“He was right. You do eat M&Ms in the order of a rainbow,” my dad comments, taking a seat beside me.
I add three yellows to my mouth.
“Who was right?” I turn my body so I can face him, even if he has a hard time looking at anything other than pine needles and his own two feet when he’s around me.
“Reed.”
My cheeks pinken. Here we go. I brace myself for the lecture to stay away from him.
“I’m sorry for barging in the other night,” he says instead, taking me by surprise.
“I’m always glad when I see you home,” I admit.
He finally looks at me. Reallylooksat me. Lets mesee his pain.
“I’ve been running for so long I’ve forgotten how to stay,” he says.
Something compels me to reach into my pocket and pull out that picture Reed gave me. I slip it in his palm.
“He was right about you too, you know. Looks like you were staying closer than you think.”
He holds out the photograph of me and my mother and regards it with a sad smile. “How did you get this?”
He doesn’t need to know Reed found it. “It fell from your pocket on the line,” I say.
A puff of air expels from his nose. “It was snowing the day you were born. Did I ever tell you that?”
A look of sympathy must pass across my face.
“Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t have.” He drops his chin at first but then lifts his eyes to ask, “Can I tell you now?”
“Please.”
“It was snowing,” he repeats. “Big fluffy flakes that stuck to your eyelashes when you stood beneath them. It was a mile-long walk to the car with the way your mother was waddling. By the time I got her tucked in the front seat, she was laughing uncontrollably at the frost that had fused to my eyebrows and beard. Said I looked like Scrooge.”
I picture it and giggle.
“Probably not my finest look.” He returns my smile. “She labored for twenty-seven hours. It was like you didn’t want to leave her.”
My eyes mist over.
“But she was determined to bring you into the world in your own timing. We paced that hallway until you were ready.”
A hot tear rolls down my face as I savor the thought that she wanted to keepmeclose just as much. It’s the first piece of my mom I get to hang on to.
“At five in the morning, you came quietlyinto the world, wide-eyed and curious. She held you, staring into your eyes. We stayed that way for a long time.”
His bottom lip quivers, and I don’t know whether to give him space or reach for his hand.
I decide on the latter.
“But then she started feeling dizzy and asked me to hold you. Somehow I hadn’t noticed that the doctor and nurses had left the room. We were all alone in there, and I had no one to call on for help. At that point, I’d worked for years in crisis situations, but as I watched blood gush from the end of the bed, I froze.”
I squeeze his hand as tears break free from his lash line, repelling down his cheeks in long streaks.
“Our doctor thought everything was fine. She’d stitched up her tear and went home for the night. It happened so fast, the hemorrhaging.”
I can see the guilt he’s been carrying around all these years, and I don’t know how to fix it besides telling him, “It wasn’t your fault.”
