Some Months Before the Book Tour

Some months before the book tour, I was visiting home and went to the doctor.
I told the doctor I was two weeks late. I knew what it meant, but this was new to me, so I wanted a doctor to take charge.
“Well, I think that what you’re telling me warrants a pregnancy test!” declared the doctor, taking charge. She said it as if I had qualified for a prize. Her office was in the front room of a small cottage in Sydney, with frangipani trees out the front and the beach down the road.
“Do you see two lines here?” she said. I wasn’t so sure, but she ignored my answer. She shook my hand, very formal, and said: “Congratulations.”
I phoned Colin in Canada, and went to meet my parents and sisters at Michel’s Patisserie, where they were drinking coffee and eating pecan pie. I told them the news.
My mother didn’t believe me. She laughed. “But Colin’s in Canada!” And went back to her pecan pie. Then she figured out the timing.
I knew it was wrong to feel extraordinary and proud, because people do this all the time, but that was how I felt.
That night, I went to bed and there was a curious, pleasant feeling as if somebody was tightening seatbelts across my lap.
The next day I returned to the doctor’s cottage and said, “I think the baby’s trying to escape.”
The doctor used her formal voice again to say, “I’m very sorry to hear that.”
She printed up a form for blood tests, the word ‘miscarriage’ in a box.
I didn’t read it until I was on the ferry, going into town.