29. Jeremiah
JEREMIAH
Hedy’s message reaches me in the hospital car park.
I have been here since noon, in the row where I parked at Christmas. My phone is on the dashboard. I have picked it up so often that when it finally lights, I wait for it to go dark again before I understand someone has written to me.
Otto is here. Zelda says you can come now. Wait at the desk until I come for you.
Here.
I read that word again. Then I get out of the car so quickly I leave the door open and have to go back.
At the desk I give Zelda’s name. My voice sounds wrong. I give my own as well, although nobody has asked for it.
Hedy comes through the doors looking exhausted. There is something in her face I haven’t seen before, a brightness underneath it.
“How did you get here so fast?”
“I was outside.”
“Since when?”
“Noon.”
She looks at me, then at the doors.
“She asked me to bring you in. Wash your hands first.”
I do. I dry them twice because I don’t know what else to do with them while she speaks to someone at the desk.
Zelda is against the pillows, a blanket over her legs. There is a damp strand of hair stuck beside her ear. Her mouth looks tired. She has done something enormous while I sat outside watching a phone, and I cannot make myself walk into the room.
“Hi,” she says.
I take the last steps to the bed.
“Hi.”
She smiles a little. “You can come closer.”
Otto lies on her chest in a cap too large for him. I had known there would be a baby. We chose a hat. I assembled a crib. I still wasn’t expecting this face.
His cheek is pressed sideways, his mouth making a small shape against her. One hand is folded under his chin.
“How are you?” I ask Zelda.
“Tired. Hungry, maybe. I keep forgetting what I was going to ask for.”
I want to move the hair from her face. I want to kiss every part of her I can see. I stand with my hands loose at my sides because I don’t know which of those things she could bear right now.
“He’s beautiful.”
“He was very cross about arriving.”
Hedy laughs. “Cross is a mild word.”
They look at each other and laugh again, and I feel the hours I wasn’t here. The jokes they can begin halfway through. The way Hedy knows which cup Zelda means when she asks for water.
Then Zelda winces as she shifts, and I stop wanting any part of this to be about what I missed.
“What can I get?”
“Nothing yet. Look at him.”
I do. His eyelids move. I wait for his eyes to open as if he might recognize me if they do.
“Would you like to hold him?”
“Yes.”
It comes out before she has finished. She smiles properly this time.
The nurse shows me how to support his head. I sit in the chair Hedy pulls close. Then he is in my arms, and I cannot remember how I ever carried anything before.
He weighs almost nothing and enough to change every muscle in my body. My elbow is in the wrong place. I try to fix it without moving him.
“You can breathe,” Zelda says.
I let out the breath.
Otto opens his mouth. I freeze.
“What is it?”
“He’s being a baby.”
Hedy puts a folded blanket beneath my arm. The weight settles. His head rests where I have been shown to hold it, and I look down at the fine hair against my wrist.
I am his father. He does not know what that means. He wants warmth, perhaps, or the person I have just taken him from. I want to tell him I can learn the rest if he gives me a little time.
One hand works free. I put my finger against it, hardly touching.
He closes his fingers.
“Zelda.”
“I see.”
I look up to make sure she does. She is watching us, her head against the pillow. There are tears at the corners of her eyes.
I nearly say I’m sorry. I have so much to be sorry for that it is always there, ready to come between us.
This is the first time my son has held my hand.
“He’s got me,” I say instead.
“He does that.”
“Clearly excellent judgment.”
“He also liked the blanket.”
I laugh, very carefully, so I won’t shake him. Otto doesn’t seem impressed by either of us. His grip stays closed around the end of my finger.
Hedy takes a photograph when Zelda asks her. I am sitting apart from the bed, turned so Zelda can see his face. I wish I could put them both in my arms. I am grateful she wants a picture with me in it at all.
When Otto starts to fret, I look at Zelda before she speaks. She holds out her arms. I am clumsy giving him back, terrified of the little space between her hands and mine. The nurse helps. Then he is against his mother again and I can stop holding my breath.
My forearm still feels the shape of his head.
“Could you tell my supervisor we’re all right?” Zelda asks. “I said I’d let her know.”
She gives me the number. I send the message she asks for and put the phone away.
There are things I could offer to bring, questions I could ask to stay another ten minutes. Hedy finds her hair clip. Zelda says something quietly to her, then her eyes begin to close. I stand.
“I’ll let you rest.”
She looks up. “Thank you for coming.”
I have no answer that won’t break in my mouth. I nod, look at Otto once more, and follow Hedy into the corridor.
She pulls the door nearly closed.
“Two minutes. Then I’m going back.”
“All right.”
“At Christmas, she asked me to read that message of yours to the midwife. She couldn’t explain wanting you and wanting me to keep you out.”
Through the doorway, I can still see a narrow strip of her bed.
“Afterward, in the car, she asked whether her standing up for herself, her leaving you had caused the bleeding.”
My hand goes flat against the wall.
“No.”
Hedy waits.
“No. She didn’t do anything to him. She needed to leave me.” My voice won’t stay steady. “Did you tell her?”
“Of course I told her.”
I nod. I can’t stop nodding, remembering, imagining.
Zelda in the passenger seat with her hood up, asking that after everything else she had been through. I had spent the night wishing she had been at home with me. I hadn’t known she was finding a way to blame herself too.
“She never hit Candace,” Hedy says. “You made her defend herself until she didn’t know what else you’d blame her for.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you know all of it.” Her voice is quiet. “I’ve watched you for five months. The car park. The laundry. She told me about the plant. I still didn’t want you in that room today.”
I take my hand off the wall.
“She did,” Hedy says. “So I came and got you. I’m her sister before I’m anything to you. If she ever has to beg you to believe her again, I will come for her. I will take her from you.”
“She won’t.”
Hedy holds my eyes for another moment.
Then she takes out her phone.
“She said nobody gets photographs yet. Then she said you could have this one.”
It is a foot. A wrinkled heel, five toes, the edge of Zelda’s finger beside it. I lean closer to the screen.
“Her exact words were, ‘He can have the foot.’”
I laugh. It catches painfully in my throat.
“Don’t show Dax.”
“I won’t.”
My phone buzzes. I keep looking at hers because I don’t trust my hands to take mine out.
“Thank you.”
“Go home and sleep. She’s going to need things carried.”
Hedy goes back inside. Through the narrowing gap I hear her ask Zelda whether the sandwich is still forbidden.
Then the door closes.
I stand in the corridor until a porter asks if I’m lost. I tell him no and walk toward the stairs.
In the car, I open the photograph. I enlarge it until the little creases in Otto’s heel fill the screen, then make it small again so I can see Zelda’s finger beside him.
I sit with the phone in both hands for a long time before I can drive home.