“You can’t get into any trouble.”
“Promise.” He held up a hand like a Boy Scout and winked. Renee nearly slapped him.
“And baseball is over,” she continued. “You’re off the team.” This part of the deal she felt in her stomach, an achy nausea left over from the meeting. She had no idea how Joe would react; he’d played baseball nearly every day of his life since their father’s death.
But the look on Joe’s face was pure relief. Nearly joy. “Oh, thank God,” he said. “I didn’t want to play anymore. Renee, I haven’t wanted to in years. My throwing arm isn’t what it used to be. I just didn’t want to tell you. Or Noni.”
For a moment Renee watched her brother: the clear blue eyes, the dimples. For the first time, she noticed the faintest trace of sagging purple beneath his eyes, the swell of a belly beneath his T-shirt, a puffiness to his cheeks. His familiar features looked older, altered. She could almost see the kind of man he was becoming.
“You can’t tell Noni you want to quit baseball,” said Renee. “I’ve already talked to Caroline. We’ll tell her you had a knee injury. That’s why you’re off the team. I don’t want Noni to know about the party or the drugs. None of it, okay?”
Joe nodded and moved in to hug his sister. “Thank you,” he said into her hair.
“You’re welcome,” she replied.
“Renee,” he said, still in the hug, “have you ever seen Dad?”
“What?” She pulled away from him.
“I mean, have you ever seen him? Like a ghost. Or spirit. Whatever you want to call it.”
“Dad? No, Joe. I haven’t.” Then Renee remembered the coach’s comment. “Have you? Seen him, I mean?”
“I saw him the night of the party. ‘Joe, your throwing arm isn’t what it used to be.’ That’s what he said to me. Isn’t that wild? And he’s totally right.”
Joe’s face shone with an innocent wonder. He believes this, Renee realized.
“Joe, what were you on?” During Renee’s pharmacology class, she’d read about hallucinations induced by all sorts of drugs. Talking animals, aliens, dead people—all the result of chemically altered neurons firing in unexpected ways.
But Joe shook his head. “It wasn’t the drugs. Really. It wasn’t. Dad was standing outside on the back lawn of the frat house, talking to me just like we’re talking now. Really, Renee. It was amazing. I had been hoping for it for so long. And finally it happened.” Joe smiled with such calm satisfaction, such a clear sense of relief, that Renee did not know how to respond.
“Maybe you should talk to someone about this,” she said.
“Someone? You mean like a counselor?”
Renee nodded.
“I don’t need a counselor, trust me. I’ll talk to you about it. You and Caroline and Fiona, but that’s it. You’re the only ones who would understand anyhow.” Joe smiled again: the same relief, same joy. “It’s a good thing, Renee. Don’t look so worried. Someday it’ll happen to you, too. I bet he visits all of us.” Joe yawned. “I better get some sleep,” he said, and hugged Renee again and then disappeared into his room.
When Renee returned to Boston, her roommate told her the news about Caroline.
“Your sister’s in labor,” Lydia said, not looking up from a textbook on the table.
Renee called the number that Nathan had left. His sleepy voice confirmed that little Louis had arrived. Everyone was delirious, relieved, happy.
“I’m so glad everything went well,” said Renee. “Noni will be thrilled. We all need some good news right about now. We all need a distraction.”
Joe kept his promise to Renee. He graduated on time and in good standing from Alden College, certainly not an A student, but did it matter? A degree from Alden was a degree from Alden, whether you worked as hard as you could or you slacked off, drank beer, cycled through girlfriends as fast as you changed your jeans, climbed the roof of your frat house, and shouted Beastie Boys lyrics until the hazy dawn light hit the trees and the grass and made everything look like a mist-filled dream. Joe took his degree and accepted a job offer from Kyle Morgan, an Alden alum and former fraternity brother two years older than Joe. His family ran a boutique investment bank called Morgan Capital Ltd. The year was 1996.
“We’re getting into tech,” Kyle explained at Joe’s first and only job interview. “There’s a lot happening in that sector. Lots of potential. You can start as an analyst. Go from there. Bonuses, baby.” Kyle smiled broadly, teeth white as a new baseball, and held out a hand for Joe to shake.
* * *
Normally Renee would not visit an ER patient once he or she had been admitted to the hospital. But the failed home birth stayed on Renee’s mind. Soon after the woman left the ER, a baby girl had been delivered. Everything had gone as well as it could go, Jaypa told Renee as she was packing up to leave. Even so, the mother remained in intensive care. She’d labored at home for over forty-eight hours and lost a large amount of blood. The baby, deprived of oxygen for an unknown length of time, was in the NICU. There was the possibility of cerebral palsy, epilepsy, autism, developmental delays, any number of disabilities.
“What can you do?” Jaypa had said to Renee with a shrug, and then he returned to the ER for the remaining ten hours of his shift.
After Renee scrubbed the blood from beneath her fingernails and changed into street clothes, she traveled via three separate elevators to the neonatal intensive care unit. There she found the baby splay-legged and purple inside an incubator that bristled with white tubes and black cords. baby girl dustin read the card on the incubator. Most of the infants here were preemies, some weighing no more than a pound or two. Baby Girl Dustin looked freakishly large in comparison, but the size differential only underlined the problem. At least you knew what you were looking at with the others. But this baby girl—it was impossible to say. Perhaps she would be fine. But perhaps she would not.
Renee’s phone buzzed. A message from Fiona: where r u? Renee groaned. She did not reply. She was now an hour late for Joe’s party.
The baby’s father, the man from the ER, was not in the room. Baby Girl Dustin sighed audibly into her respirator. She clenched and unclenched her toes. For a moment Renee considered pushing her hands into the built-in black rubber gloves the nurses used for feeding and changing and cleaning. The gloves that were also used by parents to hold and caress. But again came the insistent buzz of her phone. How would she explain to Joe and Noni, to Sandrine and Fiona and all of Joe’s friends, all of Sandrine’s family, why she was late? I could not step away from an infant without a name.
This baby was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, that Renee would treat over the course of her career. Renee was not sentimental. Years ago she had decided never to have children. It was precisely these kinds of moments—when she hesitated about what was best to do, when she blanched at the possibility of creating connection—that showed her just how ill-suited she was for motherhood. When Renee had visited Caroline at the hospital after baby Louis was born, she had felt only inadequacy. Caroline’s face was exhausted, her hair a mess, the hospital gown slipping off her shoulders, but she shone—literally glimmered—in that hospital bed like some beautiful consumptive.