17. Gavin
GAVIN
For the whole drive up from the city, I’m sure I’m right.
I’ve got two SUVs, two men from my security team, a bottle sterilizer still in its box on the seat beside me and a baby nurse named Denise in the back row.
My mother hired her the morning after Henry was born.
She sent me the woman’s résumé with no message at all.
That’s my mother’s way of saying she’s already handled it.
Denise has worked with babies born early for longer than I’ve been running a company.
She has a clipboard. I found that comforting somewhere around White Plains.
I’ve barely slept since London. I’ve read everything there is to read about jaundice and feeding schedules and newborn sleep.
I’ve sat in my new apartment in the city, the one I rented this week because I couldn’t stand to walk back into the penthouse, and listened to the quiet in there.
And every time I picked up my phone and saw that my second text was still sitting there unanswered, the anger got a little harder and a little colder.
He’s my son. I’m not going to wait in a hallway for my wife to decide when I get to see him.
Luis opens the delivery gate exactly as wide as the first SUV and no wider, and he doesn’t wave at me. We pull into the loading yard. The lights are on upstairs, in the small apartment over the retail house, and I can see a shape in the window over the sink.
I get out. Denise gets out after me with her clipboard. My security guys get out of the second car and stand behind us, because that’s what I pay them to do. For a moment, in the cold with the headlights on, I think this looks like a man taking care of things.
Then the door at the bottom of the stairs opens, and Allison comes out.
She’s in a gray zip-up over a white nursing top, leggings and thick socks with no shoes, and her hair’s pulled back off a face that’s pale with exhaustion.
She’s holding the railing with one hand.
She came down those stairs days after giving birth, slowly, because I pulled into her yard with headlights and strangers, and I watch her wince on the last step.
“I’m here to see my son,” I say.
It comes out exactly the way I rehearsed it in the car. It sounds a lot worse out loud.
Allison looks past me. She looks at the two SUVs, and the two men in dark jackets, and the woman in scrubs, and the box with a picture of a sterilizer on it that my guy’s holding against his chest like a gift at a baby shower nobody invited him to.
Across the road there’s a photographer by the news van, and his camera’s up.
“You can come up alone,” she says. “Or not at all.”
“Allison.”
“Only you.”
“Denise is a nurse. She specializes in babies born early.”
“Henry has a pediatrician. And a mother.” Her hand’s white on the railing. “I’m not letting your mother’s nurse into my kitchen, Gavin. I’m not letting your security guys learn where he sleeps. You get up those stairs by yourself, or you get back in the car.”
She doesn’t raise her voice. It hits harder than yelling would.
I stand there in my good overcoat with my whole staff behind me, and my face goes hot as I understand what this looks like from where she’s standing. I didn’t come to see my son. I came to make a point about who gets to decide things.
I turn around. “Take all of it back to the city.”
My guy looks down at the sterilizer. “All of it?”
“All of it. Wait at the end of the road. Denise, I’m sorry for your evening.”
Denise looks at Allison, and then at me, and she gives me a small, tired look that says she’s seen a lot of rich fathers do a lot of dumb things. She gets back in the car without a word. The SUVs back out of the yard and the headlights swing away, and it gets very quiet and a lot darker.
Allison turns and starts up the stairs. I follow her. She takes them one at a time, and I keep my hands at my sides, because I know if I reach for her elbow she’ll hate it.
The apartment’s small and warm and smells like somebody’s casserole.
There’s a crib against the wall under a row of lopsided painted leaves.
Janet’s at the kitchen table. She looks at me over her reading glasses for a long moment, and then she goes back to her crossword without saying hello.
I’ve been fired by clients who were warmer.
Henry’s in a bassinet by the couch in a cream sleeper, asleep.
My feet start moving toward him before my brain’s involved. Allison steps in front of me.
“Wash your hands.”
I wash my hands.
Henry turns his head under his blanket and opens his mouth, and every thought I’ve got leaves my head at once. “Is he okay?”
“He’s waking up.” She lowers herself onto the couch carefully, and she winces and hides it. “He’s due to eat. There’s pumped milk in the fridge. Warm it up in that mug of hot water. Don’t microwave it.”
“I know that.”
I do know it. I read every feeding guide I could find and watched a video about bottles in the middle of the night. Not one of them mentioned that this bottle comes apart into a pile of little pieces.
I put the bottle in the mug. Henry’s fussing turns into real crying.
“How long does it take?” I ask.
“Until it’s warm.”
“That’s not an amount of time.”
“Babies are bad at schedules.”
It’s still cold when I test it on my wrist. Henry cries harder, and every cry goes straight up my spine. My palms are sweating, and I’m starting to panic. The vent on the bottle looks crooked, so I take it apart, and when I put it back together, milk runs down my hand and onto the counter.
Janet doesn’t look up from her crossword. “The valve goes inside the collar.”
“It was inside.”
“It was upside down,” Allison says.
I fix it. By now Henry’s face is red and he’s pulled his fists up to his chest, and he’s screaming like he’s lodging a complaint with management.
“Pick him up,” Allison says.
I look at the bottle.
“Now, Gavin.”
I put the bottle down and lift him. His head’s so loose in my hand it scares me. I hold him against my chest with one hand behind his neck, and he screams louder.
“Am I hurting him?”
“No. Loosen your arm.” I loosen it. “Not that much.” I tighten it. Allison leans forward, catches herself, and grips the arm of the couch instead of taking him. “Hold him. Don’t brace him like the plane’s coming in for a crash landing.”
There’s a knock, and the door opens before anybody answers it.
Scott Gallagher comes in with two paper grocery bags, rain on the shoulders of his work jacket and mud drying on one boot. He sees me and stops short.
“Sorry. Janet asked me to grab a few things.” He lifts the bags a little, like they’re his permission slip. “Milk, bread, the good crackers. The pharmacy was out of the nipple cream, Allison, but they’ll have it tomorrow.”
He knows about the nipple cream. I’m standing in my wife’s kitchen holding my screaming son, and the landscaper knows about the nipple cream.
Henry hears his voice. The screaming breaks into one wet, shaky breath, and then another. Scott looks toward the sound.
“Hey, Henry.”
My son goes quiet. He isn’t asleep. He’s listening.
The jealousy is instant, and it’s ugly. I want to throw this man down the stairs.
He got every hour I missed. He knows where Janet keeps the crackers.
He can say my son’s name without practicing it in the car first. He was holding Allison’s hand when Henry was born, and I was standing under fluorescent lights at Farnborough asking a pilot how much wind a jet can take.
I don’t move. I hold my son and keep my mouth shut, and it’s one of the harder things I’ve done.
Scott sets the bags on the counter and starts putting the milk away like he’s done it before. Then he seems to hear himself, and he stops, and he leaves the rest in the bag.
“I’ll get out of your way.” He glances at Henry on his way to the door, and then, carefully, at me. “Congratulations. He’s a good one.”
The door shuts. Henry starts crying again right away. I want to make that Scott’s fault. I look down at my son instead and pick the bottle back up.
This time Allison checks the seal before she lets me sit down with it.
I sit on the other end of the couch and hold Henry wrong a couple of ways, and he yells until I’m sweating through my collar.
She tells me to touch it to his top lip and wait.
I wait. He opens his mouth and takes a few slow pulls and stops, and I panic, and she doesn’t.
“Let him take a breath.”
I let him. He starts again. For a while my whole life comes down to that bottle and the small movement in his throat every time he swallows.
When he’s done I put him on my shoulder, and his cheek’s warm through my shirt, and he lets out one exhausted little sound and falls asleep on me.
The relief goes all the way down my back and unknots it.
I don’t move until Allison says my name.
“Here’s how this works,” she says. She keeps her voice low for Henry, but she doesn’t soften it.
“You see him here. You see him alone. No security, no nurse, no assistant carrying boxes. You come when I say, not when you decide. And you call first. Every time. You don’t pull into my yard with headlights again. ”
Every word of it stings, and most of them are fair. Another man can walk into this kitchen with a grocery bag while I need a schedule to hold my son, and my pride burns at that.
“You’re making this impossible,” I say, and I’m angry, and I mean it.
Her face shuts down, and I hear it too late. It’s the same line I’ve been using on her for years. The shame hits so fast my ears ring. Your need is making my work impossible. Your line in the sand is making the trip impossible.
“No,” she says, and that’s all she says.
I look at Henry asleep on my shoulder. I think about Allison coming down those stairs in her socks with her hand white on the rail.
“Okay,” I say. “Here. Alone. When you say. I’ll call first.”
“Every time.”
“Every time.”
I get up and put Henry in the bassinet, and I’m careful with his head, and I tuck the blanket under his arms the way I watched her do it. Janet turns a page of her crossword. Allison doesn’t say goodbye, and I don’t ask her to.
I’m ashamed before I’m halfway down the stairs.
It’s not the kind of shame I can argue with, either.
I brought two cars and a stranger to the home of a woman who was stitched up days ago, because I was angry and I could.
I’ve watched clients do that on the tarmac for years, roll up with enough people behind them that nobody can tell them no, and I’ve always thought a little less of them for it.
The yard’s dark and cold. One of my security guys has walked back up from the road anyway and is waiting by the car, because he’s good at his job. He opens the back door for me. I tell him I’ll get it myself, and I walk past him and put my hand on the handle.
Then I stop.
I go back across the gravel to the bottom of the stairs. The door at the top is still open, and Allison’s standing in the light with her arms crossed over the zip-up, watching to make sure I actually leave.
“What time does Henry eat tomorrow?”