Chapter 9 The Appointment
Lesley
I got there at nine fifteen for my nine thirty appointment. Hank was already sitting in the waiting room.
He was in a chair near the window, a coat folded over his lap and a paper cup of coffee in his hand that looked like it had gone cold a while ago. When he saw me, he stood up. He didn’t come toward me. He waited for me to come to him, or not.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” His eyes moved over my face, cataloguing. “How are you feeling?”
“Better. The cough’s almost gone.”
“Good. That’s good.”
I checked in at the desk and came back and sat down, leaving one empty chair between us.
He didn’t comment on it. He didn’t take out his phone.
I noticed that, and then I was annoyed with myself for noticing, because a man sitting in a waiting room without checking his email shouldn’t be a thing anyone has to notice.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“A while,” he said.
The nurse called my name at nine thirty-five. Hank stood when I did and then paused, looking at me.
“You can come in,” I said. “You’re the baby’s father.”
He followed me down the hall.
Dr. Kessler was a brisk, silver-haired woman in her sixties who had delivered two of Heather’s nieces and had a reputation for being gentle with patients and merciless with hospital administrators.
She’d already seen the records from Aspen.
She asked about my symptoms and listened to my lungs and reviewed the blood work and nodded in a way that suggested she was satisfied.
“Carbon monoxide exposure is the thing I worry about most in pregnancy,” she said.
“But your levels came down quickly, and you were on high-flow oxygen almost right away. The first responders did everything right.” She glanced at me over her glasses.
“I understand you did a few things right yourself.”
“Who told you that?”
“It was in the paramedic notes. Reporting party called 911 with exact location, five occupants, one elderly.” She smiled slightly. “They don’t usually write that much.”
I felt Hank look at me. I didn’t look back.
“Do you have any questions before we take a look?” Dr. Kessler asked.
Before either of us could answer, she glanced down at her tablet and added, in the same even tone, “And I ask all my patients this after something like a fire. Do you have support at home? Someone checking on you?”
“I’m living on my own right now,” I said. “At my condo in LoHi. I have a lot of support. My best friend is a pediatric nurse, and she checks on me more than I’d like.”
Dr. Kessler nodded and made a note, and didn’t look at Hank, which I appreciated. Hank didn’t say anything. He sat very still in the chair by the wall with his hands on his knees.
When Dr. Kessler asked again whether we had any questions, I shook my head. Hank cleared his throat.
“Just one,” he said. “Is there anything we should be watching for over the next few weeks? Any delayed effects from the smoke?”
It was a good question, and it was the only one he asked. Dr. Kessler answered it thoroughly. Hank listened without interrupting, and he didn’t glance at me afterward to see if I’d noticed.
Then she dimmed the lights and brought the ultrasound machine over, and I lay back on the paper-covered table and pulled my sweater up over my stomach.
At thirteen weeks, I had the smallest curve. I’d only just started to see it myself in the mornings, before I ate anything. Dr. Kessler squeezed the gel onto my skin and pressed the wand against it, and the screen filled with gray and black static.
Then there it was.
It had changed so much since that night in Aspen. It looked like a baby now, unmistakably, with a round head and a tiny upturned nose and a hand raised near its face. As we watched, it kicked both legs and turned halfway over, as if it were annoyed at being disturbed.
“Look at that,” Dr. Kessler said. “Very active. That’s exactly what we want to see.”
She turned up the sound, and the heartbeat filled the room, fast and strong.
I heard Hank make a sound beside me, low and involuntary. I turned my head. He was standing near the foot of the table with his hand pressed over his mouth, staring at the screen, and tears were running down his face. He didn’t wipe them away. I don’t think he knew they were there.
For a long moment, neither of us said anything. The baby hiccuped, a small jerk of its whole body, and Dr. Kessler laughed.
“Hiccups,” she said. “They practice breathing in there. Perfectly normal.”
“Can we get a picture?” Hank asked. His voice was thick. Then he looked at me. “I mean, can you. If you want one.”
“We can get two,” Dr. Kessler said, already printing.
In the parking garage afterward, we stood between our two cars. He’d parked beside me, or I’d parked beside him; I couldn’t remember which. He was holding the ultrasound photo by its edges as though it might tear.
“Thank you,” he said. “For letting me be there.”
“You’re the baby’s father,” I said again, because it was true and because it was the only answer I had.
He nodded. He looked down at the photo in his hands and then back at me. “Can I ask how you want to handle this part?” he said. “The appointments. I don’t want to keep texting you to ask when the next one is. I don’t want you to have to manage me on top of everything else.”
I’d thought about this too. “I’m going to make a shared calendar,” I said. “Just for the baby. Appointments, tests, anything to do with the pregnancy. Everything I schedule goes in there, and you’ll see it when I do. You won’t have to ask, and I won’t have to remind you.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Thank you.”
“It’s not a favor,” I said. “It’s how I’d run any project with two people who need the same information.”
Something close to a smile crossed his face. “I know,” he said. “I’ve seen you run projects.”
“Do you want to get breakfast? There’s a place on Colfax. Just breakfast. We don’t have to talk about anything.”
I thought about it. The part of me that had been married to him for seven years wanted to say yes so badly it surprised me. I wanted to sit in a booth across from him and eat pancakes and talk about the baby’s tiny nose. I wanted to pretend, for an hour, that the last five days hadn’t happened.
That was exactly why I couldn’t.
“No,” I said. “Not today.”
He took it without argument. He didn’t ask why or suggest another day or explain why it would be good for us. He just nodded, slowly.
“Okay,” he said. “Drive safe.”
“You too.”
I got into my car and pulled out of the space, and in the rearview mirror I saw him still standing there, looking at the photograph.
I didn’t go home. I drove downtown to the office on Wynkoop Street for the first time since the gala.
Our firm occupied the top two floors of a restored brick warehouse two blocks from Union Station, with worn wood floors and long drafting tables and a view of the tracks where the light rail trains slid in and out all day.
I’d worked there for eight years. When I came through the door at eleven with my laptop bag and the ultrasound picture tucked inside my coat, the studio went quiet for a moment.
Then Priya was coming across the floor with a thermos in both hands, and behind her Brody, the intern, and then half the office.
“Ginger tea,” Priya said, pressing the thermos into my hands. “Real ginger. I peeled it with a spoon, like the internet said.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I really did,” she said. “We were all so scared, Lesley.”
Gail came out of her office in her red reading glasses and hugged me, briefly and hard, and told me I was an idiot for coming in and that she was very glad I was an idiot. Then she asked if I wanted to go home, and I said no, and she nodded as if she’d expected that and went back to her office.
I sat down at my desk. My drafting lamp was where I’d left it.
The Larimer Street drawings were still pinned to the corkboard above my monitor with a sticky note in my own handwriting: Check the north stair.
Somebody had left a small potted succulent beside my keyboard with a card that said Glad you’re okay in six different people’s handwriting.
I spent the afternoon checking the north stair. It was the best afternoon I’d had in a week.
He’d been early. He’d listened. He’d asked one good question and hadn’t made the appointment about himself. He’d cried without making a show of it. He’d asked me to breakfast and accepted my answer.
It should have been nothing special. For a lot of men it would have been nothing special, just a Thursday morning. A husband showing up to his wife’s prenatal appointment on time is not a grand gesture. It’s the floor. It’s the least I should ever have expected.
That was the thing I kept turning over that night, back in LoHi. The man in that exam room had always been there, somewhere. I’d seen him before, in the good months, in Santa Barbara, on the hallway floor with the pregnancy test in his hand. I knew he existed.
I just couldn’t tell yet whether he was going to stay.