been so much like the one Yale made when he was anxious—a look that had always reminded Fiona of a rabbit. It might have made Fiona love this woman, just as she loved Yale, but instead she resented her even more. That one of her favorite things about Yale came from someone who’d abandoned him.
“And you sent her away.”
Fiona let out a sob that made Nicolette look up from her leaves. Her hair translucent in the sunlight.
“I wasn’t a mother yet, not really. I—all I could think was it might upset him to see her. But I was being possessive, too, I know that now. He was mine, and here this woman came, and I didn’t think about what she was going through. Or what it had taken for her to walk in there. I thought it would kill him. I thought he’d be so upset, and I imagined her messing up the treatment, trying to take charge the way my parents had with Nico. And I hated my own mother so much. I walked her to the elevator and I pressed the button for her, and I told her he’d specifically said he didn’t want to see her.”
“Was that true?”
“Yes, actually. Yes. It was one of the things we’d gone over. But I could have told him when he was awake. I could have asked what he wanted to do. And I never did. I was going to tell him. I kept being about to tell him.”
She’d gone into labor, is what happened, and then when that went horribly awry, she’d had her C-section, been tethered to the bed with IVs and drugs and pain right upstairs from him but unable to get herself down the hall and to the elevator. When Cecily wasn’t back yet, and Asher was in New York, and there was really no one left to stay by his bedside. She’d thought of calling casual acquaintances and asking them to check on him, but he was closer with the nurses than with random old neighbors, and these nurses knew what they were doing; they’d held hands for hours with many men dying alone. Besides which, Fiona just needed to recover and then she could get back down there to the third floor, take care of him again.
But meanwhile Yale fell into deep unconsciousness, and Fiona had to make the medical decisions over the phone, the maternity nurses looking on with concern. She’d send Damian down again and again with messages for Yale, despite the fact that he likely couldn’t hear a thing, and when he came back up she’d make him tell her what Yale looked like. “He’s got so many tubes coming out of him,” he said. “He’s the wrong color. Fiona, I don’t know. I’m so tired. I’ll go back again if you need, but every time I’m in there I think I’ll pass out.” Yale’s old friend Gloria and her girlfriend did some shifts, but only in the afternoons. When Nico had died, there were too many people wanting to be in the room, jockeying for position, vying for the roles of caretaker and hand-holder and chief mourner. And now there was no one. Yale had been there for Nico, and Terrence, and even fucking Charlie, and there was no one left for him, not really, and it killed her.
Claire was thirty-six hours old and nursing wasn’t working, and Fiona, who’d been prepared for the tearing of a natural birth, was in disbelief at the howling pain that ran through her entire body when she tried to adjust her torso, tried to sit up on her own just the slightest bit. She’d go light-headed and collapse back, blind. In the five minutes the Lamaze instructor had devoted to C-sections, she’d never mentioned the pain, the crippling. Fiona made it to the bathroom on the arm of the nurse, and nearly fainted. She asked if they could take her down to the AIDS unit in a wheelchair, and the first nurse said she’d have to ask the doctor, but then she never came back. The second nurse said it could be done in the morning. Fiona might have fought harder, but the pain was too much, and the drugs were closing her eyes, and in the morning everything would be easier.
Claire stayed in the nursery all night that night, and Fiona slept late. She woke to Dr. Cheng’s face. He’d come all the way upstairs. When his expression came into focus she screamed