6. Tess
Tess
Shane starts toward the car and I hold up a hand through the windshield and he stops like I’ve thrown something at him. The chest clip on the car seat won’t release. It takes me three tries while Shane watches from across a parking lot.
By the time I’m out with Sadie, Shane’s changed position. Squared up, hands behind his back.
“Tess.”
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I know.”
He looks past my shoulder and finds the side of her head, and his whole face lets go. I’ve watched this man take an amphitheater to its feet. I watched him get the call about his father in a hotel corridor in Cincinnati. His face has never done what it does in that parking lot.
“Oh,” he says.
To nobody. But I see it on his face, clear as day. He’s spotted the notch in Sadie’s ear, the same notch I’ve traced a hundred times on his ear, and apparently the same one he inherited straight from his father.
The proof he needed, the proof I didn’t need because I’ve known she was his all along.
Still, I feel vindicated.
“Look all you want. You’re paying for it,” I say and walk past him.
He puts a hand out toward the SUV like the asphalt’s moved under him.
Two men with cameras at the edge of the lot have noticed us and started jogging, and I turn my shoulder in and put her face against my neck.
He comes around to my other side without being asked and takes the wind off me and I hate that I let him.
We match pace as we move together, a family that hasn’t figure it out yet.
Inside it’s a waiting room like any waiting room.
Fake ficus. A television bracketed to the wall with a cooking show going.
A woman behind glass who’s clearly been warned, because she says his name and then goes red to the roots of her hair.
Two women in scrubs come out of a back hallway, see him, and go straight back through the door they came out of. One has her phone up before it shuts.
“That’ll be online in a minute,” I say, glowering at the door as it closes.
“Probably.”
“Does it bother you?”
He watches the door. “No. Honest answer. It stopped bothering me around 2014.” He turns his knuckle over with his thumb. “It bothers me that you’re getting pulled into it.”
He doesn’t sit next to me. He takes the chair across, forearms on his knees, and looks at his hands, then at her, then back at his hands.
“Can I ask her name?” he says at last.
I could refuse. I think about refusing.
“Sadie.”
He nods slowly, like it’s information that has to be put somewhere careful.
“Sadie.”
“Broderick.”
“Yeah.” His jaw works. “Okay.”
A man comes in off the street with a paper cup and gets three steps toward the glass before he sees who’s sitting in the chairs.
He stops. He looks at Shane, then at me, then at the baby, and I watch him assemble the whole thing behind his eyes.
He doesn’t take a picture. He goes and sits on the far side of the waiting room and stares at the cooking show with his ears going red.
After a few minutes they call us back to a small room with a poster about immunizations and a technician named Deb who has decided to be aggressively normal about all of this, God bless her.
She steps out to log something and pulls the door most of the way shut.
Sadie is very interested in the paper on the exam table.
She gets a fistful, crushes it, and looks up at me to see whether that was allowed.
“She’s big. For six months.”
“She’s small. She’s on the chart, but she’s small.”
“Oh.”
“She came five weeks early.”
He takes that in. I watch him decide not to ask, and then watch him fail.
“Was it bad?”
“Yes. Very.”
I think about the fear I carried for the longest time, that I would lose her to any number of things that can take a premature baby out of this world. I still have fear, but now that she’s catching up in size and milestones, they don’t sit so heavy on my chest.
Shane waits to see if there’s more for me to say. There isn’t. To his credit he doesn’t ask for it.
Deb comes back and does him first. Ten seconds, done.
Then she brings the swab at Sadie and Sadie takes one look at the stranger and the stick and goes off, that hot outraged shriek, her whole face plum-colored, arching back against my arm.
He’s out of the chair before I register the movement. Hands up. I put my body between them.
I don’t say anything. I just stand there, and he stops with his hands still raised, and Deb finds something on the counter to recalibrate.
I get Sadie’s head steady on my shoulder.
“Do it now.” It is over quickly. My daughter forgives the world almost at once because she is six months old and merciful. He sits back down.
Deb tapes the vials and writes on a form and tells us it’s usually a week, sometimes less, and that they’ll call the number on the top sheet. She says it to me. He notices that she says it to me.
“Which number’s on the top sheet.”
“Mine,” I say.
“Okay.”
“Is that a problem.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “No, that’s, no.”
“I’m sorry. For the studio. The window. Whatever they’ve been sending you, I’ve seen some of it.”
“Have you.”
“Janelle printed them out.”
“That must have been hard for you.”
He takes it. He doesn’t flinch off it. “Yes.”
“So which are you sorry for.” Sadie grabs a piece of my hair and I let her. “Are you sorry your fans did it. Or sorry you told them to?”
“I didn’t tell them to.”
“You told forty million people I was a liar making money off a baby.” I get the bag onto my shoulder. “They didn’t get creative, Shane. They just did what you said.”
He’s quiet.
“I should have called you before that interview.”
And that’s almost right. It’s so nearly the right sentence that for a second my whole chest tips toward him, and that scares me worse than the brick did.
“You should have called me fourteen months ago.”
“Tess.”
“There’s a green card in a drawer at my house. Somebody in your office signed for a picture of her.” I shift the strap. “So when you find out who, and you will, because you’re going to want to very badly, remember that you’re about to feel a lot better once you’ve got somebody to be angry at.”
He stands when I stand. He doesn’t follow.
Deb holds the door and I’m untangling Sadie’s arm from the strap, turning, and Sadie swings out sideways the way babies do, hand opening and closing.
She catches his finger. Just takes it, the whole thing wrapped up in that fist, the way she grabs a spoon or a fistful of my collar or the vet’s stethoscope. He goes completely still.
She holds on. Then something else interests her and she lets go and grabs the strap instead, and I keep walking, and behind me I hear him take a breath with a crack down the middle of it.
At the door I look back, because I’m not a saint.
He’s standing exactly where I left him with his hand held out a little from his body, like he’s trying not to disturb something, looking at his own finger.
“She’s mine,” he says.
Not to me. He doesn’t know I’m still there.
Of course she’s his, I’m just glad he’s finally realizing it.