16. Allison
ALLISON
Henry’s trying to eat when Evelyn Callahan shows up.
He’s not doing a great job of it, and neither am I.
The nurse has built a fort of pillows around me and folded a blanket under my arm and shown me the latch twice, and Henry opens his mouth, takes two very determined pulls, and falls asleep like I’ve made him haul lumber.
My milk hasn’t really come in yet. I’m in mesh underwear and a gown with one shoulder unsnapped, and parts of me hurt that nobody puts on a birth announcement.
Naturally, this is when my mother-in-law comes calling.
The nurse leans in the door. “There’s an Evelyn Callahan here to see you.”
“No,” I say.
Evelyn’s voice floats in from the hall. “Five minutes, Allison.”
Mom gets up out of the window chair. “She said no.”
Evelyn comes in anyway, in a gray wool dress and pearls and low heels that don’t make a sound on the floor.
She’s the kind of woman who hears no as an opening offer.
She stops at the foot of the bed and looks at Henry, and her face goes soft, just for a moment.
I see it. Then it’s gone, and she tucks her handbag tighter under her arm.
“So this is the heir.”
Mom makes a noise behind her teeth.
“His name is Henry,” I say.
“I know what you named him.”
“Then use it.”
Her eyes slide to the card taped on the bassinet, where somebody at the nurses’ station wrote HENRY BARRETT in blue marker and drew a little star next to it. Her mouth gets tight.
“What does he weigh?”
That question’s coming way too late, and we both know it. I’m angry, and I let him hear it. “Enough to stay in this room with me instead of down the hall in the NICU.”
“I’m his grandmother.”
“You called him a job title before you called him Henry.”
Henry finally latches right then, and it hurts, a hard pinch that curls my toes under the blanket.
I keep him close and don’t look away from her.
I’d always figured rich people would be more graceful than this.
It turns out they’re just as willing as anybody else to pick a fight with a woman trying not to bleed through a hospital pad.
“You kept a Callahan child a secret until the day he was born,” Evelyn says, “and then you gave him your name. I’d like to know what you think happens now.”
“What happens now is he eats.”
“Gavin has a right to his son.”
“Then Gavin can talk to me about his son himself.”
She doesn’t answer that, and that’s how I know Gavin didn’t send her.
Mom walks around the end of the bed. She’s in her old barn coat with a coffee stain on the cuff, and she’s about a foot shorter than Evelyn, and she doesn’t look up at her at all. She just opens the door as wide as it goes.
“Out,” she says.
“Janet, this is a family matter.”
“I’m family. You’re a visitor. Out.”
“I’ll speak to my son about this.”
“Good. He’s got a phone.” Mom holds the door. “You can go now, or the nurse can call somebody bigger than me to help you find the elevator.”
The nurse is standing in the hall with her arms folded, and she looks very ready to make that call. Evelyn looks at the three of us. Then she goes, heels silent on the floor, and Mom shuts the door behind her so gently it doesn’t even click.
“Mom.”
“What?”
“That was amazing.”
“I’ve wanted to do that since your wedding,” she says, and sits back down with her crossword like she just took out the trash.
By lunchtime the story’s out.
I don’t know who told. It could’ve been anybody at the hospital, or anybody at that hangar in London who saw Gavin’s face when he read his phone, or anybody who looked at the pictures from the opening and then looked at the flight tracker.
My phone buzzes so much it walks itself across the tray table.
CALLAHAN AIR BOSS’S SECRET BABY. Then a worse one: HE PARTIED IN LONDON WHILE HIS WIFE GAVE BIRTH.
Somebody got a picture of Scott’s truck outside the hospital entrance and drew a red circle around his face, and the caption calls him a “mystery man close to the estranged wife.” Another site asks, in so many words, whether Gavin’s even the father.
I turn the phone face down. I’m scared in a way I’ve never been scared for myself, low and animal, and I pull Henry’s blanket up over his ear like the headlines could get in.
Scott texts a picture from the greenhouse a little later. There’s a news van parked across the road, a guy with a long lens standing by our sign, and Luis dragging the delivery gate shut. We’re using the back entrance. Nobody here’s talking to them. Don’t worry about us.
I’m so sorry they dragged you into this, I write.
You didn’t hand anybody a camera. Take care of Henry.
He doesn’t ask me to clear his name. I save the message.
Gavin texts that afternoon. Please tell me the jaundice number when you can.
I stare at it a while. It’s such a small, careful thing to ask, and it’s the right thing to ask, and I hate him a little for knowing it. Still under the line where they’d treat it. He’s stable.
Thank you, he writes.
The second one comes that night, while Henry’s asleep on my chest and Mom’s snoring in the chair. When can I see him?
I read it over and over. There’s no please in it. It could be a man who misses his son, or it could be the man who asked me why I did this to him while our baby slept in his arms. I don’t know which one wrote it, so I don’t answer.
My milk comes in the next day, and nobody warned me properly.
My breasts go hot and hard and ache all the way up into my armpits.
My stomach cramps every time Henry eats, because apparently my uterus has to be reminded where it belongs, and my stitches pull whenever I shift on the pillows.
I haven’t slept longer than a TV episode since he was born.
I cry because the hospital pudding is butterscotch instead of chocolate.
I cry again when the nurse tells me Henry’s gained back a little of what he lost, because I’m proud of him, and because he did it without his father in the room.
Mom takes Henry so I can shower, and I stand under the hot water with my hand pressed flat on the soft, empty place where he used to kick. I’d gotten used to him being right there, all the time, a kick under my ribs whenever I got quiet. Now he’s out in the world where anybody can take his picture.
Gavin doesn’t text again. I check.
Henry passes his car-seat test, and his jaundice stays under the line, and he keeps his temperature up and eats enough, and he earns his way out of the hospital one small result at a time.
Mom brings me clean leggings and a gray zip-up and my coat.
Henry goes home in the blue-gray sleeper I bought after the anatomy scan, and it’s way too big on him. His feet don’t come close to the ends.
Hospital security walks us out through a service door.
The news van’s still parked across the road from Barrett, and a camera flash goes off against the car window as we pull in.
Mom drives straight through the back gate, and Luis swings it shut behind us and stands in front of it with his arms folded until the photographer gives up and gets back in the van.
Upstairs, the apartment looks smaller than it did when I left it.
The crib’s against the wall under Molly’s lopsided painted leaves.
There are bottles drying on a towel by the sink, and a casserole in the fridge with Luis’s wife’s handwriting on the foil.
Henry sleeps in my arms through all of it.
I’m so tired my bones ache, and I’m so glad to be home I could cry about the bottles.
Mom puts the kettle on. She waits until I’m settled on the couch with Henry on my chest and my feet up. Then she sits down at the other end and looks at me over her reading glasses.
“Go ahead and say it,” I tell her.
“Say what?”
“Whatever you’ve been sitting on since the hospital. I can see it on your face.”
She pulls my feet into her lap and rubs one through the sock. “Gavin staying at that party while you were in labor was cruel. I don’t care what anybody hid from him. You asked him to come, and he didn’t, and if he walked in here right now I’d tell him so.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a second part.”
“I figured.”
“You kept his son from him all spring and summer and fall.” She says it gently, and she doesn’t look away. “You were scared, so you went quiet and stayed quiet. That was cruel too.”
Heat comes up behind my eyes. “He’d have come home for the baby. Not for me.”
“Maybe. You didn’t let him find out.” She squeezes my foot. “He should’ve been here, and you should’ve told him. I love you, honey, and you were wrong too.”
I hate her for one hot breath. Then I let it sit there, because she loves me enough to say it to my face, and because Henry picks that moment to sigh against my collarbone like an old man settling into a recliner.
We eat the casserole out of the dish with two forks. Mom washes the bottles. The sun goes down over the glass, orange and then gray, and the parking lot lights come on one at a time down by the retail house. I’m half asleep on the couch when I hear engines in the yard.
It’s too late for a delivery. It’s too loud for Luis’s truck.
I get up slowly, holding Henry, and go to the window over the sink.
Two black SUVs are pulling into the loading yard, side by side, headlights sweeping across the pallets and the shut gate that somebody must have opened for them.
They stop by the dock. The back door of the first one opens, and Gavin gets out in a dark overcoat, and a woman in navy scrubs gets out after him, holding a clipboard.
The doors of the second SUV open, and two big men in dark jackets step out and stand behind them.