Chapter 3 - What Brothers Don't Say
Adam stared at the phone for a long moment. Then he picked it up and walked out into the hall without a word.
The nurse glanced at me. I looked at the door.
"I'll give you two a minute," she said gently, and moved to the far side of the room, fussing over the warming table to give me the illusion of privacy.
I held my daughter against my chest. She was so tiny. So warm. She smelled brand-new, like the first page of something, and I pressed my lips to the soft spot on her head and worked to keep my breathing even while my husband stood in a hospital corridor at two in the morning taking a phone call from his brother.
Three minutes. Maybe four.
He came back in. He didn't look at me at first. He set the phone face-down on the table and stood at the foot of the bed with his hands buried in his pockets.
"Adam."
"I know."
"You don't get to just say 'I know.' You walked out of this room thirty seconds after you held your daughter for the first time in your life. You're going to tell me what is going on. Right now."
He dragged the chair over and sat. He looked wrung out in a way that had nothing to do with a sleepless night.
"That birthmark," he said. "It's a family thing. My dad's side. My father had one. I have one — on my ribs, you've seen it a hundred times. My brother Ryan has one on his left shoulder. Same shape as hers. Same place, almost to the inch."
I waited.
"It doesn't pass to everybody," he went on. "My dad used to say his grandfather had it and then it skipped clean over two generations. It's rare. And when I saw it on her, I just —" He stopped.
"You just what?"
He looked at his hands. "I panicked. I don't even know why. It doesn't mean anything. It's genetics. It could've come through me."
"Could have," I said.
He glanced up.
"That's a strange way to put it," I said. "Could have."
"That's not what I meant."
"Then tell me what you meant. Because you handed our newborn to a nurse like she was a hot pan, and then you went out to the hallway to call Ryan at two in the morning, and now you're sitting here telling me a birthmark that could have come through you sent you into a panic." My voice was pulling tight. "Help me understand that."
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
"When did you last see Ryan?" I asked.
Something crossed his face. Quick. Gone before I could read it.
"Christmas," he said. "Same as you."
"He stayed three nights."
"Right."
"And before that?"
Adam was quiet a beat too long. "I don't know exactly. We don't keep track."
The nurse drifted back over to check the baby's numbers, wearing the polite blankness of a woman pretending she hadn't heard a word. I let her work. I watched Adam watch his daughter, and I tried to figure out what I was looking at — a scared man, a guilty man, or a man who was both, and couldn't tell me which.
When the nurse stepped away again, I said, "Call him back."
"What?"
"Call Ryan back. Right now. Put him on speaker."
Adam's jaw flexed. "It's two in the morning."
"He called you first."
The room was very still. Adam reached for the phone. His hand rested on it. He didn't pick it up.
"He didn't call to say congratulations," he said. "Did he."
It wasn't a question.
Something cold slid through me. "What did he say to you out there?"
May you like
Adam looked at me, and for the first time that whole night he looked genuinely afraid.
"He said he had to talk to me before you and I talked to each other."
