was a strangled, wet little sound. It punctured the air of the white waiting room like the yowl of a cat. I’d been staring at the ceiling, slumped into an ergonomically curved plastic chair, and when the sound came I looked up in surprise. It had happened so fast. One minute they were wheeling her into surgery, fending me off with waving hands shrouded in plastic gloves, and the next—almost literally the next—came the cry. But it seemed a good long time before the door swung open and a small crib clunked through it, pushed by a nurse. On the center of the white mattress, like a seashell nested in cotton, lay the baby, all wrapped up with just its head sticking out. Its skin was dusky pink. Its eyes were closed but with eyebrows raised, head turned to the side as though listening to a distant hum.
“It’s a boy,” said the nurse, all cheerful, as though this whole thing were normal.
So this was the price I had paid. This was the six pounds that had crushed me like it was the weight of the whole world. I had to catch myself before I laughed. All of a sudden I felt like such an embarrassing whiner. For months I’d been carrying on like nature’s original jackass, and here was this baby who was—and there’s just no other word for it—cute. I’d never held a baby in my life, not even one of Candy’s, but I reached in and scooped him up. It was like picking up a soda can you think is going to be full but turns out to be empty. They had him wrapped up so tight, he was like a very delicate football.
“Is Jill going to be all right?” I asked.
“She lost some blood, but she’ll be fine once she recovers. Why didn’t you tell us she had placenta previa?”
“What’s placenta previa?”
She explained it to me, but the words went over my head, and I shrugged. The nurse asked, “Did she get any prenatal care?”
“We couldn’t afford it.”
She scowled at me. “It’s a potentially fatal condition for both mother and child. A simple sonogram would have detected it.”
“Oh.” I looked down at the baby. “Do I need to sign him out or anything?”
She gave me a funny look. “He’s going to the nursery. What did you think, you can just walk out the door with him?”
“Well—Jill can’t take care of him, right? She’s sick and all.”
“That’s what the nursery is for. He hasn’t even been bathed yet.” She took the baby from my hands as if he was a prize she’d decided I hadn’t earned after all. “Sit tight. As soon as your wife gets into a room, I’ll let you know.”
My wife. When the nurse said that I felt ashamed that she was wrong. It was yet another thing I’d dropped the ball on, like the prenatal care and getting a better job, keeping the fences in good repair and getting Elias taken care of before he turned into a raving lunatic at the sight of somebody bleeding.
It was a relief, at least, that Elias had nothing to do with why she was bleeding. I felt kind of bad about that, the more it sank in. If he hadn’t started screaming, Jill would have bled out right there on the sofa and nobody would have realized it until it was too late. It was such a weird response for him. The guy had seen carnage on a level I could never imagine. He’d seen dead Afghan people by the score, kids even, and he’d told me about some of those, mutilated or partially eaten by animals. He’d seen his own buddy blown apart into a dozen pieces by an IED. In those situations he had acted decisively, and we knew that for a fact because he’d lived and come home, a Purple Heart veteran, honorably discharged. And then in his own house he acted as if his legs were stuck in concrete, screaming as though a truck was barreling down on him. Those anti-anxiety pills he was taking weren’t doing a damn thing. I made a mental note to talk to him about that.
But it might not be anytime soon. I had a son to look after now, and that son had a mother I needed to watch out for, too. At least we knew now that under pressure Elias didn’t lash out—he froze. That made the whole thing a little less urgent. At least he