17. Margot
Margot
He's hoping.
I can see it. He doesn't say anything, doesn't do anything, doesn't so much as look at me sideways when he comes to sit with Nora.
But it's there, in how he stands on the porch, in the way he leaves.
Something in him has straightened. He carries himself like a man who's stopped waiting for a verdict and started waiting for a door.
It makes me furious.
Not only at him. I’m angry at him and the fact that I haven't decided anything, and he's already standing somewhere on the other side of a decision I haven't made. He’s being patient about it, and the patience is worse than pressure would be.
Pressure I could push back on. He's giving me nothing to push.
So I push anyway.
My lawyer has handled every contract Reyes Development has signed in eleven years and she drafted the prenup, and when I called her the week after the hospital she asked, "Are you sure?" I said, "Draft it," and she did, and it's been in my mother's desk for three weeks.
Tuesday he comes at two. I meet him on the porch with the envelope.
He looks at it. He knows what it is. I watch him know.
"You can look it over," I say. “The lawyer says it's clean. Everything that was mine stays mine. Everything that was yours stays yours. Nora's yours and mine. There's a schedule. You can push back on the schedule if it doesn’t work for you.”
He takes it.
He doesn't open it. He doesn't say no, the way he did in the coffee shop. He doesn't ask me to wait. He doesn't say anything about Nora, or the bracelet, or the last eight weeks of Tuesdays.
"Okay," he says.
He turns and walks to the truck and puts the envelope on the passenger seat, and comes back, and stands on the mat.
"Can I still see her today?"
"Yes."
He comes in. He sits in the armchair. He holds his daughter for an hour and talks to her about nothing, about the weather and the truck and a dog he saw, and when the hour's up he hands her back and says "Thursday" and goes.
The envelope's still on the passenger seat when he pulls out. I can see it through the window.
I stand in the doorway and hate that it worked, and hate that I wanted it to, and I still don’t know what I even mean.
Nora spikes a fever the next Tuesday.
She's ten weeks. Her temperature is 100.
8 at noon and 101.4 twenty minutes later.
I've read every page the pediatrician gave me, and the instruction for a baby under three months is not ambiguous.
I am standing in my mother's kitchen with a limp, hot baby against my chest and my mother's at the dentist, and I'm not thinking anymore. I'm just moving. Car seat. Bag. Keys.
At the pediatric emergency room on Route 9, the triage nurse asks Nora's age and takes us through the doors before I have finished answering.
A nurse with kind hands and no expression checks the temperature again and says, "Let's get the doctor," and something about how quickly she says it puts me on the floor.
I call him from the plastic chair.
I don't decide to. It's like the mask. My hand does it.
"Mar."
"She's got a fever. I'm at the pediatric ER on Route 9 and they took her back, I don't know what’s happening.”
"I'm coming."
Not how high. Not did you call the pediatrician. Not where's your mother. Just I'm coming, and the sound of a door, and the call ends.
He's there in fourteen minutes. He comes through the sliding doors at a run and stops when he sees me, and he doesn't touch me, he just sits down in the next plastic chair and says, "What do we know."
I tell him what we know. It isn't much. He listens to all of it.
They take blood. They take urine. They keep us for six hours because at ten weeks a fever is never nothing until somebody proves it is.
The tests come back reassuring. An early viral infection, the doctor says, the kind that looks terrifying in a body this small and usually passes.
By seven Nora is cooler and furious about being woken, and I have never been so grateful to hear her scream.
Anders carries the seat to my car. He puts it in. He checks the buckle twice.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't."
He waits until I've pulled out to get in his truck.
I find out Thursday, from Dev.
Dev comes by to drop off a check for the strip along the fence that his son mowed twice while I've been at my mother's, and he stands in the doorway with his hat in his hand and says, "How's she doing? The little one."
"Better. The tests were clear. They think it's viral."
"Yeah. He told me." Dev shifts his weight. "Bad day for it."
"What do you mean."
He looks at me like he's said too much and can't get it back.
"The city job. The library annex. Final walkthrough was Tuesday, one o'clock.
Six months of bidding on that. Anders was in the room with the councilman and the inspector and about three other people when his phone went, and he looked at it, and he said 'I have to go,' and he went.
Didn't explain. Didn't call from the truck.
Just gone." Dev turns his hat over. "They gave it to Halvorsen Group.
Said if he couldn't be bothered to finish a walkthrough. "
"How much?”
Dev tells me.
It's more than Stenburg Construction clears in a year. I know this because I've seen their books. I've seen their books because for six years they've been my subcontractor and I don't hire anybody whose books I haven't seen.
"He didn't tell you?” Dev asks.
"No."
"Figured." He puts his hat on. "He wouldn't. I probably shouldn't have. But know whatever he did, he regrets it, Margot. I see him almost every day, I have for years now. I’ve never seen him down this bad. If you can find a way to make it right, you need to do it, he’s a good guy, one of the good ones.”
“I know,” I reply, and I mean it. I know he’s one of the good ones, at least, I just don’t know if I have to make it right.
I go to the house a few days later.
I haven't been back since the kitchen. I let myself in with my own key and stand in the mudroom, and the highchair's gone, folded up and put away. The basket of toys is gone. The sippy cup's gone from the rack. The house smells like the house.
He's in the garage. The toy excavator's gone too.
"You didn't have to do that," I say.
He turns around. He's got a drill in his hand and he sets it down.
"Dev?”
"Dev."
"I'm going to kill him."
"You lost the annex."
"Yeah."
"That was six months. That was the whole spring."
"Yeah. I did." He wipes his hands on his jeans. "You called. I went."
"The tests were clear. My mother was twenty minutes away."
"I didn't know that."
"You could have asked."
"Yeah." He looks at me. "I could have. I fucked up when you were in labor, I'm not doing that again, Margot, I don't care who else needs me. You called. I went. That's all it's ever going to be now."
I stand in the garage.
"I'm not trying to recreate what I missed," he says.
"I can't. I don't get her birth back. I don't get to unsee that picture.
I'm not stupid enough to think an emergency room visit makes up for it all.
It doesn't. Nothing does. I'm just trying to be there for everything I haven't missed yet.
That's all I've got. It's not enough and it's what there is. "
It gets me.
Right under the sternum, where Nora used to kick. I feel it land and I feel it go in.
I don't let it show. I've had eleven years of practice not letting things show across a table, and I use every one of them, and I say, "Don't lose any more contracts on my account."
"Not on your account. On hers."
"Anders."
"I'll try."
I leave. I make it to the car. I sit in it in the driveway of my own house and put my forehead on the wheel and stay there until I can breathe.
The envelope is still on his passenger seat. I saw it through the truck window on my way past.
Unopened.