Chapter 3 #2
A message board informed him that he should simply let her cry it out. He closed that tab with enough force to make the screen shake.
His phone buzzed. The team group chat had been going since eight, when somebody had apparently told Fen.
Fen: ROGNAR HAS A BABY
Fen: I need everyone to understand that ROGNAR has a BABY
Korvash: Elena told you, didn’t she
Fen: I’m putting it in the newsletter
Tarmek: There is no newsletter.
Fen: there is now
Tarmek: Is he all right?
He stared at that one for a moment.
Rognar: I’m fine
Charlie wailed directly into his ear, and he reconsidered.
Rognar: actually no
Rognar: she won’t stop crying
Rognar: she settles for a few minutes then starts again
The response was immediate.
Korvash: fever?
Rognar: no
Korvash: eating?
Rognar: not much
Rognar: Mildred says she had 6 oz around 3
Rognar: maybe 2 since we got home
Three dots appeared beneath Korvash’s name. Then disappeared. Then appeared beneath a name Rognar hadn’t expected.
Brogan: how many people held her today
He frowned and went back through the day. Mildred. Someone at the county office. George’s paralegal for a minute while he signed paperwork. The girl at the store while he wrestled with the car seat. Him.
Rognar: 5 or 6
Brogan: new house new smells new people
Brogan: she’s overtired and overstimulated
Brogan: stop trying new things
Brogan: dark room. hold her. stay put.
A moment later.
Fen: since when do you know about babies
Brogan: since none of your business
Brogan went offline, and Rognar stared at the screen. He had just received more words from Brogan in thirty seconds than the goalie voluntarily produced during most road trips. He put that away for a night when his daughter wasn’t screaming.
“Okay,” he told Charlie. “Brogan says we stop.”
He carried her into the living room, turned off all but one lamp, and sat in the chair with her tucked against his chest. For nearly a minute, he managed not to move.
Her crying went up half an octave, and every instinct he possessed screamed at him to do something.
He lasted another thirty seconds before his body won and he was back on his feet.
“Brogan said not to do this,” he told her.
Charlie screamed.
He tried the bottle once more. She turned her face away and arched so hard he almost dropped her.
“What do you need?” he said desperately. “Tell me what you need.”
She couldn’t. That might have been the worst part.
He reached for his phone again and called the after-hours number Mildred had written on the back of her card.
A recorded voice thanked him for calling county family services and informed him that office hours were eight-thirty to four-thirty.
If this was an emergency, he should hang up and call 911.
He considered that. Was it an emergency? He went back to the list of warning signs. He checked Charlie again. No fever. Her breathing settled whenever the crying stopped briefly. She was alert. Furious, exhausted, miserable—but alert.
Not an emergency. At least he didn’t think it was. And he didn’t know enough to trust himself, and he hated that. For the first time all day, underneath the fear, he was angry.
Val had known.
She’d known his number. She’d known where he lived. She’d known how to find him. She had gone through doctors and pregnancy and childbirth and six months of Charlie’s life, and somewhere along the way she had decided he was a male you named in a will but didn’t call. He had missed everything.
Charlie hiccupped against his neck, and the anger vanished almost as quickly as it had come, leaving something heavier behind. Val was dead. She had trusted him enough to send Charlie to him. Those facts sat side by side in his chest and refused to fit together.
He could be angry later. Right now his daughter needed him. And he didn’t know what she needed.
Do you even know how to take care of a baby?
Nora’s words came back with viciously good timing. He closed his eyes. He could keep doing this. Keep walking. Keep trying the same things in different orders because asking Nora Bennett for help would mean admitting that, at this precise moment, she had been right about him.
Except she hadn’t been right, not really. He didn’t know how to take care of Charlie yet.
He had spent most of his adult life on the ice.
He knew what happened when a play broke down and the plan disappeared.
He could keep skating into a corner nobody was covering because that was where he’d intended to go.
Or he could look up and find the open man.
Pride was the corner nobody was covering.
He looked towards the wall. There was a woman eight feet away across the grass who alphabetized things.
He had watched Nora Bennett replace a section of her gutter last spring in the rain, wearing a yellow raincoat and using a level because apparently even gutters required precision.
He had watched her carry a container of soup across the street to old Mr. Halloran at exactly six o’clock every evening for four days after his hip replacement.
She had complained to the town when a broken streetlight went unrepaired for two weeks, then followed up until somebody fixed it.
Nora noticed things. Nora fixed things. And underneath all the dry remarks and disapproving looks, Nora was kind. He knew that too.
He looked down at Charlie. Her face was wet, her cheeks flushed darker around the edges, her tiny fists clenched against his chest. She drew a shuddering breath. That settled it.
“Come on,” he murmured, grabbing the nearest blanket. “We’re going to make me eat some crow.”
Charlie whimpered.
“Wait till you meet her properly. She thinks I’m an idiot. You’ll love her.”
He crossed the strip of grass between the houses in bare feet because he genuinely didn’t think about shoes. He was halfway up Nora’s front steps before he realized he hadn’t thought about a coat either. It didn’t matter. Charlie started crying again.
He raised one fist and knocked three times. Then he waited, and it was the longest four seconds of his life until he heard footsteps, and the deadbolt, and the door swung open.
Nora stood there in flannel pajama pants and a college sweatshirt, her reading glasses pushed up into her dark hair.
Her hair was down, he noticed distantly, and considerably longer than he’d realized.
Her expression was already halfway to a comment about the hour.
Then she looked at Charlie, and she looked at him, and whatever she had been about to say died.
He had no grin for her, and no joke, and he didn’t say neighbor in the voice that always made her eyes narrow. For the first time since he’d moved in next door to Nora Bennett, he had absolutely nothing charming to offer.
Instead he held his furious daughter between them like she was the last open man on the ice.
“Do you know anything about babies?”