15. Gavin
GAVIN
Iget to my son’s hospital room a day and a half after he’s born, in the same suit I wore to give a speech instead of getting on a plane.
The suit hasn’t aged well. Neither have I.
The shirt’s wrinkled and open at the collar, my shoes have dried rain on them, and I’ve got enough stubble that the nurse at the desk checks my ID twice.
I don’t blame her. I look like I lost a fight with the weather, which I did.
We came down in Bangor, Maine, and I drove through the night, and at every rest stop I read the hospital’s message again with my thumbs gone clumsy from the cold.
It’s everything I know about my son’s life.
The nurse comes back to the desk. “Mrs. Callahan says you can come in for a few minutes.”
My hand’s on the door before she’s finished the sentence. I make myself stop. “Are they both all right?”
“They’re doing well. He’s in the room with her.”
He’s in the room with her, breathing on his own, close enough to his mother that I’ll see them both at once. The relief hits the backs of my knees first, and they nearly go before I get the door open.
The room is dim. Allison’s propped up against white pillows with her hair tied back in a bad knot and her eyes swollen, and her wedding ring’s on a chain over the hospital gown. She looks wrecked. She also looks like the only person in the building who knows how anything works.
Next to her bed there’s a clear plastic bassinet, and my son is in it.
I’ve watched mechanics take engines apart in hangars.
I’ve talked a client down after an engine quit over the Atlantic with his whole family on board.
None of it gets me ready for a striped blanket with a face at the top of it.
Henry’s eyes are shut. A knit cap covers most of his dark hair, and his mouth is small and very serious, and one hand’s tucked up next to his cheek.
He’s real. He was real the whole time I was in London telling myself we’d sort everything out after the November opening, and I’m so ashamed of that I feel sick.
“Wash your hands,” Allison says. Her voice is rough.
I go to the sink. The soap pump gives me way too much, and I wash anyway, fingers and palms and wrists. Then I do it all again, because the first time doesn’t feel like enough.
When I turn around she’s watching me. “Can I come closer?”
She nods. I take one step, then another, and Henry makes a tiny sound in his sleep, and my legs quit on me. I sit down hard in the visitor chair. It’s blue plastic with one short leg, and it rocks under me.
I put my hands over my face, and I cry.
My ribs heave with it. The first noise out of me is ugly and the next one’s worse, and I don’t care. My son’s been in the world this whole time, and I missed all of it.
Allison lets me cry. She shouldn’t have to comfort me, and I know it even while I’m falling apart an arm’s length from our baby.
When I can see again, Henry’s still asleep. He has no idea his father just lost his mind next to him.
“He’s so small,” I say.
“He’s early.”
“Is he eating?”
“Not enough at a time. We wake him and try again every few hours. His sugar’s been okay. His temperature dropped once, and they put him under the warmer, and it came back up.”
She says it like a report, but what it means is heel sticks and no sleep, and her learning all of this without me. The guilt sits heavy in my gut.
“And the jaundice?”
Her eyes narrow a little. “You’ve been reading.”
“Most of yesterday.”
“They’re checking it again this morning.”
I look at the bruise inside her elbow and the plastic bracelet on her wrist, and it hits me what I should have asked first. “How are you?”
Her mouth flattens. She noticed I asked about him first. “Sore. Bleeding. Tired. Dr. Shah says it’s all normal.”
“Was the delivery hard?”
“Yes.”
That one word tells me I don’t get a walk-through of the whole night just because I finally made it to the room. “Okay,” I say, and I leave it there.
A nurse comes in and checks the band on Henry’s ankle against the one on Allison’s wrist. Then she lifts him out of the bassinet and settles him in Allison’s arms, and Allison holds his head without even thinking about it. My eyes burn so fast I have to look at the window.
“He just ate,” the nurse says. “Dad can hold him, if Mom wants.”
Allison looks at me. I’m so scared she’ll say no that my palms go damp on my knees.
“Sit back,” she says.
I sit back. She stands up slowly, wincing, and hides it fast. I start to get up. “I can help.”
“Don’t.”
I stay exactly where I am. She leans down and puts our son in my arms.
My hands are too big. That’s my first thought. My second is that I’ve signed for whole jets with less care than this blanket needs.
“His neck,” she says.
“I’ve got him.”
“Support it.” I move my hand. She watches a second. “Yes. Like that.”
She sits on the edge of the bed, close enough to grab him. Henry opens his eyes. They’re dark and cloudy and pointed somewhere around my shirt buttons.
“Hi,” I say, and my voice goes again. “Hi. I’m your dad.”
Henry sneezes. His whole body jerks with it, and I panic so obviously that Allison almost smiles.
“Babies sneeze,” she says.
“I knew that.”
I didn’t know it in any way that helps. One small hand works its way out of the blanket, and his fingers open and catch the front of my shirt, and close in the wrinkled cotton. I stop moving completely. I’ve never in my life been this afraid of breathing wrong. He falls asleep holding on to me.
For a little while I’m only his father. There’s no London and no hangar full of clients and no plane sitting on a wet runway, just a warm weight on my chest and a fist in my shirt that doesn’t know what I failed to do.
I look up at Allison. She’s watching Henry, not me, and the question comes out of my mouth before I can make it any kinder.
“Why did you do this to me?”
Her face goes hard. I hear my own words a beat too late, and the blood goes out of my face.
“Allison, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You’ve had him for a few minutes. A few minutes, and you’ve made it about what I did to you.”
“You hid my son from me for half a year.” I keep my voice low for Henry. It doesn’t make the sentence any less angry.
“And I called you. From labor. And you stayed for a party.”
There it is, the question I don’t have any right to dodge.
“I thought I had hours,” I say. “Rebecca kept the pilot’s warning from me. I didn’t find out until after the speech.”
“I didn’t know about any warning.” She looks straight at me. “All I knew was that I asked you to come, and you found one more reason to wait.”
I can’t argue with that. I try anyway. “Every client we’d signed was in that hangar.”
“Your son was in this room.”
Henry shifts against my chest, and we both go quiet.
Allison holds out her arms. Every part of me wants to hang on tighter, ask for a little more time, tell her I crossed an ocean and a storm and a night with no sleep to get here.
But I got here after, again. My arms don’t want to open.
I make them, and I put him back in her arms.
“Why did you keep him from me?” I ask.
Her eyes fill. “Because I wanted you to come home for me. Not for him.”
“I did want you.”
“From London.” I flinch, and she keeps going. “You wanted me from London, on the phone, when you had a minute. I wasn’t going to use a baby to get the rest of you.”
“I was in New York in July. You could have told me at breakfast.”
“You asked me to breakfast at dawn, before a flight.”
“So you decided I didn’t get to know.”
“I decided a lot of things.” She looks down at Henry. “Not today.”
I want that answer, and every other one she’s kept from me, and the anger comes up hot in my face. Her mouth goes tight, and she says it before I can ask again.
“Leave, Gavin.”
It hurts worse than I expected. I stand up, and I go.
My mother’s waiting in the hall.
She’s in a cream coat with her gloves folded in one hand, sitting in a row of vinyl chairs like she’s been asked to wait somewhere beneath her. I didn’t call her. I don’t know who did, and it doesn’t matter, because Evelyn Callahan has always found out everything before anyone tells her.
She stands when she sees me. She doesn’t hug me. She never has, not at my graduation, not at my father’s funeral. She looks at my suit, and at my face, and her mouth tightens a little.
“Is it yours?”
For a second I honestly don’t understand the question. Then I do, and I’m so angry my scalp prickles.
“His name is Henry,” I say. “And yes.”
“You’re sure.”
“Mom.”
“I’m asking what anyone will ask. She moved out in April and turns up in November with a baby and a landscaper. I’d be a fool not to ask.” She pulls on one glove, finger by finger. “Is she talking to lawyers yet?”
“She gave birth yesterday.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
She looks past me at the closed door. There’s a small card taped to the glass with Allison’s name on it, and my mother reads it the way she reads a guest list she didn’t approve.
“The first Callahan grandson,” she says. “Born in Westchester, to a woman who hid him. Your father would have had a great deal to say.”
“My father isn’t here.”
“No. I am.” She pulls on the other glove. “Call me when you’ve decided how you’re going to handle this.”
She doesn’t ask to see him. She doesn’t ask what he weighs, or whether he has my hair, or if Allison’s all right.
She walks to the elevator with her back very straight, and the doors close on her, and I’m left in the hallway with the smell of hand sanitizer and the certainty that my mother cares more about the announcement than the baby.
I take the stairs down to the parking garage, because I can’t stand in another elevator.
It’s cold down there and it smells like wet concrete and exhaust. My rental’s parked crooked across two spaces where I left it in the dark. I get in and put my hands on the wheel and don’t start the car.
I’m angry at her. I’m so angry at her that my jaw aches from holding it.
She let me find out I was a father in a phone call in the middle of a storm.
She let me live all spring and summer and fall in a townhouse in London thinking the worst thing between us was a fight about Rebecca.
She let a stranger at the hospital send me his name.
And I’m angrier at myself, because she called, and I stayed, and every word she said in that room was true.
Neither kind of angry has anywhere to go. It sits in my chest and grinds.
Henry had my shirt in his fist. I can still feel the place. I look down at the wrinkles in the cotton, and I put my hand over them, and I decide right there in a rental car in a hospital garage that I’m done asking anybody’s permission to see my son.