Five Twelve

Theron

He weighed nothing.

That was the first fact, and it was wrong, and it would be a fortnight before he understood why. Seven pounds, two ounces: the figure was written on a whiteboard on the wall, in a nurse's looping green marker, with a smiley face beside it. He had lifted heavier things. He had lifted oak knees and mast hoops and, once, at nineteen, a stalled outboard motor off a quay. He had assumed, in the part of his mind that estimates such things, that a newborn would feel like a small dense parcel, like a loaf of bread, like a bag of flour.

He felt like a held breath.

He felt like something that had been lowered into his arms from a very great height, on a thread, by hands that had not yet quite let go. The nurse had laid him in the crook of Theron's left elbow, in his white towel, with the hat, and slid a hand under the back of the small skull to show him where it went, and said briskly, "There, Dad. Support the head. You've got it." And then she had removed her hand.

He had not got it.

He had nothing. He stood in the bright cold operating room in a paper cap with his arms locked and his elbows rigid, holding the most fragile object he had ever touched, and he could not feel his own fingers. The room tilted. The light was a blaze. He heard from a very long way off a voice (his own) saying, "I am not— he is not—" and the nurse, who was kind, replying, "It's okay, honey, everybody says that."

He looked down.

The face was the size of his palm.

It was creased and crimson and fantastically cross. It had a wide flat nose and a pair of heavy swollen lids, and a wet black swirl of hair plastered to the forehead, and a mouth, the mouth was open, a square red cave, from which was issuing a thin, rhythmic, indignant bleat. A fist had worked its way out of the towel. It was the size of a walnut. It opened and closed on the air, and each of the five fingers was an exact, flawless, minute replica of a finger, down to the nail.

Oh, thought Theron.

Oh, there you are.

He had heard people say that. In films, on the television, in books. He had thought them sentimental. He had thought it a figure of speech, the sort of thing a person said to cover a gap in the emotion. He stood in the roar of the OR with a person in his arms and discovered that it was not a figure of speech at all. It was a precise, literal, scientific description of an event. For eleven months he had known that Kit had a child. He had known it from a file, from a photograph, from a scan, from the heave of a belly under his hand. And now the child had arrived, and the knowledge, which had been an idea, had become a fact, and the fact had a weight, and a warmth, and a smell: a damp sweet heavy odor like warm bread and new rain.

"Hello," he whispered.

The bleat stopped.

It stopped quite suddenly, in the middle of a note. The mouth closed. The heavy lids lifted, a quarter-inch, and two eyes looked out at him, dark and wet and cloudy, and unfocused as a pair of coins in a pond.

He did not breathe.

"Hello," said Theron again. "I— forgive me. I am your— I am—" He stopped. He tried again. "My name is Theron."

The eyes closed. The mouth opened. The bleat resumed with a certain majesty.

"Yes," said Theron. "I thought you might have views."

…

"You're doing great," said the nurse. "Why don't you bring him round to Mom?"

He found that he could not move.

It was one of those states, he supposed, familiar to the medical profession: the paralysis of the novice. His feet were glued. His knees had melted. He stood there with the baby in his arms and the green drape on his left, behind which he could see, between a masked shoulder and a bank of lights, the pale curve of an arm, and the tip of a hand, which was moving. Fingers were opening and closing on the air. They were making a gesture he recognized, from the dock: come here.

"Theron," said Dess.

Her voice was thin and cracked and astonishingly clear. It came from the other side of the screen, over the hum of the machines.

"Yes."

"Bring him here."

"I'm afraid I'll drop him."

"You won't."

"I shall. I'm trembling."

"You're not."

He looked down at his arm. It was true. The tremor, which had lived in his left hand for twelve years, which had gone with him to funerals and board meetings and the deck of a boat in a gale, had gone. Not stilled; gone. The hand lay under the towel, warm and large and utterly steady, cupped around a back no longer than a paperback book. He could feel through it the tiny, rapid flutter of a heart.

"Oh," he said.

"See?"

"It has stopped."

"It always does." She was crying; he could hear it. "It stops when you've got something to hold. Come here. Please."

He walked.

It was six steps. He would remember each. He walked round the end of the screen in the bright bath of the surgical lamp, past the masked figures with their gloved red hands, past the stool where he had sat, to the head of the table, and bent, and slid the bundle gently into the space beside her face.

She turned her head.

For a moment she simply looked.

She lay on her back, gray with fatigue, her braid a wet rope on the pillow, her face blotched and shining, her eyes red and huge and bottomless. He saw her take it in: the wrinkled forehead, the wet black hair, the open mouth. He saw her see the hat, crooked on the small skull. He saw her lips move, and no sound come.

"Hi," she said, at last, in a whisper. "Hi, baby."

The baby stopped crying.

He didn't just stop. He turned. The tiny head, in its wool cap, swung toward the sound of her voice, with a blind, sleepy, magnetic certainty, like a compass needle; and the mouth, which had been a square, closed into an O; and the clouded eyes, which could not yet focus on anything farther than a foot away, came to rest on her face and stayed.

"Oh," said Dess. "Oh, there you are."

"He knows you," said Theron.

"He doesn't."

"He does. Look."

"He knows my voice. He's heard it for nine months." She was laughing, through her tears. "He's heard me swear. He's heard me sing in the shower. He's heard me yell at a lemon tree." She turned her cheek, so that the small round skull rested against it, and shut her eyes. "Hi. I'm your mom. I'm sorry about the language."

Theron stood at the head of the table with his hands hanging.

He could not take his eyes from them. He saw, in the glaring light, with the white drapes and the blue masks and the clicking machines, a picture that he was quite sure he would carry with him until the end: a woman lying flat on her back, with a newborn tucked against her face, both of them pink and wet, both of them with their eyes shut. The same curve of brow. The same set of the mouth. The same small, furious determination to stay.

I am not in this picture, he thought.

I am next to it. I am a man who has been invited to stand at the edge.

And I could not ask for anything better.

…

They let him carry the baby to recovery.

It was a long way. It was down a corridor lit in sickly fluorescent green, through two sets of swinging doors, with the stretcher trundling ahead and the nurse behind and the little warm weight in his arms, now swaddled in a flannel receiving blanket printed with ducks. He had been told to go slowly. He went as slowly as a man in a funeral procession, with his eyes fixed on a point in front of him, and each footfall measured, and every few seconds a flicker of dread: the floor, the corners, the doorframe. He had the odd conviction that the whole building was against him. The walls had grown corners. The tiles had become treacherous.

Rosalie, the nurse with the gold tooth, walked beside him.

"You're a natural," she said.

"I am terrified."

"That's what natural looks like." She grinned, and the tooth flashed. "I've seen a hundred fathers do this walk. Most of them either carry the baby like a football or like a bomb. You carry him like a man carrying a candle in the wind."

"I do not wish to extinguish him."

"You won't."

"I am not his father."

"I know." Her face did not change. "I read the chart. I read all of it. I was there when she said it. 'He's yours to hold.' I thought: that's the smartest thing I've heard in this ward in twenty years."

He glanced at her.

"I've worked here twenty-three years," said Rosalie. "I've seen every kind of family. The ones where the father's in the room and doesn't want to be. The ones where he's not in the room and should be. The ones where there are two moms, or three, or one and a grandmother, or an aunt who's driven six hours with a casserole." She shifted her clipboard. "I'll tell you what I've learned. It's not about who the baby belongs to. It's about who holds him at five in the morning when everybody else is asleep."

"And who is that?"

"You tell me."

They had reached the double doors of Recovery. She pushed them open with her hip. Beyond lay a long low room, dimly lit, curtained into cubicles, with the soft electronic murmur of a dozen monitors. At the far end, under a lamp, they were maneuvering a bed into a bay.

Theron stopped.

"Rosalie."

"Mm?"

"If I ask something," he said, "will you tell me the truth?"

"I always do."

"How do I know whether I am doing it right?"

"Doing what?"

"This." He lifted the bundle, an inch. "I have arrived, as you say, at the edge. I am here because I was asked. I am not his father. I am not her husband. I do not know what I am. And I wish very much to do this correctly, and I am afraid that there is no correct." His throat worked. "I do not wish to take anything. I only wish to be useful."

Rosalie looked up at him.

She was a small woman, fifty-odd, with silver at her temples and a face the color of walnut, and for a moment the gold tooth was hidden and she was only a person.

"Mr. Wexcombe," she said gently. "Do you want to know the secret of being useful?"

"Please."

"You hold the baby. You hold the mom. You hold the door. And you don't need to know what to call it." She patted his arm. "It'll tell you. It'll tell you when you're not looking. It'll tell you at three in the morning in a kitchen with a diaper in your hand, when you realize you've been doing it for a week and nobody asked."

"That is quite wise."

"I've had a lot of practice." She pushed the door wider. "Go on. She's waiting."

…

Recovery was a long, bleary, drowsy hour.

They put the bed under the lamp, and tucked a heated blanket round her, and attached her to a number of wires. A nurse massaged her belly with a cruel, efficient palm, and she cried out, and apologized, and cried out again. Someone put a plastic cup of ice chips in her hand. Someone put a warm cloth over her eyes. The morning came slowly, and gray, through a window high in the wall, and in the dim green aquarium light of the ward the other mothers dozed, each in her cubicle, with their babies in their arms like parcels of stars.

He sat in a vinyl chair at the foot of her bed.

He had not been told to. He had not been told to go. A tall nurse had brought him a stool, and then a chair, and then, after a long look at his face, a second blanket, and had said, "You'll want to sit. They always want to stand." He had sat. The baby lay in the crook of his arm. He had been told, in the OR, that she would need to rest; that the spinal would wear off slowly; that for the first hour or two, until she could feel her legs and hold her arms steady, someone would need to keep the baby warm.

"Skin to skin," the nurse had said. "It's the best thing. It regulates his temperature, his heart rate, his breathing. It calms him. Dad can do it as well as Mom."

"I am not—"

"Whoever's holding," said the nurse, "does it. It's not a title. It's a job."

So here he was.

He sat in the chair with his scrub top unbuttoned and the baby against his bare chest, a tiny warm weight inside the fold of a blanket, with a flannel hat on his head and his cheek against the hollow of Theron's collarbone. He was asleep. He had been asleep for eleven minutes. He slept like a dropped stone, in absolute surrender, with his mouth slightly open and his fist curled against Theron's breastbone, and every few seconds, in sleep, his whole body gave a tiny convulsive start, as of a creature falling off a very high cliff.

"Hi," said Theron.

No answer.

"I do not know whether I am permitted to speak to you."

No answer.

"I have been told that babies like to hear voices. I have also been told that they dislike noise. I am not certain where this falls." He lowered his voice to a murmur. "You may tell me to stop. You may do so by crying. It will be extremely clear."

The baby sighed. It was the sigh of a very old man in a very warm bath.

Theron closed his eyes.

He sat for some time with his chin resting against the blanketed head, and the heartbeat pulsing against his sternum. It was fast. It was fluttering. It was perhaps twice the speed of his own. And for the first time since the twenty-eighth of October, since a folder on a table, since a clause and a pen and a photograph in a drawer, the clamor in his head went quiet.

Kit, he thought.

You have a son.

He is asleep on me.

I'm sorry. I wish you were here.

I wish it more than I can say.

But I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

He drew a breath. It shook.

"I am going to tell you about your father," he said, very low. "Not now. When you can hear. I am going to tell you about the time he built a boat in the garage out of a door. It sank. He built another. It sank. He built eleven. The eleventh is in the harbor at Newport, and it has your name on its hull, though you do not know it yet, because I had it painted on the day before yesterday." He swallowed. "It is Calder. It is the new name. The Kittiwake is still the Kittiwake. But the little one, the Beetle Cat, the one he was sailing the day he turned nine, I have given her a new name. Because he would have wanted you to have one of his boats, and I do not know how else to give you one."

The baby slept.

"I do not know how to be an uncle," said Theron. "Nor a father. Nor anything. I know how to sit in a chair. I know how to fix a gutter, and calculate a displacement, and read the Wind in the Willows in four voices. I know how to be there at six in the morning." He pressed his lips to the soft hat, once, lightly. "It will have to be enough."

He sat there.

He didn't notice that the other sounds had stopped. The monitors, the drip, the murmur of the ward: they had hushed, or he had ceased to hear them. A hand had come to rest on the edge of the blanket.

He opened his eyes.

She was awake.

She lay propped on two pillows, with the head of the bed raised, pale as milk, with a cup of ice chips in her lap and the wires trailing from her wrist. She was looking at him. She had been looking for some time. Her eyes were gray-green and very tired and perfectly clear, and in them was an expression that he could not at first read, because he had never seen it turned on himself.

It was the look of a woman watching a thing she had been told she would not see.

"Dess," he said.

"Don't stop."

"I— I did not mean you to hear."

"I know." Her voice was a thread. "Don't stop. Please. Keep going."

"I have nothing more to say."

"You were doing fine."

"I was talking to the baby."

"I know." She smiled, a small cracked drowsy smile. "He likes it. Look. He's turned his head."

He looked down.

It was true. The small hatted head had rotated on its stalk of neck, an inch or so, so that the flat nose pointed up at his chin, and the lids had lifted, and the dark cloudy eyes were fixed with enormous gravity on his mouth.

"He's listening," said Dess.

"He is not."

"He is. He's learning your voice."

"God help him."

"He'll be fine." She shifted. A small gasp of pain escaped her, and she pressed her lips together and rode it out. "He'll know it. At night. In the dark. He'll hear it from the other room, and he'll know."

Theron said nothing.

He could not. His chest had closed. He sat with the small warm body against his skin and the great gray sweet exhausted light filling the room, and felt the tears begin again, quietly, from nowhere, running down into the crease of his smile.

She was watching him.

She did not look away. She watched him cry, as she had watched him once at a kitchen table in December, over a spoon, as she had watched him on a bridge in April, with a plastic chicken. She watched it with no expression whatever, with her chin on her pillow and her cheek against the blanket. And then she turned her face down, very slowly, to the small shape of the baby in his arms, and said, in a whisper so low he almost missed it:

"He's here."

Theron went still.

"What?"

"Not you." She smiled faintly. "I'm talking to him. I'm saying: 'Look, baby, he's here.'" Her eyes lifted. "That's what I said. In the OR. In my head. When they were pulling you out. I said, Come on, come on, and I thought about everybody I wanted in the room. And I counted. Joelle. Mom. Pratt. And I thought, who's missing? And I thought: nobody. I thought, he's here."

"I was beside you."

"I know. That's what I mean." Her eyes closed, then opened. "I didn't plan it. I want that clear. I didn't plan for you to be there. I planned for Joelle. I wanted somebody who knew what to do. But at four in the morning, with that line going down, I thought, Who do I want to hold my hand? And it wasn't a nurse. It was a guy who bought a building and a chicken."

"Dess—"

"I'm not saying it means anything." She spoke very fast, and her voice cracked. "I'm saying you were there. You came off a roof, and you stood in a corridor for fourteen hours, and you held me up when I couldn't hold myself, and you told me a story about a mug. And then you took my son and you cried on him."

"I did not intend—"

"I'm not complaining."

"You are not?"

"I'm thanking you," said Dess. "Okay? This is me. Thanking you. It's term fourteen, which isn't on the napkin yet, but I'm adding it. The person who is thanked shall accept the thanks and shall not apologize."

He laughed. It was a ragged, helpless gasp, and the baby started at the sound, and he said "Forgive me," and the baby settled.

"See," said Dess, "you're already good at it."

"At what?"

"At being there at five in the morning."

…

He had never thought he would be so happy to be wrong about himself.

He sat in the vinyl chair through the long gray morning, with the child on his chest, and watched the light creep down the wall. The other mothers woke, and fed their babies, and were wheeled away. A woman with a mop went by. A man with a cart. A radio in the corridor, turned low, began to play a song he did not know. At seven a nurse came and took the baby's temperature, and weighed him again (seven pounds, one ounce, the loss of an ounce being normal), and slid a plastic bracelet onto the thin ankle. It said, in black ink: RAYMOND ROURKE, BOY. Dess made a face. "That's not his name." The nurse said, "It's the default." Dess said, "Whose default?" The nurse said, "The computer's."

"Calder," said Theron.

"What?"

"The name. Calder Wexcombe Rourke." He spelled it. He found that he did not have to be asked. The nurse crossed out the line with a ballpoint and rewrote it, in neat capitals, and clipped the bracelet again.

"There," she said. "And your name, hon?"

"Mine?"

"For the support person tag. Husband, partner, relative. Whatever you'd like me to put."

He looked at Dess.

She was lying with her eyes closed. She was perfectly still. Her chest rose and fell. But the corner of her mouth, he saw, had begun to twitch. She was pretending to be asleep. She was, in fact, listening so hard that it was almost audible, and the faint, pale, tired, transparent mask of her face was waiting, with an air of terrible calm.

"What would you like me to say?" said Theron.

Silence.

"Mr. Wexcombe?" said the nurse.

"It is not mine to say."

"I just need something for the band."

"Then—" He stopped. He looked at the baby. "Write Theron."

"Just Theron?"

"Yes."

"No title?"

"None that I can claim."

"Okay." The nurse wrote it. She snapped the tag shut around his wrist, a small white plastic loop with a bar code and four black letters, and he looked at it. It lay against his pulse, light as a leaf.

THERON.

It was a good word. It had never been so naked.

The nurse left.

"Hey," said Dess, without opening her eyes.

"Yes?"

"That was the right answer."

"I did not know there was a test."

"There's always a test." She smiled. "You passed. Don't get cocky."

…

The family came in at eight.

They came in a wave. The door at the end of the ward banged, and there was a rumble of feet, a clatter of bags, a rapid, hissing, urgent exchange of whispers, and then Colleen stood in the doorway in the Tweety nightgown with a raincoat over it, her hair in a scarf, her glasses perched crooked on her nose, and her arms full of a pink-and-yellow balloon that said IT'S A BOY! in a font that suggested a casino. Behind her stood Joelle, looking as though she'd been run through a car wash and was pleased with the result. Behind Joelle stood Terrence, a big quiet man in a Dunkin' jacket, holding a paper tray of eight coffees. And behind him, in a plum-colored coat and rain bonnet, with a grocery bag in each hand, a pair of fur-lined slippers on her feet, and an expression of fierce and tremulous vigil, stood Mrs. Ferreira.

"Where is he?" she said.

No one answered. They had stopped dead.

They were looking at the chair at the foot of the bed.

In the soft gray light, Theron sat motionless, bare-chested under the open scrub top, with a sleeping infant tucked against his collarbone and a blanket drawn up around them both. His head was bowed. His cheek rested on the knitted hat. His dark hair stuck up, and his eyes were closed, and the great hollowed ravaged face was as peaceful as a stone in a stream. One hand supported the small back. The other lay spread across it, large and pale and absolutely still.

Colleen's mouth opened.

"Mother of God," said Mrs. Ferreira, very softly. She crossed herself.

"Shh," said Joelle. She was weeping. She did not appear to have noticed. "Shh, shh. Nobody say anything. Don't wake him."

"Which one?" whispered Terrence.

"Either."

It was Dess who spoke.

She had turned her head on the pillow. She was looking at the chair, and at the sleeping man, and at the five of them frozen in the doorway with their balloons and their coffees; and she put a finger to her lips, and then, very slowly, with a hand that still shook from the drugs, she pointed to the chair.

Look, said the finger.

They looked.

"I've been trying to figure out," she said, in a whisper so quiet that the words seemed to rise from the pillow, "what you call a man like that. I've got companion. I've got uncle. I've got emergency contact. They all fit. None of them's big enough." She breathed. "He fell asleep eleven minutes ago. He's been up for forty hours. He ran across a yard in a thunderstorm and held me up for nineteen hours and stood in a hall, and cried on my son. He's got his arm round him like he's a bomb he's afraid to set off. And he won't tell me what he is, because he's afraid of the answer."

"Honey," said Colleen, in a small voice.

"I know, Mom."

"You don't have to—"

"I know. I'm not deciding. I'm just saying." Dess shut her eyes. "That's a good man. That's a very, very good man, and I'm still furious at him, and I'd like it on the record that I think he's the best thing that ever happened to this kid."

"On the record," said Joelle, wiping her nose, "witnessed."

"Second," said Mrs. Ferreira.

"Third," said Terrence.

They stood there in a ragged row, in the soft light, with their eight coffees going cold.

And in the chair at the foot of the bed, without waking, without stirring, with a small gray-blue hat against his jaw, Theron Wexcombe turned his face a quarter-inch deeper into the warmth of a sleeping child, and smiled.

…

He woke at ten past nine to the smell of the car park.

It was a smell he knew: rubber and diesel and rain-soaked asphalt, with the sweetish note of exhaust. It rose from the window, which someone had cracked. He lay for a moment with his eyes shut, not knowing where he was. He felt the weight on his chest, and thought, the cat, and then, no, and then he opened his eyes.

The baby was awake.

He lay with his head tilted up, and his wide dark cloudy eyes fixed on Theron's face, unblinking, with the intense, distant, appraising stare of a small old general. He was not crying. He was not doing anything. He was only looking.

"Good morning," said Theron.

The baby blinked.

"I trust you slept?"

The baby yawned. It was the largest yawn Theron had ever seen. It displayed a tongue like a pink petal, and a pair of toothless gums, and a pharynx of bottomless pink mystery. It ended in a little squeak.

"I take that as assent."

"Morning," said a voice.

He looked up. Joelle was sitting on the edge of the next bed with a coffee in one hand and a phone in the other. She had changed out of her scrubs. She wore a gray sweatshirt that said L&D: WE GET THE LAST WORD and looked, for the first time since he had known her, entirely at peace.

"How long have I been asleep?"

"About an hour. Dess is out. They gave her something. Colleen went to find a vending machine." She sipped. "You were adorable."

"I was—"

"You were drooling."

"I do not drool."

"You drooled on his head. It's on my phone." She turned the screen to show him. It was a photograph: a man in a rumpled scrub top, in a plastic chair, with his head tipped back and his mouth slightly open and a small baby asleep on his chest. "I took eleven. I'm sending them to Mrs. F. She wants them for the shrine."

"There is a shrine?"

"There's been a shrine since March. You're on it." Joelle grinned. "Between the Virgin and the canary."

He closed his eyes.

"Theron."

"Yes."

"I want to say something, and I want you to not make it a thing."

"I shall try."

"I think she's going to say yes." Joelle spoke very fast. "I don't know to what. I don't know when. I think it might be years. But I think that somewhere in the last twenty-four hours she crossed a line, and she's not going to cross back." She looked at the coffee. "I'm telling you because you'll want to do something. You'll want to buy a ring or write a speech or rent a plane. Don't."

"I would not."

"You would."

"I would consider it."

"Don't consider it." She looked up. "She said it herself. 'He's here.' That's all. That's the whole sentence. Don't make it a paragraph."

He looked at her.

He sat for a moment with the baby against his chest and the morning sun, thin and gold and hopeful, coming through the cracked window onto the blanket. He thought of a plastic chicken. He thought of a ledger. He thought of a long, dark, thorny road that he had walked for eight months in the wrong direction, and of a small white tag on his wrist that said THERON, and he said, with perfect truth:

"I shall not make it a paragraph."

"Good."

"I shall make it a word."

Joelle laughed. It was a surprised, liquid, delighted sound.

"Which word?"

"I have not decided." He tilted his head, to look at the face of the child. "It will come to me. At three in the morning. In a kitchen. With a diaper in my hand."

"Who told you that?"

"A very wise nurse, with a gold tooth."

"Rosalie." Joelle nodded. "She's never wrong."

…

The telephone buzzed at ten.

It was in the pocket of his wet trousers, which had been hung on a hook behind the bed to dry, and which he fished out with his free hand, cradling the baby in the other. The screen was cracked. It had been dropped in the stairwell. It said, in bright blue letters:

DELL.

He answered in a whisper.

"Sir," said Dell.

"Good morning."

"May I ask how the infant is?"

"Perfectly well. Seven pounds, one. He has a foot."

"I am glad to hear it, sir." Dell's voice was steady, but it had a curious scraped quality, as though it had been through a sieve. "I have a message for you, sir. I was asked to convey it at precisely ten o'clock, and not before."

"From whom?"

"From Madam, sir." A pause. "She has been in the car park since four."

Theron stopped breathing.

"I beg your pardon?"

"She arrived at 4:12 a.m., sir. By the Newport Bridge, in the dark. I did not know she would come. She came down to the hall at three in a black wool coat and said, 'Dell, get the car.' I said, 'Madam, it is the middle of the night.' She said, 'I said I would be early.'" The old man's voice cracked. "She has been sitting in the back of the Bentley for six hours, sir, with a flask of tea and a hat. She would not come in. She said it was not her place. She said she would wait to be asked."

"Dell."

"Yes, sir."

"Is she there? Now? Beside you?"

"She is in the back, sir. She is looking at the window of the maternity ward. It is on the fourth floor, and she cannot see anything but a light." He paused. "I have told her it is the right window. I do not know if it is. But she seems to find it a comfort."

Theron stood up.

He did it quite smoothly, with the baby cradled in both arms, and the blanket slid from his shoulders. He looked at the sleeping woman in the bed: the dark braid, the thin white hand curled on the sheet, the small smile. He looked at Colleen, who had returned and was standing in the door with a bag of pretzels. He looked at Joelle, who had put down her coffee and was staring at him with eyebrows raised to the roots of her hair.

"My mother," he said, "has been sitting in a car for six hours."

"Oh my God," said Joelle.

"She said she would be early."

"Oh my God."

"I must—" He stopped. He looked down at the small wrapped shape in his arms, and then at Colleen. "Mrs. Rourke. Would it be at all permissible— I do not wish to presume— I would like to bring my mother up."

"Now?" said Colleen.

"If Dess is willing."

"She's out cold."

"I know." He swallowed. "I do not wish to ask her. I wish to ask you."

Colleen blinked. Her mouth moved. She set down the bag of pretzels on the bed, with great care, and straightened her glasses, and looked at Theron, bareheaded, shirtless, with her grandson in his arms, and his face open as a child's.

"Hon," she said. "I'm just a cashier from Fall River."

"You are his grandmother."

"One of."

"One of two. And you are the one who has been here since five." His voice was very steady. "My mother asked, in April, if she might hold him. She was told yes. She was told it would be twice. I do not know how to do it correctly. I do not know if the second is hers or Dess's or yours. But I should like it very much if she might come up the stairs and be given a chance to sit down."

Colleen stood there.

Then she did something nobody expected. She crossed the room in four quick steps, put both hands on either side of his face, and kissed him on the forehead, hard, with a smack.

"Go get your mother," she said.

"Thank you."

"And tell her to bring the tea."