12. Chapter 12
Julian
The thing nobody tells you about being the surgeon in the family is that it buys you nothing in a delivery room.
I've stood at an open chest with a man's life in my two hands and kept my pulse under sixty.
Tonight I'm useless in a way I haven't been since I was a student, holding one of Christina's hands while she crushes the bones in the other one, watching a monitor I'm not allowed to touch, listening to an obstetrician named Dr. Navarro tell my wife she's doing beautifully.
Dianna's sister. The development director's sister delivers babies on the same floor where my father rebuilt hearts for thirty one years. The whole city is six people standing in a circle. I've decided that tonight.
"One more like that," Dr. Navarro says. "Big one. You've got him right here."
Christina turns her head on the pillow. Her blonde hair is stuck to her face. Her eyes are wild, furious, lit up in a way I've never seen her before, not once in all the time I've known her, and she says through her teeth, "If you tell me to breathe I will kill you."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were loading it."
I look at her. The monitor is climbing behind her. The room has gone tighter, that specific kind of tight I know from a different kind of table, when everything that was moving stops. "I love you," I say, because it's true, because it's the only thing in the room that isn't a risk.
She turns back toward Dr. Navarro. She bears down. The room shifts the way rooms do right before, that held collective breath, the single words from the team, the quiet urgency of people who've done this a thousand times treating it like it's the first, and then.
Then our son.
He comes out furious. Fists going before he's fully clear.
He takes one offended breath, uses the whole of it to tell everyone in the building exactly what he thinks of the last nine months, and the sound hits me somewhere I don't have a name for.
Something moves in my chest that a decade of surgical training has no category for.
Dr. Navarro lifts him onto Christina's chest and he's wet, screaming, the most perfect thing I've ever seen.
I've seen a stopped heart start again. It doesn't compare.
Christina's hands come up around him on instinct, both of them at once, and she stops mid-sentence, stops everything, just goes completely still looking at him.
Her whole face opens. Not the composed face, not the professional face, not even the private face she saves for rooms with no witnesses.
Something underneath all of those. Something she didn't know she had until this second.
"Oh," she says. Very quiet. Like she'd been arguing a case for nine months and just got the verdict.
"Hi." Her voice drops to a whisper. "Hi. There you are."
I put my hand on his back. He fits under my whole palm. His back is moving fast, the furious little engine of him working, and I keep my hand there. I don't have one clear thought in my head except that I'm not moving. Not tonight, not in ten years, not ever.
"Does he have a name?" Dr. Navarro asks.
Christina looks up at me.
"Luke," I say.
She looks back down at him. "Luke." She presses her lips to the top of his head, and he keeps yelling, furious at everything, at all of us, at the whole cold bright world. It's the best sound in the building.
We stay in the hospital that night and the next, the three of us in a room that smells of antiseptic and the flowers Dianna's office sent, Luke in the clear bassinet beside the bed, waking every two hours with strong opinions about it.
I sleep in the chair with one hand on the bassinet rail.
I don't mind. I've slept in worse chairs for worse reasons.
My father comes at six the next morning.
He stops in the doorway. He has flowers.
I have never once in my life seen my father hold flowers.
Grocery store flowers, still in their plastic sleeve, the price sticker half peeled off, and he stands there in the doorway looking at Christina asleep in the bed, at the bassinet, at the small loud bundle inside it, and something happens to his face.
Something I've been waiting thirty four years to see. Something I'd stopped expecting.
He sets the flowers on the tray table. Very carefully, like he's placing a graft.
"May I," he says.
I lift Luke out. I put him in my father's arms the way I've been doing it for two days now, my hand under his on the small head, no instruction needed but I give it anyway, the same way he once stood behind me at a scrub sink at five in the morning and counted thirty seconds a hand without saying a word.
Raymond Cross, chief of cardiothoracic surgery, retired, stands in a hospital room with his grandson and goes completely quiet.
A long moment passes.
"He's loud," my father says.
"Yeah."
His eyes don't move from Luke's face. "Your mother would've been here at four. She'd have brought a casserole nobody asked for, rearranged this whole room, made that doctor laugh before she got through the door."
"I know."
He's quiet again. He starts to sway, very slightly, the unconscious rock of someone holding something small. I didn't know I'd do that until I caught myself doing it last night.
"I owe you something," he says finally. He still doesn't look up.
"I'm too old to make it pretty." A pause.
"I asked you to choose, a long time ago.
I told myself it was about the work. It wasn't." His jaw moves.
"I'd lost her. I couldn't watch you build something with room in it for the thing I was spending the rest of mine without. "
I don't say anything.
"It was the wrong thing to ask." He looks up at me. His eyes are dry. My father's eyes are always dry. "You kept what you kept. You went back when you went back. That was right."
"It's okay, Dad."
The corner of his mouth moves. On him, that's everything.
He hands Luke back to me. Both hands, careful, the way you hand off something that can't be replaced. He picks up his coat from the chair by the door. He stops with his back to me, one hand on the frame.
"Take the leave," he says. "All of it. Michael can cover for you." A pause. "She's good for you."
He walks out before I can say anything back. Which is the most him thing that has ever happened. The flowers sit on the tray table in their plastic sleeve, price tag half hanging off. The loudest thing he's ever said.
Christina is awake. She's been awake for at least the last five minutes, I can tell by the set of her shoulders, and she's looking at the ceiling with her hands flat on the blanket, giving us the room.
"He brought flowers," she says, without moving.
"He did."
"Grocery store flowers."
"Still in the bag."
She turns her head on the pillow toward me. Her eyes are soft in a way she'd never let me see if she knew I was cataloguing it. "That man loves you so much."
I look down at Luke, at his face, at the specific furious expression he's worn since minute one. "Yeah," I say. "I know."
We're home three days later. I drive them from the hospital in my car, Luke in the infant seat I installed six times before I was satisfied with it, Christina in the passenger seat with her hand resting on the edge of the car seat the entire drive, two fingers tucked against his knee.
The apartment looks different when we walk in.
It looked different to me the first time she was in it and it looks different again now, the three of us coming through the door, the lake gray through the windows, the city going on outside like nothing happened.
Something happened.
Christina's on the couch with Luke two days after that, the lake gray out the windows, when she starts telling me about Rachel.
I'd known the shape of it. I hadn't known the end.
She shifts Luke higher on her chest, one hand spread across his back. She's not looking at me while she talks. She's looking at him, the way she does when she's thinking through something out loud. "Vivian never moved," she says. "After the column. She just waited."
"How long?"
"Two months." She glances at me. "There was a pitch.
Big foundation gala, Vivian's firm against a competitor.
Week before the decision, something ran in the same column.
" She pauses, her thumb moving in a slow circle on Luke's back.
"Not about me that time. About a senior planner at the firm who'd padded an invoice.
A hospital account. They had a number. Specific enough to scare a client. "
I watch her face. "Was it real?"
"The account was real. The number wasn't. But it was built from a draft I'd made. One that had an error in it, that I caught, that I fixed before it ever left the building." Her eyes go back to Luke. "Three people saw the wrong version. Me, Vivian, and the co-lead on that stage."
I'm quiet.
"When Vivian called me in, I didn't say her name. I just put both versions on the desk. Time stamps. Distribution list. Three names." She looks up at me. "I let Vivian read the third one herself."
"She fired Rachel that afternoon for trying to sabotage again."
"Walked her to the elevator while the whole floor pretended to work."
I look at her. "You didn't go to her desk," I say. "Even after everything."
She shrugs, small. "Vivian told me not to."
"Vivian told you a lot of things."
"Yeah, well." She looks back down at the baby. "She was right."
I reach over and put my hand on top of hers, the one on Luke's back. We sit there a minute, the lake going on outside, Luke asleep between us.
"Kate called that night," she says. "Said Bree had already put my name on the bigger office door before lunch."
"You took the bigger office."
She tips her chin up, just slightly. The look she gets when she's trying not to look pleased with herself. "It has two windows."
"Of course it does."
"On a clear day you can see the river past the garage."
"You deserve it."