22 - BROKEN HEARTS
Derek
"Dr. Lacey isn't a mommy yet," Jessica said, like she was telling me a problem I needed to fix. "Can she be my mommy?"
Christ, that hit like bricks. I gathered her up and said my goodbyes.
The parking lot was quiet in the mid-afternoon. I clicked Jessica into her booster seat, buckled the strap with the automatic precision of four years of practice. She stirred, eyelids fluttering open just enough to catch the light, then closing again.
"I like Dr. Lacey, Daddy," she mumbled, mostly asleep.
I gave her a little squeeze. "I know, Tiger."
A pause. Then, quieter: "The other kids in daycare have mommies."
Her lower lip trembled for exactly half a second before she caught it. She'd been doing that lately. Catching herself, pulling it back, like I pulled things back. Four years old and she was already learning to manage it.
"I know, baby," I said. "I wish we had Mommy too. Every single day."
She didn't remember Pamela. She'd been one year old when we lost her, but she carried Pamela anyway.
The same laugh, sudden and complete, nothing held back.
The same open-handed readiness to love whoever seemed kind.
The same absolute fearlessness, the conviction that she could climb anything and that someone would catch her if she fell.
She was asleep before I'd finished closing the car door.
I got in the driver's seat and sat for a moment without starting the engine, hands resting on the wheel. The parking lot was still. A few cars. The long shadow of the hospital wall stretching across the asphalt.
Jess blinked up at me in the rearview mirror, not quite as asleep as I'd thought. "Do you like her, Daddy? She's pretty."
"She is, Tiger." I exhaled through my nose, something between a laugh and a sigh. "But like I said, grown-up things are complicated. Dr. Lacey is your doctor."
I was usually better at this. I felt the mental pressure and fought it back.
Jess subsided. Her eyes closed for real this time. I watched her in the mirror for a moment. Cheek pressed against the car seat, tiny hand curled around the edge of her blanket, chest rising and falling.
I thought of Pamela's first ultrasound. Twenty weeks.
The tech had gone quiet in that way that means something's fucked. She'd stepped out, come back with Roberts, the old Peds chief, and his young hotshot doc. This woman I'd never seen before stood at the monitor while Roberts explained what they were looking at.
Tetralogy of Fallot. Four defects. Surgery after birth, probably within the first few months. High success rate with the right team. The right team was here.
Pamela had gripped my hand so hard her nails dug into my palm. I'd needed something to hold onto too. I'd spent the whole appointment calculating, assessing, trying to turn fear into information I could act on.
Roberts deferred to Bonds twice during that appointment, the slight turn of his head in her direction, the pause that meant he was checking with her before he spoke. I'd been trained to see this kind of thing.
At the second appointment, the one where they confirmed Jessica would be born stable enough for surgery, the one where Pamela finally let herself breathe, I'd been watching Bonds at the monitor when Pamela leaned close to me.
"She's damn pretty, isn't she?" Pamela whispered.
I'd laughed, caught entirely off guard. "Yeah. She is." It hadn't been what I was thinking, but Bonds was sexy, if you didn't know her.
"Were you thinking about asking her something?"
"What?"
She'd continued, unbothered. "I'd be up for it."
I'd laughed out loud at that. "Her? Baby, you never could read women. She's wound up so tight the very idea would make her head explode."
Pamela had just smiled. "You never know."
Then Jessica had kicked. The first time I'd ever felt it. Pamela taking my hand and pressing it flat against the curve of her stomach, and then the small, unmistakable pressure of a foot or a fist pushing back.
I started the engine.
Something was bugging me about today. I ran back through it looking for the variable I'd missed.
The handshake. That was where it started.
She hadn't tightened.
I went through it again, slower. Every exchange in the wing. How she'd held my gaze during the climbing-wall argument and hadn't looked away first. The way she'd spoken to me in front of Jessica. And she'd touched my arm in the lobby when she'd said I wasn't so bad.
Nothing I'd done today had shaken her. The pattern was gone.
Patterns were my stock in trade.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. Jessica, asleep, cheek smushed against the car seat, the ponytail splayed across her shoulder.
Bonds was different.
If she kept that kind of thing up, she might get interesting.