And you had this shock of red, red hair.” He hovered his hand over his Yankees cap, indicating. “Your mom and I were sitting in the nursery in rocking chairs, in scrubs, with these shower caps on our heads, like they were afraid we were going to give you the plague. Just waiting for you.” He wasn’t watching the television now but the empty space in the room. “We waited there forever, just rocking back and forth. Your mom was terrified they’d changed their minds, that there was a problem. She wanted a cigarette so bad and all she had was this king-size bag of M&M’S. She ate the entire bag of M&M’S, waiting for you.”
Jude had not heard this story before, and it was only after hearing it that he realized he’d had a picture of his first meeting with his parents, and this was not it. He now understood why his father had chosen this inconveniently located emergency room, ninety blocks away: it belonged, in his mind, to a baby hospital. Second-degree burn: Beth Israel. Miscarriage: Mount Sinai. If Jude’s heart were not already preoccupied, it might have been warmed by his father’s lumbering logic.
“She prefers Snickers now,” Jude answered, not looking at him. Then, “Did she tell you I might have FAS?”
Les nodded. “Yes, she did.”
“Retard disease,” said Jude after a moment, because his father was cruelly silent.
“Not retard disease. It’s a disability.”
“It’s why I’m always in trouble and fuck my numbers up so bad.”
“Fuck your numbers up how?”
“Mix them up. Turn them around. Letters, too. You didn’t know that?”
“I guess not,” Les said. “Look, who cares? It’s just a fancy name for your birth mom indulged a little too much. So did half my generation, okay? We didn’t know any better. Your mom smoked like a chimney when she was knocked up with your sister. Not to mention a little wacky tobacky now and then.”
“She did? While she was pregnant?”
“She said it helped with morning sickness,” Les said, shrugging dubiously. This piece of trivia made Jude feel better and worse at the same time, but Les looked pleased with himself, as though he’d wrapped up a nice father-son conversation. The fact that his father had tossed off the story of his birth in a waiting room while watching the Today show, might just have easily not shared it with him (as his mother surely would not have shared it with him), was enjoying the memory like he was enjoying his jelly doughnut and the prospect of pulling one over on his girlfriend, left Jude with nothing else to say.
The sliding doors to the street blew open then. Through them came three young black men, two propping up the third, whose jacket pocket was soaked with blood. The boy’s head was rolled back on his neck, and the yellow whites of his eyes were still. He made a sound as though he were choking on his tongue. A bubble of blood came up and sat poised on his open mouth for a moment before breaking.
It wasn’t until nearly an hour later, when Eliza returned to the waiting room, pale and smiling and still pregnant, that Jude could drain that blood from his mind. She was spotting—it wasn’t a miscarriage, but an infection—and Jude was so relieved that he clutched her arm and whispered, “Bacterial vaginosis!” as though they were the loveliest words on earth.
“I saw her on the monitor,” Eliza told them on the subway ride home. “They did an ultrasound. She’s jumping around like a jumping bean! Do beans jump?”
“She?” said Les.
“Annabel Lee,” Jude explained. The doctors said they could determine the sex of the baby, but Eliza didn’t want to know.
They begged Les not to tell Di, and Les, after enjoying their pleas for a while, agreed. “A baby,” he said, looking worried for the first time in his life. Jude told Eliza about the man who’d come in bleeding. Had he been shot? they wondered. Stabbed? Had he lived or died? Jude wanted to put his hand on Eliza’s belly, but he didn’t. He hadn’t known, before that morning, how badly he wanted Teddy’s baby to be born.
Johnny was not pleased that Eliza and Jude had confided in Les, but he did not complain that they hadn’t consulted him first, because, as it happened, Johnny had been indisposed at the time. The morning Eliza was admitted to the ER, he wasn’t in his apartment but in Rooster DeLuca’s, a scrappy little studio near Charlie