Chapter 29 Building Something Different #2
Dr. Kessler asked Hank if he wanted to cut the cord. He looked at me. I nodded. His hands shook so badly that the nurse had to steady the scissors, but he did it.
Then he bent down over the two of us, very carefully, and put one finger against our daughter’s palm. She closed her tiny hand around it immediately, with a grip much stronger than anyone would have expected, and stopped crying.
“Oh,” Hank said. It was barely a sound. “Oh, look at her, Les.”
“I’m looking.”
“She’s got your hair.”
“She’s got your temper,” I said.
He laughed, a wet, broken sound, and pressed his forehead very gently against the top of my head.
We named her Nora Evelyn Cavanagh. Nora because I’d loved the name since I was a girl.
Evelyn because a woman in a beaded jacket had once sat on the floor of a burning hallway waiting for someone to stop, and because she’d told me, over gin and tonics in the Great Hall at Union Station, that I didn’t have to prove I was strong every day.
I texted Evelyn a picture from the hospital bed that afternoon with the name underneath.
She called me within five minutes, and she cried so hard I could barely understand her.
We brought Nora home to the condo on Thursday afternoon.
My mother had moved from Heather’s guest room onto my pullout couch, and Heather had stocked my refrigerator with enough food to feed a small army.
Hank carried the car seat up the stairs, very slowly, as though it held something that might explode, and set it down in the middle of my living room.
The three of us stood around it looking at our daughter, who was asleep with her fists up by her ears, entirely unimpressed with her new address.
At nine o’clock that night, Hank stood by the door with his jacket in his hand.
“Where do you want me tonight?” he asked. “I can stay on the floor, if that helps. Or I can go home and be back first thing. Whatever’s easiest for you.”
I’d thought about it. “Go home,” I said. “Mom’s here. We’ll be okay. Come back in the morning.”
He nodded. He didn’t argue or make a face. He kissed Nora’s forehead, and then, carefully, mine, and went.
At three in the morning, Nora woke up screaming and didn’t stop for an hour and ten minutes.
My mother and I took turns walking her up and down the hall.
I cried a little, from exhaustion, and my mother told me that I had screamed for three hours every night for the first month of my life, and that I had turned out fine, mostly.
At four fifteen Nora finally fell asleep on my chest, and I sat in the glider in the green room and didn’t dare move.
At six fifty-eight, there was a soft knock on the door. Hank, with coffee.
Hank came to the condo every morning at seven.
He was on leave, and he treated the leave like the most important job he’d ever had.
He arrived with coffee for me and my mother and a bag of groceries, and he stayed until nine at night, and in between he did everything I’d let him do and quite a few things I hadn’t thought to ask for.
He changed diapers with a grim, focused competence that made my mother laugh.
He did laundry. He learned to swaddle from a YouTube video and then from Heather, who told him the YouTube video was wrong.
He took Nora out in the stroller for long walks through Commons Park so I could sleep in the afternoons, and came back with reports about which dogs she’d seen and how she’d reacted to each of them, which was mostly by sleeping.
He went home every night at nine. I never had to ask him to. He’d hand Nora back to me, kiss her head, kiss mine, and drive back to the house in Washington Park, and be back at seven the next morning with the coffee.
My mother stayed through the middle of June. On her last night, while Hank was giving Nora a bottle of pumped milk on my sofa and singing “My Girl” to her badly and off-key, my mother stood beside me in the kitchen and watched them for a long time.
“Your father never once did a night feeding,” she said quietly. “Not once. Not with you, not ever.”
“I know, Mom.”
“I’m not saying anything,” she said. “I’m just watching.”
We kept dating. It was harder with a newborn, and also, somehow, easier.
Our Thursday dates became walks around the neighborhood with Nora in the carrier on Hank’s chest, or takeout from Sal’s eaten on my sofa while she slept in the bassinet beside us.
Once, in the middle of June, Nancy came over to watch her for two hours so we could go out properly, and we went back to Sal’s and sat at the table by the restroom, which Sal now called our table.
Hank discovered halfway through dinner that he had a streak of dried spit-up down the back of his shirt that had been there since four in the afternoon, and I laughed so hard I had to put my head down on the tablecloth.
He’d started practicing braids. Tess had lent him a doll with long yellow yarn hair, and one evening I came out of the shower to find him on my sofa with Nora asleep on his chest and the doll propped on his knee, frowning with deep concentration at a French braid that had gone badly wrong.
“She’s three weeks old,” I said. “She has about eleven hairs.”
“I’m getting ahead of it,” he said, without looking up. “I have maybe four years before this becomes a crisis.”
I stood in the doorway and watched him for a long time. The man who’d once built resorts in four states, frowning over a yarn doll with our daughter asleep on his heart.
I’d forgotten how funny he was. I’d forgotten how much I liked him. Somewhere in the long years of waiting, I’d stopped remembering why I’d called him the day the Oxford renovation was finished. I was remembering now.
The first time he kissed me properly, really kissed me, not a careful goodnight at the door, was on my sofa in early July, when Nora was six weeks old and had finally started sleeping four hours at a stretch.
We’d been watching a terrible movie. I’d fallen asleep against his shoulder.
When I woke up, he was looking down at me, and neither of us said anything, and then he kissed me, slowly, and I kissed him back, and it went on for a long time.