We stand in the corridor for a while longer, the three of us, and outside the hospital windows the sun is doing something orange and low on the horizon. The world is the same as it was this morning yet completely different. Somewhere out there Savannah is preparing for med school, and she doesn't know about any of this.
One day, maybe, she will.
But that's a story for another time.
Right now, I've got a son.
And a patch on my back that says SPROG.
And for the first time since I watched her walk out of my life, I feel like something is beginning instead of ending.
CHAPTER 5
Austin
EJ at 18 Months
Nobody tells you about three a.m.
They tell you it's hard to be a dad. They tell you it changes everything. Pops told me I'd love him more than I thought I was capable of loving anything, which turned out to be true but also not particularly useful information at three in the morning when EJ has been screaming for forty minutes. I've tried everything I know to do and some things I made up, but he's still going.
I'm walking him around the kitchen of the house on the compound, the small one that Razor sorted out for us two months before EJ arrived, the one with the hot water heater that knocks and the back door that sticks in the rain. I've been walking him in circles for twenty minutes. My shoulder is damp where his face has been pressed against it and he's making this sound that isn't quite crying anymore, it's more like complaint, like he's pissed off at the world and he's decided I'm the right person to hear about it.
"I know, buddy," I tell him. "I know."
He doesn't care. He keeps going.
I don't know what's wrong. I've checked everything. Fed him, changed him, checked his temperature, walked him, rocked him, stood in the bathroom with the shower running because Seb swore blind the steam helps and Seb was full of shit. I've been a father for eighteen months and most days I feel like I'm figuring it out as I go, which I suspect is how every father feels but nobody admits.
The back door opens.
Rosie comes in still in her scrubs, her bag over one shoulder and her keys in her hand, just back from a hospital shift by the look of her. She's one of the old ladies, married to Prez, and she's been checking on us since EJ was six weeks old without ever making it seem like checking.
She looks at me. She looks at EJ. She drops her bag on the kitchen table and holds out her hands.
I hand him over without a word.
She tucks him against her chest and starts walking, the same circuit I've been doing around the kitchen table, except she does it differently, some angle or rhythm I haven't cracked yet. EJ makes the complaint sound twice more and then it drops off into something quieter and then nothing.
I sit down at the kitchen table.
She keeps walking him for another ten minutes until she's sure. Then she lays him down in the basket we keep in the corner of the kitchen for exactly this situation and she straightens up and looks at me.
"When did you last eat?" she says.
"Lunch."
"It's three in the morning."
"Yeah."
She opens my fridge, which has beer and leftover pasta and something in a container I can't identify. She takes out the pasta, puts it in a bowl, puts the bowl in the microwave. While it heats up she leans on the counter and looks at me with the same expression she probably uses on patients who are being stupid about their own care.
"You need sleep," she says.
"I know that."
"Tomorrow night, bring him to mine at ten. I'll take him through till six. You sleep."
