CHAPTER 16
JONAS
“Layne’s in labor. She’s admitted at St. Catherine’s. She’s safe, she’s with Dana, and she does not want you here.” A breath. “I’m telling you because you’re her father, and I’d want to know. That’s the whole call.”
“Margot—”
“Lake road, two hours from you, one hour from her. Do what you want with the math. Goodbye.”
She hangs up. I stand in the dark of the penthouse, phone in hand, the city glittering forty stories below, and for one second the old machinery engages — call the hospital chairman, call the floor, arrange — and then I think of Layne pressing a nurse call button to have me escorted out, and I put the machinery down.
I drive myself. Marcus will be furious. I leave him a message like a teenager leaving a note.
St. Catherine’s maternity floor at five in the morning is warm light and quiet and a smell I know from somewhere, antiseptic and laundry, and Dana is at the nurses’ station when I come off the elevator, and she sees me and does not move.
“Mr. Palmer.”
“I know she doesn’t want me here. Margot called me. I’m not asking to—” I stop, because I am asking, it’s the only thing in the world I’m asking. “Is she all right? Is the baby—”
“Laboring normally. Thirty-seven weeks is a good week.” Dana studies me the way she studies charts, the whole history in one pass. “She said no, Mr. Palmer. You know that or you wouldn’t be standing at my desk instead of in her room.”
“I know.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
It’s a test. I know it’s a test. A month ago I’d have failed it without noticing there was one.
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m going to sit in that waiting room and do nothing. If she needs anything — anything, ice, a hand, the moon — someone can tell me. Otherwise I’ll do nothing very quietly.”
Dana holds my gaze another second, then reaches under the desk and pulls out a visitor badge, and writes WAITING ROOM on it instead of a name, and clips it to my coat herself.
“There’s coffee,” she says. “It’s terrible. It’s ours.”
So I wait. This is the part they don’t put in the billionaire profiles — the part where the money is a toy in a room where nothing is for sale.
The waiting room is orange chairs and a vending machine and a fish tank, and I sit in the corner of it for hours while down the hall my daughter comes into the world without me.
Margot finds me there around seven.
She comes for the vending machine, sees me, stops. She looks terrible and magnificent, a lawyer in yesterday’s clothes who has been up all night holding my wife’s hand, and she considers me the way she must consider opposing counsel.
“You came,” she says.
“You called.”
“I called.” She feeds the machine, punches buttons.
“She’s doing well. Dana’s with her. There’s a doctor named Osei who’s apparently terrifying and excellent.
” The machine drops a packet of something.
She doesn’t look at me. “You should know she said your name once, around five. Then she caught herself and said mine instead. Make of that whatever you deserve.”
“Margot.”
“What.”
“Thank you. For the call. For being the one she said instead.”
She picks up her packet and turns, and for a second the lawyer face slips and I see how tired she is, how long she’s been carrying my share of this.
“Don’t waste it,” she says, and goes back down the hall.
The fish tank hums. I memorize the fish.
There’s a blue one with a torn fin that hides behind the plastic castle and a fat orange one that appears to run the place, and I name them Brenner and Whitmore, and it passes ten minutes, and then I go back to listening to the door at the end of the hall like a man at the wall of a city he’s locked out of himself.
My mother arrives at nine, which I expected, with coffee I didn’t ask for, in a coat that costs more than the chairs.
“You’re here,” she says, as if I’ve won something. Then, reading my face: “Have you been in?”
“She doesn’t want me in.”
“Jonas.” My mother sits, arranges herself, delivers the verdict of her entire worldview in one breath. “You’re the father. There’s no court in this country that would—”
“I’m not asking a court.” I look at her, and something must be in my face, because she stops. “She’s in there doing something I can’t help with and never earned. The least I can do is not make it about what I want. Sit if you’re staying. Don’t sit if you’re going to say ‘you’re the father’ again.”
Helena sits. She doesn’t say it again. We watch Brenner hide behind his castle for an hour without speaking, and it’s the most honest hour we’ve spent together in years.
Renn warned me, weeks ago, that memory might come back like weather — pressure first, then the front.
All morning the pressure builds. I don’t know why.
I pace, I sit, I drink the terrible coffee.
Helena calls twice and I don’t answer. My mother will arrive eventually, because my mother arrives everywhere eventually, but right now it’s me and the fish tank and the sound.
The sound is the thing.
Maternity floors are not quiet, it turns out.
Doors open and close, and through the door at the end of the hall, sometimes, I can hear her — muffled, far away, Layne’s voice, Layne making sounds I’ve never heard her make, and every one of them goes through me like a current.
I stand in the corridor outside the waiting room with my back against the wall and I don’t move any closer, because the line of where I’m allowed is a door I’m not allowed through, and I finally understand that the line is the point.
I built this line. Decision by decision, I built it.
At eleven, Margot comes out again and stands in the waiting room doorway, and every atom in me stops.
“She’s close,” Margot says. To me, or to the room, or to my mother — I’m not sure. Then she looks straight at me, and adds, “Dana says it goes fast at the end.”
And she’s gone again, and the door swings, and down the hall there’s a sound of effort, rising, and my mother reaches over and takes my hand — my mother, who has not held my hand since I was nine — and neither of us remarks on it.
At 11:40 the corridor changes.
A sound comes through that door that I have never heard before and recognize instantly, down in some part of me older than memory — a cry, thin and furious and brand new, a tiny person objecting to the entire concept of air.
Elodie.
And the wall comes down.
I don’t know how to write what happens next.
I’ve tried a dozen times, in the journal Renn makes me keep, and it never lands right, so here’s the plainest version: it isn’t like remembering.
It’s like drowning in reverse. Everything that’s been behind the wall for two months comes through at once, not in order, not gently — the bathroom floor at Riverside and a blue line on a test and my knees on the tile and her hands in my hair, the sound she made, half laugh half sob; a stone church in June and the doors opening and Layne in white and my face wet before she’s halfway to me; a blue-shuttered inn and a surly cat and the two of us drunk on sunlight saying Elodie, it was always Elodie; paint smell and her fingers at the nape of my neck and my own voice saying we’re really doing this; a thousand mornings, cinnamon coffee, her asleep on my shoulder with a pencil still in her hand; every fight, every making up, every pancake Sunday, her laugh in the rain on a voice memo, the crib, the curb cut, watch me —
Mine. All of it. Mine. Five years, and they were never gone, they were locked, and my daughter’s first sound on earth was the key.
And then the second wave hits, and I understand Renn’s warning fully, because the first wave is joy and the second wave is the bill.
The hospital bed. Her hand reaching for mine.
Who are you? — my voice, asking that, at her, at my wife, at the woman carrying my whole life.
The ring coming off my finger while she watched.
Stop calling me that. Fifty missed calls and a candlelit table across from Estelle.
Her face over the heartbeat monitor when I asked the question I will not even think in words.
The curb. The wet curb, the lenses, her face through the glass of a livestream while a stranger caught her arm.
I did all of it. The man who knelt on the bathroom floor and the man who asked that question are the same man, and he’s me, and there’s no wall anymore to hide behind either way.
I slide down the corridor wall. Marcus finds me there — Marcus arrived sometime, I don’t know when, Marcus always arrives — and he doesn’t touch me, he just stands between me and the hallway traffic while I sit on the floor of a hospital corridor with WAITING ROOM clipped to my coat, and I say the only words there are.
“Oh God.”
“Sir.”
“Oh God, Marcus. I remember.” My voice is wrecked and I don’t care. “I remember everything. I remember all of it. I remember what I did.”
He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, with the flat calm of a man who has driven this family through everything: “Yes, sir. That’s the job now.”
My mother is standing a few feet away with her hand over her mouth. She heard it too — the cry, the wall coming down, all of it — and she says, very quietly, “Jonas,” and I say, “Not now,” and she doesn’t push, and it’s the second-most-considerate thing she’s done all year.
Down the hall, a door opens, and Dana comes out pulling off her gloves, and she sees me on the floor and something in her face eases, and she comes over and crouches, and she smells of soap and coffee.
“She’s beautiful,” Dana says. “Six pounds, two ounces. She’s furious and perfect. Mother did wonderfully.” A pause, and the kindness sharpens. “She has your chin, poor thing. And her mother’s whole face around it.”
“Dana. I—”
“I know, honey.” She pats my knee, once, like I’m one of her own. “I heard you from the desk.” She straightens up, and her face does the professional thing again, but gently. “Give her some time. She’s just done the hardest thing a body does. She’ll decide when.”
“When she’s ready,” I say. “Tell her— don’t tell her anything. Tell her the waiting room coffee is terrible and I’m still in it. And Dana — the fish in the tank. The orange one’s name is Whitmore. Someone should know I’ve named the fish.”
“You’re going to be all right, Mr. Palmer,” she says, and it’s the first time anyone’s said that to me like they believe it.
Dana studies me for a long moment, then nods, and goes back down the hall toward my daughter, and I stay on the floor a while longer, because kneeling is coming, soon, in earnest, and I might as well start learning the floor.
My daughter is born. My wife is safe. And I remember everything — which means the easy part of the rest of my life is over, and the work starts now. All six weeks of it that I have to answer for, every step.