Chapter Thirty-Three
WADE
Sheridan Memorial does labor and delivery on the third floor. He knew the building. He had been in that building probably two hundred times in twenty years, mostly downstairs, mostly for other people’s worst nights.
He had never once been on three.
Kelsey was scared. That was the part he had not prepared for, because in thirteen months he had not seen that woman scared of anything, including him.
She had her phone in her hand at four thirty and put it face down when he came in and did not pick it up again.
“They keep saying thirty-three weeks,” she said. “They keep saying it like it’s a problem.”
“It’s a hospital. That’s what they do.”
“There’s a whole team coming. There’s a team for the baby, separate. They told me that like it was supposed to be reassuring.”
“That’s good. That means they’ve got people.”
“Wade.”
“It’s good,” he said. “Look at me. It’s a good hospital. Ben Rasmussen’s wife had both of hers here.”
She looked at him for a second and then held out her hand, and he took it, and he stood there for about forty minutes holding a twenty-eight-year-old’s hand in a room with a monitor going and thought about absolutely nothing at all, which had not happened to him since October.
At half past nine he told her he had a thing he could not move and would be back inside of three hours, and she said fine, and did not ask what it was, and he drove out past the county line to a farmhouse with a wood stove in it and sat on the floor of a court-appointed psychologist’s office and did the worst ninety minutes of the entire eight months.
He was back on the third floor at ten of one and nothing had happened yet, and then everything happened at once, the way they tell you it does.
The baby came at 6:14 in the evening on the twenty-second of April.
Wade Kessler was forty-one years old and he had been in rooms where people died and he had told nine families in twenty years that somebody was not coming home, and he had a photograph of his father in a dress uniform on the wall of a study in a house on Larkspur Court, and none of it had prepared him for one single second of it.
The kid came out loud.
That was the first thing. There is supposed to be a wait, everybody tells you there’s a wait, and there was no wait at all. He came out furious and started up before he was all the way out and did not stop.
And there were four people in that room in different colored scrubs waiting to take him, and they took him, and they had him under a light on a table with a heater on it, and Wade stood where he’d been told to stand and could not see anything except elbows.
Somebody said a number.
Somebody else laughed.
“Well,” a woman said. “Hello, sir.”
Then, over her shoulder, to the room in general, in the tone of a person making conversation:
“He’s a big fella for thirty-three weeks.”
Seven pounds one ounce.
Twenty inches.
Eight and nine, which Wade did not know the meaning of and which Kelsey’s nurse explained twice, and which means the child came out working.
No tube. No mask. Nothing on his face at all. One of the people in scrubs held an oxygen mask about four inches off him for maybe thirty seconds and then took it away and said something to another one of them and they both looked at the baby.
At seven fifteen a nurse brought him to Kelsey with a hat on and he latched inside of about two minutes, which Wade also did not know the meaning of and which the nurse told him, twice, was not what she’d expected today.
They put a hat on him. Somebody had knitted it. There is apparently a woman in Medina who knits them by the hundred and donates them, and a nurse told Wade this while he stood there and he said “huh” and could not have repeated one word of it back.
He held him at twenty of eight.
He is not going to write down or say out loud what happened to him at twenty of eight in the evening on the twenty-second of April, and there is nobody in his life he would say it to, and the only true statement he has ever made about it is that he had been under the impression, for forty-one years, that he understood roughly what people meant.
He called his mother at nine.
Vivian answered on the second ring the way she does, and he said the numbers and the time and the weight, and she said, “A boy,” in a voice he had not heard her use since his father’s funeral.
Then she said, “I’ll come Saturday. Not before. Let the girl get her feet under her.”
“Okay.”
“Wade.” A pause on the line. “Your father would have liked this very much.”
He sat in a plastic chair by a window on the third floor after that for about ten minutes and did not do anything at all.
The neonatologist came in at ten the next morning.
Her name was Dr. Anand and she had a laptop on a rolling cart and she was pleasant and fast, and she stood at the end of the bed and said the baby looked terrific and that they’d keep him a couple of days for feeding and temperature but that she was not concerned.
Then she said, “I do want to flag one thing on the record so nobody’s confused later.”
Kelsey said, “Is he okay?”
“He’s better than okay. That’s the thing I’m flagging.” She turned the cart. “When a baby’s dating and clinical appearance don’t match, we can do a New Ballard assessment. Skin, ears, soles of the feet, muscle tone. It gives us an independent estimate of gestational age.”
“His score is consistent with about thirty-eight weeks.”
The room did a thing.
“Your dating had you at thirty-three. His exam is closer to thirty-eight. That’s a five-week gap, and it’s outside what I’d call a normal spread.”
“So the dates were wrong,” Kelsey said.
“They may have been entered wrong, or based on a later date somebody reported.” Dr. Anand was typing.
“But if there was a first-trimester ultrasound, I’d want to see it.
We generally do not move a due date by five weeks after an early scan.
I’m noting the discrepancy because it will follow him in the chart, and because if anybody ever tells you your son was a thirty-three-week preemie, that’s going to be inconsistent with everything else in his file. ”
“Okay.”
“Clinically, he looks like a term baby. Congratulations. That’s the good version of a discrepancy.”
She shook Wade’s hand and went out.
Kelsey looked at the door for a second and then said, brightly, “Well, I told you Dr. Rand moved me.”
Wade said, “Yeah.”
He stood at the window at the end of the hall by the vending machines for a while.
There was a laminated notice about hand sanitizer and a poster about flu shots and a view of the employee lot with about four inches of standing water at the low end of it.
Without a first-trimester scan.
He got out his phone.
The thread was still there. It has been on that phone since March of last year and he has never deleted a single one of them, which is a thing he has thought about since and has no explanation for.
He scrolled up. Past February, past January, past the whole ugly winter.
October eighteenth. Doctor confirmed the dating. Everything’s right where it should be. I sent you the picture. Do you believe me now?
And below it, the image.
He opened it and pinched it out.
He had looked at that picture, he would guess, thirty or forty times between October and Christmas, and had never once looked anywhere on it except the middle.
Along the bottom edge, in the small type the machine puts there:
10/18. 11w 2d.
A first-trimester scan.
He stood in a hallway on the third floor of Sheridan Memorial at ten twenty in the morning and did the arithmetic, and he did it the way he does everything, which is carefully and twice.
Eleven weeks and two days on the eighteenth of October.
Back up eleven weeks and two days from the eighteenth of October.
Then move forward about two weeks, because he had sat through enough of this in a fertility clinic in 2017 to know gestational age starts roughly two weeks before conception.
The middle of August.
He put his hand flat on the window ledge.
Something happens to men in his line of work when the pieces go together, and it is not a feeling, it is closer to a sound. He had had it maybe six times in twenty years. It is entirely physical and it arrives about four seconds ahead of the thought.
He knew where he was in the middle of August the way he knows his own badge number, because he had spent three weeks in a dormitory room in Kentucky with a communal bathroom down the hall, and he had complained about it to four separate people, and he had come home on a Sunday with a certificate in a cardboard tube that was still in the trunk of the truck.
August third to the twenty-fourth.