drugs. Talking animals, aliens, dead people—all the result of chemically altered neurons firing in unexpected ways.
But Joe shook his head. “It wasn’t the drugs. Really. It wasn’t. Dad was standing outside on the back lawn of the frat house, talking to me just like we’re talking now. Really, Renee. It was amazing. I had been hoping for it for so long. And finally it happened.” Joe smiled with such calm satisfaction, such a clear sense of relief, that Renee did not know how to respond.
“Maybe you should talk to someone about this,” she said.
“Someone? You mean like a counselor?”
Renee nodded.
“I don’t need a counselor, trust me. I’ll talk to you about it. You and Caroline and Fiona, but that’s it. You’re the only ones who would understand anyhow.” Joe smiled again: the same relief, same joy. “It’s a good thing, Renee. Don’t look so worried. Someday it’ll happen to you, too. I bet he visits all of us.” Joe yawned. “I better get some sleep,” he said, and hugged Renee again and then disappeared into his room.
When Renee returned to Boston, her roommate told her the news about Caroline.
“Your sister’s in labor,” Lydia said, not looking up from a textbook on the table.
Renee called the number that Nathan had left. His sleepy voice confirmed that little Louis had arrived. Everyone was delirious, relieved, happy.
“I’m so glad everything went well,” said Renee. “Noni will be thrilled. We all need some good news right about now. We all need a distraction.”
Joe kept his promise to Renee. He graduated on time and in good standing from Alden College, certainly not an A student, but did it matter? A degree from Alden was a degree from Alden, whether you worked as hard as you could or you slacked off, drank beer, cycled through girlfriends as fast as you changed your jeans, climbed the roof of your frat house, and shouted Beastie Boys lyrics until the hazy dawn light hit the trees and the grass and made everything look like a mist-filled dream. Joe took his degree and accepted a job offer from Kyle Morgan, an Alden alum and former fraternity brother two years older than Joe. His family ran a boutique investment bank called Morgan Capital Ltd. The year was 1996.
“We’re getting into tech,” Kyle explained at Joe’s first and only job interview. “There’s a lot happening in that sector. Lots of potential. You can start as an analyst. Go from there. Bonuses, baby.” Kyle smiled broadly, teeth white as a new baseball, and held out a hand for Joe to shake.
* * *
Normally Renee would not visit an ER patient once he or she had been admitted to the hospital. But the failed home birth stayed on Renee’s mind. Soon after the woman left the ER, a baby girl had been delivered. Everything had gone as well as it could go, Jaypa told Renee as she was packing up to leave. Even so, the mother remained in intensive care. She’d labored at home for over forty-eight hours and lost a large amount of blood. The baby, deprived of oxygen for an unknown length of time, was in the NICU. There was the possibility of cerebral palsy, epilepsy, autism, developmental delays, any number of disabilities.
“What can you do?” Jaypa had said to Renee with a shrug, and then he returned to the ER for the remaining ten hours of his shift.
After Renee scrubbed the blood from beneath her fingernails and changed into street clothes, she traveled via three separate elevators to the neonatal intensive care unit. There she found the baby splay-legged and purple inside an incubator that bristled with white tubes and black cords. baby girl dustin read the card on the incubator. Most of the infants here were preemies, some weighing no more than a pound or two. Baby Girl Dustin looked freakishly large in comparison, but the size differential only underlined the problem. At least you knew what you were looking at with the others. But this baby girl—it was impossible to say. Perhaps she would be fine. But perhaps she would not.
Renee’s phone buzzed. A message from Fiona: where r u? Renee groaned. She did not reply. She was now an hour late for Joe’s party.
The baby’s father, the man from the ER, was not in the room. Baby Girl Dustin sighed audibly into her respirator. She clenched and unclenched her toes. For a moment Renee considered pushing her hands into the built-in black rubber gloves the nurses used for