Home Game by Michael Lewis

partial disinheritance. The birth is supposed to have put them into a delicate psychological state. As I enter the house, I see no trace of it, however, or, for that matter, of them. Just inside the front door lies the shrapnel from an exploded giant Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. In the kitchen is the residue of what seems to have been a pancake breakfast for twenty. Dishes long banished from use have migrated out of the backs of kitchen cabinets, toys untouched for years litter their bedroom floors. Exactly thirteen hours ago, at midnight, our kind and generous next-door neighbors left their own bed for ours, so that we might go to the hospital and have a baby. Briefly, I have the feeling that if I turned around and walked away, my children would very happily use these new grown-ups to create a new life for themselves and never think twice about it.
    At length, I find them, at play with their benign overlords in the courtyard. “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” they shriek.
    We embrace histrionically. They know where I’ve been, and they know their mother has given birth. But instead of asking the obvious question—to what?—they race off to find various works of art they’ve created in the past six hours. “You have a baby brother!” I shout at their vanishing backs. A baby brother, as it happens, is exactly what they both claimed to least want. “A baby brother!” they shriek.
    I’ve never been able to feel whatever it is I’m meant to feel on great occasions, so I shouldn’t expect them to, either. But of course I do. It’s not until they climb into the minivan that they finally get a grip. “Daddy?” asks Dixie, age four, from her seat in the third row. “How does the baby get out of Mama?”
    This minivan is new. I’ve never been in the same car with a person who still seemed so far away. In the rearview mirror, her little blond head is a speck.
    I holler back what little I know.
    â€œDaddy?” asks Quinn, age seven.
    â€œYes, Quinn.”
    â€œHow do cells get from your body into Mama’s body?”
    We wheel into the hospital parking lot.
    â€œHelp me look for a parking spot.”
    That distracts her: They love to look for parking spots. In the Bay Area, looking for parking spots counts as a hobby. One day when they are grown, their therapists will ask them, “What did you and your father do together?” and they will say, “Look for parking spots.”
    We find a spot and instantly the race is on to the hospital elevators, followed by the usual battle-to-the-death to push the up/down button, followed by the usual cries from Dixie that because Quinn pushed the up/ down button she has first dibs on the floor button, followed by Quinn’s usual attempt to push the floor button, too. Since not long after Tabitha began to balloon, they’ve treated every resource as scarce; one of anything has become casus belli ; no object is too trivial to squabble over. A Gummi Worm vitamin, for instance, or a ripped pair of stockings. Produce in their presence an actually desirable object—an elevator button in need of punching or, God forbid, a piece of candy—and you’ll have screams inside of a minute and tears inside of two. Oddly enough, they used to get along.
    When the elevator doors open onto the third floor—all smiles, you’d never know how narrowly they’d just averted bloodshed—they come face to knee with Shirley. Shirley is the large and intimidating security guard assigned to prevent the twelve thousand babies born each year in the Alta Bates hospital from being stolen. She must be a success at it, as she’s been guarding them even longer than we’ve been making them. This is the very same Shirley who, seven and a half years ago, prevented Quinn from being abducted at birth, and thus spared some poor kidnapper years of sleep deprivation.
    But even Shirley presents the girls with no more