Chapter 5
The doctor studied me for a moment with the frank assessment of a man whose profession does not allow sentiment to distort diagnosis. Then he said, "She's stable. The baby is in the NICU — he's early by two weeks and his lungs are working harder than we'd like, but he's strong." He paused. "She's been asking for someone named Delia, who is her neighbor, and who has been with her for the last hour. She has not asked for you."
I understood that this was information delivered precisely, and that it was delivered precisely because I needed to understand the full shape of the situation before I made a decision that could not be undone.
"I would like to sit outside the room," I said. "I will not go in unless she asks me to. I need to know that both of them are breathing. That's all."
He looked at me for another long moment. "Room 4114. There's a chair in the hall. The nurse at the end of the corridor knows I'm allowing you to be there. You stay in the chair."
I stayed in the chair.
It was the longest four hours of my life, which is a statement I make with full awareness of the other nights I have had.
Delia, Brin's neighbor, was a small Guatemalan woman in her sixties who came out of room 4114 twice during those hours — once to get coffee from the machine at the end of the hall, once to make a phone call. The second time, she looked at me sitting in the chair outside the room with the stillness of a man who has decided that stillness is the only appropriate posture, and she stopped.
"She knows you're here," Delia said.
"I know."
"She hasn't asked for you."
"I know that too."
May you like
Delia looked at me for a long moment with the expression of someone who has watched a young woman build a life out of the wreckage of a decision a man made for both of them. "She named him Daniel," she said. "After her father."
She went back inside.
