Chapter 4 #3
“I told them to walk,” announced a third voice, aggrieved and belonging to a girl of about ten.
She stood in the doorway with a toddler’s shoe in one hand and an air of profoundly exasperated responsibility.
She took in the whole office in a single sweep, exactly the way her mother did and said in the exact tone her mother had used, “They never walk. I’m sorry. Boys, the rug.”
“It’s all right,” Hank said easily. “Come here, all three of you. Go wash your hands in that sink in the corner. Doctors wash their hands before they do anything.”
They washed their hands and marched over to him at the exam table. He fit the stethoscope’s earpieces into the first boy’s ears as he asked, “Which one are you?”
“Jenson.”
“Nice to meet you, Jenson.” He settled the bell against the boy’s own chest and watched his face go round and astonished as he heard, for the first time in his short life, the engine that had been running his body the whole time.
“That’s me,” Jenson whispered in awe. “Harris. Harris, it’s me, listen.”
And then they were passing the stethoscope back and forth, listening to their hearts and then to each other’s. The older girl, Sunny had called her Presley, drifted closer and he made sure she got a turn too.
Sunny moved around behind him, unwinding a metal measuring tape from its case and jotting down measurements in a small notebook. He stood there watching the children discover their hearts, and the wave of guilt from the dining room retreated farther than it had in a long time.
Without warning, something fastened onto his leg.
He looked down. A little girl, he estimated three years old, had both arms wrapped around his knee.
She climbed on his shoe and reached up for his front pants pocket.
By standing tippy-toe, she was just able to snag it with one hand.
He stood perfectly still and watched with interest as she tried to haul herself up his leg. She failed.
Amused, he watched her let go of his leg, step back, and frown up at him. Then she threw both arms up in the universal, non-negotiable command of small children everywhere.
“Up,” demanded the smallest Carter.
“That’s Chloe,” Sunny said from somewhere behind him in the weary tone of a woman vastly outnumbered by small tornadoes. “She climbs anything that holds still. Chloe, Baby, leave Dr. Steele alo—”
But Hank had already bent and scooped the child up.
His years of bending toward hurt and frightened beings had become a reflex somewhere below thought.
He parked her on his right hip, and Chloe settled against him, taking immediate and proprietary hold of his collar.
She commenced the careful, deeply skeptical inspection toddlers conduct upon new people.
She patted his cheek. She pulled his earlobe. She discovered the gray hairs at his temple, found them fascinating, and gave one a hard tug.
“Ow,” Hank yelped.
Chloe laughed as if he’d done it entirely for her benefit, and the sound went straight through some old, locked door in him he hadn’t known still had its hinges on.
“She does that to everybody,” Presley informed him.
He looked up. Madison was halfway down the stairs, looking around in disbelief at the chaos that had been unleashed down here in the span of a few minutes.
Jenson held the stethoscope out toward her like an offering and said, “Come hear my heart.”
Hank watched in disbelief of his own as his careful, contained, locked-up-tight girl come the rest of the way down the stairs and gravely listened to a seven-year-old’s heartbeat.
She caught her father’s eye over the boy’s head. And for one unguarded second, before the caution climbed back into her face, she gave him a look that said, isn’t this something?
He also thought he caught a glimpse of her thinking, Can we keep them?
Sunny stopped cold in the dining-room doorway, staring at the Idaho water stain.
“Hi, Sunny,” Madison called out.
Sunny turned and called back a cheerful greeting. Her gaze took in her children swarming around Hank, lifted to her youngest perched on his hip, and for a moment, she smiled.
She caught herself at it the same instant he looked back at her, and they both looked quickly away. Outside, the rain that had been thinking about it all morning finally began to come down, soft and steady.
Sunny asked Madison and Presley to help her measure the dining room, and Hank stood in the middle of his loud, invaded, un-quiet house, the Tyrant on one hip, taking it all in.
As much as he’d dreaded his quiet being disturbed, he had to admit that this was .
. . not exactly fun, but certainly . . . stimulating.
He’d always wanted a big family, but Lorraine had been unwilling to have another child after Madison. It was just as well. She’d barely managed to care for one child. Any more would have completely overwhelmed her and been awful for the kids.
This is what it would have been like.
Well, not exactly like this. These children were happy and obviously well-loved by a parent who had a modicum of control over them.
As Harris and Jenson plied him with questions about the other medical equipment in the glass-doored cabinets along the wall, he reminded himself that the only way to earn a child’s respect was to give it to the child first, and then hold one’s ground when the child eventually challenged the adult’s authority.
Through the window he could see the aluminum porch chair, out in the rain with water dripping from it, holding its ground.
He understood exactly how it felt.