Page 48 of Kill Your Darlings

“I will.”

Wendy shifted herself up a little onto her pillows. She smelled like a combination of milk and sweat. “What do you think of the name Edgar?” she said.

“As a rule, not much. Are you talking about renaming Jason?”

“Did we officially decide on Jason?”

“I thought we did. I thoughtyoudid.”

“Yeah, I guess so. It’s just that for some reason he’s an Edgar now that he’s born. I don’t know why.”

Thom and Wendy had probably spoken five hundred boy names out loud to each other in the previous months, but as far as he could remember, he’d never heard Wendy mention the name Edgar. “Is it a family name?”

“No.”

“So is it because of Edgar Allan Poe?”

Wendy looked surprised, her pale eyebrows rising a fraction. “I suppose it is. I just always loved the name. Do you not love it?”

“No,” Thom said. “I don’t love it. Besides, I’ve been thinking of him as Jason. I thought we both had.”

“Oh,” Wendy said, and Thom realized that she was half asleep, or else talking in her sleep, or maybe just really out of it from the birth and the drugs.

“How does it feel to be a mom?” he said.

She seemed to really think about it, biting her lower lip like she sometimes did when she was reading, and said, “I’ve been a mom for a long time.”

“Have you?”

“It feels like it. And you’ve been a father for a long time.”

“About twenty-four hours.”

“See what I told you. A long time.” She smiled up at him, her face free of makeup, still rosy with exertion, and for an instant it was like she was fourteen again, unchanged by all the years.

Someone swung open the door behind him and Thom turned to see that a nurse had poked her head into the room then quickly retreated. When he turned back to Wendy he saw that she had fallen back asleep.

He left her and wandered back out into the hallway of the maternity wing at Cambridge Hospital. In the waiting room he found Diane, his mother, alone, flipping through aYankeemagazine. Hisfather had never been able to sit still for more than about ten minutes, which meant he was probably roaming the halls, or going to check on the car.

“How is she?” his mom said, looking up from the magazine.

“Out of it. She just fell back asleep.”

“You must be tired too.”

“I can’t sleep. Where’s Dad?”

“I told him I needed a cranberry juice, because the cafeteria doesn’t have it. So he’s out on a scouting mission.”

“Good one, Mom.”

“Should we go look at your son?”

Together they walked down to the nursery, where Jason/Edgar was swaddled and sleeping in a clear plastic bassinet. There were three other babies in the room with him, and Thom had a brief out-of-body experience imagining the different lives of these humans who would forever share a birthday. And he thought of himself, swaddled and helpless, in Concord, New Hampshire, on February13, 1968, on the same day that Wendy had been born, somewhere in Southern California, the two of them fated to meet fourteen years later. Thom must have swayed a little on his feet, because his mother slid an arm around him that felt more like physical support than emotional. “I didn’t much like babies,” she said.

“No?” Thom said.

“I like them when they start to talk. Your father was different, though. He was surprisingly good with both you and your sister when you were newborns. He loved comforting you, walking you from room to room. I remember he used to put your sister in the car and drive her around in order to get her to sleep.”

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