s just a name change—November, December, January. We endured the holidays, rented obscene amounts of movies and basically stayed in, arguing about names and methods of child rearing. I was more stern, spare the rod and all that, whereas Shell thought spanking was a form of child abuse. She favored time-outs and other enlightened modern practices.

“Were you ever spanked?” she asked me one morning as I was chipping away at the latest glacier that had formed in our freezer, which was supposed to defrost automatically but did not. Another of the apartment’s many faults that we didn’t complain to Mrs. Tokuda about.

“Hell yes,” I said, sounding almost proud, which wasn’t what I’d intended. I gave the frozen block another good whack with the ice pick. “Spanked, whipped, hit, slapped, knuckle rapped, you name it.”

“Then congratulations,” said Shell. “You were an abused child.”

Even though I thought that was crap I let it go, kept on with the ice pick like I didn’t care. Getting spanked, being put in your place, encountering power and authority beyond yourself—that was all part of growing up, of learning about the world and how to live in it. But they say compromise is important in a marriage—they do say that, don’t they?—and I was doing my best, making the agreed-upon effort.

When the time came for the ultrasound we didn’t need it. “It’s a boy,” announced Shell, and of course she was right. But we went anyway, just to be sure, and because that’s what you do these days. We asked the doctor if being pregnant had anything to do with being psychic. He had a Magnum P.I. mustache and wire-rimmed glasses that were supposed to make him look not just rich but cultured, too. We waited, but he didn’t answer our question, just handed us the picture, mumbled something about the wonders of the human fetus, and said it was a boy. He circled the penis to verify.

We taped the ultrasound picture on the refrigerator next to the magnets and funny pictures we cut out of newspapers and magazines, and there it hung until I made a crack about how it was reassuring that the baby looked like me and not like Ramón. Then Shell tore it up. She tore it up into little eggshell pieces and then she tore up everything else on the fridge, including that priceless picture of Nixon and Elvis that has graced several different refrigerators over the years. She marched into the living room, livid, grabbed the closest object (it was a Blockbuster video, Remains of the Day, Shell’s choice, not mine) and hurled it at me. She missed, but it hit the wall and exploded, bits of plastic and tape everywhere. It cost us something like a hundred bucks. The clerk couldn’t explain to me why one measly videotape was so expensive. “Policy,” he said, and how do you argue with that?

And so there were the occasional fights, commotions, communication blackouts, etc., and once or twice I left for a few days and then came back and it would be tense for a day, maybe two, tops, but then it would be all right. Nothing more than the usual. The time passed painlessly enough. By the sixth month Shell was rapidly getting bigger and bigger and she grumbled about how her body was like an inflatable toy, only she couldn’t let out the air. She consumed massive amounts of TV, way more than the average 6.5 hours per day or whatever the latest statistic is. I was always bringing home movies, ice cream, magazines, new Nintendo games. Money-wise, Shell’s unemployment wouldn’t run out for another few months, and I picked up two or three night shifts a week at the printers, watching the giant machines spit out our local newspaper and drinking Jolt cola to stay awake. Plus I was painting apartments at the other building Mrs. Tokuda owned, down in San Ysidro. Cash, under the table, no strings. It might not sound like much, but at the time I was feeling okay. Generally. There was movement, progression. I couldn’t complain, not really. How your life turns out is never what you expect. Driving home at night on the 5, tired and ready for the couch and the balm of cable, I could see the lights of Tijuana in my rearview mirror. I’d half wonder what it would be like to live over there instead of here, the different language, the yearning to be somewhere else, the idea that things could be so much better if it weren’t for geography.

It was probably around the sixth or seventh month when I came home after a day of painting (the all-important first coat for an apartment whose occupant, I’d discovered, happened to be a collector of hard-core pornography and rare South American stamps) and found Shell, as usual, marooned on the sofa, preparing the syringe for Hiccup’s injection, the cat curled next to her like the docile creature I knew he wasn’t. This was Shell’s domain. I tried, but I was just too squeamish, and besides, the cat thinks I’m a Nazi so it’s hard for him to be calm enough for the shot when I’m the one sticking a needle in him. Shell motioned for me to be quiet. Gently she repositioned Hiccup on his side, steadied the needle like a lifelong junkie, then ushered it into the cat’s skin, all in one fluid motion. A pro.

Once that was over, I sat down and gave Shell a kiss that got half lip and half cheek. We went through the how-was-your-day conversation. Hiccup had had enough by then. He wanted to make his statement and publicly scorn my presence, so he ejected himself down to the floor and one-hundred-yard-dashed it toward the hallway.

“I had another one,” Shell said.

“Another one,” I repeated. “Wow.” I had only an hour to eat and shower before I was off to the printers for part two of my day. The mail was in my lap, a big, thick, ridiculous stack. Was it just me or was the amount of mail steadily increasing? Each day it took longer and longer to plow through. More credit card applications, banks I’d never heard of, based in places like Wilmington, Delaware, and Running Brook, Idaho. Jesus, didn’t these companies get it? People like us didn’t need more plastic, more burdens to fill our days and nights.

“It was just right after lunch,” Shell went on, “and I had this flash, a BAM!, you know, in my head, and then I saw a red and white van with lights flashing. So then I do—I don’t know—the dishes, whatever, and a little while later I hear this BAM! outside. I look out the bedroom window and there on the street are these two cars, one totally totaled and the other up on the sidewalk all gnarled up like some modern sculpture. They called the ambulance and carried one of the guys away on a stretcher. A car crash. That was the BAM!”

I tossed the mail onto the coffee table next to yesterday’s still unopened queries; it was practically the last available space on the table’s surface. This was an ongoing issue—the issue of space. Meaning more than just the coffee table. And what with the baby coming and all.

“You know Shell, I’ve been thinking.”

“Uh-oh.”

“No, good thinking.”

“Oh, good thinking. Well that’s okay then. What have you been good thinking about?”

“About your special powers of perception and whatnot.”

This was a conversation I’d been trying to have for a while, and now it was happening, more or less unrehearsed. Usually when I had something I wanted to talk to Shell about I’d go over everything in my head, map out the scene, anticipate her comments and reactions. Not this time, though. I was going freestyle. Improvising.

“All right,” said Shell, her mouth already souring into a skeptical slant that I knew all too well. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts, something she did a lot of now. The Pretenders: Learning to Crawl Tour ’84.

“Well,” I started, “what I’ve been thinking lately is pretty simple actually. Very simple. What it is is this. How can we use this gift? Because that’s what it is, a gift. Not for the good of mankind or anything noble like that, but for our own selfish betterment. So I’m thinking: How can we take this gift, harness it so to speak, and then parlay a small investment into something greater? Parlay. Now there’s a word I’ve always wanted to use.”

“Rick, what are you getting at?”

“Well if you can see things before they happen then why not take it to the next level? What’s that Indian casino Mike and Nancy are always going to?”

“It’s up by Temecula, I think. Why?” Her mouth slanted even further. I had my work cut out for me.

“We’ve got a little money saved up.”

“That’s baby money.”

“We don’t need to use all of it. Just some of it. Besides, you’re never wrong. You say it yourself all the time. ‘I’m never wrong.’ It’s a gift. Who are we to question the hows and whys of such phenomena?”

“But this is different. This is money we’re talking about now, Rick. You know we already have to borrow a shitload from my mom and probably from your sister, too. I don’t know about you, but being a mooch doesn’t suit me very well. I don’t like waking up in the morning and knowing that I owe somebody something. And I’m pregnant, I’m cranky, I’m huge, in case you haven’t noticed. It’s hard enough for me to go to the market or Target let alone some casino. Some Indian casino.”

“Just this one time. We’ll go, and if it works, fine, and if not, that’s it, it’s over. Just once. We won’t be greedy. That’s where these things usually go wrong. James Caan or whoever gets too greedy, wants too much, won’t settle for less. But for us less is already more.”

Shell didn’t say anything, but I held out hope that she’d come around. Just like me, she can be coaxed into mischief with the right amount of prodding. Of course I’d have to brush up on my gambling. Maybe call Mike for some tips, when to hit, when to stay, what doubling down was all about. Although roulette probably would be best. All you had to do was choose red or black. I wanted to keep it simple, put the least amount of strain on Shell as possible. Red or black. Certainly she could see a color if she could see a car crashing.

“So what are you doing Saturday night?”

“Reading,” Shell monotoned, and she pointed to an opened paperback on the coffee table, Babies for Beginners, something like that. “And I shouldn’t be the only one doing this.”

“I know Shell, I know. I promise I’ll get up to speed on the baby thing. But this is something we should do. It’s just one night. We’re in, we’re out. It’s for the baby after all.”

“We’ll see,” she said.

That night I left the printers early. It must have been three or four in the morning and I’d been up for almost twenty-four hours straight. As I drove I kept dozing off, drifting into the other lane, drifting (in my mind at least) into an alternate existence where I didn’t have to work two shifts back to back, didn’t have to argue why we shouldn’t name our kid Nigel or Percival. I tried everything: slapping my face, rolling down the window, turning up the radio. No matter what I did, though, I couldn’t stay awake, my eyelids heavy as pyramids. Somehow I made it home without killing myself or anyone else. I was alive. And for that, I was thankful. I was learning to take small victories wherever I could find them.

We saw the burning blue and pink neon of the Laughing Coyote Casino and Restaurant from the main highway soon after we’d passed through Temecula. There wasn’t much else nearby, so it was easy to spot. We lucked out (a sign?) and pulled into the last parking space in the lot and then approached the entrance, over which hung a series of blinking dollar signs and a giant revolving teepee.

“Chee-zee,” said Shell, who’d been having some doubts about the whole enterprise on the drive up. She talked nonstop. Her mother would kill her. San Diego radio sucked. Another week of this (the pregnancy, the fat, the waiting) and she’d be totally Sybil. Was this place even legal? Did they use actual American dollars? If the baby knew what we were doing. Maybe the premonitions weren’t always right. Etc., etc. But I’d already got the night off from the printers and withdrawn the money. More importantly, I’d managed to convince myself that this was our fate, our destiny.

The air conditioning greeted us with an assaulting, Arctic blast. Inside, the place was packed, swarming with smoke and people and noise. It was pretty much like a regular casino you’d see in Tahoe or Reno, which surprised me. I’d been expecting something lower on the gambling chain, a large asbestos-ridden room decorated in brothel colors and peeling paint, a few tables, a couple of Rat Pack-era slot machines, a handful of lost souls wagering Social Security checks. But it wasn’t that at all. The colors were cheery, Southwestern. Families milled about. A fair amount of young people mixed in with the old. Waitresses and dealers wore snappy uniforms. To the far left there was a Denny’s-ish restaurant, and next to that a cocktail lounge with free popcorn and a sixties cover band that was slashing and burning its way through a disastrous version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” as we entered. And yes, the gambling. Rows and rows of blackjack tables. The Wheel of Fortune. Keno. Roulette. Slots. Poker tables way in the back by the bathrooms and cashier stations. And strangely nobody who looked to be Indian.

We started slowly with some video poker. Shell plopped down on the swivel stool and picked the cards as I fed the quarters. After an hour our initial five-dollar investment had netted close to two hundred dollars. Things were moving right along. Next we headed to the restaurant to kill some time before we hit the roulette table. I had a Sitting Bull Burger with cheese, Shell a bowl of Cherokee Three-Bean Chili plus a side of Onondaga Onion Rings. Next door the band wheezed out what I think was supposed to be “Purple Haze.” Neither of us spoke much as we ate. Too much tension, too much awareness that the next half hour could be critical—somehow, more and more it seemed like it would either make or break us, and not just financially. Shell finished everything and asked for a dessert menu. I filled out one Keno card after another.

At the roulette table we stood around a while to get the flow of the game and for Shell to practice some. I’d been reading up on roulette. The easiest, simplest bet was to pick a color: red or black. So that was what Shell focused on. Three times she predicted the outcome, and three times she was right. We got our chips.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t push me. God, I think I have to pee.”

“Now?”

“No, it passed. Wait. Aw shit. Let’s just do this before I faint or have a heart attack. Or have the kid right here right now.”

That was good enough for me. “Make way,” I called out as Shell waddled forward and I helped her get situated at the table. “Pregnant woman gambling here.” The dealer was paying off from the last game. I was nervous, which usually causes me to say something stupid, and that’s exactly what I did. “You don’t look like an Indian,” I told the guy, thinking I’d make a little small talk, why not. But the dealer shot me this look like he’s heard this about a billion times before and if he wasn’t in a public place and wearing a uniform and name tag (EARL, it said) he’d strangle me with his belt and leave my body in some snake-infested marsh.

“Place your bets,” he ordered, pretty obviously taunting me with his bloodshot eyes. He was short, probably in his forties, and had an Albert Einstein electric shock of hair. You got the sense that he didn’t have much of a personal life and that his work wasn’t exactly all that fulfilling and that he’d been having a bad day since around the third grade.

People put down their chips, made their bets, just like in the movies and TV. I placed my hands on Shell’s shoulders, massaging gently. Scanning the table, I noticed that most of our fellow gamblers looked like extras from The Andy Griffith Show. I whispered in my wife’s ear:

“Do you see a color?”

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“Well maybe if you close your eyes, sweetie.”

“I can’t believe I’m fucking doing this. Just shut up, all right. Let me think.”

Shell took a deep breath. I waited. The dealer waited. Aunt Bee next to us waited. Floyd the Barber across the table, sipping his watery gin and tonic, he waited. Everyone’s bet already down. I pinched Shell’s shoulders. Hard. Harder.

“Stop it,” she snapped.

We needed to make a decision, black or red. Shell was sweating now. I could feel the damp of her skin. We hadn’t made love in I don’t know how long. Which is a strange thought at such a time, I know, but that’s what surfaced in my polluted mind. Black or red. One or the other.

“Does the lady want to make a bet or not?” asked the dealer.

Shell’s skin was burning, pure fire. Suddenly my mind slipped elsewhere. There we were on our first date: stupid, boozy, naked, humping away on my couch, our couch. In the morning we ate cereal right from the box and watched cartoons. I didn’t know about her asshole dad yet. She didn’t know about my less-than-stellar relationship history yet. It seemed so long ago that we’d crossed over into something that neither of us really wanted.

“Red,” she said. “Fuck it. Red.” And the chips were placed on the felt surface of the table, and the dealer took our bet, all seven hundred—the five hundred we’d agreed on plus the two hundred from video poker—and then there was nothing to do except wait.

For a second I had a flash of doubt. This was wrong. All wrong. This wasn’t adult. Soon-to-be parents shouldn’t be doing this. I wanted to take the bet back, take Shell home and talk gibberish to her stomach and put on some Mozart. But it was too late. Together we watched the ball sputter and clank all over the spinning wheel. It went on for an eternity, a slow-mo movie moment where the soundtrack swells and your life stops and there’s usually a revelation of some kind; in this case, however, the revelation wasn’t coming; there was nothing but doubt and panic and an industrial buzzing in my head, and I seriously considered the fact that everything was relative—time, truth, sex, you name it—and that I’d never gotten musicals and probably never would. Click, click. Shell had put her hands over her eyes, like a little kid. The ball was immortal. It had a purpose, a power. Finally it began to slow down. Somewhere a baby cried. That was the only sound. That and the ball. Less ferocious now, settling in. Bounce, click, clack, zlack. Then it ceased to move as if at last it realized what it wanted, where it desired to be. Number 16. Red. Of course. Otis the Drunk let out a deep moan. The dealer looked pissed.

I told Shell to look, that it was all good, that we won. She guessed right. Red. So why was she crying? People were starting to stare. I touched her hair, her wet cheeks. Nothing.

“Please,” she said. “Just take me home. I just want to be home.”

So we doubled our money and walked away. Not a huge deal for some folks, but for us it made a big difference. And as it turned out, we needed it. And as it turned out, we should have been greedy. If the rest of the world is out for blood, then why not us? Truth is, we fucked up.

After that night Shell kept quiet about any more predictions. I could tell, though, that she saw things, bad things. And she was right. The last few months of the pregnancy fizzled away like a faulty Fourth of July sparkler. I ran out of apartments to paint. And not only that: some of the tenants were having problems—vomiting, nausea, shortness of breath—and claiming that unsafe paint had been used. They had hired a lawyer, threatening to sue Mrs. Tokuda, who dropped hints about raising the rent again to cover her legal bills. The printers was cutting back, and pretty soon, as the birth neared, I was officially unemployed and generating zero income. On more than one occasion I found my way back to El Torito. The people were different but they all looked the same as their predecessors: aging, a little haunted by something. I met a woman named Marcia Higbee. She told me I had lips she could trust. Meanwhile Shell’s unemployment had run dry. We considered asking my sister for money, again, even though she had her hands full with Nathan and his epilepsy. There was his medicine, the regular doctor visits. The insurance covered some of it, but not everything. Then, a week before Shell’s contractions started, just when we were set to bring up the subject of money (as in: can we have some?), Lydia informed us she’d been diagnosed with something called Sick Building Syndrome. The place where she worked, a real estate office in Santee, was contaminated with chemicals. She too experienced vomiting, nausea, shortness of breath. It seemed to be the thing.

What happened was this: the premonitions stopped once the baby was born. Flat out. No more. Nada mas. Shell was out of the hospital and back on the couch, nursing our son and circling shows in TV Guide, and she said it’s over, nothing was there, it had to do with the pregnancy, a temporary situation, and that was that. One of life’s little mysteries.

Now it’s the three of us. The baby, Tyler’s his name (not Nigel, not Percival), is two months old, a mystery of his own. He cries and cries like he’s shooting for martyrdom, like a giant mistake has been made. Shell sleeps a lot. Our conversations revolve around two main topics: diapers and bills. The apartment shrinks on a daily basis, filled to the ceiling with baby toys, baby books, baby everything. We had no choice but to fill out some of those credit card applications, first signing up for two, then four. I’m currently putting together a resume and doing sit-ups every night.

And I know it’s wrong, I know it’s bad and I’m living up to the much-publicized faults of my sex, but I keep wondering how permanent this all is—marriage, wife, now a child. They’re part of me yet also separate, removed. There are times when they vanish—poof, presto, it’s magic—even if we’re all in the same room together. And then I’m left with nothing but my lazy random thoughts. Which are never as profound as I’d like. Nothing about mortality or religion or the meaning of existence, or even what it means to live with someone, to share your life like this. Just the everyday clutter that prevents you from getting down to the heart of the matter, or matters. How I drive too fast, stay up too late. How I mumble. How women who are too beautiful seriously frighten me. How there’s always the possibility: to disappear, walk away. What else is there to say? Marcia Higbee thinks I’m a software engineer, divorced, trying to put his life back together.

Often at night I stand and watch my son as he sleeps in his crib. He squirms, has difficulty sleeping for more than an hour. I understand. I sympathize as he battles this strange new universe. Always restless. As if he has a troubling knowledge of what’s to come. As if he’s the one who has the gift now, like it’s been passed from mother to son. He sees the future, yes, I’m sure of it, but he won’t be able to tell us for a few years. When he finally speaks he’ll tell us everything we need to know. But until then we’ll just have to live as best we can, and wait.