their lungs cleared completely and they could handle feedings on their own. Their brains, hearts, and other internal organs were unscathed. Their esophagi were fully attached. They were probably not going to suffer any significant developmental delays; though time would tell on this score, the same was true for any kid. They were beautiful—dizzyingly so—and intact. Bruce had such difficulty grasping this that his pace would quicken each morning as he drew abreast of their Isolette, so that he could assure himself once again that their survival was true. They should look like accident victims, bloodied and deformed by trauma, he thought. But they didn’t—aside from the tubes, and the slight translucence of their skin and obvious lack of meat on their bones, they were babies, their features tiny but formed, discrete, unblemished. His eyes seared, as if he were looking into the sun.
Ethan was longer. He had a raspberry-colored mark on one of his eyelids, which Bruce had been told would fade as he grew. There was a suggestion of fuzz, which lent a reddish cast to his scalp, though this was covered up most of the time with one of the striped caps the hospital provided for warmth. His nostrils flared as he slept; his fingers were tapered and elegant; he seemed to Bruce to possess a capacity for disdain that made Bruce proud and even more protective of him than he was, if that were possible: You’re right, he thought. Everything you’re thinking is right. Though Bruce held him anyway, for as much time as he was allowed each day, it was clear Ethan didn’t like to be held, not yet; he stiffened slightly within Bruce’s careful grasp, and his breath quickened.
Ben seemed dreamier. Phantom smiles animated his mouth while he dozed against Bruce’s forearm, his head cradled in his father’s left hand. His cries seemed briefer, more to the point, than his brother’s, as if he couldn’t wait to have them over. He was darker, would have Charlotte’s coloring, it appeared—though Bruce was careful as yet not to let his mind extend any further into the future than the next feeding time.
“You’re comparing them?” Sophia said to him this afternoon. She sighed, shook her coarse, hennaed curls. She wore a loud smock, printed with Warner Bros. cartoon characters, over her nurse’s clothing. Her face was punctuated with moles of different colors and shapes. “I’ve got two girls at home. Why is it always our instinct to compare them? I can’t help it, either. But it’ll get you in trouble, for sure.”
Bruce watched as Sophia slid Ben’s diaper off without waking him, and quickly fastened him into a fresh one.
“How can anyone help comparing,” Bruce said. “They’re so different.”
“The more different they are, the harder you’ve got to work to pretend you don’t notice, otherwise they’re going to try to figure out which of them you think is better, or which one is more like you, whatever. It’s like a wedge. These things gone off at all this morning?” Sophia pointed at the Brady monitors.
“Ethan’s just once, but I turned him a little and it stopped.”
“Good. They’re too damn sensitive sometimes. A little reflux will set one of these machines off, or the wrong position—I’m glad you know that. Some people around here get hysterical.”
“We’re all hysterical,” Bruce said.
Sophia looked at him, smoothing at her Tweety Bird pockets.
“With good reason,” she said, after a long moment. “You been down to the chapel yet?”
“No.”
“You’re going to need all the help you can stand with these boys. You might as well get some from God.”
“I think I’ll get a Coke. Would you like one?”
“Go down there,” Sophia said. She didn’t smile. “It’s nice. Nobody will bother you.”
“Thanks,” Bruce said airily, and he tried to smile as he stood, though he wasn’t sure that he was successful, and in a moment Sophia was fiddling with a saline drip, her expression concentrated, inaccessible.
Bruce didn’t want to tell Sophia that he didn’t believe in God. One might assume that this shortcoming dated from his mother’s death, but his mother hadn’t believed in God, either, though she wasn’t incapable of invoking him as one might a character from one of Bruce’s comic books—a bumbling straight man, a Magoo. She railed at God, made jokes at his expense, but she didn’t actually believe he existed, nor did his rational, mathematically oriented father. What explanation could Bruce offer to the devout, to someone like Sophia? Sorry, I grew up in Manhattan. Sorry, my family spent