13. Margot
Margot
I don't see it. My mother tells me later, all of it, in the flat voice she uses when she is going to say something once and then never again. But I hear the first part through the door, because the door is thin and his voice carries.
"Where is she? Diane. Where is she? Is she okay? How’s the baby?”
"Lower your voice. There are other people on this floor."
"Please."
"Your daughter was born at 4:17."
A sound. Not a word. Something coming out of him.
"She's fine. She's seven pounds one ounce. She's got all her fingers. Margot's fine. She's asleep."
"I want to see them."
"I know."
"Diane. Please. I should have left when she called. I should never have stayed for the cake."
"You left when the cake was cut."
Silence.
"I have a picture, Anders. Would you like to see it? Not of your daughter. That one you can earn. This one's free."
I don't hear anything for a while. Then I hear him make a noise I've never heard from him, low and cracked, and I know she's shown him.
I know it's Becca's post, the crown and the cake and the gray shirt.
I know he's looking at it in a hospital hallway outside the room where I gave birth without him.
"While my daughter was terrified," my mother says, "that's where you were."
"I didn't know. Diane. The doctor said the first one is always late.”
"Her heart rate dropped at two o'clock. They put my daughter on oxygen and she needed you."
"Oh God."
"And you were at a bounce house, with a baby that might not even be yours. You are an idiot, Anders, and you have messed this up really bad.”
He's crying. I can hear it through the door. It's not loud. It's the kind of crying a man does when he's trying not to, all breath and no sound.
"You can cry in the hallway," my mother says. “They don’t need to see you like this. If at all.”
She finally lets him in at eight because I ask her to. Nora's awake and fed, our second one, and I've looked at her for hours already. There's a version of me that could keep him in that hallway until she's in college, and I've decided that version isn't the one I want to be for her.
"Five minutes," I tell my mother.
He comes in.
He's wearing the gray shirt. I'd hoped, stupidly, that he'd have changed. He hasn't. It's got a smear of something white on the front, frosting or fondant, and I look at it and then I don't look at it again.
He stops just inside the door. He looks at me first, my face, checking, the way he used to. Then his eyes go down to my arms.
"Oh," he says.
That's all. Oh.
"You can hold her."
He crosses the room like the floor might give. I hand her up. He takes her the right way, one hand under her head, because he's practiced on Milo, and I file that and put it away.
She's asleep. She doesn't know who he is. He looks down at her and I watch his whole face go, watch it come apart in real time, love and grief and something I don't have a name for, and he makes a sound and puts his lips on her forehead and closes his eyes.
I feel nothing.
It frightens me more than anything he's done.
I'd braced for rage. I'd braced for the thing I felt in the kitchen with the handprint burning on my skin.
I'd have known what to do with either. Instead I lie in the bed and watch my husband fall in love with our daughter, and it's like watching it on a screen.
Like something that's happening to a woman in a hospital in a movie.
"She's got your hair," he whispers.
I don't answer.
"Mar." He doesn't look up from her. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have been here. I should have left the second you called. I should have never gone. I should have."
“Okay, cool. Give me my baby."
He stops.
He looks at me then, and I can see him wanting to say more, the whole speech that's been building in his truck for two hours, every should and every never, and I can see him want to explain about the seven minutes and the twelve hours.
He doesn't.
He crosses back to the bed and puts Nora in my arms, carefully, the way you'd hand someone a thing you'd already broken once.
"Leave," I say.
He stands there.
"Anders. Leave."
And he does.
He turns around and he walks to the door and he opens it and he goes through it, and he doesn't argue and he doesn't ask for one more minute and he doesn't say her name, and the door closes behind him with a soft click.
For the first time since Becca walked into his office with a baby on her hip, Anders has done exactly what I asked.
I don't know what to do with that.
I look down at Nora. She's stirring. Her mouth is working at the air.
"That was your father," I tell her. "We'll see."
My mother comes back in. She doesn't ask. She sits in the chair by the window and picks up her crossword and we stay like that, the three of us, while it gets dark over the parking structure.
Somewhere in the building he's crying in a hallway.
I let him.
He doesn't leave the hospital.
I find that out at midnight from Bettina, who's back on shift and comes to check my stitches and says, in the same voice she used for you're at six, "Your husband's in the family lounge on three. Been there since eight. I told him he could go home and he said he'd rather not."
"He's not."
She waits.
"He's not my husband. He's." I stop. I don't have a word. "He's her father."
Bettina looks at Nora asleep in the bassinet with her fist up.
"Well," she says. "He's on three if the father's needed."
He isn't needed. I feed her at one and at three-thirty and at five, and each time I'm awake in the dark with her mouth working and the monitor ticking and I think about a man in a lounge on three with fondant on his shirt, not going home.
It doesn't move me. I check. I look for it, the way you'd press on a bruise to see if it still hurts, and there's nothing.
But he's there. At five in the morning he's there, on three, and he hasn't come up and he hasn't texted my mother and he hasn't tried the door. He's just there.
I don't know what to do with that either.
In the morning a nurse I don't know brings a paper bag. "Someone left this at the desk for you."
Inside: the wedge pillow from my mother's, which I'd forgotten. My phone charger, the long one. A hair tie. A bottle of the ginger candies, half full, from the drawer in the nursery.
And a folded piece of paper, torn from a lumber invoice. His handwriting.
I'm not going to ask for anything. I'll be downstairs if you need something carried. Or I'll go, if you'd rather. Just tell your mother. Whichever it is I'll do it.
I read it twice. Then I put it in the bag with the ginger candies and the hair tie and I don't read it again.
I don't tell my mother to send him home.
I don't tell her anything. I feed my daughter and look at the parking structure and let him sit on three.