Quest
Nobody came out for forty-seven minutes.
I know because I watched the clock on the wall like it owed me money.
Every minute was a year. Every sound from behind those doors made my heart stop and restart.
I paced. I sat. I paced again. I tried to pray but I couldn’t remember the words because I hadn’t prayed since I was twelve years old sitting in the pew next to Rita pretending to listen to the sermon, and now I was trying to talk to God in a hallway that smelled like sickness and all I could come up with was “please” on a loop.
Please let her be okay. Please let the baby be okay. Please.
A nurse pushed through the doors and I was on my feet before she cleared the threshold.
“Mr. Banks?”
“Yeah. What’s happening?”
“Your daughter was delivered by emergency cesarean at 7:14 PM. She is alive.”
Alive. My legs almost gave out on that word. Alive.
“She weighs approximately three pounds, eleven ounces. Her lungs are underdeveloped, which is expected at this gestational age. She’s been intubated and placed on a ventilator in the neonatal intensive care unit.
The medical team has administered surfactant to help her lungs mature.
The next forty-eight hours will be critical in determining her respiratory progress. ”
She delivered every sentence like she was reading from a chart. Professional. Clinical. I heard every word and understood none of them because my brain had stopped processing at “her lungs are underdeveloped.” My daughter couldn’t breathe on her own. She was three pounds. She was on a machine.
“Can I see her?”
“I can take you to the NICU viewing window.”
She walked me down a corridor and stopped at a window and pointed and I looked through the glass and saw her for the first time.
She was so small. Smaller than I ever imagined a person could be.
She was in an incubator under warm lights, tubes running from her nose, wires taped to her chest, a monitor tracking numbers that meant everything to the nurses and nothing to me.
Her skin was thin and reddish and I could see the veins underneath.
Her fingers were curled into fists the size of grapes.
Her chest rose and fell with the ventilator’s rhythm, mechanical and steady, and I pressed my hand against the glass because I couldn’t press it against her.
My hand. Against the glass. Weeks ago that hand pulled her mother out of a sinking plane.
Built a raft. Paddled across an ocean. Killed for food.
Started fires from nothing. Carried Mehar through hell and kept her alive through sheer refusal to let the island win.
And now that hand was flat against a window because I couldn’t touch my own daughter.
Because she was three pounds of fight on the other side of a pane of glass and all I could give her was my palm pressed against the barrier between us.
“She’s a fighter,” the nurse said behind me.
I didn’t respond. I just stood there with my hand on the glass and watched my daughter breathe through a machine and made her a promise I didn’t say out loud.
A commotion behind me pulled me back. Voices, urgent, somebody calling for a doctor. I turned around and a different nurse was coming toward me, walking fast, and her face had the expression that hospital workers get when they have to say something nobody wants to hear.
“Mr. Banks, there’s been a complication with the mother.”
“What complication?”
“She’s experiencing a postpartum hemorrhage. The surgical team is working to stabilize her. That’s all I can tell you right now.”
Working to stabilize her. Those four words rearranged the entire architecture of my nervous system.
Working to stabilize meant they hadn’t stabilized.
Meant she was still bleeding. Meant the woman I had kept alive for several weeks through starvation and storms and a hurricane was now bleeding out on a surgical table thirty feet from me and I could not get to her.
“I need to see her.”
“Sir, that’s not possible right now. The team needs space to work.”
“Is she going to die?”
The nurse paused. It was less than a second but I felt every fraction of it. “The team is doing everything they can.”
She walked away and I stood in the hallway between two doors.
My daughter behind one, attached to a machine that was breathing for her.
Mehar behind the other, bleeding from a surgery that had saved one life and was now threatening another.
And I was in the middle. The man who controlled everything, who built empires and crushed competitors and moved through the world like it was a chessboard he’d already solved, standing in a hallway in bare feet with nothing in his hands.
My hands.
I looked down at them. Scarred, cut, calloused, sunburned.
Hands that had done everything. Hands that were shaking now, trembling against my sides, completely useless for the first time in my life.
I couldn’t build anything to fix this. I couldn’t carry anyone to safety.
I couldn’t fight what was happening behind those doors.
I couldn’t buy my way through the walls or intimidate the bleeding into stopping or negotiate with God for a better outcome.
I slid down the wall. My back hit the cold tile.
I sat on the floor, put those useless hands over my face, and broke.
Quietly. Not the dramatic kind of breaking you see in movies where the man screams and throws things and somebody rushes to his side.
The real kind. The kind where the sound stays in your chest because if you let it out you’re afraid it won’t stop.
The kind where tears run through your fingers and land on the floor and nobody notices because nobody is looking at the barefoot man sitting against the wall in a hospital hallway in Grenada.
Prime found me like that. I don’t know how much time had passed.
Five minutes or twenty. He came around the corner and saw me on the floor and he didn’t say a word.
No pep talk. No “she’s going to be okay.
” No motivational speech about being strong.
He just sat down next to me, put his hand on the back of my neck, and held it there.
That was it. His hand on my neck. Firm and warm and steady. The same grip our father used to give us when we were boys and scared of something we couldn’t name. Prime just sat there, gave me that, let the silence hold both of us. I was grateful in a way I would never be able to articulate to him.
Bryce was somewhere. Pacing or praying or calling Rita. I didn’t know and couldn’t care because the only two things my brain had room for were behind those two doors and every second of silence was either a mercy or a horror and I couldn’t tell which.
I don’t know how long we sat there. Long enough for the light in the hallway to feel permanent. Long enough for the tile to warm under me. Long enough for the shaking in my hands to stop and be replaced by a numbness that was somehow worse.
Then the double doors opened.
A doctor walked through them. Green scrubs, surgical cap still on, mask pulled down around his neck. He was looking for someone and his eyes found me on the floor. I stood up. Prime stood up with me, his hand still on my neck for a beat before he let go.
I looked at the doctor’s face and tried to read it. Tried to find the answer before he gave it. Tried to calculate the outcome from the angle of his eyebrows and the set of his mouth and the speed at which he was walking toward me.
I couldn’t read it.
He stopped in front of me and opened his mouth.