I wander down the hall a little aimlessly until a voice reaches me from the waiting area around the corner.
“Saylor.”
Eleanor is seated in a row of chairs near the window. She’s in a navy dress, low heels, a strand of pearls that probably predate my birth. Her posture is perfect, her hands folded in her lap, herexpression composed. She looks like she’s waiting for a board meeting, not a baby.
“Eleanor.” I walk over. Sit down in the chair beside her, leaving one empty seat between us…for safety. A snake loves to strike when your back is turned. Celeste has warmed up to Eleanor. I need a little more convincing. “You got banished too?”
“Banished? No.” She adjusts a pearl. “I chose to wait out here. Raven was very generous with the invitation, but I have never been good with…squishy things.”
“Squishy things.”
“Yes, I’ve had a child, remember? I know the mess that’s made in there.” She crosses her ankles. “Thank goodness Celeste is here. She has a stronger stomach than I do.”
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, thumbs twiddling against each other. The nervous energy that was propelling me up four flights of stairs has nowhere to go now. It’s pooling in my hands, my feet, the base of my spine. I bounce my right knee. Stop. Start again.
“Stop fidgeting. You’re making me anxious.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You simply choose not to.”
“Eleanor, give it a rest. My kid is being born twenty meters from where I’m sitting and I don’t know what to do with my hands.My kid.” I say it like I’m testing the integrity of the word. A baby is one thing.My babyis a whole other thing.
She looks at me. Something moves behind her eyes, something warmer than I’ve seen from her before. Not soft, exactly. Eleanor doesn’t do soft. But the hardness rearranges into something adjacent to tenderness, the way a winter sky can look almost gentle just before dawn.
“You’re going to be a good father, Saylor.” She says it with certainty, as if the matter has already been settled and she’s merely informing me of the outcome. “Don’t worry too much.Children are resilient. They forgive the mistakes you make as long as you show up for the moments that matter.” She pauses. “This is one of those moments. You’re here. That’s enough.”
I look at her. This woman who fought us for months, who deployed lawyers and legal strategies and every weapon in her arsenal to claim this baby. This woman who then stood at her daughter’s grave and chose to let go. Who sold two properties and wrote a check and surrendered her rights because she finally heard what her daughter was saying.
“Thank you, Eleanor.”
“For what?”
“For being here. For all of it.”
She nods but doesn’t elaborate. Eleanor does not require gratitude to be expanded upon. She accepts it the way she accepts a coat check ticket: efficiently, without sentiment, and with the expectation that the interaction is now complete.
We sit in silence. The hospital hums around us. Nurses pass in soft-soled shoes. A phone rings somewhere down the hall. The clock on the wall ticks through minutes that feel like geological eras. Eleanor reads a magazine she brought from home. I stare at the floor tiles and count them because my brain needs a task or it’s going to implode.
Thirty-seven tiles between my chair and the nurses’ station. I count them twice. The number doesn’t change, but the exercise keeps my hands from shaking.
Then, finally, after two trips down to the cafeteria, three loo breaks, and failing to finish two different Sudokus, the door opens.
A nurse steps into the hallway. Young, smiling, tired in the good way. She looks at me, then at Eleanor, and the smile widens.
“Family for Drews Pecker?”
I don’t laugh this time. I’m too far past laughter. I’m in the territory beyond it, where everything is sharp and bright and the air tastes different.
“Baby girl is here,” the nurse says. “Healthy. Strong lungs. Mom and mom and baby are ready for you.”
When I stand, my legs feel borrowed. Eleanor rises beside me with considerably more grace, smoothing her dress, touching her pearls, preparing to meet her granddaughter the way she prepares for everything: with composure and an unshakable belief that presentation matters even when the world is falling apart. Or coming together.
The walk to 316A takes ten seconds and ten years.
I push open the door.
Celeste is in the chair beside the bed, and she’s holding a baby.
