PART 2
By the time the cab pulled beneath the bright red letters of the emergency entrance, Maya was barely conscious.
The driver jumped out before I could ask for help. He opened the rear door, took one look at Maya’s gray face and the bundle tucked against my chest, then shouted toward the hospital doors.
“Somebody get a wheelchair!”
A nurse came running with an orderly behind her. The next few minutes dissolved into fragments—questions, fluorescent light, the squeak of rubber wheels, Liam’s thin cry, Maya’s fingers slipping from mine.
“She had a C-section eleven days ago,” I said as they lifted her onto a bed. “She’s bleeding. She has a fever. She hasn’t been eating.”
“How long has the bleeding been going on?”
“I don’t know.”
The answer tasted like failure.
I had spoken to Maya every day while I was in Germany. Sometimes twice a day. She had told me she was tired but fine. She had smiled at the camera while holding Liam against her shoulder. My mother had appeared behind her with a tray of tea and said, “Don’t worry about a thing, David. We have everything under control.”
And I had believed her.
A pediatric nurse gently took Liam from me. I resisted without meaning to.
“I need to check his temperature,” she said softly. “You can stay right here.”
The thermometer registered low. Not dangerously low, she assured me, but low enough that they wrapped him in heated blankets and brought warm formula. When the nurse asked what brand he had been taking, I told her the name of the prescription formula his pediatrician had recommended.
She frowned.
“This isn’t what’s in his diaper bag.”
I looked down. Inside the canvas bag was a half-empty tin of the cheapest powdered formula sold at a neighborhood discount store.
“That’s not his,” I said.
Maya turned her head toward us. Her eyes opened only halfway.
“Eleanor said the other one was wasteful,” she whispered. “She said babies don’t know the difference.”
The nurse’s expression changed, but she asked no further questions. She simply wrote something on the chart.
A doctor examined Maya behind a curtain while I sat outside with Liam against my chest. He had stopped crying and was making small, exhausted sounds in his sleep. His face was red from the cold. One tiny fist had escaped the blanket and rested against my shirt.
I had imagined meeting my son a hundred times during the flight home.
I had pictured Maya standing at the door, smiling despite her exhaustion. I had pictured taking Liam in my arms while my mother cried and Chloe took pictures. I had imagined warmth, food, laughter, and the city counting down to midnight outside our windows.
Instead, the first time I held my child, his body was chilled because the heat had been turned down in my own apartment.
A security officer passed the waiting area just as fireworks began exploding somewhere beyond the hospital walls. Through a narrow window, I could see flashes of red and gold reflected in the glass towers across the river.
