15. Heath
— ? —
Heath
I was going to be a father.
The thought kept circling through my mind, landing and taking off again before I could fully grasp it. I sat at my desk in the study at Fairhaven, staring at the blank paper in front of me, trying to make sense of the last twenty-four hours.
A baby. My baby. Our baby.
I had heard the heartbeat. That rapid flutter, that impossible sound, the proof that a new life was growing inside the woman I loved. I had stood there in that hospital room and cried like I hadn’t cried since my father’s funeral, overcome by a feeling I couldn’t name.
Joy. Terror. Grief. Wonder. All of it tangled together, impossible to separate.
And underneath it all, the crushing weight of guilt.
I had left Delphine alone with my mother for weeks.
I had retreated into my work, into my silence, into my cowardly attempt to solve a problem that wasn’t mine to solve alone.
While I had been agonizing over buildings and blueprints and the logistics of opening a European branch, my wife had been taking pregnancy tests in pharmacy bathrooms and crying on cold tile floors.
***
The call came at seven in the morning.
I had taken it in a hotel room in Boston with the curtains shut, forty minutes from my wife’s parents’ house, because I could not make myself drive back to Rhode Island and I could not make myself knock on that door again either, so I had spent the night doing neither.
It was the thing my father had started before he died.
The reason for all of it, the branch in Paris, the whole shape of the future he had drawn and not lived to build.
There was a door closing on it. If we did not commit by the first of March it went to someone else and it was gone, and there was no later and no second chance, and the only person who could say yes was me, because it was my name over the door and my father in the ground and there’s only one of us left.
“We need to know by the first, Heath,” the man on the phone said. Kindly. He had known my father thirty years. “Not today. But by the first.”
Six weeks.
“You’ll have it by the first,” I said, and I hung up, and I sat on the end of a hotel bed in yesterday’s shirt with six weeks on the clock and my whole life in a house I was not allowed inside.
Here’s what I did not do. I did not get in the car and drive to that house and tell my wife there was a clock running.
It’s close to the only thing I did right in three months.
She had told me, on a hospital floor, that she needed to protect her heart.
You do not hand a woman a deadline when she’s trying to protect her heart.
A deadline is a way of deciding for someone while pretending you’re only telling them the time.
I had done enough deciding for her to last us both a lifetime.
So the branch could have its first of March, and Del could have as long as she needed, and if the day ever came when those two things could not both be true, then the branch could go, and I would have to find out somewhere quiet what my father thought of me for it.
The European expansion looked obscene to me anyway. The grand plans, the careful calculations, the vision my father had nurtured for years. What did any of it matter if it cost me my family?
I had told her. Finally, on my knees on a hospital floor, three months and one broken marriage too late, I had told her.
And now the enormous relief of it was curdling into dread, because now she knew, and now it was a thing that could be asked, and I had decided in the ambulance that I was never going to be the one to ask it.
She would raise it or nobody would. If that meant the branch went to somebody else and my father’s life’s work opened without a Fairchild in the building, then it opened without a Fairchild in the building.
***
I picked up a pen and pressed it to the paper.
Dear baby, I wrote.
The words looked strange, almost ridiculous. But I kept going, because there were things I needed to say, things I couldn’t articulate any other way.
Dear baby,
I don’t know if you’ll ever read this. I don’t know if your mother will let me be part of your life. But I need to write it anyway, because there are things I want you to understand.
I wasn’t there when I should have been. Not for you, not for your mother.
I was so caught up in my own problems that I forgot what really mattered.
I forgot that love isn’t just a feeling.
It’s a choice you make every day, a thousand small decisions to show up and be present and put the people you love first.
I failed at that. I failed your mother, and I failed you before you were even born.
But I’m going to do better. I’m going to show you, for as long as I live, that I can be the father you deserve. The husband your mother deserves. Even if she never takes me back, even if I only get to see you on weekends and holidays, I’ll be there. I’ll never disappear again.
I love you. I haven’t met you yet, but I love you more than I knew it was possible to love someone.
Your father
I set the letter aside and stared at it for a while. Then I pulled out another sheet of paper.
Dear Del, I wrote.
This one was harder. So much harder. Because I had already said so many things to her, already begged and pleaded and promised, and none of it had been enough. Words were cheap. She had told me that herself. Actions, not words.
But I needed her to understand. I needed her to know what she meant to me, even if I had done a terrible job of showing it.
Dear Del,
I’ve started this letter a dozen times. I keep writing things and then crossing them out because nothing I say seems big enough to hold what I’m feeling.
So I’m just going to say it, even if it comes out wrong.
You’re everything to me. You’ve been everything to me since the night I found you at war with a schematic in the engineering lab. I fell in love with you that day, with your fire and your brilliance and the way you refused to be impressed by anything about me except my mind.
I should have told you about Europe. I should have sat down with you and explained what was happening and asked you what you wanted. Instead I tried to solve it alone, the way I’ve always tried to solve everything alone, and I ended up losing the one person who makes my life worth living.
I can’t fix the past. I can’t take back the months I wasted or the pain I caused you. But I can promise you this: I’ll never stop trying to earn back your trust. I’ll never stop showing up. I’ll never stop fighting for us, even when you’re too tired to fight with me.
You’re the love of my life, Delphine. You’re the mother of my child. And I’ll spend whatever time I’ve left on this earth proving that I deserve you.
All my love,
Heath
I folded the letter carefully and slipped it into my pocket. Then I stood up, grabbed my car keys, and headed out.
The pharmacy was my first stop. I walked up and down the aisles, filling a basket with every prenatal vitamin and supplement I could find.
Folic acid. Iron. Calcium. Things I didn’t even know the purpose of but that seemed important based on the labels.
The cashier raised an eyebrow at my haul but didn’t comment.
The maternity store was next. I had never been in one before, and the sheer volume of options was overwhelming.
Clothes in every size and color. Pillows shaped like crescents.
Books about pregnancy and childbirth and what to expect in the first year.
I grabbed everything that looked useful, everything that might make Delphine more comfortable, everything that might show her I was thinking about her even when she wasn’t there.
The saleswoman offered to help me several times. I declined, preferring to wander the aisles alone, imagining Delphine in each item, wondering what would make her smile.
I found a stuffed elephant in the corner of the store, soft gray with floppy ears and a friendly face. I added it to the pile without hesitation.
By the time I checked out, I had filled four shopping bags. The total was obscene, but I didn’t care. Money meant nothing compared to this.
The drive to Boston took three hours. I spent most of it rehearsing what I would say, trying to find the right words, the right tone, the right balance between eager and overwhelming. I didn’t want to push too hard, or make her feel pressured. I just wanted her to know I was there.
Her parents’ house looked the same as it had the last time I visited, three narrow stories behind a blue door, the window boxes bare in the winter cold. I parked on the street and gathered all my bags, stacking them in my arms until I could barely see over the top.
I knocked on the door and waited.
It opened, and there she was. Delphine, in jeans and an oversized sweater, her hair loose around her shoulders, her eyes widening as she took in the mountain of shopping bags.
“What’s all this?”
“Can I come in?”
She stepped back, and I stumbled through the doorway, setting everything down in the small entryway. The bags tipped and spilled, revealing boxes and bottles and soft fabric in a dozen different colors.
“Heath.” She was staring at the mess, her expression somewhere between amused and bewildered. “Did you buy out an entire store?”
“Maybe two.” I straightened up, suddenly self conscious.
“I just... I wanted to make sure you had everything you needed. The doctor said supplements were important, and I didn’t know which ones you were already taking, so I got all of them.
And I saw some clothes that looked comfortable, and I thought maybe you might want a few pieces that fit differently now that you’re... and then there was this elephant...”
I was rambling. I could hear myself rambling and I couldn’t stop. Delphine knelt down and started going through the bags, pulling out items one by one.
“Prenatal vitamins,” she said, examining a bottle. “I have these already.”
“I’ll return them.”