Chương 8
Ethan had wanted an expedited test. Claire refused to pay extra.
Waiting, she decided, was part of what he had purchased with the accusation.
He was permitted a supervised hospital visit the following afternoon after meeting with security, Dana, and a patient-relations representative. Claire agreed on three conditions: he would not enter her recovery room, he would not approach the incubators until staff allowed it, and he would leave immediately if she asked.
Ethan arrived wearing the charcoal shirt from the night of the birth.
It had been washed. Claire could smell detergent when he stopped several feet from her in the family consultation room near the NICU.
He looked as if he had not shaved or slept. His eyes went first to the wheelchair, then to the hospital bracelet around her wrist.
“Hi,” he said.
Claire said nothing.
Dana sat near the door.
Ethan lowered himself into the chair opposite Claire. His hands rested on his knees. A faint scrape marked one knuckle, probably from the clipboard.
“How are they?”
“Benjamin is responding to antibiotics. Oliver is stable.”
“And you?”
Claire shifted carefully.
“Alive.”
He nodded. “I’m glad.”
The phrase sounded insufficient, and he knew it.
“I brought your glasses,” he said. “And the charger for your e-reader.”
“They’re in the bag?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
He looked toward the closed door leading to the unit.
“I keep seeing it.”
“What?”
“The hallway.”
Claire waited.
“I see my hand hitting the plastic. I hear the brakes.” He rubbed his palms together. “I told myself I was stopping someone from taking them away before anyone wrote my name on a lie. That’s what it felt like for maybe ten seconds. Like everything was happening to me.”
“It was happening to them.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Would you have moved if Marcus hadn’t pushed you?”
Ethan’s jaw shifted.
“I don’t know.”
The honesty startled her.
He looked down. “I want to say yes. I want to tell you I would have heard the alarms and gotten out of the way. But I heard them. I stayed there.”
Dana remained still.
Ethan continued. “I thought he was their father.”
“You had never seen him before.”
“I saw the babies. Then I saw him.”
“Those are not connected facts.”
“They were in my head.”
“Why?”
His face flushed.
Claire felt the familiar urge to rescue him from the word he did not want to say.
She kept quiet.
“Because they’re Black,” he said.
The room seemed to contract around the sentence.
Ethan swallowed.
“I saw two babies who didn’t look like me, and a Black doctor standing beside them, and I made a story in less than a second. I made you a liar and him guilty. I know what that is.”
“Say it.”
He looked at Dana, then back at Claire.
“Racism.”
The word did not repair anything. It did, however, remove one place where he had been hiding.
Claire gripped the arms of the wheelchair.
“Have you always been like this?”
“I don’t know.”
“That is a terrifying answer.”
“I know.”
“No, you keep saying that. You don’t get to know everything after one meeting with a social worker.”
“I’m trying not to defend myself.”
“You are bad at it.”
“Yes.”
Claire looked at the scrape on his knuckle.
“Why do you need the test?”
Ethan’s eyes closed briefly.
“Because some part of me is still afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That you’ll tell me they’re mine, and I’ll believe you because I need to, and someday I’ll learn I was the only person who didn’t know.”
“Humiliation.”
“Yes.”
“Not losing me.”
“That too.”
“Which came first?”
He did not answer quickly enough.
Claire nodded.
Ethan leaned forward, then stopped before his body crossed the space between them.
“My father found out my mother had been seeing someone else,” he said. “I was twelve. Everybody in our family knew before he did. My uncle joked about it at Thanksgiving. My dad threw a plate through the kitchen window.”
Claire had heard the story of the broken window. Ethan had told her his father was drunk. He had left out the rest.
“Did your mother cheat?”
“Yes.”
“Were you not your father’s son?”
“I was his.”
“And what did he do?”
“He stayed for three years and punished everyone. Then he left.”
Ethan rubbed his thumb against the scrape.
“I promised myself I would never be the last man to know.”
“So you became the first man to accuse.”
He looked at her.
“Yes.”
Claire let the silence remain.
At last, Ethan said, “Can I see them?”
She had planned to refuse. She had rehearsed the refusal while nurses changed dressings and checked her blood pressure. Yet the answer no longer felt like protection. It felt like another decision centered on Ethan.
“You can stand outside the bay,” she said. “You cannot touch them today.”
Pain moved across his face.
“All right.”
“And you don’t get to cry over them where I have to comfort you.”
“I won’t.”
Dana led them into the NICU.
Ethan washed his hands for the required time. He scrubbed too hard, the skin reddening between his fingers. At the twins’ bay, he stopped behind the line marked on the floor.
Benjamin lay beneath a small knitted cap. Oliver’s curls had been flattened by the breathing support, then sprung up again near one ear.
Ethan stared.
His face did not soften in the cinematic way Claire might once have imagined. He looked frightened, ashamed, and slightly sick.
“That’s Benjamin?” he whispered.
Claire nodded.
“And Oliver?”
“Yes.”
He pressed his fist against his mouth.
Oliver moved one hand beneath the blanket.
Ethan’s shoulders shook once. He lowered his arm.
“Hi,” he said.
The same inadequate word Claire had offered them on her first visit.
He stood there for seven minutes.
May you like
When a nurse approached to check Benjamin, Ethan stepped back immediately. He thanked her, then apologized for being in the way though he was not.
Before leaving, he looked at Claire.
