Chapter 5 - Two Words
Why was his mother even there.
Bram has worked in the audiology department at St. Ambrose Hospital since 2013. He's thirty-nine, profoundly deaf, married with two kids, and he fits hearing aids on other people's babies for a living — a fact I have genuinely never gotten over since I first learned it.
On the morning of the fourteenth of May, a referral came through for a repeat newborn hearing screen. Baby, born the thirteenth, left ear refer.
Our last name isn't common.
Bram went up to the maternity ward around half past nine and looked through the window of a bay at a bassinet holding a baby with a white forelock, and he did not go inside.
He walked back downstairs instead and stood in a corridor for nearly twenty minutes, just standing there.
And then he called his mother — because he had never fully cut her off, because he'd decided years earlier he would rather manage her carefully than lose her entirely, and because, as he told me in July across a kitchen table, with his wife Sabine helping translate the parts I couldn't follow, he genuinely believed his brother might need somebody in that room who understood exactly what he was looking at.
He thought his mother could be that person.
He was wrong, and he has said so, plainly and more than once.
Because Odette walked into that room, looked at her son, and then looked past him, straight into the bassinet, at her own granddaughter.
And what she said was: "Oh, Rhys."
And then: "I told you."
Two words. I told you. Aimed at a man who had been a father for exactly nineteen hours.
I was thirty-nine hours out from an emergency cesarean, on a morphine pump, holding my newborn daughter against my chest, and I said — probably shouted —
"Get out of my room."
She started to say something about being his mother.
I said it again. Louder.
Rhys didn't say a single word the entire time. He sat in that chair with his face still buried in his hands and never once lifted his head.
She left.
That has been the entirety of our contact with that woman since, aside from one letter that arrived in November — which I read, and which Rhys never opened.
Bram came up to the room that same afternoon, around half past two. He knocked, waited, and when I told him to come in, he stepped in and stood at the foot of the bed, and signed something briefly to himself before speaking out loud, which I now know is something he does when he's nervous.
"I made a mistake this morning," he said, "and I've come to say so."
Then: "Can I see her?"
He looked at our daughter for a long time. And then he said the first genuinely useful thing anybody had said in that entire hospital.
"Right. So she's probably got it in the left ear, and probably not the right, same as him. Which means she'll want an aid on the left from about three months old, and she'll be talking right on time, and she is going to be completely fine. My oldest is nine, and she is exhausting, and she has never once in her life been held back by anything."
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His oldest can hear perfectly well. He was making a point, and he meant every word of it.
That was the exact moment the temperature in that room changed — and it has stayed changed ever since.
