Telegraph Avenue

doctor with a stubbly scalp stuck his head into the room. He wore blue scrubs and a stethoscope necklace.

“Seven minutes apart!” Julie reported, holding up the envelope. “Seven minutes!”

“Seven minutes!” the doctor echoed. “Is that English time or metric?”

Julie lost himself in a fascinated confusion over this concept, the year divided into ten months, the month into ten weeks, the week into ten days. No, that would be too many days.

Gwen had closed her eyes; Julie was not even sure she had seen the doctor. “Not you,” she said, her voice so soft it was barely audible. “No fucking way.”

Lazar glanced at Julie, trying to enlist him with a look. Julie returned his most basilisk stare, willing it to vaporize the doctor into a shimmering Tantalus mist.

“Who’s your friend, huh?” Lazar said to Gwen. He took a look at the fetal monitor, tried to take hold of Gwen’s wrist. “You having one right now?”

She yanked her hand free. “No,” Gwen said. “I’m fine. The baby’s fine. There’s no sign of distress. I can wait until Aviva gets here.”

Then the contraction rolled in over Gwen, and she was swept up in it, swept away. Julie felt himself, Lazar, the hospital, vanish from her thoughts. Lazar stood there watching her. His eyes had looked dead before, exhausted, but now Julie saw a quickness there, an alertness, almost, Julie would have said, a sense of adventure. Lazar waited and waited, glancing at the monitor display. When Gwen opened her eyes again, he said, “Tell you what I’ll do. And this is all I’ll do. Ms. Shanks, you can wait for your partner, hang out here and labor, I’ll be only too happy to stay out of your way. But the instant we see one little blip of what I feel to be evidence of fetal distress, I am going in and getting that baby. Period. Got it?”

Gwen only nodded.

Lazar seemed to hesitate, on the point of saying something more. But he just jotted a few notes in her file and walked out.

“I’m sorry,” Julie said, “I didn’t kill him.”

“That’s all right,” Gwen said. “There’s time. I think there’s time. I wish my mom were here.”

She started to cry about her mom a little bit. She said she missed her father and her brothers, all of them back in D.C. and Philly. Julie gave her a tissue, then a second. His father came in holding a rattling cup of ice.

“Aviva’ll be here as soon as she can,” he announced. “Probably any minute. Also, I brought ice.”

“Bless you,” Gwen said.

He handed her the plastic cup, and she crunched thoughtfully. Eyes aswim, staring at Julie in a way that made him worry he might start to cry, too. She was feeling sorry either for herself, having a baby three thousand miles from her family, or for him.

“You know where to look for Titus?” she said at last, around a mouthful of ice.

“Maybe,” Julie said, drafting a thesis almost immediately. “Maybe I might.”

“Go on and find him, then,” she said. “This baby is going to want his brother.”

“I don’t know you,” said the little old Chinese lady. “Why I would know your friend?”

“No reason,” Julie said. “But—”

“He’s my student?”

“No. But like I said. He keeps his bike here. So I—”

“You think I’m deaf?”

“No.”

“Because you talking so loud.”

“I—”

“Deaf, old, Chinese, and stupid. That what you think?”

“No.” Julie took a deep breath. Start again. “Hello,” he said. He held out his hand. “My name is Julius Jaffe.” He took out the cards from his wallet, shuffled through them. Found one, an old one, that identified him as OCCULT RESEARCHER. Passed it to her. She read the proffered text, frowned, took another look at him, betraying neither skepticism nor interest.

“My friend Titus,” he said, “hid his bicycle behind your Dumpster, in the, uh, honeysuckle bush? He has to hide it there because, okay, when he was living in Mrs. Wiggins’s house? Around the corner on Forty-second? Stuff kept happening to his bike. I guess there’s a lot of people living there?”

“Miss Wiggins.” He could tell that she knew which house he meant. “Okay.”

“Like one time somebody took it and, like, rode it. And they broke it. And another time somebody sold it to buy drugs, and Titus had to steal it back. So he started hiding it back there because, I mean, there’s so much honeysuckle. You can’t see it. And because I am looking for him, to tell him that his baby brother is being born right now—”

“Loudness,” she cautioned him. “Volume.”

“I was going to see if he’s at Mrs. Wiggins’s. So I looked, and his bike is in the bushes. But then I thought, I don’t know. That maybe he might be here.”

“Here?” She shook her head, looking closer to smiling than he had yet seen her. “Not here.”

“I mean, you don’t know. He could have sneaked in. Titus has skills.”

“Look at me, occult investigator,” she said. “You think because I am old, stupid, deaf, and Chinese, some boy can sneak and hide in my house and I don’t know it?”

“No,” he guessed.

“You must be a really lousy occult investigator.”

“Kind of.”

“I think ghosts are laughing at you.”

“Probably.”

“No ghost here,” she said. “Your friend went to his house. Go look there, tell him, ‘Little brother is coming.’”

“Yeah, but what about,” lowering his voice, glancing up and down Telegraph, “that room you have?”

“No room.”

“No, the, like, secret bedroom? The door that’s hidden behind a poster of Bruce Lee? Where Gwen was staying. Gwen Shanks.”

She blinked and handed him back his card. “No ghost. No ghost room. Good luck. Goodbye.”

Julie thought about trying to slip past this annoying old person. Run upstairs, take a look for himself in the room that was behind the Bruce Lee door. He turned away, dropped his board to the sidewalk, stepped onto the deck. Hesitating, trying out a different kind of move.

“Oh, uh, you taught Luther Stallings, right?” he said. “From the movies. My friend, Titus? He’s Luther Stallings’s grandson.”

She came out in her gray gi and black sandals, skinny and featherweight with the walk of a younger person. “Let me see this ghost bicycle,” she said.

Julie led her around the side of the building to the parking area. They crunched across the gravel over to the Dumpster. He pushed aside tangles of honeysuckle, covered in flowers like a scattering of buttered popcorn. The heavy fragrance of the flowers mingled with the rancid atmosphere of the Dumpster. Before Julie could help or prevent her, she grabbed the handlebars of Titus’s bicycle, tugged it out of the tangling vines with surprising ease. She seemed to regard the bike’s presence as something of an offense, but there was also, Julie thought, a touch of puzzlement; even, possibly, of wonder. She looked sidelong at a small, square window at the top of the building—it was open, though there was no obvious way to climb up to it—then back down at the bicycle.

“Weird bike,” she said.

“It’s called a fixie?” Julie said. “No brakes. No gears. You just pedal it. When you want to stop, you have to pedal the other way.”

She climbed on the seat, gripping the handlebars, pedaled forward slushing through the gravel, fingers fluttering to find hand brakes that were not there. She slammed backward on the pedals, stopped, ground forward till she hit sidewalk. For three seconds she wobbled on the bike like a kid fresh from training wheels, a frail knot of bone, tendon, and gray silk. By the fourth second, she had figured out how to pedal backward, weaving away heedless down the sidewalk without looking over her shoulder. She disappeared behind a high fence. Ten seconds later, she reappeared, pedaling forward, and gestured curtly with one hand, master of the fixie now and for all time.