feeding and changing and cleaning. The gloves that were also used by parents to hold and caress. But again came the insistent buzz of her phone. How would she explain to Joe and Noni, to Sandrine and Fiona and all of Joe’s friends, all of Sandrine’s family, why she was late? I could not step away from an infant without a name.
This baby was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, that Renee would treat over the course of her career. Renee was not sentimental. Years ago she had decided never to have children. It was precisely these kinds of moments—when she hesitated about what was best to do, when she blanched at the possibility of creating connection—that showed her just how ill-suited she was for motherhood. When Renee had visited Caroline at the hospital after baby Louis was born, she had felt only inadequacy. Caroline’s face was exhausted, her hair a mess, the hospital gown slipping off her shoulders, but she shone—literally glimmered—in that hospital bed like some beautiful consumptive.
“Isn’t he perfect?” Caroline had said, and Renee could only nod. She had leaned over her nephew’s small body and observed his beauty and newness, but she could not bring herself to touch him.
Renee left the NICU without touching Baby Girl Dustin. She texted Fiona: be there soon.
Outside, the dusk smelled like frost and chestnuts, and Renee breathed to clear the chemical stench of the hospital from her lungs. With her arm outstretched, she walked one block, two, but no cabs stopped. It was that busy early-evening hour when people had plans, places to be. Renee was considering how long it would take to walk all the way to Kyle’s apartment when her phone buzzed. She was expecting Fiona again, but the number was unknown. Renee answered; it was Jonathan Frank, her patient with the cut hand.
Renee explained that she was late, she couldn’t talk. She’d already overstayed her shift and would be late for her brother’s engagement party, and now she couldn’t find a cab and would probably have to walk or wait for a crosstown bus, which would take nearly as long.
“Why didn’t you leave earlier?” Jonathan asked. “I thought I was your last patient.”
“I had to check on someone in the NICU,” Renee answered. “A new baby.”
“What happened?”
Renee paused. What had happened? Why had she visited a baby who was not her patient, whom she had not treated, to whom she had no connection whatsoever? Renee told Jonathan about the parents’ entrance to the ER, the failed home birth, the preventability of certain situations. Why were people so stupid? she asked him. Why did they put themselves and the people they loved at risk? She was talking about the home birth, but more than that she was talking about Joe. She never mentioned his name, of course, and this man Jonathan Frank didn’t know anything about her, didn’t know about her father’s death, didn’t know she had a younger brother whom she felt sometimes she’d done more to raise than their mother had. That her kid brother had grown into a man who appeared in all material respects successful and happy and blessed and yet who carried around within himself a sense of absence and loss, and for whatever reasons—he refused therapy, he didn’t talk about it with friends, he liked to preserve the illusion of strength—this emptiness had become his core. Renee remembered Joe’s fury with the fireplace poker on the day of their father’s funeral. Part of Joe was still that boy, still raging through the yellow house, still destroying the image of the family that would never exist again.
“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said. “About the baby.”
“Thank you,” Renee replied.
She wondered who he thought she was. The kind of woman who swooned over babies? Maybe she should tell him a story: Once, Renee had gone fishing with her father on the Long Island Sound. He’d rented a cruiser, a big boat, but he’d taken only Renee with him. Just you and me kid, she remembered him saying in a funny, scratchy voice that seemed an imitation of someone, though she didn’t know who. The voice had momentarily confused Renee, made her wonder if perhaps her father expected a certain kind of response. She didn’t want to disappoint him, not on such a momentous day, and so she’d bounded aboard and with concentration began to thread worms onto the hook. She sat in the sun with her father, who had packed salami sandwiches, her favorite, and cans of Coke,